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blackwoolncrown · 5 years

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Hey I'm wondering if you could help me out? I'm trying to figure out how spirituality can coexist with science and I'm starting to think (and hope) that I have some fundamental misunderstandings about spirituality? Like, I don't feel like I've heard a definition of spirituality that didn't include basically believing in something that i want to be true without a firm, knowledge based reason to? Am I incompatible with spiritual belief or am I just really ignorant?

-I was inspired to send that ask because of the Rational Thinker™ ask because I’ve always considered myself to be that sort of person but I’ve been realizing that there are so many people who find so much value in spirituality that I’m thinking it’s pretty closed-minded of me to dismiss it because I don’t understand it properly (end)

So this may be one of the most interesting and relevant asks I’ve ever gotten.

First of all, you are very very intelligent to second-guess your conviction.

Second of all, all anyone can really be, in terms of ‘wrong’, is simply ignorant.

Third of all, it is my belief as history, culture and science show, that not only are you not incompatible with spirituality, but you as a human are inherently compatible with it as much as you are compatible with the scientific process and the curiosity and intellect it embodies.

So sure, I could help you out, but I don’t know what you need. I can’t prove anything to you the same way no one can think for you, and it’s best if you just ask questions. But a really helpful jumping off point is to understand the cold, hard fact that most of what we all are convinced to believe are ‘rules’ and fixed realities about how the world works are only at best relative, subjective, consistent but transient ephemera.

There is probably nothing I’m more passionate about than the overlap of science and spirituality because there’s nothing I’m more passionate about than creation- the universe, the world, All There Is.

It’s all very big and very subtle and very there but as human history conveys…evades direct dissection or examination in much the same way that a single eye cannot see into itself. That being said, a good jumping off point is knowing that the irony in the Rational Thinker™ archetype is their conviction that they are the only rational thinkers. Plenty of spiritual people got there through rational thought. Plenty of religions are fundamentally based on rigorous dialectical investigation. And also…

Plenty of things Rational Thinker™ holds dear as ‘normal, rational, real’ is also nothing but a belief, simply ‘real’ to them because everyone else believes it.

There is the world of perception- literally the world the human body can directly perceive, there is the world as it is, which often we can only attempt to measure as our own bodies are not attuned to observe it (think of how certain sounds and light wavelengths are beyond our perception), and then there is the world of ideas, which we project on the world as it is.

For instance, there is a thing, over there. It is up in the middle and down on the sides and goes to where birds fly. I may call it a mountain, like I’ve named the birds, but a mountain itself does not exist. The idea of it, some manner of rocky, large peaked thing, exists that I project on it, but in reality each mountain is differently shaped, all of them are connected to other mountains, and there is no real, extant barrier between the ‘end’ of a mountain and the ‘start’ of a valley. They are only relative, they are only subjective things. Furthermore, while we can agree that globally mountains exist, they are also called different things by each group of people. Which group is right? None are, but we accept as ‘right’ the consensus idea that humans project.

The first step in going beyond the rigid ‘rational thinker’ persona is realizing not that there is an issue with rational thought, but that what you thought was rational was a lot fuzzier, in reality. ANd that’s the issue- dogged ‘rational’ thinking operates on the fact that beneath it all, there must be some rigid, accurate ‘true’ reality we can discover. This is actually just a belief.

The more science you get into, the more you see that that does not exist. Reality at its most fundamental is fuzzy, probabilistic, transient and so on…which not-so-coincidentally is precisely the belief that fundamentally underlies lots of indigenous and Eastern Religious thought.

My favorite thing about The Stuff, for instance, is the incredible similarity between Hindu and Buddhist explanations of the universe and what is being discovered in Quantum Mechanics.

If you have any questions I’d be glad to help but on your own time I’d suggest to you that, strange as it sounds, what is most rational is an un-learning or a de-centering of whatever it is you are not-so-sure is correct. Doubt is an alchemical preparation to soften ones convictions prior to alteration. Double-fist Sapiens by Noah Yuval Harari and anything about time by Carlo Rovelli if you want to start reconfiguring your data from the scientific side.

Just like there’s bad science, there are spiritual things that I would say are probably wrong. But that’s not the point here. The point is that it’s not actually so irrational to be a spiritual being.

Have FUN! K love you bye.

Note: Rational thinking is like a boat that can take you anywhere you want to go. Eventually though, you have to walk on dry land.

Edit: PSYCHEDELICS study psychedelics, they’re another GREAT synthesis, research-wise, between science and spirituality.

#antediluvian-microchip

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Wednesday, September 15, 2021

Tropical Storm Nicholas slows, dumps rain along Gulf Coast (AP) Tropical Storm Nicholas slowed to a crawl over southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana Tuesday after blowing ashore as a hurricane, knocking out power to a half-million homes and businesses and dumping more than a foot (30.5 centimeters) of rain along the same area swamped by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Nicholas is moving so slowly it will dump several inches of rain as it crawls over Texas and southern Louisiana, meteorologists said. This includes areas already struck by Hurricane Ida and devastated last year by Hurricane Laura. Parts of Louisiana are saturated with nowhere for the extra water to go, so it will flood, said University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy. While the storm itself may weaken “that won’t stop the rain from happening. Whether it’s a tropical storm, tropical depression or post-tropical blob, it’ll still rain a lot.”

College students reported record-high marijuana use and record-low drinking in 2020, study says (Washington Post) The coronavirus pandemic that’s killed more than 658,000 people in the United States and infected 41 million, upended economies and moved classes to bedrooms may have added another change for college students: less booze and more weed. A newly released study found that nearly half of the country’s college-age students said they consumed marijuana last year. According to the report, 44 percent of college students reported using marijuana in 2020, an increase from 38 percent in 2015. There was also an uptick in “daily or near daily” marijuana usage, which rose from 5 percent to 8 percent in five years. At the same time, reported alcohol use among college students dipped from 62 percent in 2019 to 56 percent, with the number of them reporting being drunk in the past month decreasing to 28 percent from 35 percent last year. Binge-drinking—defined as having five or more drinks in one outing at least once in two weeks—fell from 32 percent to 24 percent. Although the study does not address the causes behind these tendencies, scientists speculate that the pandemic’s toll on daily life and mental health may be one of the driving forces behind young adults’ consumption patterns.

The enormous costs and elusive benefits of the war on terror (Vox) There have been no 9/11-scale terrorist attacks in the United States in the past 20 years. Meanwhile, according to the most recent estimates from Brown University’s Costs of War Project, at least 897,000 people around the world have died in violence that can be classified as part of the war on terror; at least 38 million people have been displaced due to these wars; and the effort has cost the US at least $5.8 trillion, not including about $2 trillion more needed in health care and disability coverage for veterans in decades to come.

Change in Norway (Foreign Policy) Jonas Gahr Støre is set to become Norway’s next prime minister after his Labor party won the most seats in the country’s parliamentary election. The victory ends Conservative Erna Solberg’s nearly eight years in power and means that all five Nordic states will now be led by left-leaning governments.

Dutch police thought they had arrested Europe’s most wanted mafia boss. Instead, they got a British racing fan. (Washington Post) A British Formula 1 fan was arrested in the Netherlands last week after he was mistaken for a Sicilian mafia boss who is one of Europe’s most wanted fugitives. The 54-year-old man, identified by his attorney only as Mark L, was apprehended by heavily armed police while having a meal with his son at a restaurant in the Hague, his lawyer told The Washington Post. The police’s intended target: Matteo Messina Denaro, 59, a mafia boss from southern Italy considered a godfather of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. But the man they arrested was born and bred in England, said Leon van Kleef, Mark L’s attorney, adding that his client had a thick Scouse accent—specific to the northern English city of Liverpool and hard to fake. Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, lists Messina Denaro’s only language as Italian. After reportedly being taken to a maximum-security prison in the Netherlands, Mark L was brought before prosecutors. He was released after officials confirmed the man they had arrested was not the man sought by Italian authorities on a European arrest warrant. Dutch prosecutors have dropped the case.

Pope visit a sign of inclusion for Slovakia’s excluded Roma (AP) Pope Francis traveled to the far east of Slovakia on Tuesday to meet with the country’s Roma in a gesture of inclusion for the most socially excluded minority group in Slovakia, who have long suffered discrimination, marginalization and poverty. Francis’ visit to the Lunik IX settlement in Kosice is one of the highlights of his four-day pilgrimage to Hungary and Slovakia. Lunik IX is the biggest of about 600 shabby, segregated settlements where the poorest 20% of Slovakia’s 400,000 Roma live. Most lack basics such as running water or sewage systems, gas or electricity. The “pope of the peripheries” has long sought to meet with society’s most marginal during his foreign trips, making sure to always include visits to slums, ghettos or prisons where he can offer words of encouragement, solidarity and welcome.

School’s (still) out (NYT) Students across much of the world are trading in Zoom windows for chalkboards, in a global moment of hope and apprehension. In some places, including parts of the United States, many school doors shut for a year and a half have swung open, even amid resurgent coronavirus outbreaks. In five countries—Bangladesh, Kuwait, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela—in-person schooling was paused nationally for 18 months. In the Philippines and Venezuela, there’s no end in sight. On Monday, students across the Philippines began class, once again remote, in their third school year marred by the pandemic. Of the nation’s approximately 27 million students, only around 14 percent participated in online schooling last fall, according to a survey conducted in November 2020. Robert Jenkins, global director of education for UNICEF, said the sheer magnitude and duration of the disruption is unparalleled.

A Million Afghan Children Could Die in ‘Most Perilous Hour,’ U.N. Warns (NYT) Millions of Afghans could run out of food before the arrival of winter and one million children are at risk of starvation and death if their immediate needs are not met, top United Nations officials warned on Monday, putting the country’s plight into stark relief. Secretary General António Guterres, speaking at a high-level U.N. conference in Geneva convened to address the crisis, said that since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan last month, the nation’s poverty rate has soared and basic public services have neared collapse and, in the past year, hundreds of thousands of people have been made homeless after being forced to flee fighting. “After decades of war, suffering and insecurity, they face perhaps their most perilous hour,” Mr. Guterres said, adding that one in three Afghans do not know where they will get their next meal. The deepening humanitarian crisis tops a dizzying array of challenges confronting the new Taliban regime as it navigates governing a country propped up for decades by aid from international donors.

Once inmates, Taliban now in charge in a Kabul prison (AP) Once, Kabul’s main prison was crowded with thousands of Taliban captured and arrested by the government. On Monday, a Taliban commander strolled through its empty halls and cell blocks, showing his friends where he had once been imprisoned. It was a sign of the sudden and startling new order in Afghanistan after the militant group swept into the capital nearly a month ago and threw out the crumbling, U.S.-backed government it had fought for 20 years. The Taliban now run Pul-e-Charkhi Prison, a sprawling complex on Kabul’s eastern outskirts. After capturing the city, the fighters freed all the inmates there, the government guards fled, and now dozens of Taliban fighters are running the facility. Pul-e-Charkhi had a long, disturbing history of violence, mass executions and torture. Mass graves and torture cells were uncovered dating from the Soviet-backed governments of the late 1970s and 1980s. Under the U.S.-backed government, it was more known for poor conditions and overcrowding—its 11 cell blocks were built to house 5,000 inmates, but were often packed with more than 10,000, including Taliban prisoners and criminals. Though the facility remains largely empty, one section holds around 60 people imprisoned in the past few weeks, who the guards said were mostly accused criminals and drug addicts.

Lebanese cancer patients face frantic search for medication (AP) Saydi Mubarak and her mother share a bond that goes beyond a close mother-daughter relationship: They were both diagnosed with breast cancer a year ago and underwent months of chemotherapy at a Beirut hospital, together facing the anxiety, the hair loss and the uncertainty for the future. Now they share the fear of not being able to get the medication they need to complete their treatment because in Lebanon, where a devastating economic crisis has upended daily life, there are almost no drugs to be found. The small Mediterranean country—once a medical hub in the Middle East—is grappling with severe shortages in medical supplies, fuel and other necessities. The economic crisis, described as one of the world’s worst of the past 150 years, is rooted in decades of corruption and mismanagement by a political class that has accumulated debt and done little to encourage local industries, forcing the country to rely on imports for almost everything. But those imports are hard to come by since the Lebanese pound has lost more than 90% of its value since 2019, and the Central Bank’s foreign reserves are drying up. For months, pharmacy shelves have been bare, exacerbated by panic buying and suppliers holding back drugs, hoping to sell them later for higher prices amid the uncertainty.

Nigeria faces one of its worst cholera outbreaks in years (AP) Nigeria is seeing one of its worst cholera outbreaks in years, with more than 2,300 people dying from suspected cases as Africa’s most populous country struggles to deal with multiple disease outbreaks. This year’s cholera outbreak, with a higher case fatality rate than the previous four years, is worsened by what many consider to be a bigger priority for state governments: the COVID-19 pandemic. At least 69,925 suspected cholera cases were recorded as of Sept. 5 in 25 of Nigeria’s 36 states and in the capital, Abuja, according to the Nigeria Center for Disease Control. Children between 5 and 14 are the most affected age group and the overall case fatality rate is 3.3%, more than double that of COVID-19′s 1.3% case fatality rate in Nigeria.

Space debris (Economist) At orbital speeds a tennis-ball-sized piece of space junk can obliterate a satellite. It makes good sense, then, to track orbiting debris, the better to steer spacecraft away from danger. At the moment, space-going junk is mapped mostly by radar. But of an estimated 34,000 orbiting objects ten or more centimetres across, only about 29,000 are being tracked with reasonable accuracy. Smaller pieces are harder to follow. Those between one and ten centimetres across number more than 900,000; those at least a millimetre across, perhaps 128m. Even tiny bits of debris can do damage. In May the Canadian Space Agency said that an untracked piece of junk had punched a hole 5mm across in Canadarm2, a robotic limb on the ISS. As orbiting objects multiply, the danger grows. Roughly a dozen sizeable pieces of space debris break up every year as a result of collisions, exploding rocket fuel, or the rupturing of pressurised tanks or old batteries. Solar radiation chips off bits of paint and metal. And the number of launches is increasing. According to BryceTech, a consultancy in Virginia, at the end of 2001 there were 771 active satellites orbiting Earth. Ten years later that population had grown to 965. Since then, it has nearly quintupled, to roughly 4,500—and this does not include defunct satellites. And small, cheap satellites are a booming business. Maciej Konacki of the Polish Academy of Sciences, in Warsaw, who has studied the matter on behalf of the European Union, reckons there could be 100,000 active satellites in orbit by the end of the decade.

