Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.
Rita Mae Brown
(Source: the-random-quotes)
March 12th, 2013
![How Racism Is Bad for Our Bodies
The researchers had each Latina student prepare a three-minute speech on “what I am like as a work partner” for their white partner. But before each student gave her speech, she read her partner’s responses — and, among other things, knew if the person evaluating her speech held racist beliefs. To monitor stress during the speech, the researchers hooked the speakers up to blood pressure cuffs and sensors to measure other cardiovascular data, including an electrocardiogram and impedance cardiography.
When Latina participants thought they were interacting with a racist white partner, they had higher blood pressure, a faster heart rate, and shorter pre-ejection periods. What this shows is an increased sympathetic response, or what is often called the “fight or flight response.” Merely the anticipation of racism, and not necessarily the act, is enough to trigger a stress response. And this study only involved a three-minute speech.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/a3407ade9057e3f9745c461af5029828/tumblr_mjk102Lfl11qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
How Racism Is Bad for Our Bodies
The researchers had each Latina student prepare a three-minute speech on “what I am like as a work partner” for their white partner. But before each student gave her speech, she read her partner’s responses — and, among other things, knew if the person evaluating her speech held racist beliefs. To monitor stress during the speech, the researchers hooked the speakers up to blood pressure cuffs and sensors to measure other cardiovascular data, including an electrocardiogram and impedance cardiography.
When Latina participants thought they were interacting with a racist white partner, they had higher blood pressure, a faster heart rate, and shorter pre-ejection periods. What this shows is an increased sympathetic response, or what is often called the “fight or flight response.” Merely the anticipation of racism, and not necessarily the act, is enough to trigger a stress response. And this study only involved a three-minute speech.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]
(Source: theatlantic)
It has never been easier to be a writer; and it has never been harder to be a professional writer.
January 27th, 2013
Today in History: January 27,1945 the Soviet Army entered the Auschwitz camp complex and liberated 7,000 prisoners, including children.
Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II. It was the largest of the German concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I (the base camp); Auschwitz II–Birkenau (the extermination camp); Auschwitz III–Monowitz (a labor camp); and 45 satellite camps.
Auschwitz II–Birkenau was designated by the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler as the place of the “final solution of the Jewish question in Europe”. From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp’s gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe. Those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious disease, individual executions, and medical experiments.
On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, a day commemorated around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Vasily Gromadsky, a Russian officer with the 60th Army liberating Auschwitz recalls what happened.
They [the prisoners] began rushing towards us, in a big crowd. They were weeping, embracing us and kissing us. I felt a grievance on behalf of mankind that these fascists had made such a mockery of us. It roused me and all the soldiers to go and quickly destroy them and send them to hell.
As the Allies learned more about the severity of the Nazis’ crimes at Auschwitz, they realized that Rudolf Höss was still alive and hiding in Germany. His wife told her husband’s whereabouts, and British soldiers captured him on the farm where he was hiding. Höss was incarcerated and then moved to Nuremberg as part of the war crimes trial.
Whitney Harris, a member of the prosecuting team at the Nuremberg trials, recalls what Rudolf Höss was like:
He struck me as a normal person, that was the horrible thing about it. He was cool, objective, matter of fact. ‘This is my war duty. I did my war duty.’ It was like I had to go out and cut down so many trees. So I went out and took my saw and cut the trees down. He was just acting like a normal, unimportant individual.
He simply answered the questions, and as far as I could tell, told what happened without emotion. Without emotion. Without a sense of guilt. Not in the slightest apologetic, not in the remotest degree was he apologetic. In a sense, I think he showed a certain pride in accomplishment.
On April 16, 1947, he was hanged on a specially constructed gallows in Auschwitz, the site of his crimes.
Overall, 1.3 million, around 90 percent of them Jewish, were killed in Auschwitz. Others include 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, some 400 Jehovah’s Witnesses and tens of thousands of people of diverse nationalities
(Source: collectivehistory)
January 20th, 2013
My heart wants roots. My mind wants wings. I cannot bear their bickerings.
E. Y. Harburg
(Source: coffeemaps, via teachingliteracy)
The anguish is clear on the face of Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, who takes long pauses in an attempt to steady his tearful voice, as he recounts to the interviewer about how American interrogators repeatedly raped and tortured, or pretended to rape and torture, a woman in the cell next to him in an attempt to force him to falsely confess.
