Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): News Intervention
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/01
Dr. Alexander Douglas specialises in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. In this series, we will discuss the philosophy of economics.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Dr. Douglas, as previously discussed, a gap in knowledge, theory, and predictable consequences have developed in economics. When did this occur?
Dr. Alexander Douglas: Economics didn’t always seek status as a precise empirical science. Adam Smith famously declared disinterest in what he called “political arithmetic”. He might have been thinking of William Petty’s Political Arithmetick (1690), which attempted to advise the king on the specific economic effects of various policies. Smith, at least as I read him, was more interested in the moral psychology of economic activity, such as the sorts of motivations that drive people into economic interaction and the psychological effects of being engaged in it. I think he was closer to a novelist than a scientist. He sought to dramatize capitalism and present the sorts of character that inhabit it. There is a world of difference between this, and the ambition to use economic theory to forecast the specific effects of various policies or institutional changes.
The mania for the latter sort of calculated forecasting took off with the innovations in national accounting statistics that began with the development of the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States, and in other similar departments around the globe, in the middle of the twentieth century. Now economic aggregates are treated as the report card for the standing government. The government takes credit when the numbers look good. The opposition blames the government when the numbers look bad. Both agree to propound the illusion that the government somehow controls these numbers.
Jacobsen: What might be the upper limit in predicting human choices?
Douglas: I don’t know. Neuroscience might one day discover some algorithm that predicts precise behavioural outputs from easily-sorted classes of inputs. We’d then have a precise method for predicting behavioural responses of human agents to environmental changes. But, again, even if this were possible, who knows whether it would be of any predictive use. Huge differences in behavioural outcomes might be made by differences too small for the instruments to measure.
At any rate, I don’t see why we should be trying to predict human behaviour – or what I’d rather call human action. The eighteenth-century materialist Baron D’Holbach dreamed of a day when the government could “hold the magnet” to move its citizens around like iron filings, after having developed a complete science of psychological “magnetism”. He was, in other words, an early advocate of governance by manipulation of incentives – perhaps an ancestor of today’s proponents of “nudge” theory. I find this idea disturbing. I believe that the unpredictability of human action is a precious thing that should be preserved, and instead of trying to render human action predictable and thus controllable, I’d rather we strove to develop an ethics and a politics that fully embraces uncertainty. Maybe if we stopped trying to control each other so much, we’d find that the world is becoming less dangerous rather than more.
What really worries me is that in developing a theory that treats people as cipher-like “pleasure machines” – to use Geoffrey Hodgson’s term – and in designing our institutions on the basis of that theory, we will end up reducing people to what the theory treats them as being. Economists often say that their theory is value-neutral, that they aren’t telling us how people should be, but merely telling us how people are. They treat opposition to their project as a superstitious reaction against scientific enquiry. But they don’t consider that the prevailing theory of human nature can end up transforming human nature. For example, if you regard humans as little more than consumers, you might cover the landscape with advertising, seeking to tap into this lucrative monomania. Then when the advertising becomes so abundant that people have nothing else to look at, they really do become the monomaniacal consumers they were assumed to be. This is, I think, what Ruskin was getting at in the first part of Unto This Last. A key job for philosophers is to fight this tendency that degrades the human spirit in practice by underestimating it in theory.
Jacobsen: Could the rules for economic behaviour – exchange of products and services – become looser with weakened social ties, and thus loosen the Wittgensteinian view on “rules”?
Douglas: In the ‘Wittgensteinian’ view that I proposed (which may not really have much to do with Wittgenstein), rules are instantiated at the level of communities, not individuals. Certainly we could explain the exchange of products and services by identifying the various social rules that drive these exchanges, beginning our analysis at the level of the community rather than the individual. But in doing so we would be giving up a crucial principle of mainstream economics, namely methodological individualism: the principle that the unit of explanation for economic behaviour are individuals. Individuals, in mainstream economic theory, are supposed to have preference-orderings, which are rules governing their behaviour (“swap one apple for two or more oranges, but not less”).
The ‘Wittgensteinian’ argument I hinted at has the conclusion that preferences can’t pertain to individuals on their own. A rule requires a crowd in order to be concretely instantiated. A rule that isn’t properly binding has no concrete reality; it exists as a mere abstraction. But a rule that I impose on myself isn’t properly binding. I always have absolute power to exempt myself from the rule. The same holds for a small group, who can always conspire to excuse themselves. But a crowd develops an inner tendency towards conformism, exercising peer-pressure and the “tyranny of public opinion” to keep its members in the fold. If (concretely existing) rules are peculiar to crowds, then so are preferences. Individuals explore and experiment; it is the crowd that gives rise to the rigid preferences from which economists begin their analyses.
Jacobsen: How do economic choices (tendencies) change over the course of an individual’s life?
Douglas: Well, it is only in the middle of our lives that we can expect much from the Invisible Hand – and that’s only for those who are able and legally permitted to sell their labour. During childhood and old age, we can only count on what others are obliged to give us. I believe that our societies pitifully under-provides for the non-working population. Young children are packed into classrooms in ugly buildings, often taught by inadequately-trained assistants. The elderly languish in miserable and understaffed care facilities, or are left alone at home. Provision for the disabled is always strongly urged as it is inadequately funded. For centuries the domestic labour of women, unrecognised as a commodity by the market, was at best remunerated with a bare subsistence living; and to some extent this remains true. Meanwhile, income-earners get to enjoy the highest material standard of living in history: things that used to be luxury commodities – holidays abroad, designer clothing, exotic cuisine –are now mass-produced for widespread enjoyment by the waged.
John Kenneth Galbraith once depicted an American family meditating on “the curious unevenness of its blessings” – an engorgement of private consumer goods alongside threadbare public services. Today this unevenness translates into a massive inequality between income-earners, who can access the consumer goods with which the market is gavaged, and non-income-earners, who are stuck with the vanishing trickle of public services.
There is no reason to expect anything different according to standard economic theory. Why would a market society produce anything for those who have no commodities to offer in exchange, or are not permitted to exchange what they have to offer, or offer a sort of value that is not recognised as a legitimate commodity by the market? Critics of capitalism often focus on the exploitation of the worker, but, as Joan Robinson said, it is often worse under capitalism to not have your labour exploited – at least not in the labour market.
Jacobsen: Thank you once again Dr. Douglas.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): News Intervention
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/31
Dr. Alexander Douglas specialises in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. In this series, we will discuss the the philosophy of economics.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is there a lack of consistency in the terminologies used by economists?
Dr. Alexander Douglas: There’s a question about whether economists use terms consistently. But there’s another pressing issue, which is the gap between the language academic economists use and the language of public discourse.
I wonder if the retreat of economics into higher- and higher-level mathematics has done damage to democracy. Although there was a near-consensus among macro-economists in Britain that first austerity and then Brexit were bad policies, the government received popular support for both. The problem was that the macro-economists could say what they believed, but they couldn’t really explain why they believed it. The official argument rested on some of the most complex mathematics in the world, and there was no convincing ‘entry-level’ version.
Effectively, macro-economists have to ask the public to trust their expertise, even though we can’t see into their black boxes. It was easy for the media to portray the economic experts as elites with hidden agendas and vested interests. Normally the way to fend off that sort of ad hominem argument is to say, “Never mind me or my motives, just look at my argument”. But you can’t do that when the simplest compelling version of your argument consists of hundreds of differential equations.
I think this is a major problem. There is no bridge between the concepts of academic economics and the concepts we use to think about our day-to-day lives. Politics happens in the domain of the everyday concepts.
Jacobsen: What do you think of neuroeconomics?
Douglas: Neuroeconomics is very interesting and something I know little about. Philosophically, it raises more ‘conceptual bridge’ puzzles, this time between the scientific study of brain-events causing behaviour and the ordinary explanations we give for human actions. Some philosophers call this “folk psychology”. There are a range of opinions on this. The most extreme , “eliminative materialism”, suggests that our ordinary explanations, e.g. “Jane crossed the road because she prefers to walk in the sun”, are simply wrong and will one day be entirely replaced by explanations at the physiological/neurological level: Jane’s body moved in such-and-such a way because such-and-such events occurred in her brain. Standard choice theory in economics is, in my view, a regimented version of “folk psychology”. So one interesting question is whether the end game for neuro – economics is to entirely replace standard economics or whether it can somehow be fitted into the existing paradigm.
Jacobsen: What is the healthy perspective – the accurate view – on human economic decisions? What drives us?
Douglas: I’m not convinced that the individual economic agent is the right starting point. You can start instead at the sub-personal level, as the eliminative materialists propose. You can also start with institutions, which have their own ways of behaving that sometimes seem independent of the agents composing them. J.K. Galbraith’s entertaining book, The New Industrial State, is full of plausible-sounding claims about how committees, boards, and so on have their own strange ways of making decisions, which differ from the ways that individual people make decisions. His book on the 1929 stock market crash contains equally plausible descriptions of crowd behaviour, which can be very unlike the behaviour of individuals on their own.
Academic economists are beginning to study institutions in more formal and rigorous ways. The ‘New Institutionalists’ build models to explain why (rational) individuals might submit to the authority of an institution in order to avoid the transaction costs that accompany free exchange in the market. Economists like Herbert Gintis use models from evolutionary biology and game theory to model social norms and other emergent properties of social systems (properties that can’t be explained in terms of facts about the individual agents).
I’m sometimes tempted towards a much more radical view. There is philosophical literature that emerged from the work of the later Wittgenstein, concerning the nature of rule-following behaviour. One central claim is that rules can’t exist for an individual on her own; they can only exist for a whole community. Another is that the relation between a rule and the behaviour it governs can’t be captured by any causal relation – it is not the case, for instance, that knowledge of a rule causes behaviour in accordance with that rule. Rather, the relation is more akin to a logical connection: the rule and the behaviour stand in a similar relation to that of the premise and conclusion in an argument. I believe that preferences are effectively rules: a preference for A over B is a rule: choose A over B. This theory of preferences-as-rules, combined with the Wittgensteinian ideas about rules, suggests to me that both methodological individualism and the search for causalexplanations of choice-guided behaviour might be mistakes. If so, much of modern economics would rest upon a mistake.
Jacobsen: Can you imagine a future with ubiquitous artificial intelligence where mathematical models and algorithms could accurately predict all human behaviour?
Douglas: To the extent that the physical world is determinate then there should in principle be a system of equations that could accurately predict all human behaviour. Of course, the physical world might not be determinate. And even if it is, the finding of the relevant equations might be beyond not only our cognitive capacities but those of any cognitive system capable of existing.
Moreover, there is no reason to expect that any workable model will look anything like the choice theory used by economists. The perfect explanation of human behaviour might make no reference to choices at all; again, it might just track the motion of particles around the human brain and body, or it might track patterns at the institutional level. We don’t know what sorts of causes the perfect model would quantify over. Thus you don’t have to believe that there’s a perfect mathematical model of individual choice, even if you think there’s guaranteed to be a perfect causal model that explains and predicts all observable human behaviour.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): News Intervention
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/30
Dr. Alexander Douglas specialises in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. In this series, we will discuss the the philosophy of economics.
Scott Jacobsen: With the words such as “capital,” “debt,” “money,” and “wealth,” what creates moderate levels of confusion over use in public discussion?
Dr. Alexander Douglas: Take “debt,” for instance, the subject of my last book. We apply one word to a wide diversity of cases: my debt to a friend, a household’s debt to a bank, a government’s debt to its bondholders. These cases have important differences, which are ignored if we assume the word to be perfectly univocal. I won’t say more about this example here, since I’ve written about it elsewhere.
Another example is “money.” We know that cash is money, but are bank deposits “money”? Some say yes, some say no, leading to unhelpful debates about whether or not banks can “create money” by making new loans. Many people don’t count UK Treasury Bills and Gilts as “money,” but traders do: they call them “securities accounts” and treat them just like term deposits at a bank. The ambiguity in the concept leads to confusion. But worse, if we restrict it to mean a certain class of financial assets, it loses almost all its explanatory power. In elementary textbooks, you find something called the Quantity Theory of Money, which tells you (among other things) that changes in the total amount of money, other things being equal, change prices. But the theory breaks down if you restrict the definition of “money” to a certain class of assets while people make payments by creating and circulating different sorts of assets. Thus, the term “money” is either imprecise or of no real explanatory value.
How about “capital?” An economics textbook might tell you that it refers to the various physical equipment that can be combined with labour to produce output. But can we quantify it? In what units? Weight, for instance, isn’t the relevant measure, since a lighter tool can be more productive than a heavier one – some sharp chainsaws weigh less than some blunt axes. We can measure capital by its monetary value, but then we can’t distinguish between, e.g., the loss or physical destruction of £100,000 worth of capital and a drop of £100,000 in the market value of existing capital. Meanwhile, Marx defined capital as power – the power of the capitalist to command labour and resources. Is Marx presenting a revision to the meaning of the term “capital,” or is he advancing a theory about what we all agree to call “capital?”
As for “wealth,” well – just what is it, and how should we measure it? Ruskin said there is no wealth but life. Was he obviously wrong?
Jacobsen: What have economists really tested against the data? What are some more established findings?
Douglas: There are lots of important recent developments in empirical economics. In the 80’s and 90’s, Alexander Rosenberg pushed a fairly critical line against economics. Drawing on some research by Wassily Leontief, he argued that economists had made almost no reliable precise predictions. Prediction is the gold standard of explanation in science: if you can’t predict it, how do you know you’ve properly explained it?
But recently, economists have developed new techniques for gathering data and testing theories – they no longer depend only on time-series data, which is notoriously inconclusive. They now design controlled laboratory experiments, which can be as simple as giving people choices with different parameters and seeing how they react – the growing field of behavioural economics uses techniques like this. They are also starting to employ the research of sociologists and others to study how different sorts of institutional contexts affect human behaviour. They have developed new ways of measuring crucial macroeconomic variables like rates of inflation and growth.
But there is still much room for criticism. Many core theories are still almost impossible to test. For example, if you try to measure the ‘price-elasticity of demand’ by seeing how the quantities purchased of some commodity change when prices change, you need to assume that the preferences of the relevant consumers are stable over time. You also need to abstract away from interactions between the market for that commodity with all the other markets in which the consumers participate.
Although I’m not an expert, I think that many macroeconomic models use variables whose values can’t be tested – the rate of technological change, the degree of institutional trust: since these floating variables can absorb any error margin between the predictions of the theory and what shows up in the data, they put an opaque screen between the theory and the data. Since these are the sorts of models that get used to guide economic policy, this should be of concern to society in general, not just to economists.
Jacobsen: You mentioned many names. From Jevons, Keynes, Smith, and Aristotle to Hausman, Rosenberg, Cartwright, Laws, Sen, Robinson, and Hicks. Logic, to an extent, forms the foundation for the ideas and thought processes. Here’s a general question, what is the logic below economics? The logic that gives rise to terms, which, as noted earlier, are used, even abused.
I ask because philosophies have logic. Thus, the philosophy of economics, seems to, at root, look at the logic of economics.
Douglas: One way to think of the theory of choice that underlies standard economics is as a sort of normative theory: it studies the choices that people should make, given their preferences, just as logic studies the sorts of inferences that people should make, given certain premises. The fact that people often make irrational choices or bad inferences is simply not relevant to the aims of the discipline in either case.
I think there is still some confusion in economics around this: there is a lot of slippage between a purely logical theory of choice, given some formal definition of rationality, and a predictively powerful theory capable of explaining what actually happens in the world. Sometimes the slippage is covered up by an appeal to ‘the long run:’ people might make irrational decisions in some cases, but if they repeat the choice-problem many times they will wise up and converge towards the formally rational outcome. I don’t buy it.
Jacobsen: Two questions for you: “Are economists justified in using abstract mathematical models?” and “Is Rational Choice Theory, which forms the basis of much economics, empirically unfalsifiable?”
Douglas: On mathematical models, it’s hard to say, since there are so many different sorts of mathematical models. Tony Lawson, whom I mentioned before, has come out very strongly against the use of mathematical models in economics. He thinks it just gets the ‘ontology’ wrong: neither individual people nor economic systems as a whole are elementary particles operating according to fixed laws. I think there is a lot in his argument.
One issue I have with mathematical models in economics is that they sometimes assume an optimum exists, with no solid mathematical argument for this. To give a simple example: suppose I set you the problem of choosing the greatest real number that is less than 5. There is no optimum solution – for any answer you give, there are an infinite number of better answers. If, on the other hand, I set you the problem of choosing the greatest real number that is less than or equal to 5, then there is an optimum answer: 5. Economic models sometimes assume that the optimisation problems they describe are like the second example without proving that they aren’t in fact like the first example.
On the other hand, the difficulty with non-mathematical theories is in testing them. I like to think of this in terms of René Girard, an anthropologist whose writing I admire. He has a single theory for explaining all human mythology and institutions, based on the centrality of what he calls the ‘scapegoating mechanism.’ He finds hints of this mechanism in the Upanishads, the plays of Shakespeare, and the phenomenon of global terrorism. I find his work profound and illuminating, but would I bet my life on its truth? No, because there’s no way to measure just how accurate, and therefore, just how predictively robust the theory is. It’s easy to find hints of the scapegoating mechanism in any story, but there’s no way to quantify just how much any story really conforms to the model.
With Rational Choice Theory, I can be briefer. Yes, in its standard form, it is empirically unfalsifiable. The problem is simple: the theory claims that people make the choices that maximise their preferences subject to constraints. But all we observe are the choices people make. If we take “preferences” simply to mean people’s patterns of choice – this is recommended in Paul Samuelson’s famous economics textbook – then the RCT is trivial: it just tells us that people choose what they choose. It can’t be refuted by any observation of choice behaviour. But if preferences are something other than patterns of choice, we can’t observe them directly, and again the theory can’t be falsified (nor verified) empirically.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): News Intervention
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/25
Dr. Alexander Douglas specialises in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. In this series, we will discuss the the philosophy of economics.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In correspondence with Dr. Stephen Law, completion of an interview, and then completion of the first Q&A on Philosophy with him, I reached out to him for a recommendation. He recommended you. Your specialty is the philosophy of economics, as noted in correspondence. This might seem confusing, as if an expertise in economics, as I thought – wrongly. So what is the philosophy of economics?
Dr. Alexander Douglas: I don’t have expertise in building economic models, collecting economic data, or any of the things economists specialise in doing. I’m not a good person to ask about the economic effects of Brexit, or of raising the minimum wage, or of changing the tax code, or anything like that.
I’m interested in tracing out the meanings of economic concepts. Words like “money,” “capital,” “debt,” “wealth,” and so on are used to great effect in public discourse. But when we look closely, they are often used in equivocal, confused, and contradictory ways.
I also look at the logical coherence of economic models. Economists often claim to have tested their theories against the data, thus discouraging criticism from non-economists who don’t know the data as well. But the job of the philosopher is always to ask: what have you tested against the data? Some theories suffer from logical inconsistencies that make it unclear regarding what it even means to say that they have been empirically tested. If I propose that all tall men are short, it’s hardly reassuring to know that I have tested my theory against the data. How would that work?
SJ: How did this interest in the philosophy of economics originate for you?
AD: I’ve always been interested in economics, but I began writing on it around 2011. I was becoming increasingly annoyed at the way, as I saw it, politicians and the media were using the concept of debt in an unreflective and illogical way to manipulate the public. I wrote my book, The Philosophy of Debt, in an attempt to clarify the concept and reduce its undeserved rhetorical power.
My main specialisation is in the history of philosophy, recently with an emphasis on the history of logic. But in a way, the history of economics is part of the history of logic. Many of the founders of modern economics were logicians – Stanley Jevons, for example, and John Maynard Keynes in a way. Even Adam Smith began as a professor of logic. To a certain extent, economics can be seen as a branch of logic: the logic of human decision-making, or what Aristotle might have called, the art of practical syllogism.
SJ: Who seem like some of the foundational names in the field?
AD: Daniel Hausman should probably get credit for founding the modern university sub-discipline known as “philosophy of economics.” Alexander Rosenberg was another pioneer, though he switched to philosophy of biology, as he tells it, upon discovering that economists have no interest in what philosophers have to say! Nancy Cartwright has done important work on the methodology and ontology of economics, as has the economist, Tony Lawson. Amartya Sen is both an economist and a philosopher and often brings the two disciplines together into a unity.
For the sort of philosophy of economics that interests me, the work of Joan Robinson is very important. Robinson published a book in 1962, Economic Philosophy, that still has relevance in the probing questions it asks about the conceptual foundations of the discipline. Other departures into philosophy by economists – John Hicks’s, Causality in Economics, for example – seem comparatively shallow to me.
SJ: What core concepts and sub-fields define the philosophy of economics?
AD: The dominant strand of philosophy of economics examines the methodologies employed by economists to see how they can be justified as ‘good’ science. For example: are economists justified in using abstract mathematical models, often based on unrealistic assumptions about human capacities, to explain observable economic phenomena? If models are successful at making predictions, does it matter if they contain unrealistic assumptions? Is Rational Choice Theory, which forms the basis of much economics, empirically unfalsifiable? Is it therefore unscientific? Etc.
Another strand looks at the ethical aspects of economics. Political economy and welfare economics involve ethical questions. Some philosophers of economics look at the moral foundations of welfare economics (is preference-maximisation a good measure of welfare?), explore what political philosophy has to say about economic policy (is economic efficiency relevant to justice?), and related enquiries.
A final strand – the one that most interests me – questions the logical coherence of economic theories. For instance, economic models often define a timeless equilibrium, in which the values of many interdependent variables are solved simultaneously, even while the models are meant to represent causal sequences; in which, what happens at an earlier time determines what happens at a later time. This can lead to terrific logical conundrums. Older models face a different logical problem: they describe sequential exchanges of one homogenous good, measurable in a standard unit, while proposing to represent exchanges of incommensurable goods that can’t be counted by a single standard unit. The way in which economists use seemingly innocent terms like “preference,” “expectation,” “capital,” “labour,” etc. often open out to these deep conceptual puzzles.
A final strand – the one that most interests me – questions the logical coherence of economic theories. For instance, economic models often define a timeless equilibrium, in which the values of many interdependent variables are solved simultaneously, even while the models are meant to represent causal sequences; in which, what happens at an earlier time determines what happens at a later time. This can lead to terrific logical conundrums. Older models face a different logical problem: they describe sequential exchanges of one homogenous good, measurable in a standard unit, while proposing to represent exchanges of incommensurable goods that can’t be counted by a single standard unit. The way in which economists use seemingly innocent terms like “preference,” “expectation,” “capital,” “labour,” etc. often open out to these deep conceptual puzzles.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/25
The Roman Catholic Christian Church Pope Francis – the guy who thinks he is the only Pope should look into the Discordians, adjacent to the Church of the SubGenius and its SubGenii – remarked on the problems with drug abuse or, less moralistically, substance misuse in the context of Duterte (Romero, 2018).
But this requires some context on Christian conceptualizations of suffering through time right into the present, which will, in due course, include commentary on Christian ideas of suffering, substance misuse, drugs, and the brain, and harm reduction in the Philippines and global context.
The image of pain, suffering, and misery sits at the Cross of the Roman Catholic Christians and other Christians, with the assumption of the redemptive work in a sacrifice of God made flesh, where the Salvifici Doloris states the meaning of suffering “illuminated by the Word of God” and reflected in the words of “Saint Paul” (John Paul II, 1984).
In this Christian context, of the largest sect and others, the meaning of suffering and pain, the purported mystery of suffering evokes “compassion,” “respect,” and intimidation and retains its plumbed linkages to a “need of the heart” and the “deep imperative of faith” (Ibid.).
Within this framework of the world, the alleviation of suffering is seen as only through Christ at the Cross and through no other, as this, simply put, is an emotional need and an imperative of religious faith and, therefore, an inexplicable and mandatory part of faith in Christ for a true Christianity.
Christianity, and its representatives in the largest sect and its highest offices to the supposed Vicar of Christ on Earth become guardians of this suffering, because without such sacrament of suffering and pain the redemptive power of Christ in a fallen world, so-called, would remain unneeded; the Roman Catholic Christian Church would become outmoded and irrelevant to the concerns of a mature and critical-minded, empirically informed, and logically coherent person of the future.
Intimations of this can be seen within the advanced industrial economies of the world which, historically speaking, were predominantly Christian and serious in their faith but, over time, they began to lose hold and slipped in their adherence to the faith, in degree and raw numbers. Throughout the 20th century, we witnessed a historic rise of the non-religious, of the individuals without the need or even basic want for a traditional religious life.
In this, we also, at least in North America, developed the post-WWII Healing Revival Movement with a wide range of people preaching the Gospel with renewed vigor and proclamations of the end times and purification of the world for the benefit of the Good and Christian – synonyms within the framework propounded for centuries, hence the sociocultural assumption of nonbelievers as amoral if not, worse, inherently immoral – including Rev. Billy Graham, Oral Roberts – who some during the higher heights of faith in Sigmund Freud labeled “Anal Roberts,” William Marion Branham, Jack Coe, Jack Moore, A. A. Allen, T. L. Osborn, Gordon Lindsay, F. F. Bosworth, Ern Baxter, Paul Cain, Kenneth Hagin, and O.L. Jaggers (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2018).
All lunatics, charlatans, or ignoramuses in their own rights. The fourth option, of course, is knowledgeable; however, these individuals did not know much about the world but had, as per the statement by Hawking, neither ignorance nor knowledge but the illusion of knowledge, which, in the end, analysis, is far viler and the enemy of real knowledge about the reality abounding around us. To quote the late cosmologist once more, religion is based on authority. Science is based on evidence. Approximately, one can apply the same categorization sweep in the analysis of prominent creationists in history including Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, Immanuel Velikovsky, Duane Gish, and others. A lesson in life, learn to detect pseudoscience and nonsense and then move on, which saves time.
Famously, even the within-the-faith beloved supposed Saint Mother Theresa of Calcutta, also known as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, the writings of the late purported saint remain littered with commentary on suffering and the importance of pain and suffering, as this retains a sense of the redemption of Christ.
Bojaxhiu states, “Suffering, if it is accepted together, borne together, is joy. Remember that the Passion of Christ ends always in the joy of the Resurrection of Christ, so when you feel in your own heart the suffering of Christ, remember the Resurrection has to come—–the joy of Easter has to dawn. Never let anything so fill you with sorrow as to make you forget the joy of the Risen Christ” (Lau, n.d.).
Suffering shall be accepted as a joy; a joy as the “Risen Christ” (Ibid.). The nature of the framework represents an assumption of a resurrection from the dead, i.e., the death, burial, and three days later resurrection of Christ in so-called defiance of death.
The only crux, so to speak, of the issue of suffering from Christian theology, remains with the supposed resurrection and in the power of the sacrifice of a God-man, of God made flesh, on a Cross, through a form of Roman capital punishment.
Without veracity to these claims of a resurrection and to its panacea power for the supernatural moral blights of sin for all time – past, present, and future, the notion of Christian alleviation of suffering, or need for recognition of suffering as joy in realization of its reflection in Jesus’s or Yeshua Ben Yosef’s murder, becomes nothing.
It’s true, then, the Roman Catholic Christians did it: ex nihilo. They created something from nothing, more suffering than necessary through its enshrinement and as guardianship for access to the joy of Christ’s self-sacrifice at the Cross. Unnecessary suffering within a secular referent frame becomes immoral because of the tacit premise of a supernatural moral realm; whereas, to the Roman Catholic Christian Church, the secularly seen unnecessary suffering becomes necessary suffering via reflective qualities with the penultimate sacrifice of Christ for the so-called sins of humankind. That is to say, the well-being moral matrix of humanism stands opposed to the meta-physicalistic ethic of Christianity; although, if one takes the words of the Utilitarian ethicist and political philosopher John Stuart Mill seriously in Utilitarianism, the foundation of the ethics of wellbeing writ broad and deep with a eudaemonistic view of human life and their relations with one another becomes the moral nature of the Nazarene:
I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent’s own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbour as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. As the means of making the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness, or (as speaking practically it may be called) the interest, of every individual, as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole; and secondly, that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole; especially between his own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes; so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being’s sentient existence.(Mill, 1863)
This could lead into commentary on the ongoing and overwhelming sexual abuse of children and nuns entering into the news cycle at a rapid pace; however, this will not be the focus of this article (Dancel, 2018; Gomes, 2018; Pierce, 2018; Regencia, 2018; Macdonald, 2018; Long, 2018). Mill took a naturalistic frame of the Nazarene reflective of the morals of Utilitarianism, where the Roman Catholic Christian Church holds fast to the notion of supernatural lessons and an ethical gradient within this meta-material world of grace to sin.
Of the many foci within the categorization of pain, misery, and suffering of the Roman Catholic Christian Church, we can, also, come to the realization of the ongoing and international problem with the pain and death created through the substance misuse crisis around the world (WHO, 2018a; WHO, 2018b).
If we look at the deaths associated with the drug epidemic around the world, we can find approximately 70,000 to 100,000 people dying from opioid-related overdoses, alone, per annum, and as many as 99,000 to 253,000 deaths from to illicit drug use, circa 2010 (UNODC/WHO, 2013).
The main deaths from these substances are men (NIH, 2018a; NIH, 2018b). These statistics from the National Institutes of Health in the United States replicate to other parts of the world. This does not seem like a spiritual problem, as in some spiritual-moral realm corrupted and influencing the men to become addicted in the short- and long-term. One which damages families and communities, and leaving men to die alone.
The basics of addiction, rather than a spiritual-moral framework in years past filled with theological arguments and references to revelation, comes from a functional comprehension of the architecture of the mind, of the brain as an organic sense input receiver and information processor, as we are evolved organisms with imperfectly coordinated but good enough consciousnesses; where these systems can be hijacked by the substances, the neural networks can be, without context, activated based on the ability of the addictive substances to cross the blood-brain barrier and remain active and suitable for locking into neurotransmitter sites at gap junctions. It is well-known as the “biology of addiction” (NIH News in Health, 2015). One common and among the most lethal substances, and which is legal in several nations around the world, remain alcohol, which makes for a good example.
Dr. George Koob, the Director of the NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, stated, “A common misperception is that addiction is a choice or moral problem, and all you have to do is stop. But nothing could be further from the truth… The brain actually changes with addiction, and it takes a good deal of work to get it back to its normal state. The more drugs or alcohol you’ve taken, the more disruptive it is to the brain” (Ibid.).
The Director of the NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, Dr. Nora Volkow, notes the decreased activity in the frontal cortex in individuals who harbor addictive tendencies or outright addictions, whether to alcohol or other substances; they take the substance in spite of the costs of losing “custody of their children” or real threats of a potential rightful entrance into a penitentiary (Ibid.).
These experts in the functional neurological and behavioral aspects of addiction do not mention the spiritual world or spiritual problems, or alternate and inexplicable dimensions apart from the ordinary, but these medical professionals and research directors at the highest level in the world direct attention to organized matter, a brain, and its malfunctions, e.g., the poor functional capacity of the frontal lobes and, in particular, the frontal cortex of the unfortunates suffering with or through addiction.
As Professor Adele Diamond of The University of British Columbia explains with regards to the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex, the poor functioning of the DPfC, in particular, or the PfC, in general, can impair function in most important areas of personal and professional life, and associated with many mental disorders, including attention and conduct disorders, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders, even schizophrenia, and can impact physical health with poor health habits in either exercise or diet, reading and writing achievement, dependability, violent and emotional outburst events and degrees of said moments, retaining of a job let alone a career, levels of productivity, and success and harmony in work or marital life, and so on (Diamond, 2012).
A material, physical, or natural structure with impairments expresses widespread life problems, i.e., not a spiritual-moral issue by necessity and, by the principle of parsimony or Occam’s Razor, far more probable as a neurological impairment issue. This leads to some implications in the legal and social, and law enforcement, aspects of substance misuse epidemics. There has been a wide range of calls for the decriminalization of drugs to deal with this international problem, as would be a humanistic orientation based on evidence of the reduction in harms to the general public at all levels. That is to say, compassion- and science-based solution to this international problem. [Ed. I have written on this before and reference common knowledge within the international community on this subject matter, as well as prior references from other articles.]
The calls have been from the UN General Assembly Session on the Approach to the World Drug Problem (UNGASS) in its 2016 unanimous conclusion, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, through drug policy and the Sustainable Development Goals, and others (UNODC, 2018; Yakupitiyage, 2017; UNODC, 2015; Sustainable Development Goals, n.d.).
The United Nations and the World Health Organization issued a joint statement calling for decriminalization of all drugs in 2017 (WHO, 2017). The Former Portuguese Prime Minister and Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres called for the decriminalization of all drugs while the Prime Minister of Portugal; same while the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the prior Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon did the same (Secretariat to the Governing Bodies UNODC, 2018).
Some nations made continuous calls for decriminalization. They enacted the changes, including the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and Portugal, and other countries (Travis, 2014; Vastag, 2009). The questions about this issue of drugs or substances with deadly or addictive potentials around the world remains the ways in which the substances are dealt with via the criminal justice system, the system of jurisprudence, and the assumptions floating within the public consciousness influencing the conscience of the general populace of a nation, including the Philippines.
If we look at the situation with the nation for me, Canadian society, in other words, we can note the ways in which the punitive approach to substance misuse has been an utter failure, even worse in the nation south of our border, i.e., the United States of America.
The punishment of the misusers, in fact, based on the firm and robust evidence showing the increase of the use, the severity of the outcomes, and how this punishment methodology simply leaves more people without support and possibly addicted/deceased, and the prison population filled more than before within the nation-state, based on the implementation of policies set forth with a punitive approach.
Most often, the poor and minorities within a state are the majority of the victims here; thus, if poor, male, and a minority within a nation, then the greater the likelihood of falling victim to injury, addiction, or death via illicit substance intake, whether orally, anally, or injections (Fellner, 2009; NIH, 2018a; NIH, 2018b). In general, this is counter-complemented by an evidence-based methodology towards the issues of substance misuse: harm reduction, which amounts to both a philosophy and a methodology (Harm Reduction International, 2018).
Much akin to the humanistic approach, as noted, harm reduction provides a basis for the implementation in societies around the world with a reason, science, and compassion foundation in the management of substance misuse as a human issue and a social health problem primarily, and secondarily as an issue of law enforcement. For example, if decriminalized, the black market in this sector becomes nullified.
The alternative to mostly punishment is harm reduction (Harm Reduction International, 2018). One major aspect of compassion would be the implementation of decriminalization, as per the national and international calls, and compassion oriented policies, programmes, and initiatives in order to alleviate the suffering of those at the bottom of society.
These methodologies can be as simple as needle exchange programs or safe injections sites. Others, if the population of young postsecondary students, can be an emphasis on naloxone kits on campus, which blocks the opioid receptors of the body and stalls overdoses for time to return the young person to the hospital. These remain solutions bound to a realistic view of a free country, likely, harboring illicit substances or licit substances that will be misused, and then the role of the government should be to protect and help the public in the most evidence-based way possible, which means the harm reduction approaches, while also respecting the bodily autonomy and choices of the Filipino/Filipina.
More than 1,000 Canadian citizens died in the province of British Columbia alone, which prompted an emergency task force to examine the issue and the evidence. This led to the proposals for more extensive harm reduction approaches, not less, where this mirrors the situation with Portugal under Guterres.
Humanistic approaches do not imply for all time or inherent completeness of philosophical foundation, in a symmetry with the logical findings of Kurt Godel about the incompleteness of any standard mathematical system proclaiming consistency or the inconsistency of any mathematical system proclaiming completeness, because the fundamental basis in science – process, discoveries, and substantiated empirical theories – amounts to a philosophy of discovery about the natural world and, therefore, an ethic, by implication incorporating it, becomes one of a wondrous continual searching, probing, retaining, integrating, and refining of inherent compassionate sentiments of the human heart reflected in the Golden Rule to the advanced scientific and technological landscape of the world today.
This brings us back into the subject matter of suffering and the context of Christianity, the Pope, Duterte, and harm reduction. As the Roman Catholic Christian Church from the previous Pope to a saint noted on the Christian conceptualization of suffering, as they live in a worldview of the teleological bound within this notion of God as a Logos or the source of absolute truth without room for deviancy – the Logos way or the highway (to hell, even paved with good intentions, presumably), the suffering in the world must have some God-given purpose.
Suffering comes from a fallen world but is extant due to some ultimate teleological purpose with God’s divine plan, even while the standard position of the Roman Catholic Christian Church is acceptance of Theistic Evolution with, in many eyes, humanity as the crowning achievement of creation. From an evolutionary viewpoint without teleology, a naturalistic worldview, the pain, suffering, and misery remain products of evolution carved via natural selective processes from natural disasters to reciprocal altruism to mate selection to kin selection to punctuated equilibrium and so on, without teleology. Kropotkin noted the factor of mutual aid in evolution at any rate.
The pain and suffering are seen as necessary and, potentially, needing encouragement or even praise as reflective of the joy identified with the notion of a crucified Christ, i.e., the ultimate in suffering and sacrifice then victory over the death of the mortal coil.
However, lacking the evidence or firm evidentiary basis for the claims in the narratives of a Christ who died and rose from the dead a la Lazarus, or the biological evidence to show natural means by which death has ever been forestalled indefinitely and even reversed then or now, the teleological view of suffering becomes less cosmic, more parochial, and akin to the Evolution by Natural Selection posited by Darwin in 1859 (On the Origin of Species) without a teleological lens on the development, adaptation, and speciation of species.
Suffering becomes another unavoidable aspect of the evolved organisms of Earth useful for long-term species survival while also, given the aforementioned sentiments and inquiring ethical discovery linked to science, becoming something human beings can alleviate, not only in themselves but in others as per the Golden Rule.
Some individuals seem to have less of this. Duterte, in particular, admitted to extrajudicial killings, stated, “What is my sin? Did I steal even one peso? Did I prosecute somebody who I ordered jailed? My sin is extrajudicial killings” (Human Rights Watch, 2018a).
In the anti-drug fervor of the nation, of the Philippines, more than 12,000 people have been killed, including men, women, and children (Ibid.), based on conservative estimates from “the nongovernmental groups Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates and the International Drug Policy Consortium, as well as media outlets including the Sydney Morning Herald” (Ibid.).
There has been, also, the efforts to push an independent investigation via the UN into the killings associated with this so-called War on Drugs, which amounts to the punitive or punished oriented approach, in contradistinction to the harm reduction approach, mentioned before (Human Rights Watch, 2018b). This harsh tone and tough talk are not new from Duterte.
In a May 2015 election campaign rally, he, in a strong suggestion of a punitive approach to drugs, exclaimed, “If I became president, you [alleged criminals] should hide. I would kill all of you who make the lives of Filipinos miserable. I will definitely kill you. I do not want to commit this crime. But if by chance per chance God will place me there, stay on guard because that 1,000 [killed in Davao City] will become 100,000” (Rappler.com, 2015).
Golez quoted the Roman Catholic Christian Pope spokesperson, Salvador Panelo, stating, “This is precisely the rationale behind the President’s war on illegal drugs in the Philippines: to save the young and future generations of Filipinos from the drug scourge… Laudable developments have been achieved by the current administration in this regard, notwithstanding the noise coming from the loud minority composed of his detractors and critics here and abroad” (Golez, 2018; Romero, 2018).
In short, Duterte and the Pope speak in different tones but support the same social and law enforcement right-wing ideological perspective, which, in accordance with all evidence available to us, will not only maintain the terrible conditions but make them worse or exacerbate them for individuals and society.
As per the calls for decriminalization and the empirical robust support for harm reduction methodologies, the Pope and Duterte should take a complete about-face in their commitment, as they currently rely on an anti-science conservative agenda that harms the public and has resulted in, potentially 12,000 or more killings when a perfectly functional and evidence-based approach sits before them with support from the international community from the United Nations to the World Health Organization.
The implications of more suffering and then working to stamp this out does not sit apart from the work of mostly male world leaders working to maintain a tough-guy image and in the Christian conceptualization of human suffering as a derivation of a good reflective of the redemptive self-sacrifice of Christ at the Cross; but for God’s sake, the evidence and the naturalistic ethics bound to the sciences of the mind better suit the modern world and will, in fact, do what the purported holy figure and strongman want in their triumphal declarations: reduce the drug abuse or substance misuse problem – so, stop being the guardians of unnecessary suffering and death, and misery, and pain.
Then, maybe, we can thank heaven, literally or metaphorically.
References
Dancel, R. (2018, December 5). American priest arrested in the Philippines for alleged sexual abuse of up to 50 boys. Retrieved from https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/american-priest-arrested-in-the-philippines-for-alleged-sexual-abuse-of-up-to-50-boys.
Diamond, A. (2012, September 27). Executive Functions. Retrieved from http://www.devcogneuro.com/Publications/ExecutiveFunctions2013.pdf.
Fellner, J. (2009, June 19). Race, Drugs, and Law Enforcement in the United States. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/06/19/race-drugs-and-law-enforcement-united-states.
Golez, P. (2018, December 2). Pope’s drug remarks ‘relevant, timely’ in Philippines drug war: Palace. Retrieved from https://politics.com.ph/popes-drug-remarks-relevant-timely-in-philippines-drug-war-palace/.
Gomes, R. (2018, September 3). Philippine bishops vow to prevent clerical sexual and other abuse and cover-ups. Retrieved from https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2018-09/philippines-bishops-clerical-abuse-valles-cbcp.html.
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Long, H. (2018, December 6). 13 Catholic clergy connected to central AL accused of sexual assault of children. Retrieved from https://www.wsfa.com/2018/12/06/catholic-clergy-connected-central-al-accused-sexual-assault-children/.
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Rev. Gretta Vosper of West Hill United Church in Scarborough, Ontario, went through an approximately 3-year ordeal – almost 4 in fact – in the uncertainty of station in the Christian denomination The United Church of Canada, arguably the most progressive sect in the nation and much of the world (not my opinion alone).
Take, for example, the fact of the matter as the first church to permit the ordination of women, circa 1936 with Lydia Guchy (University of Toronto, 2017; BC Conference of the United Church of Canada, 2018).
Also, we can take Vosper stating that The United Church of Canada is the “most progressive denomination in the world, as far as I’m concerned” in a podcast with Ryan Bell (Garrison, 2016).
In a conclusion-of-the-ordeal article, following the first article a couple years prior, Garrison (2018) notes, “Vosper hopes to create resources for the development of secular communities that have these multilayered social connections within them.”
A community was the point the entire time. Vosper remains a person oriented around the construction of community. She has also been labeled a “brave woman,” and rightly so (Thomas, 2018). The reason, as noted by Thomas, “… her situation grabbed headlines when she wrote a letter to the church’s spiritual leader after the January 2015 terrorist massacre at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper office in Paris. Her point: Belief in God can motivate bad things” (Ibid.).
More pointedly, Vosper denounced the belief in a supernatural “being whose purposes can be divined and which, once interpreted and without mercy, must be brought about within the human community in the name of that being” (Longhurst, 2018).
This was, in part, a basis for Vosper, personally, to be unable and unwilling to reaffirm the original vows during ordination in The United Church of Canada. There was supposed to be a hearing for Vosper, and then delays in the hearing occurred for some time – until recently.
As reported by Longhurst, “…before that hearing took place, the Toronto Conference and Vosper reached a settlement on Nov. 7 to let her keep her job” (2018). However, the church released another statement in reaffirmation of some beliefs following the announcement of the reaching of a settlement (The United Church of Canada, 2018a).
“In a brief joint statement, the Toronto Conference, Vosper and West Hill Church said the parties had ‘settled all outstanding issues between them,’” as reported by Longhurst (Longhurst, 2018; The United Church of Canada, 2018b).
The articles, since the November 7 press statement, continue to come out, even more than one month later (Stonestreet, J. & Morris, 2018; Bean, 2018). According to Vosper’s lawyer, Juliana Falconer, there was a rational calculation on the costs and benefits of a continuation of the disagreement, for all parties (Ibid.).
Douglas Todd, a long-time religion and belief commentator, lamented the lack of open reasoning for the decision by The United Church of Canada (Todd, 2018).
Todd argues The United Church of Canada is the main source of “worm theology,” which amounts to engagement in identity politics and followers who “perceive themselves as fundamentally flawed, guilty and unworthy” (Ibid.).
While also considering the prior statement of The United Church of Canada, we can see the earlier tone, as declared:
The Committee read the submissions and listened very carefully to determine whether Ms. Vosper’s beliefs are in essential agreement with the statement of doctrine of the United Church. This is a crucial question asked of all potential ordinands to determine whether they are suitable for ministry within The United Church of Canada.
We have concluded that if Gretta Vosper were before us today, seeking to be ordained, the Toronto Conference Interview Committee would not recommend her. In our opinion, she is not suitable to continue in ordained ministry because she does not believe in God, Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit. Ms. Vosper does not recognize the primacy of scripture, she will not conduct the sacraments, and she is no longer in essential agreement with the statement of doctrine of The United Church of Canada. (Henderson, 2016)
But with some cultural knowledge or research into the belief of clergy in congregations around North America, there is a long history of doubting leaders alongside the larger disbelieving laity, who may simply suspect but not explicitly know about one another.
One such project was set forth by Tufts University Professor Daniel C. Dennett and Independent Qualitative Research Consultant Linda LaScola, called The Clergy Project (The Clergy Project, 2018). (If you look close at the banner collage image at the top of the main webpage of the website, you can see Vosper’s photo.)
Vosper simply becomes another in a long line of brave individuals, as noted by Thomas (2018), working to expand the landscape of Christian and other spirituality in the early 21st century. A woman freethought pioneer within the tradition of The United Church of Canada.
The conclusion of the ordeal for Vosper has left some letters to the editor with laments, including the following from Steve Thorkildsen, “What will be next? School principals who don’t believe in the value of educating children? Doctors who don’t believe the natural progression of diseases should be interrupted? Engineers who spurn precision and believe that approximations are close enough? Our new Age of Reason doesn’t seem so reasonable to me” (Hamilton Spectator, 2018).
But even within The United Church of Canada, the head of the denomination is happy to keep Vosper (Stonestreet & Morris, 2018). Discomfort from some on the outside and resolute comfort, even happiness, on the inside.
One commentary, by Antonio Gualteri (2018), openly opined, “Now I wonder if the terms of the settlement between the two parties were based more on labour law than theology, though we may never know given the condition of confidentiality.”
In a nuanced view, he considers the critical issue not the atheism of Vosper but the approach to the Bible. While, at the same time, Vosper has spoken to these subtler concerns in prior writing, as cited in the article by Gualteri (2018).
That is to say, she (Vosper) states, directly, the problematic contents of the texts comprising the Bible with the “obscure,” “irrelevant,” and “dangerously prone to misguiding” contents of it (Gualteri, 2018; Vosper, 2016).
Perhaps, in other words, the issue remains not Vosper’s approach to the Bible, but, rather, with the applicability of the purported holy text to much of modern secular life and spirituality in standard interpretations, in contradistinction to the noteworthy but, likely, wrongly – inversely so – placed concerns of Gualteri (2018).
Vosper, in response to a question about “atheist minister” being, supposedly, an oxymoron, stated, “Not if you understand the history of biblical and theological study. For well over 100 years, we’ve questioned the authority of the Bible and recognized it was written by humans. When you do that, everything is up for grabs, including the idea of a supernatural God.”
She seems correct, in part, but this tradition of questioning of the Bible by prominent and intelligent women exists much farther into the historical record, including back to some of the earliest women geniuses in the Western philosophical tradition (Adler, 2018).
I speak, of course, of one of the few great women polymaths permitted to flourish, for a time, in the ancient world: Hypatia of Alexandria. She had a number of distinct statements about fables, myths, miracles, superstitions, and religions:
Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth — often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.
All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.
Taking the historical account and comparing to the current, we can see, at a minimum perhaps, an amicable solution, as per the joint statement, to the updated (a-)theological stances of Vosper within the “most progressive denomination in the world” and another woman, Hypatia, outside of the church in the ancient world, i.e., cut to pieces and mutilated to death by a Christian mob.
Both “brave” but, certainly, different contexts. In a sense, for the church and the Western critical tradition, and the popular reactionaries to freethinking women, this is, certainly, progress, of a kind, once more – and within a suitable Western tradition and Christian denomination.
References
Adler, M. (2018, November 23). Atheist minister Gretta Vosper is free to continue her West Hill work. Retrieved from https://www.toronto.com/news-story/9042831-atheist-minister-gretta-vosper-is-free-to-continue-her-west-hill-work/.
BC Conference of the United Church of Canada. (2018). Rev. Lydia Emelie Gruchy. Retrieved from https://bc.united-church.ca/rev-lydia-emelie-gruchy/.
Bean, A. (2018, December 12). Lost in the debate over Trump’s silence during the Apostles’ Creed: a bigger issue for progressive Christians. Retrieved from https://baptistnews.com/article/lost-in-the-debate-over-trumps-silence-during-the-apostles-creed-a-bigger-issue-for-progressive-christians/#.XBokr2hKiM8.
Garrison, B. (2016, October 4). Atheist Pastor Deemed Unsuitable for Ministry. Retrieved from https://thehumanist.com/news/religion/atheist-pastor-deemed-unsuitable-ministry.
Garrison, B. (2018, December 3). Case Against Atheist Pastor Dismissed. Retrieved from https://thehumanist.com/news/religion/case-against-atheist-pastor-dismissed.
Gualteri, A. (2018, November). Gretta Vosper’s atheism isn’t the problem. Retrieved from https://www.ucobserver.org/columns/2018/11/gretta_vosper_united_church/.
Hamilton Spectator. (2018, November 22). Nov. 23: Pardon the turkeys, jail the kids, gender identity isn’t a theory and other letters to the editor. Retrieved from https://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/9046012-nov-23-pardon-the-turkeys-jail-the-kids-gender-identity-isn-t-a-theory-and-other-letters-to-the-editor/.
Henderson, S. (2016, September 22). A Message from the Sub-Executive of Toronto Conference Regarding the Review of the Rev. Gretta Vosper. Retrieved from https://torontoconference.ca/2016/09/message-sub-executive-toronto-conference-regarding-review-rev-gretta-vosper/.
Longhurst, J. (2018, December 1). Opinion split after atheist minister keeps job. Retrieved from https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/faith/opinion-split-after-atheist-minister-keeps-job-501694981.html.
Stonestreet, J. & Morris, G.S. (2018, December 18). When “Christianity” Is Pointless: Why Real Faith Makes Demands. Retrieved from https://www.christianheadlines.com/columnists/breakpoint/when-christianity-is-pointless-why-real-faith-makes-demands.html.
The Clergy Project. (2018). The Clergy Project. Retrieved from http://clergyproject.org/.
The United Church of Canada. (2018b, November 7). Statement on the Rev. Gretta Vosper. Retrieved from https://www.united-church.ca/news/statement-rev-gretta-vosper.
The United Church of Canada. (2018a, November 7). The United Church of Canada Responds to the Joint Statement on the Rev. Vosper. Retrieved from https://www.united-church.ca/news/united-church-canada-responds-joint-statement-rev-vosper.
Thomas, W. (2018, November 30). How to tell if your minister is also an atheist. Retrieved from https://www.niagarathisweek.com/opinion-story/9060407-how-to-tell-if-your-minister-is-also-an-atheist/.
Todd, D. (2018, November 17). Douglas Todd: Atheist Rev. Gretta Vosper’s case reveals a church’s ‘worm theology’. Retrieved from https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-atheist-rev-gretta-vospers-case-reveals-a-churchs-worm-theology.
University of Toronto. (2017, February 2). Changing roles of women in the Canadian churches. Retrieved from individual.utoronto.ca/hayes/xty_canada/xn_women.html.
Vosper, G. (2016, June 30). My Answers to the Questions of Ordination. Retrieved from https://www.grettavosper.ca/answers-questions-ordination/.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/24
Dr. Azra Raza is a Professor at Columbia University. Here we talk about current position, growing up, acquisition of education, original dream, and more, part 3.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you consider the controversial topics in your field? How do you examine the controversial topics? What do some in opposition to you argue? How do you respond?
Dr. Azra Raza: In the current atmosphere of cancer research, researchers study the evolution of a cancer cell rather than its etiology. In at least a subset of patients, I have hypothesized for about two decades that MDS may begin as a viral disease. I committed a form of professional suicide by presenting very early work related to this hypothesis at an MDS Foundation meeting held 19 years ago in Prague. They have not invited me back to that meeting in the last two decades. I learnt a tremendous amount from this experience. For one thing, I became more self-critical and stringent in examining our own data. For another, I started collaboration with the top virologists in the country (Drs. Robert Gallo, Don Ganem, and Joe DeRisi). Finally, it made me more committed to finding the proof for my hypothesis. In that, instead of throwing up my arms in frustration, by persisting in our search for a virus, we are taking full advantage of next generation sequencing to identify non-human elements in the human genome and re-construct viruses from these pieces. The technology has reached a point where we are poised to unravel possible new retroviral sequences from the RNA Sequence data we have generated. This will still be only half the battle. The important study will be to prove the etiologic relationship of the pathogen to the MDS under study. This is where all the controversy creeps in again because the pathogens are often known organisms and no one is ready to believe they are the agency for causing the malignancy. Remember that to prove that helicobacter pylori was the cause of gastric ulcers, Barry Marshall had to swallow the pathogen and nurse ulcers in his own stomach before anyone would believe him! (Eventually, he got the Nobel Prize). Now we know that this bacterium is the cause of many stomach cancers. So, in my opinion, the etiologic studies remain extremely controversial and many a career has been sacrificed on the altar of virologic basis of malignancy. I nearly lost my career, but have been able to survive – thankfully. I continue my studies in the area, always trying for that moment:
“Chance will strike a prepared mind”
Jacobsen: What advice do you have for young MDs?