#headlines #news

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tripnumbersofficial · 3 years

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An interview with Breaking Travel News: Gavin Tollman, Chief Executive Officer, Trafalgar

The business was planning to begin an expansion into Africa in the spring of last year when Breaking Travel News talked to Trafalgar's chief executive, Gavin Tollman.

He hoped that new destinations, fresh source markets and new experiences would allow the brand owned by Travel Corporation to continue its global growth.

So as we sat in his palatial office next to Buckingham Palace in central London a year later did the launch satisfy expectations?

Our Africa product was nothing short of amazing in terms of revenue from the United Kingdom; in the first few months we surpassed our complete first year budget.

"Once again this year, sales far outstripped the expected interest-it was enormously encouraging."

For Tollman and the Travel Company, bringing Trafalgar to Africa is something of a personal achievement, with the organization tracing its origins back to the middle of the last century in South Africa.

"Tollman continues: "The most exciting moment for me, personally, came in December last year the family gathered in South Africa for the holiday season.

This meant that I was there when Cape Town left for the first trip and I had the chance to meet the 20 or so guests who were travelling.

What really stood out when I look back, was the excitement and hope of the journey ahead-none of them expected Africa to be so exciting.

On the backdrop of Table Mountain, we gave a welcome reception against an all-glass wall, and as we were there, we had one of those beautiful sunsets, and the mountain spread out the 'tablecloth' and cloud poured over the top.

"One of those special moments, it was."

Tollman is also able to point to changes within the Travel Company in Africa from abroad, with Red Carnation's sister brand currently involved in constructing what he calls the 'ultimate' safari lodge in the Okavango Delta, Botswana.

Opening next year, Xigera Safari Lodge will encourage guests to see large cats, magnificent birds (including native kingfishers), wild scavengers and majestic giants in their natural habitat, while also enjoying the hotel brand's hospitality.

But it has not been smooth sailing, Tollman confides.

I was in the United States only working with hotel team members ahead of the opening in June next year and the project's ambition is great," he continues."

Yet of course, there were delays, as with any project - but ours was unexpected.

There was first a leopard-the property is obviously on the delta, so you have to have a bridge to get to it and a female leopard decided for a day that the bridge was the ultimate place to enjoy the sun.

"There was also a python that took up residence in our architect Anton's room-needless to say he was frightened-and it was hard to persuade him to spend a lot of time in the camp."

His excitement is contagious, however, and in the coming months we can expect to hear a lot more about this project.

Closer to home, and from an outbound viewpoint from the UK, it is eastern Europe that piqued Trafalgar's interest.

If I look at Europe and our expansion here it is in eastern Europe first and foremost.

"We see the former Yugoslavia and some of the Baltic countries as growth markets, as well as Poland, where we see a real, completely unprecedented, resurgence in demand," Tollman explains.

I am often asked how we find our experiences and with great difficulty, I always answer!

Everyone would do it if it was convenient.

That's why people are actually traveling with Trafalgar to take advantage of that study and expertise.

"Simply from going to trade shows, you can not find these experiences-you have to knock on doors, ask friends of friends and keep your mind open."

Trafalgar has noticed a shift in the booking window when it comes to actually making travel plans, Tollman continues.

Our European and British revenues vary from where they have been heading for years.

The interest we see is currently higher than net bookings even though they remain strong, and what this means is that we have entered a time of uncertainty.

Politics in the United States, an election in Australia and economics here in the United Kingdom have all changed the booking window, and people are now booking even closer to leaving.

Trafalgar therefore went out of our way to support our travel agent partners, to give them the assurance and that has been well received with the 100 percent assured departures here in Europe.

Travelers have a common sense of 'why book now?' There is a rise in production, but a decline in transformation.

Instead of the six or seven months we've seen in the past, we now see bookings 90 days out. People are wondering whether they need to book so early and prefer to wait and see.

With Brexit, people don't think that Britain would shut down, they just don't know what it would look like, so before booking, they prefer to wait and see.

One of the biggest opportunities I see when I look forward to is outbound from here in the United Kingdom, there is a tremendous potential for growth.

"Major legacy brands have been having problems, others have been pulling out, but I am a strong believer that some of the best opportunities occur when there is a little uncertainty in a market.

"Here in the UK, we have put in new structures to take advantage of that."

Tollman, when we spoke last year, pointed to the position of travel agents as a key to the Travel Corporation's success, a message reiterated by Jonathan Raggett, chief executive of Red Carnation.

However the Trafalgar chief warns that their position is shifting, with fewer young travellers using conventional high-street agents.

Research conducted last year by the company suggested that half of potential travelers believe the time and research needed to schedule a vacation makes a trip unduly stressful, with agents now required to add value to reduce the demands of choosing where to go.

What emerged from the study was an unexpected customer perspective; today travelers are frustrated by the excess of options, choosing what to purchase is becoming increasingly difficult.

They were searching for 'real and authentic' travel while looking at travel, but this is increasingly difficult to get. You do not just go and knock on local doors and ask to come in.

People read guides and research on the internet about their journey, but they end up doing almost the same things.

"These are all things that are beginning to bubble up in the minds of consumers, and I say to our agents when I look at that that's your greatest opportunity."

He adds: "My trade challenge is one of the reasons why people will not visit a travel agent if you are no more than an order taker, and you add no real value to the purchase cycle."

Following your own research, if all an agent does is book a holiday for you then what value do they add?

What I'm telling agents is that the best chance is to become a travel professional, to add value, and your future will never be brighter.

Finally, the increasing importance of overtourism, a subject where Tollman has been especially outspoken, is discussed in our discussion.

"Overtourism is a reality, and when I hear people in our industry say I am only 'x' percentage of tourism, the thing that antagonizes and frustrates me the most is that I am not part of the problem," he explains.

But the fact is we have to look at things from the eyes of the locals if we are in the travel industry.

If they see travel as a problem, then that is the truth-after all it is their home.

As an industry, we should look at a few main principals, the first being the value of dissemination.

This means moving away from only the iconic: the advantage of tourism must be felt by local people and if all you do is visit the iconic places, there is no real gain for people.

"This implies that there is no real benefit to tourism, there is only pollution from crowds-it needs to be done in a way that benefits locals."

Secondly, 365 tourism must ensure that you bring visitors throughout the year.

If everybody goes at the same time, you end up with these immense blocks and nothing else.

We continually question ourselves as to how we can become a provider of year-round travel.

"As with our autumn, winter, spring series, where we changed the entire costing model to ensure that we could inspire people to travel year-round, this again requires an open mind."

However, perhaps somewhat predictably, Tollman believes that government taxation is not the way to minimize overtourism.

I am irritated by governments that over-tax the travel industry," he concludes."

We are not local constituents, but they see travel as a necessary evil, but they do not see it in the larger context of its financial advantages.

Governments need to recognize that not all tourism is the same, they need to investigate the effect visitors have on a destination they are visiting.

For example, we're supporting the destination in Venice, where we have Be My Guests and Uniworld river cruises.

We take guests around the lagoon, helping, for instance, to benefit local fishermen, which is very different from anyone who comes on a cruise ship and has very little contribution to the economy.

"If an organization does not contribute, then of course, there might be an opportunity to tax more but governments need to be very careful."

More Info

Trafalgar is a guided holiday company that offers a range of exciting destinations with itineraries.

Trafalgar offers an insider's viewpoint of almost 70 years of experience and local knowledge to create travel experiences around the world.

On the official website you will find out more.

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armeniaitn · 4 years

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INTERVIEW: Armenian-Ukrainian rappers Samuum shed a light on bride kidnapping

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/culture/interview-armenian-ukrainian-rappers-samuum-shed-a-light-on-bride-kidnapping-41453-01-08-2020/

INTERVIEW: Armenian-Ukrainian rappers Samuum shed a light on bride kidnapping

Armenian-Ukrainian rappers Samuum shed a light on bride kidnapping.

There are not many music videos that feature a woman tied to the roof of a car as four men kidnap her for a forced wedding, but Samuum’s new single Maria is shining a light on a centuries old crime that is now becoming rarer in the Middle East.

Lead singer Lusine Kocharian and video director Andranik Berberian met in Kiev’s thriving underground music scene, and coming together as Samuum wanted to use the metaphor of bride kidnapping to explore what life is like for some women in Armenia.

“For me it’s my experience of Armenia as we always got to choose,” says Lusine. “You have to choose you want to have a family or a career, you want to work or have a child.

“I don’t understand why that is the case. I had the experience to choose to have family in Armenia, or just have my career. I chose my career, and I want us to have that choice to have a family and a career.”

Maria is sang in Armenian with a pulsing bassline and a hook that echoes the haunting calls of a praying muezzin’s yell. Samuum set out to challenge the norms of Middle Eastern culture and the tough choices many women in the region still face.

“In our culture it is hard as most of the time you gotta choose. and it’s how we can talk about our development, and we don’t need borders. So it’s how you can’t move if you have those walls in this century about how you want to work or have a family. I wanted to talk about that through my song and explore that question.”

Berberian’s ironic video, inspired by 70s psychedelic directors Sergei Parajanov and Alejandro Jodorowky contrasts the passivity of the victim with the camp high spirits of the four men who have kidnapped her. To many people the idea that bride kidnapping happens in civilized countries for centuries, let alone still goes in some places, seems almost unbelievable, especially as it means some ‘brides’ won’t be welcomed back to the families.

“There are a lot of villages where it happens but back then it was a normal thing,” notes Kocharian. “In Armenia now it is much better, but I know that even in America it happens. It is a strange thing, wild and a bad thing. I can’t even imagine that mentality that you couldn’t go back after your kidnapping.

“Not every girl can decide ‘Ok, I can go back to my family’, and not every family can say, ok you can come back. Most of the families say sorry you can’t come back as you are now his wife so you got to be with him., It is rare in Armenia right now, but it happens in other places like Russia, so it not only our national problem.”

“I want girls, even if it happens, I want them to feel they don’t have to marry that guy, or deal with that problem, but you can move on.”

Kockarian is quick to point out that this is a global issue, but the feedback on YouTube for the single from Armenia, and elsewhere, has been very positive, particularly from a new generation pushing to smash down damaging social stereotypes.

“It has been good as I have had a lot of messages saying ‘Thank you girl, you did it’. It is kind of inspirational that they can talk as this whole thing is not exactly about kidnapping as that is just one of the forms to explain what’s going on

“It’s about talking about this wildness, and even if it happens the girls aren’t talking about that so it’s about respect. The comments and views are an inspiration for them and I’m so happy as that is exactly what I wanted.”

“You can study if you want to or talk if you want to. I understand you respect your elders, but you have to talk. We will try to change things, and if we can help somebody I will be very happy.”

[embedded content]

You can follow Samuum on Facebook and Twitter.

Review by Paul Clarke, you can see his author profile here.

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Read original article here.

#Armenia #Culture

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southeastasianists · 7 years

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In November last year, Ros Sokny, an ambitious and friendly 36-year-old businesswoman from Kratie in eastern Cambodia, made the five-hour journey to Phnom Penh’s De Beaute Clinic, a private cosmetic surgery hospital tucked away in the capital’s western fringes. She had been considering breast augmentation surgery for several months, but in October, the mother of four came across an advert from De Beaute promoting the procedure at a discounted price on her Facebook feed. After discussing the idea with her husband, she booked in the operation, handed over a reported $3,000 to De Beaute and drove to Phnom Penh for a consultation.

What should have been a relatively straightforward surgery took a tragic turn once Sokny was anaesthetised. Following an undisclosed complication, she was rushed to the intensive care unit of a nearby private hospital with an organ infection. Three days after going under the knife, she died. The clinic was subsequently closed and is currently under police investigation for possible evidence of malpractice. Sokny’s death made national news headlines but, according to police officials, suspects at De Beaute “escaped” before they could be questioned. Despite being unclear how many suspects were at large, deputy municipal police chief Song Ly assured a reporter from the Cambodia Daily that the police were “looking for them”.

Speaking to Southeast Asia Globe almost a month after his late wife’s death, Phai Veasna expressed his anguish. “My tears have run dry. Right now, I’m scrambling to my feet to pay back the loans that we took for the surgery and to take care of my children’s school fees and expenses. I don’t really know if I can do all this alone without her,” he said, adding that the clinic had not contacted him or offered any compensation.

“My wife was still young and full of life. This was the biggest mistake of our lives. When her condition became serious, the cosmetic surgeon told me to go to another clinic for treatment because he did not have the equipment to treat her.”

The fact that a growing number of middle-class Cambodians such as Sokny are seeking such procedures indicates that cosmetic surgery in the fast-developing country is shifting away from being an industry aimed at the cashed-up, glamorous and famous.

'Brain boosters’ and liver detoxification serums on shelves inside Vita Longa ‘Brain boosters’ and liver detoxification serums on shelves inside Vita Longa This increased demand has partly been fuelled by a flood of new and often unregulated clinics such as De Beaute that offer cheaper services to lure in a wider spectrum of the Cambodian population, according to Thida Khus, a prominent women’s rights campaigner and the executive director of Silaka, a local capacity-building NGO. She has a number of reservations regarding the safety of such clinics: “It is dangerous. There is no effective monitoring or restriction on the people training and operating in the business”.

“The problem is the state, who do not accept their responsibility to monitor this industry. Competition among [the clinics] themselves isn’t enough [to improve safety standards],” she added. “There have been many cases of people who wanted to get a nose adjustment but have had horrible complications because the procedure was badly performed with poor materials.”

Despite the dangerously under-qualified clinicians, doctors and quacks working in Cambodia, the country’s – and more broadly Southeast Asia’s – cosmetic medicine sector is thriving. A report released last November by research firm MarketsAndMarkets found that while North America is the world’s largest medical aesthetics market, the Asia-Pacific market is set to grow at the fastest rate from now until 2021. By that year, the global medical aesthetics market will be worth $13.29 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 10.8% from 2016-21, the report stated.

A separate report released by Grand View Research in June 2016 contended that by 2014, the Asia-Pacific region was already the biggest aesthetic medicine market in the world. Although South Korea, China and Japan are by far the largest contributors to the market size, Southeast Asian nations such as Cambodia have also anecdotally seen a growth in the industry.

