Tuesday, February 14
A narrow logic of numbers
By using checklist of symptoms about emotions, you have gone out and confused normal human responses to life with mental disorders, and therefore you've created an illusion of a vast epidemic; a medicalized illusion. And obviously a situation where you medicalize is a situation where your focus will not be on social change. It will be on controlling the individuals to fit in properly. That's the subtle and overall danger here, that it could serve our kind of social economics system's needs in a way in which we would become more efficient but less human.
By using checklist of symptoms about emotions, you have gone out and confused normal human responses to life with mental disorders, and therefore you've created an illusion of a vast epidemic; a medicalized illusion. And obviously a situation where you medicalize is a situation where your focus will not be on social change. It will be on controlling the individuals to fit in properly. That's the subtle and overall danger here, that it could serve our kind of social economics system's needs in a way in which we would become more efficient but less human.
Monday, February 13
the chilly enduring odor of bear
Sunday, February 12
Langston Hughes on "when Harlem was in vogue"
It was a period when, at almost every Harlem upper-crust dance or party, one would be introduced to various distinguished white celebrities there as guests. It was a period when almost any Harlem Negro of any social importance at all would be likely to say casually: "As I was remarking the other day to Heywood--," meaning Heywood Broun. Or: "As I said to George--," referring to George Gershwin. It was a period when local and visiting royalty were not at all uncommon in Harlem. And when the parties of A'Lelia Walker, the Negro heiress, were filled with guests whose names would turn any Nordic social climber green with envy. It was a period when Harold Jackman, a handsome young Harlem school teacher of modest means, calmly announced one day that he was sailing for the Riviera for a fortnight, to attend Princess Murat's yachting party. It was a period when Charleston preachers opened up shouting churches as sideshows for white tourists. It was a period when at least one charming colored chorus girl, amber enough to pass for a Latin American, was living in a pent house, with all her bills paid by a gentleman whose name was banker's magic on Wall Street. 1t was a period when every season there was at least one hit play on Broadway acted by a Negro cast. And when books by Negro authors were being published with much greater frequency and much more publicity than ever before or since in history. It was a period when white writers wrote about Negroes more successfully (commercially speaking) than Negroes did about themselves. It was the period (God help us!) when Ethel Barrymore appeared in blackface in Scarlet Sister Mary! It was the period when the Negro was in vogue.
From The Big Sea by Langston Hughes (New York: Hill and Wang, 1940)
Thursday, February 9
and the new discipline called behavioral economics has been studying whether people really do behave as the simplified model anticipated; their studies show only two groups in society actually behave in a rationally self-interested way almost in all experimental situations: one is the economists themselves, the other is psychopaths. hahahahahaa!