Raza: A life without work is a life without worth, and this work should be done for the good of mankind as well as for one’s own good. Last year, I was fortunate to win the Hope Award for Cancer Research and in my acceptance speech; I gave advice to my 18 year old daughter which I wish to quote for the young MDs:
“At the risk of being a spendthrift of my own celebrity, I want to address my teenage daughter who is a sophomore at Columbia University and like her parents, plans on a career in science and medicine. You might be wondering why I have to use the 3 minutes allotted to me to do so in this room…well, as Nora Ephron once said, “When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.” Actually, it is for two reasons…first because she is a captive audience and second because of the presence of all of you in this room and what this moment means and how indelibly what I say today may be etched on her brain. Sheherzad, as a result of several decades of experience and observation, I have narrowed down the formula for personal success to three cardinal rules: find your passion, find a mentor and then give it everything you’ve got. However, there is a different kind of success, one which many in this room epitomize. As living beings, we know that death will come inevitably, but thankfully, we do not know the hour of our death. What goes through the hearts and minds of souls who have received a diagnosis of cancer and hear the footsteps of death approaching closer every day? Theirs are the heroic stories of hardiness, ingenuity and resourcefulness. Some of us have the privilege of witnessing on a daily basis, the remarkable dignity with which they face their ongoing ordeals. You have decided to join the ranks of these privileged caregivers. As a little girl from age 3 to 8 years, you have already witnessed your father go through a losing battle with cancer. When faced with such human suffering, your qualifications, your CV or your degrees do not help. What helps is your heart, your sensitivity to feel the pain of others. On this special day, realize that you are fortunate to be in a room full of such compassionate and deeply committed individuals, realize that you will not need magic or miracles to help your patients but you will need serious scientific research and deep sensitivity to their anguish and suffering. Today, I use the honour bestowed upon me through this award to urge you to pledge that even as you will strive for excellence and follow the three rules to guarantee success in your personal life, you will never forget the dues you owe to the patients you will be caring for very soon.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Dr. Azra Raza is a Professor at Columbia University. Here we talk about current position, growing up, acquisition of education, original dream, and more, part 2.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your most recent research?
Dr. Azra Raza: I remain completely focused on understanding the Etiology and Biology of MDS and now use the latest genomic technology to interrogate the pathology of these diseases. With the enabling technology, this whole field has become extremely productive and exciting. We are using exome sequencing, RNA Sequence and global methylation studies to carefully study large numbers of patients to identify new drug targets in MDS cells, and hopefully develop novel non-toxic therapies for these malignant diseases of the elderly.
Jacobsen: If you had unlimited funding and unrestricted freedom, what research would you conduct?
Raza: My commitment is to therapy driven research. How can basic molecular research improve the outcome for my patients? I feel strongly that many effective drugs already exist to treat common cancers, but we do not know how to use them intelligently. Instead of tailoring therapy for individual patients, we blindly treat many with the same drug with the result that 20-30% patients respond. Usually, we do not know the responders.
The goal would be to match the right drug to the right patient. A goal for which we need detailed cellular signalling and molecular information. Basic concept: it seems that while multiple signalling pathways that start proliferation in normal cells, cancer cells become addicted to a particular pathway. These pathways of addiction differ between patients. It is critical to identify which pathway a particular patient’s cells are addicted to and then devise ways of interrupting it. If I had unrestricted funding, I would start a dedicated program to perform detailed genomic and methylation studies described above on every patient at diagnosis. Hopefully, this would eventually help identify the vital signalling pathways in individual patients. With this information available, the elegant concept of Synthetic Lethality can be applied where drugs or natural compounds are identified that can interrupt the particular pathway to which the cell is addicted and cause it to stop proliferating. So my dream research revolves around individualized targeted translational research. I would like to give one example here. In a recent patient, we identified a mutation that leads to over activity of the b-catenin pathway of proliferation. I was planning to treat the patient with a monoclonal antibody against TGFb, which is in trial at the MDS Center. However, it turns out that one of the checks on the b-catenin pathway is TGFb. In other words, if I had not performed whole exome sequencing on the genome, I would have treated the patient with an agent that would likely have worsened the disease by allowing the b-catenin to run amok with no checks at all. This information alone, which is the direct result of using genomics is probably life saving for the patient. In addition, we found that one possible way of interrupting the b-catenin may come from using small molecules that interrupt this pathway. Several of them being in trials in humans already, and also that Vitamin A (all trans-retinoic acid or ATRA) could do the same. In short, we saved the patient from getting a potentially harmful agent. Additionally, we may have found a perfect treatment for individualized therapy, which is a vitamin! This is my dream research if I have all the resources at my disposal.
As a second dream project requiring unlimited resources, I want to describe the Virome or viral make up of every MDS patient. The goal is to identify all endogenous and exogenous viruses that have become part of each patient’s genome and see whether any of these could have the label of causative. After all, cats regularly get MDS. In their case, the disease is because of the Feline Leukemia Virus. Practically every cat is infected with this virus, but only a handful get MDS. There must be
other co-factors involved in MDS causation. Defining the Virome would help all of this research.
Jacobsen: What is your philosophical foundation? How did it change over time?
Raza: Humanism dictates the foundation of my philosophy. However, the practice and ultimate goals have undergone subtle changes over time. In my formative years, I felt more interest in dedicating myself to grander themes. For example, believing that the thinking and work of a few can change the lives of millions (penicillin is a prime example), I became consumed with a desire to find the cause and cure of cancer. Whether I would ultimately achieve it or not, at least I was ready to dedicate my life to the pursuit of this goal. With age, and one hopes, some level of maturity, the issues for me have transformed to more immediate and individual goals. Human conduct is connected by a series of incidents where one act is the result of another. This necessitated a philosophy that requires a dynamic accounting of one’s knowledge, desires, and deeds, and then to harness these in the service of humanity with humility and forbearance. In other words, instead of the grand designs of curing cancer for many, each individual patient has acquired a special place in my life and caring for their every physical, emotional, and psychosocial need has become far more important. This by no means indicates that my obsession to find the cure for cancer has lessened, but it means my focus shifted from many to one, from cancer patients to Mrs. X, Y, or Z. It is similar to Salman Rushdie saying in Midnight’s Children: “To understand one human, one has to swallow the world.” For me, the road to understanding and treating the disease is through grasping individual variations at the clinical level and caring for each patient as a special case. Of all the philosophical ideologies, humanism remains mine, but with an altered vision over time about how best to conduct myself in a manner that would be faithful to its basic principles.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/23
Dr. Azra Raza is a Professor at Columbia University. Here we talk about current position, growing up, acquisition of education, original dream, and more, part 1.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your current position?
Dr. Azra Raza: My position is Professor of Medicine and Director of Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) Center at Columbia University.
Jacobsen: What positions have you held in your academic career?
Raza: I earned the appointment of Full Professor at Rush University in Chicago (Age 39). Subsequently, the University of Chicago appointed me the Charles Arthur Weaver Professor of Cancer Research. The Department of Medicine created a Division of Myeloid Diseases, where I was first Director. I moved in 2004 to the University of Massachusetts as Director of Hematology and Oncology. They gave me the Gladys Smith Martin Chair in Oncology. I have been in New York since 2007. Presently, I direct the MDS Center at Columbia University.
Jacobsen: Where did you grow up? How do you think this influenced your career direction?
Raza: I grew up in Pakistan. This greatly influenced my career and life. Post-graduate work in Science was non-existent. I entered medical school as a tangential way of becoming involved in Molecular Biology. However, once I began seeing patients, I knew that I would never give that up. This led me to the idea of doing translational research. When I felt ready to graduate medical school, it had become abundantly clear to me, even after those three years of clinical work, that if I stayed back in Pakistan, I would not be practicing translational research, but would have no choice other than to become an activist. The conditions under which an impoverished population faces disease are such that one has few other options. I felt that way. Here, I came to understand my primary duty – sincerity to my passion: Science. In a way, I took to heart the advice of Polonius to Laertes:
“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
(Shakespeare, HAMLET, Act I, Scene III).
Jacobsen: Where did you acquire your education?
Raza: Pakistan.
Jacobsen: What was your original dream?
Raza: I became obsessed with ants at a very young age, maybe 4 years old. I used to lie for hours and watch them zip in and out of their little holes in long hot summer afternoons in Karachi and imagine their lives. I constructed imaginary homes for them and social lives complete with romance and all. As I grew and read about biology, I obsessed over Darwin and Freud. In fact, I obtained the first position in my pre-medical examination by scoring high during the viva part of the test, when I engaged the external examiners in a heated debate over Darwinian versus Lamarckian theories of evolution and showing why I was a die hard Darwinian at the ripe old age of 16. If I had grown up in the West, I feel confident I would be a scientist, and not a physician, but I had no way of following my dreams there. Medical School was the only option to study Biology. So I went to Medical School.
Jacobsen: What have been your major areas of research?
Raza: I have focused extremely on studying the biology and pathology of myeloid malignancies since the start of my career, even before I started my Residency. This happened because I had come to the US soon after graduation from Medical School and had six months before the start of my Fellowship. I started working at Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RCPI) in Buffalo New York, where I started working with Acute Myeloid Leukemia patients. On completion of my Residency, I returned to RPCI for my Fellowship and stayed on as a faculty member for another 6 years. During this period, I had an experience with a patient who had acute myeloid leukemia (AML) which had evolved from a prior MDS or a pre-leukemia. This made me interested in MDS. As a Fellow and young Faculty member, I defined the Cell Cycle Kinetics of Myeloid Leukemia cells in vivoin both MDS and AML by developing a novel technique of studying cellular proliferation directly in patients. These studies led to a startling revelation that the low blood counts in MDS patients were not because of bone marrow failure. Rather paradoxically, the marrow was in a hyper-proliferative state. This led to the logical examination of rate of cell death and we were able to resolve the paradox by showing that the majority of hematopoietic cells in the marrow were undergoing a suicidal self-destruction by apoptosis. Further, this cell death appeared mediated by pro-inflammatory cytokines, especially tumor necrosis factor (TNF). Next, we treated MDS patients with the anti-TNF drug thalidomide, which produced complete responses in 20% patients. Thus, over a course of 10 years, we were able to develop biologic insights into the disease that translated into a novel treatment strategy.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Dr. Cory Pedersen works at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in the Psychology Department at the time. Here we talked about psychology in her office, part 3.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When you entered academia, you likely had a certain philosophical framework for understanding the world. How have your philosophical views changed over time to the present?
Dr. Cory Pedersen: Well, there is no single salient point, right. I mean, as a professor, the only thing I want my students to take away from my class is – if you forget everything about theories, facts, and numbers – the most important thing that every student should take away is how to think critically – how to be a critical consumer of information.
That is the most relevant thing in psychology. The knowledge we have about the brain, its desire to explain cause and to do that via making connections that are probably superfluous, they are not real – and I want students to be critical consumers of information because psychological information is everywhere. It is in the news, on the radio, on the television. If you cannot be a critical consumer of information, you are in trouble. Not everyone has a critical thinking style, which is why I consider it extremely important for people to be critical consumers.
Jacobsen: What advice would you give to undergraduate psychology students aiming for a work, career, and general interest in psychology?
Pedersen: Good grades are important, but they will only get you so far. If you want a career in psychology, you need more than an undergraduate degree. That is my advice. Grades will help you get into graduate school, absolutely. But, back to my regression models, there are many predictors of success in graduate school. Grades are only one path – grades will put you into the competitive pool of graduate school. Yet, you will have more chances of getting into graduate school with strong letters of reference.
Grades will provide your letter writer with something solid to comment on about you. However, that is where it stops. My advice for people in psychology is A) apply to graduate school and B) get in good with faculty. Join a committee. Join their lab. Participate in research. Do something in some way to make yourself known to them because that is the only way they will be able to write you a letter of reference that says something besides, “This is a good student in class and they have a good grade point average.” That is all that most professors could say with only grades to recommend you. Letters of reference go a long, long way.
Jacobsen: Who have been the biggest influences on you? What books or articles characterize their viewpoint well?
Pedersen: God, I do not even know. This is a tough one. I do not even know, honestly. I would put my supervisor Dr. Kim Schonert-Reichl right up there. She is exceptionally well-published and a fabulous speaker. And she knows how to conduct research. She really taught me how to be a researcher and a critical thinker. I remember once that she told me about a study she was designing. She had developed a program evaluation for a well-known socioemotional development program called “Roots of Empathy”. The initial results were promising. Data suggested that kids exposed to the program had less classroom problem behavior, participated less in bullying, and displayed greater social competence and prosocial behavior. I remember Kim saying to me one day, “Look, the data indicates that bullying is decreasing and social competence is increasing.
This is fabulous, but so flawed.” I wasn’t sure what she meant. She said, “Well, the bullying behaviors are decreasing and the social competencies are increasing, but compared to what? How do we know whether the behavior of all kids becomes better as the year progresses?” Now, it seems obvious. There was no control group! No baseline! Kim incorporated a control group into her subsequent evaluations of the program. It seems so obvious, but you have to be a sharp researcher to be able to recognize that flaw.
That is critical thinking. That is just one of the many intelligent things that Kim has said since I have known her. She is just a solid researcher and really knows her stuff. She is well published and just recently made full professor. I feel like she has influenced many of my ways of doing and thinking about things. Even outside of being her student, when I first designed the human sexuality course – and I had not been her student for years, though we speak regularly – I told her about it and she suggested that I include some statement in my course outline about the topics discussed in the course bringing up difficult issues for some people. She is always thinking ahead. She said, “You may want to tell people that if they have difficulty with the material than they should be referred to see someone.”
She is very thoughtful. She is always trying to help me be more thoughtful that way too. Some of the fundamentals of conducting research with kids she has introduced to me. Some basic stuff – this is how to treat your participants. This is how you ensure your participants are going to be willing to participate in your study. That the participants understand anonymity and confidentiality, and that they understand their contribution and why it is important. That is what I do with all of my studies now. That is how I relay the importance of my studies to all of my participants.
I think she has been profoundly impactful on the way I conduct research, as well as how I run my class. She always made her classes relevant; she always brought the material around, emphasized how should we be studying this particular topic. Why we should be studying this particular topic. She took it away from the theoretical and brought it down into the relevant, the practical applications. And thanks to her, I have always tried to be that way too. That is my style with my own students. Even the way I write articles have been influenced by her writing style, the way that I mark papers, the way I make suggestions in comments These are just some examples of someone who has been immensely influential.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Dr. Cory Pedersen works at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in the Psychology Department at the time. Here we talked about psychology in her office, part 2.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With your expertise, what do you consider the most controversial findings in psychology? What do you consider some of the implications of these findings?
Dr. Cory Pedersen: Well, I cannot speak to the whole field, of course. However, if I were to speak generally I would look back at my introductory psychology classes and cover a broad range of topics. Generally, I would say, probably, in issues to this day of consciousness. How to know what consciousness is? How to measure it? These are still problematic for psychologists and philosophers. I would say, in my particular field, some of the big issues are things like causes of sexual orientation, and at a deeper level whether we should be even asking such questions. Such questions are biased, as we do not ask about the causes of heterosexual orientation. Being straight is presumed status quo. I would say, in my field, this area counts as one of the biggest of controversy.
There is also controversy around certain sexual disorders. In particular, hyper-sexuality and gender identity disorder as disorder. Both of these are in considerable debate as to whether they should be included or not in the DSM. I do not believe that either of those should be included, personally, from the research that I have read. I think they simply represent variations in human sexuality, which is exceptionally varied. I have difficulty reconciling many sexual disorders in the DSM, because they suggest there is a normative amount of desire; that there is a normative amount and that anything more or less than that is pathological. I consider human behavior much too varied, especially human sexual behaviour, to say, “Oh, this is the appropriate amount of sex, and any more than this, or less than this, is pathological.” I have some difficulty with that.
In the developmental field, again there is controversy relating to the DSM, particularly, what constitutes developmental psychopathology? What is considered appropriate behavior for children? Determining whether a children’s behavior is pathological hinges on the adult’s perception of the behavior, and so it is the parents or teachers that go to a psychologist or physician and say, “My child is ill.” The child rarely goes into the doctor and says, “I think there’s something wrong with me.” You don’t see that, right? There are disorders in the DSM for children that are debatable. Take for example, a new one that was under consideration, I think it was to be called temper-tantrum reaction disorder or something like that, being proposed for the DSM-5. It is based on parent’s reports of children having unreasonable and excessive temper tantrums; in other words, more than the norm! I am not suggesting that there are no mental illnesses among kids. I simply mean that the DSM has expanded to the point where much “normative” behaviour is designated pathological if the parameters are not exactly right. I think those are the biggest debates in the field of psychology that are of most interest to me.
Jacobsen: If you restructure, or at least reframe, the study of sexuality, how would you do it?
Pedersen: Well, that is a tough question. I think this links somewhat to my earlier comments about pathology. I am teaching human sexuality now. The last several chapters are about things wrong in sexuality. Commercial sex, prostitution, exotic dance are wrong. Selling sex is wrong. Then, there are the sections of sexual dysfunction, like hyper-sexuality and hypo-sexuality, and how these are ‘disorder’. And then next week it is paraphilia; exhibitionism, fetishism, BDSM, etc. And it is all so structured like, “Wow, look how wacky everyone is…” Even the chapter on gender identity that I did last week was all about why would people want to transition from male to female? What is with these people? Look how these people are different? The science is set around pointing out what is presumed to be “normal”. Some textbooks are grey because they call these topics ‘sexual variations,’ but the implication is the same; that there is something somewhat wrong about it all. I do not like that. I do not teach my class that way. I am very liberal in my class encourage tolerance of these differences. There is nothing wrong with these differences. So, I would re-structure our science in how we pathologize everything, make everything seem like it is abnormal. I do not like that. While I appreciate that there IS pathology, I often believe much of the stress and stigma associated with pathology comes from the fact that we pathologize!
Jacobsen: If you had unlimited funding, what would you research?
Pedersen: Unlimited funding? If I had unlimited funding, I would get two different pieces of equipment. One, I would get a penile plethysmograph, which measures tumescence of the genital organs for males. Two, I would get a vaginal photoplethysmograph, which is a measure of vasocongestion. They are both measures of physiological arousal. In sexuality research, the field is burdened by the social-desirability bias. People are going to say what they believe other people want to hear. Take for example the standard question, this is just an example, but take the standard question, “How many sexual partners have you had?” Men tend to overestimate their number of sexual partners and women tend to underestimate their number of sexual partners. The truth is somewhere in between. It is hard to measure things like sexual arousal based on self-report. And that is all the kind of data that I have been primarily working with; questionnaires, self-reports, survey data. If I had unlimited funding, I would buy those pieces of equipment and hidden camera equipment to conduct observational research in labs.
If I had unlimited funds, I would also want an fMRI machine. It would be amazing to see what happens in the brain during orgasm. Is it diffuse or localized? I would put technology on my side if I had unlimited funding. Although I have asked the university for a vaginal photoplethysmograph and a penile plethysmograph, there is so far no such luck in getting this equipment.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Dr. Cory Pedersen works at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in the Psychology Department at the time. Here we talked about psychology in her office, part 1.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Where did you acquire your education?
Dr. Cory Pedersen: At the undergraduate level, at the University of Calgary. At the graduate level, at the University of British Columbia, from where I earned a Masters and Ph.D. degree in Developmental Psychology.
Jacobsen: What originally interested you in psychology? In particular, what interested you about human sexuality?
Pedersen: Well, I acquired my degree from the department of educational psychology and special education. I applied there because I particularly wanted to work with one of the faculty, Dr. Kim Schonert-Reichl. She was doing research in socio-emotional learning and competence, and how it relates to things like psychopathology and peer relationships. That’s what I was initially interested in. In particular, I wanted to study those variables as they related to mental illness and various childhood mental disorders, and I especially wanted to work with Kim. However, well into my academic career, after many years teaching adolescent development, it came to my attention that textbook coverage of sexual development was lacking in many respects, and outright wrong (I hypothesized), in others. So I developed my first lab at Kwantlen (tentatively called a “Development Lab”) and conducted two large scale studies on sexual development among adolescents. From there, I developed an entire human sexuality course and changed the focus of my research to human sexuality.
Jacobsen: What topics have you researched in your career?
Pedersen: As a graduate student, I was in two different research labs at UBC. One was the Socioemotional Development Lab run by Kim. We investigated things like moral reasoning, moral development, peer relationships, bullying, conduct disorder, empathy, and pro-social moral reasoning.. My masters work came out of that lab. The other lab I worked in was the Self-Regulated Learning Lab, which involved work on the self-regulated learning components of learning disabilities among children and adults. Kids and adults with learning disabilities tend to lack self-regulated learning. They tend to be unaware of their own learning difficulties. We developed some self-regulated learning strategies to help them monitor their own cognition, and their own learning styles. I was in that lab, and we did a number of studies in the local schools.
For my Doctoral Dissertation, I looked at children’s conceptions of mental illness, ‘how do children come to understand mental illness in their peers?’ They do see it – unfortunately. How do they understand its cause, its prognosis, its severity? How do they perceive these individuals in terms of friendship quality? Whether they would be good friends or bad friends, whether they would like them or not. And since leaving graduate school, and coming to Kwantlen, I have done several studies; most recently on human sexuality among adolescents and emerging adults. Things like the developmental progression of sexual events in life of adolescents and emerging adults. What do they do in their developmental progression? In other words, what they do first, what do they do next, and so on, and whether these series of events predict their level of promiscuity and level of unusual sexual activities. I also did another study on the predictors – I do a lot of regression research – of infidelity as measured by the big five personality variables.
Jacobsen: What areas are you currently researching?
Pedersen: I have a couple of things on the go. Right now in my human sexuality lab we are looking at changes to current trends in exotic dance. We have two directions in which we are going. If you look at the popular media, you have lately seen a lot of exotic dance put out there as normative behavior. A person can take pole dancing classes. A person can learn how to lap dance, provide a lap dance. Popular culture is trending towards putting lap dancing and pole dancing out as a good means for aerobic exercise. Some researchers have coined the term `stripper chic`, which is the new culture of empowerment for exotic dancers. Given that, we hypothesize that there has been a shift. Traditionally, exotic dance has been stigmatized in the literature. Much literature has come out of the field of sociology, which results in a tendency towards female liberalism. Female exotic dancers have been viewed largely as victims. But we have a different take on that. While admittedly many exotic dancers have been victimized, we are putting forth the argument that exotic dancing can actually be sexually liberating. That exotic dancers are earning legitimate capital gain. They are providing a legitimate service, and with the general trend toward what is called `stripper chic, it may be changing not just societal views, but the views among exotic dancers too. The view of their own stigma; that their personal identity is viewed more positively. Also, we are going to look at predictors (regression is my thing!) of things like psychopathology, self-esteem, and standard measures of restrictive or permissive sexuality. We hypothesize that there will be no difference between the average population – Kwantlen students – and exotic dancers.
The other study that we are looking at is the enmeshment of gender identity with sexual orientation. There is considerable anecdote, even research, that people confuse sexual orientation with gender identity. For instance, there is a perception that if someone is gay, this person must not be gender normed; the perception that gay men are feminine and that lesbian women are masculine. We plan to tease this enmeshment apart by having participants evaluate the degree to which they think a gay person would be suitable for a job description that is exceptionally masculine or feminine. Of course, we think gay men will be viewed as less competent and that lesbian women will be viewed as more competent in a traditionally masculine job and visa versa.
Jacobsen: What epistemologies, methodologies, and tools do you use for your research?
Pedersen: Almost all of my research is cross-sectional. I have not conducted any longitudinal designs, as many trained in developmental psychology do. Most of my research is quasi-experimental in nature that does not involve any manipulation of variables for the most part, but only to examine variables as they exist in cross-sections of the population. Two exceptions to this general trend; the study recently done in my lab on the confounding of gender and sexual orientation, and work with my honours student on sexual paraphilia. These were both experimental designs.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/22
Danielle Blau’s Rhyme and Reason: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Art of Living the Big Questions is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Her collection mere eye was selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Award and published in 2013 with an introduction by poet D.A. Powell, and her poems won first place in the 2015 multi-genre Narrative 30 Below Contest. Poetry, short stories, articles, and interviews by Blau can be found in such publications as The Atlantic online, The Baffler, Black Clock, The Harvard Review, The Literary Review, Narrative Magazine, The New Yorker’s book blog, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Plume Poetry, The Saint Ann’s Review, The Wolf, the Argos Books poetry anthology Why I Am Not a Painter, and Plume Anthology of Poetry. A graduate of Brown University with an honors degree in philosophy, and of NYU with an MFA in poetry, she curates and hosts the monthly Gavagai Music + Reading Series, and teaches at Hunter College. Here are her views and story, part 2. Part 1 here.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If you reflect on the process, how have you developed a method for writing poetry? Did you learn from someone else, develop your own and then refine it, some admixture of the two, or something else?
Blau: I’ve always written and loved to write, but for a while I didn’t actually know what it was I was writing. And at a certain point, I began to worry. Because even though, as a reader, I still wanted to lose myself in the sumptuous folds of a highly plotted novel, my tastes as a writer seemed to be growing increasingly eccentric. So I noticed I had ever less patience for getting down to the crucial business of plotting, say—but ever more patience for mulling over the benefits of ending a particular sentence on a trochee versus a spondee, say, or for deciding whether the made-up brand of HIV self-testing kit bought by a particular character should be named HemoGenuine Diagnostics or Ora•cular.
And this—my compulsion to be sidetracked, as it seemed then—was kind of worrisome, until I found myself reading more and more books of poetry, in my spare time, at some point during college. Which is how it suddenly dawned on me: Hey, they haven’t been hobbled and misshapen pieces of fiction, what I’ve been writing all my life; they’ve been poems!
Once I knew I was writing poetry, I didn’t have to beat myself up over what had seemed like my excessive preoccupation with detail; I was free to throw myself into the sideshow—because it wasn’t a sideshow, I now understood, but the heart of the matter. That’s one of the things I so love about poems: how shiftily and how deviously they can arrive at the heart of things.
Jacobsen: Often, poetry speaks to the heart, and to the heart of things. What have been some common themes in your poetry?
Blau: Aloneness is a big one for me, and the fear of being blotted out—the Lone Human Voice vs. the Vast Obliterating Void. And then (this has always been a theme, but it seems to have become ever more present in my writing these past odd eight or so months): how this particular fear of ours, this deep human fear of going cosmically unheard—of not mattering—seems to lie at the heart of what is most ungenerous and most evil in us, too. So much of our small-mindedness and xenophobia and racism seems rooted in this fear, and in the bizarrely misguided notion that mattering is a sort of zero-sum game.
Jacobsen: Is there a poet who makes you weep? Who?
Blau: Oh, so many poets make me weep— I guess I must be a weeper. But most recently I think it was John Clare: “And e’en the dearest—that I loved the best— / Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.”
It doesn’t help matters that when he wrote these lines, Clare was in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, and that this is where he ended up living out the last twenty years of his already-tragic-enough existence, in total isolation from his family and friends—but, then again, it does help matters, in a way. Or rather, it makes matters (and the nature of my weeping) more complex.
Because there is also something astonishingly hopeful (maybe almost joy-inducing?) about the fact that this man who was born to illiterate farm laborers in turn-of-the-eighteenth-century England, who spent the good part of his life ploughing and threshing, and the rest of it in a mental hospital—that this man and I can be so close. Because that is definitely how it feels when I read him; when I read his poem “I Am!” it seems clear beyond reasonable doubt: not only do I have intimate knowledge of Clare, but Clare has intimate knowledge of me.
It’s one of those things that poems sometimes manage to do, somehow—to shatter our metaphysical solitude (or very nearly) in a way that precious else can. The poet Stevie Smith has this quote I love: “The human creature is alone in his carapace. Poetry is a strong way out. The passage out that she blasts is often in splinters, covered with blood; but she can come out softly.”
Jacobsen: What was the benefit of the philosophy undergraduate degree for your own personal philosophy, ethical stance, and worldview?
Blau: My undergrad training in and continued preoccupation with philosophy has definitely upped my generalized astonishment levels throughout these however many years; it has made me more generally astonished and more uncertain (that much is certain).
And I think maybe it has made me generally sadder, too, to be honest—but sadder in a good way, in a way that also makes me kinder and more generous, more loving, I think. Because it’s never far from my mind: how at odds the individual human perspective is with the (distant and indifferent) View from Nowhere: how little we all are: how all alone: how much we all just want to matter.
So it’s made my view of human life more ultimately tragic (or, in my lightest of moods, more ultimately absurd), I guess. But that has only made me feel more bone-deeply how much we are all of us in this thing together: Here we all are, a vast collection of tiny this’s, each of us wishing the world would make us feel as infinite and infinitely necessary as we feel to ourselves. So why not just allow each other that, if and when at all possible? It seems, given the circumstances, the least we can do.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/22
Danielle Blau’s Rhyme and Reason: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Art of Living the Big Questions is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Her collection mere eye was selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Award and published in 2013 with an introduction by poet D.A. Powell, and her poems won first place in the 2015 multi-genre Narrative 30 Below Contest. Poetry, short stories, articles, and interviews by Blau can be found in such publications as The Atlantic online, The Baffler, Black Clock, The Harvard Review, The Literary Review, Narrative Magazine, The New Yorker’s book blog, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Plume Poetry, The Saint Ann’s Review, The Wolf, the Argos Books poetry anthology Why I Am Not a Painter, and Plume Anthology of Poetry. A graduate of Brown University with an honors degree in philosophy, and of NYU with an MFA in poetry, she curates and hosts the monthly Gavagai Music + Reading Series, and teaches at Hunter College. Here are her views and story, part 1.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You graduated from Brown University with an honors degree in philosophy. Also, you earned an MFA in poetry from New York University. Obviously, a deep background in philosophical and poetic thought. Both, often, abstract or, if not, parsing the aspects of the world into distinct (and abstract) bits. Was there an early indication of gifts and talents in philosophy, poetry, or analytic and metaphor thought? Any anecdotes from within the family?
Danielle Blau: Well, I was a weird kid, for sure—that much I know. And my family likes to tell this story about how as a toddler (maybe two years old or something) I used to do this thing whenever they had the gall to address me by my given name: I’d fly into a rage and inform them, “I’m not Danielle, I’m this!” I was very insistent on this point, apparently. Which meant that for a little while there I was basically refusing to acknowledge anybody’s direct address; which, of course, made it even harder (I think it was already not easy) to get me to come out from where I was moonily standing under the kitchen table, and to put on my shoes and my other pant leg or whatever—to just comply in any way with the relevant unfolding business of daily life. I’m not sure how long the “I’m not Danielle, I’m this” era lasted exactly, but it was a definite stage in my early-childhood development.
Were these bizarre tantrums indicative of emerging gifts and talents in philosophy or abstract thought? Who knows. They seem indicative of emerging neurosis, to me, certainly. My family got a huge kick out of them, though, and my mother, in particular, puts a very generous spin (as mother’s will) on the nature of my perplexed little brain during this period. My mother is a philosophy professor, by the way, so this interpretation might say more about her than it does about me (or toddler-me): but as she saw it, here was the stage in my development when I ceased to view myself as the necessary, infinite, eternal Subject (which that all-meaningful name I’d been associated with since time immemorial—Danielle—had I guess come, in my mind, to represent); here was when it struck me that I was in fact just one more thing, one more object—one more this in a vast world of this’s. I’m not Danielle, I’m this.
Jacobsen: Was the family and educational environment supportive of these gifts and talents? Or was this something requiring a struggle to maintain and develop to the full?
Blau: I think they were a little nonplussed actually—most especially my father, who is a theoretical physicist/ abstract mathematician himself—when I didn’t go the way of abstract math, because through most of my childhood-through-adolescence that looked like the direction I’d almost certainly be heading. In my college years that shifted over (slightly), to analytic philosophy, which was also totally fine in their book—but when I announced at the end of college that I’d not be going on to get my PhD in philosophy, and would instead pursue this poetry thing, that was a bit of a shock to the family system (to my dad particularly), and to my professors, and also somewhat to myself.
The thing is, though, I’d always felt pulled in two opposite directions—between the world of abstract universals, which Bertrand Russell describes (in The Problems of Philosophy) as “unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life,” on the one hand, and the world of concrete particulars, which “is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear plan or arrangement, but [which] contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of life,” on the other.
Both worlds have equal footing in reality, it seems to me (along with Russell), but there’s also something incompatible about them. It’s a little like those famous optical illusions: the duck is just as much a part of the picture as the rabbit, but you can’t hold the two visions in your mind at one and the same time; as soon as you see the duck, the rabbit vanishes (and vice versa). “According to our temperaments, we shall prefer the contemplation of the one or of the other,” Russell says. “The one we do not prefer will probably seem to us a pale shadow of the one we prefer, and hardly worthy to be regarded as in any sense real.”
But I’ve always loved contemplating—and living in—the one world just as much as the (somewhat incompatible and yet still equally real) other. And I think I can do that, in poetry. I can see the duck and the rabbit at once.
And then I’ve also found—though the two disciplines are of course extraordinarily different—that, for me, there’s a weird similarity between the process of writing poems and the process of doing philosophy: The one process often feels like hunting down the single right rhythm or image to get at a certain vague turning in my gut, while the other feels like excavating the single hard core of an argument in a certain bog of intellectual queasiness. And these two feelings of mine (which, despite my odd choice of analogies just now, are not at all gastrointestinal) do have a fair bit in common, it turns out.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/19
Aislinn Hunter worked at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in the Creative Writing Department at the time, not sure where now or if the same, but this was interesting as I do not do a lot of creative writing. Here is part 2.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Most recently, you have worked on your PhD at the University of Edinburgh. What is the basis of it?
Hunter: I’m looking at resonance and beloved objects in Victorian culture, and asking why certain objects appear again and again in Victorian writers’ museum collections. It’s ‘thing theory’ so to speak (I’m asserting that certain ‘things’ are more fit for the task of acting as remembrancers than others) with a narrative through-line in that I am also looking at how, in life-writing and literature, we tend to describe the way an object presences the absent beloved for us. It’s quite a fascinating topic and intersects with some of the themes in my new novel.
Jacobsen: Since you began in writing, what do you consider the controversial books or poems? Why do you consider them controversial?
Hunter: I had to think a lot about this question because I don’t think I’m considered controversial at all (in relation to my work in the Canadian literary landscape). I am quite an earnest writer, a meliorist, and that effects, I suppose, how much I’m willing to discombobulate or challenge the reader. That said I think that there’s a slightly controversial position hovering thematically under a lot of my work (academic and literary) – ideas around how we humans presume too much agency for ourselves when things and events are actively shaping us all the time. I’m also interested in extended mind theory and in how we cognize the world through limiting ontologies (i.e. the depth ontology in Western culture where we forefront the concept of the ‘inner being’). The most deliberately provocative work I’ve done has been in the essay form. I wrote a piece on why writers shouldn’t do reviews for The Quill and Quire (an unpopular position) and a piece on the impossibility of competition amongst poets for Arc Magazine.
Jacobsen: How do you describe your philosophical understanding of the art of Creative Writing?
Hunter: I once said to a second-year creative writing class at The University of Victoria that “to be a writer one needs to procure wisdom, knowledge or wonder.” I said it wanting to be challenged but no one so much as raised an eyebrow or a hand.
Jacobsen: How has it changed?
Hunter: Well, given that I sort of believed what I said to that class a decade ago (though I remain open to revision) I’d have to say that my understanding of what is required of a writer or ‘writing’ hasn’t changed: I believe you need something of use to say, or an ability to create a sense of wonder in another, and craft in order to do so in a way that locates and dislocates the reader simultaneously, adds to what they had when they entered into the conversation with your work. But the literary landscape has changed significantly in the last few years, in part because what’s valued drives the market. Information is highly valued now (the kind of ‘information’ that’s arguably different from wisdom or knowledge) as is escapism, and so there’s a commerce in that; digestibility matters too, and that means that what gets written and what sells, what is ‘successful’ changes. I still tend to differentiate between classes of literature which is probably an old-fashioned thing to do in the age of the blog-turned-film-turned-novel.
Jacobsen: What advice do you have for undergraduate and graduate students in Creative Writing?
Hunter: Fail, fail better. Take risks. Remember that rejection makes you stronger.
Jacobsen: Whom do you consider your biggest influences? Could you recommend any seminal or important books/poems by them?
Hunter: I think the first time I felt as a reader that I was in the hands of a master writer was reading the Irish writer Dermot Healy. He’s widely considered a writer’s writer because you can marvel at his craft even as you’re set adrift in his narrative or poetic worlds. I especially love A Goat’s Song which is a novel and What The Hammer (poems) but all of his work has taught me something, and he innovates every time when a lot of writers would be content to repeat their successes. Anne Carson, Jan Zwicky and Carolyn Forché (all poets) make me think ‘why bother’ – they’ve already said so much so perfectly – but they also inspire me to keep at it. Alice Munro inspires me on numerous levels. It’s not that I want to write like her but I am in awe of her craft and her tenacity. She makes me aspire to be a better writer, to try to be great at it.
Jacobsen: What poem has most influenced you?
Hunter: TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. I don’t actually have an academic’s handling of it, but it sends me off in a new direction with every reading and I think his thinking about time in it is perfectly complex: ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past…’. It’s directly influenced a lot of my work.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/21
Aislinn Hunter worked at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in the Creative Writing Department at the time, not sure where now or if the same, but this was interesting as I do not do a lot of creative writing. Here is part 1.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What positions have you held? What position do you currently hold?
Aislinn Hunter: I am currently a faculty member in the Creative Writing department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, but I tend to teach part-time (in one semester) so that I can write more than four months a year. This has allowed me to take on writer-in-residence positions at other universities (Memorial University in St. John’s Newfoundland, Lancaster University in England, and Macquarie University in Australia) and to do freelance or contract work that interests me. It’s also afforded me time to undertake a PhD. Before coming to Kwantlen I taught creative writing as a sessional instructor at The University of Victoria and before that I worked on a contract-basis as a broadcaster and producer at CBC Radio and as a researcher at the National Film Board of Canada.
Jacobsen: In brief, how was your youth? How did you come to this point in your academics?
Hunter: My family was above middle-class economically but I didn’t grow up in what I’d now call a ‘culturally rich’ environment. (My friend’s parents owned an art gallery and they used to wake their kids up by blaring classical music – I remember feeling completely envious of their arty world.) My mom, who was a nurse, took a few university classes in psychology and sociology when I was growing up and her excitement and what she brought home from those classes helped cultivate my enthusiasm for learning. When I was old enough to express my leanings she enrolled me in dance classes and supported my interest in theatre. I was an inconsistent high school student (A’s in the arts, D’s in maths and sciences) but an amazing day-dreamer. At sixteen I dropped out of high school (where I was miserable) and at seventeen I moved on my own to Dublin, Ireland and got a job in a pub. A few crucial years followed: in them I had the freedom to discover what excited me – for example, I remember being obsessed with the material residue of the past which seemed to be everywhere in Ireland. At twenty-one I was accepted at the University of Victoria as a ‘mature’ student and I fell in love with art history and creative writing. In second year I unexpectedly received a small bursary, the Patti Barker Award for Writing, and it was a life-changing moment – I’d never been recognized for excellence before. I think that award gave me a new way to identify who I was and what I could do. An MFA in Creative Writing followed and then three book publications and then an MSc in Writing and Cultural Politics, and now I’m almost through my PhD in English Literature at Edinburgh. I’ve received a lot of encouragement in the form of academic awards along the way and I’ve worked hard. Still I think any success I’ve had has a lot to do with that old adage: do what you love and the rest will follow.
Jacobsen: How did you gain interest in Creative Writing? Where did you acquire your education?
Hunter: I was involved in theatre until I was 18 or so and had always been a bit of a scribbler, but I didn’t formally arrive at writing until I took an introductory creative writing class at The University of Victoria when I was twenty-one. That year Patrick Lane walked into the classroom, opened a book, read a poem by Gwendolyn MacEwan and made me, in one fell swoop, want to be a poet; made me want to know something the way a poet knows it, and to be able to say that back to others in the same way that MacEwan did. Patrick was around fifty then and a Governor General Award-winning poet with, I believe, a high school education. Still, in one year he taught me more than any other writer or professor about writing and about what it might mean to be a writer in the world. My soon-to-be-husband was like that too: a kind of Renaissance man with no formal post-secondary education, but incredibly, incredibly intelligent. He taught me, mostly by example, how to be a critical thinker. Any success I’ve had in my formal education (an MFA at The University of British Columbia and an MSc at The University of Edinburgh) owes something to these two men and the wonderful mentors inside and outside academia who have followed them.
Jacobsen: You have written five books. What form has your creative expression taken over time?
Hunter: I work in a variety of genres so generally the topic or the material dictates the form – something will generally ‘feel’ like content for a poem or for an essay or fodder for something more involved like a novel. I am obsessed by the past (as both a construct and as a site of historical events) and by how we engage with it (and it with us) and so that is always at the centre of my creative, and I suppose, my academic work.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/21
Dr. Carla MacLean is a faculty member at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. We discuss academics, education, research, unrestricted freedom, biggest influences, psychology, and other topics.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What positions have you held in Academe? What position do you currently hold?
Dr. Carla MacLean: I am currently a faculty member at Kwantlen Polytechnic Universtiy (KPU). My past positions include typical graduate student work like research and teaching assistantships and also lecturer positions at both the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University. My position immediately prior to starting at KPU was as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada post-doctoral research fellow at Simon Fraser University.
Jacobsen: How did you come to this point in your academics?
MacLean: I arrived at this point in my career by serendipity. It would have been convenient if I always knew what I wanted to do and I simply executed my plan – that is not how my career evolved. Rather, I followed my interests, kept an open mind, and talked with people (all sorts). That process gave me a realistic understanding of what different career paths looked like and it also opened doors for me. My good luck led me to my career as a psychology faculty member.
Jacobsen: How did you gain interest in psychology? Where did you acquire your education?
MacLean: I asked a lot of “whys’ and “hows” growing up and being an inherently social person it was very natural for me to apply that curiosity to people. Although I pursued a number of interests in my undergraduate schooling, at a certain point psychology felt more right than the other subjects I was studying. Once I selected psychology I never looked back.
My university education began at the University of Victoria, then to Saint Mary’s University in Halifax to acquire a MSc. in Industrial/Organizational psychology, and then back to the University of Victoria for my Ph.D. in experimental psychology. My education was not as continuous as my brief description above would suggest. I took opportunities during these years to work, travel and ultimately cultivate experiences and a sense of self outside of the institutions I was studying in.
Jacobsen: What kinds of research have you conducted up to the present? If you currently conduct research, what form does it take?
MacLean: I enjoy research. My past and present research merges the areas of forensic and occupational health psychology. Although my interests are diverse, the core of my research pursuits is the understanding of how: (i) people assess one another and (ii) we might reduce bias and/or maintain accuracy in people’s assessments of situations, information, and individuals. I typically pursue these core interests in the applied areas of eyewitness memory and investigator decision making to an adverse event (industrial incident or forensic).
Historically my research on investigator decision making has explored ways to minimize confirmation bias in industrial investigation. People who investigate industrial events are typically foremen, supervisors or health and safety professionals of the organization in which the accident occurred. The contextual knowledge that comes with familiarity with the work environment can result in biased decision making as investigators may seek information that supports their preconceived notions. The eyewitness to an industrial or criminal event is equally as important a member of the investigative dyad as the investigator. Hundreds of studies tell us that eyewitness memory is fragile, malleable, and susceptible to forgetting, even in optimal conditions. I study factors that may lead to inaccurate witness recall post-event and/or factors that can help maintain the quality and quantity of a witness’s information. In collaboration with others, I have researched: the effects of witness fatigue and misinformation, access to memory of a central instance of a repeated event, post-event information on investigator and witness identification evaluations, and psychologically-based incident report forms.
Jacobsen: Since you began studying psychology, what do you consider the controversial topics? How do you examine the controversial topics?
MacLean: There are many areas of controversy in psychology but the areas that directly relate to my research are: how we as researchers try to ensure we are drawing reliable and valid findings from our studies, the role of personal responsibility (i.e., human error) in event causation, and the influence of post-event suggestions on memory (my co-contributor to this In-sight issue, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, is likely a better candidate to tackle the implications of this last topic).
To address the first issue in the above list, because I am aware of the possibility of spurious results I take small steps to try to minimize error in my reporting of results, e.g., replicate when I can, use large sample sizes when possible, show restraint when talking about the implications of my findings. The other controversial area that I mention above is the role of personal responsibility in event causation. People’s views regarding human error can fall on a continuum from “the event was caused by a rogue employee who made an inappropriate decision” all the way to “there is no such thing as human error, all inappropriate worker action is a result of latent failures within the system.” A great deal of time has been spent discussing the most productive viewpoint to enhance safety. This controversy touches my research because the view of human behaviour taken by the investigating officer/organization may have implications regarding how information is sought and interpreted during an investigation, as well as, what the organization will do with the investigative findings.
Last, one area that I do not study but I follow closely is deception detection. This is a fascinating area that has evolved rapidly over the last few years. Researchers are pursuing different features of deception such as emotion and cognitive load to try and generate effective tools to enhance detection e.g., asking for the narrative in reverse order, asking about unanticipated features of the event, the strategic use of evidence or the emotion based microexpression research. This is a fun area of study that is always interesting to read about.
Jacobsen: If you had unlimited funding and unrestricted freedom, what would you enjoy researching?
MacLean: Well if there was really no constraints (and we could ensure no consequences for the people participating) I would move my research into a more externally valid framework. That is, I would expose people to high stakes situations and manipulate their physiological and psychological state to see how these factors affect their recall and decision making. It is hard to find research done in high resolution environments but a fairly recent collaboration of note is Loftus’s and Morgan III who used military recruits in survival school as their participants.
Jacobsen: For students looking for fame, fortune, and/or utility (personal and/or social), what advice do you have for undergraduate and graduate students in Psychology?
MacLean: I am hesitant to answer this question as I have neither fame nor fortune and my utility is likely up for debate (just kidding). My personal experience has taught me a few general principles that worked well for me: first, do your homework so you have a good understanding of the scope of what it is you are considering, second, talk with people and find out the pros and cons of any given situation/position, third, be open to feedback – it is rarely intended to insult rather it is usually offered as a means to help you grow, and last, get hands on experience when you can. If you have a career in mind, talk to people who hire for that job and find out exactly what they require as this will enable you to target your education and experiences more effectively.
Jacobsen: Whom do you consider your biggest influences? Could you recommend any seminal or important books/articles by them?
MacLean: The people who influenced me the most were the people I worked directly with during my graduate training, Dr.’s Elizabeth Brimacombe, Stephen Lindsay, Don Read, and Veronica Stinson. Each one of these academics modeled a unique approach to study, research, and networking and from each relationship I took valuable lessons. On a purely scholarly note I would say that the most influential author for me over the years has been Daniel Kahneman. His work encouraged me to think in depth about how we synthesize information and this ultimately helped me script my dissertation research. I hear Kahneman’s recent book, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” is very enjoyable and accessible reading (which I look forward to getting to when my busy first year of teaching is behind me!). The other authors I watch with interest tend to be more applied researchers, to name just a few, Elizabeth Loftus, Saul Kassin, Christian Meissner, Dan Ariely, Itiel Dror, Garry Wells, and Aldert Vrij.
Jacobsen: You may consider many areas of Psychology important for academics and non-academics. Even so, whether one or many points, what do you consider the most important point(s) of Psychology as a discipline?
MacLean: Humans are a marvel – we habituate but then adapt with lightning speed. We are frugal with our allocation of resources yet act with close to optimal performance with little (or no) executive effort. In psychology we recognize that the complex nature of people cannot be studied using only one perspective, we use a biopsychosocial approach and this is our strength. This multifaceted approach not only broadens our understanding of human behaviour from within psychology but facilitates collaboration with researchers from other disciplines (e.g., medicine, cultural anthropology). Being open to fresh perspectives and approaches may ultimately provide us with new and exciting understandings into human behaviour.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/21
Professor Elizabeth Loftus discusses education, growing up, Do Justice and Let the Sky Fall, graduate school training, experimental and mathematical psychology, and a host of other topics. Here is part 3.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have earned numerous awards, but the AAAS award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility seems most relevant to me. In your acceptance speech you state, “We live in perilous times for science…and in order for scientists to preserve their freedoms they have a responsibility…to bring our science to the public arena and to speak out as forcefully as we can against even the most cherished beliefs that reflect unsubstantiated myths.” I quote this in an interview with Dr. Daniel Bernstein and ask, “How important do you see criticizing ‘unsubstantiated myths’ in ‘perilous times’ for Science?” He says, “I think that this is excellent advice. Science has a responsibility to “give back” to the communities and cultures that invest in it. Scientists can and should correct myths whenever the opportunity arises.” Can you expand on this idea of scientific responsibility to society?
Professor Elizabeth Loftus: You know, I think he put it beautifully. Not everyone has to do everything, I think collectively we can all contribute to giving back to the society that supported the scientific work. Some people are going to be good at getting the experiments done and published in journals, and they’re uncomfortable speaking to the press or speaking in the context of legal cases. Other people are comfortable doing that. Some people are not comfortable writing for lay audiences. They only want to write for concise scientific journals. Collectively, I think there is something of a responsibility in an ideal world for people to want to give back.
Jacobsen: Whom do you consider your biggest influences? Could you recommend any seminal or important books/articles by them?
Loftus: Back in Graduate School, I had a professor that I did some research with on semantic memory that really taught me how to be an experimental psychologist. To be able to design a study with him, conduct and gather the data, analyze the data, and write up a publication. That was a great benefit for me. That collaboration was with a social psychologist named Jonathan Freedman. That was an important influence in terms of turning me into an independent experimental psychologist. I would say, in terms of people that I have never met whose work has probably set the stage for the tradition in which I work, Bartlett from England who was famous for his work on reconstructive memory. I see my work in the tradition of reconstructive memory. He was an important forefather.
If people want to read about memory distortion, I think they may want to read something more recent. I have a book by Brainerd and Reyna. It is rather advanced, but it is called The Science of False Memory. It is sort of everything you would ever want to know about false memories up to 2005 or whenever that book was published. For your readers, if they wanted something easy and fun for reading, I would recommend The Memory Doctor in Slate.com written by Will Saletan. That will give you a small slice of memory research. If you want more, you could probably read The Science of False Memory.
Jacobsen: What do you consider the most important point(s) of Psychology as a discipline? In particular, what do you consider the most important point about cognitive psychology?
Loftus: I do not think I want to go there. (Laughs) There are just too many. I have just been focused on the study of memory. I think the study memory distortion is an important area because of its practical and theoretical implications. I think some recent work in a completely different area has to do with learning and memory, in a classroom or an educational setting. The work that shows that if you test people, they learn better than if you just ask them to study again. All these findings on testing effects are interesting and we will see more work in that area.
This of course has many people interested in memory and neuroscience, and brain imaging. It is not something I do, unless I am collaborating with someone who does, but we will see where that will lead. It is certainly the subject of a lot of current research.
Jacobsen: Three years ago, I informally asked Dr. Anthony Greenwald, “Where do you see Psychology going?” He said the frontier lies in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, a first generation of researchers, like the first round of soldiers marching out of the trenches, will fall – making all the necessary mistakes. After that point, the next generation of researchers will have learned from those mistakes to make deep progress. In the same stream of thought three years later, “Where do you see Psychology going?”
Loftus: That is interesting because he has been quite successful with the implicit association test and all kinds of ramifications in uses of it, but he does not seem to be going in a neuroscience direction. However, he is a smart guy, whose speculation I would invest in.
People are enamored with this neuroimaging stuff. I do see a lot more research. I was about to say progress, but I do not know yet. The neuroscience of cognitive psychology, there has been a lot of discussion in our interdisciplinary teams, people seem to be enamored with the idea that if you bring together people from all different types of perspectives and fields, then you can come together to tackle problems. Will we see more of that – more funding of those type of enterprises? More research, more publications, involving these large interdisciplinary teams. It is a speculation, but it is an educated one given how enamored people seem to be of this notion.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/20
Professor Elizabeth Loftus discusses education, growing up, Do Justice and Let the Sky Fall, graduate school training, experimental and mathematical psychology, and a host of other topics. Here is part 2.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Subsequently, you took the role of expert witness in a number of important, controversial, and intriguing court cases. What are some of the court cases? Can you describe some of the more memorable moments with individuals involved in them?
Professor Elizabeth Loftus: Many of these cases involve people no one has ever heard of, of course, I have worked, and consulted, on some famous cases involving people like Michael Jackson, Martha Stewart, and Scooter Libby – a politician in the United States. I think some of the more memorable ones are people looked at accused of crimes convicted based on somebody’s memory when these people are either definitely innocent or probably innocent.
I think a memorable one was a man named Steve Titus, who was charged with rape based on the testimony of an eyewitness who somehow in the course of being interviewed went from not being particularly certain to being completely certain it was Steve. Steve Titus was convicted. Ultimately, he was able to get a journalist to show that another man committed these crimes. So Titus was freed, but he was very, very bitter. He had lost his job. He lost his fiancé. He lost his reputation. He lost his savings. He filed a lawsuit against the police and just as that case was about to go to trial, he woke up one morning and doubled over in pain and died of a stress related heart attack at 35. That is one of the saddest cases I have ever encountered.
If you want to write about one up in Canada, you might write about the teacher Michael Kliman, who, based on claims of repressed memory, had to go through three trials up in Vancouver before he was freed. I would bet my house the man is innocent.
Jacobsen: What is your most recent research?
Loftus: I started a line of work with Dan Bernstein and a couple of Graduate Students. We were looking at the repercussions of having a false memory. If I plant a false memory in your mind, does it have consequences? Does it affect your later thoughts, or intentions, or behaviours?