Preedinoot Sripradoo is the director of Vita Longa clinic in Phnom Penh’s affluent Boeung Keng Kang 1 suburb, which specialises in placenta-based and stem cell rejuvenation treatments. She believes that the industry growth is driven by insecurities, and that a smooth, wrinkle-free face and full, collagen-injected lips are markers of perfection in an increasingly appearance-driven Cambodian society. “Imagine you are not beautiful but ugly. You would be uncomfortable and not confident in yourself. You would be afraid of going everywhere and to do things. There would be no use in having life,” she said in a stark commentary.

Clinicians in Phnom Penh interviewed for this story expressed contradictory sentiments about the level of regulation and safety within the beauty industry. Sripradoo claimed that over the past five years, the Ministry of Health has been “working hard” due to the mass proliferation of new clinics. “They are very strict with regulations,” she added.

Yet others expressed concern over a lack of regulatory oversight. Sem Rotana, the owner of Dr Skin clinic, located in a condominium near Boeung Trabek, said: “To open a licensed clinic through the Ministry of Health, you need to be a qualified doctor. Unfortunately, many clinics these days open without any qualifications at all.”

“Patients are not that ready to trust cosmetic doctors at the moment. There have been too many stories of people having bad experiences. Nowadays, they really want to see certificates,” she added.

But certification is not a guarantee of quality, according to activist Khus. “The [private beauty clinics] that provide these services also provide training. If you pay enough money, you can get certified quickly.”

Somany Yen, the clinic manager at MD7 clinic in Phnom Penh’s south, agreed that a significant number of practitioners claim to be qualified after minimal training. “They go to learn a short course for three months or four months and think they know how to do plastic surgery, and then they do it,” she said.

Speaking to Southeast Asia Globe last month, Sok Kanha, deputy director of the Ministry of Health’s planning and health information department, seemed unclear whose jurisdiction the regulation of cosmetic surgery clinics fell under, while the ministry’s hospital department did not respond to requests for comment. “All I can tell you is that we provide licences only to hospitals, polyclinics and private clinics. I’m not sure if within the ministry we have policies about cosmetic clinics,” Kanha said.

Plastic surgeon Reid Sheftall – also an MIT graduate, former physics lecturer at the University of Southern California, author, actor, film director and professional golfer – operates out of his own private clinic in Phnom Penh Central Hospital. He emphasised that his operating room was “very clean, very modern” and that “you couldn’t find a better one even in San Francisco”, yet he confided that there was a lot of “faux-medical stuff that goes on” elsewhere in Cambodia.

“When I first got here, women were going to these beauty clinics and having negative suction cups put on their breasts and then pulled very hard. Women thought this would make their breasts bigger but all it did was tear the ligaments. It was terrible,” he said.

Sheftall also highlighted the dangers of Cambodia’s popular skin-whitening treatments, often acknowledged as the Asian beauty industry’s cash cow. Whitening creams, serums, peels, injectables and pills can be found almost everywhere in Phnom Penh, from tiny local market stalls, roadside pharmacies and supermarkets right through to swish, costly clinics and international aesthetic franchises. “I have had a couple of patients crawling into the clinic vomiting after applying too much [whitening cream] on their skin. You shouldn’t put that poison on your skin,” he said.

In 2011, a study by Phnom Penh’s University of Health Sciences found that 15% of commercially available skin whitening creams and 30% of those found in specialist beauty clinics contained illegally high levels of toxic compounds such as mercury. The treatments also often contain salicylic acid, arsenic and lead, which can not only burn the skin but also cause the liver and brain to swell.

It is difficult to establish the scale of the market in Cambodia, due to the lack of reliable data and an abundance of unregistered clinics. However, every practitioner that spoke to Southeast Asia Globe reported a growing demand for aesthetic medicine procedures in the country. “There has been a big increase in the number of beauty clinics in Phnom Penh,” said Rotana.

Corroborating this, Sheftall said: “Over the years, demand for my services has increased tenfold. It has gone way up.” He attributed this largely to the swift growth of Cambodia’s middle class. “In the past, the prices here were super low, but people still couldn’t afford it. But now, there is a middle class that didn’t exist here before.”

Khus added that the stylistic influence of Korea has also helped to grow the aesthetics market. “Korean cinema has invaded Cambodia and had a big impact on the population,” she said.

Social media is undoubtedly a key driver of the industry and is used extensively by beauty clinics to market their services. Sripradoo claimed that “Facebook is the main media source in Cambodia” and that her clinic utilises the platform extensively. Indeed, the Vita Longa Clinic page is updated with glossy photos of white-skinned, round-eyed patients with great frequency. Special promotions for ‘meso-fat therapy’, intravenous ‘liver detox’, ‘brain booster’ and ‘beauty booster’ treatments, as well as various laser treatments are employed regularly.

The now defunct and shuttered De Beaute Clinic still has a public Facebook page; a series of posts last year advertised procedures such as ‘rhinoplasty and peeling’ for less than $2,000, ‘dimples’ for $250, liposuction for $1,600 and breast augmentation for “about $3,500”.

Dr Skin, meanwhile, uses Cambodian pop stars, actors and models to promote treatments such as ‘mega-botox’ and ‘V-shaped face’ procedures. Dalice Katam Sovandalice, an assistant at the practice, said that famous Cambodians receive “discounts” in exchange for their help with promotion.

Slick marketing is not the be all and end all, however, and in a climate of stiff competition, results are also critical. “The middle class is growing and very informed. They learn, they search and they check before they go,” said Sripradoo. “Right now, the medical treatments and the beauty industry standards are getting higher.”

The clinic director also added that improved education would raise competency among practitioners. “The University of Health Sciences in Cambodia is promoting a dermatology department so they can train dermatologists and plastic surgeons. I think it is going to leave the Cambodian beauty industry with better standards,” she said.

Surgeon Reid Sheftall relies simply on word of mouth. “I get people from Australia, France, Singapore, Hong Kong. Everybody flies here. You do one, they go home, show their friends and then ten more come,” he said.

One Cambodian woman, who asked to be identified as ‘Bopha’, explained to Southeast Asia Globe how she convinced herself to get a recent rhinoplasty procedure. “I highly trust the clinic that I went to. You can’t trust every beauty clinic in Phnom Penh, however. Sometimes, a recommendation is the only way to ensure quality,” she said.

However, for Phai Veasna, still coming to terms with the loss of his wife, the industry can never be endorsed. “Some of those doctors are not even sure about the results themselves,” he said.

As standards improve, pricing remains competitive and treatments become increasingly fashionable, it seems certain that the beauty business will only continue to grow in Cambodia. In the words of Dr Skin’s Rotana: “People love it and come back for more and more. Today they’ll do one injection, tomorrow they’ll do another.”

#Southeast Asia #Cambodia #Beauty Industry

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actutrends · 4 years

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Trump takes massive gamble with killing of Iranian commander

” General Soleimani was actively developing plans to assault American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” it included, blaming him for current attacks on U.S. soldiers and the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. “This strike was targeted at preventing future Iranian attack strategies.”

Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, implicated the U.S. of “global terrorism” and said it “bears obligation for all effects of its rogue adventurism.”

Even the possibility that the U.S. had actually directly targeted Soleimani– especially on Iraqi soil– sent out shockwaves around the globe, surging oil costs and leading to instantaneous evaluations of the potential fallout. U.S. officials have long illustrated Soleimani as a paramilitary and terrorist mastermind, deemed accountable for attacks on American troops in Iraq and versus U.S. interests all over the world.

” It is hard to overemphasize the significance,” said retired Gen. David Petraeus, who supervised the “surge” of American troops in Iraq in the violent years after the 2003 U.S. intrusion. “But there will be reactions in Iraq and likely Syria and the area.”

Some present and former U.S. authorities, along with veteran Iran observers, said the killing was an escalatory relocation far beyond what they had actually ever anticipated.

” There’s no possibility in hell Iran will not respond,” said Afshon Ostovar, a specialist on Soleimani and author of “Vanguard of the Imam” a book about Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The strike likewise supposedly eliminated Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was taking a trip in the very same convoy as Soleimani. It astonished even some members of the Trump administration who said eliminating the Iranian general had actually not been seriously considered– a minimum of not just recently.

” I can’t think it,” one U.S. official stated. “The instant issue for me is: What’s the next action from Iran? Is this the beginning of a local blaze?”

A previous U.S. official who handled the Middle East said the strike was especially noteworthy since it targeted the leader of a state device, rather than a non-state star.

” We require to be prepared that we’re now at war,” he stated.

A Middle Eastern official said that a retaliation by Iran– understood for its own assassinations abroad– might occur anywhere.

” It could be targets in Africa, it could be in Latin America, it could be in the Gulf, it could be anything,” the authorities said. “I do not think they’re going to take the assassination of among their crucial people and just turn the other cheek.”

Soleimani had actually been leading the Quds Force, an unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that lags much of Iran’s military actions outside its borders. He was a hugely popular figure in Iran, and a regular rhetorical target of President Donald Trump and his aides.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for example, repeatedly singled out Soleimani for criticism as part of the Trump team’s broader anti-Iran “optimal pressure” project. Part of that project included designating the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization.

Trump’s “optimal pressure” project has intensified in recent months, as the U.S. has clashed with Iran and its proxies. Simply days back, an American professional passed away in Iraq after an attack by an Iraqi militia allied with Iran. The U.S. responded by battle websites held by the group, killing some two dozen militiamen.

Within days, protesters thought to be linked to the Iran-backed militia breached parts of the U.S. Embassy substance in Baghdad. The Iraqi government, meanwhile, condemned the U.S. airstrikes, noting that the militia had ties to its own security forces.

In remarks Thursday that may have foreshadowed the strike, Esper cautioned that the U.S. reserved the right to strike preemptively in Iraq or the area. “If we get word of attacks, we will take preemptive action too to secure American forces, safeguard American lives,” the defense secretary informed reporters at the Pentagon. “The game has changed.”

But the killing of Soleimani was a stunning development, even thinking about how tense U.S.-Iran relations have actually grown under Trump. The president has loaded economic sanctions on Iran’s Islamist program and sometimes threatened Tehran with military action.

Trump also pulled the United States out of the internationally negotiated nuclear deal with Iran, stating it was too narrow and ought to have curbed Iran’s non-nuclear aggressions in the area as well as its nuclear program.

The two countries almost pertained to a direct military clash previously this year after Iran was blamed in a string of attacks on international oil tankers. The U.S. and Iran even downed each other’s drones, but Trump pulled back at the last minute from staging a military strike directly on Iran.

Though he has actually sent thousands more troops to the area, Trump has actually said repeatedly that he doesn’t wish to take part in a new war in the Middle East. The possibility that Iran will feel forced to react with escalatory actions of its own could involve the president in a politically risky fight in the middle of an election year.

Democrats responded cautiously to Soleimani’s killing, however instantly raised concerns about its legality, even as Republicans hailed it as an unalloyed victory.

” Soleimani was an enemy of the United States.

Former vice president Joe Biden, the Democrats’ prominent presidential prospect, stated that while ‘no American will mourn Qassem Soleimani’s passing,” his killing was a “hugely escalatory relocation” that would prompt Iranian reprisals. “President Trump just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox.”

The death of Soleimani is most likely to have deep ramifications in Iraq and other nations in the area, where Iran has powerful political allies and proxy forces.

The most instant effects will be felt in Iraq, which for many years has actually been a battlefield for influence between Washington and Tehran. Iran has long looked for to press U.S. soldiers out of Iraq, where they’ve kept an existence since the 2003 invasion that fell dictator Saddam Hussein.

Lots of Iraqis are ill of Iranian influence in their country. Current extensive demonstrations have actually included chants versus Tehran and the Shiite clerics who mainly run its religion-infused program.

However Iraq also wants to avoid ending up being ground absolutely no for a U.S.-Iran war, while keeping up friendly relations with Iran to assist its own economy.

” It is just fair for Iraq to make every effort to attain this balance however provided the ‘beef’ between Iran and the U.S. it’s a lost effort,” a previous Iraqi diplomat told POLITICO. The “Trump administration is on a zero-sum mission vis a vis Iran, and expects Iraq to choose one side only.”

Trump’s hard line toward Iran has actually made applause from other Middle Eastern nations, especially Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which consider Iran an implacable opponent set on manipulating the region in its favor.

Still, Saudi and UAE diplomats in current months have attempted to cool tensions with Iran. And while they’re most likely to shed couple of tears for Soleimani, they might stress over the blowback Iran and its allies can developing in their own nations.

The Pentagon had actually thought about striking Soleimani before, throughout the height of U.S. participation in Iraq, when the Quds Force was providing bombs and other weapons to Iraqi Shiite militia groups that the military estimated killed over 600 U.S. soldiers.

In 2006, according to an Army study of the Iraq War that was eventually declassified, the U.S. military head office in Iraq “prepared a plan to eliminate or record Qods Force commander Qassem Soleimani, who had actually made his method into Iraq for a minimum of the second time” that year, the next time he went to the nation.

However U.S. leaders “eventually avoided doing something about it against Soleimani, enabling the Iranian basic to enter and leave Iraq unrestricted,” says the study. It does not describe why the military did not act upon the proposal or whether it was considered at greater levels, such as at the military’s Central Command or the Pentagon.

U.S. task forces in Iraq did detain some of Soleimani’s Quds Force associates throughout raids later on in 2006 and 2007, though, after the Bush administration approved expanded authorities for the elite troops to pursue Iranian targets in the country.

Those captures showed controversial with the Iraqi federal government, which often gave Quds Force members diplomatic resistance and demanded their release.

While Soleimani’s death is no doubt a significant loss for the Iranian program, it is not likely the judgment clerics and their military aides were entirely unprepared for it.

Ostovar, the Soleimani and IRGC specialist, stated in all likelihood Iran will name a successor quickly due to the fact that its systematic method to their rule is “really strong.”

” He was actually just sort of the forward or outdoors face of the Islamic Republic,” Ostovar stated. “He was the face of their technique, but their strategy goes beyond him.”

The post Trump takes massive gamble with killing of Iranian commander appeared first on Actu Trends.

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mideastsoccer · 5 years

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Mounting tension with Iran sheds a light on dynamics of US geopolitics

By James M. Dorsey

A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts and Tumblr

Mounting tension between the Trump administration and Iran are likely to shed light on US dynamics shaping today’s geopolitical environment.

Looming large is the figure of US national security advisor John Bolton, a proponent of a muscular US foreign policy in which the United States employs military force to impose its will and fortify its superpower status as the playground shifts from a unipolar to a multipolar world.