Begg’s eyes cloud over and he stares off into the distance as he relates how they manipulated his biggest fear, that his wife and children who were with him at the time of his arrest, were also imprisoned and in danger:
“I heard the cries of a woman (in the cell next to me) and an American voice shouting, ‘Spread your legs!’ and the woman is screaming and crying (as if she is being raped). Before I used to (always) ask the Americans about what happened to my wife and children since my arrest. They said ‘We don’t know,’ but at this time I didn’t ask because I was afraid of the answer. I thought my wife was in the cell.”
Begg was tortured and assaulted physically, mentally, psychologically, emotionally, and sexually as the American interrogators tried “breaking him down” in order to make him sign false confessions. Begg was released after three years spent in US custody without any charges held against him.
It is still not clear to this day whether the woman in the cell next to him was a fellow inmate also unjustly prisoned or an interrogator posing as a woman in distress.
It is known but hardly ever reported that the United States detains (Muslim) women who they “suspect” of being terrorists for no apparent reason, an example being Dr. Aafia Siddiqui (shown below in a picture of her taken while in US custody) who was abducted with her children by US intelligence.
After severe mistreatment in custody, during which she sustained a gunshot wound, Siddiqui was sentenced to 84 years in prison. Her young children who were with her when she was kidnapped and subsequently detained and interrogated have only recently been relocated. Siddiqui’s youngest son, who hadn’t even started walking yet, has disappeared since her kidnapping with no hint whatsoever of his whereabouts. Her older son has claimed that “the bloody body of his baby brother” was tossed to the side of the road by US soldiers when Siddiqui and her children were arrested. During her trial, Siddiqui was repeatedly removed from the court room for interrupting proceedings to scream out that her children had been tortured in front of her.
Four men who were imprisoned with Dr. Siddiqui in Bagram and who managed to escape reported in an interview:
“When they torture you, they threaten to sodomise you, they threaten to bring your wife and rape her in front of you and do other things to her. My words can never fully explain to you what happened during those interrogations.”
“Those American criminals think that they are the lords of human rights and that they are the callers for the freedom of the woman and her rescuers from oppression. There is a woman from Pakistan. She was put in solitary confinement for two full years in Bagram prison among more than 500 male prisoners and guards. She was treated the same way as the men were. This woman stayed there until she lost her mind, until she became insane, hitting the door and screaming day and night.”
(via anarcho-queer)
January 19th, 2013
Jan. 14, 2013. Hindu devotees bathe in the waters of the holy Ganges river during the bathing day of Makar Sankranti of the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India.
See more from TIME’s photos of the week here.
(Source: timelightbox)
Here’s a video of the attempted assassination of Ahmed Dogan, head of Bulgaria’s Movement for Rights and Freedoms, which we mentioned earlier today. From the looks of things, Dogan was well-served by his lightning-quick reflexes (though a minister quoted by the BBC suggested “most likely the [gas pistol] misfired”), as he moved to swat the weapon away in immediate fashion, before members of his party descended upon the assailant. From there, things get chaotic, with the crowd shoving, punching and kicking the disarmed attacker as he’s stuck on the ground. All in all, a harrowing murder attempt, and one that was mercifully unsuccessful. source
I saw a news report about this on T.V., she was a straight A Student who had perfect attendance and everything. Everyone loved and respected her for her skills, but when she started this experiment and people thought she was pregnant, they started treating her like garbage. Even her teachers started looking down on her like she was scum of the earth. The only people who knew she was doing this as an experiment were her school principle, her health care teacher and her father. Her own mother thought she was pregnant.
I mean even her friends turned on her, it was horrid. Very very sad, and as soon as she revealed during an assembly that the pregnancy was false, a lot of people were in shock as she brought up all the horrible things they said and did to her because they thought she was pregnant.
The reason for the experiment was to see how people would react and treat her if they thought she was pregnant, as opposed as to treating her as the straight A “Perfect” student they usually did. And it proved that people were horrible scumbags to her as soon as they thought she was.
“ It’s said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That’s false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: ‘I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken.’ I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leó Szilárd, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people. ”
~ Jacob Bronowski; (Born 105 years ago today, January 18, 1908)
~ Jacob Bronowski; (Born 105 years ago today, January 18, 1908)