We started by trying to convince people they had gotten sick as children by eating certain foods. We succeeded in persuading people that they got sick eating hard-boiled eggs and dill pickles, and we did it with a fattening food, namely strawberry ice cream. Then, we showed that it could effect, not only what people thought they wanted to eat when they went to a party, but what they actually ate when you put food in front of them. Bernstein has gone on with some other collaborators to do further experiments on how it effects eating behavior. Most recently we have published a paper with collaborators showing these kind of suggestive manipulations work not just with food, but also can work with alcohol. We can plant false memories that you got sick drinking vodka and you don’t want to drink vodka as much.
That’s one line of continuing work.
For instance, in Asparagus: A Love Story, we described a study that showed that you could plant not only a getting sick memory that people then want to avoid. You could also plant a warm, fuzzy memory for a healthy food, and then people want to eat it more.
Jacobsen: If you had unlimited funding and unrestricted freedom, what research would you conduct?
Loftus: I am not sure if I want to conduct it, but with unlimited funding and no worry about ethics, ha! You could maybe do the kind of experiment to explore whether massive repression really occurs or it doesn’t. Where you could be able to expose people to prolonged brutalization, and really get a chance to study them thoroughly, but ethical concerns would prohibit that kind of study.
Jacobsen: Currently, you are on the executive council for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal – or CSI for short. What role do you play on the executive council? What is the core message of CSI?
Loftus: I am a fellow of the CSI. Periodically, I give talks at various conferences that the organization holds or I might write something for the Skeptical Inquirer. But I am so busy with so many organizations that I don’t play a large role in the executive council. I mean, other people may have been providing more input to what to bring to the conferences or activities that the organization might engage in, but I am on so many committees and boards that I am spread a little too thin to spend too much time at one.
It’s an organization of people that are pro-science, against pseudo-science and flimflam. Trying to expose efforts to manipulate people into believing or thinking things that might be dangerous, harmful, or untrue.
Jacobsen: Since you began studying psychology, what do you consider the controversial topics in Psychology? How do you examine the controversial topics in Psychology?
Loftus: That is a big question, and I do not get into all of them. I’ve got my own little area in memory and memory distortion. I know a lot about the science of memory and lay beliefs about memory. I sort of tend to focus my efforts there. There are many controversial areas that one could look at, but you are going to have to find a different expert to talk about some of the other ones. A related one to the one I care about is using facilitated communication with autistic kids. There is controversy about vaccinations. I don’t think it is particularly controversial. There is controversy about the human contribution to climate change. I don’t think there is much of a controversy. You can find a few people out of the mainstream.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/20
Professor Elizabeth Loftus discusses education, growing up, Do Justice and Let the Sky Fall, graduate school training, experimental and mathematical psychology, and a host of other topics. Here is part 1.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your current position at the University of California, Irvine?
Professor Elizabeth Loftus: My title is Distinguished Professor. My main appointments are in a couple departments. One is Psychology and Social Behaviour. Another is Criminology, Law, and Society. Then, I am also Professor of Law.
Jacobsen: Where did you grow up? What was youth like for you? What effect do you feel this had on your career path?
Loftus: I grew up in Los Angeles, not very far from UCLA.
I would say it was peppered with tragedies. My mother drowned when I was 14 and my brothers were 12 and 9. A few years later, our house burned down, and we had to live somewhere else while it was being rebuilt. Through all of this, I managed to keep studying and got into college.
Well, I feel a little like it contributed to my workaholic ways. You know, just keep working, working, working, and feeling a sense of accomplishment. Then, distract yourself from painful thoughts. Since I do not do psychotherapy that is just an armchair self-analysis.
Jacobsen: Where did you acquire your education?
Loftus: I went to college at UCLA. UCLA was close by to where I lived. UCLA was probably not the greatest idea since I lived about a half-mile away, and I ended up living at home. I graduated from UCLA and then ended up going to Stanford for Graduate School. I got my PhD in Psychology from Stanford.
Jacobsen: What was your original dream?
Loftus: At some point because I had a double major in mathematics and psychology, I thought I might teach mathematics. Something like high school or junior high, but that is not what I ended up doing. I don’t know if I had a dream. I just kept on with school, until I had a PhD and became an assistant professor.
Jacobsen: How did you gain an interest in Mathematical Psychology? In Chapter 3 of Do Justice and Let the Sky Fall, Dr. Geoffrey Loftus recounts your hemming skirts and keeping familial correspondence up to date during your Graduate School training at Stanford. When did you realize Experimental Psychology was the new dream for you?
Loftus: I did that because I was bored with mathematical psychology. I later happily discovered memory, ha! It’s what ultimately I would get a little more passionate about. I ended up going to Graduate School in mathematical psychology because I thought that combining my two majors in what would be a perfect field. I was not in the end taken by it. I did other things while listening to, in one ear, the talks, or presentations that were being made.
Jacobsen: You have published 22 books and over 500 articles. You continue to publish new research on an ongoing basis. What have been your major areas of research?
Loftus: Well, most generally it is human memory. More specifically, I studied eyewitness testimony for a long time. I studied people’s memory for crime and accidents, and other complex events that tend to be legally relevant. Even within that area, I studied how memories can change as a result of new information that we are exposed to. I did hundreds of experiments studying everything you would want to know about memory distortion in that kind of context. In the 1990s, when I started to get interested in what would be called ‘The Memory Wars,’ the debate about psychotherapy and whether some subset of psychotherapists were using highly suggestive procedures that were getting patients to create entirely false memories. I, with my collaborators and students, established a paradigm for studying the development of what we would later call, in a paper with Bernstein, Rich False Memories. Not just changing a detail here and there in memory, but actually applying people with suggestions so that they would develop these complete false memories.
Jacobsen: Your research did not have immediate acceptance among professionals. In fact, it attracted much anger, which spilt over to you. In particular, what research set the controversy? What became the controversy? How did this come to a resolution?
Loftus: I would take us back to around 1990, when I was confronted with an opportunity to consult on my very first repressed memory case. A case where someone was claiming repressed memory. It was a murder case where a man named George Franklin was being prosecuted for murdering a little girl twenty years earlier. The only evidence against him was the claim of his adult daughter that she had witnessed the murder when she was 8 years old and had repressed the memory for 20 years, and now the memory was back. It was in the context of that case that I began to scour the literature of what was the evidence for this kind of repression. She was claiming that she had repressed her memory of the murder. That she had repressed her memory for years of sexual abuse that the father had supposedly perpetrated on her. I could really find no credible scientific support for the idea that memory works this way. That you could take years of brutalization, banish it into the unconscious, and be completely unaware of it by some process that is beyond ordinary forgetting – and that you could remember these experiences completely accurately later on. And so I began to ask, “Well, if these memories aren’t real, (If there is no credible support for the idea that memory works this way) where could these memories have come from?” I began to dig through literature, and examples, ultimately court cases, and would discover that some of these memories were being created by highly suggestive psychotherapy procedures. When I began to speak out about this issue, then people began to get mad, and for those who got mad, this was something for whom repression was one of their treasured beliefs. The repressed memory therapists and the patients they influenced.
Early in my interest in memory distortion, I was thinking about legal cases. In fact, my earliest experiments were designed to map onto what happens when a witness sees an accident or a crime, and then is later exposed to some newer information about that experience, e.g. talks to other witnesses, is questioned in a leading or suggestive fashion, or sees media coverage about an event, my research modeled after that real-world situation.
Some things have happened in the law. In the eyewitness cases, because of many, many psychologists’ work, some jurisdictions have revised the way they handle eyewitness evidence in a case. Some courts have suggested that, and recognized the scientific work by devising new legal standards for handling eyewitness evidence. That’s been a change, and a fairly recent change. And then in the repressed memory cases, I think some jurisdictions have recognized now that this whole claim of massive repression is highly controversial at best. Some courts have ruled that it is too controversial for the cases to go forward. You know, one day we may prove that repression exists. It has not been proven. It is my opinion that we should not be throwing people in prison based on an unproven theory.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/20
Louise Meilleur is a friend and colleague, who works with me in the Lifespan Cognition Lab. Here we talk about undergraduate education, work prior to psychology, work with Dr. Bernstein, and controversial research topics.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you gain interest in psychology? To date, where have you acquired education?
Louise Meilleur: I was first interested in Psychology in high school, but I knew that I wasn’t interested in counselling as a profession and, like many, I didn’t really realize that Psychology involved much more than counselling. In 2004, I looked for a career change. I decided to attend an information session on the Bachelor of Applied Arts in Psychology and the whole world of applied and experimental psychology was opened up to me. I could see how I could pursue Psychology, but also leverage my experience working with technology. Before that, I felt held back by the idea of “starting from scratch”, but when I realized that I could build off of my past experiences, rather than leave them behind altogether, returning to school to pursue a BA didn’t seem quite so over whelming.
I received my Associate of Arts and my Bachelor of Applied Arts (Hons) from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. I am currently working towards a PhD at Ohio State University. I will receive my MA in Psychology in December 2012. I’m also working on a Master’s of Public Health in Health Behavior and Health Promotion which I’ll receive in May of 2013. If things continue as planned, I should be finished my PhD in May of 2015.
While I was still working I also completed a couple of programs that helped to further my telecommunications career. I received a certificate in Telecommunications Management from Vancouver Community College and a Data Network Administration certificate from Langara College.
Jacobsen: What did you pursue prior to your interest in Psychology?
Meilleur: I spent 12 years working in telecommunications. I started in a Call Center, providing bilingual (French/English) customer service for long distance customers. From there, I started night school to move ahead and ended in management positions at companies like Bell Canada, Telus, and Best Buy Canada.
Jacobsen: What kind of research did you pursue as an undergraduate student?
Meilleur: I worked in Dr. Bernstein’s Lab for two and a half years studying various aspects of social cognition. The B.A.A. at Kwantlen allows you to experience a lot of hands-on research. I was able to pursue projects in many different domains, which helped to refine my interest and led to my honours project – studying the effects of perceptual fluency on risk perceptions. More broadly, I became interested in how our judgments and decisions, and subsequently our behavior, are influenced not just by pertinent information, but erroneous sources that “rationally” should not affect our behavior.
Jacobsen: What have you specialized in at Ohio State University? What do you currently research as a graduate student?
Meilleur: Officially, my specialty is Quantitative Psychology but my focus is in Judgment and Decision Making, which is grouped together with Quantitative Psychology at Ohio State University. What that means is that my required coursework is mostly in stats, while I pursue my own interests/research. I’m in the CAIDe (Cognitive and Affective Influences on Decision making) working with Ellen Peters. My main interest is in Medical Decision Making and I have been studying how we can manipulate attention to improve health decisions. One of the ways to measure attention is through eye movements. Therefore, much of my data is collected using eye tracking equipment.
Jacobsen: Since you began studying psychology, what controversial topics seem pertinent to you? How do you examine the controversial topic?
Meilleur: To be honest, I am not terribly concerned with controversial topics. I am much more interested in the application of psychology to improve people’s lives. For example, how can we change the way that information is presented so that it actually changes behavior? In my area of research, the biggest controversy that I perceive is the ability to use what we learn to impact people’s behavior, specifically their health related behaviors. The question is, “where do you draw the line between libertarianism (free choice) and paternalism (influencing people to do what you think is best)?” We want to construct an environment that leads to people making the best choice, but who decides what is the best option? As a scientist, my interest is predominantly in how I can affect behavior, but I also need to consider the ethics of using my knowledge in a way that might impede free choice, as well as consider any unintended consequences of any intervention I might construct.
Jacobsen: How would you describe your philosophical framework for understanding psychology?
Meilleur: In general, I am a pragmatist. I am open to using any reliable methodology that allows me to answer the questions I want to ask. I ask questions with a pragmatic nature. In that, they have a clear application with the intention to improve or “fix” a real life problem.
Jacobsen: If you had sufficient funding for any topic of research, what would you like to research?
Meilleur: I am in the enviable position to have the necessary resources available to conduct the research most interesting to me at this time. Later on in my career, I hope to apply my training in psychology and public health to conduct research in order to develop public policies and programs that can successfully improve people’s health. We focus so much of our attention on disease, but the major causes of death and disease are due to health related behaviors (e.g., tobacco use, over eating). I would like to continue to research ways to help people improve their negative and positive health behaviors.
Jacobsen: What advice do you have for undergraduate students intending to pursue graduate-level studies and research?
Meilleur: The most important thing is start early. Get involved in as much research as possible, go to as many conferences, and if possible present. Start studying for the GRE early; it took me at least 100 hours of preparation. There are dozens of reference books that will tell you what you need to do to get into grad school. Read them because they are mostly correct. The thing that cannot be stressed enough is the importance of selecting an advisor. This is true in undergrad for your honours thesis, but it is critical for graduate school. In a sense, I was lucky when applying to graduate schools; I did not have a clear understanding which schools were good, bad, or average – particularly the American schools. Specifically, I focused on finding people I was interested in working with rather than schools I wanted to go to. I contacted all of the people I wanted to work with via email, phone, and in person where possible. When it comes to the selection process, as much as they are interviewing you, you need to interview them to make sure you can work with them for the next five plus years. Regardless of how great a program, student, or advisor is, if the fit is not right, everyone loses. Even at Ohio State, where the competition to get in is fierce and the faculty are amazing, I have peers who are stagnating, partially due to mismatch with their advisor and, as a result, a number of them have left the program. I am lucky in that my advisor and I have very similar interests and we work well together. It has made all the difference in my research productivity.
One final note, if you do choose to go to grad school you need to prepare yourself for a big change in perspective. Overnight you go from being one of the top students to being decidedly average, and if you don’t feel stupid on a regular basis, you’re probably doing something wrong and aren’t being challenged sufficiently. It gets better, but there will always be someone who is smarter, progressing faster and publishing more than you. You’ll need to make sure you don’t compare yourself to others and focus on challenging yourself based on your own goals (and those of your advisor).
Jacobsen: What individuals have influenced your thinking the most?
Meilleur: Except for the obvious choices of my advisors, I think I am too green to name someone who has influenced my thinking most with respect to psychology. I will have to get back to you on that. I will say that I have been enormously influenced by various mentors and teachers throughout my life. When I think of the trajectory my life has taken, and try to pinpoint a single thing that has enabled me to pursue my goals, what is most salient to me is the impact that my second grade learning assistance teacher had while helping me to improve my reading skills. I
was told, in no uncertain terms, that I was not allowed to use the phrase “I can’t” ever again, followed by frequent reinforcement over the span of a year. Looking back through the lens of my psychology training, I am certain that banning “I can’t” at such an early age had a much greater effect than simply changing my vocabulary. Asking the question “how do I,” rather than immediately saying “I can’t,” led to small successes that grew over time and helped me to develop a strong sense of personal agency, that has impacted every aspect of my life including how I approach my education and research.
Jacobsen: If you have any books to recommend for people, what would you recommend as seminal/influential/required reading?
Meilleur: For a general overview of judgment and decision-making, the Blackwell handbook is quite good. It is a collection of chapters written by leading experts in various topics within judgment and decision-making.
The Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making. Eds Derek Koehler & Nigel Harvey, 2007
Heuristics and Biases is another collection of papers by various researchers, but it focuses on intuitive judgments, which is to particular interest to me.
Heuristics and Biases, The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. Eds Gilovich, Griffin & Kahneman, 2002
A couple of more commercial books that deal with intuitive decision making that I really enjoyed:
Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. Malcolm Gladwell 2007
Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness. Thayler & Sunstein 2009
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/20
Dr. Kevin Hamilton works at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Here we talk about research and education.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What positions have you held with Kwantlen? What work have you performed here?
Dr. Kevin Hamilton: I have been a faculty member with Kwantlen’s department of Psychology for approximately 15 years, teaching and conducting applied research in an area known as Human Factor’s Psychology. During that time I have been involved in a number of department and institutional initiatives.
A little over 10 years ago I headed a committee responsible for developing the first applied academic degree, namely the Bachelor of Applied Arts in Psychology (BAA). This degree focused on workplace psychology, community service, research methods, and data analysis. The BAA was designed to provide employability skills including those necessary for further graduate training. Later I headed a committee that initiated Kwantlen’s Office of Research and Scholarship and our current Institutional Research Ethics Board (IRB). From 2008 to 2011, I served as Department Chair for Psychology, during which time our first formal program review and strategic plan were completed. Currently I serve on Kwantlen’s IRB and on the Senate Task Force for Academic Rank and Advancement.
Jacobsen: How did you gain interest in Psychology? Where have you acquired your education?
Hamilton: I became seriously interested in Psychology while completing a Masters Degree in Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. Prior to studying at York I completed an Honours BA at the university of Prince Edward Island with a double major in Philosophy and English. In secondary school I was enrolled in a pre-engineering program.
At York, I studied with Dr. Daniel Cappon, a physician who investigated human behaviour and health in the context of the built environment, architectural design and building interiors. While completing this degree, I was a teaching assistant for a professor in the Psychology department, who conducted Human Factors research, and was later introduced to Dr. Barry Fowler a Psychologist who worked in this same area with the School of Exercise and Sports Science. Dr. Fowler specialized in extreme environments and human performance. My doctoral work with him examined cognitive impairment associated with deep sea diving – inert nitrogen narcosis. My comprehensive area focused on biological rhythms and shiftwork. As part of my doctoral studies, I was employed as a research assistant and helped manage some of Dr. Fowler’s research contracts with Defence Canada.
Following my Ph.D., I was awarded a Post Doctoral Research Fellowship, funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council (NSERC). In this capacity, I became further involved with Defence Canada for 2 years studying spatial disorientation effects associated with pilots training on flight simulators.
Jacobsen: Where have you gone to work prior to joining Kwantlen?
Hamilton: In 1989, following my Post Doc, I began work as a Defence Scientist at the Defence and Civil Institute of Environmental Medicine (DCIEM) in Toronto. DCIEM is a Human Factors Lab and in this position I was engaged in a number of projects concerned with the performance of military personnel in a variety of extreme and unusual operational environments. Here, I developed considerable expertise in Environmental and Human Factors Psychology.
After approximately 7 years I left Defence Canada and moved to Vancouver to take a job with Hughes Aircraft as a Human Engineer, helping to redesign Canada’s air traffic control systems. The project was called the Canadian Automated Air Traffic Control System (CATS) and focused largely on workstation and computer interface design and large scale evaluations. As CATS neared completion, I was hired by BC Research Inc. (BCRI) as a Senior Ergonomist. At BCRI I was involved with several Coast Guard and US Army projects, again focused on performance in extreme operational settings. In 1997, I moved to Kwantlen to help teach in what was to become a new Applied Psychology Program.
Jacobsen: What kinds of research have you conducted up to the present? If you currently conduct research, what form does it take?
Hamilton: In addition to the work I’ve already described, I have had a number of Honours students at Kwantlen and have supervised their theses in areas including Post Traumatic Stress in firefighters; computer interface evaluation with online learning; GPS integration in aircraft cockpits, and, most recently, hazard recognition training with coastal tree fallers – the most at risk profession in North America for accidents and fatalities. Currently I am helping WorkSafeBC looking at the use of 3D degraded imagery in hazard recognition training.
Jacobsen: Since you began studying psychology, what controversial issues seem pertinent to you?
Hamilton: Working in applied research, I have seen several instances of people’s and organization’s agendas getting intertwined with how information is collected and reported. I learned that ‘politics and science’ can frequently become intertwined. As a researcher, I firmly believe that we need to be very cautious of such influences and that we should strive to be as objective as possible, regardless of research outcomes. In my view, the best approach is to let the science speak for itself.
Jacobsen: How would you describe your philosophical framework for understanding psychology? Have your philosophical frameworks changed over time to the present?
Hamilton: I suppose I would say that I try my best to strive for a philosophical perspective that is broad, all inclusive, and as objective ‘as possible’. Human Factors research utilizes a systems approach in trying to understand the complex relationships between human beings, their behaviour, the tools they use and the environmental contexts in which they work and live. These relationships are the result of a multitude of variables interacting. Identifying relevant variables, their relative contributions to system output, and how they coexist dynamically, I believe is the key to really beginning to understand how things work. However, developing this kind of perspective is ongoing and rooted in accepting that we must continuously change how we look at things. Science in itself is but one system of comprehension, founded on assumptions which have their own logic and reality. I am intrigued when modern physicists argue that what we used to consider inarguable realities, such as time and causation, may in fact be mere mental constructs – lenses through which we view the world and ourselves in it. That James Lovelock, the reputed NASA scientist, in his mid-nineties decided we need to re-think everything and consider earth is one living organism is indicative of the value of fostering ever changing and broader perspectives. The universe and understanding what’s in it and how it works may be out of reach for mere human cognitive capacity. But the privilege of being able to contemplate such matters is a gift beyond compare. Perhaps the Taoists had it right when they said that as soon as you begin to use language to differentiate thought, real comprehension becomes impossible. In answering your last question – “have your philosophical frameworks changed over time” – absolutely – and I am excited by the prospect that they will continue to do so!
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/19
Dr. Daniel M. Bernstein works as the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Lifespan Cognition for the Psychology department of Kwantlen Polytechnic University. He is the principal investigator for the Lifespan Cognition Lab. Dr. Bernstein earned his Bachelor of Arts at the University of California, Berkeley, Master’s at Brock University, Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Washington. His research interests lie in “belief and memory; developmental metacognition; hindsight bias; mild head injury; sleep and dreams.” Dr. Daniel Bernstein is the primary investigator in the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair Lifespan Cognition Lab. Here we talk about a variety of educational, research, and psychology oriented topics. He’s been a boss, mentor, and eventually a good friend. Here is part 2.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If you had sufficient funding for any topic, what would you research?
Dr. Daniel M. Bernstein: Exactly what I am studying now: Hindsight Bias, Theory of Mind, and False Memories.
Jacobsen: Many assume scientists and social scientists to have ‘Eureka’ moments, where they discover some fundamental process about nature in an instant. Yet, the truth of research comes from the rarely heard story of the scientist or social scientist assiduously working for years in the laboratory, and finding clues to fundamental processes in nature. How do you conduct research? What do you consider your methodology for coming to new ideas, developing research hypotheses based off them, and designing experiments and required materials for said ideas?
Bernstein: I do not know. I do not think that I am very organized about it. I pursue questions that are interesting to me. Sometimes I wonder if I am interested in too many questions. Something will occur to me and I think it is a good question. I talk to colleagues, and they sometimes agree that it is a good question. Sometimes, they disagree and tell me that it is not a good question. If I think that a question is worth pursuing with an experiment or set of experiments, then I will set out to design the simplest experiment(s) to answer that question. Very few questions can be answered with a single experiment. I start with an experiment that can answer part of the question. As I delve more deeply into the question, I realize that I am signing onto years of experiments to answer the question more fully. I speak here only for myself. Many questions I choose to ask will not have ready answers, and I know that they will take years to answer. I probably choose hard questions intentionally. Who wants to answer easy questions? I find that boring. In fact, in research, I do not think I have answered fully any question I have asked. However, I am not alone. I do not think Psychology fully answers the questions it asks. Psychology is too variable. It is too multifaceted, and it is too fraught with interactions. We try to simplify things as much as possible so that we can do our experiments and talk about the nature of behavior as if we understand it. Moreover, the busiest we ever seem to get in an experiment is a 3-way interaction. Really, folks? We are studying human nature and behavior after all. Thus, it is unlikely that we will derive a satisfactory explanation from a 2-way interaction or a 3-way interaction. Our answers will probably require a 100-way interaction. We are years away from answering even the most fundamental questions regarding human behavior precisely because those answers require extremely complex interactions. Perhaps we ask hard questions in Psychology because we do not want to answer those questions quickly. We want a good set of questions that we can pursue long into the future.
Jacobsen: For students looking for fame, fortune, and/or utility (personal and/or social), what advice do you have for undergraduate and graduate students in Psychology?
Bernstein: As much as possible and widely. Do not be afraid to ask difficult questions. Do not be discouraged by people’s attempts to tell you that you are wrong. In the end, it is not so much about who is right or wrong, but about sticking to your guns and pursuing your questions, being open to criticism and feedback, valuing criticism and feedback, incorporating it into your pursuit, and adjusting your pursuit accordingly. That said, I remember reading an article some years ago in the APA Monitor, the magazine of the American Psychological Association. The person who wrote it was a long-time cognitive psychologist. He had supervised some of the most influential cognitive psychologists working today. His advice was that it is just as important to have a good question that you can pursue for a long time, but that it is also important to be able to give up if the question is intractable. If you are pursuing a question that does not seem to be yielding at all, then it is time adjust your question, potentially ditch it and find a new question that does yield.
Jacobsen: Whom do you consider your biggest intellectual influences? Could you recommend any seminal or important books by them?
Bernstein: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I took a course as an undergraduate with George Lakoff, who is a modern Whorfian and a linguist. Lakoff believes that our language and metaphor dictate the way we think rather than vice versa. This idea turns cognition on its head. It is not so much the way we think that dictates the way we speak, but the way we speak that dictates the way we think. The course was on metaphor, and the course was pivotal in shaping my interests. This course taught me to ask big questions, and to embrace controversy. In this class, we read “Metaphors We Live By”, Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Great book. Also as an undergraduate, I read Freud’s Interpretations of Dreams in my second year, when I took a directed study with my undergraduate supervisor Arnie Leiman. More than Freud, Arnie Leiman sparked my intellectual curiosity. Lehman was incredibly well read and once told me that, “When you cease to be well-informed, you become an asshole.” He was describing academia and beyond. If you want to be a responsible academic or world citizen, you should be well informed. This reminds me of Bob Dylan’s great line in a Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, “I’ll know my song well before I start singing.” Other intellectual influences? During my Ph.D., I worked with two really smart people: Vito Modigliani and Bruce Whittlesea. During my post-doctoral work, I had the great fortune of working with Elizabeth Loftus, whose “Eyewitness Testimony” profoundly shaped the way we interview witnesses and view their testimony in legal cases. In addition, during my post-doc, I worked with Geoff Loftus and Andy Meltzoff who have both had huge impacts on psychology and my intellectual development. Other great academic works: Vygotsky’s Language and Thought and Mind in Society. Works of Fiction: Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I once read or heard, but have not verified that Freud called Dostoevsky the greatest Psychologist. I think writers of fiction have a finger on the pulse of human nature and human behavior, and psychologists often overlook this fact.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/19
Dr. Daniel M. Bernstein works as the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Lifespan Cognition for the Psychology department of Kwantlen Polytechnic University. He is the principal investigator for the Lifespan Cognition Lab. Dr. Bernstein earned his Bachelor of Arts at the University of California, Berkeley, Master’s at Brock University, PhD at Simon Fraser University, and did Post-Doctoral work at the University of Washington. His research interests lie in “belief and memory; developmental metacognition; hindsight bias; mild head injury; sleep and dreams.” Dr. Daniel Bernstein is the primary investigator in the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair Lifespan Cognition Lab. Here we talk about a variety of educational, research, and psychology oriented topics. He’s been a boss, mentor, and eventually a good friend. Here is part 1.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What positions have you held at Kwantlen? What work have you performed here?
Dr. Daniel M. Bernstein: I have been an instructor of Psychology since 2005, when I began working at Kwantlen. In addition, I have sat on various departmental and university-wide committees while at Kwantlen.
Jacobsen: Where have you worked prior to Kwantlen?
Bernstein: After I graduated from Simon Fraser University with my Ph.D., I was a Postdoc from 2001 to 2004 at the University of Washington. I started working at Kwantlen in 2005, and for the first year at Kwantlen, I was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Washington,
Jacobsen: How did you gain interest in Psychology? Where did you acquire your education?
Bernstein: I was always interested in Psychology. I was the go-to person when I was young for friends’ troubles. I was always the mediator for relationships going askew because I never managed to have lasting romantic relationships of my own. When I was young, I took a real interest in the Clinical aspects of Psychology, the areas that tend to be of most interest to people. Later, I started taking an interest in the non-Clinical aspects of Psychology.
My undergraduate degree was from the University of California Berkeley. Following this, I did a Master’s degree at Brock University in Ontario. Then, I did my PhD at Simon Fraser University, and finished a Postdoc at the University of Washington. That is all of my Post-Secondary education.
Jacobsen: What kinds of research have you conducted up to the present? If you currently conduct research, what form does it take?
Bernstein: That would take a long time to answer. I will give you very broad-brush strokes. I started doing work in sleep and dreams as an undergraduate student. I continued that work as a Masters student. I did my undergraduate and master’s work on sleep and dreams. While a Masters Student, I became interested in the cognitive effects of mild traumatic head injury. I continued that work when I started my Ph.D., but that was not the subject matter of my PhD. My Ph.D. work was on memory. More specifically, I studied how people make mistakes when thinking about the past. During my post-doc, I studied cognitive biases – or how people err in their cognition. I continue to pursue this work now.
Jacobsen: Other institutions in Canada host more research-activities. Where would you like to see research move forward in Kwantlen?
Bernstein: I would like to see Kwantlen embrace a research culture without being bogged down with the treadmill mentality of chasing publications for tenure, and that is a fine balance to strike because it is hard to get people interested in research if that is not part of their job. I would like to see Kwantlen develop more of a research culture by offering and attending research talks and colloquia. Exposure to research will stimulate discussion about research. Currently, most conversations at Kwantlen center on teaching. This makes sense, after all, because Kwantlen is primarily a teaching institution.
Jacobsen: Since you began studying Psychology, what controversial topics seem pertinent to you? How do you examine the controversial topics?
Bernstein: I think the first controversial topic that I really sank my teeth into was mild traumatic brain injury, which came from my own experience of skiing into a tree while a senior in High School. I had other head knocks growing up playing sports. I was just very interested in how these experiences affect someone’s cognition over the long term. The prevailing wisdom in 1993 was that people recover almost entirely from these head knocks within a short period, typically within 3 months. I did not believe that. I also did not believe that researchers were using the right tasks to elicit long-term cognitive deficits associated with mild head injury. Therefore, I took a controversial stance and argued, along with others, that these injuries possibly never resolved completely. I thought that if you smack your head hard enough that you have to stop what you are doing because you are dizzy, disoriented, or unconscious, you will have subtle residual deficits for the rest of your life. It does not mean everybody will have these deficits after a mild head injury. Instead, it means that when compared to individuals who have not bonked their heads, those who have sustained mild head injuries, will perform worse on highly demanding cognitive tasks years after the injuries. I think the tide is changing, and more people are open to this possibility.
When I was an undergraduate student, I studied dreams too, which was controversial by its very nature. While working on my post-doc much later, I got interested in False Memory. A highly controversial topic. I worked on this topic with Elizabeth Loftus, who served as a kind of lightning rod in this controversy. Beth showed me how to navigate controversy. In addition, while doing my Postdoc, I got interested in doing Hindsight Bias and Theory of Mind. Theory of Mind is the understanding that other minds are different from one’s. The prevailing wisdom in the developmental psychological field is that by the age of four and a half or five, children develop a theory of mind. It is as if a ‘light bulb’ goes on inside the child’s head. You not only understand that other minds are different from your own but that other people can hold mistaken beliefs about the world. Once you have this mature theory of mind, it is not something that extinguishes. But the acquisition of theory of mind is regarded by many as all or none – you have it or you do not. Very few things in psychology or in the world at large are all or none. With the exception of neurons, which either fire or do not fire, I can’t think of other examples of all-or-none constructs. I remember that in graduate school I was taking a seminar course on neuroscience. One of my colleagues in the program was doing his presentation on gender differences in the brain. He had racked his own brain for hours in preparation for his presentation and he had come into the presentation without any sleep. He came to class dishevelled the morning of his presentation. He said something to the following effect: “It occurred to me a few hours ago. The problem with this field is that gender is not discrete. It is continuous. It is not a categorical variable. Moreover, the reason that this field is so fucked up is that people refuse to appreciate the nuances of continuity. Instead, they want to slot you into this gender or that gender. Then, they look for differences in the brain. Well guess what folks, these differences are very difficult to detect on a consistent basis.” This was a deep insight. As I said, with respect to Theory of Mind, most people believe that it is categorical, you have it or you don’t. I am trying to show that it is not categorical. This is a controversial topic in a controversial field.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/18
Patricia Coburn is a friend and colleague, who works with me in the Lifespan Cognition Lab. Here we talk about undergraduate education, work prior to psychology, work with Dr. Bernstein, and controversial research topics, part 1.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Where did you acquire your undergraduate education? Where do you conduct your graduate studies?
Patricia Coburn: I graduated with a BA Honours in Psychology from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. I recently began my Masters in the Forensic Psychology Program.
Jacobsen: Where did you work prior to researching in Psychology?
Coburn: I had various jobs. I was a farmer, a sign-maker: my most recent job was at a Casino.
Jacobsen: You worked in a cognition lab with Dr. Daniel Bernstein. How did you become part of his lab?
Coburn: There were two reasons. Mainly, I was interested in going to graduate school, but I felt unsure of how to get there. As well, I received good advice from the current Chair of Psychology at Kwantlen, Dr. Wayne Podrouzek. He suggested if I wanted to go to graduate school, I should acquire some research experience. I had taken memory with Danny and really learned a lot while enjoying the experience. I thought he was a friendly and approachable person.
Jacobsen: How would you describe your experience working in a Psychology Lab? What positive and negative parts come with managing a lab?
Coburn: I would describe the experience almost entirely positive: necessary to go to graduate school, and probably a big component of my education. I have recently realized that a lot of my education that is relevant did not come from the classroom alone, even though I really enjoyed my classes, learned a lot, and appreciated the instructors. However, there comes a point where you are so proficient at learning material in a textbook that you need a new experience, such as a lab setting with all concomitant experience. It brought me out of my comfort zone. It gave me all of the skills that I needed for graduate school. I can only recommend it for anyone wanting to go to graduate school specifically in Psychology. Additionally, I think it prepares people for graduate school in general because of the workload. Managing a lab of 12 people really took a large amount of time: scheduling the studies, trying to get rooms for the studies, keeping track of everyone for their studies, overseeing data entry, ethics applications, and contacts with people in the research office. Even though, it was challenging and time-consuming at times, it probably, in terms of graduate school, was the most valuable experience I had at the undergraduate level.
Jacobsen: What kinds of research have you conducted up to the present? For your graduate studies, what research do you conduct?
Coburn: Up until I graduated from Kwantlen, my research mainly focused on perspective taking, different cognitive biases, theory of mind, theory of mind deficits, individual differences in perspective taking, and a lifespan approach to theory of mind. As well, I did a bunch of hindsight bias research with Danny and worked on one of his false memory studies. I acquired a fairly well rounded experience, in terms of research, but most of it looked at perspective taking. My research now looks at perceptions of child witness credibility. In particular, I look at how adolescents are perceived in legal settings. I try to incorporate what I learned at the undergraduate level. I look at the way certain biases and stereotypes influence decisions, when people are dealing with children and adolescents. Although, my undergraduate research has influenced or transferred to some degree I have taken a slightly different path.
Jacobsen: With your expertise, what topic(s) seem most controversial to you? How do you examine these topic(s)?
Coburn: Maybe not controversial, but in my area because Judges do not like to talk about the way their decisions are determined and jurors are prohibited from talking about the deliberation process, my research is limited. It could be considered controversial because it is different from the American system. Jurors are allowed to discuss the process, making the system more transparent in a sense. Although, I understand the reasons for why jurors are prohibited from discussing the deliberation process in Canada, it makes my research difficult. I end up having to do many mock juror designs, which could be criticized. Many people might question the ecological validity of that type of research. However, I use university participants, as many of us do. I try to argue that certain cognitive processes are inherent to all human beings. So, we can look at university participants and how they make a decision in a certain area, or if presented with a certain scenario. Some of that will transfer to a juror or even a judge. I believe that judges are better trained than the average person is, but some of these biases will be inherent to the fact that they are human.
Jacobsen: How would you describe the evolution of your philosophical framework?
Coburn: My philosophical framework, I would say that my philosophical framework has evolved even since I entered graduate school. I am still a strong believer in things that can be measured empirically. I subscribe to the empirical model, especially that model of acquiring knowledge. Taking Law courses and looking at the operation of the legal system, I have begun to understand certain questions cannot be understood in the lab. I am beginning to gain a broad perspective on how to best answer questions in different areas. I have acquired a better appreciation for other approaches to knowledge. I have gained some practical experience in court and feel there are some questions we simply do not have the answers for, and we cannot necessarily find them using measurement and experimental design. From this, I have gained an appreciation for people that simply spend a great deal of time thinking and debating the hard questions.
There are certain things where we never know what ground truth is. However, even though I have an appreciation for debate or discourse that attempts to get at questions that do not, or appear to not, have an answer, it does not mean we cannot move closer to the truth through replication and good methodology. We can move towards the direction where we become more confident with those results. Of course, we have to be open to the fact that we could have been wrong. Having good methodology and replicating studies will increase our confidence in those questions that seem difficult to answer. Sometimes it is really more of a philosophical question such as “What is a natural human right? What are human rights?” these sorts of question can only be debated and not measured, as far as I am concerned. However, so many questions can be measured. It is about getting the right study, asking the right questions, gathering the information and bit by bit we get closer to learning the answers.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/18
Joey C. is a colleague, who works with me in the Lifespan Cognition Lab. Here we talk about psychology, selection of degree, the Lifespan Cognition Lab, his main research question, and tips for becoming involved in psychology.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you come into an interest in psychology?
Joey C.: For myself, I was always interested in pursuing something that would have to do to help people. My family and I thought something in the medical field (i.e. a physician) would most likely be the best road to go down in the future, and as I was leaving high school and pursuing a university career, I decided that learning about human processes and behaviour would be the first stepping stone in my journey.
Jacobsen: What is your degree? Why select it? Why choose the Lifespan Cognition Lab?
Joey C.: I am in the Arts program with a major in psychology and a minor in counseling. As aforementioned, I was always interested in helping people and no matter how many research studies I read about different areas of psychology, my first question is “Why?”. I chose the Lifespan Cognition Lab as cognitive psychology is a field that I have been interested in for a few years, and I feel that I can contribute on a multitude of levels for the lab, and at the same time, learn new things every single day.
Jacobsen: What is your main research question?
Joey C.: I haven’t done any independent research for the lab yet, as I have started out recently in the Lifespan Cognition Lab. My dream and end goal would be to pursue clinical psychology in the criminal justice system. For that, I recently have written a paper on the logic and rationale behind classification and diagnosis of psychopathy in children and adolescents. In addition to the Cognition Lab, I am a part of the KPU IMAGe lab, in which I was interested in learning how social perceptions of advertisements can be changed and influenced. At some point, I would like to do research for head injuries. I am a soccer player (goalkeeper) and in my career, I have gotten a concussion before and noticed that I was having a hard time grasping topics and things normal people would have no problem doing in a shorter time. Though this was several years ago and I made a full recovery, I would like to see how a person who recently faced brain injury vs. a person who has not would perform an identical task.
Jacobsen: What are some good tips for those with an interest in psychology for becoming involved in a psychology lab? What should they not be afraid of? What should they be prepared for?
Joey C.: I would say to just start out with an open mind. I was extremely into social psychology when I started out at Kwantlen and it changed to clinical and now is a happy balance between clinical and cognitive. Since you get to do the experiments up close and hands on, you learn new things and might be attracted to different areas of psychology you might not have even known about. Additionally, asking questions is important because there are times where you might not know the answer. I have learned that sometimes, it’s totally OKAY to say that you don’t know an answer or something. The next step is to learn and work hard to remember and use that knowledge where it’s applicable. Psychology is all about hard work. It’s not easy to do research or become a lab assistant/researcher but you have to work hard for it and earn everything you get. Sometimes you won’t get the result you want or were expecting and that’s okay too. Nobody truly knows what they’re looking for in psychology, but that’s the fun part; finding out new things and expanding out own minds on different topics.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/17
Eric Mah is a friend and colleague, who works with me in the Lifespan Cognition Lab. Here we talk about psychology, selection of degree, the Lifespan Cognition Lab, his main research question, and tips for becoming involved in psychology.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you come into an interest in psychology?
Eric Mah: Like many (most) undergraduates starting an Arts degree, I signed up for a number of intro psychology courses in my first year at KPU. I was immediately drawn to several aspects of the field—the complexity and mystery of the human mind, the direct relevance of findings to myself and others, and the sheer variety of interesting research areas. As I took more courses, I also came to appreciate the rigor and applicability of psychological research methods and the ingenious and elegant research designs scholars have used to answer profound questions about the mind. Currently, I see psychology as one of the fields with the most remaining unsolved puzzles and mysteries—and I can’t resist a good mystery!
Jacobsen: What is your degree? Why select it? Why choose the Lifespan Cognition Lab?
Mah: I graduated with a BA Major in Psychology (Honours) and a BA Minor in Philosophy. Though my primary interest is in psychology, philosophy has also fascinated me. Similar to psychology, my interest in philosophy grew out of a curiosity about the many great mysteries that philosophers have tackled: What is the nature of reality? What is knowledge, and how much can we really know? What makes a person who they are? What makes something right (or wrong)? On a more practical level, I believe that the tools provided by philosophical education—critical thinking and healthy skepticism, ability to evaluate arguments, and openness to new ideas, among others—are extremely valuable in psychological research (and most other fields)! While the mysteries philosophy presents are fascinating, I believe that many of them are in principle unsolvable, and most of them have limited relevance to everyday life. I believe psychological research has more answerable questions and more practical relevance, but one of my research interests is in the psychological questions one can ask about philosophical questions (e.g., how do people think about morality, free will, arguments, epistemology, etc.)
I chose the Lifespan Cognition Lab primarily because I wanted more experience in the field of cognitive psychology. Prior to my involvement with Dr. Bernstein’s lab, my work, including my Honours thesis, had been in social and positive psychology. Cognition is a broad and fascinating area of psychology and I wanted to expand my knowledge and expertise to this field. Cognitive research has revealed a number of seemingly paradoxical and mysterious psychological phenomena that beg explanation (e.g., irrational biases, unexplained phenomena like the revelation effect, etc.). In particular, research on common biases and fallacies aligns with my broad research question.
Jacobsen: What is your main research question?
Mah: My main research question, broadly, is this: Are humans more rational or irrational? While we like to call ourselves the “rational animal”, research suggests that we can be systematically wrong in our thinking—we rely on time-saving but oft-faulty heuristics, fall victim to unconscious bias, and regularly commit fallacies.
Within this broad research question about rationality, there are several more specific questions I would am interested in trying my hand at: What are the ways in which our thinking can be flawed?; What are the contexts in which bias arises; Can we guard against systematic errors in thinking, and if so, how?; Are biases truly “irrational”—or are some of them actually adaptive?; What constitutes “rational” thinking (e.g., purely logical/philosophical standards or something else)? Due to the broad nature of these questions, I could see myself in cognitive, social or forensic psychology.
Jacobsen: What are some good tips for those with an interest in psychology for becoming involved in a psychology lab? What should they not be afraid of? What should they be prepared for?
Mah: Research work is incredibly interesting and rewarding, and working in a lab offers a lot of opportunities you might not find elsewhere (e.g., funding, resources, guidance from senior researchers, opportunity to attend conferences, connections w/potential supervisors). Practical lab research experience is invaluable if you’re planning on eventually attending grad school or doing any post-undergraduate psychology work. Overall, I would definitely recommend joining a psychology lab to any student serious about psychology, regardless of whether they have research or clinical inclinations.
In terms of advice, I would recommend starting early. I see a lot of students that join up in their late 3rd or 4th years of their degree, and they don’t have a lot of time to get research experience (and the all-important lines for their CV). I had the good fortune to be approached by a faculty member and senior researcher (who would later become my Honours supervisor) in my 1st year at KPU, and a number of the students in our lab came to us in their 1st/2nd years. By getting an early start (i.e., a late 1st year or early 2nd year in a 4-year program), you have more time to gain research experience, dabble in a number of different projects and research areas, and find out if research is for you.
On a related note, don’t be afraid to approach faculty researchers, even if you’re just starting along the psychological path. As a lab manager, I’m always impressed to see a 1st or 2nd-year student with an interest in psychological research and the initiative to seek out lab opportunities. Even if you feel you lack experience and knowledge, the lab is a collaborative learning environment. Faculty researchers and more experienced research assistants are happy to guide you and help you learn the skills necessary for research. I see a lot of students who are intimidated by faculty and end up being too afraid to approach them about research opportunities. My advice here: Don’t be afraid! Many faculty members are more than willing to talk research and offer advice (and research opportunities) to students.
As for preparation, it does help to have a basic foundation of research experience. This experience generally comes from 1st or 2nd-year research methods and stats courses, and I would recommend that interested students take these before pursuing more involved research in a lab. Early research methods courses also provide a great opportunity to find out if you enjoy research and whether you’re a good fit for it. Beyond that, those interested in lab research should be prepared to work hard. Lab work most typically involves running subjects but also involves study design, data entry, data preparation (e.g., posters, manuscripts), and presentations (e.g., to fellow lab members, conference audiences).
In sum: take a couple research courses, start looking early, and don’t be intimidated or afraid—just be prepared to work hard!
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/17
Nicole Pernat is a friend and colleague, who worked with me in the Lifespan Cognition Lab. Here we talk about her research and interest in psychology, part 3. (Part 1 here and Part 2 here)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What advice do you have for undergraduate students in psychology intending to pursue graduate-level study?
Nicole Pernat: Take time to figure out what you really want to do. Talk to many people in different disciplines, professors and students included; when you are prospecting potential supervisors, ask their students what their relationship with the prof is like, because your supervisor is someone you are going to be in close contact with for 2-7 years. Apply for a Tri-Council Scholarship. The process is a… challenge, but it’s rad if you get it. (Food!)
Ask yourself if you willing to spend another 2-9 years getting a degree, that might not get you the job you want? Also, if you don’t like travelling, academia probably isn’t the place for you; if you pursue academic work, you’ll go wherever the schools are and wherever the job is. Psychology and philosophy are overflowing with masters and doctorates, and there are very few jobs out there. For example, if you get a PhD from one of the top 50 philosophy programs, you might have a 25% chance of actually getting a career as a philosopher. And don’t expect the career to happen right away. Many have to wait a number of years before they get an untenured job as a sessional, with no health benefits and unstable work. It’s a damn tough market. That said; if your dream is to be a psychologist or philosopher, do not give up on it quite yet. Even though it’s tough to get into, there is still a job market. I hear it is slightly better for psychology.
Of course, you should read Scott Jacobsen’s blog.
Jacobsen: Who influenced your intellectual development the most? Have they written any noteworthy books/articles that characterize their views well?
Pernat: At the risk of sounding cliché, my professors at Kwantlen played important roles. Certain profs stand out clearly; in Intro Psychology I brought up some sketchy “evidence” from a book for some weird claim about consciousness; Jocelyn Lymburner asked to see the book’s references. That has stuck in my mind for eight years now. Wayne Podrouzek also punched some of the dumb out of me. He pushed me to really think about morality, consciousness, pseudo science, and personal issues. I used to think I had substantially different sensations and perceptions than others–Rick LeGrand challenged my interpretation, suggesting that perhaps I pay attention to those things more, and that because I share the human physiology, it’s likely that others (can) have similar experiences. Danny Bernstein drilled better writing skills into me (any errors I’ve made here are thanks to my neglecting his advice). I’m convinced that the 15 rounds of editing on one manuscript gave me my wicked score on the GRE’s analytic writing section. Overall, the most valuable thing that I got out of my degree was a radical shift in how I look at the world. I used to have unsubstantiated “New-Age” beliefs (ghosts, psychic powers, etc.). Now I have the training to scrutinize such claims and realize that either there is no evidence, or “evidence” from studies that usually had shitty methodology. It took most of my degree (and the professors) to get there, and the rest to hone my skills.
Outside of Kwantlen, I’ve been particular touched by the “4 horsemen,” Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. These four to me are paragons of critical thinking applied to religious dogma (find them on YouTube to see what I mean. I recommend Harris’ (audio) books “End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Harris’ succinct, eloquent style is ear-candy; I recommend Harris’ (audio) books “End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation” His book, presumptuously entitled “Consciousness Explained,” is an eye-opening read for anyone interested in blind sight, split-brain phenomenon, illusions of time, 1st person science of consciousness, and I host of other related issues.
On the topic of colour vision and its pervasive use in philosophical thought-experiments, Kathleen Akins has moved me. She and Dr. Martin Hahn (SFU) are currently coming out with a tome on colour vision. Colour is not the basic property philosophers and others often think it is; chromatic information (hue / wavelength, brightness, and saturation) are each processed for multiple different functions, such as motion detection, object identification, and distinguishing surface properties from atmospheric ones (e.g., looking at obnoxious blue pants in a yellow-lit store looks different than under sunlight, but we compare the pants to colours of other objects to figure out what the colour of the pants actually are).
On a totally different vein, my interest in physics have led me to David Bohm’s “The Implicate Order,” where he discusses a notion based on quantum mechanics that events, not objects, are basic units of reality. In the first third of the book, he even suggests a verb-based language to reflect this—a rather philosophical endeavour for a physicist! He later argues that the universe is something like a hologram, with information about the whole existing in every part.
Of course, no dilettante of physics would be complete without Stephen Hawking, the god of black holes. His book “A Brief History of Time” is a pleasant-to-read, comprehensive overview of physics, starting with some of its philosophical roots (Aristotle), and discussing the evolution of physics, including, of course, our theoretical knowledge of black holes. I fell in love with those mysterious things in grade four, and owe much of the satisfaction—and sparking—of my curiosity to Hawking. Could black holes really lead to other universes? Is that where half of my socks have gone?
Coming back to Earth, dish-washing has become a mental adventure; the dishes feel solid, but are actually mostly empty space interlaced with collapsing probabilities—or something to that effect. (Thank you string theorist Brian Greene, for your description of quantum mechanics). When you are exposed to these ideas, you look at your environment and think, Holy shit, this is awesome. And then you wonder how a physical thing like your brain could produce all these fantastic experiences. And then you pursue something like neurophilosophy.
How has physics for lay people influenced my intellectual development? (1) By giving me mental stimulation, satisfying and provoking my curiosity in the nature of reality, and (2) by showing me that this is the value of science brought to the public. I think that science has a duty to share its findings with the public, and these authors have demonstrably (and admirably) fulfilled that duty. I think the same is true of all academic disciplines; access to what the Ivory Tower is finding can enhance the life quality of the (interested) public. At least, it did for me. And considering the public funds our work, it’s important to give information back to them. In this way, every academic author of books (that I have read) for the common person has affected me.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/09
Nicole Pernat is a friend and colleague, who worked with me in the Lifespan Cognition Lab. Here we talk about her research and interest in psychology, part 2. (Part 1 here)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why did you choose it for graduate studies?
Nicole Pernat: Because it is sexy. I wanted to get at the root of consciousness—specifically the neural correlates– and felt as though cognitive and perceptual psychology mostly tap around the periphery. I wanted to get at the heart, and figured that it would be either cognitive neuroscience or philosophy that would get me there.
Anyhow, I emailed Dr. Christoff Koch (Biology department, but famous for his work on the neural correlates of consciousness with Dr. Francis Crick) for advice on what was required to get into CalTech program. He was very amiable and responded soon after, advising a strong background in math, physics, chemistry, and/or bio. At least a minor in one of them would be preferable. Bummer. I was at the time, willing to go back and get the requisite background, but my lack of quantitative aptitude would continue to be a hindrance (I did well in psychological stats, but struggled horribly with calculus). I didn’t feel like I would thrive in the hard sciences environment. That’s certainly not to say that philosophers don’t make good quantitative people! Often it’s quite the opposite—for example, many physics undergrads with a thirst for the nature of reality (metaphysics) end up in philosophy. This comes from a professor of mine, Dr. Holly Anderson, who has a BA in physics.
Aside from the quant conundrum, I still loved philosophy. A previous PHIL professor, Dr. Colin Ruloff, finally helped convince me that philosophy was a sweet route. He had been telling me for years that I should go into philosophy, but I kept saying, “No, I like philosophy, but I want to do Psychology. I want the empirical side of things.” Well, in neurophilosophy, you get both. Colin pointed out that Dennett and Churchland (both prominent neurophilosophers) visit neuro labs and talk to the scientists. That sounded good to me. I mulled everything over and decided that I would go philosophy.
Jacobsen: What topic(s) seem unsettled and controversial in neurophilosophy? If any, how do you analyze the topic(s)?
Pernat: Take your pick. The nature of representations, unity of self, colour vision, inverted spectrum, sensory modalities, perception of time, emotions, social cognition… Neurophilosophy is still a toddler—a really smart toddler, mind you. It’s an open field out there. (Ha, stupid pun.)
Analyzing the topics is a challenge, at least for someone who’s not used to coming at a problem from two different disciplines. Take the following illustration: I am taking this fall (2012), appropriately called “Neurophilosophy.” For our projects, we pick a topic that traverses both philosophy of mind and neuroscience (surprise!). We look at the literature in both fields, and then synthesize them. So there are two components in neurophilosophy; analyzing the issue from both sides, and then synthesizing the sides. I do not know if it is all like this, but looking at some other pieces of neurophilosophy (e.g., the Churchlands, Akins), it seems to be a similar sort of process. I would recommend the piece, “What is it like to be boring and myopic?” where Kathleen describes in detail a bats echolocation system and surmises that through bat physiology and neuroscience we can indeed know what it’s like for a bat to be a bat (Akins, 1993).
Jacobsen: You probably had philosophical assumptions prior to entering university. How have your philosophical views changed over time to the present?