At first glance, President Donald J. Trump, viscerally opposed to the 2015 international agreement that curbed Iran’s nuclear program, appears to be allowing Mr. Bolton to drive the administration’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Iran.

In the latest unprecedented move, it was Mr. Bolton rather than the Pentagon who announced the accelerated deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group to the Gulf in what the national security advisor framed as a warning to Iran.

In many respects, Messrs. Trump and Bolton share a common worldview that is aligned with the way men like Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed, define their countries’ national interests.

In a book acclaimed by conservatives, Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony provided the tacit theoretical underpinnings of what goes beyond the worldview of Mr. Trump, his associates and Middle Eastern leaders.

Arguing that nationalism is a defense against imperialism redefined as the tyranny of universal values and liberal international organizations like the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the International Criminal Court, Mr. Hazony provides the basis for what amounts to a tacit agreement on shared values by autocrats, authoritarians and illiberals that also include the presidents of Russia, China and Turkey, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the prime ministers of India and Hungary, Narendra Modi and Victor Orban.

Mr. Hazony’s theory, fuelled by mounting international criticism of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, resonated because it harked back to right-wing anti-imperialism and rejection of universal values and standard-setting international institutions because they restrict what can countries do, primarily within their own borders.

Embracing Mr. Hazony’s theory, however, does not stop men like Messrs. Trump, Bolton, Xi, Bin Salman, Bin Zayed and Erdogan from imposing their will on others as part of what they see as a national interest.

In America’s case, columnist Gideon Rahman argues that Messrs. Trump and Bolton are harking back to an era when the United States brutally pursued its interests without regard for others.

Theirs is an understanding that the United States is in the longer term unlikely to be able to compete against a China that eventually outstrips it economically and militarily.

“The Trumpian view is that the US has gone soft and risks ruin if it is too scrupulous when dealing with ruthless adversaries such as ISIS (the Islamic State) – or, even, with Russia and China,” Mr. Rahman said. He could just as well have included Iran as an example.

If there is a silver lining in all of this, it is that the jury is out in answering the question of who ultimately drives US policy towards Iran or for that matter Venezuela: Mr. Trump, who despite his bluster is perceived to want to avoid military entanglements, or Mr. Bolton to whom the military appears to be a magic wand.

The question is also whether the evolution of the North Korea crisis suggests that other crises like Iran could evolve similarly even if there are no indications as yet of that potentially being the case and despite the fact that Mr. Trump at one point declared his willingness to meet with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani.

Mr. Trump appeared to initially follow Mr. Bolton’s inclinations when he threatened North Korea to respond with “fire and fury” if it did not denuclearize and mocked North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as “Little Rocket Man.”

Just months before joining Mr. Trump’s administration, Mr. Bolton had argued in favour of military strikes against North Korea in a Wall Street Journal oped.

“Given the gaps in U.S. intelligence about North Korea, we should not wait until the very last minute. That would risk striking after the North has deliverable nuclear weapons, a much more dangerous situation,” Mr. Bolton said.

Yet, Mr. Trump has since held two inconclusive, if not failed summits with Mr. Kim, declared that “we fell in love,” and rejected Mr. Bolton’s advice to tighten the North Korean sanctions regime.

Similarly, Mr. Trump, frustrated that US efforts led by Mr. Bolton to oust Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, has privately half-joked that his national security advisor is seeking to drag him “into a war.”

For now, Mr. Trump appears to be more on board with Mr. Bolton’s hard line towards Iran than his approach towards Venezuela and North Korea.

While it is unclear whether Iran could prove to be the exception to the president’s anti-war inclinations, it could, in a twist of irony, be Saudi Arabia that proves to be a moderating influence.

Despite being a proponent of regime change in Tehran, Prince Mohammed’s interest in the short and medium term is likely to be destabilization of the Iranian regime rather than immediate replacement with a government capable of returning the Islamic republic to the international fold and quickly reclaiming its place in global oil and gas markets.

The sanctions on Iran give the kingdom the time to in the short-term establish itself as a major gas trader and within six years as a key gas exporter.

If that Saudi interest prevails, it would jell with Mr. Trump’s aversion towards war.

Iranian journalist Ahmad Hashemi argues that ‘Venezuelization’ or destabilization of Iran may prove to be Mr. Trump’s compromise formula.

“Donald Trump is anything but a warmonger. He doesn’t want Iraq and Afghanistan-style regime change because another costly war in the Middle East goes against his “America First” policy,” Mr. Hashemi said.

The failure of Mr. Bolton’s effort to overthrow Mr. Maduro could prove to be a watershed and, possibly, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture.

#bolton #Trump #iran #Iran sanctions #saudi arabia #saudi #uae #Israel #Iran nuclear deal

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walruspush87-blog · 5 years

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Urgent Call for the Respect of Women and Minorities: Kevin Powell’s “My Mother. Barack Obama. Donald Trump. And the Last Stand of the Angry White Man.”

NOVEMBER 7, 2018

KEVIN POWELL’S LATEST BOOK, My Mother. Barack Obama. Donald Trump. And the Last Stand of the Angry White Man. is a collection of 13 extensive essays with adept use of personal accounts and historical insight into how the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and other forms of oppression prevent these 50 states from being a multicultural union.

The collection begins with the highly personal “Letter to a Young Man,” a poignant open letter to a young African-American college student named Sam who writes to him for advice on manhood. The first thing Powell does is let Sam know that he doesn’t have all the answers, that he doesn’t have “this thing called manhood” all figured out. In this essay, he breaks down patriarchy and how it warps young boys’ sense of manhood, imbuing them with the false idea that men are superior to women simply because they have penises. Using his own life as a backdrop for an analysis of sexism, Powell conveys the intimate details of his relationships with women, including his painful admission of pushing a former live-in girlfriend through a bathroom door, a moment Powell sees as a tipping point in his life.

I have learned since that fateful day with the bathroom door, that destructive manhood in America, or globally, does not care about your race or color or culture; nor does it care about your money or class or status. I have learned that manhood, the twisted and debilitating definitions of manhood most of us have been given, links us closely as the branches of the poplar tree.

Powell goes on to explain how sexism and patriarchy solidify themselves through institutions such as our educational system, which teaches us all about violent men, dubbing them “explorers” and “settlers,” “warriors,” “soldiers,” and “pioneers,” while largely ignoring the vast contributions that women have made to the nation and the world. He also points out the dubious role sports play in shoring up patriarchy via violence. Powell recounts his painstaking journey to rid himself of the patriarchal ideals and urges Sam and other men to do the same: “This is the kind of commitment we men need to make to ourselves: to live a life of peace, of love, of respect for women and girls as our equals.” He adds, “if we men and boys can, with humility, become allies to women and girls, then maybe we can rid the world of sexism once and for all.”

Using a keen analysis of the elections of Barack Obama and the subsequent election of Donald J. Trump along with life lessons learned from growing up in poverty with his single mother in Jersey City, New Jersey, My Mother. Barack Obama. Donald Trump. And the Last Stand of the Angry White Man. brings America to bear with itself by telling the naked truth, regardless of what the throngs of MAGA hat–wearing Trump supporters may think. Powell reminds us that in spite of all of our differences, all of our flaws, our destiny is a common one.

“I do see very clearly that we are all connected,” writes Powell in his essay “Will Racism Ever End, Will I Ever Stop Being a Nigger?”

[A]nd I truly love and acknowledge every race, every ethnic group, every identity, and every culture that exists in America, on this earth. But I, we, would be lying if we did not also admit that the longest running drama and the single most dysfunctional racial relationship in American history is between White people and Black people.

Powell contends that as long as the United States maintains this dysfunctional relationship between Black and White people, it can never begin to properly reconcile its sordid history: with Native American genocide and the theft of their land; with Latinx immigrants being viewed as anything other than criminals fueling the profits of the burgeoning prison industrial complex, and cheap labor exploited by the political whims of whoever happens to occupy the White House; Asians being seen much past the stereotypic “model minority”; and the humanity of Arabs, Middle Easterners, and Muslims largely ignored. Given this, it is no wonder why some racist elements of American society were prone to denounce the United States’s first democratically elected African-American president as a Muslim.

Powell vividly recalls in the title essay how Barack Obama, a tall, handsome, African-American community organizer, stepped out the shadows of political obscurity and into the national spotlight by doing what I honestly thought was the impossible — becoming the first African-American president in the history of the United States of America, a country whose history is steeped in the virtual genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, along with the wholesale exploitation of women and people of color, in general. Only a few decades before Obama’s election, Black people in the Deep South, such as author Kevin Powell’s mother, who hails from the Low Country of South Carolina, could be killed for trying to exercise their constitutional right to vote for the candidate of their choice. Thus, Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency became even more significant for women like Kevin’s mother who had sacrificed all their lives to afford the next generation such opportunities they could only dream of. For them, the Obamas became the long, last fulfillment of an American dream deferred.

Powell writes: “[I]n a nation where a people who are not White and privileged are treated as outsiders, as undesirables, as interlopers, we look for sheroes and heroes we can connect to, who speak to us, who speak for us, who can be and are what we can never be in our own lifetimes.”

But for Powell’s mother, seduced and abandoned by his father, leaving her to raise alone her only son, the Obamas mean something much more personal.

Except for one Black preacher or another my mother has never had images of Black people on her walls before, not even Dr. King. But in Barack and Michelle, I am sure, my mother saw the supernatural miracle of their marriage and a love she will never have for herself, and she saw a Black man as president through the eyes of that little Black girl in South Carolina who could have never imagined such a reality, not in her lifetime, not in a million lifetimes.

Just as Obama’s presidency marked a milestone in the history of African Americans, it was also seized upon by many Whites — especially the ones in mainstream media who began touting the election as a primary example of the declining insignificance of race, some even proclaiming that we were now in a “post-racial America,” a notion that Powell rejects as “absolutely not true.” He correctly points out that anytime there is significant progress for African Americans or minorities in general, there is a major White backlash fueled by racial animus and mostly manifested via the legal and extralegal actions of Whites.

Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of American history can see that he is one hundred percent correct. They need simply look at the history of chattel slavery, the Klan, the Black Codes, Jim Crow, redlining, the American Neo-Nazi movement, the Bakke decision, and the Reagan Revolution. If none of the above are enough, consider the salient fact that since the election of the United States’s first Black President there has been a noticeable spike in racially motivated attacks around the country. There is the phenomenon of Whites who show their psychological discomfort from sharing spaces with Black people by calling the police on them for no reason other than suspicion. Driving while Black is joined by a myriad of imaginary offenses: walking while Black, sleeping while Black, working while Black, standing while Black, studying in a public library while Black, waiting in a coffee shop while Black, picnicking in a public park while Black, and the list goes on. Any number of these imaginary offenses, which take place solely in the paranoid imagination of bigoted White folk, can get a person of color arrested, shot, or, worst, killed by a cop or a so-called law-abiding White American citizen “standing their ground.” Powell also points out that “Barack Obama has received more death threats than any other commander in chief in American history.”

According to Powell, it is this zeitgeist of hatred that led to the election of Donald J. Trump:

Indeed, what set the table for Donald Trump was the racist backlash to Barack Obama, were those Congressional members who vowed to block anything he did, those Whites in power who fanned the flames of fear by placing the blame on immigrants, on movements like Black Lives Matter, who made it seem as if they were more patriotic, as a matter of fact, than any other group in America.

The table he’s referring to is White supremacy, a doctrine as American as apple pie, one Trump adroitly uses to keep his base of largely poor, White, working-class males, who are quickly losing economic ground in a shifting global economy, blind to the cold hard fact that they are being duped into supporting policies that severely hurt their class interest, and in so blaming Blacks, Latinx, immigrants, gays, transgender people, the disabled, Muslims, and anyone else who aren’t straight, White, able-bodied males.

Other notable pieces in the book include “A Letter to Tupac Shakur,” “Why Baltimore is Burning,” “Cam Newton and the Killing of a Mockingbird,” and “Jay-Z and the Remaking of His Manhood.” Or, “The Crumpled and Forgotten Freedom Papers of Mr. Shawn Carter” and “Redefining Manhood: Harvey Weinstein and How His Toxic Manhood is Our Toxic Manhood, too.” With My Mother. Barack Obama. Donald Trump. And the Last Stand of the Angry White Man., Kevin Powell examines a salient mix of tough subjects such as race, poverty, and sexual violence with a passion and sensitivity that few writers of his generation can match.

Charlie Braxton is a poet, playwright, and cultural critic. His latest book is Embers Among the Ashes: Poems in a Haiku Manner (Jawara Press, 2018).

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/urgent-call-for-the-respect-of-women-and-minorities-kevin-powells-my-mother-barack-obama-donald-trump-and-the-last-stand-of-the-angry-white-man/

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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Christie’s, the famed auction house, recently sold an AI-generated painting for $432,500. The piece, titled “Portrait of Edmond Belamy,” was made by Obvious, a French art collective, and sold for roughly 45 times its estimated worth.

The sale was controversial, though not entirely because of the painting’s steep price tag. Paying $450,000 for a buzzy work of art — especially one that may sell well later on — isn’t unheard of in the art world. The most coveted works sell for many times that. Sotheby’s Hong Kong sold a Picasso for $7.79 million in September; a pair of paintings by the late Chinese-French painter Zao Wou-Ki sold for $65.1 million and $11.5 million, respectively, at that same sale. Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” sold at Christie’s last year for $450 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold.

According to a joint report by UBS and Art Basel released in March, the global art market saw $63.7 billion in total sales last year. But that doesn’t mean that most artists see even a small fraction of that money, since the highest-value sales usually involve one wealthy collector putting a highly sought-after work up for auction.

The money generated from that sale, then, goes to the work’s previous owner, not to the artist who made it. (Artists profit off their own work when it’s sold on what’s known as the “primary market,” i.e., directly from a gallery or from the artist herself. When art is sold on the “secondary market,” however — meaning that it’s sold by a collector to another collector, either privately or at an auction — only the seller and, if applicable, the auction house profits.)

Aside from a handful of celebrity artists — Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Yayoi Kusama, to name a few — most living artists’ works will never sell in the six- or seven-figure range. The result of all of this is that a small group of collectors pay astronomical prices for works made by an even smaller group of artists, who are in turn represented by a small number of high-profile galleries. Meanwhile, lesser-known artists and smaller galleries are increasingly being left behind.

The short answer is that most art isn’t. Pieces sold for six and seven figures tend to make headlines, but most living artists’ works will never sell for that much.

To understand why a few artists are rich and famous, first you need to realize that most of them aren’t and will never be. To break into the art market, an artist first has to find a gallery to represent them, which is harder than it sounds. Henri Neuendorf, an associate editor at Artnet News, told me gallerists often visit art schools’ MFA graduate shows to find young talent to represent. “These shows are the first arena, the first entry point for a lot of young artists,” Neuendorf said.

Some gallerists also look outside the art school crowd, presumably to diversify their representation, since MFAs don’t come cheap. (In 2014, tuitions at the 10 most influential MFA programs cost an average $38,000 per year, meaning a student would have to spend around $100,000 to complete their degree.) That said, the art world remains far from diverse. A 2014 study by the artists collective BFAMFAPhD found that 77.6 percent of artists who actually make a living by selling art are white, as are 80 percent of all art school graduates.

Christie’s sold its first piece of computer generated art, “Portrait of Edmond Belamy,” for $432,500. Christie’s

Artists who stand out in a graduate show or another setting may go on to have their work displayed in group shows with other emerging artists; if their work sells well, they may get a solo exhibition at a gallery. If their solo exhibition does well, that’s when their career really begins to take off.

Emerging artists’ works are generally priced based on size and medium, Neuendorf said. A larger painting, for example, will usually be priced between $10,000 and $15,000. Works on canvas are priced higher than works on paper, which are priced higher than prints. If an artist is represented by a well-known gallery like David Zwirner or Hauser & Wirth, however, the dealer’s prestige is enough to raise the artist’s sale prices, even if the artist is relatively unknown. In most cases, galleries take a 50 percent cut of the artist’s sales.

This process is becoming increasingly difficult thanks to the shuttering of small galleries around the world. The UBS and Art Basel report found that more galleries closed than opened in 2017. Meanwhile, large galleries are opening new locations to cater to an increasingly global market.

Olav Velthuis, a professor at the University of Amsterdam who studies sociology in the arts, attributes the shuttering of small galleries to the rise of art fairs like Frieze and Art Basel. In a column for the New York Times, Velthuis wrote that these fairs, which often charge gallerists between $50,000 and $100,000 for booth space, make it incredibly difficult for smaller gallerists to come home with a profit. But since fairs are becoming the preferred way for wealthy collectors to buy art — they can browse art from hundreds of galleries in a single location, all while hobnobbing with other collectors — galleries have no choice but to participate.

Smaller galleries tend to represent emerging artists, putting both the dealer and artist at yet another disadvantage. “The issue is that demand for art is not distributed evenly among all living artists,” Velthuis told me in an email. “Instead, many people are going after a small number of artists. That’s what’s driving up prices.”

Given the subjective nature part in general and contemporary art in particular, it’s hard for collectors to discern whether an artist is truly good. “The art market functions as a big consensus marketing machine,” said Velthuis. “So what people do is look at quality signals. Those signals can for instance be what an important curator is saying about an artist; if she has exhibitions in museums; if influential collectors are buying his work. Because everybody is, to some extent at the least, looking at the same signals, at one point they start agreeing who are the most desirable artists.”

In other words, some artists’ works are expensive because there’s a consensus in the art world that their works should be expensive. And, Velthuis adds, art “is a market for unique objects,” which adds a sense of scarcity into the mix. There are only a few known da Vinci paintings in existence, some of which belong to museums and are therefore permanently off the market. (It’s a “big taboo” for museums to sell works from their collection, Velthuis told me.) It only makes sense that when a da Vinci is up for auction, someone with the means to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for it will do just that.

“The issue is that demand for art is not distributed evenly among all living artists. Instead, many people are going after a small number of artists. That’s what’s driving up prices.” —Olav Velthuis

Just 0.2 percent of artists have work that sells for more than $10 million, according to the UBS and Art Basel report. But 32 percent of the $63.7 billion in total sales made that year came from works that sold for more than $10 million. An analysis conducted by Artnet last year similarly found that just 25 artists accounted for nearly half of all contemporary auction sales in the first six months of 2017. Only three of those artists were women.

“It definitely is a good example of a winner-take-all market, where revenues and profits are distributed in a highly unequal way,” Velthuis said. “[On] principle, it is not a problem in itself. However, galleries in the middle segment of the market are having a hard time surviving, and if many of them close their doors, that is bad for the ecology of the art world. We should think of ways to let profits at the top trickle down to the middle and bottom.”

The 2017 sale of da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” reignited discussions about the role of money in the art world. Georgina Adam, an art market expert and author of Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century, explained how it’s possible that a single painting could cost more money than most people would ever see in their lifetimes.

“Very rich people, these days, have an astonishing amount of money,” art expert Georgina Adam told the Financial Times. A gallerist interviewed in her book, The Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century, explained it this way: If a couple has a net worth of $10 billion and decides to invest 10 percent of that in art, they can buy $1 billion worth of paintings and sculptures.

There are more collectors now than ever before, and those collectors are wealthier than they have ever been. According to Adam’s book, the liberalization of certain countries’ economies — including China, India, and Eastern European countries — led to an art collection boom outside of the US and Western Europe. (The art market is also booming in the Gulf states.) As a result, the market has exploded into what writer Rachel Wetzler described as “a global industry bound up with luxury, fashion, and celebrity, attracting an expanded range of ultra-wealthy buyers who aggressively compete for works by brand-name artists.”

Art isn’t just a luxury commodity; it’s an investment. If collectors invest wisely, the works they buy can be worth much more later on. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Robert Scull, a New York City taxi tycoon who auctioned off pieces from his collection in 1973. One of the works was a painting by Robert Rauschenberg that Scull had bought for just $900 in 1958. It sold for $85,000.

The Price of Everything, a documentary about the role of money in the art world released in October, delves into the Scull auction drama and its aftermath. Art historian Barbara Rose, whose report on the auction for New York magazine was titled “Profit Without Honor,” called that auction a “pivotal moment” in the art world.

“The idea that art was being put on the auction block like a piece of meat, it was extraordinary to me,” Rose said in the film. “I remember that Rauschenberg was there and he was really incensed, because the artists got nothing out of this. … Suddenly there was the realization — because of the prices — that you could make money by buying low and selling high.”

More recently, the 2008 financial crisis was a boon for a few wealthy collectors who gobbled up works that were being sold by their suddenly cash-poor art world acquaintances. For example, billionaire business executive Mitchell Rales and his wife, Emily, added “about 50 works” to their collection in 2009, many of which they purchased at low prices, according to a 2016 Bloomberg report. The Rales family’s collection is now worth more than $1 billion.

“People who were active [buyers] at the time are very happy today,” art adviser Sandy Heller told Bloomberg. “Those opportunities would not have presented themselves without the financial crisis.”

A highly valued work of art is a luxury good, an investment, and, in some cases, a vehicle through which the ultra-wealthy can avoid paying taxes. Until very recently, collectors were able to exploit a loophole in the tax code known as the “like-kind exchange,” which allowed them to defer capital gains taxes on certain sales if the profits generated from those sales were put into a similar investment.

In the case of art sales, that meant that a collector who bought a painting for a certain amount of money — let’s say $1 million — and then sold it for $5 million a few years later didn’t have to pay capital gains taxes if they transferred that $4 million gain into the purchase of another work of art. (The Republican tax bill eliminated this benefit for art collectors, though it continues to benefit real estate developers.)

A gallery assistant views a painting by Turkish artist Fahrelnissa Zeid, titled Towards a Sky, which sold for £992,750 at Sotheby’s Middle Eastern Art Week in London in April 2017. Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Collectors can also receive tax benefits by donating pieces from their collection to museums. (Here’s where buying low and donating high is really beneficial, since the charitable deduction would take the current value of the work into account, not the amount the collector originally paid for it.)

Jennifer Blei Stockman, the former president of the Guggenheim and one of the producers of The Price of Everything, told me that galleries often require collectors who purchase new work by prominent artists to eventually make that work available to the public.

“Many galleries are now insisting that they will not sell a work to a private collector unless they either buy a second work and give it to a museum, or promise that the artwork will eventually be given to a museum,” Stockman said. These agreements aren’t legally enforceable, but collectors who want to remain in good standing with galleries tend to keep their word.

Artists’ works don’t necessarily have to end up in publicly-owned museums in order to be seen by the public. Over the past decade, a growing number of ultra-wealthy art collectors have opened private museums in order to show off the works they’ve acquired. Unlike public museums, which are hindered by relatively limited acquisitions budgets — the Louvre’s 2016 budget, for example, was €7.3 million — collectors can purchase just about any work they want for their private museums, provided they have the money. And since these museums are ostensibly open to the public, they come with a slew of tax benefits.

“The rich buy art,” arts writer Julie Baumgardner declared in an Artsy editorial. “And the super-rich, well, they make museums.”

Materially speaking, artists only benefit from sales when their works are sold on the primary market, meaning a collector purchased the work from a gallery or, less frequently, from the artist himself. When a work sells at auction, the artist doesn’t benefit at all.

For decades, artists have attempted to correct this by fighting to receive royalties from works sold on the secondary market. Most writers, for example, receive royalties from book sales in perpetuity. But once an artist sells a work to a collector, the collector — and the auction house, if applicable — is the only one who benefits from selling that work at a later date.

In 2011, a coalition of artists, including Chuck Close and Laddie John Dill, filed class-action lawsuits against Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and eBay. Citing the California Resale Royalties Act — which entitled California residents who sold work anywhere in the country, as well as any visual artist selling their work in California, to 5 percent of the price of any resale of their work more than $1,000 — the artists claimed that the eBay and the auction houses had broken state law. But in July, a federal appeals court sided with the sellers, not the artists.

Even if artists don’t make any money from these sales, Stockman told me, they can occasionally benefit in other ways. “Artists do benefit when their pieces sell well at auction, because primary prices are then increased,” Stockman said. “However, when a piece sells at auction or in the secondary market, the artist does not [financially] benefit at all, and that, I know, is very scary and upsetting to many artists.”

Taken together, all of these factors paint a troubling picture: Access to art seems to be increasingly concentrated among the superrich. As the rich get richer, collectors are paying increasingly higher prices for works made by a handful of living artists, leaving emerging artists and the galleries that represent them behind. Then there’s the question of who even gets to be an artist. Art school is expensive, and an MFA doesn’t automatically translate to financial success in such a competitive industry.

Jeff Koons’s “Popeye” was purchased for $28 million by billionaire casino tycoon Steve Wynn in 2014. Emmanual Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

There is some pushback to this concentration of the market at the very top — or even to the idea that art is inaccessible to the average person. Emily Kaplan, the vice president of postwar and contemporary sales at Christie’s, told me that the auction house’s day sales are open to the public and often feature works that cost much less than headlines would lead you to believe.

“Christie’s can be seen as an intimidating name for a lot of people, but most of the sales that we do are much lower prices than what gets reported in the news,” said Kaplan. “We have a lot of sales that happen throughout the calendar year in multiple locations, especially postwar and contemporary art. … Works can sell for a couple hundred dollars, one, two, three thousand dollars. It’s a much lower range than people expect.”

Affordable art fairs, which usually sell art for a few thousand dollars, are another alternative for people who want to buy art but can’t spend millions on a single sculpture. Superfine, an art fair founded in 2015, describes itself as a way of bringing art to the people. Co-founders James Miille and Alex Mitow say the fair is a reaction to the inflated prices they saw on the high end of the “insular” art market.

“We saw a rift in the art market between artists and galleries with amazing work who need to sell it to survive, and people who love art and can afford it but weren’t feeling like a part of the game,” Mitow told me in an email. “Most transactions in the art market actually occur at the under $5,000 level, and that’s what we’re publicizing: the movement of real art by real living artists who build a sustainable career, not necessarily outlier superstar artists with sales records that are unattainable for the average — if equally qualified — artist.”

In addition to hosting fairs in New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and Washington, DC, Superfine sells works through its “e-fair.” In the same vein as more traditional art fairs like Art Basel, Superfine charges artists or gallerists a flat fee for exhibition space, though Superfine’s rates are much lower.

In spite of these efforts to democratize art, though, the overall market is still privileged towards, well, the very privileged. Art patronage has always been a hobby for the very rich, and that’s not going to change any time soon — but the ability to look at beautiful things shouldn’t be limited to those who can afford to buy them.

Original Source -> Why is art so expensive?

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End of nations: Is there an alternative to countries?

THE FUTURE Nation states cause some of our biggest problems, from civil war to climate inaction. Science suggests there are better ways to run a planet

Imagine there’s no countries… ...it isn't hard to do, sang John Lennon. Actually, it is, argues Debora MacKenzie. Is there an alternative?

Try, for a moment, to envisage a world without countries. Imagine a map not divided into neat, coloured patches, each with clear borders, governments, laws. Try to describe anything our society does – trade, travel, science, sport, maintaining peace and security – without mentioning countries. Try to describe yourself: you have a right to at least one nationality, and the right to change it, but not the right to have none.

Those coloured patches on the map may be democracies, dictatorships or too chaotic to be either, but virtually all claim to be one thing: a nation state, the sovereign territory of a "people" or nation who are entitled to self-determination within a self-governing state. So says the United Nations, which now numbers 193 of them.

And more and more peoples want their own state, from Scots voting for independence to jihadis declaring a new state in the Middle East. Many of the big news stories of the day, from conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine to rows over immigration and membership of the European Union, are linked to nation states in some way.

Even as our economies globalise, nation states remain the planet's premier political institution. Large votes for nationalist parties in the 2014 EU elections prove nationalism remains alive – even as the EU tries to transcend it.

Yet there is a growing feeling among economists, political scientists and even national governments that the nation state is not necessarily the best scale on which to run our affairs. We must manage vital matters like food supply and climate on a global scale, yet national agendas repeatedly trump the global good. At a smaller scale, city and regional administrations often seem to serve people better than national governments.

How, then, should we organise ourselves? Is the nation state a natural, inevitable institution? Or is it a dangerous anachronism in a globalised world?

https://youtu.be/hvJdc7hJTR0 [Shifting sands: National borders can feel permanent and immutable – until you look at how they have changed over the past two centuries, especially in Europe, the cradle of the modern nation state.]

These are not normally scientific questions – but that is changing. Complexity theorists, social scientists and historians are addressing them using new techniques, and the answers are not always what you might expect. Far from timeless, the nation state is a recent phenomenon. And as complexity keeps rising, it is already mutating into novel political structures. Get set for neo-medievalism.