Pernat: I would say so. I now realize that philosophers can (and often do) object to assumptions that I’ve carried over from psychology. For example, I thought that it was a pretty easy answer as to whether there are moral truths; namely, “no, there aren’t any.” After all, moralityevolved. If it evolved, then it’s superfluous to posit moral truths that exist objectively and independently of moral/social creatures. Now I realize, after working on the third version of a final paper for a meta-ethics class, that this question is not so easy to answer. There are many smart people arguing for moral realism, and they can make quite convincing cases. I was questioning my view (as I should be). Now, my view on morality is basically the same as it was (I don’t think there are moral truths), but it took more reasoning than I expected. In sum, I am slowly learning that sometimes what seems most obvious actually takes a good solid argument to establish.
In addition, I thought that science could answer every question, though now I am not so sure. Science can’t tell us what we should do; it only describes how things are. Science doesn’t tell us exactly what an explanation is, or how much you must explain for an adequate explanation. For example, if a 4-year-old asks, “Why does that thing float?” Their parent could answer “because it’s a boat and boats float.” In other words, for a child, learning that something belongs to a category with a particular property is sufficient for an explanation. Obviously, the same is not true for a physicist. They probably want a detailed causal story. But are laws sufficient? They seem rather empty, merely describing rules. And what exactly is causation? Is it a mechanism with consistent, identifiable parts? Is it what you get when you intervening on variables to control them? Again, it comes down to defining what exactly an explanation is. That is where philosophy comes in.
Lastly, I used to assume that the scientific method was independent of philosophy, thank you very much. Now I’ve changed my mind. The “artful” component of experimental design seems to be a philosophical exercise, for example. It’s the juice that gets the scientific method up and running. Or consider that when we construct operational definitions, we’re stipulating them. We’re picking out things in the world and identifying them. For example, perhaps “happiness” is X amount of endorphins or being paid more than $60 K a year. Of course we draw on past empirical work to help us along, but how and why we choose particular operational definitions, I argue, are at least partly philosophical. Reason marries science and philosophy.
In short, my previous assumption that science was all and Everything Forever has been overturned. Philosophy, it seems, helps us address questions that science, strictly speaking, cannot—what we should do, what explanations are, or how to design an experiment.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/16
Nicole Pernat is a friend and colleague, who worked with me in the Lifespan Cognition Lab. Here we talk about her research and interest in psychology, part 1. (Part 2 here)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why did you start studying psychology? Where have you acquired your education?
Nicole Pernat: I took an intro course in the first year and loved it. I received my BA (Honours) Psychology from Kwantlen, with a minor in philosophy, and ended up getting a certificate in language studies (4 courses of German) after I graduated.
Jacobsen: You published a paper with Dr. Elizabeth Loftus & Dr. Daniel Bernstein in 2011 entitled The False Memory Diet: False Memories Alter Food Preferences. What did you find in this research?
Pernat: This particular publication gathered work that had already been done—largely by Danny (Bernstein et al., 2005), professor Loftus, Dr. Alan Scoboria (U. of Windsor), Geraerts (et al., 2008), and Laney (et al., 2008). The general theme was applying false memories to food experiences. Loftus’ famous work on false memories found that people’s memories for events, including videos, could be manipulated by the wording. For example, subjects watched a video of a car accident and were asked to rate how fast the car was going. When the questions used loaded words such as “smashed” rather than “hit,” subject gave higher speed ratings. Memories can clearly be altered.
Entire memories can even be fabricated. The thesis of the book chapter was that implanting entirely false memories could change people’s food preferences and eating behavior. Through various experiments, the aforementioned authors discovered that people can develop false memories about foods, such as getting sick from a particular food (e.g., egg salad sandwich), or liking the food as a child (e.g., asparagus). People are more likely to develop false memories for uncommonly eaten foods, such as ice-cream, and less likely to develop them for common foods, such as cookies. This makes evolutionary sense; humans are wildly omnivorous—we can eat almost anything, meaning we often encountered novel foods and needed to learn quickly if that food was poisonous. Thus, we can more easily develop an aversion to novel food. In contrast, it is difficult to convince us that familiar foods that we have eaten for years suddenly turned poisonous and made us sick.
There are some commonly eaten foods, however, which are amenable to false memories. These are foods that contain naturally more “disgusting” (easily spoiled, or smell rotten) components, such as yogurt (dairy spoils) and eggs (which naturally smell of sulfur). This also makes sense in evolutionary terms. Although, pickles are also among that list, which is a bit mystifying.
Most interestingly, and to the point, they found that with false memories came corresponding attitudinal and behavioral changes. In one study, half the subjects developed the belief that they loved asparagus when they first tried it. A week later, the experimenters emailed the subject asking them to come into the lab, and pick what foods they wanted to eat; they ranked a list of sandwiches and vegetables by what they preferred. Thirty-four percent of the subjects in the Love Asparagus group indicated that they wanted asparagus. This suggests that false food memories influence preferences and behavior. In another study, subjects were told that they got sick from egg salad as a child. Thirty-five percent falsely believed that this happened. Different types of sandwiches were offered at a later session, including egg salad. There was also a follow-up four months later, disguised as an unrelated taste-test. Participants were told that the food was going to be thrown out and that they could eat as much as they wanted. Those who erroneously believed they got sick from egg salad were less likely than others to eat egg sandwiches, both shortly after and four months after receiving false feedback. They also gave lower appearance and flavor ratings to the egg.
I was not involved in the original experiments. My part was on researching applications for other health issues and disease. This focused on the “false memory diet,” suggested and coined by Danny and Loftus. It’s highly controversial idea, suggesting the implantation of false memories in order to manipulate diet choices. Nevertheless, it could be useful for neophobia (fear of trying new foods, which often results in restricted vegetable and fruit intake) and obesity. Ideally, the false memory diet would help people eat more healthy foods and fewer unhealthy ones—including alcohol.
Unfortunately, an average of merely 23% of subjects developed false food memories. So even if a false memory diet were to catch on, it would have a small market. Moreover, it’s unclear exactly who would benefit in the first place. Then there are obvious ethical concerns. First, you’re implanting fabricated memories. Second, a false memory diet could exacerbate eating disorders. That said, just as how the same medication brand may be good for one but harmful to another, false memory diets could still be helpful for some people.
Relevant references:
Bernstein DM, Laney C, Morris EK, Loftus EF. Soc Cognition. 2005a;23:11–34.
Bernstein DM, Laney C, Morris EK, Loftus EF. P Natl Acad Sci USA. 2005b;102:13724–31.
Bernstein DM, Godfrey R, Loftus EF. In: Markman KD, Klein WMP, Suhr JA, editors. The handbook of imagination
and mental simulation. New York: Psychology Press; 2009. p. 89–112.
Geraerts E, Bernstein DM, Merckelbach H, Linders C, Raymaekers L, Loftus EF. Psychol Sci. 2008;19:749–753.
Laney C, Morris EK, Bernstein DM, Wakefeld BM, Loftus EF. Exp Psychol. 2008a;55:291–300.
Laney C, Kaasa S, Morris EK, Berkowitz SR, Bernstein DM, Loftus EF. Psychol Res. 2008b;72:362–75.
Laney C, Bowman-Fowler N, Nelson KJ, Bernstein DM, Loftus EF. Acta Psychol. 2008c;129:190–7.
Scoboria A, Mazzoni G, Kirsch I, Relyea M. Appl Cognit Psychol. 2004;18:791–807.
Scoboria A, Mazznoi G, Jarry J. Acta Psychol. 2008;128:304–9
Jacobsen: You entered an emerging field co-founded by Dr. Patricia Churchland called ‘Neurophilosophy’. Can you describe the field?
Pernat: Neurophilosophy is the study of consciousness in philosophy that draws heavily on (cognitive) neuroscience and related sciences. My supervisor, Dr. Kathleen Akins, gives an excellent detailed description on her website:
“‘Neurophilosophy’ is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of philosophy and the neurosciences. In Neurophilosophy, we attempt to understand how various traditional, long-standing problems about the nature of the mind and the world can be resolved (or at least nudged towards resolution) by current findings within the neurosciences. In this group, we use current research within neurophysiology, neuropsychology, neuroethology and psychophysics in order to understand the nature of perception, cognition, consciousness, the emotions and mental representation in general.”
(Please excuse the lack of APA style citation for the sake of ease).
I understand that ideally, there would be a 2-way dialogue between the disciplines—neuroscience informs philosophy, and philosophy can help guide neuroscience through testable hypotheses. Though I do not know how often, philosophers actually affect contemporary psychological sciences.
Neurophilosophy can be confused with the philosophy of neuroscience, but they are distinct. The latter belongs to the philosophy of science and studies the foundations of neuroscience and its methods (see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [SEP]). SEP gives the following examples; philosophy of neuroscience might ask about different conceptions of representation and how they are employed in neuroscience. In contrast, Neurophilosophy might examine how neurological disorders affect our view of a unified self.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Leo Igwe is the founder of the Nigerian Humanist Movement and former Western and Southern African representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He holds a Ph.D. from the Bayreuth International School of African Studies at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, having earned a graduate degree in Philosophy from the University of Calabar in Nigeria. Here we talk about masculinity and femininity in Nigeria.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I wanted to conduct a conversation series on masculinity from a humanist perspective in Nigeria with you, Leo. Why you? You founded the Nigerian Humanist Movement. So, to begin, and with this relevant justification as to your qualifications (doctorate as well), what is traditional masculinity and, by implication, femininity in Nigeria?
Dr. Leo Igwe: There is always a risk of conflation in responding to a question such as this because any answer could easily be taken to be all embracing and applicable to all. Definitely, an understanding of traditional masculinity or femininity that applies to over 170 million people in Nigeria with various cultures and beliefs presents a challenge.
Having said that, given the nature of this conversation, I offer a personal opinion. In brief, traditional masculinity or femininity is simply that idea of manliness or womanliness that is handed down from the past. This idea of what it is to be a man or a woman draws its moral and binding force from the fact that it was handed down to a generation that assumes it is expected to observe it, comply with it and pass it on without revision or alteration.
Thus as a tradition, this quality of maleness or femaleness is deemed sacrosanct. It is designated as the norm for social ordering, nurturing and cultivation. It is important to note that the idea of manliness and womanliness which people regard as the norm because they are handed down from the past differ from community to community, and sometimes from family to family, in fact from individual to individual. It is difficult to pin it down.
Generally speaking, masculinity is traditionally identified with strength, power, toughness, and leadership hence the notion of male domination in gender discourses. The male is taken as the natural head and is expected to be strong and should be capable of absorbing pain without crying. The male is nurtured to be the defender, the one who protects the family and who tackles anything dangerous or threatening. Womanliness is associated with ‘weakness’ and vulnerability. Marriage, childcare, child bearing and domestic duties are also linked to womanhood.
Persons are brought up to fit into these roles and expectations. Unfortunately, the emphasis is often, on women and their designated subordinate and subjugated roles. It is often forgotten that male persons are brought up by their parents including their mothers and sisters, nieces and aunts to fit into certain designated roles.
They are pressured sometimes against their will to be manly. These designated manly and womanly roles are well spelled out and mainly applicable in rural areas and among uneducated folks, or in religiously conservative environments. In such situations and circumstances, ruralness, lack of education and faith constrain the ability of males and females to break away from the traditions.
Jacobsen: These designated roles likely, come from Abrahamic religious traditions, as expectations?
Igwe: I prefer to say that supernatural traditions, not only the Abrahamic codifications, are at the root of these designated qualities of maleness and femaleness. In fact, traditional masculinity and femininity are embedded in indigenous religions that predate Abrahamic religious traditions in Africa. What we have in contemporary Africa is a situation where the faiths of Christianity and Islam only reinforce pre-existing religious and traditional notions of masculinity and femininity.
Jacobsen: How does the humanist perspective, in your opinion, differ from these views? How is it similar, even the same, as these views?
Igwe: A humanist perspective is the same with the traditional viewpoint in the sense that they are all human creations and constructions. They are all attempts by humans to define, designate and assign roles and duties. Humanist and non-humanist ideas of manliness and womanliness are devices to make sense of human associations and interactions. But the humanist perspective is different because it is a product of critical evaluation, not of revelation or blind faith.
The humanist view of masculinity or femininity is non-dogmatic and can be questioned and challenged. The humanist idea of male or female is informed by reason, science, and human rights. It is non-conformist and non-orthodox. Like traditional masculinity and femininity, humanist masculinity takes cognizance of the outlined duties and responsibilities. However, the humanist idea of manliness and womanliness is not cast in stone. The qualities and functions are subject to revision and rejection in the light of knowledge and individual freedom.
Jacobsen: If you were to define a humanist masculinity, how would you define it?
Igwe: It is the idea of maleness that emphasizes the humanity of men and males, the fact that men are human like their female counterparts. That males have emotions, entertain fear and suffer pain like their female counterparts. Simply humanistic masculinity stands for maleness as humanness. It stresses male care, compassion, and cooperation while acknowledging domination and oppression as a human, not as an exclusively male property.
The whole idea of humanist masculinity is vital in clearing this mistaken impression that associates ‘masculinism’ or masculinity with the subordination of women. There are cases of male oppression of women but is that masculinism? No, not at all. That should not be designated as what it is to be manly. Being manly should be within the ambient of humanity not without. Women do oppress men too but is oppression of men feminism? No.
Subordination of men should not be identified as feminism. It is an aberration of feminism. Just as feminism does not imply the oppression of men, masculinity should not be equated with the oppression of females. Thus humanist masculinity is – and should be–about the expression of hu-maleness or hu-manliness and not the humiliation and subordination of females.
Jacobsen: What is a way to inculcate a healthier, humanistic, masculinity in young men in Nigeria?
Igwe: Of course, it is through education that the inculcation of humanist masculinity can be achieved. Unfortunately, this goal cannot be realized in the form of education we have in Nigeria at the moment. The educational process is manipulated to preserve certain religious and traditional values and interests. The educational system is used to reinforce notions of masculinity and femininity that are incompatible with humanist and human rights values. So the inculcation of humanistic masculinity can only happen if the educational system is overhauled to foster and reflect humanistic ideas and values.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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The International Humanist and Ethical Youth Organisation (IHEYO) stands in solidarity with the International Humanist and Ethical Union and the American Humanist Association against the white supremacists and Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.
IHEYO also stands in solidarity with the Kuala Lumpur consulate for Atheist Republic.
In light of the calls for hunting down the atheists for being public and having a dinner in an Islamically-run society, and the Neo-Nazi and white supremacist gatherings in Charlottesville, the humanist and ethical culture movement does have implied positions.
On the hunting down of atheists, or nonbelievers, even “infidels” by some people’s lights, this goes against fundamental principles of freedom of belief and association, especially without fear to life and livelihood after a dinner photo.
On the Charlottesville gathering of Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, IHEYO stands against any ethnic chauvinism and supremacy, Nazi political positions, especially when brought together in movements hoping for a fantasy through ethnic nationalism.
These recent events reinstantiate the need for universalist values inherent in humanist to be further implemented in societies, especially those wracked by theological domination over state and law, and the death threats for those simply believing as they wish.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Dr. Sven van de Wetering has just stepped down as head of psychology at the University of the Fraser Valley and is a now an associate professor in the same department. He is on the Advisory Board of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. Dr. van de Wetering earned his BSc in Biology at The University of British Columbia, and Bachelors of Arts in Psychology at Concordia University, Master of Arts, and Ph.D. in Psychology from Simon Fraser University. His research interest lies in “conservation psychology, lay conceptions of evil, relationships between personality variables and political attitudes.” Here we discuss his background and views, part 3.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you consider the most salient point for people to understand about psychology in light of your background, research, and current perspective?
Dr. Sben van de Wetering: I’m not sure there is a salient core truth about psychology that I can impart. Psychology is a sprawling multi-tentacle monster with no obvious centre and very few widely shared premises. As I indicated above, I consider this a good thing, and maybe would even like to see it become more like this.
After saying that, I have to admit that pluralism makes me a little uncomfortable. I went into psychology thinking that there were a relatively small number of core truths about human nature. That those truths were discoverable, and that psychology either had found or would soon find the way to get at those truths. The truth about human nature would lead to a technology of human nature, which would make the solution of a large number of problems with psychological roots a much more straightforward matter than it currently is. I find it much harder to believe in this now, for two reasons. First, I seriously doubt that psychology is on track to discover many such truths. Second, to the extent that we do have a technology of human behavior, the people who use it are not concerned citizens trying to solve human problems, but rather rich people trying to get richer and powerful people trying to get more powerful. For example, advertisers use a technology of behaviour to induce people to buy goods they don’t need with money they don’t have, which is all right, I guess. However, in the process the advertisers incidentally persuade many people that buying things is the primary route to happiness. We have data suggesting that this is an astonishingly pernicious belief to hold.
Jacobsen: As you observe academics pursue their careers in search of fame, fortune, and/or utility (personal and/or societal), what course do you recommend for amateur academics? If you perceive pitfalls or benefits in particular reasons for and types of an academic career, can you bring some of these to the fore?
There are a bunch of different people who fall under the heading of amateur academics, and I think different things will bring them utility.
First, there are those who are in the academic world more or less by accident, perhaps even against their will. They`re living at home, and their parents will kick them out unless they either get a job or go to school. So they go to school. Or they`re on their own, but the economy`s bad, so they get student loans and study for a while.
I have a lot of sympathy for people in this situation. I have ‘been there, done that’. As an instructor, I often don`t like having people like this in my class, because their palpable boredom drags down the rest of the class, but I usually manage to avoid blaming them for it. I do have advice for such people: pretend you care. It`s not as good as really caring, of course, but it`s better than simmering in ennui and resentment for four years.
A second group, unfortunately much smaller, is motivated primarily by curiosity. These people don`t need advice. They`re in the right place, their appetite for new information will be satisfied as in almost no other environment, and all they have to do is follow their natural proclivities in order to succeed.
A third group, overlapping with the second, is the glory seekers. They hope to make a name for themselves by making some sort of big discovery, etc. My advice here is more complicated. First, if you`re part of this group, you`d better also be part of the second group, or you`re not going to make it. The process of discovery is so demanding of time and energy that if you don`t enjoy the actual process, you`re not going to get anywhere. Second, I`ve discovered that freedom is overrated.
Let me explain that remark. I`ve discovered that in graduate school, there are two sorts of academic supervisors. One type has a highly active research program on the go, with lots of graduate students and research assistants working on various components of that program. When the new graduate student comes, their range of freedom is severely limited: do they want to plug into this part of the program or that part? The second type of supervisor, for one reason or another, does not have a program of research which the student can plug into. They therefore give the student a great degree of freedom to do what they want. This has the advantage that the student can pursue their true interests, but also the disadvantage that the student gets relatively little guidance, and endlessly seems to be reinventing the wheel. This is a lot of fun for students in the second group, the highly curious, but a bit of a handicap for students in the third group, the glory-seekers, because productivity is likely to be low throughout graduate school and may remain low in their academic career.
Jacobsen: Who have been the biggest intellectual influences on you?
When looking back on who has exerted the biggest influence on my thinking, it`s remarkable how few are psychologists. My move into social psychology in the early 1990s was inspired by Shelley Taylor, but the longer I stay in the field, the less I actually draw on her ideas. The two books I have read in the last 10 years that have influenced me the most have been Jared Diamond`s Collapse and Robert Putnam`s Making Democracy Work. I`ve traditionally been a big fan of Wittgenstein, though that influence is also waning. Probably the single psychologist who has changed my thinking the most in the last little while is Philip Tetlock with his Expert Political Judgment, which really revitalized my uneasy endorsement of pluralism.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Dr. Sven van de Wetering has just stepped down as head of psychology at the University of the Fraser Valley and is a now an associate professor in the same department. He is on the Advisory Board of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. Dr. van de Wetering earned his BSc in Biology at The University of British Columbia, and Bachelors of Arts in Psychology at Concordia University, Master of Arts, and Ph.D. in Psychology from Simon Fraser University. His research interest lies in “conservation psychology, lay conceptions of evil, relationships between personality variables and political attitudes.” Here we discuss his background and views, part 2.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you consider the conventional epistemological framework in psychology?
Dr. Sven van de Wetering: This is of course hard to summarize in a few words, since we teach whole courses on epistemology to our undergraduates (though we call them “research methods” and “statistics”), and then make our graduate students study more epistemology. So it’s a complicated topic.
Despite this complexity, I may be able to point to a few basic assumptions. First, we tend to assume that there is no great mystery about what people do, only about why they do it. Hence, relatively little energy goes into purely descriptive work, whereas a tremendous amount goes into elucidating the causes of those simple, taken-for-granted behaviours. Thus, we may say that the goal of psychology is to attempt to explain human behaviour in terms of chains, or more likely webs, of cause and effect linkages.
A second mainstream assumption, one not shared by many environmental psychologists, is that these causes have the potential to be isolated from each other. That is, although all competent psychologists (and many incompetent ones as well) are aware that in many everyday situations a large number of causes may be operating at the same time, that it is nevertheless a viable analytical strategy to assume that this complex causal web can be usefully broken up into a number of simple, measurable causes, each of which can be experimented upon or otherwise examined individually.
A third mainstream assumption is that psychological propensities are relatively stable entities that do not change from time to time and place to place. You can see this if you look at the verb tenses in an APA-style article. The description of what was done in the experiment is written in the past tense, indicating (very properly) that the experiment was conducted in the past. The interpretation of the results, however, is written in the simple present indicating that the particular results obtained in the past was a particular manifestation of a broad, general, enduring core of human propensities. Please note that I endorsed the idea of an enduring human nature a few paragraphs back, so I don’t necessarily think this assumption is wrong (though I do think many psychologists’ lists of enduring human propensities are too long, and that a lot of psychological findings are the product of ephemeral culturally and historically situated propensities).
Jacobsen: If you could restructure the epistemological foundation of psychology, how would you do it? Furthermore, how would you reframe the approach to that foundation?
van de Wetering: I think the approach described above has some huge successes to its credit, so I certainly don’t want to see it scrapped or seriously revamped. What I would like to see is greater pluralism in epistemology, a recognition that we don’t really know what that psychological knowledge is, and that we should therefore be tolerant of a fairly wide range of epistemological approaches.
There’s a great section near the end of Kurt Danziger’s Constructing the Subject where Danziger points out that two basic classes of factors go into any psychological finding. One, of course, is the “real” world telling us how it works. The other is social factors (what some people might call artifacts) derived from the way the investigative situation has been set up and interpreted. Looking at any given psychological investigation or even any given psychological research program, it’s not clear how much, if any, of the core finding is “true” rather than a product of the investigative situation. However, if a bunch of people with very different epistemologies that have led them to set up very different investigative situations and interpret them using very different concepts and processes of reasoning nevertheless investigate the same approximate issue and come to the same basic conclusions, then it seems likely that the social factors largely cancel each other out and that that agreed-upon finding is derived from some fairly fundamental feature of the way the world works.
I always thought that this was a cool idea, but it only works if psychology comprises a wide variety of vibrant research programs based on a variety of very different epistemological foundations. A second prerequisite for this to work is that there have to be psychologists willing to look at work from all these different paradigms without to much prejudice to the effect that psychologists working in such-and-such a tradition are not “real” psychologists.
Jacobsen: If you had unlimited funding, what would you research?
van de Wetering: I’m not sure unlimited funding would change the general topics of my research all that much, but it would make the scope of the research projects much greater, and if the funding included course releases, I might also do more than one project a year.
My number one area of interest is summarized by the title of a paper I presented 11 years ago, “If everyone’s an environmentalist, why are SUVs selling so well?” There is a big disconnect between people’s stated concern for environmental issues and what they actually do, and I would love to explore that a little more. The question of discrepancies between attitudes and behaviours has been around since at least the 1930s and LaPiere, but in this applied context, there’s a lot more still to learn.
The other area I would love to research a little more is the study of trust, cynicism, and political participation. One of the most frightening trends I’ve seen lately is for young people to disengage from politics more or less completely, to the point where many people (not just the young) know nothing about what the politicians are up to in their name, and then either don’t vote or vote from a position of near total ignorance. The more widespread this becomes, the less politicians are held to account, with the result that the lying, corrupt scumbag politicians who turn people off politics in the first place find it easier to rise to the top without even having to pretend to be decent human beings. A better understanding of why this is happening would be a great thing.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Claire Saenz is a SMART Recovery Facilitator for SMART Recovery. It is an addiction recovery service without a necessary reference to a higher power or incorporation of a faith, or some faith-based system into it – by necessity. Those can be used it, but they are not necessities. The system is about options. In this series, we look at her story, views, and expertise regarding addiction, having been an addict herself. This is session 2.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Now, you’re working for SMART Recovery and have been for a while. How long? Why there? What is in it for you (cui bono?)?
Claire Saenz: I started with SMART Recovery in 2007 as a participant, following my departure from AA. At the time, I was going through a deep reevaluation of my personal belief system. I call it my “recovering from recovery” period. My initial reaction upon learning about SMART and its philosophy was profound sorrow that I had not had access to that program when I initially made the decision to quit. I was horrified to realize that the counselor at the rehab I attended in 1998 had done me a vast disservice by insisting that my history of addiction meant that my thinking could not be trusted and that the only way to recover was through AA. It was due to that misdirection that I ended up spending years of my life in an ill-fitting program.
I continue to participate in SMART now, after ten years, for one simple reason: I do not want others to have the same experience I did. I want to see that people have knowledge of, and access to, SMART as well as other approaches to addiction recovery.
I suppose you could say that there is nothing to be gained for me personally in my continued work with SMART and the issue of choice in recovery since I’m comfortably abstinent now. To be honest, I have been tempted at times to say “I’ve got mine and I’ve done enough” and take up another meaningful cause. But then I meet yet another person who is caught in the net of endless 12 step, who weeps to meet a person who is contented and healthy outside of that world, and I realize afresh that this is my life’s work.
Jacobsen: How do you work with people? What is the process there?
Saenz: There are several aspects to my work. The first is advocacy: getting the word out that quality recovery treatment requires that people seeking recovery receive full information about their choices. I have done this in many contexts. In addition to writing articles about SMART Recovery and the constitutional issues surrounding mandated 12 step attendance, I have been interviewed for books and television and presented several continuing legal education programs regarding SMART and the general issue of choice in recovery.
The second aspect has been working with SMART at the board or committee level to help set policy and strategize for further growth.
The third aspect is working directly with people seeking recovery, which is the activity I enjoy the most. Even before I began facilitating a local meeting, I would often communicate directly with people seeking recovery who were going to SMART’s online meetings and felt they would benefit from personal contact with a SMARTie. I’ve also served as the point of introduction for newcomers who learned about SMART from AA members. Within AA, there is a growing group of members who are more than willing to send struggling newcomers to SMART. I love to see this increasing awareness that although we may have different philosophies, we share the same goal: helping people achieve abstinence.
Jacobsen: If you could take one principle from working with addicts in recovery and have that implemented at a federal level, what would it be?
Saenz: I would like to see a Supreme Court decision that mandated 12 step participation by the criminal justice system is a violation of the First Amendment and cannot take place in the United States. There are several federal circuit court cases that say this very clearly, as well as state supreme court cases, but I would like to see this principle come from the highest court in the land.
Jacobsen: Why do people become addicts? How do they? Does the 12-step program deliver on its purported ends?
Saenz: Well, if I could provide a simple answer to the “why?” question, we could all brush off our hands and go home! However, the question is controversial and the topic of much research. At the moment, the evidence seems to point to the conclusion that while the etiology varies, for most, it is a combination of genetics, environment, and psychological factors. As a complicating factor, at least half of those with addictions have a co-occurring mental illness, often a mood disorder. Treatment of dually diagnosed people has to be integrated—the two conditions must be treated together as they tend to be inextricably entwined.
As far as the “how” question, I think that’s fairly simple. People become addicted by engaging in the addictive behavior too much for too long. I know there are theorists who could complicate this, even going so far as to claim that people are “addicts” before they ever engage in addictive behavior, but this strikes me as an entirely illogical stance.
As far as whether 12 step delivers what it promises, the answer is it does—for some, but by no means all. It’s great choice for those it helps. For those people, it delivers what it promises. The problem is that it doesn’t work for a significant number of people. The exact success rate is a matter of extreme controversy and I’ve witnessed some fine people following the argument down a hopeless rabbit hole. However, it is unquestionably true that 12 step does not help, and may in fact harm, a number of people.
Jacobsen: Does faith more often or less often than not improve the recovering addict through their recovery to sobriety?
Saenz: Once again, it depends on the person. It amazes me that we all too often view people with addictions through a lens that presumes they are all the same, have the same experiences, and find the same approaches helpful. Faith helps some people. It does not help others. It did not help me.
Jacobsen: What are the personal dangers in helping addicts through recovery?
Saenz: If you’re talking about me personally, I can’t think of any dangers that aren’t already present in my day to day work as a lawyer. The fact is simply that some people are not safe, whether they suffer from addictions or not. I do the best I can to protect myself, I have security systems in place and generally try not to be entirely alone with people, but other than that I don’t worry about it. I am also not particularly concerned with whatever reputational danger might exist by being open about my history of addiction. I believe I am a success story and am proud to help the next person achieve their own version of success.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/15
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Was there a background in atheism, in the family? Within that family background, was there a surrounding culture that brought forth a critical mindset towards religion? If so, how? If not, why not?
Enrique Valdés Pliego: My father’s background has a religious mindset. So I lived with him my first 9 years. I was a believer then, but at the dissolution of my parents’ marriage, I lived with my mother´s family who is scientist and agnostics. At that point, I developed my critical thinking skills. They had a library, a big area to read. I had a lot of time to read. My mother’s family never took to me to participate in any religious activity, but we used to visit museums and watch movies, theatre and a lot of other activities.
Jacobsen: Through these threads of family and surrounding culture, what made for the pivotal moments in development as an atheist?
Pliego: There were a lot of pivotal moments, but some of them were like moments of revelation, when a bunch of religious ideas had not sensed, or when a religious community used to act violently against free people, I disagree with religious events where I obliged to shut up just because if I express my self it could be dangerous. but the most important pivotal moment was understanding some concepts like freedom, opinion, law, belief, respect, persuasion, and profit.
Jacobsen: Also, “a-” as a prefix in atheism means many things because it is both denial and affirmation. What is affirmed there to you? What is denied to you?
Pliego: In my mind, I think strongly it´s a free theme, so there´s affirmed that even God in existence, people like me will defend always our rights when some people use that freedom to believe or not believe and is denied to leave our freedom on abuse or swindler hands.
Jacobsen: How did you find the Atheist Republic? What do you do for them? What are your tasks and responsibilities?
Pliego: I found AR because people need to talk about common themes, protection, people with common issues. I do community links, produce messages, questions, replicate notices, and act as a community manager. We work with freedom. Our work is free. We just have a couple of easy rules. Respect is always a base. Our responsibility is to build a web of free people, to guarantee it, not to fight against religious people, but build bridges toward civilization.
Jacobsen: How does an Atheist Republic consulate work? What are its daily operations? How do you make sure the operations function smoothly?
Pliego: Each civilization, each community, city or town grow up independently, even AR. so each consulate has similar rules, is part of a mesh that works as a train, lot of people go in and go out, if they need something we could offer them, with out fees, just because we are real people who want to give to our time the other opportunity to future, options. each one it´s different, each person has rights.
Jacobsen: Why volunteer for them? What meaning comes from it?
Pliego: Why help people? why build better communities? why is the sense of build civilization a struggle? why make divisions? why disrespect other with same rights? why people arrive at the moon or finding lots of advances? A lot of meanings are inside people, each one of us, but even objective things, because its function, peaceful communities, educated communities are possible, even the opposite.
Jacobsen: How does the Atheist Republic, in your own experience and in conversing with others, give back to the atheist community and provide a platform for them – even to simply vent from social and political conventions that hold them either in contempt or in begrudging silence for fear of loss of life quality?
Pliego: When people grew up inside a religious world, with lots of fears, even a tiny, little, very small opportunity of freedom is a great experience, that’s why we want to provide a big community for religious refugees. We do not provide disrespect, we want to achieve the common place of meeting, brainstorming, options to kids, their parents, just people who need say any thing related to religiosity, what they feel, what they need, what they lived, what they could give to the community. everybody must live freely. everybody deserves it.
Jacobsen: What do you hope for the future of atheism? What are the movements next steps?
Pliego: Not hopes, it’s a reality, some places, some countries, towns, who known about rights, about liberty are convinced of taking care of it. the future is related to spread of liberty, with rights, not religious issues, an atheist is not a furious stubborn, is not a politician giving recommendations, is not a leader, is just common people who love freedom as anyone who had to prove it. the next step is the common objectives, freedom anywhere, and maintenance of it. even we have a local activities calendar and sometimes a common calendar at whole consulates. You could check with the consulates, some of them have a complete project while others are building
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Pliego: No one deserves disrespect, abuse, lack of freedom; everybody deserves human rights and a healthy world. obviously, we must take decisions, but this kind of decisions could have sense between human rights.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Enrique.
Pliego: Good night.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/14
André Coelho is a contributor to the Basic Income Earth Network. I asked about some perspectives on gender roles, as he is a friend and mentor. Here is the result.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I wanted to talk about masculinity in the 21st century. You have been a mentor for me through the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). What is BIEN, as an open plug? More to the interview, if you look at the gender roles where you live, what are they?
André Coelho: BIEN is a decentralized organization composed by people who promote, in their diversity, a core idea currently named basic income. BIEN holds a non-political defense and promotion of basic income, a progressive social policy which aims at de-linking income from employment, in a pursuit of freedom for all.
In Portugal, my place of birth and residence, there are still marked gender differences in society. Women access incomes, on average, lower than men. Women get sexually discriminated in day-to-day situations and are burdened, on average, with more workload than men, namely within the household. Domestic violence against women is still a reality in Portugal, in the dawn of the 21st century.
At work, there are also some gender roles that are still reinforced in Portuguese society. For example, it’s very hard to find a woman working in construction. Or in mechanical workshops. Or in computing (although here things are changing). On the other hand, in the caring world, one seldom finds men working. Nursing, cleaning, social assistance and kindergartens are examples where women clearly dominate.
Jacobsen: Are these gender roles more or less functional as we’re moving farther and farther into the 21st century?
Coelho: I understand that there are basic traits that incline men and women more to certain roles. Caring for children or elderly people come natural for women, given their motherhood instincts. This doesn’t mean men cannot fulfill these roles, but only that, at the time being, they do in fact come more naturally to women. Conversely, a woman can also learn and get trained to be a good construction worker, but their interest in such activities is usually low.
Fundamentally, however, I don’t feel men and women have specific or fixed roles to play in society. As we move further into the 21st century, as society gets transformed into something this species has never experienced before at a global scale, traditional gender roles get more and more irrelevant.
Jacobsen: As a leader in the basic income world, what are you taking into account when mentoring and writing, and leading?
Coelho: I don’t know how much of a leader I am, or if I can be called as such. However, I try to remain aware that nothing I may do, in the basic income world or within other spheres, is possible without the collaboration of other people. At Basic Income News (a part of BIEN’s activity), to give an example, we have a rotating team of more or less six people, who make it possible to publish every day, given our relatively high-quality standards. My role there is to make sure work flows in the smoothest way possible, and that everybody’s happy. That implies being thankful for all the help they provide, because nothing would be produced without these people’s goodwill, technical capacity and devoted efforts.
More specifically in mentoring and writing, my approach is usually to make people comfortable with our system at Basic Income News, explaining and supplying all the information they need to work properly and to their maximum satisfaction. I do not teach anyone to write, but instead show them where our quality standards are, and help them to bring their own writing style up to our standards, if necessary. For that we also have a team of volunteer reviewers, who are dedicated to reviewing text, style and content of every article that gets published through Basic Income News.
Jacobsen: Mentorship is important for older males to do for younger males. How do you go about it, e.g. in the BIEN world or elsewhere?
Coelho: I don’t see mentorship as a gender relationship (older males onto younger males). I have mentored males and females alike at Basic Income News, and of different ages. But as I see it, mentorship is mainly about making the other person feel he/she is at home, and that is achieved not only with information and technical aspects, but also with gratitude and flexibility. And being available when the need arises, so that the person gets integrated in the best possible way. Acknowledging mistakes is also part of a mentor’s job, because the more you recognize your humanity the more you reduce distance between people, and that is crucial for close and durable work relationships.
Jacobsen: What do you see as a healthier version of masculine identity, e.g. self-image and action?
Coelho: I feel that men in general are still somewhat mistaken into thinking they are in control. Or that they should be in control. That can make men possessive, over confident or afraid (to lose control). All those feelings are bad. A healthier version of man would be, first and foremost to let go control. That doesn’t mean living in chaos. It means letting go of dominating attitudes, micromanagement and strengthened rigidity. To turn pyramid hierarchies into lateral collaborative organizations. To stop looking at oneself as a stone wall, that supposedly can take any weight and any blow, to a more human-like self-image, where mistakes and compassion are possible.
Ironically, a more flexible and humble self makes it possible to grow into a strong, resilient person. On the contrary, an apparently all-mighty solid and rigid self turns men into fragile beings that fall apart once they crack – and they all eventually do. In civil engineering, as a kind of parallel, we know that very rigid materials are usually associated with fragile behaviour: they suddenly snap after an initial crack. Good construction materials are those rigid enough to withstand design loads, but flexible enough to accommodate displacements and not snap under high stresses. The same in people, and particularly men. In a nutshell: less rigidity, more flexibility. Long term resistance comes from resilience, and resilience comes from knowing who you are, away from artificial notions of control.
Jacobsen: Also, you’re an independent scholar. What topics are of interest to you? How does this build into your ability to function better in the professional world, e.g. mentoring, writing, and leading?
Coelho: At present my life doesn’t allow me to do research, keep up my professional engineering activity plus volunteering for BIEN or Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. That is, in the absence of a basic income. I would like to reduce my engineering hours and dedicate more time to research, music and volunteering. In research, particularly, I would like to continue my studies into construction and demolition waste management, as this is one often disregarded aspect of waste management, and one critical if we intend to go sustainable on this planet. Quality, meaningful research – in our monetized, all-business world, much research has lost its meaning and is of little use to society – is an important way not only to expand our knowledge, but also to inform policy into building a better society.
Sex also interests me. Like this it sounds too bold, but it truly interests me in an analytical sense, as it informs so much about who we are, men and women, conjugating almost every human trait. There are so many unconscious behaviours related to sex, the “animal” part of it and its interaction with our “cultural” side. We are the product of our evolutionary path, as much as we are the result of our own culture. We are at the edge of a great human transformation, one that will dictate if we go extinct, or if we will survive and live happily on this planet. And that is also related to how we understand, deal and accept our sexuality. The human being definitely interests me.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, André.
Coelho: I thank you for your interest in what I had to say, by answering your questions. Cheers.c
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Numbering: Issue 29.D, Idea: Outliers & Outsiders (24)
Place of Publication: Langley, British Columbia, Canada
Title: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com
Individual Publication Date: April 1, 2022
Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2022
Name of Publisher: In-Sight Publishing
Frequency: Three Times Per Year
Words: 5,115
ISSN 2369-6885
Abstract
Chris Cole is a longstanding member of the Mega Society. Richard May is a longstanding member of the Mega Society and Co-Editor of Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society. Rick Rosner is a longstanding member of the Mega Society and a former editor of Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society. They discuss: major warning signs of something awry; the minor, or subtle, warning signs; 4 standard deviations above the norm; the successes and failures of the Mega Test, the Ultra Test, the Power Test, and the Titan Test; 4 and 5 sigma above the norm; the principal design of the Adaptive Test; other extraordinary high-I.Q. societies; associative horizon; the Mega Test; the claims about the Mega Test; legitimate testing; extrapolations well beyond the norms of the mainstream tests; the motivation behind making claims well beyond the norms of the most used mainstream I.Q. tests; the more egregious I.Q. claims in 20th century; and the big lessons in debunking phony I.Q. claims.
Keywords: Adaptive Test, Aleph Society, Chris Cole, debunking, I.Q., intelligence, Keith Raniere, Marilyn vos Savant, Mega Society, Mega Test, Power Test, Richard Feynman, Richard May, Rick Rosner, standard deviation, The Plurality IQ Society, Titan Test, Ultra Test.
Debunking I.Q. Claims Discussion with Chris Cole, Richard May, and Rick Rosner: Member, Mega Society; Co-Editor, “Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society”; Member, Mega Society (2)
*Please see the references, footnotes, and citations, after the interview, respectively.*
*Rosner section transcribed from audio.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have all been around the block. Your membership in the Mega Society has spanned decades. So, you’ve seen controversies, failed high-I.Q. societies, and proclamations to this-or-that I.Q., even individuals who spun off into fraudulent activities, messianic posing, and criminal behaviour. As a note on collectives of high-I.Q. people, when it comes to claimed high-I.Q. societies, what are the major warning signs of something awry, not quite right, with it?
Richard May[1]*: The major warning signs of statistical and psychometric incompetence, fraud, or madness are usually quite subtle. Please see below.
Rick Rosner[2]*: You got to start with the disclaimer that most people in high-IQ societies are well-behaved relatively normal people who like taking tests and solving puzzles, and there are only a few lunatics. And because the ones I belong to don’t get together very often, you don’t have a chance to see any warning signs developing.
Although, in the case of one guy from many years ago, you could see a guy who was kind of being physically dominant and, I guess, mentally dominant getting increasingly frustrated that people didn’t understand him or believe his theories. So, it was just an increasing belligerence or pre-belligerence.
I guess, a skosh of megalomania.
Chris Cole[3],[4]*: The major warning signs are the ones you list: fraudulent activity, messianic posing, and criminal behavior.
Jacobsen: Following from the previous question, what are the minor, or subtle, warning signs?
May: I get slightly suspicious if someone comes up with the most brilliant Theory of Everything ever, explained in a newly invented language of neologisms, which only the inventor of the theory himself can understand, especially if the theory makes no falsifiable predictions and none of those few who claim to understand the theory can explain it in their own words. I’m also slightly suspicious of, e.g., taxi cab drivers or barbers, who have conclusively proved Einstein’s theory of special and general relativity wrong.
If someone claims to be the most intelligent person in the history our solar system or to be the actual God of the Bible, then this level of measured intelligence may be beyond the current development of psychometric science, even with the Flynn effect. I’m probably too skeptical sometimes.
Also, branding of one’s associates by high-IQ types is often unnecessary in my view.
Rosner: Again, I don’t hang. I have no basis or nothing to talk about regarding this. It is not like I was living with a high-IQ person who slowly went crazy, besides myself. Really, in the last few years, I’ve gotten less crazy, more lazy. Lazy has replaced crazy.
Cole: The minor warning signs are incredible IQ claims. As a rule of thumb anything above five sigma is not credible as is anything that has not been normed using regular statistical methods.
Jacobsen: Why is 4 standard deviations above the norm (e.g., mean 100, S.D. 15, I.Q. 160) such a difficult barrier to break in finding highly intelligent individuals?
May: Almost no one in the alleged “real world” is interested in measuring intelligence beyond the 4 sigma level. Where would you find a large sample of individuals beyond the top 1-per-30,000 level of intelligence to study? This level of intelligence is not a target level for standard IQ tests developed by psychologists. Why should it be? Which professions require IQs beyond the 4 sigma level? Even Nobels in physics probably depend more upon a mathematical ability sub-factor of general intelligence than upon super-high IQ per se. Two physics Nobel laureates didn’t qualify for inclusion in Lewis Terman’s study of the intellectually gifted, because their IQs were not sufficiently high! In addition Nature may sometimes not be ‘politically correct’. What if cognitive differences were discovered among various human sub-groups? For example, what if a growing number of trans-species individuals, who identify as advanced AI units, were found to be better at arithmetic addition?
Rosner: Several reasons, one, there aren’t that many people. 4-sigma level is one person in 30,000. Although, in real terms, it’s less rare than that because the average IQ of people on the street is like 105 or 110. The people with IQs of 35 are institutionalized. You don’t see them around. It’s rare. That’s one problem.
Problem two, it is hard to test. All the good high-end tests take dozens of hours to do well on. Thing two-and-a-half, many people who might score well on them might be successful and may not want to waste their time putting in 40 or 50 hours in something that doesn’t compensate them.
They could be trading stocks or coding or doing business deals or getting laid. None of which taking an IQ test helps.
Cole: High range tests require high range questions which are hard to create. Plus there is not much of a market.
Jacobsen: What have been the successes and failures of the Mega Test, the Ultra Test, the Power Test, and the Titan Test in identifying highly intelligent persons – despite being compromised?
May: There is evidence that uncompromised tests work better.
Rosner: Maybe, some smart people still trickle in. The Mega Test has been compromised since, probably, the late ‘90s or the internet made it possible to contaminate the questions by throwing around answers in chat rooms.
The Mega Test was the most successful in finding high-IQ people because the most people took it when it was published in Omni magazine. 4,000 people took it. It’s more than any other test ever.
Which means, though, more people have taken the Hoeflin tests than tests by any other author, though probably a strong second and possibly somebody who has overtaken Hoeflin because he has written dozens of tests is Paul Cooijmans, who has been writing tests for decades and has cranked out quite a few.
Some of his tests have certainly been taken by more than 100 people. In the aggregate, thousands of people must have taken Cooijmans tests. With the success of the Hoeflin tests, they have found, depending on the cutoff, hundreds of high-IQ people.
Some of those people got together and some people were mentored by other high-IQ people, and had their lives improved, including myself. So, the success of the Hoeflin tests is the large numbers of people who have taken them.
For years, I, and sometimes with partners or being asked to consult, pitched TV involving high-IQ-type competitions. The same kind of shit as Project Runway or American Idol. A talent search, but instead of for fashion designing or culinary skill or singing skill, it was for raw intelligence.
This is an idea that comes to people not infrequently, but just has never been turned into a show. But if you had a show that did that, that would be the most successful project ever to find high-IQ people because millions of people would see the show and tens of thousands of people, if there were high-IQ tests associated with the show, would try those tests.
But that project has never happened, which I think is stupid because reality shows are about following assholes around with cameras and there are plenty of high-IQ assholes. Not as a percentage of high-IQ people who are, as I said, mostly decent, normal-ish people.
But if out of 100 people who have managed to score 160 on an IQ test, there are probably a half-dozen who you could productively, entertainingly follow around with cameras.
Cole: First of all Ron Hoeflin is a talented question framer. Next he spent a lot of effort validating his questions. Finally he normed them several different ways.
Jacobsen: In principle, what is realistically needed to test between – let’s say – 4 and 5 sigma above the norm, reliably and validly?
May: Perhaps advanced AI can be used to develop significantly improved high-range intelligence tests. Other neurobiological methods of assessment of the general factor of intelligence, ‘g’, may eventually make IQ tests obsolete. For example, measures of biological traits such as pitch discrimination ability (of sound frequencies), among other such physical measures, have been found to have surprisingly high correlations with general intelligence. This may be the way of cognitive ability assessment in the future.
Rosner: You need experienced test-builders. You need a decent amount of people to norm the problems on, to make sure the problems can actually measure high-IQs. You need their other scores to see what scores getting those problems right correspond to.
As I said, you need some kind of widespread exposure. You have to let hundreds of thousands of people know that the test exists. Ideally, that it’s something fun and/or cool to do.
Another condition is that it would be really, really helpful if the test took less than 20 hours to take. It would be helpful if someonecould spend 20 hours or 10 hours on the test and score near the ceiling, which is not a common thing among these tests.
Cole: To avoid spoilage you need question schemas, not single questions. Then you need a way to automatically collect many samples. Presumably this would be on the Internet. A group of Mega members is working on this. Contact me if you’d like to help [Ed. chris@questrel.com.].
Jacobsen: What is the principal design of the Adaptive Test, inasmuch can be stated at this time? (Is this series the first announcement of the test, by the way?)
Cole: Cf www.mental-testing.com. There are some articles in Noesis. Let me check with the team.
Jacobsen: What other extraordinary high-I.Q. societies have been observed by you – the highest, most inclusive, most exclusive, the most multi-planetary, least reliant on D.N.A. prejudice, most non-carbon-based, und so weiter?
May: The Plurality IQ Society
Top 0.0000000000000000000000000 … % of Multiverse
Previously the highest-IQ group founded was the Aleph Society, which sought to have at most fewer than one member per Multiverse potentially qualifiable. However, the Aleph is found to be insufficiently selective in its admissions criteria for several reasons. First, it only considered 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time per universe. We feel that it is necessary to include all theoretically possible multiple dimensions of spaces and of times per universe of the Multiverse. (For multiple-time dimensions see, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_time_dimensions , https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.389 ,
https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/there-are-in-fact-2-dimensions-of-time-one-theoretical-ph ysicist-states/ )
Secondly, the Aleph only sought the highest IQ ‘individual’, including AIs, in the Multiverse ‘now’, i.e., at only one point in ‘time’ relative to one (1) observer, the Wormhole Officer (formerly called the Membership Officer). To remedy this we ‘now’ recognize that to whatever extent possible technologically, the Wormhole Officer must be a time traveler.
Thirdly, it is not sufficient that our psychometric instruments selecting at the Aleph level be culture free. Our IQ tests must also be genome free, i.e., free of any genetic influences upon performance. Speciesism is even more common than racism and gender-bias. We seek genetic justice in our member selection testing criteria. For example, in the past and even today, species with brains are unfairly advantaged over species without brains, including, of course, AIs. Why should an Isaac Newton have an IQ advantage over a slug, simply because a Newton has a brain? This obvious bias must be eliminated.
NB: All of the non-members of the Plurality IQ Society are Full Non-members and Official Non-members.
Jacobsen: What is the system of thought or the psychometric philosophy behind associative horizon?
Rosner: In my mind, when you get hit with a hard problem, one that might take more than ten hours to figure out. Part of it is how many different angles can you come up with on the problem. How many parts of life can you apply? How many possible analogies can you apply? How many keys are on your key ring to approach the problem?
When he talks about associative horizon, it is how many associations can you possibly come up with, with the symbols or whatever, that constitute the problem. To some extent, taking one of these high-range tests is profiling the author, trying to figure out, maybe, them, Hoeflin problems have a Hoeflin flavour to them, let you know if you are on the right track. Other test makers have flavours similar to them too.
It may be similar to their culture, say. The person building the problem found something in their world and boiled it down to an analogy. There is a popularish puzzle that is 7 d in a w.” You have to figure out what the “d” and the “w” are. It’s ‘days in a week.’ The problems can get tough. Another easy one. “5,280 f in an m,” ‘feet in a mile.’
So, “106 billion p who e l.” The “e” “l” is tough. You have to figure out. It is ‘people who ever lived.’ So, for a lot of IQ problems, they have at least some aspect of that. Decoding, figuring out what the symbols represent. Then it is an exercise in figuring out what could the “p” and the ‘p in e l’ stand for.
“6*10^23 As in an M.” My numbers might not be right. But ‘atoms in a mole,’ it is a test of cultural literacy. Often, there is further manipulation done to the symbols, so you have to work through two or three transformation or link two or three transformations to figure out the problem. It is how much cultural literacy do you have or do you give yourself, and then the flexibility for combining these things.
It is how much different stuff can you bring to bear on a fairly obscure or convoluted problem.
Jacobsen: How did you first come to find the Mega Test?
May: Actually I don’t remember. It was about 40 years ago. I probably met Ron Hoeflin through my membership in the Triple Nine Society. This was probably my initial connection to the Mega Test.
Rosner: Some guys in my dorm told me about the Mega. I must’ve already been IQ braggy. Yuck.
Cole: Saw it in Omni Magazine.
Jacobsen: What were the claims about the Mega Test – and your score(s) in each section on it – by Ronald Hoeflin, the media, and others?
May: Ron Hoeflin told me that I was the 2nd person to obtain a perfect score on the 24 verbal analogies, I believe. I think Marilyn Vos Savant was the first. I certainly didn’t tell many people, beyond my girl friend. I remember showing a copy of the Mega Test to one young woman, thinking she might be interested. She just laughed and laughed. Neil Blincom of Mr. Pecker’s original, illustrious National Enquirer tried to interview me once when I was Membership Officer of the Triple Nine Society. I pondered this offer deeply for a fraction of a second. I remembered Chris. (never forget the decimal point) Harding’s interview, “World’s Highest IQ Genius is an Unemployed Janitor” and decided not to be interviewed. I avoided the media.
Rosner: So, the claims were the Mega was the world’s hardest IQ test. By hardest, having the highest ceiling, the score a perfect score would get you, for instance. I think after the sixth norming, after Ron looked at 4,000 test submissions that came through Omni. I think the ceiling became 190 S.D. 16 or a little over 5.6 sigma. The first time I took it, I got a 44, which was 23 verbal problems right and 1 wrong and 21 math right and 3 wrong. I took it a second time and got a 47, which was 1 math wrong, I think. It doesn’t matter whether math or verbal; I got 1 wrong the second time.
What does that translate into for me, after the fourth or fifth norming, my 44 wasn’t high enough to get me into Mega. Marilyn herself turned me down for admission. My score might have corresponded to 172. Then after the sixth norming, after all these scores came in, I think a 44 got you a 180. I think the Mega cutoff is a 176. There you go. The 1-in-a-million level. Next question.
Cole: Omni called it the “world’s hardest IQ test.” Interpretation of scores can be found in Hoeflin’s normings.
Jacobsen: How does the internet complicate legitimate testing in the high-range?
May: The internet facilitates cheating on tests and meeting other cheaters to work with.
Rosner: The Mega came out in ’85. The Titan, the sequel to the Mega, came out in ’90. Most people got on the internet in the mid-to-late-‘90s. For those tests, it complicated and contaminated them because people went on message boards and threw answers around. Some of which were correct. That was problem one. Problem two was once Google came along; you could put in the words to the analogy and the fourth word would pop up. The analogies were half of the Titan and the Mega.