Before the late 18th century there were no real nation states, says John Breuilly of the London School of Economics. If you travelled across Europe, no one asked for your passport at borders; neither passports nor borders as we know them existed. People had ethnic and cultural identities, but these didn't really define the political entity they lived in.

That goes back to the anthropology, and psychology, of humanity's earliest politics. We started as wandering, extended families, then formed larger bands of hunter-gatherers, and then, around 10,000 years ago, settled in farming villages. Such alliances had adaptive advantages, as people cooperated to feed and defend themselves.

War and peace

But they also had limits. Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford has shown that one individual can keep track of social interactions linking no more than around 150 people. Evidence for that includes studies of villages and army units through history, and the average tally of Facebook friends.

But there was one important reason to have more friends than that: war. "In small-scale societies, between 10 and 60 per cent of male deaths are attributable to warfare," says Peter Turchin at the University of Connecticut. More allies meant a higher chance of survival.

Turchin has found that ancient Eurasian empires grew largest where fighting was fiercest, suggesting war was a major factor in political enlargement. Archaeologist Ian Morris at Stanford University in California reasons that as populations grew, people could no longer find empty lands where they could escape foes (see " War, what is it good for? Just look around you"). The losers of battles were simply absorbed into the enemy's domain – so domains grew bigger.

How did they get past Dunbar's number? Humanity's universal answer was the invention of hierarchy. Several villages allied themselves under a chief; several chiefdoms banded together under a higher chief. To grow, these alliances added more villages, and if necessary more layers of hierarchy.

Hierarchies meant leaders could coordinate large groups without anyone having to keep personal track of more than 150 people. In addition to their immediate circle, an individual interacted with one person from a higher level in the hierarchy, and typically eight people from lower levels, says Turchin.

These alliances continued to enlarge and increase in complexity in order to perform more kinds of collective actions, says Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Massachusetts. For a society to survive, its collective behaviour must be as complex as the challenges it faces – including competition from neighbours.

Emotional attachment to a nation state is a recent invention.

If one group adopted a hierarchical society, its competitors also had to. Hierarchies spread and social complexity grew. Larger hierarchies not only won more wars but also fed more people through economies of scale, which enabled technical and social innovations such as irrigation, food storage, record-keeping and a unifying religion. Cities, kingdoms and empires followed.

But these were not nation states. A conquered city or region could be subsumed into an empire regardless of its inhabitants' "national" identity. "The view of the state as a necessary framework for politics, as old as civilisation itself, does not stand up to scrutiny," says historian Andreas Osiander of the Humboldt University of Berlin.

One key point is that agrarian societies required little actual governing. Nine people in 10 were peasants who had to farm or starve, so were largely self-organising. Government intervened to take its cut, enforce basic criminal law and keep the peace within its undisputed territories. Otherwise its main role was to fight to keep those territories, or acquire more.

Even quite late on, rulers spent little time governing, says Osiander. In the 17th century Louis XIV of France had half a million troops fighting foreign wars but only 2000 keeping order at home. In the 18th century, the Dutch and Swiss needed no central government at all. Many eastern European immigrants arriving in the US in the 19th century could say what village they came from, but not what country: it didn't matter to them.

Before the modern era, says Breuilly, people defined themselves "vertically" by who their rulers were. There was little horizontal interaction between peasants beyond local markets. Whoever else the king ruled over, and whether those people were anything like oneself, was largely irrelevant.

Such systems are very different from today's states, which have well-defined boundaries filled with citizens. In a system of vertical loyalties, says Breuilly, power peaks where the overlord lives and peters out in frontier territories that shade into neighbouring regions. Ancient empires are coloured on modern maps as if they had firm borders, but they didn't. Moreover, people and territories often came under different jurisdictions for different purposes.

Simple societies

Such loose control, says Bar-Yam, meant pre-modern political units were only capable of scaling up a few simple actions such as growing food, fighting battles, collecting tribute and keeping order. Some, like the Roman Empire, did this on a very large scale. But complexity – the different actions society could collectively perform – was relatively low.

Complexity was limited by the energy a society could harness. For most of history that essentially meant human and animal labour. In the late Middle Ages, Europe harnessed more, especially water power. This boosted social complexity – trade increased, for example– requiring more government. A decentralised feudal system gave way to centralised monarchies with more power.

But these were still not nation states. Monarchies were defined by who ruled them, and rulers were defined by mutual recognition – or its converse, near-constant warfare. In Europe, however, as trade grew, monarchs discovered they could get more power from wealth than war.

In 1648, Europe's Peace of Westphalia ended centuries of war by declaring existing kingdoms, empires and other polities "sovereign": none was to interfere in the internal affairs of others. This was a step towards modern states, but these sovereign entities were still not defined by their peoples' national identities. International law is said to date from the Westphalia treaty, yet the word "international" was not coined until 132 years later.

By then Europe had hit the tipping point of the industrial revolution. Harnessing vastly more energy from coal meant that complex behaviours performed by individuals, such as weaving, could be amplified, says Bar-Yam, producing much more complex collective behaviours.

This demanded a different kind of government. In 1776 and 1789, revolutions in the US and France created the first nation states, defined by the national identity of their citizens rather than the bloodlines of their rulers. According to one landmark history of the period, says Breuilly, "in 1800 almost nobody in France thought of themselves as French. By 1900 they all did." For various reasons, people in England had an earlier sense of "Englishness", he says, but it was not expressed as a nationalist ideology.

By 1918, with the dismemberment of Europe's last multinational empires such as the Habsburgs in the first world war, European state boundaries had been redrawn largely along cultural and linguistic lines. In Europe at least, the nation state was the new norm.

Part of the reason was a pragmatic adaptation of the scale of political control required to run an industrial economy. Unlike farming, industry needs steel, coal and other resources which are not uniformly distributed, so many micro-states were no longer viable. Meanwhile, empires became unwieldy as they industrialised and needed more actual governing. So in 19th-century Europe, micro-states fused and empires split.

These new nation states were justified not merely as economically efficient, but as the fulfilment of their inhabitants' national destiny. A succession of historians has nonetheless concluded that it was the states that defined their respective nations, and not the other way around.

France, for example, was not the natural expression of a pre-existing French nation. At the revolution in 1789, half its residents did not speak French. In 1860, when Italy unified, only 2.5 per cent of residents regularly spoke standard Italian. Its leaders spoke French to each other. One famously said that, having created Italy, they now had to create Italians – a process many feel is still taking place.

Sociologist Siniša Maleševic of University College Dublin in Ireland believes that this "nation building" was a key step in the evolution of modern nation states. It required the creation of an ideology of nationalism that emotionally equated the nation with people's Dunbar circle of family and friends.

That in turn relied heavily on mass communication technologies. In an influential analysis, the late Benedict Anderson at Cornell University in New York described nations as "imagined" communities: they far outnumber our immediate circle and we will never meet them all, yet people will die for their nation as they would for their family.

Such nationalist feelings, he argued, arose after mass-market books standardised vernaculars and created linguistic communities. Newspapers allowed people to learn about events of common concern, creating a large "horizontal" community that was previously impossible. National identity was also deliberately fostered by state-funded mass education.

The key factor driving this ideological process, Maleševic says, was an underlying structural one: the development of far-reaching bureaucracies needed to run complex industrialised societies. For example, says Breuilly, in the 1880s Prussia became the first government to pay unemployment benefits. At first they were paid only in a worker's native village, where identification was not a problem. As people migrated for work, benefits were made available anywhere in Prussia. "It wasn't until then that they had to establish who a Prussian was," he says, and they needed bureaucracy to do it. Citizenship papers, censuses and policed borders followed.

That meant hierarchical control structures ballooned, with more layers of middle management. Such bureaucracy was what really brought people together in nation-sized units, argues Maleševic. But not by design: it emerged out of the behaviour of complex hierarchical systems. As people do more kinds of activities, says Bar-Yam, the control structure of their society inevitably becomes denser.

In the emerging nation state, that translates into more bureaucrats per head of population. Being tied into such close bureaucratic control also encouraged people to feel personal ties with the state, especially as ties to church and village declined. As governments exerted greater control, people got more rights, such as voting, in return. For the first time, people felt the state was theirs.

Natural state of affairs?

Once Europe had established the nation state model and prospered, says Breuilly, everyone wanted to follow suit. In fact it is hard now to imagine that there could be another way. But is a structure that grew spontaneously out of the complexity of the industrial revolution really the best way to manage our affairs?

According to Brian Slattery of York University in Toronto, nation states still thrive on a widely held belief that "the world is naturally made of distinct, homogeneous national or tribal groups which occupy separate portions of the globe, and claim most people's primary allegiance". But anthropological research does not bear that out, he says. Even in tribal societies, ethnic and cultural pluralism has always been widespread. Multilingualism is common, cultures shade into each other, and language and cultural groups are not congruent.

Moreover, people always have a sense of belonging to numerous different groups based on region, culture, background and more. "The claim that a person's identity and well-being is tied in a central way to the well-being of the national group is wrong as a simple matter of historical fact," says Slattery.

Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that the nation-state model fails so often: since 1960 there have been more than 180 civil wars worldwide.

Such conflicts are often blamed on ethnic or sectarian tensions. Failed states, such as Syria right now, are typically riven by violence along such lines. According to the idea that nation states should contain only one nation, such failures have often been blamed on the colonial legacy of bundling together many peoples within unnatural boundaries.

But for every Syria or Iraq there is a Singapore, Malaysia or Tanzania, getting along okay despite having several "national" groups. Immigrant states in Australia and the Americas, meanwhile, forged single nations out of massive initial diversity.

Living together

What makes the difference? It turns out that while ethnicity and language are important, what really matters is bureaucracy. This is clear in the varying fates of the independent states that emerged as Europe's overseas empires fell apart after the second world war.

According to the mythology of nationalism, all they needed was a territory, a flag, a national government and UN recognition. In fact what they really needed was complex bureaucracy.

Multi-ethnic states such as Malaysia can get along quite well. Some former colonies that had one became stable democracies, notably India. Others did not, especially those such as the former Belgian Congo, whose colonial rulers had merely extracted resources. Many of these became dictatorships, which require a much simpler bureaucracy than democracies.

Dictatorships exacerbate ethnic strife because their institutions do not promote citizens' identification with the nation. In such situations, people fall back on trusted alliances based on kinship, which readily elicit Dunbar-like loyalties. Insecure governments allied to ethnic groups favour their own, while grievances among the disfavoured groups grow – and the resulting conflict can be fierce.

Recent research confirms that the problem is not ethnic diversity itself, but not enough official inclusiveness. Countries with little historic ethnic diversity are now having to learn that on the fly, as people migrate to find jobs within a globalised economy.

How that pans out may depend on whether people self-segregate. Humans like being around people like themselves, and ethnic enclaves can be the result.

Jennifer Neal of Michigan State University has used agent-based modelling to look at the effect of this in city neighbourhoods. Her work suggests that enclaves promote social cohesion, but at the cost of decreasing tolerance between groups. Small enclaves in close proximity may be the solution.

But at what scale? Bar-Yam says communities where people are well mixed – such as in peaceable Singapore, where enclaves are actively discouraged – tend not to have ethnic strife. Larger enclaves can also foster stability. Using mathematical models to correlate the size of enclaves with the incidences of ethnic strife in India, Switzerland and the former Yugoslavia, he found that enclaves 56 kilometres or more wide make for peaceful coexistence – especially if they are separated by natural geographical barriers.

Switzerland's 26 cantons, for example, which have different languages and religions, meet Bar-Yam's spatial stability test – except one. A French-speaking enclave in German-speaking Berne experienced the only major unrest in recent Swiss history. It was resolved by making it a separate canton, Jura, which meets the criteria.

Again, though, ethnicity and language are only part of the story. Lars-Erik Cederman of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich argues that Swiss cantons have achieved peace not by geographical adjustment of frontiers, but by political arrangements giving cantons considerable autonomy and a part in collective decisions.

Similarly, using a recently compiled database to analyse civil wars since 1960, Cederman finds that strife is indeed more likely in countries that are more ethnically diverse. But careful analysis confirms that trouble arises not from diversity alone, but when certain groups are systematically excluded from power.

Governments with ethnicity-based politics were especially vulnerable. The US set up just such a government in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Exclusion of Sunni by Shiites led to insurgents declaring a Sunni state in occupied territory in Iraq and Syria. True to nation-state mythology, it rejects the colonial boundaries of Iraq and Syria, as they force dissimilar "nations" together.

Ethnic cleansing

Yet the solution cannot be imposing ethnic uniformity. Historically, so-called ethnic cleansing has been uniquely bloody, and "national" uniformity is no guarantee of harmony. In any case, there is no good definition of an ethnic group. Many people's ethnicities are mixed and change with the political weather: the numbers who claimed to be German in the Czech Sudetenland territory annexed by Hitler changed dramatically before and after the war. Russian claims to Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine now may be equally flimsy.

Both Bar-Yam's and Cederman's research suggests one answer to diversity within nation states: devolve power to local communities, as multicultural states such as Belgium and Canada have done.

"We need a conception of the state as a place where multiple affiliations and languages and religions may be safe and flourish," says Slattery. "That is the ideal Tanzania has embraced and it seems to be working reasonably well." Tanzania has more than 120 ethnic groups and about 100 languages.

In the end, what may matter more than ethnicity, language or religion is economic scale. The scale needed to prosper may have changed with technology – tiny Estonia is a high-tech winner – but a small state may still not pack enough economic power to compete.

That is one reason why Estonia is such an enthusiastic member of the EU. After the devastating wars in the 20th century, European countries tried to prevent further war by integrating their basic industries. That project, which became the European Union, now primarily offers member states profitable economies of scale, through manufacturing and selling in the world's largest single market.

What the EU fails to inspire is nationalist-style allegiance – which Maleševic thinks nowadays relies on the "banal" nationalism of sport, anthems, TV news programmes, even song contests. That means Europeans' allegiances are no longer identified with the political unit that handles much of their government.

Ironically, says Jan Zielonka at the University of Oxford, the EU has saved Europe's nation states, which are now too small to compete individually. The call by nationalist parties to "take back power from Brussels", he argues, would lead to weaker countries, not stronger ones.

He sees a different problem. Nation states grew out of the complex hierarchies of the industrial revolution. The EU adds another layer of hierarchy – but without enough underlying integration to wield decisive power. It lacks both of Maleševic's necessary conditions: nationalist ideology and pervasive integrating bureaucracy.

Even so, the EU may point the way to what a post-nation-state world will look like. Zielonka agrees that further integration of Europe's governing systems is needed as economies become more interdependent. But he says Europe's often-paralysed hierarchy cannot achieve this. Instead he sees the replacement of hierarchy by networks of cities, regions and even non-governmental organisations. Sound familiar? Proponents call it neo-medievalism.

"The future structure and exercise of political power will resemble the medieval model more than the Westphalian one," says Zielonka. "The latter is about concentration of power, sovereignty and clear-cut identity." Neo-medievalism, on the other hand, means overlapping authorities, divided sovereignty, multiple identities and governing institutions, and fuzzy borders.

Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University, a former US assistant secretary of state, also sees hierarchies giving way to global networks primarily of experts and bureaucrats from nation states. For example, governments now work more through flexible networks such as the G7 (or 8, or 20) to manage global problems than through the UN hierarchy.

Ian Goldin, a former head of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, which analyses global problems, thinks such networks must emerge. He believes existing institutions such as UN agencies and the World Bank are structurally unable to deal with problems that emerge from global interrelatedness, such as economic instability, pandemics, climate change and cybersecurity – partly because they are hierarchies of member states which themselves cannot deal with these global problems. He quotes Slaughter: "Networked problems require a networked response."

Again, the underlying behaviour of systems and the limits of the human brain explain why. Bar-Yam notes that in any hierarchy, the person at the top has to be able to get their head around the whole system. When systems are too complex for one human mind to grasp, he argues that they must evolve from hierarchies into networks where no one person is in charge.

Even today, conflicts usually revolve around issues of nationhood.

Where does this leave nation states? "They remain the main containers of power in the world," says Breuilly. And we need their power to maintain the personal security that has permitted human violence to decline to all-time lows (see “War, what is it good for? Just look around you”).

Moreover, says Dani Rodrik at Harvard University, the very globalised economy that is allowing these networks to emerge needs something or somebody to write and enforce the rules. Nation states are currently the only entities powerful enough to do this.

Yet their limitations are clear, both in solving global problems and resolving local conflicts. One solution may be to pay more attention to the scale of government. Known as subsidiarity, this is a basic principle of the EU: the idea that government should act at the level where it is most effective, with local government for local problems and higher powers at higher scales. There is empirical evidence that it works: social and ecological systems can be better governed when their users self-organise than when they are run by outside leaders.

However, it is hard to see how our political system can evolve coherently in that direction. Nation states could get in the way of both devolution to local control and networking to achieve global goals. With climate change, it is arguable that they already have.

There is an alternative to evolving towards a globalised world of interlocking networks, neo-medieval or not, and that is collapse. "Most hierarchical systems tend to become top-heavy, expensive and incapable of responding to change," says Marten Scheffer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. "The resulting tension may be released through partial collapse." For nation states, that could mean anything from the renewed pre-eminence of cities to Iraq-style anarchy: an uncertain prospect, but there is an upside. Collapse, say some, is the creative destruction that allows new structures to emerge.

Like it or not, our societies may already be undergoing this transition. We cannot yet imagine there are no countries. But recognising that they were temporary solutions to specific historical situations can only help us manage a transition to whatever we need next. Whether or not our nations endure, the structures through which we govern our affairs are due for a change. Time to start imagining.

By Debora MacKenzie, New Scientist Magazine Leader: “In our world beyond nations, the future is medieval” This article appeared in print under the headline “Imagine there’s no countries…” https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329850-600-end-of-nations-is-there-an-alternative-to-countries/

#international affairs #nationalism

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poojatmr-blog · 6 years

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Photoinitiator Market to Reap Excessive Revenues by 2027

A photoinitiator is a molecule that creates reactive species such as free radicals, cations, or anions when exposed to radiation - UV or visible. Synthetic photoinitiators are key components used in photopolymers. These polymers are further utilized to produce photo-curable coatings, adhesives, and dental restoratives.

Some small molecules in the atmosphere can also act as photoinitiators by decomposing to give free radicals, as is in the case of photochemical smog. For example, nitrogen dioxide is produced in large quantities by gasoline-burning internal combustion engines. NO2 in the troposphere gives smog its brown coloration and catalyzes production of toxic ground-level ozone. Molecular oxygen (O2) also serves as a photoinitiator in the stratosphere, breaking down into atomic oxygen and combining with O2 in order to form ozone in the ozone layer.

Photoinitators can create a reactive species by different pathways including photo-dissociation and electron transfer. As an example of dissociation, hydrogen peroxide can undergo homolytic cleavage, with the O-O bond cleaving to form two hydroxyl radicals. Certain azo compounds such as azobisisobutyronitrile can also photolytically cleave, forming two alkyl radicals and nitrogen gas. These free radicals can now promote other reactions, thus acting as photoinitiators. Peroxides, nitrogen dioxides, and molecular oxygen are key atmospheric photoinitiators.

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A compound that goes through a photoreaction after absorbing the light and creating a reactive species is called as photoinitiator. Photoinitiators have the capacity to catalyze or initiate chemical reactions, which result in remarkable changes in the physical properties and solubility of various suitable formulations. Therefore, this compound is able to transform light’s physical energy into appropriate chemical energy in the form of reactive intermediates. Polycondesation and polymerization reactions are typically achieve these change. Radiation curing or Photopolymerization is a process that is started by light and photoinitiator. This process change a formulation of soluble liquid into insoluble and hard polymer network which is cross linked. Physically and chemically the cured coating has resistant qualities and it used both to decorate and protect substrates for example metal, plastic and wood.

Photoinitiator market- Drivers

Ideal photoinitiators are simple and cheap synthesis. Besides, controlled and easy operation and formulation, low toxicity, and speed are some of the factors which are increasing the growth of photoinitiator market. To control the imaging processes photoinitiator is assumed as a key compound. Lately, there are many new and innovative developments have witnessed, and these developments include the need for cheaper visible/UV sensitizers with improved speed, water soluble and polymeric & co-reactive structures with low rates of migration. Although, effective and new cationic systems are expensive, still they are able to attract remarkable commercial and academic interest.

Photoinitiators and light products are odorless and with low toxic

They have higher efficiency to manage between photoinitiations’ initiator channeling

Radiation source’s emission spectrum have to match with the photoinitiors’ absoption spectra and has a high level of molar extinction coefficient

Photoinitiators are easy to store and they have a better stability

All these factors are fuelling the growth of photoinitiator market during the projected period. Photo

Photoinitiator market- Restraints

The CQ element in photoinitiator can hamper the growth of the market. Toxicity, low efficiency of polymerization and compromise the esthetics of dental composite restoration are some of the disadvantages of CQ element of photoinitiator. This compromise of esthetics of dental composite restoration is because of effect of residual and un-reacted molecules of CQ.

Photoinitiator market- Regional Overview

Asia- Pacific region is expected to be the rapidly developing market for photoinitiator. The evolution of construction, automotive, electronics and electrical and paint & coating industries in Asia- Pacific region is expected to create a tremendous growth of photoinitiator market. Recession of economy in China is responsible for the shift of foreign investment in other countries of Southeast Asia which has also resulted into the growth of photoinitiator market across the globe. In North America, the market for photoinitiator is stable and fragmented due to which competition among key players have increased. This region is technology driven and this is one of the reason for the constant growth of the photoinitiator market in North America.

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Photoinitiator market- Key Companies

Some of the key companies functioning in the photoinitiator market are Polynaisse, IGM Resins, Gurun, BASF, JKT, Lambson, Hongtai, Arkema, Tronly, DBC, Tronly, Eutec, Yangfan, Jiuri Chemical, NewSun and IHT

This analytical research study imparts an all-inclusive assessment on the market, while propounding historical intelligence, actionable insights, and industry-validated & statistically-upheld market forecast. Verified and suitable set of assumptions and methodology has been leveraged for developing this comprehensive study. Information and analysis on key market segments incorporated in the report has been delivered in weighted chapters. A thorough analysis has been offered by the report on

Market Dynamics

Market Size

Market Segments

Demand & Supply Trends

Current Issues and Challenges

Companies and Competitor Landscape

Value Chain

Technology

Main Report URL@ https://www.factmr.com/report/488/photoinitiator-market

Regional Segments Analyzed Include

North America (U.S., Canada)

Latin America (Mexico. Brazil)

Western Europe (Germany, Italy, France, U.K, Spain)

Eastern Europe (Poland, Russia)

Asia Pacific (China, India, ASEAN, Australia & New Zealand)

Japan

Middle East and Africa (GCC, S. Africa, N. Africa)

Compilation of authentic and first-hand intelligence, insights offered in the report are based on quantitative and qualitative assessment by leading industry experts, and inputs from opinion leaders & industry participants around the value chain. Growth determinants, macroeconomic indicators, and parent market trends have been scrutinized and delivered, coupled with the market attractiveness for each market segment encompassed. Qualitative impact of growth influencers on the market segments across regions has also been mapped by the report.

About Fact.MR

Fact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; that’s why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.

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#Photoinitiator Market

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inventedworld · 7 years

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LEGENDARY OBSCURITY

It was a tale passed from twelve-year-old to twelve-year-old like a reverie, like a sacred oath. That older kid? The ninth grader at the bus stop, the one who moved out of town with his parents after only a year? He had an older brother who owned a set of late ‘60s, early 70’s mint condition Fantastic Four comic books, and his copy of issue #100 was autographed by Jack Kirby himself! Everyone new about the story, even if nobody actually saw the collection. The story had too much information and detail for it not to be true. It had to be true. The guy clearly knew the value of what he had. It wasn’t just that particular run of legendary issues. He understand the value of the particular artist. Anyone who understood what Jack Kirby meant to the Fantastic Four must also be good for a whole range of other cool surprises.

There used to be a record store a few blocks from my college campus. Now there are no record stores anywhere, of course, but in 20th century (so long ago…) the location of one’s vinyl considerations could confer as much credibility as the music itself. The best stories had sales clerks who obsessed over their stock, who knew what you wanted before you knew it yourself. The music may have been obscure, but to those in the know, the knowledge alone meant membership to an exclusive club.

Remember that great diner across town, the place across the street from the warehouse with the big metal door? Remember that art gallery on 2nd Street, the place that somehow seemed to survive with surprisingly sophisticated shows no matter how the neighborhood changed around it? Remember the time you heard about a showing of George Lucas’s first movie THX 1138 at a college auditorium(projected from 16mm film print, no less!), and you made the enormous effort to get there as if it were a pilgrimage? Walking in you realized everyone else in the theater made the same trip, too, knew the value of what was once an obscure film, knew it mattered. There, sitting in that crowded theater of other people who shared the same hard earned, rare knowledge, you not only saw a young filmmaker’s work, but felt buoyed by a sense of tribal community. You were not alone in the world. Somehow a pod of rare blue whales had found each other in the open ocean and come together for a pow-wow.

Something has been lost by everything becoming easily discoverable. There are no obscure cafes anymore. If they’re not discoverable and well reviewed by masses of patrons these days, they don’t survive. There are no obscure contemporary recordings of musical greats. If they’re really, truly great, they get discovered tout suite or they disappear. The creative process as a shared cultural trading experience has gained immeasurably since the recent dawn of the networked era, with cross pollination and endless ideas exchanged more frictionlessly than every before. But obscurity had it’s unexpected virtues. Discoveries of the obscure produces depths of emotion that are not equivalently met by mere accomplishment. Obscurity suggests adventure, and adventure fills the soul. The irony is that we’re now all awash in tidal waves of information, yet there’s rarely a sense of anything being a surprise anymore. There’s just an endless stream of “have you gotten to it, yet?”, andthat’s not even close to knowing about something awesome that others may not have yet found.

In second half of the twentieth century the only Western cultural penetration of traditional Asian martial arts were through hard to find and often culturally degrading chop-socky movies. The movies traded in stereotypes, the production values were often crude, and the stories were often blunt and obvious. Nonetheless, there was sheer bravura in some of the storytelling, with a physicality unparalleled by western standards and implicative of knowledge that only the most intrepid fan might discover extraordinary expressions.

Just a few decades ago suburbanites didn’t go to dojos. They didn’t even know the word. But then ideas began to spread. People got exposed. An accelerating rush of information spread ideas to a global audience, carried by the typically prurient wings of the entertainment mega-culture. And guess what? Along with all of the most base aspects that attracted superficial interest, more substantive aspects of Asian martial arts crept in to the mainstream. Western people studied foreign (to them) philosophies, demystifying Eastern ideas. Standards of excellence grew. Stereotypes began to erode (long distances still remain on that score), and a sense of foreign “otherness” started to fade. But then, once ordinary middle school students wanted to take classes, the thing that initially attracted crowds become commodified. The thing was no longer the thing. It became ordinary, and then it lost its mojo, except for the most dedicated and disciplined.

But knowledge spread. “Information wants to be free”, as the saying goes, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.

No one wants to remain obscure, especially if he or she believes in what they’re pursuing. But one of the reasons people thought Dr. Strange and The Silver Surfer were such cool comic book characters years ago is because they both made us believe that there were distant places where special knowledge might be obtained for the most probing devotees. That inspiration led to passions. Those passions led to change. In obscurity, the seeds of greatness wait.

twitter.com/michaelstarobin or facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

#records #comic books #martial arts

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mariahronnie-blog · 7 years

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Essence and ethical issues of women in business in Eastern Europe

Introduction

Modern women in our world are becoming more and more independent thereby moving men to the background taking the turn with them on the social stage by changing their stereotypes that were perceived by her since childhood, but if a woman decided to climb the social ladder, she should Prepare to master another's territory. And the higher it goes up, the less around it will be representatives of the weaker sex. Thus, for a higher level, a woman needs to learn the rules of business conduct in the world of men. The participation of women in business in developed countries is a familiar phenomenon and is not surprising in the business world and society. Rather, it is respected by the fact that women show remarkable abilities and business qualities.

Studies conducted by the US Census Bureau showed that the percentage of women with their own business increased by 20% between 1997-2002. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), the company that is the foremost in the business enterprise research market, has found that in the United States at the moment, for every 100 male entrepreneurs, 89 women entrepreneurs are run by companies that are less than 42 months from the date of establishment.