The 24 verbal problems were all analogies of the type “find the fourth word.” Most of those could be instantly solved using a decent search engine. Tests are different. The Cooijmans tests, which I consider the most challenging of the internet era tests can’t simply be solved by plugging things into a search engine. You still have to figure a lot of shit out. The most general issue with these tests and the internet is just sharing answers. Beyond that, it is a pain in the ass to make sure that the problems on the test can’t be solved through easy searches.
Chris (Cole) and his group of people, who are working on this test that are resistant to having answers shared, are working on tests that give each test-taker the same general problem, but the specifics of the problem are fresh. So, somebody else’s answer on this problem is not going to help you because, even though the problem should score the same – getting it right should reflect the same IQ level, you can’t just post what you got on answer 12. They’ve been working on that for well over a decade.
It’s coming along. Anyway, next question.
Cole: The Mega and Titan tests have been spoiled on the Web. The Power and Ultra tests are at risk.
Jacobsen: Some, in fact more than a few, claim extrapolations well beyond the norms of the mainstream tests, e.g., the WAIS and the SB, which cap out at or around 4-sigma. Assuming legitimacy of the claims, then, the individuals would be highly intelligent, but the claims can range between a little over 4-sigma to 6-sigma. How is this extrapolation generally seen within the high-I.Q. communities at the higher ranges?
May: I don’t know how other others generally perceive unsound or bogus extrapolations of IQ scores.
Rosner: I think the skepticism of super-high scores is generally more for specific claims than for the entire idea of being able to have an IQ that high. I think most people in the high-IQ community believe it is possible to have an IQ close to 200. But I think most people also have a reasonable idea of the rarity of scores like that. Adult IQs, the deviation scores, are based on a bell curve, where between 0 and 1 standard deviation, you have 34% of the population in a bell-shaped distribution for something like height. Between 1 and 2 SDs, you’ve got 14% of the population. Between 2 and 3, you’ve got about 1.5% of the population. Between 3 and 4, you’ve got roughly one-half percent of the population.
Let’s see, about 4 SDs, that’s only one person in 30,000 should score above 4 SDs. One person in 3,000,000 above 5 SDs. What is it? 1 person in 750,000,000 above 6 SD or so; somewhere, I’ve fucked it up, according to the standard bell curve. People also like to say that at the very far ends; there are more outliers than on the normal bell curve. That there are more high-IQs than would be given if it were a perfectly bell-shaped distribution.
But even so, you shouldn’t see more than a half-dozen or ten or twelve or whatever, people, with scores above 6 SDs. So, Paul Cooijmans has the Giga Society, which has 7 or 8 members. It is for people with IQs that are supposed to be one in a billion. So, there are 8 billion people on Earth, 8 members of the Giga Society, so that makes a certain sense, but not really. That’s as if everybody who could score at that level has taken one of his tests. That’s just obviously not true. So, way too many people scoring at the one in a billion level. It’s not like the Giga Society has 300 members.
Cooijmans is pretty rigorous in his norming and testing. So, if you have taken a Cooijmans test and scored at or close to the Giga Society, legitimately, Cooijmans has written in the past about people’s attempts to cheat on his tests, but I don’t think there has been a successful attempt in decades. So, people are pretty accepting that if you get a Giga level score on his tests; that you’re legitimately pretty smart. The claims of super high-IQs, there are legit claims based on performing well on ultra-high IQ tests or kicking ass as a kid on a test like the Stanford-Binet or the Wechsler. Someone can say, “As a kid, I scored a 200,” or something.
That’s another thing I won’t go into. People who claim high-IQ scores and are lying are generally not sophisticatedly lying. They’re saying something that cannot hold up at all. I don’t know if there are many or any sophisticated lies about having a super-high-IQ. So, then there are people outside the high-IQ community who are skeptical about the whole thing, but no one is really worried a lot about it, because: who gives a shit?
Also, if you want to say something, or know something that I’m not aware of, that contradicts what I’m saying, go ahead.
Cole: Hoeflin’s norms all involve some extrapolation. I find it reasonable up to the mega level (about 4.75 standard deviations).
Jacobsen: Following from the previous question, what seems like the motivation behind making claims well beyond the norms of the most used mainstream I.Q. tests?
May: It’s a shame Einstein did physics. He could have been on Facebook (now called Meta, I guess).
Rosner: Going off my own experience, I kind of felt like a loser based on when I was about 20. I’d fucked up a lot of opportunities for myself. Then somebody told me about the previous world’s hardest IQ test, which was a Kevin Langdon test. It ran in Omni or Games Magazine. I took it and scored 170. I went, ‘Wow, that’s a good score.’ When Mega came along, I took that. I liked that validation that it gave me. Even though, it is a ridiculous thing. I kind of feel like it might be analogous to a guy who can bench press 500 lbs.
It’s kind of a goofy thing. You wouldn’t tell that guy it is goofy to his face, but the Sven Magnason. He is 6’4” and weighs 310 lbs. and eats 200 grams of protein a day to get that or support that huge bench press and has hypertension and his joints will be fucked in 10 years. It’s a kind of a goofy thing. It is amazing the guy can bench 500 lbs. It is this ridiculous thing. It is a very obscure sport. Sven Magnason is not playing in the NFL for 1.8 million USD a year. He probably works in a warehouse and does strength training on the side.
It doesn’t translate into the kind of fame or success that you might want. So, it is a niche kind of sport.
Cole: Vanity is one motivation.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more egregious I.Q. claims in 20th century by groups and by individuals? This is a free forum.
May: In the 20th century — maybe being the smartest man in America was a fairly egregious claim. Top 1 per billion high-IQ societies may qualify if such came into existence in the 20th century.
Rosner: I don’t know. Anybody can go on the internet and type whatever they want. One of the craziest claims I saw I mentioned before. Somebody had a site or has a site claiming Jesus had an IQ of 300. The idea that somebody with the deep wisdom of Jesus meant Jesus had a huge IQ. His estimate based on nothing: If smartest people have an IQ of 200, then Jesus must have an IQ of 300. William Sidis, people claim 259 based on extreme achievements as a young person, at least it is based on his history and is a fairly earnest attempt to estimate a very smart young man’s IQ.
It is kind of egregious and not based on him being tested. Oh! Some of the most egregious are in the last 15 years; some insane moms, one mom out of Colorado, maybe 18 years ago, got a hold of the answer key to an earlier edition of the Stanford-Binet. Stanford-Binet gets revised every 15 or 20 years. I don’t know. You can still find psychologists who will give an earlier version. In the stacks of libraries. Probably, the Norlin Library at the University of Colorado, she found an earlier editions, found an answer key. Then taught her kid all the answers, so, that kid scored, at age 3 or 4, like a 10-year-old, which, the way they calculate childhood IQs, gave him an IQ well over 300. She tried to get herself and her kid famous off this.
It, eventually, fell apart because the kid did not have a 300 IQ. So, that is pretty egregious. But! Doable if you’re not an idiot about it, I believe. But anybody who would do it would be a kind of idiot. First of all, I don’t know. How much would a 4-year-old be into it? But if you took a 6-year-old and got a 6-year-old into it, “We’re going to ride this pony into a T.V. show, your acting career.” It has never happened, but it is not impossible. Because Alicia Witt was a child actor, an actor now. Great actor and great kid actor, one of the things that makes for a great kid actor is a 4-year-old who can read.
Because if you can give a 4-year-old – Alicia Witt could read at 3 – a script and the kid can read the script and memorize the script rather than having to be told shit line by line, and if the kid is smart enough to do that, then the kid is smart enough to take direction. Alicia Witt was at least a kid actor because she was super fucking smart. So, I’m thinking if you had a motivated 6-year-old and a creepy parent. I even started working on a screenplay on this or thought about it 30 years ago as a good plot. Like a lot of shit I do, I didn’t do anything with it, except the mom did it and a shitty job in real life.
The right combination of psychopathic parent and bright, motivated kid. That team could believably sustain the bullshit that that kid has an IQ of 300+ for quite a while. Although, nobody has done that. Yes, that would be egregious.
Cole: Before they were banned by Wikipedia, there were many articles by groups making incredible IQ claims.
Jacobsen: What seem like the big lessons in debunking phony I.Q. claims from the 20th century?
May: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard P. Feynman
Rosner: [Laughing] A lot of stuff underlying a lot about high-IQ is “Why?” Why claim to have a high-IQ? Why work your ass off to get a super high score on these tests? Why sweat debunking it? In retrospect, you can see why you might want to hold people who might claim super-high-IQs up to scrutiny, at least given Raniere. The NXVIM sex cult, swindler of the Bronfman’s who is in prison for life now. One of the pillars of his duping people was using a high score on the Mega Test to claim to be one of the smartest people on Earth, though he didn’t really push it.
Because once he gathered enough acolytes, I don’t know enough about him to know how often he dragged out his IQ. But it seems that once he was surrounded by dozens of followers; that he didn’t need to do that. He could rely on his charisma and manipulation skills, and also being at the top of a pyramid of people with good manipulation skills. He was smart enough to recruit charismatic actors, TV stars. A couple actors from Smallville. People with actual show biz careers. One of his selling points and one of the selling points of Scientology can help you succeed professionally in shit where what it takes to succeed, like acting, can seem nebulous.
So, he didn’t need to haul out his IQ a lot because he was surrounded by TV stars who were helping him recruit other people into his cult. He, certainly, deserved a lot of scrutiny, perhaps a lot sooner than he got the scrutiny. There’s another guy who is pretty culty who has a bunch of acolytes who espoused a bunch of scary shit. So, that’s one reason to scrutinize claims of super-high-IQ because people can be up to no good, but those people are fairly rare. Of the 60, 80, 100, people who have qualified for the Mega Society over the past 40 years, 95 or more percent of them are completely normal, undangerous people.
The biggest danger might be that they might be really funny, like Richard May, is a completely decent guy who happens to be extra smart and extra funny. Super-high-IQ people mostly aren’t to be feared. What were we talking about? I always talk myself way away from the question. [Ed. Question repeated.] That, I guess, let the babies have their bottles for the most part, let high-IQ people be high-IQ people, it doesn’t hurt anyone, except for a few cases. Those involved in IQ fraud, the fraud is pretty transparent.
Most of the high-IQ lying is some desperate asshole who is 25 and going to undergraduate parties at his school. That guy finds a freshman girl and says, “Oh, people don’t understand me. I have a 205 IQ. I graduated high school at age 5.” It’s that abject bullshit. There are more sophisticated attempts, but not that much more. Because the payoffs are pretty low. Even lower than getting a hand job from a freshman girl, the end.
Cole: “It’s hard to be right.” — Richard Feynman
Footnotes
[1] Richard May (“May-Tzu”/“MayTzu”/“Mayzi”) is a Member of the Mega Society based on a qualifying score on the Mega Test (before 1995) prior to the compromise of the Mega Test and Co-Editor of Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society. In self-description, May states: “Not even forgotten in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), I’m an Amish yuppie, born near the rarified regions of Laputa, then and often, above suburban Boston. I’ve done occasional consulting and frequent Sisyphean shlepping. Kafka and Munch have been my therapists and allies. Occasionally I’ve strived to descend from the mists to attain the mythic orientation known as having one’s feet upon the Earth. An ailurophile and a cerebrotonic ectomorph, I write for beings which do not, and never will, exist — writings for no one. I’ve been awarded an M.A. degree, mirabile dictu, in the humanities/philosophy, and U.S. patent for a board game of possible interest to extraterrestrials. I’m a member of the Mega Society, the Omega Society and formerly of Mensa. I’m the founder of the Exa Society, the transfinite Aleph-3 Society and of the renowned Laputans Manqué. I’m a biographee in Who’s Who in the Brane World. My interests include the realization of the idea of humans as incomplete beings with the capacity to complete their own evolution by effecting a change in their being and consciousness. In a moment of presence to myself in inner silence, when I see Richard May’s non-being, ‘I’ am. You can meet me if you go to an empty room.” Some other resources include Stains Upon the Silence: something for no one, McGinnis Genealogy of Crown Point, New York: Hiram Porter McGinnis, Swines List, Solipsist Soliloquies, Board Game, Lulu blog, Memoir of a Non-Irish Non-Jew, and May-Tzu’s posterous.
[2] According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
[3] Chris Cole is a longstanding member of the Mega Society.
[4] Individual Publication Date: April 1, 2022: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/debunking-2; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2022: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA): Jacobsen S. Debunking I.Q. Claims Discussion with Chris Cole, Richard May, and Rick Rosner: Member, Mega Society; Co-Editor, “Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society”; Member, Mega Society (2)[Online]. April 2022; 29(D). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/debunking-2.
American Psychological Association (APA, 6th Edition, 2010): Jacobsen, S.D. (2022, April 1). Debunking I.Q. Claims Discussion with Chris Cole, Richard May, and Rick Rosner: Member, Mega Society; Co-Editor, “Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society”; Member, Mega Society (2). Retrieved from http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/debunking-2.
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Debunking I.Q. Claims Discussion with Chris Cole, Richard May, and Rick Rosner: Member, Mega Society; Co-Editor, “Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society”; Member, Mega Society (2). In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. 29.D, April. 2022. <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/debunking-2>.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (16th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2022. “Debunking I.Q. Claims Discussion with Chris Cole, Richard May, and Rick Rosner: Member, Mega Society; Co-Editor, “Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society”; Member, Mega Society (2).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. 29.D. http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/debunking-2.
Chicago/Turabian, Humanities (16th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott “Debunking I.Q. Claims Discussion with Chris Cole, Richard May, and Rick Rosner: Member, Mega Society; Co-Editor, “Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society”; Member, Mega Society (2).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. 29.D (April 2022). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/debunking-2.
Harvard: Jacobsen, S. 2022, ‘Debunking I.Q. Claims Discussion with Chris Cole, Richard May, and Rick Rosner: Member, Mega Society; Co-Editor, “Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society”; Member, Mega Society (2)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 29.D. Available from: <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/debunking-2>.
Harvard, Australian: Jacobsen, S. 2022, ‘Debunking I.Q. Claims Discussion with Chris Cole, Richard May, and Rick Rosner: Member, Mega Society; Co-Editor, “Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society”; Member, Mega Society (2)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 29.D., http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/debunking-2.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 7th Edition, 2009): Scott D. Jacobsen. “Debunking I.Q. Claims Discussion with Chris Cole, Richard May, and Rick Rosner: Member, Mega Society; Co-Editor, “Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society”; Member, Mega Society (2).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 29.D (2022): April. 2022. Web. <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/debunking-2>.
Vancouver/ICMJE: Jacobsen S. Debunking I.Q. Claims Discussion with Chris Cole, Richard May, and Rick Rosner: Member, Mega Society; Co-Editor, “Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society”; Member, Mega Society (2)[Internet]. (2022, April 29(D). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/debunking-2.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012–Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, and In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and can disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/14
Dr. Sven van de Wetering has just stepped down as head of psychology at the University of the Fraser Valley and is a now an associate professor in the same department. He is on the Advisory Board of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. Dr. van de Wetering earned his BSc in Biology at The University of British Columbia, and Bachelors of Arts in Psychology at Concordia University, Master of Arts, and Ph.D. in Psychology from Simon Fraser University. His research interest lies in “conservation psychology, lay conceptions of evil, relationships between personality variables and political attitudes.” Here we discuss his background and views, part 1.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Where did you acquire your education?
I did my education all over. I went to grade school at various schools in Powell River, Greater Vancouver, and Calgary, including three alternative schools: the Oxford House of Knowledge (an extremely unpretentious place that happened to be on Oxford Street), the Ideal School (which didn’t quite live up to its name but was a big step up from conventional schools), and, in Calgary, the Alternative High School.
I received a B.Sc. in biology at UBC in 1983. Then, after some years of drift, I went back to school in 1988 and studied psychology at Concordia University in Montreal (though I spent a visiting year at Albert Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg, Germany), got my B.A. in psychology in 1992, then spent the next ten years doing my graduate work at SFU.
Jacobsen: Why did you pursue that field of study? How did psychology interest to you?
I originally intended to be a clinician. I was working in a home for the mentally handicapped in 1988, and was quite burned out, but thought the work was important and wanted to pursue it at a higher level. I thought clinical psychology was the field for me. Of course, that didn’t quite work out.
Jacobsen: What topics have you researched in your career?
I have researched only a restricted range of topics in my empirical research career. As an undergraduate, I was looking at belief in the paranormal. As a masters student I tried to develop a relatively nonreactive measure of prejudice, then as a doctoral student, I stayed in the area of prejudice, but tried to study whether people use gossip as a technique to incite prejudice in others. Once I started teaching full time, I could only do one project a year, but have looked at things like beliefs about the nature of evil, predictors of people’s car purchase decisions (this was in an environmental context), a couple of studies on system justification theory. My last several studies have had a very striking tendency to produce null results.
Jacobsen: What areas are you currently researching?
If I can ever get it up and running, I hope to conduct a study on the relationship between narcissism and political attitudes. It’ll be a correlational study, and I’ll probably toss in a whole bunch of variables in the hopes of finding something.
Jacobsen: How do you engage in research? What methodologies do you employ?
My methodology tends to be very straightforward, either simple correlational studies or experimental studies with just one or two variables manipulated. Most of the time this is done using simple paper-and-pencil measures, but sometimes I’ll do something a little fancier in an attempt to assess implicit cognition.
Jacobsen: Within the field of psychology, what do you consider the most controversial topics? How do you examine the debates pertaining to these topics?
If one takes “controversial” to mean that everyone has a very strong opinion about the issue, and the opinions aren’t all the same, I would have to say that number one is still the status of psychoanalysis. A determined minority of psychologists still considers Freud half a step below God, a majority seem to think of him as some deluded anti-empirical megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur and no data, and not many psychologists sit on the fence about this. I may be one of them, though. The number of issues on which Freud may have been right is slowly growing in my mind, and I’m not quite as ready to dismiss him as I once was. To be honest, I barely examine this issue at all, though. Just in a few isolated moments, I think “Hey! Freud may be right about that!”
Another debate of the same ilk concerns the status of evolutionary thinking in psychology. Relatively few academic psychologists actually deny that human evolution has occurred. The issue is more whether the fact of our having evolved actually furnishes significant insights into current human psychology. This is a thorny issue that I do have to deal with on a fairly regular basis, and I must confess that my strategy here is to read the arguments on both sides, and then come to an informed decision based largely on intuition.
The most troubling argument I have heard goes something like this: “Evolutionary psychology promotes patriarchy.” I don’t think it does; at least, there are a number of feminist evolutionary psychologists out there, one of whom I know personally. Furthermore, having taught evolutionary psychology, I’ve gotten the impression that there is almost no other point of view so very good at making a lot of typical male dominance behaviors look completely ridiculous. Nevertheless, I must admit that, when I go to evolutionary psychology conferences, I do get the impression that the typical evolutionary psychologist is somewhat to the political right of the typical non-evolutionary psychologist.
What disturbs me about the argument though, is the idea that an idea should be suppressed if it has negative consequences, even if it happens to be true. I feel ambivalent about this idea but tend to think that suppressing potentially true ideas is, if not always wrong, at least almost always wrong. The quest for truth is what got me into academic life in the first place, and I find the idea that we should hide the truth distasteful and potentially destructive.
A third controversy that doesn’t so much play out within psychology but instead between psychologists and other fields in the humanities and social sciences is whether there is such a thing as human nature at all. Most psychologists who are not behaviorists will answer this in the affirmative, but some learning theorists and many anthropologists and sociologists will contend that human behavior is almost infinitely plastic and that those who seek to find an enduring core to human nature will find nothing but sand. Given the large number of cross-cultural universals we have found that also seem to be thoroughly anchored in individual human development, I find the idea of an infinitely plastic human nature odd and contrary to all evidence I am aware of. This is not a dispute I spend a lot of time on; I’ve never yet heard a decent argument from the infinite plasticity camp, and so I consider it a big waste of time.
Please note that I am not contending that there is no plasticity; clearly, there is. Learning takes place, cultures differ, and the brain rewires itself under certain circumstances. My objection is only to the idea that these processes are so all-encompassing that there is no longer an unchanging core that is resistant to these processes.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/14
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Where did you acquire your education? How did you become interested in Psychology?
Betty Rideout: My first two years were completed at Kwantlen, back when Kwantlen first separated from Douglas college and was a series of trailers on 140th street. I was a mature student (relatively speaking) and wanted a way out of the boring job I was in. From Kwantlen, I went onto UBC to complete my BA in Psychology (was tied for the governor’s general award at Kwantlen, GPA) but lost the award to another student because a few of my courses I had completed were taken at Cap College.
At UBC I went on to complete an MA in Counselling Psychology, and I recently completed a Ph.D. through an interdisciplinary faculty in education, the Centre for Cross Faculty Inquiry, which was a more sensible choice for me than a Ph.D. in Counselling Psychology since my research interests had long since strayed from psychotherapy. My advisor thought was the same advisor for my Ph.D. as was for my MA, from Counselling Psychology.
Jacobsen: What topics have you researched in your career?
Rideout: My Master’s degree looked at the influence of divorce on adolescents – this was in the 1980’s and there actually wasn’t a lot of research at the time on that topic.
Jacobsen: You recently earned your Ph.D. What did you research? How do the results extend into larger society?
Rideout: My research looked at how young adults who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, assess and critically reflect upon their spiritual beliefs. The research questions were twofold: what were young adults’ beliefs, and secondly, how did they critically reflect upon them. The second research question utilized King and Kitchener’s reflective judgment model to interpret and assess participants’ beliefs.
How do the results extend into the larger society? We found that participants scored at about the norm for their age and education level, but having said that, were alarmed at how participants’ beliefs seemed tentative and were not grounded into their personal philosophies.
Hanan Alexander (2002) points out that “today’s spiritual seekers experience their moral intuitions as fragmented and ungrounded” (p. x) and comments that part of a spiritual exploration is asking big questions, the meaning of life questions, the type of questions that typically include pondering the nature of goodness.
These sorts of questions, and the answers we decide for ourselves seem particularly relevant for young adults since one’s idea of the nature of goodness can guide both their career and relationship choices.
It’s possible then that the kind of spiritual seeking that appears to be so common these days, without some type of intellectual support, inquiry, etc. may be one piece that contributes to the higher rate of depression and anxiety that we see in young adults today.
There’s no doubt that institutional religion is no longer a source of undisputed guidance and meaning, more and more people tend to pick and choose their favourite religious pieces, but how effectively can we integrate those pieces into a larger personal philosophy that coheres, has integrity and can provide an authentic source of guidance for ourselves?
Jacobsen: Other than the social domain, where would you like to take your research?
Rideout: Well, I suppose the main thrust of my research is that I hope individuals will entertain the idea that one’s epistemological stance bears examination, and that the ideas and personal philosophies we hold outside of the academic world warrant just as much critical examination of the topics we prepare for in an examination.
Maybe even more, because, if spiritual beliefs tend to include a notion of what is best, then this is a foundational belief that can only benefit from close scrutiny in order to make that belief a lived experience.
Jacobsen: What do you consider the most controversial research in psychology? How do you examine this research?
Rideout: In Psychology, hmm – I think actually I’d point to work in Philosophy and its influence on Psychology as a more significant source of controversy, particularly the work of post-modern theorists such as Foucault and Derrida.
They’re changing the nature of language and core social concepts – and that’s powerfully influential. Foucault argued that the Social Sciences were the most influential academic area because it is the Social Sciences that produce and institute our cultural ideals, for better or for worse.
Jacobsen: How have your philosophical views changed over time – in and out of psychology?
Rideout: I’ve changed from a simple naïve realist to someone who is much more open to ontological possibilities I would never have considered in my thirties. I remain convinced that the method of science is the most powerful epistemological tool available to us but wonder whether this method may evolve as well, and sometimes ponder whether there are possible realities that the human mind simply has yet to evolve the capacity to comprehend.
I’m also interested in Jonathan Haidt’s (2012) research – who points out that Psychology has solidly been influenced by a rationalist perspective from the time of Plato on – there is a direct line of influence to Piaget and Kohlberg. He argues that so much of human processing is non-rational – and we rationalists overlook this at our peril. My research falls squarely into a rationalist perspective; King and Kitchener were influenced by William Perry, who was influenced by Kohlberg, who was influenced by Piaget. There are researchers who propose a personal epistemology that is more embodied, intuitive, and perhaps I’ve overlooked the importance of this given my rationalist bias.
Jacobsen: What advice would you give to undergraduate and graduate students aiming for a career in psychology?
Rideout: Consider what your specific goal is, and if it includes working as a psychotherapist, make sure that you have had lots of opportunities to work in that kind of capacity before you commit. Not everyone is ideally suited to working with other people’s painful experiences, and psychological change is a slow process, successes are measured out in teaspoons.
Jacobsen: What books, article, and/or people have most influenced your intellectual development?
Rideout: I quite admire Jonathan Haidt – his book The Righteous Mind (2012) is a timely read given the polarization politically that is so dominant these days.
I admire Charles Taylor’s scholarship and ability to integrate diverse perspectives: A Secular Age (2007) and Sources of the Self (1989).
Foucault’s Madness and Civilization
Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo: The Future of Religion, argue a kind of post-modern update of religion, their ideas were brand new for me.
I still like Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents
Jacobsen: What do you consider the take-home message of your research?
Rideout: Know thyself? Perhaps not in the true Platonic tradition, but at least Jungian, and while we are blessed to live in multicultural times where the internet exposes us to lots of different perspectives, whatever ideals we choose we need to make our own, and that’s best achieved through the hard work of critical inquiry as well ensuring that our beliefs also become our lived experience.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/14
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I wanted to interview you because you’re a colleague. I haven’t set aside enough time to interact with you, so here’s my lucky break! Also, you mentioned having a different view, potentially, than the general “ethos” of The Good Men Project. How might your views differ, socially and politically?
Helen Pluckrose: Hi! Nice to chat with you. I am not sure of the extent to which my views differ from the general ethos of The Good Men Project but have caught pieces every now and then which seem to share talking points I have concerns about within intersectional feminism.
For example, a look at trending articles right now reveals ‘Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person’ and ‘Confessions of a Privileged White Male and Former Conservative.’
I am skeptical of approaches to social justice which focus on systems of privilege favoring dominant groups rather than prejudice and discrimination affecting minorities. This is often regarded as a kind of ‘original sin’ based on identity and used to perpetuate the root problem of prejudice and discrimination: judging people by their gender, race or sexuality rather than their values and behavior.
It shifts the focus to the groups least affected by prejudice and regards their greater access to rights and opportunities as an unjust privilege rather than focusing on groups which are disadvantaged and regarding this as a denial of basic equality needing to be fixed. As a universal liberal and humanist, I see more worth in focusing attention and compassion on those who are disadvantaged than shame and censure on those who are not.
I also find the systems of privilege approach to be reductionist and require many generalisations and forcing people into categories. Although the concept of intersectionality intended to overcome such reductionism and show that oppression can be complex and multi-faceted, in practice it often doesn’t because it neglects class unless accompanied by another form of marginalised identity and assumes that men are consistently privileged over women in a way that can only be supported by reading society through an ideological lens and applying much confirmation bias.
I support efforts to address areas in which men are disadvantaged – the right to genital integrity, unequal custody norms, unequal sentencing, neglect of provision for male victims of violence and a failure to address gender gaps in education, homelessness and suicide – but find that the men’s rights’ activism can also be highly biased and ideological.
I favor an approach to thinking about ethics in the realm of gender which is strongly humanist and liberal, and which values men and women as humans, as equals and as men and women facing different challenges due to biological and cultural differences.
Jacobsen: What are some important messages that those in The Good Men Project may not necessarily take into full account when considering their own political and social views, as someone with a degree of objectivity looking from the outside in? I am fascinated to know because I wouldn’t necessarily know as I am in the ‘water’ so to speak.
Pluckrose: I wouldn’t like to generalize as you have so many writers and they surely have a range of views. I recognize that The Good Men Project is neither men’s rights’ activism nor feminism but an exploration by men of the experience of being a man and trying to be a good one in the 21st-century society. I think free-ranging discussion of how to be a good man is a great idea in the same way as discussion of how to be a good woman would be because, although it is most important to be a good person, men and women are not identical physically, cognitively or psychologically and they do not face identical challenges in society.
I would simply hope that the overall ethos would be positive about the inherent worth of men, their contributions to society and the nature of masculinity.
I may be biased by my close connection with feminism but my experience of liberals addressing the topic of masculinity or manhood in an ethical sense is that too many see it as a problem to be fixed or restrained or detoxified.
They also tend to look at it in a way which centers men’s relationships with women rather than men’s own needs and experiences due to a feeling that these have been centered for too long which I’m not sure is true. Of course, this need not be the case at all.
Explorations of what it is to be a good man can be done unapologetically in a positive and practical way which does not devolve into the pathologisation of masculinity. It need not neglect to appreciate the positive qualities more typical of the male psychology nor prize them above those more typical of the female.
Also among the currently trending articles of The Good Men Project are ‘Why Does Stress Cause More Depression in Men Than in Women?’ and ‘Nobody Gets to Tell My Sons What It Means to Be a Man’ which I found to be both male-centred and positive.
Jacobsen: What are your favorite topics to write on? Can you link to some examples?
Pluckrose: Academically, I write mostly about late medieval and early modern religious writing by and for women. I am interested in the way that women negotiated authority and autonomy for themselves using religion within patriarchal societies which denied them both.
My popular writing on contemporary issues have included advocacy of secularism and skepticism, critiques of postmodernism and intersectional feminism, dissections of common flaws of critical thinking and analyses of how to fix the problems within the political left and thus strengthen it. The common thread linking these is my interest in ideology and the ways that people think and have thought, particularly on the subjects of religion and gender.
Jacobsen: We both contribute to Conatus News. What seems like its core message to you? Why did you start writing for them? How did you find them?
Pluckrose: I like Conatus News because of its positioning within the political sphere. With its core definition of ‘progressive’ and its commitment to secularism and human rights and its opposition to regressive, identitarian, postmodern politics, it is open to contributions from everyone from liberal centrists, liberal lefties, libertarian lefties, radical lefties, socialists, radical feminists and centre-rightists with liberal aims. This gives it both coherence and diversity within a leftist, progressive ethos quite different to the culturally-relative postmodern left. As a liberal centre-leftie, non-feminist supporter of gender equality who favours a mixed economy, I have strong differences with the radical writers, both feminist and economic but we tolerate these differences well and still find common cause where we can.
Outside of Conatus News, my readers are often centrists and much of my writing focuses on the problems within the left that I want to fix, so it is valuable to have a platform which appeals mostly to leftists. I found Conatus when Terry Murray, the feminist writer contacted me to invite me to the ‘Defending Progressivism’ conference, for which I am very grateful.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion based on the conversation today?
Pluckrose: No, I don’t think so. I will certainly pay more attention to the output of The Good Men Project, though.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Helen.
Pluckrose: Thank you, Scott.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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The Single Mother’s Alliance of British Columbia (SMA) has taken their fight for women’s rights to the United Nations. Viveca Ellis, a single mother from Vancouver, British Columbia, said, “We can’t sell ourselves short: we can’t settle for anything less than the realization of our full human rights, as women and people.” An important call for one marginalized population, single mothers. They have the tremendous responsibility of the upbringing of the next generation of children.
Ellis, also a mother of a 7-year-old boy, founded the Single Mother’s Alliance of British Columbia. The SMA devotes grassroots, non-profit efforts and resources to community building, leadership, and advocacy for single mothers in British Columbia. In short, it is a women’s collective for the needs of single mothers in British Columbia.
Of the single mothers in BC, one out of two raises the single parent family in poverty. Women as single mothers in poverty translate into children in poverty. Children in poverty mean lowered life expectations, outcomes, and prospects. In general, the issues faced by single mothers are noted in a December 2008, paper entitled Precarious and Vulnerable: Lone Mothers on Income Assistance. It describes the insecurity and vulnerability of single mothers.
On the one hand, as a society, we have concerns about single parent households having one source of income. Two incomes tend to make financial life easier. As well, there is only one person for child care and house chores. On the other hand, we have concerns about the lower pay single mothers receive. As well, the fact that many of them require income assistance. Together, this creates problems for the livelihoods and well-being of mothers and their children. The single mothers’ situations come with the additional problem of a difficult ex-partner, possibly with substance abuse or domestic abuse issues in the past. Devastation can ensue.
SMA works to alleviate some of these difficulties through ground-up group planning and implementation. To guide them, the SMA developed and works from the Three Point Mandate:
To build community among the family class of single mothers…
To provide educational opportunities and tools for single mothers to a) gain empowerment, and b) develop leadership skills which strengthens both our individual and collective capacity to participate in public policy-making that impacts our lives, and those of their children…
To advocate for the rights of single mothers and their children to live lives free of poverty and discrimination.
Indeed, to me these seem like noble aims and initiatives for women raising children in difficult circumstances (similar arguments apply to the minority single parent sub-population known as single fathers). However, they might need assistance to achieve these goals. That is, the strength of grassroots and nonprofit organizations can weaken without national or international legitimation, recognition, and support.
Recently, there were months of testimonies at the United Nations on the struggles of single mothers. The issues raised at the United Nations related to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which is intended to reaffirm fundamental human rights and the equality of rights between women and men.
The BC CEDAW Group submitted to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women with the combined 8th and 9th periodic reports from Canada in the 65th session of the committee. The BC CEDAW Group included other organizations such as the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC, Hospital Employees’ Union, Justice for Girls, Poverty and Human Rights Centre, Vancouver Committee for Domestic Workers and Caregivers Rights, Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, West Coast LEAF-Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, Single Mothers’ Alliance of BC, and Vancouver Women’s Health Collective.
They recognized in the periodic review the failure of BC to comply with CEDAW, the “42,236 single mothers on welfare in a prosperous province” (August, 2016), the almost decade long stall in welfare rate raises (since 2007), the fact that over 90% of single parents are single mothers (July, 2016), and more than half of poverty-stricken children are raised by single parents (in BC). They also recognized that single mothers in BC with kids below the age of 18 have the highest food insecurity rate (34.3%) and there are intersectional disadvantages for Indigenous and immigrant single mothers, and there is a “crisis due to lack of affordable childcare, access to justice, inadequate responses to violence against women, and lack of access to education for those accessing welfare.”
Through the Canadian periodic review, the BC CEDAW Group recommended the following (among many others):
BC to raise welfare rates and restore access to education for all accessing welfare.
Enact a comprehensive poverty reduction plan within a gender based analysis with special temporary measures and targets to eliminate women’s poverty in BC
British Columbia adopts and implements the $10 a Day Child Care Plan over ten years.
Province to introduce proactive pay equity legislation requiring both public and private sector employers to ensure women equal pay for work of equal value.
BC to reinstate the BC Human Rights Commission; provide adequate funding for poverty and family law legal aid and raise financial thresholds for qualification.
BC to develop an effective provincial anti-violence plan to address economic and social policy failures that make women unable to escape violence.
With the tremendous difficulties faced by single mothers, there are hardships and heartbreak felt with the living observation of one’s own child disadvantaged by disproportionate poor life circumstances. At a minimum, the province and nation can commit to the acknowledgment, in policy and practice, of the troubles faced by the single mother subpopulation in British Columbia. They can do this through the support of the international obligations that this nation, and therefore province, remain obligated to; I suspect Ellis and others would agree.
* All views expressed in this blog post belong to the author and doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of CYH.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/13
In this post, youth blogger Scott interviews Afifa Hashimi, Check Your Head’s current blog coordinator. Afifa has been volunteering with CYH since 2015.
How did you get involved in youth activism?
My interest in social justice grew in my last few years of high school when I started paying more attention to politics and reading about injustice and oppression worldwide.
I was a part of a local Boys & Girls Club Youth Council, where I worked on an inclusion project, but I didn’t really engage in activism until I came to university.
That’s when I got involved in the Simon Fraser Public Research Interest Group (SFPIRG). It’s an awesome student-funded and directed non-profit organization at SFU, which focuses on social and environmental justice. My experience as part of the SFPIRG Street Team was really amazing. It motivated me to get involved in more initiatives.
How did you find us at Check Your Head (CYH)?
In the summer of 2015, I was searching for more social justice volunteer opportunities and I came across a page on the CYH website encouraging youth to apply to become workshop facilitators.
I was really excited to discover a local organization with values that mirror my own and I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to combine my passion for anti-oppression work and my interest in working with young people.
What tasks and responsibilities come along with your position at CYH?
As blog coordinator, I’m responsible for enlisting youth to be volunteer writers for CYH’s blog. I also offer support to the bloggers through the various stages of the writing and editing process, and I post their submissions.
What is the content and purpose of the written work through CYH – by others and yourself?
I think that the blog offers youth an opportunity to showcase their perspectives on important issues. It gives them a chance to research and write about causes they’re passion about. The content encourages critical thinking and inspires engagement with the issues discussed.
It’s a great space for youth to read the work of other young people and expand their knowledge of the various topics that the blog posts cover.
It has been a valuable experience for me, personally. I’ve learned a lot.
What is your post-secondary education in?
I’m currently in the last semester of my Honours Political Science BA with an English minor, and I plan to start law school this fall. My academic focus areas include international politics, oppression and resistance, and feminist political thought.
For my honours research project, I’m studying the effects of women’s participation in civil society on women’s rights across countries.
Did your post-secondary education assist in writing your own work and editing others’ work for the blog?
Yes, my English minor has improved my writing and editing skills. My interest areas in political science have also been relevant to my work at CYH. My education continues to add to my base of knowledge of important issues. It encourages me to analyze oppressive power structures, which helps me to think critically and creatively about anti-oppression work.
Along with my community involvement, my classes encourage me to keep up to date on political news and events related to things like social, environmental, and economic justice. This makes me better equipped to suggest timely topics and offer relevant resources to bloggers.
What are some impacts you have seen in BC from the work of CYH – at all levels?
One thing I can speak to is the impact of the youth workshops. The workshops create a space for young people to explore topics that they may not have had a chance to directly engage with in school or in other settings.
Some participants share comments on their own experiences. They make links between those experiences and broader societal forces that shape those experiences, which we address in the workshops.
For some participants, this may be the first time that they are consciously making these links. It’s great to see youth thinking critically. I felt that I could see the positive impact of the workshops when they’d say things like, “Wow, I never thought about it like that before!”
Also, the projects like CYH’s Democracy Check campaign have also had a significant impact. Although I was not involved in that campaign, I was involved in other non-partisan youth initiatives during the last federal election and I kept up with this campaign’s significant work. I think it definitely contributed to an increase in youth interest and involvement during the election.
Where do you hope CYH goes into the future?
I think the organization has a really important role to play in the education and engagement of youth. I hope CYH keeps facilitating workshops for youth and introduces new workshops to cover even more topics, maybe even expanding workshops or adapting them for even younger youth.
I’d also love to see CYH expand and take on more projects such as the current Inclusion and Anti-Racism project. One of my best friends, Rowena, is involved in that project, and from what I’ve heard it sounds awesome.https://in-sightjournal.com/in-sight-people/, http://checkyourhead.org/people/inclusionproject/, https://storify.com/check_your_head/democracy-check, http://www.sfpirg.ca/
Thank you for your time, Afifa.
* All views expressed in this interview belong to the interviewee and don’t necessarily reflect the views of CYH.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/13
Zachary R.W. Johnson and I are the principal officers of the BC Progressive Party. Here we write about activism.
All change comes from individual citizens through collective action. Whether an individual conscience is sparked by an event or personal experience, or groups of citizens have become or remain impacted by an event or experience, individuals and groups come together, organize, strategize, and protest for change in their own lives, lives of their neighbors, and their communities.
Political activism remains the same. The nuances are different. Though the tools and outcomes may differ, the emotional motivations are the same: the need to make positive change within the current political framework. For many others, of course, the point is to make a change outside of the present political structures of power because of the felt disenchantment with the political system. Different methodologies, frameworks/structures, and general considerations are dependent on the individual and the collective. Occasionally, as in the Arab Spring, governments can be overthrown, which can, unfortunately, be bloody.
In certain nations such as North American and Western European countries, characterized by advanced technological infrastructure and well-functioning economies and a high standard of living, with the fundamental needs of the majority of the citizenry met – needs such as food, water, shelter, civic life, civil society, amicable social relations, international respect, and a constitution, especially in contrast to international standards – the political activism takes different masks.
In particular, Canada seems like one of the more economically developed nations to us. It seems to have the aforementioned foundations. What does political activism look like in this province, in British Columbia?
Political activism in general and in an economically developed country, more often than not, remains the same as that in less wealthy democracies with the ability to vote. No individual’s vote counts more than another in a functional democracy.
Beyond that, the next stage of political activism includes the electronic or physical forms of education. Political activists can become active in respectable online forums, or other public forums designed for the furtherance of debate, dialogue, and discourse such as town halls. These each have pluses and minuses with the latter’s advantage in in-person meetings and planning and the former in rapidity of communication between members. Through education of others and oneself through respectful dialogue, and even heated debate, individuals can become active in collectives devoted to particular causes of personal importance.
The most active members in political activist movements will write, teach, lecture, march, boycott, and protest with blockades (sometimes with their bodies). Political activism has numerous facets.
There are many difficulties to overcome when it comes to being politically active within one’s community. Perhaps, one of the larger hurdles for an inspired individual is deciding on one of the many channels available to them. Whether it be through more formal means like aiding local politicians such as your local Member of Parliament (where the foundations for political activism already exist), or somewhat informal means like starting a local club, event or group based on one’s own values. If someone seeks to be politically active through present structures like the office of a local politician, the biggest challenge is finding ways to utilize your skills to the various causes that one as an individual supports.
If an individual or a small group is taking on the challenge of being politically active for a valued cause, the most difficult barrier to overcome is proving the worthiness of the cause to others. If other people are uninterested or disengaged, then such a cause will remain stagnant.
Some specific forms of political activism experienced by Zach have been the formation of a provincial political party, ProBC, devoted to progressive values. It comes with difficulties in terms of translating values into practice.
In particular, the organization of individual members and the coordination of meetings that everyone can agree upon can be difficult because many people living in B.C. have busy lives and may not have the ability to find the time for political activism through working with a provincial political party.
Even taking into account the challenges that those involved in elections, Town Halls, online fora, group and organization formation, and protests and demonstrations encounter, the many benefits that come from political activism can make it worthwhile.
The stresses that political engagement puts on the infrastructure and organization of society, including provincial culture, can effectuate that desired change to make for a province, and even Canadian society, desirable to sectors of citizens.
Most activism involves piecemeal reform and change because most adaptations to the changes in communities require minimal effort or simple recourse to legal and social structures in place. To observe real world changes over time remains a true privilege. One can influence the future landscape of life for oneself, one’s community, and the upcoming cohorts.
Indeed, political activism remains purpose for and devoted to positive impacts in communities. The greatest benefit is implied with all working together for communal change, in harmony.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Zachary R.W. Johnson
* All views expressed in this blog post belong to the authors and don’t necessarily reflect the views of CYH.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/12
Sharnelle Jenkins-Thompson, whose passion for social justice began at the age of ten, is a board member at Check Your Head. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Work from the University of British Columbia.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you become involved in youth activism in general?
Sharnelle Jenkins-Thompson: I became involved in activism from a fairly young age, for my 11th birthday my mum gave me a book that chronicled actions of activists and it had lots of stories on the “Battle of Seattle.” So I think you can kind of get the sense my mum was instilling a strong sense of scrappiness that shaped my experiences growing up. We were very poor but from a young age I started to see that my family hadn’t failed or done something wrong but we were fighting something unfair. So I took on a lot of causes and issues in my preteen and teen years and strongly identified with any anti-authoritarian figures that so many teens like (so a lot of really bad punk music, as well as some real great punk music). I also really feel my connection to my ancestors; both my Mum’s immigrant and my Dad’s indigenous relations have helped guide me to where I am today.
What is the importance of youth activism to individuals in a community?
There are still many meetings I attend where I am easily the youngest person in the room on issues that drastically impact youth and young families, like anti-poverty work, early childhood work (which is so foundational if we are wanting to move towards a harm reduction society), policy issues, etc. For me, it highlights ways that social justice movements are so fractured and inaccessible to folks often most impacted by these issues. Having any sort of activism that is not intergenerational raises issues of sustainability, inclusion, power imbalances, etc. We need youth in decision-making roles and youth using their skills, knowledge, relationships and creating space for youth to be innovative, critical and take risks in different movements.
You are one of the board co-chairs for Check Your Head. What tasks and responsibilities come with this position?
Being on the board is a lot about supporting the nuts and bolts of an organization, especially an organization the size of CYH (small and mighty). Specifically, as a co-chair it’s a lot about bringing all the pieces together in one place and ensuring we are all in sync, looking to the future, and able to make decisions. As well as those pieces like governance, following the law in regards to the Charity Act, and acting in “good faith”—i.e. the ship isn’t running into the ground and we didn’t feel the need to right it.
What is the content and purpose of Check Your Head?
Check Your Head is about bringing youth together to think critically about social and environmental justice issues facing society through a popular education lens. We try and tackle a variety of issues important to youth and support youth to become leaders in these areas and share their knowledge and skills with their peers.
What are the biggest emotional difficulties in activism?
Burn out is a real issue, especially for so many youth activists when our advocacy is tied up in our lived experiences that fall outside the mainstream narrative of experience. For myself as a mixed-race indigenous woman, some of the issues being discussed more openly in mainstream society like Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), family violence, mental health, food insecurity, housing, etc. are tied up in my personal experiences and relationships and I continue to navigate and reflect on them. Oftentimes, those with lived experiences are continually asked to be vulnerable and share our narratives and do the emotional labour to try and connect other folks to the issues, but within certain parameters dictated by the mainstream: you can’t be too emotional or you’re not objective on the issue and can’t see the big picture. Or, on the other side of that: too guarded and private and not performing the narrative people want from you. So, between constantly having to give your story or being chided for not doing so, it can really burn folks out. I think I have been lucky to the extent that for the most part, I like to do the background and support work so I haven’t experienced too much burnout and have firm personal boundaries about what I share while I do my own personal healing and growing.
Are there any unique problems associated with organizing for youth activism?
I think a lot of what I alluded to above, about: are those in power making sure their spaces are accessible to youth? And are they able to share real power with youth? For youth-only organizing I think there is group burnout issues, for where so many youth are in their lives we lack the same access to resources as previous generations. So many youth are in precarious work, saddled with debt, etc., that it’s really hard to carry your issue forward. That being said, there are so many incredible youth organizers that are tackling these issues and finding innovative ways to tackle them.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen
* All views expressed in this interview belong to the interviewee and don’t necessarily reflect the views of CYH.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/12
Protests provide a forum for citizens from all walks of life and backgrounds to unite under a common banner for movements and causes which are important to them. This can be for their livelihoods, the environment, or their children and grandchildren. Sometimes, it can be all these things at once. There was rain and snow, but this did not prevent 150 people from marching through downtown Fort Langley to “Stand with Kwantlen” against the proposed Kinder Morgan (Trans Mountain) Pipeline Expansion.
On December 11, 2016, the Kwantlen Nation was joined by members of the surrounding community in a march of solidarity. “Stand with Kwantlen” featured speeches by Brandon Gabriel and Tumia Knott from the Kwantlen Nation, and Petrina Arnason from the Township of Langley Council. The event was a reaction to the federal government’s approval of the Kinder Morgan Pipeline expansion.
The speakers raised many points of opposition including threats to the local environment, climate change, costs to local municipalities, and, most adamantly, the right of the Kwantlen Nation for sovereignty over unceded territory. Gabriel explained that there was no consultation with First Nations when the original pipeline was built in 1953. At the time it was extremely difficult for First Nations to find legal representation. Now, things are different and across the continent First Nations are opposing these types of energy projects. “We didn’t give permission for the first pipeline that was laid, so why would we give permission for the second?” Gabriel stated. “What we are saying is ‘No, you do not have permission to do this.’”
Arnason explained, “We’re standing here together, adding our voices to the larger collective.” While Arnason was speaking on her own behalf, the Township has raised many concerns about the expansion and were active participants in the National Energy Board hearings. During the summer, Maegen Giltrow, a legal representative of the township, told the Ministerial Panel that “This [pipeline] cannot be approved.” Earlier that day, Tumia Knott, legal representative for the Kwantlen Nation, spoke at a session with the Ministerial panel expressing grave concerns about the impact of the expansion on the Kwantlen community (including impacts on the environment) and the lack of consultation.
This is second time the Kwantlen Nation has decided to march as a nation, both times inspired by the threat that Kinder Morgan poses to their community. On April 11, 2015 the Nation marched together for the first time since colonization from their reserve through Fort Langley. This act of solidarity is an increasing trend in Indigenous and community opposition to new proposed energy infrastructure that threatens the land and water. Sunday’s march had the same message. Justine Nelson, Chapter Coordinator of the PIPE UP Network and one of the main organizers for the march, explained, “This march was to show solidarity with the Kwantlen Nation and send a message to Trudeau that the community will be standing next to Kwantlen through this fight. Very simply, they will not be able to build this pipeline.”
The expansion would triple the amount of diluted bitumen travelling from Alberta to the Burnaby coast. The result would be an increase in the amount of tankers leaving our coast to 30 per month. Kinder Morgan, the Texas-based company that owns the existing pipeline and proposed expansion, was originally created under “Enron”, the company famous for the huge tax scandal in the United States. Richard Kinder and many of the other original staff of the company were transfers from Enron. Kinder had worked for Enron for 16 years, eventually becoming the president and vice operating officer.
Opponents of the expansion insist it does not make sense from an environmental or economic perspective. In fact, Kinder Morgan is not even a good corporate citizen. They do their best to pay as few taxes at possible, and have 69 (reported) spills on the existing line and a horrible record on their other lines. Across the country, people are stating they will prevent this expansion from being built in addition to other proposed tar sands pipelines. The “Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion” has been signed by over 50 First Nations across the continent. Similarly, the Coast Protectors Pledge has been signed by over 19,000 individuals. It states: “We stand in solidarity with Indigenous lands, water and environment protectors across Turtle Island, from BC to Quebec, from Burnaby to Lelu Island, from Muskrat Falls to Standing Rock.” The “Stand with Kwantlen” rally was one of many actions uniting opposition across Canada and the United States. This was not the first, and will not be the last.
By Justine Nelson and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
* All views expressed don’t necessarily reflect the views of CYH.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/12
In this post, youth blogger Scott chats with David Kerruish. David was born in Australia but found home in Vancouver in 2011. He is a Strategic Management Consultant at Vancity, with degrees from the Queensland University of Technology. This year, David took part in the Welfare Food Challenge.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you get involved in the Welfare Food Challenge?
David Kerruish: I am involved with Raise the Rates through the community foundation. I heard about it the last couple of years. I thought, “My work is to find out what’s going on in the community.” I am deeply curious about it.
Knowing the purpose and meaning behind the campaign, I thought I should develop my own understanding by being a part of the campaign.
Jacobsen: What have you heard from others that have been a part of it?
Kerruish: It was quite an experience. Most people found it challenging. All the way from approaching shopping with $18 per week to the shopping itself. The ability to function when perpetually hungry and malnourished comes with a sobering realization.
This is the way thousands of people live every week. We can check out at any point in time or after a week.
We have these welfare rates. They haven’t gone up in 9 years. I have been in Canada for 6 years. In my entire time in Canada, there’s not been an increase in the rate. I find that a little bit sad.
Jacobsen: What was your own experience in being able to or trying to function in taking part in this, being hungry all of the time?
Kerruish: I am a management consultant. I do reading and writing a lot. I use my brain a lot. I found on day 4 that I was agitated, even within 48 hours. It was affecting daily function.
As I went further along, I could facilitate and be present in a conversation. However, I wasn’t able to concentrate, especially reading the material. I kept thinking about eating. It was a constant cycle of planning for eating. It was not a pleasant experience at all.
Jacobsen: What were some of the precautions others and you took before taking part in this?
Kerruish: I tend to be health conscious. It is making sure there’s a balance of having enough carbohydrates, proteins, mixes of vitamin and minerals as best I could. If I have some foods, it is making sure there’s the right balance.
There is no precaution, it is hard to prepare. I realize how privileged I am. It is not easy.
Jacobsen: What are some ways fellow citizens can help others through things such as food programs for nutritious meals to eat every day?
Kerruish: Food banks. I’m not sure if there is a mandate. I believe the opportunity is there for everyone to think about where they put their own money. Are we supporting out local community with our choices in where we shop, where we spend our money throughout the day?
I think that’s more challenging because we live in a culture of instant gratification and immediate result. It may not have the immediate impact, but there’s the opportunity for everyone.
Jacobsen: This is an annual event. How can people become involved?
Kerruish: There’s a lot of work you can do to support Raise the Rates by advocating for raising the minimum wage and the welfare rate. Getting involved in the campaign is one, I was conflicted in my participation, not only because I was the guy with a fast metabolism affected by it.
I engaged with somebody on Twitter, who is on welfare for 52 weeks of the year. She made a good point. Maybe, it shouldn’t be me or any of the other people that participated in the challenge. It should be people living in the state and without the opportunity to opt out.
That was my conflict. Supporting Raise the Rates is a great thing, I would encourage everyone to do that. If you think it is right for you, then advocate for the change, but also remain humble and realize thousands of people who have no choice but to complete the ‘Welfare Food Challenge’ every week.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, David.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen
* All views expressed in this interview belong to the interviewee and don’t necessarily reflect the views of CYH.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/12
Justine Nelson is the chapter coordinator for the PIPE UP Network and an event leader at Evergreen BC. In this blog post, youth blogger Scott discusses activism and organizing with Justine.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was your activist moment of awakening?
Justine Nelson: I’m not sure if I had a specific moment of awakening; I have been this type of person for as long as I can remember. As a child, I was always taking on different causes and stuff.
I was doing my undergraduate work when I realized that I was ignoring the bigger picture. I had always been focused on saving an animal, or a specific human rights issue. I did not really look at the overarching threat to the world that is climate change, which impacts all of the things I care about. I started realizing this while writing a thesis for my honors program on how people get involved in the environmental movement. That was my moment of awakening.
Jacobsen: Were there any mentors that contributed to this?
Nelson: My grandfather was a mentor for me. He was always political and he pushed me to engage in things. My parents were mentors, too. They supported my causes wholeheartedly. I wrote my first petition in grade 7. They were always very supportive of everything I was doing.
They were mentors in that way and my grandfather was a mentor in showing me what it is to be politically active and engaged. Throughout the years I have had a number of people, especially educators, impact my perspective significantly, but none as much as my family.
Jacobsen: What were some of the more moving moments of political activism?
Nelson: When we were fighting the Memorandum of Understanding that KPU signed with Kinder Morgan, the entire campaign of having the students, faculty, community, and Kwantlen First Nation come together to make the university back out. We wouldn’t have succeeded without the Kwantlen First Nation taking a strong stance. I am not sure the campus has ever seen such a unified and successful campaign. It was moving for me, it was a good moment.
Jacobsen: You are at UBC earning an M.Ed. What is the degree, in terms of content and purpose?
Nelson: It is a project-based cohort based on an adaptive education model. We don’t sit in class and listen to lectures and we are not on campus. We work together to analyze problems and create are real-world projects. My group is looking at issues around food waste.
We are looking at opening a café/food waste market. Hopefully, it will be in Surrey. We will create an educational experience around it, including programming.
I am adding a written thesis to my program and it will likely focus on aspects of the project, but we’re still formulating the topic since it is the beginning of the program. I might look at the program or our project specifically. Perhaps by applying adaptive education models and social movement education theories to look at creating educational experiences to encourage people to participate in social change. Also, we are seeing how the community can be built around it.
Jacobsen: What political activities and organizing are you involved in at this time?
Nelson: I am the chapter coordinator for the PIPE UP Network, which does advocacy around the proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion. It is my main focus and has been for some time. Climate change and transitioning into clean/alternative energy is also part of it.
Food waste is something I am also becoming involved in, although food issues have been an interest personally for a long time. In my personal life, I consider many of my choices around feminism, food, and social issues to be political, and I am often organizing around different issues.
Jacobsen: What have been the biggest impacts of collective activist efforts in the Lower Mainland that you’ve seen?
Nelson: The Kinder Morgan expansion has been a unifying point for local government, unions, activists, First Nations communities, and universities to come together.
I think the coming together of groups that have not worked together before, or for a long time, is amazing. They are coming together to oppose the same thing and work for a better future. Maybe they are coming from different points of view, but it has provided a space for everyone to work together even if people do not always see eye-to-eye. Unions or workers and activists do not necessarily see eye-to-eye, even though unions are full of activists in their own sense, but this issue seems to be unifying for many people.
Canada-wide, we had the recent announcement of the treaty alliance with the 50+ First Nations opposed to all expansions of the Tar Sands. That is a huge moment as well. It is inspired by the Dakota Access Pipeline opposition. As a Canada-wide thing, the treaty is big. Over the next couple of months with the Kinder Morgan expansion, we will see the impact that these alliances will have.
Jacobsen: Do you have any advice for students to become involved? https://nodaplsolidarity.org/, http://www.nationalobserver.com/2016/09/22/news/first-nations-across-north-america-sign-treaty-alliance-against-oilsands,
Nelson: For new students, you can do this through student activism, student unions, the public interest research groups at the school, and so on. There is so much going on at campuses. It shouldn’t be hard to find something. Community groups are great, but being on campus with other students is a good way to build your network and get involved at a level where students are in decision making positions.
I didn’t do a lot of it, personally, I volunteered outside of school. However, I know those that did gain a lot from it and a part of me wishes I had gotten more involved. If you are in a school with a public research interest group, they’re a really great place to start. It depends. You have to find your passions. If you don’t go into it with passion and a desire to make an impact then you won’t be as useful, so if you can’t find something that sparks a fire in you, create something.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen
* All views expressed in this interview belong to the interviewee and don’t necessarily reflect the views of CYH.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/11
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you get involved in the Welfare Food Challenge?
Lindsay Bissett: I became involved in the challenge last year with some VanCity colleagues of mine. A dear friend of mine is a friend of Bif Naked, who has been advocating with the Welfare Food Challenge for several years. We were all inspired to give it a try.
We have a Diversity and Inclusion Alliance at VanCity and one of our focus areas is poverty reduction. We thought this Challenge aligned strongly; it opened our eyes to the realities of living in poverty.
Jacobsen: What have you heard from others that have been a part of it?
Bissett: A lot of similar experiences. It is, in general, terrible. The first year of the challenge, I was so organized. I prepped all of my meals. I shopped at two different stores. I really thought that I was prepared.
An advocate from Raise the Rates who currently lives on welfare and lives in an SRO said, “We have to choose between being healthy and being hungry.” When I talk to other folks, no matter the level of preparation, you have to make the choice.
Often, it feels better to have a full belly. This unacceptable “choice” has stayed with me throughout the challenge and my advocacy beyond it.
You are eating processed, cheap, and sometimes expired foods. This quickly leads to physical and mental deterioration. The fifth day, last year, was when I broke. My mental health suffered greatly. I cried eating Chef Boyardee from the Dollar Store, which is embarrassing to admit. The canned pasta disintegrated when cooked and was basically inedible. On the fifth day I was not only hungry and unhealthy but I was absolutely isolated and mentally broken.
In summary, many people have the same experiences. After a few days, your motivation and mood suffer. This is how some people live every day…for years.
Jacobsen: What was your own experience in being able to or trying to function in taking part in this, being hungry all of the time?
Bissett: It is brutal. It is hard because I entered the challenge wanting to advocate at the same time. This year, I quit early, the food portion. It is hard being hungry, even if you achieve a full stomach you are not satisfied. You do not have the right amount of nutrition.
It is hard to state intellectual and powerful things. You are not healthy at the time. For me, I am hard to be around. I am cranky, which is unusual for me. It is hard to be taken seriously. It is hard to have conversations while in a constant bad mood.
Jacobsen: What were some of the precautions others and you took before taking part in this?
Bissett: There’s a great support group, in and out of Vancity through Raise the Rates. It is a great organization. Many of us converse on Twitter and share through blogs. In terms of precautions, we support one another.
We make sure nobody feels bad and know they can stop the challenge. If you recognize the privilege, then that’s okay. We want to raise the rates. We want the government to realize the importance of this.
For example, for people with mental illnesses, it is incredibly hard. Even with a balanced diet, if they are battling a chemical imbalance in their brain it only makes things harder. We kept a close eye on ourselves as friends and partners in the challenge. There is enough stigma surrounding both mental illness and poverty, we had to assure no bias if someone had to step out of the food portion of the challenge early.
You have to be ready to not beat it, to suffer. It is going to be awful. You cannot plan yourself into success with such a small amount of money.
Jacobsen: What are some ways fellow citizens can give back through things such as food programs for nutritious meals to eat every day?
Bissett: That’s a really great question. I will give you a personal answer and I appreciate that many people may have a different opinion. For me, I struggle to support food banks. It is an immediate need now, I get it. However, it makes me sad and it isn’t a sustainable solution.
A program meant to run for one year has run for 20 years. The more we normalize food banks, the more we are saying it is okay that people on welfare have only $18 a week for food. We’re normalizing it. We’re telling the government that what they are doing is enough.
The government states this is enough. It is not. Food banks are doing work we need right now but I look forward to the day they are no longer needed in BC. I consider hot lunch programs in schools as something very important. There are many kids in school who are hungry, there is a lack of equality from the get-go. They need to be set up for success with proper food as a basic need and ingredient for success.
If someone asked me about becoming involved, I would tell them to become educated, send letters to people in government that matter, have brave conversations with friends, family, and coworkers to create more advocates. An election is coming. Our government needs to know that current state is unacceptable.
That will make a change. Advocacy is the way to do it.
Jacobsen: This is an annual event. How can people become involved?
Bissett: I sound like a broken record but people can get involved by advocating for change. I hope there is no event next year. I hope they raise the rates so we don’t have to do this again and people don’t have to live like this. Whenever people ask me, “What should I do to get prepared?” I give an unfortunate answer. You can’t win.
I say, “Be prepared to be hungry and angry.” I am usually an upbeat and positive person but there is no way to win. There is no success. You are going to be miserable. It incredibly eye-opening to try for one week to live on welfare rates when some people of all ages are living like that without a choice. In this affluent province, people in poverty are being kept there.
I hope that we do not do this again because we need to raise the rates. It sounds simple but as you can see through research it has been years since the welfare rates have been increased. To be prepared if there is a Welfare Food Challenge next year, you should find the closest Dollar Store and get ready to feel terrible.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Lindsay.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen
* All views expressed in this interview belong to the interviewee and don’t necessarily reflect the views of CYH.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/11
Claire Saenz is a SMART Recovery Facilitator for SMART Recovery. It is an addiction recovery service without a necessary reference to a higher power or incorporation of a faith, or some faith-based system into it – by necessity. Those can be used it, but they are not necessities. The system is about options. In this series, we look at her story, views, and expertise regarding addiction, having been an addict herself. This is session 1.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When it comes to the experience of addiction, what were your addiction and particular substance of choice?
Claire Saenz: My substance of choice was alcohol, which was coupled with an eating disorder and an anxiety disorder.
Jacobsen: What were the thoughts that ran through your mind as you were working to combat the addiction, to stop using the substance(s)?
Saenz: I was highly motivated when I decided to stop drinking, so my primary thought, initially, was that I was going to quit or die trying. I felt determined, but also extremely vulnerable because giving up alcohol meant that in many essential ways, I was giving up my sole coping mechanism.
Jacobsen: How did SMART Recovery compare to other services?
Saenz: Other services I used in my recovery were AA, individual therapy, and pharmaceutical treatment of my anxiety. I found SMART similar to AA in that it is also a peer support group. I found the social support aspect of both programs helpful. SMART was drastically different from AA in almost all other respects, however, and much more like the individual therapy I received.
SMART’s philosophy is one of personal empowerment rather than reliance on a “higher power”. The use of stigmatizing labels such as “alcoholic” or “addict” is discouraged. Direct discussion (“cross-talk”) among group participants is encouraged. Sponsorship is not part of the program. Group facilitators are not professionals, but they are trained in the SMART tools and meeting facilitation skills, and they are expected to adhere to a code of ethics.
Finally, SMART recognizes that recovery, while a process, is not necessarily a permanent one. While participants are encouraged to attend meetings for a significant time period and to become facilitators to pay it forward, we do not view recovery as being a permanent state. Instead, we achieve a new normal.
Jacobsen: What were some of the more drastic stories that you have heard of in your time as an addict, as a recovering addict, and now as a SMART Recovery facilitator?
Saenz: For the reasons mentioned above, I don’t refer to myself as an addict or alcoholic, “recovering” or otherwise. If a label must be applied to my state, call me a person who has recovered from an addiction to alcohol.
As far as drastic stories, they fall into two categories: the carnage of addiction itself, and the carnage of one-size-fits-all addiction treatment where the “one size” is the twelve- step approach.
The carnage of addiction is simply limitless. I have lost dozens of friends and acquaintances to addiction-related causes, from organ failure to overdose, to suicide.
At one of my first AA meetings, I spent a few minutes talking to a nice young man who went home that night and hung himself. I know multiple people who have lost spouses and children to addiction. It is a dreadful condition that takes the lives of fine people, and the solutions we currently offer, as a society, are breathtakingly inadequate.
In terms of the consequences of one-size-fits-all treatment, it should come as no surprise that in a world of individuals, there will never be an approach to any physical or mental condition that will work the same way, or as well, for everyone. And yet for years, we have prescribed the exact same treatment to everyone with an addictive disorder.
Worse, what passes for treatment is often nothing more than expensive indoctrination into a free support group (12 step programs, themselves, are free)—and if the patient fails to improve, the prescription is…more 12 step. Of course, this isn’t working. The shocking thing is that we would ever expect it to work.
Jacobsen: How has religion infiltrated the recovery and addiction services world? Is this good or bad? How so?
Saenz: Twelve-step programs, which form the basis of most “traditional” treatment, are religious in nature. Adherents sometimes claim otherwise, but courts in the U.S. have nearly universally disagreed on that point.
As one jurist put it, “”The emphasis placed on God, spirituality, and faith in a ‘higher power’ by twelve-step programs such as A.A. or N.A. clearly supports a determination that the underlying basis of these programs is religious and that participation in such programs constitutes a religious exercise. It is an inescapable conclusion that coerced attendance at such programs, therefore, violates the Establishment Clause.” Warburton v. Underwood, 2 F.Supp.2d 306, 318 (W.D.N.Y.1998).
Because they are religious in nature, such programs may not be the best choice for, and certainly should not the only option given to, atheists or individuals with an internal locus of control.
Beyond that, the religious atmosphere of the programs can, and sometimes does breed an environment where seasoned members of the program become almost like “gurus”, given an almost clergy-like status and an inordinate amount of power over newer and more vulnerable members. Sometimes this power is used to exploit. The classic exploitation is sexual—“13th stepping” is a common euphemism used to describe the practice of veteran members manipulating newcomers into engaging in sexual relationships—but emotional and financial exploitation can happen as well.
But the most tragic consequence of the infiltration of religion into addiction treatment is not, in my view, the “religious” aspect per se but the fact that the focus on that approach excludes all others. The real tragedy is that people are dying because they are never even told of other approaches that might help them.
In my own experience, 19 years ago when I sought treatment for my addiction to alcohol, I was told that the only option for survival was to become an active AA member. Being the rule follower I am, I did exactly that. I spent the next nine years of my life going to AA meetings and attempting to fit my fundamentally humanist worldview within the confines of that program.
I eventually found this impossible and left the program. In the aftermath of that, I had to re-examine every thought and belief I had developed in the time I had been abstinent to determine whether those thoughts and beliefs were my own or had been implanted during my AA years. I found this an extraordinarily painful process, in many ways as painful as quitting in the first place.
When I found SMART Recovery and realized that it had been possible, all along, for me to have received social support in a manner that honored who I was a person, I cried. I thought not only of myself and all the pain I’d gone through because I wasn’t told of other options besides AA but of all the others who had experienced the same thing.
This would be equally true regardless of the specifics of the treatment being offered because there is no one approach that is right for everyone. The real tragedy is the pain that has been caused, and the lives that have been lost, because one approach has become too dominant.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/11
The Anthropocene, or the Capitalocene, is upon us, like a lumbering giant destroying Downtown Vancouver in its wake, especially for the collective global future to come very soon. British Columbia needs rapid action on transition to renewable energy source. Climate change is a global issue. By implication, it has national and provincial impacts, which means that British Columbia at large is impacted, too. British Columbians by being Canadians have responsibilities to the international community because Canada has responsibilities to the international community. Outside of the international responsibilities, there are individual choices as well. Lifestyle and policy voting are important. All factors and motions for sustainability matter.
We need to work to end carbon emissions as much as possible, as fast as possible, with transitions to renewable energies. We need to get away from fossil fuel sources in Canada, and British Columbia by implication. Individuals can vote for a carbon tax that can mean a national policy can reflect this. Governments function on the ‘will’ of the people. That means the consistent voting and activism. That’s how all change ever happens: through individuals getting together for collective efforts. There has been progress, but more needs to be done by us. One possible major solution is a provincial call for a price on carbon emissions, which can come in many forms.
There can be investments for massive public transportation that can reduce the amount of net carbon emissions by citizens within the province in addition to providing the needed infrastructure for the 21st-century. We can invest in a ‘Green Culture’ and a low-carbon infrastructure. There should be efficient vehicles with regulated standards. It can be expanded to other products consumers are buying.
Residents within British Columbia can travel in more efficient ways by using cars less. There are many options: taking more walks, riding a bike, taking the train, riding the bus, and so on. This may create problems for some high travel people. However, for others, and in fact probably most, it can be done. Through responsible, considerate, and conscientious decisions about transportation, we can reduce the net carbon emissions of all residents within the province.
Human activity is the main problem. The climate began to warm rapidly at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. High hydrocarbon producing fuel sources are a problem. Energy sectors depend on them for sustained economic growth and activity. I say this in sympathy for the difficulties to make such transition, for the employees, the managers, the businesses, and the communities built largely around them. However, with the Anthropocene/Capitalocene epoch present before us, and with massive species extinctions happening, we do not have another choice about avoiding the outcomes of this problem.
We do have choices about the means through which to do it. We are lucky. There are many, many options on the table. Canadian industry creates 35% of Canada’s net greenhouse gases, which is quite a lot. Furthermore, small numbers of industries create most emissions. Things like oil and gas extractors are some of the largest contributors, which comes to about 38% of that 35% of industry.
The simplest solution to become involved: get educated. Education at the individual level with provincial assistance is one way to keep things moving forward. It will take all of us together, but depends on individual effort for oneself and in inspiring others. This can be done at the individual level by going to your local library or bookstore to find and read books that have relevant and reliable information about climate change and sustainability. Business people can incorporate the readings and knowledge into the business practices of whatever business you have. So this can be both short- and long-term with respect to implementation. There can also be intervention in the economy through tax.
A carbon tax is the typical term for it: pricing carbon emissions to incentivize governments, and provincial and local, to transition into the future energy sector. This can facilitate the incentives of movement towards a renewable economy and infrastructure across the province. These are some possible solutions. What will happen if we do not implement any possible solutions? There will be many negative effects, such as a negative effect on water sources. A world, or a province for that matter, scarce in fresh water can create tensions among communities and adversely affect health.
This is because water connects to both the food and the health of communities and individuals. It is the lifeblood of an ecosystem. For example, water quality, air quality, food quality, and so on, impact lung health, gut health, and so on. For those with children, this can affect their health as well. For those with community-oriented minds, this means one’s own health, as well as one’s neighbours, children, and grandchildren. In a broader sense of family, this affects the family of British Columbia. In that light, it both can’t and shouldn’t be ignored.
The individual and provincial responsibilities form an interconnected system of responsibilities from individual self-education and provincial educational programs and everything in between. To flatter ourselves, this includes youth-oriented organizations such as Check Your Head through writing about topics of importance to current, upcoming, and soon-to-exist generations. Education is an act, but it is not activism. Education with an impact can be the catalyst. That’s where things begin. Individuals are inspired to act, make further impacts, and make the necessary changes.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen
* All views expressed in this interview belong to the interviewee and don’t necessarily reflect the views of CYH.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/11
As the Youth Blog Coordinator, Justin Rawlins has been an amazing part of our Check Your Head team over this past year. He was one of our 2015 Volunteers of the Year and we’re sad to say farewell to him this fall as he moves onto new projects.
In this blog post, youth blogger Scott Douglas Jacobsen chats with Justin about his involvement with Check Your Head.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you find us at Check Your Head (CYH)?
Justin Rawlins: A friend sent me the call out for CYH’s Democracy Check campaign, which focused on engaging young people in BC through digital media in the build up to the 42nd federal election. People can check out the Democracy Check archive to see some of the interesting and creative work that emerged from that campaign.
After the election, CYH was looking for a blog coordinator. I had such a positive experience with CYH during Democracy Check, so I volunteered for the position. And that was a year ago.
Jacobsen: What tasks and responsibilities come along with your position at CYH?
Rawlins: The blog coordinator is responsible for recruiting volunteer bloggers and then coordinating and editing submissions. Most submissions go through multiple rounds of revisions, not because they are poor or deficient in some way, but in order to encourage writers to grapple with their ideas a bit longer.
Jacobsen: What is the content and purpose of the written work through CYH – by others and yourself?
Rawlins: There are multiple purposes, but the one that I want to highlight is CYH’s blog as a platform for young people across BC to showcase some of their thoughts on the most pressing issues of our time. I was pleased with the quality and thoughtfulness of the submissions that I received on topics ranging from technological change to migrant justice to poverty to gentrification and beyond.
Jacobsen: Did your education assist in writing your own work and editing others’ work for the blog?
Rawlins: I was a teaching assistant during my graduate studies, which prepared me for email exchanges and written feedback. I also learned a lot from Tahia and Aleks (former CYH staff members) during the orientation for Democracy Check, especially on how to interact with volunteers, because both of them are excellent facilitators and educators.
Also, university exposed me to a lot of different thinkers whose work I find useful for making sense of the world. I was able to pass some of that along to the volunteer bloggers, such as directing people to Edward Said’s work on Orientalism and imperialism or Ananya Roy’s work on poverty.
Jacobsen: What is your post-secondary education in?
Rawlins: I completed a BA at SFU in political science and an MA in sociology. My MA thesis looked at the interconnectedness of urban and rural issues in Ankara, Turkey, with a focus on wheat cultivation and mass housing. More recently, I’m completing pre-requisite science courses, with the aim of gaining admittance to a physical therapy program.
Jacobsen: What are some impacts you have seen in BC from the work of CYH – at all levels?
Rawlins: So much of formal education, especially at the high school level, is sanitized and avoids uncomfortable topics or presents them in a neutral way that justifies or entrenches existing power dynamics. CYH does a good job of unsettling taken-for-granted assumptions and a good example of that is their recent Inclusion and Anti-Racism project.
Also, CYH works with other organizations engaged in important struggles, such as the BC Health Coalition. I mention the BC Health Coalition because they have been a key player in confronting Dr. Brian Day’s legal push for increased private health care, a push that would fundamentally undermine public health care in Canada. And CYH has an informative health care workshop that unpacks some of the issues surrounding health care in general and privatized health care in particular.
Jacobsen: Where do you hope CYH goes into the future?
Rawlins: This isn’t specific to CYH, but I would like to see the rules surrounding the political activities of charities in Canada revised, so that charities involved in advocacy work no longer need to fear costly CRA audits. The current restrictions are nebulous and stifle dissent.
I hope CYH continues to reach young people whose curiosities about the world are not necessarily being met through formal education. Young people are not apathetic–contrary to popular belief–but many do appear to possess a healthy suspicion about the old ways of doing things. CYH’s workshops and projects encourage young people to pursue their curiosities and imagine new ways of doing things. To paraphrase Paulo Freire: education changes people and people change the world. CYH will continue to educate and activate young people on social issues.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen
* All views expressed in this interview belong to the interviewee and don’t necessarily reflect the views of CYH.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/10
The Atheist Republic (Twitter, Facebook, and website) is the largest public atheist Facebook page. The page has more than 1.7 million likes, which makes the Atheist Republic the most popular atheist community on any social network. The Atheist Republic has consulates throughout the globe in the major cities of the world. Its founder, Armin Navabi, is a friend and colleague. Here is the series of interviews with the consulates of the Atheist Republic: Atheist Republic Brisbane Consulate.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Was there a background in atheism, familially?
Geoff Speakman: My parents never spoke either for or against religion. I formed my own opinions about religion and the existence of gods.
Jacobsen: Within that family background, was there a surrounding culture that brought forth a critical mindset towards religion? If so, how? If not, why not?
Speakman: Not really. Mine was a normal childhood minus religion. We were migrants who came from England to Australia, which may have insulated me from cultural and family ties to religion.
Jacobsen: Through these threads of family and surrounding culture, what made for the pivotal moments in development as an atheist?
Speakman: There was no pivotal moment. I have always been free of religious indoctrination.
Jacobsen: Also, “a-” as a prefix in atheism means many things because it is both denial and affirmation. What is affirmed there to you? What is denied to you?
Speakman: I have chosen the description “atheist” to best describe my nonbelief in religious teaching. I am considering changing my description to “anti-theist” due to the bloodshed that religious division causes worldwide.
Jacobsen: How did you find the Atheist Republic? What do you do for them? What are your tasks and responsibilities?
Speakman: I came across the Atheist Republic on Facebook. I was asked by them to be an administrator of the Brisbane Consulate where I approve applications to join and keep a watch for hateful or bigoted posts.
Jacobsen: How does an Atheist Republic consulate work? What are its daily operations? How do you make sure the operations function smoothly?
Speakman: The Atheist Republic is simply a Facebook group of like-minded people worldwide.
Jacobsen: Why volunteer for them? What meaning comes from it?
Speakman: I volunteered because I believe that communication and the sharing of ideas are the way to overcome division, mistrust, and conflict. The internet provides such communication. The internet is a revolution that will unite the people of the world.
Jacobsen: How does the Atheist Republic, in your own experience and in conversing with others, give back to the atheist community and provide a platform for them – even to simply vent from social and political conventions that hold them either in contempt or in begrudging silence for fear of loss of life quality?
Speakman: The Atheist Republic provides a place where atheists can find each other, have a feeling of belonging and organize themselves.
Jacobsen: What do you hope for the future of atheism? What are the movements next steps?
Speakman: Ideally the internet will expose theists to ideas that will convert them into rational, peace loving citizens. I hope that United Atheist Republic Consulates can assist in bringing about peace in the world.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Speakman: These are critical times for the future of our planet and for mankind. Tough decisions need to be made regarding stabilizing human population and preserving our environment. Theists must realize that the future of our planet is not in the hands of gods and that they must take responsibility for the making of their own future.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Geoff.
Speakman: You’re welcome.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/10
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Stephanie Lake, part 2.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Who are some researchers in the harm reduction movement who are reliable sources of information?
Lake: When I first became interested in drug policy and harm reduction, I was inspired by the team of investigators at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS who were heavily involved in the evaluation of Insite (Vancouver’s supervised injection site). This includes Dr. Thomas Kerr, Dr. Evan Wood, Dr. Mark Tyndall, Dr. Brandon Marshall, Dr. M-J Milloy, and Dr. Julio Montaner, and many others.
I have also spent a lot of time reading Dr. Don Des Jarlais’ research – he was one of the harm reduction pioneers in response to the HIV crisis in New York City in the 90’s. My Ph.D. supervisor, Dr. Jane Buxton, does some amazing work coordinating BC’s harm reduction programming as head of the harm reduction at the BC Centre for Disease Control.
Tim Rhodes has also done an amazing job conceptualizing a health framework (the Risk Environment) for drug-related health outcomes among people who use drugs. Instead of focusing on individual behaviors, this framework sees the drug-related harm as a result of interacting social, physical, policy, and economic states on macro- and micro-levels.
Jacobsen: What about organizations?
Lake: Vancouver has many user-led community organizations (e.g., Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users; Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society; BC Association for People on Methadone) who offer a great resource about on-the-ground experience with drug policy and harm reduction in Vancouver. In terms of larger national organizations, I often check out what’s going on with the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, the Canadian Harm Reduction Network, and the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network.
In terms of larger national organizations, I often check out what’s going on with the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, the Canadian Harm Reduction Network, and the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network.
Jacobsen: Since you’re newer, you have a fresh perspective on the operations of CSSDP. Any areas for improvement for CSSDP? Any areas where things are going well? Also, where do you hope the organization goes into the future for students?
Lake: I have only been involved with CSSDP for a few months, so it is a bit early to say for sure. I am hoping to see communication between what’s going on nationally and what’s going on with individual chapters. It would be great to be part of a movement with all other chapters across the country.
I am happy that the organization is supportive of engagement in both higher-level policy issues as well as individual-level interventions. For example, here in Vancouver, we are facing an immediate crisis of fentanyl-related overdoses. Although this crisis warrants many higher-level policy discussions about the harms of prohibition and the benefits of harm reduction, the most immediate steps we can take to respond to this crisis is through making sure that students and youth have access to naloxone and know how to use it. I’m glad that naloxone training is within the scope of activities mandated by the CSSDP.
Jacobsen: Any new thoughts or feelings in conclusion?
Lake: I’m very happy that I took the chance to be involved with CSSDP, and I’m really excited to see where this work takes me. My own research focuses on the health implications of cannabis legalization for people who use drugs, particularly in the context of the current opioid crisis. It is a really exciting time to be involved in drug policy in Canada!
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Steph.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/10
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Stephanie Lake, part 1.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you get an interest in Canadian drug policy?
Stephanie Lake: I became interested in Canadian drug policy while I was studying health sciences at the University of Ottawa. I remember writing a paper on supervised injection sites for a sociology of health course, and throughout my literature review, I found myself getting increasingly frustrated at the state of our prohibitive and punitive drug policies which all seemed to be based on ideology rather than evidence. This frustration left me feeling determined to contribute to change in drug policy through health research and advocacy.
This frustration left me feeling determined to contribute to change in drug policy through health research and advocacy.
Jacobsen: What is your position in the chapter and responsibilities?
Lake: I am currently working with a small group of students to revive CSSDP’s Vancouver chapter. I fell into this role when I came across the CSSDP Vancouver Facebook group, and noticed a post from a former CSSDP board member asking if anyone wanted to try and get the chapter going again. I decided to give it a try, and I’m really happy that I did.
Right now, since we are a relatively small core group of students (3-4), we all share the responsibility of chairing meetings, organizing events, and growing the chapter. Our chapter is organizing its first event (naloxone training for students and youth in Vancouver). I have also recently joined the national board, where I will be focusing on student outreach and conference planning.
Jacobsen: What is your perspective on the more punitive approaches to drug policy and the harm reduction approaches?
Lake: I think most people know by now that the war on drugs is a failure. Punitive approaches to drug policy just don’t work, and they don’t protect the health and human rights of people who use drugs. Substance use has been around as long as humans have walked the earth, so it is unrealistic to think that we can just abolish such a deeply rooted human behaviour through punitive measures.
Instead, we should be supporting the health of people who use drugs through minimizing the potential harms associated with drug use. When we do this, we reduce stigma that is so often linked to drug use, connect people who use drugs to health and social resources, and ultimately protect the health of the entire population.
Substance use has been around as long as humans have walked the earth, so it is unrealistic to think that we can just abolish such a deeply rooted human behaviour through punitive measures. Instead, we should be supporting the health of people who use drugs through minimizing the potential harms associated with drug use.
When we do this, we reduce stigma that is so often linked to drug use, connect people who use drugs to health and social resources, and ultimately protect the health of the entire population.
Jacobsen: What are the consequences on individuals with drug misuse if the punitive issues are employed?
Lake: Since the war on drugs began in the 1970’s the number of individuals in the US who have been incarcerated for drug law violations has gone up more than 10-fold. In other parts of the world, including the Philippines and Vietnam, drug-related offences can even result in the death penalty. These harsh responses to drug use mean that people who use drugs are often pushed underground, where they become disconnected with potentially life-saving health and social supports.
Incarceration has been linked to HIV infection (people do use drugs in jails, but they don’t have access to clean needles/pipes because this would require admitting that drugs get into jails), poor HIV treatment access and sub-optimal treatment outcomes, inadequate access to evidence-based addiction treatment (e.g., opioid substitution treatment), etc. Also, once someone goes to jail for drugs, it becomes hard to break the cycle. Many individuals will struggle to find steady employment or decent housing, and risk returning to drug dealing or related illicit activities to support themselves or their families.
Jacobsen: How does this cascade into larger society?
Lake: It is incredibly expensive to incarcerate individuals for drug use, and at the rate we’re going, it also isn’t sustainable. I think the biggest way punitive approaches to drug use can cascade into larger society is through divesting funds from other approaches that could have a positive effect on society.
For example, roughly 73% of the previous Canadian federal government’s drug strategy expenditures were dedicated to enforcement, while research, prevention, treatment, and harm reduction were left to share the remaining 27% of funds. When we put so much time and energy into reactionary measures, we are unlikely to address the root causes of the “problem”.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/10
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Antonio Cillero.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you get interested in Canadian drug policy?
Antonio Cillero: I attended the conference at the University of Toronto in 2015. It seemed interesting. I wanted to see what they were doing.
Jacobsen: What chapter are you involved in now?
Cillero: The University of Toronto chapter now, I know the students. I graduated (from Queen;s University, not UofT), but work with them.
Jacobsen: What activities are you involved in the Toronto area for drug policy?
Cillero: Psychedelic storytelling, we have been planning things around it in addition to naloxone training.
Jacobsen: British Columbia, where I live, has a fentanyl crisis. Is it similar in Toronto?
Cillero: Yes, 3 injection sites will begin here. One in the Downtown area, one in Queen Street West and one in the Leslieville area. There is concern about overdosing here too.
Jacobsen: What would you consider the main principle or value of CSSDP?
Cillero: I think the main goal of our organization is to inform people about drugs but from an evidence-based perspective rather than the old Ronald Reagan view.
Jacobsen: That leads to harm reduction and punitive strategies. Punitive has been longer-term. Harm reduction is newer to the public. What is more effective?
Cillero: In my opinion, it is the harm reduction approach. I am for the principle of cognitive liberty. Any adult should be able to alter their own consciousness and manage their own health. Anybody should be free to do what they want with their mind and their body, and that includes using drugs. Drug abuse and addiction should be seen as a health care issues rather than a law enforcement issues.
Jacobsen: Where do you hope CSSDP goes into the future?
Cillero: Not many people know about CSSDP, we want people to know about what we do and get them involved. There is a general interest about drugs and I would like CSSDP to be part of that conversation and continue to grow.
Jacobsen: We have marijuana legalization to the public now. Are other substances more likely to be talked about now?
Cillero: I would like it. I do not think this will happen in the next 5 or 10 years though. We have discussions about it. Only after clinical research as with cannabis. We have MAPS sponsoring some really interesting studies about MDMA. We have studies being done on psilocybin at John Hopkins University. So it will happen eventually. However, there’s more stigma to those substances than marijuana.
People still believe those substances are harsher. It seems unlikely to me.
Jacobsen: If the discussion doesn’t happen, and if things are regulated, then the discussion will go underground and the sales will go underground.
Cillero: With things like psychedelics, we will not have fear about overdosing on psilocybin or LSD. Substances in the public, even in the cannabis community, have a stigma to them. People who use drugs need to be more empathetic towards each other. Right now, I don’t see it. The heroin is highly stigmatized now. People who use cannabis say, “Cannabis is not like heroin or cocaine.” There is a stigma.
Psychedelics might become legal for medicinal use, but not for recreational. There is stigma, fear, and misunderstanding about them.
Jacobsen: What about particular experiments, societal experiments where they legalized one, some, most, or all drugs, in those experiments in general, are the societies’ citizens better or worse off?
Cillero: I believe in Oregon there has been a reduction in crime rate, especially violent crimes, but correlation cannot be linked to causation for this. Once more people have access to cannabis, consumption will likely increase and there might be more cases of problems associated with the use of this substance. Legalization has positive and negative effects. But then those cases will be treated as clinical or health issues, not as criminal problems.
Long-term users would see a benefit of legalization. There might be negative consequences. I am not saying there would not be, but we need to be realistic, like alcohol. It is legal. People use alcohol in different ways. Some people have problems with their use. The government can help those with issues.
Jacobsen: Does that view tie back into your value of “cognitive liberty”?
Cillero: It does. It ties in with cognitive liberty. Adults should be allowed to use these substances if they wish to. If something goes wrong, they should be able to get help. We have health services. If someone is having problems, the health service should help them.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Antonio.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/09
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Avery Sapoznikow.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen:How did you get involved? How did you get an interest in Canadian drug policy?
Avery Sapoznikow: I am finishing an undergraduate degree in psychology with an honors thesis on cannabis and attention. I am doing research on drug use and counseling because I want to be a clinical psychologist. Also, I want to maintain an active research portfolio involving drugs and drug policy.
So, one good means of achieving this is to become involved with CSSDP. I began to look around last year. I found a chapter at UBC with Michelle (the founder of the chapter). We work in the same lab. It developed from there. There was the call for board applications at the end of the year. I took advantage of it.
Jacobsen: What is the lab with Michelle?
Sapoznikow: We’re both involved in the Therapeutic, Recreational, and Problematic Substance Use Lab with Dr. Walsh.
Jacobsen: With the UBCO chapter, how many members now?
Sapoznikow: We’re at about 25 now.
Jacobsen: What are some activities of the chapter?
Sapoznikow: We are running a co-op with the nurses around naloxone – they have been running workshops with our support. We have been running screenings of movies. Also, documentary screenings and having some guest speakers.
Jacobsen: What is your position in the chapter and responsibilities?
Sapoznikow: Locally, I am the Vice President. Nationally, I am a member of the board of directors.
Jacobsen: How do you draw people into the chapter?
Sapoznikow: We have been doing tabling events. A lot has been focused on changing policies via the use petitions. Otherwise, it has been through posters around campus. I will be doing more next semester as this semester has been quite busy.
Jacobsen: What is the general perspective, for people well-entrenched in the field, on the more punitive approaches to drug policy and the harm reduction approaches?
Sapoznikow: Currently, the punitive approaches have been shown to be the worst ways to deal with these problems. We need to shift away from punitive measures. It doesn’t help. That’s from a psychology perspective. Also, in terms of mandatory minimums, it doesn’t help. Punishing people for something they can’t help on their own does them a disservice and in the end could make things worse.
Jacobsen: What are the consequences on individuals with drug misuse from the punitive issues?
Sapoznikow: They exacerbate the recurring issues. For example, if someone has conduct disorders, which leads to their misuse of drugs, it will likely exacerbate their condition.
Jacobsen: How does this cascade into larger society?
Sapoznikow: Usually, these punitive measures are placed upon people from lower socio-economic status. So, it puts them deeper into this low-income lifestyle because of the barriers in place from having a criminal record. It makes things worse for everyone involved.
Jacobsen: Who are some researchers people in the harm reduction movement who are reliable sources of information?
Sapoznikow: Anyone who has legitimate research associated with an accredited university. Dr. Walsh is one of the leading people for cannabis. With it being legalized, he would be a massive resource for people to tap.
Jacobsen: What about organizations?
Sapoznikow: Drug Policy Alliance, NORML, and our US equivalent group SSDP (Students for Sensible Drug Policy)
Jacobsen: Since you’re newer, you have a fresh perspective on the operations of CSSDP, Any areas for improvement for CSSDP? Any areas where things are going well? Also, where do you hope the organization goes into the future for students?
Sapoznikow: Our strongest aspect, in my opinion, is the social media reach. We reach tons of people via the individual chapter pages as well as the national pages. Probably, the weakest area is conferences because there has not been one for a while, we need to get more people involved together with this to make the events possible.
If we can get conferences going, we could become a more unified organization. More cross-chapter work would be good. The chapters are a bit segregated. More of an effort from the board and the chapters for reaching out. I think the chapter should communicate.
Jacobsen: Some organizations have a network. Whether it’s a repository for a conversation like for a for articles or interview, all of the organizations in one place. It wouldn’t be tiered, but simply a nexus. Do you think that is a good idea for harm reduction in Canada?
Sapoznikow: Definitely, I think collaborative efforts are key for this. It affects so many sectors. A combined effort from people involved in economic policy, government, and prisons. We need everyone involved to find a happy medium. Right now, it is not working. It is only putting money into big business (prisons) pockets.
Jacobsen: Any new thoughts or feelings in conclusion?
Sapoznikow: Drug policy is a topic of utmost important facing us today with marijuana being legalized. Drug policy will be a big thing in the next few years. With CSSDP being one of the biggest groups in Canada with a focus on drug policy, we should become more involved in this transition process. We should set an example for others groups.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Avery.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/09
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Professor Mark Haden, part 2.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is there one country or area which is ideal and provides the evidence needed for change?
Haden: No – there are many separate reports, experiences, and research which indicate the need for significant change but there is no one country with is free from the domination of the American war on drugs.
Some of the evidence for change is the fact that the Netherlands youth use cannabis at approximately half the rate that the youth in the USA use in spite of the fact that the Dutch sell cannabis openly.
Another indicator for change is the fact that Portugal decriminalized personal possession of all drugs and this change reduced both health and social problems associated with drugs and drug use rates went down in their country.
Research on police crackdowns consistently reports that this intervention does not raise the price of drugs or reduce the availability of drugs. The Senate Committee report in Canada reviewed the international literature and concluded that there is no relationship between severity of legislation and drug use problems.
It is clear from the literature the enforcement interventions are ineffective and that a health approach does reduce harms to both individuals and all of the society.
Jacobsen: Will our society have to deal with out of control drug use?
Haden: No – market regulations are all about controlling who has access to what drugs, in what contexts. The current system paradoxically encourages out of control use, as the contexts of use are not supervised by those who are trained to reduce harmful behavior. In the new, post prohibition system, supervised consumption of the more harmful drugs would be the norm.
Jacobsen: What about our international agreements?
Haden: Canada has the opportunity to be a world leader in changing the outdated international agreements. Canadians need to host other like-minded countries to discuss and sign new agreements.
Jacobsen: We have problems with drugs like Valium and Oxycontin and they are legal and prescribed. What can we learn from this?
Haden: Dealers of illegal drugs are hidden and hard to negotiate with. Physicians who provide legal drugs, change prescribing practices in response to evidence and training. Who would you prefer to control drugs: trained doctors or criminals?
Jacobsen: If we shut down (or greatly reduced) the illegal market, would the criminals find other ways of doing the crime?
Haden: The federal auditor general said that drug money is the life blood of organized crime. Take away the fuel which drives organized crime and you take away the incentive that brings in new players and keeps existing criminals motivated.
Jacobsen: Would a regulated market “encourage” drug use?
Haden: It is inaccurate and simplistic to say we have just two options: either criminalizing drug users or encouraging drug use. Encouraging drug use would only happen if the free market was the dominant paradigm. Instead, public health and human rights should guide the process establishing a regulated market and encouraging drug use is not part of either of these models.
The goal of these two models is a reduction of harm to all of society and empowerment of the marginalized. We have other significant social problems like women who drink alcohol while pregnant, sexually active teenagers and youth who “huff” gasoline and we never consider criminalizing Page 5 of 9 these behaviors. The lack of criminalization is never seen as encouraging these undesirable behaviors. Public health is seen as being the appropriate approach for all of these problems and we should use this approach for dealing with drug use.
Public health is seen as being the appropriate approach for all of these problems and we should use this approach for dealing with drug use.
Jacobsen: What about drug use and pregnancy?
Haden: Illegal drug use is only one of many factors that influence maternal outcomes. It is well documented that when pregnant women are offered non-judgemental, comprehensive prenatal and infant follow-up, maternal outcomes improve. In fact, poverty is known to have a negative effect on pregnancy. Myths related to “crack babies” have been widely exaggerated. Abundant research has observed that the legal drug alcohol is clearly more dangerous to infants than illegal drugs.
Jacobsen: Are you proposing a “liberal” approach to our drugs laws?
Haden: No – this change is not about liberal or conservative beliefs as support for change come from all parts of the political spectrum. The opposing poles in this debate are evidence based policies vs ideologically based policies.
Jacobsen: Any recommended authors or organizations for those that might want to learn more and get involved in this?
Haden: I have been writing and publishing. My academic interest is to publish on the issue of a post-prohibition regulation and control of all currently illegal drugs. So, I publish on the issue of what it will look like, what should it look like, after prohibition ends for each of the individual drugs.
So, how we regulate smokable and injectable stimulants, such as crack cocaine, after prohibition ends will be completely different from how we regulate cannabis, which will be completely different than regulation of psychedelics, or opiates.
We as a society need to have an evidence-based, public health, regulations approach to all currently illegal drugs. It will be different, completely different. That’s the subject that we need to have the conversation around. What does regulation look like for cannabis?
That discussion is now happening in Canada. I think cannabis will be first. I think psychedelics will be second because they are not addictive. They aren’t harmful. They aren’t toxic to the body in any way.
All of the harms from psychedelics come from one thing, which is a lack of supervision, context, and control. We can regulate that quite easily. That was my recent publication. How do we legalize psychedelics? I am interested in the fentanyl crisis.
The reason everybody is dying because of fentanyl is that it is prohibited. We created this problem. We can solve this problem. Now, luckily, the federal government is saying, “Yes, it looks like physicians will have access to prescription heroin.”
Because heroin addicts like heroin, they don’t like fentanyl. So, if you provide heroin addicts with heroin, the fentanyl crisis will largely go away. It won’t completely go away, but it is certainly a huge step in the right direction.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Professor Haden.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/09
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Professor Mark Haden, part 1.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In brief, how did you get interested and involved in Canadian drug policy?
Professor Mark Haden: I worked in the addiction services for 28 years. I became acutely aware at the beginning of my career that we spend the vast majority of our money not dealing with addiction as a public health problem. We deal with it as a criminal justice problem.
All of the evidence says that doesn’t work. All of the evidence says the health approach to drugs does work. Seeing an approach not work and that is irrational because of the lack of evidence, it didn’t make any sense to me. I have this commitment to speaking the truth.
Jacobsen: If we take into account the two main approaches, one is punitive of punishment-oriented called the zero tolerance approach. The other is harm reduction. What is the preferable one to you, and why?
Haden: It is interesting. There’s no evidence to support a criminal justice response to drugs in our society. Let me clarify, I collect and organize the academic literature around drug policy issues. Since I teach at UBC, they asked me to debate a cop on the issue. They wanted me to debate cannabis legalization/criminalization. I wanted to debate all currently illegal drugs. I wanted everything on the plate. But they put us in the cannabis box.
I did my homework in advance. I found 64 peer-reviewed journal articles, which said, ‘An enforcement-based approach to drug policy and drug issues in society doesn’t work. It’s never worked anywhere on the planet. It doesn’t work in Canada. And it certainly doesn’t work in Vancouver.’
So, all of the research being done says this approach is very, very expensive and produces significant health and social problems for all of us. So, when I put down those 64 peer-reviewed journal articles in front of this cop, I said, “Can you name me one peer-reviewed journal article that says that this is the right way of approaching this problem?”
He said, “No, there isn’t any.” There isn’t any academic, peer-review, evidence-based literature that analyzes the approach. It is absolutely clear that health issues need to be dealt with health tools.
Dealing with health issues as criminal justice issues doesn’t make any sense, it costs us money. It doesn’t do us any good. We need to put our money into the programs that make an impact on the health of our society and the health of the individuals in our society.
We’re putting our money into something that makes our society less healthy.
Jacobsen: From your expert perspective, what do you consider the reason for the disjunction between the research evidence and the public perception?
Haden: The politicians, starting with Richard Nixon and Donald Trump now, have often got themselves elected by making you afraid of a bad guy. Donald Trump’s are ISIS and Mexicans. Richard Nixon’s were drug users.
Politicians often find bad guys. They say they will protect you from this evil, nasty, other ‘them’. We all feel fear. That is a human experience. Politicians use that to get votes. So, that’s a very old technique and being used by many. Stephen Harper used it.
He told us that he would protect us from the nasty drug dealers. So, it is being used from Richard Nixon to Stephen Harper. There is a huge agenda out there to make people afraid. The agenda has nothing to do with protecting people. it has to do with getting people elected.
That’s one reason. There are other reasons as well. The American prison industry is to some extent privatized. Private prisons need to be funded to get the money. How do you get money? You fill the beds. How do you fill the beds?
You need the drug war. The only way guarantee that your beds will be filled is to criminalize drugs. So, this private industry needs criminals in order to survive. As the criminals show up. The industry does well. The industry then has money.
They lobby. Lobby means they surround politicians with money. That becomes a huge process of corruption in our society. Those are two reasons. They are quite different. There’s also the factor of the complexity of the argument.
It’s very easy to throw out a fear-based soundbite. It is not a complex argument. If you say, “Be afraid of bad drug users. Aren’t they bad people? Don’t they need to be criminalized?” It is a very simple argument.
The arguments for a health approach are more complex and nuanced and thoughtful. So, in the media, when simple fear-based soundbites go up against more complex evidence-based health approaches, it is easier to express the fear-based soundbites.
Those are the three reasons for why we have a criminal justice approach to drugs in our society.
Jacobsen: Those most harmed from creation from “bad guys” by politicians tend to be the most vulnerable, downtrodden, and so on, in society, e.g. minorities and the young. What would you recommend in terms of a preventative measure at the national scale, and individuals (daily life)?
Haden: We need to end drug prohibition. Drug prohibition is the problem. That is the problem. We need to be afraid. Absolutely, we need to be afraid of drug prohibition. It hurts us as a society. It hurts us as communities. It hurts us as individuals.
It hurts us as families. It is a damaging force within society. We need to end it. Once we end it, we need to end it, not with a commercialized response, but with a public health response.
Jacobsen: What do you mean by a regulated market for illegal drugs?
Haden: A regulated market would actively control drugs based on the principles of public health and human rights. Prohibition paradoxically stimulates an illegal market that makes concentrated and sometimes toxic, drugs widely available. The goal is to greatly reduce or shut down the illegal market and regulate drugs in a way that reduces harm to individuals, families and our society as a whole. Seeing drug use as primarily a health and social issue rather than a criminal issue allows us to explore a wide range of tools to manage the problems associated with drugs in a more effective way.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/09
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Lauren Lehman.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you get involved and get an interest in Canadian drug policy?
Lauren Lehman: Last year, I took a course in health geography. I enjoyed it. It was interesting. I thought about doing a masters in it. In class, we talked about harm reduction. We talked about safe injection sites in Vancouver. They are working well.
It is a good idea to reduce health risks. It reduces HIV/AIDs prevalence in a neighborhood. It does not increase crime rates. There are misconceptions around it. When I heard about the organization, it seemed cool.
They were offering a volunteer position at the University of Ottawa. It seemed like a good way to gain experience through my studies.
Jacobsen: What tasks will you be taking on since you recently started?
Lehman: I will be meeting with Nick Cristiano. He will outline a research focused role. He asked for someone interested in communications, research, or event management. I had an interest in the research aspect. They were talking about drug awareness in education.
Jacobsen: With the upcoming research focus, there are two strategies, usually. One is punitive, or punishment, oriented, which is often called zero tolerance. On the other hand, there’s another, which has prevention and minimization of harm in it, called harm reduction.
What is the preferable strategy or model to you, and why?
Lehman: I advocate harm reduction. Honestly, it is the only real way. If you do punishment measure to try and reduce drug use or drug trafficking, it is a broken system. It is seen in the War on Drugs. It is not a good system at all.
It punishes people who are at the low end and in need of help and public health. Drug use is not a criminal issue. It is a public health issue. It does not address the underlying root causes and issues for these problems.
Harm reduction is the preferable approach. It is a preventative approach rather than reactionary.
Jacobsen: Many others have noted the nonpartisan nature of CSSDP, the harm reduction advocacy for drugs, drug use, and drug policy in Canada. As a new member, what attracted you to CSSDP when you first saw it?
Lehman: I thought the work was important. I am very passionate about harm reduction. It is the way to go for public health and addressing these issues. I was on board with the mandate. I found the research interesting.
Jacobsen: Looking at the organization and the general movement (around and in the culture), what do you hope this goes in the future?
Lehman: I would hope this expands more. I hadn’t heard about it until I went to the University of Ottawa. I hope people hear more about it. They have some amazing points. They don’t take a stance on whether drugs are good or bad.
It is not a judgmental organization. It is not like a lot of advocacy organizations, where there is a judgment base for them. People can get more on board with the non-judgemental stance, and the evidence-based focus and movement.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Lauren.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/08
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Evan Loster, part 5.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You described the context for the CSSDP. I want to shift the conversation to other organizations. What other organizations would you recommend individuals look into if they have further interest in getting involved, knowledge – in whatever capacity they can?
Evan Loster: In Canada, I would recommend the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition. They are the reason for the CSSDP and its progress. They are the ‘parent’. They have more power and experience through life and career work. There’s a starting point.
I am a huge fan of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Their work is amazing. If I could be involved with them, eventually, that would be part of my dream. The paradigm pushed by them with the therapeutic use of psychedelics is important.
There are misconceptions about them used in a recreational way, which is not reflective of the experiences. Some might assume hallucinations. Others see this as a transpersonal change. That’s one major organization, which I love. They formed Zendo Project.
They test harm reduction services for psychedelics. There’s the Open Societies Foundation. There’s the American version of us, Students for Sensible Drug Policy. There are others. There are online campaigns to tell stories and reduce stigma.
It’s a huge step in the elimination of the stigma. There are multiple organizations out there. They fight for change. It is a growing movement. As I become more involved in it, I did not realize the number of frameworks and support.
Even through social media, you can tweet, retweet, like, or follow someone, there’s something right away. It is like an organism grows. Its dendrites are growing and making new connections and becoming bigger, and bigger.
Once involved in networks and organizations, it leads to more networks and organizations. It grows. You choose the level of involvement as well.
Jacobsen: There have been attempts to unify the various organizations on a small scale. Medium-term to short-term partnerships for this. What is the importance of partnerships between organizations to make larger changes?
Loster: It is looking at the fact of a single human having a great belief. However, unless compiled with other minds, your belief will only be good to yourself. When you combine organizations, not only does it bridge the gaps in spite of differences, it gives a larger voice.
It gives a larger following. In this sense, rather than 100 minds together, you can have 10,000 minds and opinions. Many more ideas too. It is essential for the change. You need the multidimensional perspective.
It is important for the change for everyone. There will always be differences, especially if you do not include these people. You want to keep people included without marginalizing people. Like the United Nations event, an event with a single mandate unifies everyone.
When on that level, you’re thinking of the entire world. You meet individuals from Guatemala, Columbia, South Africa, the United States, and so on. You learn about damaging organizations like Smart Approaches to Marijuana.
They are a perfect example. They are smart approaches to marijuana, but they are a front for the standard policies – non-evidence-based and punitive policies. They demonize the substance, have irrational claims that the science disputes, and so on.
You can have complete ignorance, too. A country like Malaysia will have policies ‘based on human rights,’ but they support the death penalty. You’re not laughing at the country. It is humorous. How can they say that?
You can have someone from Montreal and Indonesia agree with you. When you come together, your culture does not matter. Your beliefs matter. There’s a human rights lawyer from Indonesia. It is another country with the death penalty for traffickers.