Their sisters in the UK seem to follow the same path. Despite the fact that women-headed enterprises are much smaller here than in the USA (46 women per 100 men), there is still an increase in the number of such companies. According to GEM, in the previous years, the total number of UK companies remained at the same place, but the difference between the number of men's and women's companies decreased by 40% in 2002 and continues to decrease.

The contrast in the whole world is obvious. Women continue to find it difficult to overcome the barrier between the middle and top management link. Only 11 out of 100 FTSE companies in 2005 held executive directors of women, a figure that is actually lower than in the previous three years.

In 22 out of 100 companies all board members are men. In the States, approximately 13 percent of board members of 500-companies, according to Fortune magazine, are women. In 2005, the number of women directors of companies (CEOs) in these enterprises decreased from 9 to negligible.

Thus, on the one hand, there has been a tendency to increase enterprises headed by women, and on the other, the increase in the number of women in leading positions is completely invisible, and according to some reports, even falls.

At this rate of change, we must wait for the second half of this century to approach parity in the company's board. This statistic is a blow to the old myth that women can not rise to the heights of management, as they lack entrepreneurialism and self-confidence, and there is only a desire to overcome the prevailing opinion in society that it is impossible for women to occupy top positions.

When it comes to fighting in large companies at the average level

Managers, many rushing to the top, and beginning business owners, there will be only one winner. Forget, the empty chatter about corporate stresses, high goals and long hours of work, it's all about sharing pie.

Moreover, Korn / Ferry and Columbia Business School, conducted a study entitled "Why Women Executives Leave Corporate America for Entrepreneurial Ventures," which found that 41% of those who took this step indicated their family and personal circumstances as the main reasons for their departure, 78% To test their abilities, and 65% wanted to influence the strategy of their companies.

Penina Thompson, co-author of A Woman's Place in the Boardroom, writes that in this patriarchal environment, the most impatient and imaginative women are forced to leave the company and "test their potential" elsewhere - often in their own companies.

The billionaire investor, Warren Buffet, is an ardent supporter of women's leadership. He publicly announced that the famous journalist / editor Carol Loomis and Katharine Graham, who led the Washington Post for more than two decades, set an example for him to follow. He also advocated the expansion of business opportunities for women in his popular essay, which was published in the magazine Fortune in 2013.

Kevin O'Leary, an investor in the cycle of American reality shows SharkTank, agrees that women are of great value when it comes to successful business management. In a recent article published on the Business Insider news portal, he said that of the 27 companies that he is an investor, no firm under the management of a man surpassed the organizations that are ruled by women. By the way, women occupy 55% of the positions of the CEO in his companies.

These results are consistent with studies that show that women entrepreneurs achieve excellent results when compared to their male counterparts:

Private IT companies, run by women, demonstrate greater capital efficiency, and also bring a 35% higher return on investment. When they get venture financing, they bring in 12% more profit than IT-companies run by men (taken from the Kauffman Foundation report "Women and IT: Evolution that will save the world").

Venture companies with more women in top management are more likely to achieve positive results than companies solely with men in leadership (taken from the Dow Jones VentureSource report "Women at the helm: do they manage as leaders to lead a startup to success?")

Women-headed venture firms that invest in enterprises outperform firms run by men (according to the results of the SBA Office of Advocacy study).

Methodology

Formulation and substantiation of the problem

This study is devoted to the study of the role of women in modern business.

In many countries the problem of "gender-based separation" has always been the case, and often developed into discrimination against women, in the belittling of her rights. With the problem of "hidden" discrimination, of course, every woman faced: employers, especially in the business sector, often prefer not to take on responsible positions of women, motivating it in various ways (for example, the possibility of downtime due to maternity leave), but never Not acknowledging the main thing: in the modern society there continues to exist a stereotype that a woman, as a being of the weaker sex, simply can not cope with any kind of responsible task.

One significant problem related to the restriction of career advancement of women to senior management positions. Many women run into the so-called "glass ceiling (or wall)", which is a weak discrimination that does not allow them to occupy the highest positions. In Western and Eastern Europe, women are often denied promotion, because many believe that they are less interested in work and are more attached to the family than their male counterparts. According to experts, a good way to combat this prejudice is to provide

Women of two different career paths: fast - for those who believe that work has the highest priority, and the so-called mother's way - for those who want to more evenly distribute their time between work and family.

Although many women are concerned about the concept of the "mother" way, because they think that it can serve to justify discrimination, 82% of the 1000 professional women showed in the survey that they would rather prefer a career path that combines a flexible work schedule, A full working week, the opportunity to spend more time on the family, albeit with a slower promotion, than a path that involves rapid promotion, combined with a hard work schedule.

Another common problem faced by working women is the problem of sexual harassment. This problem concerns not only women, but also men. However, the number of sexual harassment against women is several times greater (at least in our days) than in relation to men. According to the definition of the US Commission for the Equal Employment Opportunity, sexual harassment is an unprovoked sexual desire, an attempt to gain favor and other verbal and physical actions of a sexual nature directed at an employee who have an impact on his or her activity and career. Studies show that most often sexual harassment is directed from the boss to the subordinate. The Enlightenment consists of conducting special seminars and conferences, warning its employees of dismissal when proving sexual harassment in the organization. The firm can also develop a special policy in the field of preventing sexual harassment.

However, today, the situation has begun to change dramatically. Twenty years ago to see a woman driving a car, to put it mildly, was considered a great rarity - today women own and drive cars on a par with men. Twenty years ago there were practically no women in the highest political elite - today some of them occupy key positions in the government, political parties; Are the heads of subjects of the federation. Twenty years ago the concept of "a woman in business", "an entrepreneur woman" caused a smile from a common man in the street, today they cause respect. What happened in those twenty years? How and why has the public consciousness changed - or, perhaps, the women themselves have changed?

The head of the State Committee for Entrepreneurship of Russia, Alexandera Kuzhel, said in an interview: "Thanks to their natural abilities, women can adapt to new market relations much faster than men." And most sociologists agree with her words. When I was preparing to write this paper, I came across an interesting expression: "Doing business is the same as riding a bicycle: either you move or you fall." This phrase perfectly reflects the content of my research.

It seems to me that the conflict between the male and female leadership styles is somewhat incorrect. After all, when we talk about business, here the borders that relate to sex are blurred. And if we focus on making decisions in business on who is before us: a woman or a man, then this is not going forward on that same bicycle, it's not a business. This, at best, is the fallout from the saddle of the process in which all the progressive world of humanity participates.

My opinion might contradict the "generally accepted" point of view. Therefore, I would like to devote my work to answering the question: a woman in business: who is she? It will be appropriate to begin with the history of the issue. The woman - leader as a phenomenon in Russia only declares itself. In my opinion, in our country historically there are no prerequisites for this. The Soviet system limited the person's personality, his freedom in everything, including the possibility for women to occupy top positions in the production and government structure. The patriarchal way of life of Russia did not allow career growth for a woman, limiting her to the kitchen, children and home. According to the Center for the Study of Public Opinion, just under 10% of women held senior positions in the late 1980s.

In the USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe (social camp), women hardly participated in making economic decisions, since they were poorly represented in key positions in the economy. In Hungary, for example, in the mid-80's. Almost 90% of the top management were men [1]. Women were appointed to managerial positions in strategically less important sectors, in particular, in retail, in hotel and restaurant business, and in the textile industry.

With the advent of the market, women began to penetrate more actively in business management, including large ones. Over the past ten years, Russia has made a huge leap in building a democratic state with a market economy. Such a path of the state of Europe passed for decades, quite smoothly and without shocks. Russia had to repeat the same path, but a much shorter period of time. Many of the phenomena and trends that accompanied this path are not always adequately perceived by society. Not because they are good or bad, but because the stereotype of thinking that has developed over many decades is not ready for their perception.

That's such a bright phenomenon, I would call a woman in business, a business lady. According to statistics, the number of women who occupy a leading position in business is steadily growing. In 1996, out of 200 large business enterprises, already in a quarter of the companies leading posts were held by women, and now average management in Russia is 60-65% represented by women.

In addition, the interesting fact is that with the arrival of the market, the so-called "women's layer" appeared in the top management of those enterprises that required crisis management. And society, most likely, will have to break the entrenched stereotypes about the female leader. And there are many such stereotypes. So, for example, it is believed that women in business pay less attention to the main thing, more trifles; Less content and more form; Make less emphasis on the prospect, more on current problems. They pay less attention to the production of money than to their preservation. Men, respectively, vice versa.

A typical antiscientific stereotype is the view that female managers are often forced to fall under the influence of their subordinate men in matters of the future of the company, its strategy. This stereotype is based on the view that strategy requires a more rational approach, rather than intuition. Although practice shows that everything can not be calculated and driven into a rational mathematical framework. It is intuition that allows you to create creative lines of behavior in a business environment with many unknowns. And strategy, successful strategy is rather a prediction. And when they talk about foresight, they often remember a woman.

I would like to reinforce my research with those researches in the field of psychology, sociology and marketing conducted by scientists all over Europe. In the following parts of the work, a detailed analysis of a number of such studies will be given, but now I would like to dwell on some of them. In 1997, the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences conducted a number of interesting studies. When asked why women can not successfully run a business, respondents named the following reasons: 22% "simply" believe that women are not at all capable of doing business. 22% sympathize with women, but feel that it is more difficult for them to get support from officials, take a loan from a bank, etc .; 12% paid attention to the fact that it is more difficult for women, for some reason, to get an appropriate education; And 21% note the resistance of relatives, relatives, their families engaged in business. What comments can there be here? Socrates also expressed the following words: "Three things can be considered happiness: that you are not a wild animal, that you are a Greek, and not a barbarian, and that you are a man, and not a woman." Almost two and a half millennia passed since the days of Socrates, and the situation has changed little.

This issue of leadership effectiveness, depending on gender, has been discussed by researchers for more than a decade. Most foreign scientists do not find any difference in the effectiveness of leadership between men and women in general. So, American researchers Nayv and Gatek believe that at a certain stage of career growth, the top priority of an effective leader is his professionalism.

Here I would like to quote one short parable. Once, three builders were asked what they were doing. The first one answered that he was killing stones, the second one was making a living, and the third one said: "I'm building a temple." I think that many will agree with me that the attitude towards their business is very important in business. Yes, there is an opinion that the so-called "female" leadership style is that women tend to focus on relationships within the collective, as they are by nature emotional. And men, because by their nature they are considered more persistent and goal-oriented, in their leadership are guided by the task. According to psychologists, the reasons for this separation of leadership styles can be personal characteristics of a businessman, his character and temperament or a certain situation, and not sexual characteristics.

According to psychologists, the reasons for this separation of leadership styles can be personal characteristics of a businessman, his character and temperament or a certain situation, and not sexual characteristics. Perhaps a woman by nature is more wise and adaptive than a man. And this creates a certain style or, say, the illusion of style. I think that we can not make generalizations here, but on average this is probably so. Life consists of some compromises and half-tones, and most importantly - to see and realize them. And when you see, you realize and feel, this is exactly the wisdom of management. Another common stereotype suggests that women decision-makers use more understanding, gentleness and love for people. And men are supporters of a detached expert evaluation

Experts on this occasion say that both women and men professional top managers - are not explicit supporters of just one style of leadership and decision-making. It is appropriate to talk about the so-called variability. As a rule, effective businessmen unconsciously, again intuitively combine different strategies of leadership and management. Psychologists note that there is such an opinion: a woman-top manager builds more cautious relations with her business partners, avoiding too risky strategies. However, this does not mean that a woman does not know how to take risks. The same studies have shown that both men and women - leaders almost equally evaluate their own abilities to take risky decisions.

Psychologists say that the qualities of an effective entrepreneur are of a common nature and do not directly depend on sex. According to the same research, the men and women of top managers have the same professional qualities: ability to act in situations of conflict and risk, constant readiness for change and innovation, ability to effectively use the skills and abilities of other people, ability to resist pressure and pressure, defend Its position. Another conclusion of psychologists seemed interesting to me: successful entrepreneurs are those who, regardless of their gender, have a psychological scenario of behavior - managers. This means that both men and women have almost equal psychological capabilities for managing the enterprise. The characteristics of the floor are practically not limiting for successful leadership.

According to the research, the most pronounced motives for both women and men of top managers are: self-realization and self-assertion, the desire to prove one's own peculiarity, non-standardity - 40%, interest in the profession - 30%, material well-being and independence - 30%. The phased implementation of them creates more ambitious goals and aspirations. In my opinion, in modern society it is hidden, intuitive, but nevertheless there is a desire to extol the masculine and belittle feminine. I think that this is wrong. Yet this stereotype idea that a woman in business is, first of all, a weak woman with her tricks, style of behavior, gentleness, tolerance and so on. You know, I recall this famous phrase: "Every desert is proud of its mirages." We should strive to get rid of such stereotypes, and not to show them to the world, which has long crossed this line.

Goals and objectives of the study

Based on the foregoing, I would like to formulate the goals and objectives of my research.

The main tasks of my work, I would call analysis of research conducted on this topic, the definition of the characteristics of women's business, the search and formulation of problems, the proposal of their options for solving these problems. The main goal of my research is to try to prove that success in the sphere of business and management does not depend on the gender of the entrepreneur or manager; That the concepts of "male" and "female" business are not so different from each other. In addition, to the purposes of this study, I would attribute an attempt to prove that in recent years the role of women in business has increased, almost equaling the male. An answer will be given to the question of what causes prevent women from fully developing their abilities in business, how to resist stereotypes, and what methods of overcoming the above problems exist in Eastern European and worldwide practices.

Object and subject of research

The object of the study is a social group of women entrepreneurs. This group is characterized by its heterogeneity, which causes certain difficulties in the analysis of personal data: to clarify the results of elections after the study, it seemed to me appropriate to divide the category of women entrepreneurs into three groups. The first unites the convinced business woman. The motivation for their choice is an inner desire to become an entrepreneur, an interest in this type of activity. They came into the business of goodwill and with the most serious intentions (one third of the surveyed population). The second, and the most numerous type, which absorbed half of the business lady, united entrepreneurs "on occasion." They took their decision spontaneously, under the influence of unexpected random circumstances (on the advice or example of friends, unexpected favorable prospects, newspaper information, etc.). And, finally, the third type - entrepreneurs involuntarily - united women who did not voluntarily come into business. They were forced by force of various unfavorable circumstances to open their business. This is the smallest group - 1/5 of all surveyed. The motivation for their choice is real unemployment or the threat of unemployment, lack of means to live, non-payment of wages, and pressure from outside.

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