They’ve killed foreigners like Australians. He wanted to talk about drug policy. He was silenced by his own country. He had a position in the roundtable and talked to us. He might risk the entire culture that he’s from. He might not be able to return to the country dependent on the political ideology there.
He’s crying as he’s speaking to us. He’s had friends killed for drug related offenses. We see that first hand. Afterward, everyone observing from upstairs (those without seats) stood and clapped. We weren’t clapping as individual organizations.
We clapped as individual humans that realized the truth he was speaking as well as giving him an acknowledgment of his sacrifice. His pain and suffering. That we’re all there for him. We never met before. We aren’t from the same country or culture, not the same race or gender.
However, with the same belief, we support each other. When organizations come together, they have the same belief. You can see if organizations work together and through their mandate. It is the biggest thing. You have a collective power. The more people, the better the greater the voice.
Jacobsen: With respect to CSSDP, there are ways to get involved with it. What do CSSDP most need from volunteers? How can potential volunteers expedite that to help out?
Loster: CSSDP needs more ground members, more chapters. The board can use for help. However, it doesn’t matter the size of the board without the youth starting to form groups and make changes. If you have 100 board members dictating tasks, starting campaigns, and so on, without chapters, nothing is happening.
We can start a campaign and post on social media. We don’t get followers or chapters, or momentum in the movement with people. The biggest thing is chapters and youth becoming involved in CSSDP.
Youth advocating for sensible drug policy. That’s the biggest thing. It starts and creates a chapter. If you want to get involved with us, you can start a chapter. If there’s a chapter near you, you can start there. There’s nothing limiting the chapters from influencing their own development.
We don’t have huge resources to start a huge event. Imagine a chapter hosting an electronic music festival with the need for drug testing. We would support it. However, we don’t do it. The chapter does it.
There’s nothing limiting a chapter. They can grow and become their own entity. The big thing is chapters becoming bigger and independent for their own community. W can change things at the national level through advocacy.
The changes happen piecemeal with a conversation with friends, family, and fellow peers and altering the mental state of politicians. If every community begins to change, the national side will too.
Eventually, you will have the same situation with the states. You have states with a belief pattern, legalizing cannabis. As well, the federal disagreement. Of course, it will become ridiculous. Individual states will legalize and the federal will not. People won’t care.
It is self-empowerment for people. It boils down to people empowering themselves to the point of making a change in their own lives. It starts small and becomes large.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Evan.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/08
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Evan Loster, part 4.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The examples of Bill Hicks and Terence McKenna sit alongside Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass, or Richard Albert. I like the analysis. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is an analysis of institutions. By “an analysis of institutions,” I mean a critical framework from which to examine society at large.
If you take the American examples that you gave, we have crack cocaine, sellers in the white population or the European Americans in terms of descendants, and the buyers in the black population or the African Americans.
You have the psychedelics with the Far Left, politically. These become the minority, marginalized, demonized groups. In Canada, we had cannabis with Mexicans. We had opium with the Chinese ‘scare’.
These become manifestations of xenophobia. In addition, certain cultural values can be expressed by output of the human organism. For example, we have the examples of tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine.
Each of these activates particular sets of networks in the brain, in the main part of the central nervous system. The values held by the society in terms of what is taken as what you called an “archetype” for the values that the society takes in.
Those values, in a concrete sense, are represented in each person’s neural architecture. When they take a substance, it will activate certain networks more often than not. If caffeine, it’s busy, busy, busy. If alcohol, it’s down, relax, forget.
In other cultures more the fringe, sub-cultures in the society, you can have psychedelics from the Far Left, which are exploratory drugs for the most part. They bring about experiences that are typically called mystical, transcendental, or religious.
We have stories of Mohammed flying to heaven on a winged horse. Ok, maybe, but that was probably a naturally born expression of a similar neural architecture being activated naturally rather than artificially. That’s what I’m taking from what you’re saying.
Evan Loster: Even to add on the caffeine, anxiety, nicotine basis, we’re a society that utilizes things like Xanax to counter those effects. You can go to your doctor tomorrow and say, “I have too much anxiety,” rather than realize that you take too may stimulants.
You can prescribe a pill to take more stimulants. You are more of a machine rather than a human. You lose the artistic element, which is self-expression. There’s a reason individuals are drawn to natural human expression.
People see someone dancing in the middle of the street and are drawn to it, “Why are they doing that?” You are all the same people. It is weird to see people have that natural expression in modern society.
That’s the difference between the counter-culture and archaic forms of society, and modern society. Substance use comes from the level of comfort individuals have with their neighbours. You might not say, “Hi,” to them.
That’s opposed to the more intimate societies. It is less than the substances, the psychedelics, but a reflection of the cultural values. We can create a psychedelic reality. It is constructed things in that form to create the behaviour.
Those people feel more interested in talking to a stranger about their day. Our society, people will honk, try to drive you off the road, and so on. Maybe, that’s a reflection of individuals being on stimulants rather than being mellow.
It is hard for youth. If you identify with the artistic side, you have everything against you. You have barriers, resistance, and problems to face. It is not impossible. However, it will be hell to get there.
You will have people say, “You’re crazy. Don’t you want to buy a house and have a family?” Your own family too. It is difficult. It is multi-dimensional. We need to get youth to behave independently.
Our youth are good at organizing. We need to organize into a central message and do something about it. The CSSDP is an important framework for it. If we continue to see the organizations, initiatives, and coalitions build and grow, then more momentum will happen for it.
It will continue to grow as long as people stand up. Another way to look at this society is to look at vaping. Analog cigarettes are being taken over by vaping. Millions of people vaporize, even though it’s not legalized.
In Winnipeg, 25 vape stores have opened in recent years.
(Laugh)
Out of nothing, you have an economy, jobs, and millions of people with a healthier manner to ingest nicotine. So, the government hasn’t done anything. It has tried to do it. You can’t vape in public spaces.
You need to make windows frosted. So, children can’t see inside. They haven’t stopped the phenomena. It is an essential point. You see this with dispensaries for marijuana, not closing and continuing to promote their ideology.
That is, they should have a non-discriminatory storefront for people over 19. People will not intervene. It is too much a headache. They will accept the social or cultural change. It is practical for them anymore.
Also, another thing is the number of people retiring in the next couple of years. The majority of the work force is on the verge of retirement. Even the provincial government has trouble finding replacement employees, you used to have 10-20 candidates per job in the government.
Now, you won’t can as many candidates. Many young people don’t want to work in the public sector. It is not a fun place to work. There are no incentives. Do you want to work for low pay with people having a completely different mentality?
With the division and segregation within the government, no organizations work together. They want to attach their name to it. You have the division that creates roadblocks and problems. Everyone needs to have their hands on it.
That’s another step too. For society, everything takes years. The dimension of time does not have to dictate the rate of change for an ideology. As long as you have an consensus of belief, it is a pinnacle moment of drug policy.
Everyone changes to a common belief about drug policy. Everything will change at that time. With the overdoses happening, it is becoming a larger epidemic with 30 overdoses in one weekend or one night.
Everyone uses the same adulterated supply. At that point, society will change. It is a common trend. We need to lose 2,000 or 5,000 lives before changing the policies to help people. As we both know, drug policy hurts the prosecuted and those overdosing.
Jacobsen: Also, it has political and economic ramifications. It affects parents and siblings. If you associate with someone using drugs, especially if the drug has legality behind it, it is an issue.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/08
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Evan Loster, part 3.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What events have success?
Evan Loster: In Europe, there are a lot of events. Zendo Project is a major one in the United States. They’ve been at Burning Man. There’s an organization called Dance Safe. That’s what I know. Other have contemplated it, but have stopped because of legal issues.
That’s the biggest issue. You have a festival run by boards. The problem is everyone on the board must agree. We need drug testing. Even in my own community, we have something called Folk Fest. I want to bring drug testing to it.
Even talking to the harm reduction community in Winnipeg, there’s this problem having accountability and responsibility in those events. They tried to bring Plan B. One, sexual assault is an ongoing and common issue at these events. Two, the need to have that protection for females is a good thing.
For example, an unsolicited sexual encounter and don’t want to have their baby. Plan B was over-the-counter. They didn’t want to take responsibility for giving that out to people. They will turn down the entire idea.
Since the festival turns down the idea, it doesn’t mean that won’t happen there. Same with the festival. They didn’t want naloxone at the festival without a trained professional. Naloxone is easy. You don’t need to be a trained professional to administer it.
It is as easy as taking saline mixtures up the nose. I hope, in spite of it, some will bring naloxone. It is not to promote drug use, but to help attendees to stay safe. Universities should have access to it.
It is a tough time. You are stressed and depressed in this major time of development. Many will experiment with substances. Opiates are a good substance to reduce pain. They calm you. They bring you down. The issue is this becoming a recurrent obsessive behavior.
Also, when you think a taken substance is one thing, and it’s not, it can be a big problem. Across the world, there are safe injection sites. Many countries have legalized heroine. Canada too now. Paraguay has decriminalized all drugs.
It is a perfect example. The statistics demonstrate drug related crime has gone down. Overdoses have gone down. HIV/AIDS rates have gone down. Drug use has gone slightly up. The statistics might be deceptive. Have rates gone up or have people admitted it – since the stigma is gone?
Maybe, people admit it. Maybe, people experiment without the dissolution of the stigma. If someone wants to try marijuana or a therapeutic amount of MDMA, that should not be stigmatized. It is awesome to explore yourself.
Jacobsen: There’s an inverted pyramid of drug abuse. An inverted pyramid of harm and legality, tobacco and alcohol are harmful to individuals, families, and societies. Cannabis is in the national discussion now.
It is illegal. Yet, it does not have major harms associated with it, especially compared to tobacco and alcohol. Tobacco and alcohol are legal and harmful. Marijuana or cannabis is virtually non-harmful and illegal. This is repeated across the spectrum.
What seems like the reason behind this?
Loster: I am unconventional. I use Terence McKenna and Bill Hicks for this perspective. Tobacco and alcohol promote productive workers. Same with caffeine. They are the most prized substances in society. You ingest nicotine and caffeine to make you productive. There’s no other reason for it.
It doesn’t bring you down at night. The whole basis is the promotion of cultural values of productivity. You drink alcohol to forget about the shitty work week. So, you have a coping mechanism.
When people stop using these substances, that’s when they stop being able to work at that level. You start depreciating yourself. Your true qualities are showing. Let’s use the opposite side of the spectrum, I like heroine as an example.
There are differences in the addictive qualities of heroin and tobacco. Heroin, you may want to stay home more than go to work. Same with psychedelics. They make you question the cultural patterns.
If everyone tried LSD or psilocybin, people wouldn’t contemplate work for tomorrow. They would look into other values, which the establishment doesn’t want now. I don’t believe in a massive conspiracy. Ideologies have created a giant illusion believed by us.
The ideologies began with a few people. It spread. If you look at a cult, a cult as it first comes out, it has a huge stigma. Everyone thinks it’s bad. If you attach the word to it, it is instantly demonized. Every major belief system started as a cult.
You had a small number of people believing something. It grew. Scientology is ridiculous now. In 1,000 years, if it’s still here, people will think it has some basis in reality because “Why has it been around for so long?”
It boils down to substances most promoted in society are promoting cultural values. Those most penalized are against those values. One of Nixon’s or Reagan’s political advisors targeted specific marginalized groups of people by penalizing the drugs used most by them.
The black community was crack and heroine. Even to today, Jay-Z put out a music video about the war on drugs. He talked about the media promoted crack as a black problem, even though more white people than black people used it.
Legally, blacks got worst charges and indictments for selling crack cocaine because the people using crack were in poverty and in minority neighborhoods based on the expense. Same with the Far Left movement. They penalized psychedelics because LSD and psilocybin created a counterculture movement.
It was associated with it. It mostly boils down to culture. There are classifications of legality and substances are not based on science, more on how we want people to act and behave. Even altered states of consciousness like schizophrenia is demonized in our society, if you’re a shaman, you are seen as a gift.
Our society doesn’t make schizophrenia mark the archetype of sanity. We demonize and attempt to medicate it.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/08
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Evan Loster, part 2.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You affirmed a preference for the harm reduction approach, which involves prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and enforcement – as the four major parts of it. If we take into account the more practical, general things of it, at least in Canada, what comes to mind for you with respect to harm reduction, practical examples?
Evan Loster: For me, there’s plenty. The three that come to mind are safe injection sites, naloxone training, and providing that overdose antidote to first responders and the users themselves. If you have a demographic of people who are high opiate users, who would have easily accessible naloxone, the idea is not to encourage use, but to, in essence, save lives.
We’re not suggesting by providing naloxone the encouragement of the use of heroine by them. We are accepting the fact and reducing the risk. We are providing a harm reducing service to eliminate that risk. Secondly, with supervised injection sites, the ideology behind that is not to encourage use, but safe use.
If there are testing services, it ensures no adulterations of the substances. If clean needles and access, then no transmissions of HIV, STDs, and diseases in genera. These services provide the support of the community.
You’re providing support as well. It revolves around reducing harm and providing support. So, you have more positive reinforcement of certain types of behavior to ensure reduction or elimination of mortality.
Every harm reduction principle is related to saving lives. Punishment is more related around, not necessarily saving a life, but reforming a life. An archetype of a productive member of society, according to them.
Harm reduction is more accepting of people and their issues, and working through those problems. One emergent phenomenon in Canada, even with the legal barriers, is drug testing at music festivals.
With new adulterants like fentanyl and other synthetic powerful opiates, those services at music festivals are essential because it brings awareness for people. For instance, Shambhala is a music festival. They did drug testing.
It was a success. There were no overdoses. They had naloxone on site. They didn’t need to use it. There is a drug testing culture. You are informing someone of the substance. Also, you’re informing the entire community the drugs and the effects of the drugs.
MDMA, for example, has a common logo on it. They would put that on a board saying, “Green bubble B pills, all tested high for PMA.” So if you’re walking by the drug testing tank, and if you have those pills, that information can prevent bad use.
You get an alert of a possible substance with an adulterant in it. Another aspect, the provision of the drug testing service. The legality is an issue. The testers can’t touch the substance. You have to follow a strict regimen.
The users need to understand. It is up to them. You can’t say to use or not to use a substance but must inform. It leaves the responsibility to the person, the choice to the person, which is a good thing. It promotes self-independence.
There is a legality issue. If you tell someone, “If you take this pill, it could cause cardiac arrest,” that’s more important than curtailing that because of legality. Until we get past the taboo with harm reduction services, it will become more open, more broad, and realistic.
Harm reduction is education, too, from a youth level. You should start as young as possible. Of course, age appropriate content. For instance, you do not show pictures of overdose people to children. That is a scare tactic. It is not informing.
There are individuals using heroine throughout life. They hold a job. They function throughout life. The services should provide education appropriate to age. People should know what people do rather than the stereotypes. I used a suppressed tablet, thinking this was pure MDMA. I didn’t understand the feeling.
(Laugh)
It was an abundance of energy and feeling in a different state, not being able to sleep. Most likely, those pills were not pure MDMA. At the time of ingesting the pill, I didn’t know it. I thought “A purple pill with a crown on top. Cool!”
So, you didn’t receive education in high that was saying, “These are pressed capsules. Did you know MDMA can’t be made into pressed capsules?” That information could have instilled the unconscious thought into me, “Oh, these are pressed. These aren’t pure MDMA.”
That beginning phase is important. People can make proper decisions. When we limiting people to not being able to make proper decisions, we get into trouble. You are taking away that self-empowerment from them.
You are saying, “You aren’t wise enough. You can’t decide this.” However, if you have the spectrum of information, people will use it. It is much better to have the optimism. People will use it.
If there are people ignorant of the knowledge gained, that is something needing independent change. It is more a reflection of the personality trait rather than our work. There’s the independent side of the person. There’s intervention from a community perspective.
It is important to have a harm reduction community, which is important for an individual’s self-development. We can promote the behavioral change.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/07
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Elazar Ehrentreu.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you get an interest in drug policy in Canada?
Evan Loster: My interest started in university. Ideologies about society changed with inspirations from first year philosophy, psychology, and sociology courses. I was having a conversation about marijuana legalization and psychedelic research. They brought up CSSDP and starting a chapter in Winnipeg. They suggested becoming involved in with the organization. I researched it.
I realized that there was a platform for students to become involved at a political level. My awareness changed from the experience. I did not become part of the board of directors in the first application.
One year later, Gonzo Nieto reached out to me. I applied and was voted on the board. Since then, my interest has been growing. My education and awareness has been growing, too. My awareness of the issues and the drug policies in place affecting human lives.
It is becoming apparent, which contributed to becoming involved politically, scientifically, and emotionally. From personal experience, I had siblings deal with drug addiction. I have volunteered in psychiatric wards too. These life experiences drove interest into consciousness, psychedelics, and drug policy.
Jacobsen: With respect to your current position, what tasks and responsibilities come along with it?
Loster: On the board, you commit as much as you can because it is a volunteer organization. We delegate tasks, organize campaigns, and help start and support chapters. Our chapters are the backbone of the organization, we represent the students in individual institutions across the country.
I chair the political advocacy and special projects committee. We write position statements on policies in place, bills being enacted, supporting initiatives voicing human rights issues around drug policy, and so on. It is what you can commit.
It can be writing blogs, helping with the website, or attending conferences or demonstrations to represent us and our chapters – show our presence.
Jacobsen: Two philosophies enter the discussion across the board. One is punitive or zero tolerance. The other is harm reduction or minimization. Which is preferable to you, and why?
Loster: I believe in harm reduction. It is a human right to experience altered states, whether it is substance induced, a religious experience, or otherwise for the shift in consciousness. It has been part of the human experience for thousands of years. We have a co-evolution with mind-altering substances.
For me, I do not think punishment will help people. It will further instill self-hatred. It will further instill the real causation of an addiction. It will promote criminal activity because you’re taking people dealing with an internal battle and throwing non-violent drug offenders into an institution with violent offenders.
It takes away any place to grow. You do not see another way. You come out with this negative view. Unless, of course, you have a rare life experience that changes you. It is subjective to the person. There are many reasons punishment will never work.
We need more empathy for how trauma affects. People are humans. It boils down to treating humans as humans. It does not have to be any more complicated.
Jacobsen: What do you consider the core principle of CSSDP?
Loster: It is hard to narrow it down to one thing. It is advocating for human rights and a harm reduction based sensible drug policy. CSSDP’s core principle is to help youth mobilize themselves and provide a platform for them to make a difference.
A lot of people don’t necessarily believe in their government, don’t know how to get involved, and may not got out of their comfort zone to find a way. If we can provide that platform, and bring awareness to it, it allows youth and students to have a voice in that political fashion.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/07
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Dr. Tara Marie Watson, part 2.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One of the more important subjects of drug policy comes in the form of volunteering. This comes from three areas. One, that means from those out of high school and with more freedom in undergraduate studies.
Two, those starting the first major research projects, honours theses and Masters theses. Three, those becoming professionals through doctorate level and having expert-level opinions on the subject matter. Any advice for those three demographics?
Watson: That’s an interesting question. I wasn’t expecting one like it. Those with an interest in drug policy should seek out resources. There should be more resources on campuses across Canada. For example, groups like the Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy are really important. These groups need to get the word out through campus and social media outreach. It can help reach the students that have interest and don’t know where to look. At the high school and undergraduate levels, you don’t get much tailored, drug-policy education.
I find that people need to be self-interested. Those grassroots, community, and student-oriented groups are really important to get students engaged in Canadian drug policy reform. For those starting at the early levels of research, there needs to be programs on campus that engage students at all levels. That includes graduate students and faculty. There needs to be a place to learn more and get involved. Here at the University of Toronto, there’s a Collaborative Program in Addiction Studies. It offers multi-disciplinary courses on drug-related issues.
Drug policy is just one aspect of this program; it is a program for those who have general interests in drug-related issues at the University of Toronto. There should be efforts to broaden those types of academic programs and have the advocacy piece to coincide with it.
For those early-career professionals, it is important to stay engaged on social media and seek out different opportunities to become involved in drug policy issues. I do this. For example, I know about and have reached out to the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition and campaigns like Support, Don’t Punish. When I see such groups or campaigns, I sign up for newsletters and email lists. I visit the websites to acquire more information. I want to stay involved in the latest news regarding harm reduction in Canada, in particular. I think it’s a good thing to be a part of these groups.
Jacobsen: How can professional academics mentor younger generations?
Watson: It is wonderful for people to seek out such mentorship. There can be more done. Drug policy experts can come to events and speak to students and other people interested in these issues. Groups like the CSSDP do a great job reaching out to speak to experts. It’s like what you’re doing right now. Drug policy experts tend to congregate together and speak to one another. That is great. However, there needs to be more cross-dialogues with other stakeholders who are interested and want to get involved in drug policy.
That includes law enforcement agents and social workers and teachers. You sometimes don’t see these individuals come to certain drug policy events. So, thinking beyond mentorship, there needs to be more outreach to get experts in drug policy speaking to different groups. How do you best do this? That’s a pressing question.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Dr. Watson.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/07
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Dr. Tara Marie Watson, part 1.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How’d you get interested and involved in Canadian drug policy?
Dr. Tara Marie Watson: I have longstanding interests in drug policy in general. I started becoming interested as a graduate student at the Master’s level. I took graduate-level courses, which opened a new personal perspective on drug issues.
Previously, I adopted a psychological lens through which to view drug issues. I took courses that were more about the sociology of drug-related problems. These courses opened up new personal perspectives.
I learned about a number of converging factors, including socio-cultural elements, that form part of drug-related issues and policies. At that point, I became interested in learning more about drug policy – its design, politics, and ways it’s debated. I then did a Ph.D. in criminology.
I have also been involved in the coordination of public health research related to harm reduction. Canada has been a jurisdiction of interest, not only because of living here, but Canada has seen interesting ups-and-downs and stagnation with regards to drug policy.
Jacobsen: In general, there are two streams of thought. Philosophies as theories. Strategies as practice. There’s a punitive or punishment approach called zero tolerance. There’s another called harm reduction. Briefly, you noted expertise in harm reduction. What is the preferable strategy, and why?
Watson: As well, there is a wide spectrum. You have correctly identified two sort of opposite ends of the spectrum. One being punitive, and zero tolerance. The other being harm reduction. There’s a lot that can fall in between these two approaches, including policies and strategies also referred to as harm reduction.
These strategies vary as to the level of meeting people ‘where they’re at’ in terms of their drug use. Some strategies are coercive. Some are harm reduction-oriented. I want to make that clarification. I am on the harm-reduction end of the spectrum. Punitive, zero-tolerance, and law enforcement-oriented approaches to drug use have been abject failures.
Evidence from criminology and sociology associated with the war on drugs document the failures in Canada, the US, and other countries following prohibitionist logic over many decades. Punitive approaches towards drugs do not reduce levels of drug use. These approaches don’t deter people from trying or experimenting with different substances. They don’t reduce drug-related crime. In particular, they discriminate against segments of the population that are typically marginalized in some way.
For example, people experiencing poverty, homelessness, histories of trauma, and so on. These experiences are important factors in the lives of some people who use drugs. By arresting, charging, and throwing people in jail for crimes like drug possession, we have done nothing to reduce the stigma and discrimination in their lives. We’ve done little to mitigate the health-related problems associated with drug use. Prisons are, in particular, known to be challenging places to offer treatment for drug use.
Jacobsen: To make things explicit, you mentioned “segments of the population.” What are the segments of the population? What are the most damaging effects of bad drug policy?
Watson: People who have had experiences with significant amounts of discrimination and social marginalization in life often exhibit heavier, more sustained, and problematic forms of drug use. This includes people who are members of racial and ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and those coming from families with ongoing and sustained problematic substance use, as well as histories of trauma.
These groups can be predisposed to more serious forms of drug use such as dependence and addiction. They find themselves more likely to be in conflict with the law compared to more “mainstream” people who may use drugs because of, for example, living on the street and having had many experiences of discrimination. They don’t have as many resources or means of protection when they obtain drugs. In terms of the damaging effects of overly punitive and zero-tolerance drug laws, there are multiple. These effects include ongoing stigmatization and marginalization of the aforementioned groups. Again, these groups tend to be disproportionately affected by drug laws. It is due in part to the discretion in place of drug enforcement by the police. We know of many issues around this in the criminal justice system.
One of the other effects, in the US especially, is the enforcement of drug laws having resulted in massive incarceration and a prison-industrial complex. There is much sociological research to support this, and some key documentaries explain this phenomenon, such as The House I Live In, too.
The health effects are very damaging. People on the street experiencing homelessness and poverty and involved in taking drugs have to conceal drug use from the authorities. This leads to myriad health-related harms. Everything from having to conceal themselves to take drugs in clandestine locations such as alleyways. They have to throw away drugs and drug-use equipment out of fear. They don’t want to get caught or have their equipment confiscated by police.
One remedy to some of these issues is harm reduction strategies and programs. They can be successful and are in place in Canada, to a degree.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/06
I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Dessy Pavlova, part 1.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In brief, how did you get involved and get an interest in Canadian drug policy?
Dessy Pavlova: When I was in high school, I went to an alternative school. It was a school where people using drugs went to become educated. It was for people who could not function in a regular school environment, whether possession or skipping classes.
I was out of the hospital for a back operation. There were a few people with chronic disabilities or mental health issues. It was a cool school. We had time to socialize with other students there. We were free to stay all day. So, I would stay all day.
I met people with drug problems through TRIP Toronto. I did not get too involved with them because I was not going to events. There thing is outreach events. Through them, I found CSSDP.
I was about 18. When I graduated from the high school, I went to York University. I started the York chapter there. It was not successful, but it segued into being more involved over the years.
In 2015, I attended a CSSDP conference. I helped before the conference too. At the conference, we voted in a new board of directors. I am on the board of directors now. I have been active ever since.
Jacobsen: What tasks and responsibilities come along with this station or position?
Pavlova: I am the chair. I have been treasurer and vice chair. I am the outreach chair, too. With vice chair, I was the support the other members in the board, especially the chairs. Sub-committee chairs need help. I was there to make sure things are streamlined.
In case the chairs can not do something, I will take the leadership role. As outreach chair, I coordinate the website and events with both the board and chapters. Anytime there are events. We are putting new features such as the calendar on the website.
It is exciting because it will be a way to put chapters across Canada in one place. You can see the event, buy tickets to the event, and help bring everybody together. I see that as my main role, bringing everybody together and then streamlining communication and collaboration efforts.
Jacobsen: What do you consider the core principle of CSSDP?
Pavlova: If we were to reduce it to one, it would be harm reduction, but connected to sensible drug policy too. It is not about reducing harm alone. It is about putting out the education for people to make informed decisions.
I found that successful. Education goes farther than politicians and older adults give credit.
Jacobsen: Where do you hope CSSDP goes into the future?
Pavlova: I hope we become more recognized and involved with the government. We are a good means for them to reach youth.
“Just Say, ‘No!’” does not work. I am glad. They are working with us, e.g. workshops and roundtables. They will be more in touch youth and help solve some of these social problems.
Jacobsen: The two major philosophies to implement in society at large are the punitive or zero tolerance approaches and the harm reduction approaches. What is preferable to you, and why?
Pavlova: The harm reduction approach is more effective. You see this. In anything that we have been told not to do and punished for, e.g. if you look at safe sex, we are told to not have sex as teenagers. The truth: I do not know a single teenager who does not have sex.
Now, the ones practicing harm reduction would have safe sex. They become educated. It is the same situation. If you bar a child from doing something, they rebel.
Jacobsen: In addition, there are family and child protective services. There are means through which negative family impacts on a child and on youth can be dealt with apart from outright punishment approaches.
Pavlova: Punishment approaches in general cause more harm by separating a child from their parent than educating both parent and child on potential harms and how to reduce them. The separation of families is not the way to do it.
Cannabis is not considered the neighbourhood menace. People did not want to sign the names on the chapter list because they were scared since they smoked pot that cops would somehow get their hands on the list.
Now, we are coming to the point where we accept it is not that great of a harm and lesser than putting people in jail. I have seen parent with very sick children go to jail, who are currently in jail, because they provided medicine to their kids. Cannabis is only one. The conversation starts here.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your family and personal story – culture, education, and geography?
My German (Lutheran and Reformed) and Scots Irish (Presbyterian) ancestors immigrated to the American colonies in the mid-Eighteenth Century and settled in the North Carolina backcountry near what is now the city of Hickory (about 35 miles northwest of Charlotte). I live a short distance from land granted to my sixth paternal great grandfather by King George II in 1752. My ancestors fought the Cherokee and then their own neighbours and family (on both sides) during the American Revolution. They owned slaves and fought for the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. They almost certainly supported Jim Crow laws in the South, but much of this history has been forgotten (or suppressed) for generations now. I’m currently in the process of researching and writing about it, sometimes in the context of current events, in a new publication on Medium. You can read a sample here. Despite being raised and living in the Carolina “backcountry” my entire life, I managed to get a degree in Mathematics and recently retired from a successful 24 year career in software engineering and support at a Fortune 100 company. So I am a product of both a rural middle class upbringing and an excellent public education system, and I have been working on computer software with great teams in Shanghai and Hyderabad for the last decade while living amidst the corn fields and chicken farms of a small rural Southern community with a nearby progressive metropolis (Charlotte) and both an Apple (Maiden) and a Google (Lenoir) data center. Welcome to the New South and a global economy based on computer technology!
What informs your personal humanist beliefs, as a worldview and ethic, respectively?
Like everyone else, my worldview is informed primarily by my life experiences and my education. Even though I majored in mathematics, I also studied philosophy and world religions (including Christianity) in college. I even explored Buddhism and Taoism in my personal life after leaving Christianity, but all my experiences and education informed a worldview based on naturalism, empiricism, scepticism, and humanism. But Taoism, absurdism (Albert Camus in particular), and other perspectives – including Christianity – still continue to inform my life. For example, I continue to find wisdom in Thomas Merton’s writings on Chuang Tzu or his devout memory of Adolf Eichmann.
In terms of ethics (humanism), it’s really pretty simple for me. John Lennon said: “All you need is love.” But it’s a little more complicated than that. So I’ve always liked Bertrand Russell’s maxim that the “good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” These are core humanist values that I learned from my (not terribly devout Christian) parents, but they were also reinforced by working at a local hospital emergency room for almost a decade while going to college part-time. If you don’t think love without knowledge can be problematic, I encourage you to spend some time in an emergency room or medical clinic.
What makes humanism seem more right or true than other worldviews to you – arguments and evidence?
At its core, humanism simply emphasises the importance of human agency and embraces reason and evidence as well as empathy and compassion. These are values that are shared by many people of faith as well as secular people who might not call themselves humanists. So I think it’s more useful to focus on how these core humanist values are shared by people who choose to add a supernatural aspect to it and call it religion. We can argue about whether the latter is right or true, but the former should be a given for any reasonable dialogue about what is true. After all, you can’t credibly use reason to argue that reason shouldn’t be embraced.
What are effective ways to advocate for humanism?
Start or join a local humanist group. If you are from the US, join the secular coalition in your state and lobby your local legislators on secular and humanist issues. Also, run for local office. If in the UK, join the British Humanist Association and either join or create a humanist group in your area. Write a letter to the editor at your local paper. Join a local interfaith group and share your perspective with others in your local community. At the Hickory Humanist Alliance, we are engaged in community service and an active member of the local interfaith council as well as a Secular Coalition for North Carolina endorsing group. We pick up trash along one of the roads in Hickory as part of the state’s adopt-a-highway program, and we donate to local charities that support the homeless. And thanks to the tireless efforts of our group’s founder, Gene Elliott, we are once again sponsoring what is expected to be the largest secular conference ever held in the Carolinas – ReasonCon3, featuring Lawrence Krauss as the keynote speaker. So I think it’s also important to keep educating yourself about humanism (and scepticism) in order to be a more effective advocate. But in the end, do something.
What is the importance of humanism in America at the moment?
First, it’s certainly growing. Ten or twenty years ago there were no humanist groups in this state that I am aware of. Now, there are numerous active groups in my own local area and across the state. These local groups provide much needed community for humanists, but they also ensure that humanists are visible in their local communities. Humanist values are of critical importance to our survival and future progress, and we need more advocates and community engagement at the local level.
The importance of humanism in America has never been more apparent to me than it is now. In our post-truth political era filled with hatred and anger and deep political divisions, we would all be well served to remember that “the good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” Humanists have long been catalysts for change because, as Carl Sagan said, “there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” We recognise both our responsibility to work together with others and the need to take collective action. In my view, nothing could be more important at this moment in our nation’s history.
What is the importance of secularism in America at the moment?I’m the Legislative Chair for the Secular Coalition for North Carolina, and I think it’s critically important for local and state legislatures to hear from their secular constituents. While I support the work that the Secular Coalition for America, the American Humanist Association, the Center for Inquiry, and other groups are doing at the national and international level, we also need to get more engaged at the local level. For years now a radical right wing legislature in my own state has been busy fighting marriage equality, expanding school vouchers, attacking women’s reproductive rights, and infamously targeting transgender people with unenforceable bathroom restrictions. We must continue to defend secular values at both the local and national level in order to preserve the separation of church and state and true religious freedom for everyone in our country.
What social forces might regress the secular humanist movements in the US?
In my view, liberal and progressive social movements regress when they embrace authoritarianism (or celebrity), dogmatism, and tribalism. As with humanism, the core secular values of separation of church and state, religious freedom, and evidence-based public policy are shared by many people of faith. Secularists, as well as humanists, need allies in faith communities to help us defend these shared values.
What has been the greatest emotional struggle in life for you?
I’m sometimes accused of being emotionally detached (a coping mechanism I honed while working in the emergency room), but my greatest emotional struggle is probably more worthy of a private conservation with a therapist than airing out here in a public forum. Sorry.
Thank you for your time, William.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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*Deo has since been murdered.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In brief, what is your family story?I was born in a poor African family. I first saw my biological father when I was ten years old. I am the heir of my late father, Fulgensio Ssekitooleko. He was a very committed catholic, very social, and a committed humanitarian. I grew up with my mother Noelina Nalwada – which was typically a single-parent household (but at other times I had step-fathers).
I am the only child. My father’s children, apart from one, died after getting infected with HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. My mother is an atheist, agnostic or skeptic. When I tried to enter a catholic seminary, she abused me and challenged me whether I had ever seen somebody who has ever seen God or returned from death.
However, one of my last stepfathers who was both a devout catholic and a believer in African traditional religion influenced me to be a very religious person (Catholic) in my early youth. My mother knew how to fight for my (and her) rights, so I never understood issues concerning human rights violations during my youth except when seeing teachers apply corporal punishment to my fellow students.
As I was growing up, I was not aware of the massive human rights abuse by the governments of the day, but, once in a while, I could hear whispers about somebody who has disappeared or killed by the government. Those were regimes of president Iddi Amin Dada, and the second regime of Apollo Milton Obote as he was fighting guerrillas lead by Yoweri Museveni – the current president of UgandaI am married to Elizabeth, and we have been together for 17 years. We have four children: Sylvia (16 years), Diana (12), Julius (11), and Nicholas (3).
Are there any others things about your personal story you would like to share?
I grew up striving to succeed in education so that I could escape poverty, ignorance, and unfairness in society. My mother’s relatives were always exploited by witchdoctors who claimed to have healing-powers and thus could cure diseases – including HIV/AIDS. My uncles and aunts gave away their land to witchdoctors in order to get cured from HIV/AIDS, but they later died leaving no property to their offsprings.
In the years to come, the Pentecostal movements emerged promising prosperity on earth, good health and many other opportunities. The two groups, i.e. the traditional religions and the Pentecostals, were undermining the struggle against HIV/AIDS, exploiting poor people. Yet, nobody could talk about them or challenge them.
This was a traumatising experience. I never knew whether this was a human rights issue or mere belief, or ignorance. As the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights defends the right to belief, all governments have gone on to include that article in their constitutions.
This means that ignorant people can be exploited in the name of belief as it is their human right to be exploited as long as they believe. This has been one of my most traumatising struggles in life. I have lost so many relatives out of their ignorance of science concerning health issues. Yet, governments cannot do anything about this because the politicians are also superstitious and the laws protect the charlatans.
In Uganda, almost 80 per cent of FM radio stations spend most of their time promoting the work of faith healers and witchdoctors. Rationalists do not have resources to own a radio station or to buy time on radio and television.
In my struggle to promote rationalism, I founded the Uganda Humanist Association. I became the East African Representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (2007-2012). Now, I am the Ugandan Representative of the Center for Inquiry International.
As advocacy campaigns are difficult, we now engage with local communities to talk about science and superstition in health and community development. Our work is now to invite whoever happens to be involved to discuss these issues openly and inform communities of the dangers of superstition in health and community development.
As of now, I have personally suspended armchair conference-hall humanism. I am in the trenches of community practical humanism. Whatever little I do, I feel proud that at least I am part of the struggle to rationalise African communities.What are your religious/irreligious, ethical and political beliefs?
I grew up as a staunch Catholic, and then at university I became a radical secular humanist. Now, having interacted with various so-called humanists and observed their limitations (especially in building harmony, inclusive communities, practical approaches to society problems, and a general lack of openness) I have reviewed my humanism.
I am now a free thinking, liberal, practical humanist. I do not mind other people’s beliefs on the condition that they do not infringe on the rights, happiness, and welfare of other human beings. I can work with Catholics on a health project, but I tell them point blank that the use of condoms should not be undermined and that family planning is essential in our families.
I tell Pentecostals that by preaching miracles such as faith-healing they are committing homicide. However, I enjoy my intellectual philosophical humanism as we debate Darwinism, the Big Bang theory, the environment, and the future of humanity among others. Politically, I am a social welfare democrat. Democracy should not be only about elections, but on how society shares opportunities and resources and how it promotes harmony.
I do not support the winner takes it all type of democracy. I prefer proportional representation in government as a form of democracy, as is the case in many countries which suffered the madness of the second world war.
How did you become an activist and a sceptic?
When I enrolled in high school, I was still a very confused young man. I had experienced a lot in my childhood. My Biology teacher, the late Mathias Katende, made an explosion in my brain and changed my ideological worldview. He introduced evolutionary biology to us.
The more he taught, the more we became confused. All along, I had prepared myself to go to heaven and meet Mary, the mother of Jesus, and escape worldly problems. However, by the time I entered University to study Botany, Zoology, and Psychology, I had become completely healed from this ideological and philosophical trauma.
At University, we got more lessons on evolution, but the lecturers were not as committed to evolution as my high school teacher. In fact, most students never took evolution seriously. They just wrote their examinations and moved on with life.
At university, by luck, a friend gave me a book on discovering religions. I read about most religions, worldviews, and philosophies. I found Humanism to be more related to my new worldview. I wrote to the British Humanist Association and got a positive response from Matt Cherry who encouraged me to form a humanist organisation. That was the birth of the Uganda Humanist Association.
He connected me to the center for Inquiry International through Norm Allen who was the Director of African Americans for Humanism (AAH). The Free Inquiry Magazines that Norm sent us opened our eyes wider on how humanity sees itself. Later, we were to work with the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) on many secular projects.
Do you consider yourself a progressive?
I am very progressive. I have always been evolving in my ideological, philosophical, cultural, and political views. I used to be a staunch believer in American democracy, but now I am more rotated towards European Social Parliamentary Democracy. I used to hate China’s politics, but now I see it relevant in order to maintain orderliness and social welfare to a country (that has over one billion people) under one authority. I am a progressive because I am ever open to new challenges, new ideas, and new world views for the good of humanity and the environment at large.
Does progressivism logically imply other beliefs, or tend to or even not all?
I don’t look at progressivism as a confined ideology or philosophy. If so, then I need more education about it. In my view, progressivism should be open to all aspects of human life including but not limited to culture, beliefs, politics, philosophy, and views about the environment among others.
How did you come to adopt socially progressive worldview?
As I explained earlier, it is a combination of my childhood experience, my culture, my environment, and possibly my inherited biological genes. I am lucky to have been introduced to evolutionary theory by my high school biology teacher and through reading various related literature including Richard Dawkin’s The Blind Watchmaker. The works of Philosophers such as Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason taught me critical reasoning skills. Studying the American revolution was equally important in my political thought development. I was humbled by the sacrifices of Nelson Mandela and his colleagues to liberate South Africa from apartheid. Julius Nyerere’s trials with community socialism in order to liberate Tanzanians from poverty and to unite them into one nation was a positive human commitment. I can not forget reading the life of Bill Clinton in his voluminous autobiography. It is a story of moving from no where to the top of the mountains of his country.
Thank you for your time, Deo Ssekitooleko
Contacts:
Email: deossekitooleko@rocketmail.com
The website is being worked on.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Linda LaScola is a research consultant. She recently re-released her book (with Daniel Dennett) based on work in which she interviewed non-believing clergy, Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind, with updates and additions.
Linda co-founded the Clergy Project. The site features members of the clergy project. She also blogs on Patheos at Rational Doubt, a site that features several articles by non-believing clergy.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In brief, what is your familial background and personal story?
I think of my own story as being very boring, compared to the stories of the people I interviewed in the non-believing study I conducted with Dan Dennett. I was raised, the youngest of three children, as Roman Catholic in an Italian-American family in a small town in Western Pennsylvania.I had a happy and very stable childhood. Although we went to church every Sunday, we weren’t very religious. My mother refused to send us to Catholic schools. She didn’t go to church much herself, claiming “claustrophobia,” and my father guiltlessly skipped holy days.
I attended church less in college and just stopped going as an adult. Though I still believed in God, there was too much silliness in Catholicism for me to take the religion seriously. After about 20 years of marriage and without children, my husband, an agnostic, and I started attending an Episcopal Church, to fill his need for community.
We both enjoyed it – especially singing in the choir. There was no pressure to believe anything – the pastor himself was openly agnostic – and the music was beautiful. About ten years ago, I realised I didn’t know much about religion from an academic point of view, so I decided to fill that gap.
After about a year of reading and taking adult education classes at church, I realised there was nothing to believe and we left. My husband, who, like me, now identifies as an atheist, has since joined an Ethical Society and a Unitarian Church. I stay home and read the paper.
What was the original interest in clinical social work and psychotherapy for you?
I once had a job as an American Red Cross caseworker that I really liked, so when I was thinking about graduate school, I decided on Social Work. Also, I had taken what was meant to be a short-term job as a tour guide at the US Capitol.
After two years, the repetition started driving me crazy. In my boredom, I couldn’t help but notice how people reacted in groups and I wanted to understand more about that. Once in a graduate social work program, I realised I preferred psychology more than community organising or social services, so I focused on individual and group psychotherapy.
Most of my work as a social worker was in alcoholism counseling, which involved a lot of group work, and employee assistance programs – workplace counseling and referral for employees with personal or family issues that are interfering with their work performance.
What about in qualitative research and analysis for you?
Qualitative research, which is conducted in the form of focus groups and in-depth individual interviews, seemed like a natural outgrowth of my work as a group and individual psychotherapist. It offered more variety, flexibility, and higher pay. What’s not to like?
Would you consider yourself socially progressive? If so, why? If not, why not?
Yes – it’s just something that I eventually realised about myself as an adult. My family of origin did not guide me in any particular direction. I found myself supporting liberal rather than conservative causes. Of course, this would apply to most if not all of the people who choose to go into social work. We think of ourselves as being empathic and interested in improving society for people less fortunate than ourselves.
Social progressivism tends to involve women’s rights and secularism. If advancement of women’s rights and secularism seem like the right values and movements to you, what is their importance in the early 21st century in America to you?
I’ve seen huge advances in women’s rights in my lifetime and know that many more are needed, e.g., equal pay for equal work, protecting abortion rights, and continuing the fight for LGBTQ rights. As for secularism, of course, I support that as well, and also see it as something that is happening on its own. People are naturally leaving religion, in many cases thanks to the free-flow of information and emotional support they can receive anonymously on the Internet.
Secularism “happened” in Europe and is happening here in the US, albeit more slowly and with resistance from the strong Christian Evangelical movement. The clergy I interviewed are examples of people who left religion even though the initial decision had a negative impact on their careers and relationships.
Who is your favourite women’s rights activist dead or alive?
I don’t have a favourite, but I greatly admire two women from my time – Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique.
The Clergy Project is the name of an organisation for non-believing clergy. It is different than the research conducted by Professor Daniel Dennett and you. In brief, what differentiates the organisation from the original research by you?
The Clergy Project (TCP) and the research with non-believing clergy I conducted with Dan Dennett are two completely separate entities. The research preceded TCP, which neither of us had even thought of as being an outgrowth of our research.
When the pilot study was completed in 2010 and getting some attention, we were approached by Richard Dawkins and Dan Barker who had been talking for a few years about doing “something” for non-believing clergy.
They had met at a conference where Dan Barker, co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, gave a talk about having been an evangelical preacher before becoming an atheist. He knew other non-believing clergy existed, because former, now atheist, clergy had made a point of introducing themselves when he was giving talks. He had gathered their names along the way.
After the Dennett-LaScola pilot study was out, non-believing started contacting us, so a larger pool was forming. The Internet, which had not existed when Barker left religion, had since become a way for like-minded people to meet.
Putting together our list of non-believing clergy with Barker’s list, we started TCP with 52 members. Dan Barker and I called each of them on the phone to make sure they legitimate and then invited them to join the private online meeting place that we had prepared for them.
What was the original research question and methodology conducted by Professor Dennett and yourself?
Excerpted from the proposal for our original research: “It’s understandable that atheist clergy would exist, considering that academically-trained clergy routinely learn about the mythical foundation of the Bible as part of their seminary education.
What would allow clergy to present these myths as truth to their congregations and what causes some of them to reject this position? What other factors are involved when clergy “lose their faith?”
What price do they pay for this change of heart and what price does society pay? The effects of the cognitive dissonance needed to preach faith in concepts that clergy themselves no longer accept is unknown and requires study.”
What was the conclusion of the original research?
There was no formal conclusion because it was a pilot study to gauge the difficulty in finding non-believing clergy to interview and to try to figure out how best to engage them in conversation about their experiences as their beliefs changed. The larger study, chronicled in Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind, also does not have a conclusion, but rather describes the experiences of non-believing clergy.
In the Preachers who are not believers (2010) published in Evolutionary Psychology, you describe the spectrum of God’s definition, as follows:
…frank anthropomorphism at one extreme – a God existing in time and space with eyes and hands and love and anger – through deism, a somehow still personal God who cares but is nevertheless outside time and space and does not intervene, and the still more abstract Ground of all Being, from which (almost?) all anthropomorphic features have been removed, all the way to frank atheism…
Actually, Dan Dennett wrote that part! But I agree with it. This is his formulation of the various ways all kinds of people define God. It’s not a specific finding of our research with clergy.
Does the elasticity of the definition of God support the unanimity and cohesion amongst the preachers and the congregation in church life? That is, everyone believes everyone else believes the same thing without believing the same thing.
I won’t opine on what people (members of religious congregations) I’ve never talked to in depth are thinking about but not saying. I can guess that among religious fundamentalists there is an assumption that clergy and congregants hold the same beliefs – the ones written as the inerrant word of God in their Holy Book.
More progressive congregations focus more on community and in acting in ways that reflect the goodness of their religion. Speaking from my personal experiences in two progressive Episcopal churches, exactly what people believe is not so important.
Can the research findings expand to local temples, mosques, synagogues, and cathedrals as well? Other faith traditions and religions in general.
Again, I can’t say. In our larger study of 35, we did interview two rabbis, but we could not find any imams to participate. Anecdotally, in conversation with Jewish lay people, they don’t seem to think believing in “God” is important to being an observant Jew and were not surprised or concerned to learn that some Rabbis do not believe. Christians, in contrast, were often shocked and disturbed by the very concept of a preacher who did not believe.
The Clergy Project is intended to “provide support, community, and hope to current and former religious professionals who no longer hold supernatural beliefs.” What have been the notable impacts of The Clergy Project?
The Clergy Project started with 52 members in March 2011. There are now almost 800 members. They found the group online or hearing about it in the media. There has been no advertising and no attempt to recruit members.
Each prospective member is screened by a current member to assure that they meet the qualifications of being a current or former religious leader who no longer holds supernatural beliefs.
The main purpose of TCP is to provide a private forum for non-believing clergy to express themselves with other past and current clergy who also don’t believe. People who have been out of the clergy for a long time can be a big help to clergy who are still inside trying to figure how to get out or how to stay in (usually for financial reasons) and keep their sanity.
In the past, these people were quite isolated. People left the clergy individually, often without telling anyone why they were leaving. Dan Barker, now the co-president of The Freedom from Religion Foundation is an exception to this. Some clergy project members who are pastors of progressive churches (e.g., United Church of Christ, Episcopal, Methodist) are pretty happy in their jobs and some choose to stay until retirement.
Because I’m not a member of TCP, I’m not on the private forum myself – and the discussion there is closed to members only. Even founders, who are not clergy, cannot go to the forum. Three of the six founders are members (Dan Barker, Carter Warden, and “Chris”).
Chris and Carter were both active pastors when The Clergy Project was founded and both have now left the clergy. “Chris” chooses to continue to maintain his anonymity. The three non-member founders are myself, Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins.
I have heard from members that the forum discussions often involve members who left the clergy years ago who are now helping new people navigate their feelings, their relationships, and their plans for the future.
Another popular feature of TCP is the outplacement program, provided by RiseSmart, which helps clergy write resumes and find secular jobs. Carter Warden, a founder, was the first member to use the service, which helped him find a good administrative position in a state university near his home.
You edit the blog called Rational Doubt. It is a place where the “public and non-believing and doubting clergy can interact.” What are some emotionally touching aspects common to many of the stories from those told in either Rational Doubt or The Clergy Project or via your clergy research?
People go into the clergy to “do good”, but because of their changing beliefs, they feel they have to leave a profession which they otherwise enjoy and are good at. They may love the music, the counseling, doing “good works” in the community, and comforting the ill or the grieving. These are activities that don’t require belief in a deity, but that belief is expected of clergy. They are so sad to have to leave the good parts of the job behind, that many try to believe, or to act as if they believe.
Many suffer greatly in the process of realising they don’t believe. Many try mightily to hold on to their beliefs, going through periods of doubt that don’t return to belief (as is supposed to happen). They may consult many people or books in the process. Changing from belief to non-belief is not something that they ever imagined would and when it starts to happen, it’s not something they actively want. In some cases, people accept it or even welcome it, but others really fight it.
There can be personal losses along the way, e.g., income (especially if needed for children’s education), spouse, family, friends.
They need to retool professionally. Though they had many transferable skills, e.g., organising, administration, public speaking, etc., they are often “pegged” as clergy, and so have difficulty convincing secular employers to hire them.
On the positive side, when I asked research participants what they felt they had gained and lost as a result of their beliefs changing, they all felt they had gained much more than they lost, often citing being at peace with themselves and seeing and appreciating the world as it really is. I remember seeing their faces light up when they told me what they had gained, despite losses they experienced in relationships and income. It was very gratifying to know that they felt they had come to the right conclusion and that their struggles ultimately had great value.
Any recommended thinkers or authors on the subject of non-believing clergy other than Professor Dennett and yourself?
Many members of The Clergy Project have written their own books – Jerry DeWitt, David Madison, Fernando Alcantar, Drew Bekius (coming in 2017), Dan Barker, Bart Ehrman, etc. Also, Catherine Dunphy wrote a book in 2015 about The Clergy Project, called From Apostle to Apostate.
Thank you for your time, Linda.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/28
What is your familial background and personal story?
I come from a traditional Kurdish family. My mother has no education, but she worked as a local midwife. My father was a radiographer, and is a Muslim Imam. My eldest brother studied fine art in the Institute of Fine Art in Mosul. He is a highly respected and influential member of the family. He inspired myself and many of my other siblings to get involved in the arts. At the time that I was growing up, the unstable situation in Northern Iraq (Kurdistan) was in full swing, living under an Iraqi dictator, with no respect for basic rights, and we were considered second class citizens. We were tortured, and lived under fear and terror. My childhood in this context has had a strong effect on who I am today.You were born in South Kurdistan, or Northern Iraq, in 1980. That year, the war began between Iran and Iraq. You saw humans act with savage brutality. How did this influence your perspective on life and people?
My perspective is a constant call for peace and rights. Art can hold a beautiful message, such as harmony, beauty and humanity. Art makes life better and beautiful, it facilitates living in peace, a colourful life. I am optimistic. My perspective is one of abject wonder regarding how people can destroy each other, themselves and nature. I believe we can all live in peace.
After The Kurdish Uprising, your family migrated. You were a student at the Erbil College of Fine Art from 1998-2002. Why did you choose this place of study? How did the training and credential help with personal and professional development?
As I mentioned, my oldest brother was a powerful influence on me. When I was young, I looked at him, the way he painted and made drawings. I starting drawing, and it has been a major part of my life since then. This passion for art substantiated itself in the academic study of art and the art movement. I wanted to become technically, practically and theoretically skilled. The choice of Erbil College of Fine Art was an accident at the time, my family ended up in Erbil and it was the only place to study fine art in the city. It was a good accident though, I learned an awful lot there, and met many close friends and interesting influences. My time at Erbil brought me through a personal and professional development in the sense that I moved from a young man passionate about art, to a man confident in his ability to run an art gallery, to write for and edit a fine art magazine, and to be successful in this field.
You fight for human rights through art. How, and why?
I grew up in a warzone, in a violent environment. Since my childhood, and until I left Kurdistan, I lived in fear, surrounded by fighting, and never in a stable situation. There were constant images of violence. Tools of war became a part of normal life. I always asked myself ‘why?’. ‘Why are people killing each other, torturing each other, hating each other?’ Whether for religious purposes, political purposes, etc., to me it is unacceptable to annihilate an individual or group of people no matter the reason. I particularly focussed on the Muslim religion, and I did not see any space for a human being to live as a free human in a Muslim world, free to think, to behave freely, free to live the way they want to live. One of my early exhibitions was called “fear”, and this was based on the fact that people are tortured for the sake of honour, religion, or different purposes – in particular, women.
Would you consider yourself socially progressive? If so, why? If not, why not?
Yes, I consider myself socially progressive. The nature of humanity is all about change, experimentation, improvement, growth and development. Therefore, day by day, humans are widely progressive in terms of technology, in terms of social life, scientifically, economically, etc.
Who is your favourite human rights activist, dead or alive?
Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. To me Gandhi is the “god” of his philosophy of non-violence in activism. Mandela, as one of the pillars of the idea that humans can live together, peacefully.
You went to Ireland to continue artistic studies in 2007 at The Galway Mayo Institute of Technology from 2009 to 2014. How did further refine professional skills to create art that fights for human rights?
My studies in Galway had a huge impact on both my skill and art education. I experimented with different media in order to express my ideas, such as in the medium of print-making and video art. Through this institution I expressed all my feelings in the context of human rights, and how the art has an effect on the audience, and the strength and power of art in delivering a message through a particular technique. Ultimately this was a great experience, one that enhanced my skills dramatically.
You approached the Minister of Culture of the Kurdish government to create a new gallery in Erbil City called the “Palace Art Gallery.” It was built. What was that experience like running the operation for its first year?
At the time, I was running an art organisation, and working as a civil servant in the Kurdish Department of cinema, and working as an editor of the Modern Art Magazine, supported by the Ministry of culture. I approached the Minister of Culture regarding the Art Gallery. The Minister was instantly pleased with the proposal and agreed to build the Palace Gallery. That was first ever experience to work in a gallery as a curator and director. Our first exhibition lasted for four months after opening, and twenty artists from the area and nearby regions were involved. It was a great platform to combine the works of these talented individuals. Also, to encourage and provide the opportunity for more artists to become involved. The mission of the Palace Gallery was different to that of other galleries at the time, in the sense of the openness to variation and celebration of different vibes, to bring dynamism and movement in the field of fine art in Erbil city. Unfortunately, I was young at the time, and perhaps naïve. Older, more established individuals (with more pull with the Minister for culture than I had) that felt that I was too inexperienced, and an outsider, caused the funding for the gallery to be withdrawn, without which the new gallery could not survive.
How did this provide a platform for your work and fight for human rights?
The majority of the works displayed at the gallery were reflections of the reality of Kurdistan at the time and rejections of the war and violence. All of the messages were that of humanity, continuity of the human race, of a time when humans can live in peace together, of human rights and human dignity. Each artist had their own technique and their own perspective, using different materials. This combination between the artists made the exhibition more powerful, and more reaching to the audience to deliver these messages in favour of the protection of human rights.
Thank you for your time, Ali.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/25
Dana L. Morganroth is an advisory Board-Member and Vice President of CFI-Pittsburgh, and a Board-Member and Vice President Sunday Assembly Pittsburgh.
What began the interest in critical thinking, science, and scepticism for you?
During high school, I was an active member of a Christian youth group that spawned the Willow Creek Community (mega) Church outside of Chicago. Throughout my involvement, I could never successfully take the “leap of faith” that allowed others to drive doubts from their minds.
I dropped out of the group and upon entering college took some courses in comparative religion, which led to philosophy, and then what was termed logical thinking.
When did this become and social concern for you?
Quite quickly in terms of geological time – I waited no more than 30 years after college at the most. Immediately engrossed in my career after leaving school, I spent a great deal of time complaining about, but almost no time acting upon, social or religious injustice.
I often daydreamed about what I might do to combat the ills of religious dogma and lack of critical thinking in society but never found (took!) time to take action.
How did the interest and the concern feed into the becoming active? You like the quote by the Brazilian author Paul Coelho who said: “The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.” In correspondence, you described this as a “full-stop!” moment for you. That is, a thought for reflection. What positives followed from this in life for you?
I’m not proud of the fact that for many, many years my ratio of complaining-to-doing-something about it – trying to make the world a better place – was very high. In fact, it probably was infinitely high, the denominator in my ratio being about zero.
That Coelho quote somehow just resonated with me. I suddenly wished I’d spent constructively the time I’d wasted just complaining. I remember sitting in my office chair completely immobile for what seemed like half an hour.
Thinking over my career in consulting and business management, wondering if any of the work I’d done was truly important. Reflecting on my belief that the majority of harm done to human happiness and progress was imposed by religious belief and inability to think critically. And since my wife and I chose not to have kids, wondering what might be considered my legacy after I’m gone someday.
I decided the time was “now or never.” Before I left my chair, I’d decided to sell the small company I operated, find one or more compatible organisations to partner with pro-bono, and leave behind the goal of making money in favour of making a difference.
How did you discover Center for Inquiry (CFI)?
Google told me. I researched the multitude of organisations out there in the critical thinking/secular/atheist/anti-pseudoscience/human rights/humanist space and was drawn to those with a broad mission.
CFI appealed due to both their mission and the fact that they were just merging with the Richard Dawkins Foundation and taking on new leadership in the person of Robyn Blumner. It seemed that after a suitable period the organisation would be poised for growth and new initiatives and I thought there might be a way for me to help. And there was a local branch with some great people: CFI-Pittsburgh.
Who were personal heroes in the midst of this discovery?
Of course, I was drawn to the “Four Horsemen of the New Atheism” – Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and Harris, in terms of their intolerance for superstition, religion, and irrational thinking. But more personally with respect to my own journey, I was motivated and inspired by Meriwether Lewis who, upon being designated by Thomas Jefferson to lead America’s “Corps of Discovery” expedition in 1803, wrote:
I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now sorely feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended, but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least endeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestowed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.
All the more poignant for me because Lewis came to that realization in his 30’s (!) and not in his 50’s, as in my own case.
CFI-Pittsburgh does not have paid staff. Unlike most other CFI branches, it operates on volunteers. What is the mission and purpose of CFI-Pittsburgh?
Our mission is the same as that of CFI’s branches that have paid staff.
We promote the mission of the Center for Inquiry, Inc. on a local level – to foster a Secular Society based on Science, Reason, Freedom of Inquiry, and Humanist values. We create a local community of people who share these values and goals and come together regularly to learn, discuss and organise action in support of our values on a local level.
We seek out and combat local instances of social, political or other injustice; when our local resources are insufficient to get the job done, we enlist the help of our CFI, Inc. parent or similar organisations.
I’ve come to believe that over the years CFI’s branch organisation has possibly grown more organically than per any particular strategic plan. Speaking for our local members as individuals and NOT officially on behalf of CFI, we hope that current leadership will recognise the value that local branches can provide in terms of creating awareness of CFI as an organisation and fulfilling CFI’s mission, and will develop strategic plans that incorporate expansion of the branch network and enhancements to existing branches and their programs. And we think there’s extraordinary potential to leverage local relationships in terms of fundraising which would benefit both parent and branch organisations.
Now, you are an advisory board member and vice president of CFI-Pittsburgh. What tasks and responsibilities come with this position?
Advisory Board membership responsibilities are the same as for any other corporate or nonprofit Board – to set a Mission-Vision-Strategic plan; to choose Officers who will implement that plan, to ensure adequate financial resources, etc. Of course as a branch of CFI, Inc. our high-level Mission is established by the parent organisation’s Board and Officers and we are overseen by the parent.
CFI-PGH’s Advisory Board, working with CFI-Inc’s Debbie Goddard and the Outreach department, determines what aspects of the CFI Mission are best implemented on a local level. As Vice-President of CFI-PGH, I work with the other local CFI-PGH Officers and Committee Chairs to effectively implement our programs here in Pittsburgh and western PA.
What have been CFI-PGH’s largest initiatives?
Besides creating awareness of the organisation in general, one of our largest standing initiatives has been our regularly scheduled lecture series with draws new locals as well as long-term stakeholders together to learn, to be entertained and to improve their critical thinking skills, and gives us the opportunity to involve them more closely in our mission.
We’ve organised locals to lobby Congress in Washington D.C. on behalf of issues important to CFI. Right now our focus is somewhat internal, better organizing our local constituency, educating them on all the programs and positions of CFI, and for the first time beginning formal membership and fundraising drives on a local level.
What have been its greatest impacts?
We’re proud our parent organisation can include our thousands of local stakeholders when counting CFI, Inc.’s constituency for congressional lobbying or UN NGO advocacy purposes.
We’re beginning to assemble a critical mass of key people, many of whom echo my own story, that is they are becoming motivated to take action in the community and as contributors to the parent organisation in addition to merely reading, discussing and complaining.
And we’ve added our voices to many small but important issues in the community, from effecting greater separation of church and state at local church polling places to protesting church tax credits at rallies of “prosperity gospel” preachers held in Pittsburgh. And we’ve advocated strongly for people to vote for leaders who reflect our values and goals.
What are some of the smaller activities performed by CFI-Pittsburgh to build community?
We bring like-minded people together by organising monthly lectures, social nights and guided discussion groups. We support other related local groups in western PA and try to coordinate our activities with them. We try to get our views into the public sphere by working with local media and thought leaders.
We have a great annual canoe/kayak trip on a local river followed by a family style shrimp boil picnic. Not to be missed! We celebrate small victories – one of our local members just had “ATHE1ST” vanity licence plate denied by PennDot (PA Dept. of Transportation).
The plate was issued after Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) attorneys reminded PennDot that issuance of such a plate does not violate rules prohibiting “offensive language or slogans” and that the individual(s) who may have denied the application could not allow their own religious beliefs to infringe on the applicant’s right to free speech.
More important than the issuance of the single license plate was the local media coverage that educated the public about church-state separation, helped normalise atheistic worldviews in the community and informed readers of the existence and activities of CFI and other secular organisations.
What are the important of science, reason, and secular humanist values?
I think of science and reason as merely the means to the end – secular humanist values. I think the idea that any belief not based on reality is either useless or harmful is kind of an a priori proposition, so I can become overly excited when trying to explain. Let me propose an I.T. analogy:
(Science) in this analogy is a valid database. The nature of science is observation, and the identification of truth, facts. Testing hypotheses results in the validation of the existing truth/facts and the rejection of falsehoods. This both refines and expands the database – it becomes an ever-larger repository of truths/facts.
(Reason) is the computer program we use to analyse the database. It is the program’s capacity to apply logical rules that insure correct and reproducible output when we manipulate data. A program that doesn’t have correct logic, or that introduces random instructions (dogma) we would call “corrupted” and unsuitable for any use.
(Humanist Values) is the output when we run our database (Science) through our program (Reason) with the query “how should human beings behave and act within society to maximize human happiness including social justice…etc.”
All good things flow from the act of critical thinking. To improve the critical thinking skills of humanity would promote science, reason and secular humanist values exponentially.
Sunday Assembly Pittsburgh (unaffiliated with CFI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation, one of 70 worldwide affiliated with the UK registered charity Sunday Assembly. You call yourselves “A Secular Congregation that Celebrates Life.” What is a typical secular congregation gathering like on Sundays?
We strive to live out our motto: Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More. Two descriptions of Sunday Assembly that quickly describe the nature of the event are “Atheist Church” and “TED talk with karaoke.” While putting those two together may best evoke an image of the physical event, it’s what’s happening below the surface that provides value to the human community.
Assemblers are “good without god.”
But they recognise that traditional religious congregations provide value based on community. Assemblers come together to learn ideas that enable them to live more fully and wisely. They celebrate their shared values with readings and music. They support each other as needed and do perform charitable works within the community.
We have an Assembly filled with young families with children, it’s probably most rewarding for me to see these children grow up free from the horrible guilt and prejudices imposed by organized religion, while being exposed from an early age to critical thinking, science, reason, tolerance, and encouragement to live this “one life that we know we have” to the fullest.
What has been the experience for the “congregation” from reports to you?
So many people have come forward to thank our group for providing a safe place, a welcoming place, for letting them know that others share their worldviews and experiences. For putting them together with others that inspire and empower them to leverage their talents to stand up for their belief in a society in which currently about 75% (but declining!) of people hold worldviews in strong opposition.
I think there is a real parallel with the LGBTQ movement of some years ago where it took a real act of courage for many people to come out of the closet and share their orientation with family, friends, co-workers, community. And with the advent of social media, “the world.”
It’s empowering to know that others have the same orientation or worldview, and once a critical mass is reached real social and legislative changes follow in our society. Without minimizing the challenges still in front of the LGBTQ community, it seemed (at least before the recent election) that critical mass had been reached and changes were forthcoming; we still have a way to go with the secular humanist cause.
Can you sum up your own experience with both CFI and Sunday Assembly?
On a personal level, I have found great reward in helping to promote and advertise the both local secular organisations such that people who have left (recently or long-ago) a faith-based support community can find an alternative supportive community of people who share their values.
Most want to promote their secular worldview; they just need encouragement and sometimes mentoring to recognise how they can support the mission that we share. As articulated by Aristotle’s statement “Give me the child until he is 7, and I will show you the man” and best explained by Richard Dawkins’ writings on evolutionary biology, there’s a reason dogmatic religious beliefs and harmful prejudices become so deeply ingrained.
It’s inspiring and rewarding to help fellow members of my community abandon old beliefs in favor of embracing critical thinking and humanist values, and it’s exciting to create a community and institutions which enable a new generation to be brought up with those values from childhood.
Thank you for your time, Dana.
Scott, thanks much for this opportunity to share my views and thanks for the work done by Conatus News through its coverage of social progressivism.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/15
Dan Rather supports science
According to Scientific American, Dan Rather supports science and says that it is more important than ever in the modern world. Some questions might be raised about the presidential election of 2016 by future historians.
The Trump Administration will need to work on the scientific front because of the pressing concerns of the modern world that require scientific solutions and pursuit for their alleviation.
“The political press treats science as a niche issue. But I would argue that it is central to America’s military and economic might […] it shapes the health and welfare of our citizenry, and that our governmental support of the pure pursuit of knowledge through basic research is one of the defining symbols of American excellence.”
“Supermoon” is here
Space.com reports that there will be a November “supermoon” on November 14 that can provide “an extraordinary sight for skywatchers,” which is “a full moon is at its perigee, or closest point to Earth during the lunar orbit.”
It will be the brightest and biggest moon, supermoon that is, to date in about 69 years, where the next one is expected to come on November 25, 2034. It is a rare event, and a rarefied experience for those that had or have the chance to see it.
NASA’s Noah Petro, Deputy Scientist of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, said, “The main reason why the orbit of the moon is not a perfect circle is that there are a lot of tidal, or gravitational, forces that are pulling on the moon.”
New Zealand shakes and kills
Science Magazine said that an earthquake hit New Zealand on November 14, which killed 2 people, and that New Zealand has convoluted seismic activity based on the judgment of experts.
James Goff, Seismologist and Tsunami Expert at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, said, “[New Zealand -seismology] is a lot more complicated than we thought…We are finding out again that there is seismic activity that we didn’t really know about.”
The US Geological Survey found the epicenter was a 7.8 magnitude earthquake near kaikoura, which is a coastal tourist town. The shallow quake from the earthquake “caused extensive damage to infrastructure.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/15
One religion dominance not allowed in public institutions such as schools
According to The Times Live, 6 former Model C schools had pupils recite prayers from the Christian faith in assembly. Students had to “pray before sport matches and describe themselves as having a predominantly ‘Christian ethos’”.
They are having to defend the right to follow a single religion in the courts. The Johannesburg High Court will be hearing the case and this will have “implications for any state school that promotes one religion.”
That promotion would include “dress code, prayers or readings – even if the religion reflects the belief system of the majority.” The “OGOD, the Organisasie Vir Godsdienste Onderrig en Demokrasie,” noted that the constitution and the National Policy of Religion disallow one religion dominance in public institutions.
US broken education system caused Trumpism
The Toronto Star described the nature of the Trump phenomenon, Trumpism, as resulting from the breakdown of the American educational system, which comes from the abandonment of the educational system.
The author congratulates Canada on having a good educational system, and thinks that as long as it can be maintained then the nation will not crash as “our next-door neighbour has, a backyard of flaming wreckage and oh no, where are the nukes.”
“Education is the key to civilized life” the columnist asserts and the underfunding of US schools tied to the absence of teachers and the inadequate salaries for teachers has eroded the educational system in America.
England’s unsustainable educational system according to the Financial Times
The Financial Times describes the “tatters” of England’s educational system because of the unsustainable level of funding given to the system, which means that the funding levels will need to change at some point in the future.
Alison Wolf, Professor at King’s College London, states that the increasing numbers of university graduates creates one funding system that cannot keep up and the “technical qualifications below degree level have suffered” resulting in a decline in “student numbers.” That is, the current demographics of the university graduate population cannot be sustained because of the poor suitability for the current job market, and those that could fill them will be able to fit into the market. Thus, the situation is described as having “serious flaws” with high levels of expense and involves “a major misallocation of resources.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/11
Rebecca Hale was elected president of the American Humanist Association in 2013. She is co-owner of EvolveFISH.com, the popular online store of atheist, humanist, and pro-science merchandise, and co-founder of the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs.
Rebecca became a member of the American Humanist Association in 1996 and served as vice president from 2005 to 2012. She is a frequent speaker and commentator on humanism for the media, conferences and local humanist organisations. Rebecca was born in New York, NY, to Humanist-Unitarian parents. She received her Masters in Public Administration in 1976 and embarked on a career in government, real estate development, and college administration. Rebecca lives in Colorado Springs, CO, with her husband, Gary Betchan, and has two children.
Any prefaces to the interview?
Please bear in mind that these are my answers, I am one humanist and I do not see this as representative of the AHA or all other humanists.
What is your family story?
The cliff notes are that my father was raised in a mildly Jewish household in New York City and my mother was raised in Johnstown PA as a member of the Church of the Brethren. It never made sense to her that her good friend would go to hell just because she attended the wrong church.
Upon asking her mother why this was so; she was told not to worry about all the stuff the church says, “just be good to people, live by the Golden Rule”. When my parents met my father had become a Unitarian and that made sense to her. I was raised as a Unitarian in the days of humanism.
What were some of the tenets involved in the Church of the Brethren faith?
I know very little about the Church of the Brethren, my mother had long since left it behind. I do know that it isn’t among the liberal progressive churches. Mum called them the “Dunkards”.
What made your father become a Unitarian in the first place?
After his Bar Mitsvah his father said to him … “okay, enough of that, lets go exploring” and the two of them proceeded to attend various churches until they found themselves at the West Side Unitarian church in New York City. I have a collection of “The Calendar” from 1927 through 1929, my father had them bound and signed by the minister, A. Wakefield Slaten. He must have made a considerable impression on my father!
What about your personal story?
I was bred, born and raised as a Unitarian, which during the time period of the 50’s – 80’s was essentially humanistic, in the modern tradition. I have at times been more aggressively atheistic and at other times more a live and let live. In high school a friend of mine and I both wore a little silver devil charm as a necklace!
And yet the night some friends and I “borrowed” my parents’ car and had trouble sneaking it back into the garage I promised god I’d believe if we could just get the car back without getting caught. We did but I couldn’t keep that promise any longer than it took to push the car back into its spot!
What differentiates non-aggressive atheism from aggressive atheism?
There is a difference between just moving ahead with your life, ignoring other peoples’ efforts at proselytising and engaging them in debate or calling them out. I call that aggressive. I also think my little Satan charm that I wore around my neck (even in my yearbook picture) was aggressive; I was clearly doing it to snub the sea of Christians that were convinced that they knew everything.
What were some of other things that you did to qualify as an aggressive atheist?
That was pretty much it, that charm and always looking for a chance to confront believers. I didn’t attack all Christians, just the ones that pushed their religion.
You earned a BA in cultural anthropology and environmental studies. You earned an MPA, too. You worked in college administration, government, and real estate development. What were some of the important life lessons gained from these credentials and those professional capacities?
It was cultural anthropology and I think it gave me some of the best lessons one can learn in college. To view people from the perspective of their background, where they come from; what is important, the value of tradition and ceremony, that smart and curios and artistic people exist in all cultures. And that you should not be afraid of “different” because that is where we can learn.
Environmental studies, well, this was the time of the first environmental movement, Rachel Carsons and Silent Spring. It has given me a messy house! (I can’t seem to throw things away because I might need them again.
This all reinforced my mother’s guidance “waste not, want not” and “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” – even though I have been fortunate in never having to really do without. I am frugal to a fault, I plan my auto travel so I don’t waste gas, I accelerate slowly and coast to braking.
An organic chicken is first a roast, then part of it becomes a casserole or sandwiches, or chicken salad and the bones become soup. I’m a scratch cook. I’m probably just this side of kooky when it comes to the foods I’ll shop and prepare for my family.
I aim for organic and non GMO, which puts me at odds with many people in the secular movement. And, at times I am paralysed by how we are destroying the planet. I easily feel a sense of awe and joy when looking at how beautiful our natural world can be.
These are all characteristics that were first instilled by my parents and then reinforced by environmental studies. My study of government and then working in the public and private sectors taught me about the dampening effects of bureaucracy and it taught me to first recognise the rules and then find a way either through them or around them.
And that sometimes when you are the one that always names the elephant in the room, you’ll get stepped on. One of the advantages of moving back and forth between the public and private sector is that you learn to understand the value of cost benefit analysis; and that sometimes its important to know the cost of doing something, even if you understand that you’ll need to go ahead and take the loss.
You have been a humanist throughout life. What makes humanism self-evidently true to you?
Humanism works; unlike prayer, where it fails more often than it succeeds. I think my parent’s raised me “right” and I’m proud of how my children are turning out. They are strong, caring, ethical people.
I deal with reality. I don’t expect everything to be perfect (I’d be okay if it was but I don’t expect it). Life can be ambiguous. You don’t always get hard answers. Humanism supports that; we strive to use logic and reason and we leave room for doubt and emotion.
What is a clear example of prayer failing in personal life?
I don’t have any personal experiences where prayer failed! I got that car into the carport. But I know it fails when people pray to win the lottery, pray for a sick loved one to recover or to get the big job, etc. The odds are against prayer.
What about in large groups?
I don’t think large groups of people praying has any better and actually has a lesser chance of success than a large group of people actually doing something.
What about in the peer-reviewed research on it?
The oft offered peer-reviewed research about prayer over sick people has been shown to be flawed. If the individual does not know that everyone is praying the results do not substantiate that prayer made a difference. It seems to only work when the sick person knows about the prayers and so we have the placebo effect in effect.
Were parents or siblings an influence on humanism for you?
My parents provided the model. I don’t think my siblings have had much influence on me in this area. One became a Jehovah Witness, one is also a card carrying humanist and the third lives her life as a humanist and adds the colour of the 9th planet theory to her core beliefs.
Did you find a community of humanists to have that community for your children? No, we found it to support rational thinking in Colorado Springs. Its been a bonus for our children, especially Tani. She has found support among her fellow humanist friends (and friends from her time at CampQuest)
Did you have early partnerships in the activist pursuit?
Yes.
If so, whom?
My husband, Gary Betchan, he is a bundle of organisational and creative energy. We started EvolveFISH.com together. I was reticent to make waves. Gary leaves a wake wherever he goes!
Do you consider yourself a progressive?
Absolutely.
Does progressivism logically imply other beliefs, or tend to or even not at all?
You’ll need to define what you mean with the term “progressivism”. I have never used this exact term, so I did what any person sitting in front of a laptop would do and I “googled” it and then read Wiki. Historically it seems to be a bit all over the board with good and bad ideas.
I imagine if we could look back to today from 75 years in the future I might see our humanism that way as well. We will have gotten many things right and may find a few mistakes or misconceptions. We can’t help but be a construct of the times and cultures we live in.
What ethical precept appears to transcend contingencies of geography, culture, and era?
If you are asking what ethical precept is universal, I’m not sure there is one that is man made. I think there may be some natural proclivities that humans have. In times past I might naively say “not to kill” but the religious only apply the do not kill to their particular tribe identity. The concept of stealing being wrong doesn’t even hold up across all cultures.
How did you come to adopt a socially progressive worldview?
It just seems to be in my DNA humanism, cultural anthropology and environmentalism. I have not pursued any of it with some grand scheme, looking back it just flowed together. It evolved as I have I’m always open for new outlooks.
Does this seem like the norm to you?
Evidently, its my norm.
Why do you think that adopting a social progressive outlook is important?
Overall If for no other reason, its pragmatic. Change is inevitable; wouldn’t you prefer to help guide it rather than stand by or oppose it and get run over? There is research that these social progressive values work best in the long run.
Game theory experiments have shown that being fair and kind ends up enhancing the position of both. However, it only works when everyone is playing by the same rules! There must be reciprocity when economics, relationships, power etc. get too far out of balance they are not sustainable.
What movements and forces in American society work against reciprocity to take advantage of the real-world implications of the game theory experiments outlined before?
The very competitive nature of our capitalism; that you “win” by getting one over on someone else. That there is a basic greed worked into our society and reinforced by our media. We have come to a point where a person is valued by their bank account, the size of their house, how much media then can attract.
The behaviors that support these goals do not support being kind and generous, unless we can help people understand that they really do “get ahead” by using reciprocity and kindness.
As a progressive, what do you think is the best socio-political position to adopt in the America?
What I have come to realise is that this is not a simple answer. It isn’t Republican or Democrat, or Green or Libertarian answer for me. It isn’t even a Berniecrat answer. This isn’t a simple world, we can’t just say this works in Colorado so it will work in or anywhere else, and what works in an urban area may not work out in the farmland.
What big obstacles (if at all) do you see social-progressive movements facing at the moment?
We need to be able to get people away from the 24-hour consumption of entertainment and find the carrot that will attract them to educating themselves on the critical topics of the day; climate change, economic inequality, and social justice. The United States is a pretty big ship that needs to change course, it won’t be easy. We built our business by selling bumper stickers and bumper sticker slogans but it takes a willingness to go deeper and educate oneself for people to understand the practical value of progressive positions.
If America does not change course, what might be the impacts to its citizenry, especially the poor, the vulnerable, the downtrodden, and the marginalised?
There will be more poor and they will be poorer. This is already evident in the growing number of homeless, the people with virtually nothing. As the economic inequality widens many in the middle class are slipping into the lower class. At some point I hope that those that are grossly wealthy will notice that they can no longer make money because there is no one left with the resources to buy things, or go places.
How might the world react to it?
I’m not sure that the world will have the capacity to take on the United States, in order to forces us to compassion and equality… that was always our story that we inflicted on others, but we are too big to conquer. So, I don’t think they will act when its only economic inequality however, if we don’t start being more proactive about the environment, that could be a different
story.
Environmental abuses cannot be limited by our borders. The responsible environmentally conscious countries, may at some point take action against us. They will have to do this for their very survival and the survival of the human race.
How important do you think social movements are?
If we didn’t have them we’d still have slavery, women would still not have the vote, we’d bow down to a king, the list goes on. I can’t think of any of the great strides in human freedom that have not been pushed and forced through without a social movement. Power is never given up easily.
Who are those unwilling to attenuate their power in American society at this point in time?
There are so many! And, of course this is not to say that there are not exceptions within these groups: older white males, the churches, the people in power (be they elected officials or bureaucrats), the very wealthy and even the moderately wealthy. That’s a start.
What are your religious/irreligious, ethical, and political beliefs?
I do not believe in a supreme being; no gods, no devils, nothing pulling strings on our lives. I think we each have components of those traits within us; we have good, we have not so good.
We are by nature animals and so we have all the in bred tendencies that an animal would have and over the eons we have imposed values or ethics on ourselves in an effort to institutionalise the “good”.
I don’t mean to make it sound as though our basic nature is bad because I do believe humans want to be “good”, that kindness and altruism exist outside of humanity and are just as natural and inherent.
Generally good begets good. However, I also live in the real world, where there are people and belief systems that I would judge as destructive and cruel and there are people who will do harm, be stupid and be damaged. I don’t see the value of allowing myself to be a victim; I prefer to only turn the other cheek once.
Above all do no harm. As a humanist I see that my active participation to make the world a better place is what gives my life purpose and value. This is my one life, no one will punish me later or reward me. So, its up to me to do the best that I know to improve the planetary condition.
What religious system does the most harm?
The ones that proclaim to have the moral high road and the implied or expressed mandate to enforce it on everyone else.
What irreligious system does the most harm?
I’m not familiar with any irreligious philosophy that encourages harmful actions. I do feel that being purely focused on scientific advancement without the constraints of compassion and empathy could do damage.
What about the most harmful political ideology as well?
Totalitarianism mixed with Fascism would be my guess. There is a famous quote from Stephen Weinberg “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.” I’m not an expert in the field of ideologies, but this one makes good sense to me as the “right” answer.
You saw the rise of evangelical Christianity in Colorado Springs in 1993. What were the negative and positive aspects from personal observations at the time?
The positive is that was developed a community of like minded people, the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs. And the Freethinkers have provided a home for the members of the community who felt and continue to feel oppressed by the influence of the evangelical Christians and their organisations and businesses.
I am sure that living in the Springs has made me more and more reactive to the incursions made by Christians into our school curriculum and our municipal government.
There is a bit of a siege mentality that develops in secularists when they are consistently demonised by organisations and people that cannot be criticised and that flagrantly violate the law and skim along its intent and all the while being celebrated.
They use fire and police protection, the roads and other public infrastructure but avoid all taxes because of their non profit status.
As a result, they have added to
the costs of local government but have not paid anything. They also pay below the norm and often require their employees to tithe back. As a result, the “jobs” they bring to the community tend to be low paying.
That sparked the need to found the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs (FCS) in addition to the web-based business EvolveFISH, which was sold in May, 2014. Now, you are the president of the American Humanist Association (AHA). What tasks and responsibilities come with these positions – at FCS and the AHA?
I’m largely in an advisory position with the Freethinkers at the AHA I am the President of the board of directors, its a volunteer position, our paid staff handles the day to day business at the professional level. I’m more of the head volunteer, so I run the board meetings, attend various movement meetings, and give the staff uninvited advice!
Technically I have oversight duties over the top two paid staff, our Executive Director and our Development Director. I’ve been president for 4 years (I was elected president before Gary and I sold EvolveFISJ) and on the board of the AHA for 12, I’ve just been elected to another 4-year term on the board, next month we will vote for officers again.
You hold to the philosophy of personal responsibility. What does this mean in personal and professional life for each individual?
It means if we see something that needs to be done we do what we can about getting it done. “If it is to be, its up to me.” This is not to be confused with a libertarian or objectivist approach. What I am referring to is that there is no deus ex machina to come to the rescue, the ills of the world are largely of human origin and it will be up to humans to fix them.
To your philosophy, human beings have responsibility to each other and the environment, or their life support system. What are some of the more mundane examples of this responsibility in action?
What kind of car do you drive? Is it a polluter or clean energy? Have you done what you can to make your home more energy efficient? Do you recycle? Do you waste food and other resources? Do you assist others within your financial capabilities? Are you contributing goodness? Each person finds their own way to contribute to the solution, there are no rules, no dictates.
What about more urgent global examples with this responsibility in action, and potential solutions that societies need to implement – quickly?
I have some controversial positions here, not necessarily sanctioned by the AHA or even humanism. I think we as a society need to look at population control. Is it a basic human right to be able to have as many children as we want or are we at a point that reproduction should be limited?
How can we change our landscaping and food production to increase carbon sinks and biodiversity and limit our use of environmentally damaging processes? Nothing else matters if we destroy our ability (and that of other life forms on earth) to live on this planet. Economic inequality, social justice, whose God is more right, all become irrelevant.
We could also help mitigate the climate issues by refocusing our cultures on things other than consumerism. My car has a rather ugly dent do I need to fix it or replace it? It’s still functional, do I need the latest new smartphone, latest fashion and more clothes than I can wear in a week, or a bigger house or my own jet plane?
The marketing folks could lend their talents to convincing us that who we are is not what we own but what we know, or the art we create, the theatre or parks we visit. To find those things that we can find purpose and meaning in that do not consume the planets resources.
Please not another KidsMeal with some cheap plastic toy that is either broken, forgotten or lost in the blink of an eye! If we make our own meaning for our lives; then let’s find the ways to do that that do not consume the planet.
How might the implementation of serious proposals of population control look to you?
I haven’t gotten this all figured out yet, how, as humans on this planet come to agreement on how best to achieve this. I’ve gotten a lot of push back on the notion of limiting reproduction. I get the argument that if we just educate women and girls population growth will slow.
It is understood that the more educated a woman is the few children she will have, and there are countries in the world with declining birth rates. This is the problem that comes up; the educated, the responsible people have fewer or no children however the uneducated and the highly religious tend to have children in very high numbers.
There is this “Quiverfull” movement among Christians to have as many children as they can specifically so they will have the armies they need to enforce their religious ideals on everyone else. It seems all of the Abrahamic religions focus on this ideal of winning by numbers.
So, in a short period of time we will have fewer and fewer educated rational people and we could be over run by the “masses” if you will. And then is it fair to put the same limitations on people who live a subsistence life? They contribute far less to the climate change drivers than Americans or people with excessive and abundant lifestyles.
Also this would require a totalitarian process, not the best choice!
What would be the restrictions?
Maybe the best approach would be to reward people with only 1 or 2 children.
I think we need to be near 1 child for some period of time, but we are seeing how this hasn’t worked well in China.
This may be because their social structure has developed for the children to take care of the older generation and when 4 grandparents and 2 parents are to be cared for by one person, well that’s a bit of a load. When that one person gets married, now there are likely 8 grandparents and 4 parents, so that doesn’t help spread the load at all.
Who would qualify?
I have no clue how this would work. I’ve been around long enough to realise that brilliant and talented people can raise terrible children and vice versa. Wealth shouldn’t be a determining factor, so I hesitate to offer a “cap and trade” system on children, but its an idea.
You raised two children, Joshua and Tanrei, within the humanist framework. What did this mean in terms of life within the home, at the school, and in relationship with the community?
It meant that sometimes they didn’t have the friends they wanted (parents wouldn’t always welcome them), it also meant that they have grown up with a bit of the sense of being an outsider or not quite fitting into the same mould as most of their friends.
They are strong, insightful individuals. They were raised with an eye of helping them learn to make their own decisions and to think about the values they want to live by. Home life was not laissez faire and it wasn’t dogmatic. They have been given the freedom to decide for themselves what life philosophy they want to embrace.
What is the national state of humanism as a philosophy and a movement in the United States?
Humanism is catching on. Our numbers are growing. There are factions with one focus or another but overall moving in the same direction. I know that there are far more humanists out there who simply don’t know the term; none the less they are living their lives with humanist principles.
What about secularism?
Secularism is most likely outpacing humanism, I don’t have any statistics to back this up, but since humanism is a subset or secularism it is a reasonable assumption. Secularism includes people who maintain their belief in god(s) and other supernatural forces and reject religious interference in government and our laws.
I think this segment has gained numbers as people have looked at the abuse of the privilege that religion has demonstrated. The Catholic Church’s sexual abuse issues are a part of the drive towards secularism.
Do secular humanists, or humanists alone, experience bigotry and prejudice at all levels of American society?
Overall I’d say “yes”. I’m sure there are segments of society where it is more acceptable, the arts and historically the institutions of higher education.
Why?
I’d say that within the arts you find people who, by nature, tend to think outside the box and are more willing to allow other people to disagree with them. The institutions of higher learning because we tend to find more humanism among those who are better educated and those whose work is based in critical thinking and analysis.
Who is a living women’s rights activist that impresses you?
I can’t say that I would pick out any one woman who has pushed women’s rights as their only “cause.” I understand the value, and the need for women’s rights but I tend to lump it into the category of fair play and economic justice.
I don’t know that I’d want to name one women over another, although the women in the Middle East are putting a lot more on the line, their lives. As far as the United States, I’m a pretty big fan of Elizabeth Warren.
Who are other personal heroes throughout history?
I don’t think much about personal heroes. And I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that history was not a subject I warmed up to. No one explained its value to me, I realise it should have been obvious, but it wasn’t.
So, I’m not well grounded in all the famous and influential people throughout history. Overall I’d say its the people who tried to do the right thing There are a few names that come to mind; Molly Ivans, Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy, Anwar Sadat, Che Guevara, Thomas Jefferson and my current favorite Bernie Sanders. I feel like this list should have more women, Pink, really, this is not my thing!
Who is the smartest person you have ever met or known personally?
This is really tough, I have met a lot of brilliant people. I prefer people who think differently who come up with a different way to see something, or make something work, people who synthesise various bits of knowledge and come up with new ideas and observations.
And I’ve met brilliant people who are also strong on compassion and empathy. But it isn’t enough to be brilliant, its not enough to be strong on compassion and empathy, you need to take action, to make things better. My dad was brilliant, he set a pretty high bar.
What is your current work?
I have three jobs, I volunteer a fair amount of time to the American Humanist Association, I rent and manage houses to college students (that’s how I help pay our bills), and I’m a mother. I’m also a wife but my husband, Gary, is pretty independent, he knows how to feed himself and do his own laundry!
Where do you hope it goes into the future?
Humanism? In my most optimistic dreams I see humanism as the overlay for everything. I’m perfectly fine with whatever religion or philosophy some one wants to adopt; I’d just like to see humanism’s basic premise be the guiding principles for living with each other.
If we all are considerate of each others space and need to survive, if we take action to support a healthy planet and healthy communities and if we all could accept that my rights only go so far as the end of my arm (and so do yours). Don’t ask me to live by your religious ideals.
Thank you for your time, Rebecca.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/06
Tehmina Kazi is an activist, writer and author based in Ireland. Tehmina was, until mid 2016, the Director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy (a position she took up in May 2009). British Muslims for Secular Democracy aims to raise awareness within British Muslims and the wider public, of democracy particularly ‘secular democracy’ helping to contribute to a shared vision of citizenship (the separation of faith and state, so faiths exert no undue influence on policies and there is a shared public space).
Prior to joining BMSD, Tehmina was a Project Officer at the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Tehmina has done extensive research on domestic and international human rights issues, particularly the detention of foreign nationals and violence against women in South Asia. Tehmina regularly contributes to debates and forums on civil liberties and foreign policy. Her articles have been published in a wide variety of newspapers and blogs.
How did you become an activist?
I was always passionate about combating injustices, even from an early age, when I was subjected to a sustained campaign of bullying at both primary school and high school.
I did an A-Level in Politics, loved it, and consequently decided to devote my career to campaigning for the rights of oppressed and marginalised people.
I then studied Law with an emphasis on human rights law at university, and ended up working for a number of human rights organisations afterwards. I was the Director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy from 2009 until 2016.
Were parents or siblings an influence on this for you?
They support me in everything I do, although deep down they would probably prefer me to be working in one of the “safe” professions like medicine, or a conventional legal career in private practice.
Was university education an asset or a hindrance to this?
An asset. I never went on to become a lawyer after completing my law degree, but my legal education has come in spectacularly useful for my campaigning work, particularly on equality and human rights matters like gender segregation.
Did you have early partnerships in these activist pursuits? If so, whom?
My early partnerships were with far-left anti-war groups. I don’t support them anymore, as many of them are only interested in opposing Western interventions for the sake of it, rather than genuinely working towards the cessation of hostilities and casualties.
How did you come to adopt a socially progressive worldview?
Because I was so keenly aware of injustices, regardless of who the perpetrators were, or who the victims were. I knew I couldn’t just sit back and not even attempt to tackle them (whether I’ve been successful or not is another matter!).
Some individuals and organisations turn a blind eye to injustices where one of “their own” happens to be the perpetrator. I had no truck with this kind of tribalism from the very beginning.
Why do you think that adopting a social progressive outlook is important?
Most of us are working towards the same goal: a fairer, more inclusive society for all. Promoting socially progressive values in everything you do – or at least, trying to – is the best way to achieve this.
Do you consider yourself a progressive?
Yes, I do consider myself to be a progressive.
Does progressivism logically imply other beliefs, or tend to or even not at all?
It implies a belief in the FREDA principles: fairness, respect, equality, dignity and autonomy.
What are your religious/irreligious beliefs?
I was a practising Muslim for twelve years, but now consider myself to be a deist with a strong interest in humanism.
As a progressive, what do you think is the best socio-political position to adopt in the United Kingdom?
Enlightenment values: democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those of all faiths and none.
What big obstacles (if at all) do you see social-progressive movements facing at the moment?
A lack of sustained funding and resources, personality clashes, groups refusing to work with each other over differences that are ultimately quite petty.
Many groups have either been wound up, or end up running out of steam once a particular charismatic personality decides to leave.
How important do you think social movements are?
Critical, but they should not allow themselves to be torn apart by ego-driven personality clashes. They should keep a tight focus without becoming overly partisan.
What is your current work?
I am the Policy and Advocacy Officer for the Cork Equal and Sustainable Communities Alliance, an alliance of 16 equality and human rights organisations in Cork.
Where do you hope your professional work will go into the future?
More opportunities for creative and non-fiction writing, hopefully! (Tehmina recently published a short story called The Tulip Asylum’ about homosexuality in contemporary Iran).
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/02
You grew up as a Catholic. You went to Holy Child School, Cape Coast as well. What is your story as a youth growing up in a religious household? What was the experience?
I attended Catholic schools, St. Theresa’s School in Accra from primary, junior high school and in Holy Child School I got my Senior high school education. They were one of the best schools at the time and provided us with the best teachers in all subjects.
The major criteria for admissions was to be a Catholic and I was baptised at the St. Theresa’s Parish so it was easier for me to gain admission. In primary school, we had ‘Worship service’ on Wednesday mornings as part of our curriculum and from 1st grade, we were read the Bible and taught to understand it.
In the beginning, I did not really understand it, especially when it came to topics on the afterlife since my mother had died when I was 4 years old and I had still not come to understand the concept of death by then. I must have tried to discuss the existence of God once to my classmates, but I was told that I could go mad (mentally ill) so I stopped.
I then made it a point to understand and accept Christianity because I felt that everyone believed in it and it was the right thing to do. By 6th grade, I attended catechism classes and had received my First Holy Communion.
My Senior High School was an all-girls boarding School and was built by the Catholic church in a town called Cape Coast in the Central Region of Ghana in 1946. It had been run initially by British nuns for decades and later by alumni of the school.
It was strict and aimed to form students into ‘women of substance’ who would grow up to be the best in the country at home as good wives, at work, and in the Catholic church.
Obedience, discipline, and morality were the core teachings there with religion and especially Catholicism at its core. It was compulsory for all students to attend Mass at least 3 times a week and observe ‘The Angelus’ prayer’ 3 times a day.
Most of the students were Catholic, but we had Anglicans and Protestants of various denominations as well. I became more exposed to Christian Charismatic teachings, joined nondenominational prayer groups and underwent a period of ‘being born-again’, which cemented my belief on God. It was there I had my ‘Confirmation of the Holy Spirit’.
Due to my mother’s death, I was brought up partly by my mother’s family and later by my dad’s. My mother’s family is mostly Catholic and conservative who encouraged and supported me to be a good Christian and was proud of me whenever I hit a milestone in my religious life.
My father’s side of the family is mostly Anglican and also went to church often, but were more liberal and reformed. I was encouraged there to think for myself and I learnt to care for myself and my sister at an early age since there was no mother-figure and my dad was not really ‘there’ either.
Staying at my dad’s, my sister and I grew up with lots of books and educational programs on satellite TV, which at the time was expensive for most homes to have. As my mother’s side taught me to be obedient and subservient in their understanding of being respectful, my father’s side of the family encouraged me to ask questions and express myself freely.
You de-converted and became an atheist in 2007. What were the major reasons, arguments, evidence, and experiences for the de-conversion?
I had finished University where I acquired my BA in Linguistics and Modern Languages and I had made lots of friends in the expat community. At the time, I had come to realise that I had certain views such as feminism that a lot of Ghanaian men were not interested in due to cultural and religious reasons so I seemed to connect well with foreigners.
Dating a Serbo-Croatian then, I became familiar with the Eastern European community in the Capital, Accra. I came to realise that most of them were non-religious as most people from Europe tend to be including my partner although they were baptised in the Orthodox church.
I also started to notice that whenever I made religious statements, there would be a short awkward silence and a change in topic. I felt then that I was not doing my job properly as a Christian if I could not teach them about the Word of God and pass on the teachings of Christ.
It was at this juncture that I set on a personal course to do objective research on the origins and importance of religion, especially Christianity, in order to properly inform my friends about it.
We had Satellite TV then as well so I gave more attention to programs on channels like the HISTORY channel, which at the time showed objective documentaries on the life and times of Jesus Christ and the origins of the Bible.
This was eye-opening because all my life, I had watched the same type of movies and documentaries which were shown every Sunday and especially on Christian Holidays, but those ones had certain relevant information left out of it and they also did not give archaeologically documented information so came my first ‘shocks’.
I also watched the Discovery and National Geographic channels for scientific documentaries on evolution the possibilities of life on other planets and these baffled me further because I had been taught to believe in only Creationism and I did not know there was another way of explaining how humans exist.
At that point, I had not gotten any information to preach with and I had no one to talk to about my findings. I went through stages of grief, disappointment, sadness, anger, and finally stopped going to church.
Even when I stopped going to church I felt that God would strike me with lightning for disobeying him or ‘betraying’ him, but as time went by and nothing bad seemed to happen, my fear lessened.
I did not know how to explain it to my family and friends. So for years, I kept my non-belief to myself and gave excuses for not attending church and sometimes hoped that I could be proven wrong with my non-belief so I could go back to worshipping God but that time never came.
You studied French at the University of Ghana for a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and Modern Languages (French and Spanish). Was this education assistive in personal and professional pursuits during postsecondary education and post-graduation?
Yes, it was. Actually, at the time, the University of Ghana did not give much room for choice by students. They mostly took subjects you excelled in from High School and gave you subjects in that field to study and since I passed exceptionally in English, French and Geography, I was given the Language subjects.
I grew to enjoy Linguistics which was a social science program and it interested me greatly as its history taught me a lot about who we are as humans and how far we have come in terms of communication in our development as a species.
I studied various courses in pragmatics, phonetics, syntax, linguistics in Ga (my local language) and Linguistics in English. In Spanish, history and literature formed a big part of our studies and French grammar as well.
As Ghana is the only Anglophone country in Africa completely neighboured by Francophone Countries, it became integral that I learnt it as it could get me a long way in the job market although I never really used it much in my career.
It came in handy in translating for visiting clients, contractors. I loved studying Spanish for the love of it and linguistics helped me in my career as an administrator in creating and reviewing company documents. I speak 3 local languages and knowing 3 more foreign languages came in handy in my social life meeting people from all over the world.
How did you become an activist?
I became active in activism after joining the Humanist Association of Ghana. I gained confidence to ‘come out’ then as atheist and I wanted to help share what I knew now just as I was as a Christian but this time, based on evidence.
I also realised how religion was destroying my country and continent due to ignorance, lack of education, and human rights abuses, and I felt I had to do something to help change things for the better. I felt that if I knew of an alternative to the dogmatic teachings I was given, I might have been atheist earlier and maybe, I could give someone else the opportunity to be a freethinker, which I was never given.
Were parents or siblings an influence on this for you?
My family had no idea that I would turn out to be atheist/humanist. I used to know that my uncle (father’s brother) who moved to the USA over 40 years ago was a deist by then, but never got the opportunity to discuss it with him until now. My sister’s godmother was also a German atheist, but it was never discussed perhaps because I felt it would be rude.
My sister left the Catholic church to become an Evangelical youth prayer group member while I was turning atheist. It was not until 2 years later that she became atheist. Even though we are so close and tell each other everything, it wasn’t until 3 years after her de-conversion that I got to hear about her story during a HAG group meeting. I definitely had no influence from Family.
The best they helped was by giving me a good education and logical reasoning skills.
Did you have early partnerships in this activist pursuit? If so, whom?
Not really. I did not know about humanism until after I joined the Freethought Ghana group from which HAG came. Once I was introduced to it and I was able to recognise that humanism describes my personal philosophy of life, I began to identify as a humanist.
The group then organised the 1st ever West African Humanist Conference in 2012 and after learning what steps other groups across the West African region were taking, we started to realise the importance of organising and formalising our group from a social group to an activist group.
The conference also gave the group the opportunity to meet other groups and their representatives that are working on humanitarian projects on human rights activism such as now Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Honourable Mrs. Nana Oye Lithur who spoke to us on the LGBT situation in Ghana at the time, Mr. Gyekye Tanoh of 3rd World Women’s rights group, Mr. Leo Igwe a renowned African humanist from Nigeria who was then doing his research in Ghana on Witchcraft accusations in the Northern region for his PhD in Germany and other humanist groups from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria.
They gave us an insight on what they had been doing and gave us ideas from which HAG was inspired to join in.
Do you consider yourself a progressive?
Yes, I do. I am of the view that as a humanist who bases her ideas and decisions on logical reasoning and human value, I have had to rethink a lot of negative dogmatic beliefs, superstitions, and culture.
I believe that Ghana, and Africa as a whole, is knee deep in ignorance and social dogma, and that is why we remain undeveloped for the most part. I love my country and my people of various tribes and cultures and for that, the need to create a better future for our next generations urges me on to fight age-old systems that stagnate our progress as a people.
Does progressivism logically imply other beliefs, or tend to or even not at all?
Progressivism, in my opinion, has not got to do with any belief in the supernatural or deities.
There has been no proof of that and so moving forward for me, would mean totally discarding those beliefs and critically thinking of ways people can create better systems of living as a civilised nation that takes into account the responsibility of the well-being of its people.
However, I personally believe also that people have their right to association as enshrined in our constitution and therefore, need to have their rights respected but monitored so that its members and the general public are not badly affected by negative religious practices that would infringe on their rights. Rather, the religious can also be freethinkers with progressive views using religion as their source of inspiration.
How did you come to adopt a socially progressive worldview?
Personally, I have always been progressive since I was young. I was a member of the Wildlife club and Girl Guide Association since Junior High School and in Senior High School, I became President of the Wildlife Club of my school as well as held the position of Public Relations Officer of the Student & Youth Travel Organisation (SYTO) in 2002.
With these organisations, I advocated for the rights of animals and the plight of near-extinct species, the rights of girls, participated in various donations and awareness campaigns such as HIV/AIDS and Breast Cancer.
I believe that becoming atheist made me more aware of my passions and my part to play in advocacy and the promotion of human rights based on the realisation that there is no one and no god to help us other than ourselves as people.
Why do you think that adopting a social progressive outlook is important?
It is very important since our lives and our well-being depend on the environment and the kind of society we are in. Having bad cultural practices, harmful traditions, and laws could lead us backwards rather than providing us with a bright future for ourselves and the next generations around the world.
I have grown to witness and live with hearing cases of child abuse at homes and in schools, seeing child trafficking on my streets, the handicapped begging, the mentally ill left naked to roam the streets, people dying of diseases that could have been prevented or cured, the loss of trust in policing and the judicial system and the effects of bad governance, bribery, and corruption on a populace.
People are growing ever so desperate that they are falling for the con of others using religion as a means of using them for their sexual perverted desires and money. Poverty is driving people to abandon their loved ones or accuse their own mothers of witchcraft in order for them to be put to death or banished from their communities for life.
It is important that we do away with these in our societies as we have come to know better and rather look to our past which in the Akan language has a term called “Sankofa” which teaches us to learn from our past to build a better tomorrow.
As a progressive, what do you think is the best socio-political position to adopt in the Ghana?
A major investment into Ghana’s educational system and the review of our school curriculum. Almost all government and private schools are influenced or owned by religious institutions and they dictate what should and should not be taught to our children.
It is in schools that major indoctrination starts and stifles freethinking in children. It is also there that teachers are given a right to beat up children to enforce ‘god’s will’ of the “spare the rod, spoil the child’ culture. If our educational system is revamped as our 1st President, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, a humanist himself, started and envisioned it to be, Ghana could have a well-educated and empowered workforce to develop the country in all the other sectors.
I attended the first University built by Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, The University of Ghana.
You became a member of the Humanist Association of Ghana (HAG) in 2012. You helped organised the first ever West African Humanist Conference (2012), which was sponsored by the International Humanist and Ethical Youth Organisation (IHEYO). What tasks and responsibilities come along with volunteering and organising for the HAG?
At the time, our group was quite small but vibrant.
It was an exciting time to meet other Ghanaian atheists and agnostics and we were very pleased that IHEYO would entrust us with organising such a big event despite us being so new as a group.
We did not have any formal leadership or an Executive Committee at the time so most of this was planned by volunteering members especially Graham Knight who helped to bring us together and started the Freethought Ghana group.
I was then working for an Australian Mining Company out of Accra so I made myself available to attend and help with last minute preparations like picking up delegates from the airport to their hotel and vice versa after the event.
During the event, I volunteered to be at the information desk where I helped to register attendees, distribute pamphlets, notebooks, pens and provide drinking water. I also took it upon myself to film the conference since the funds were not enough for photo and video services.
I also represented the group for interviews by local and international media. To be a volunteer, to me, is about helping however, wherever and whenever you can. Whether financially, using your skills or socially, any help at all goes a long way to achieve a successful event and team effort makes it even more motivating, fun and organised.
In Ghanaian culture, what are some of the more effective means to teach critical thinking within the socio-cultural milieu?
Ghana is made up of a culturally diverse population. It consists of roughly 100 linguistic and cultural groups. These groups, clans and tribes, although very different from each other, have certain similarities in various aspects of their culture. In Ghana, a child is said to be raised by the whole village rather than just the nuclear family.
Traditionally, information was passed on from generation to generation mainly through song and dance. However, in modern days, education not only begins from home but in schools, mainstream media such as TV, radio and religious institutions. As humanists, our focus has been with the youth in schools and social media.
What about modern scientific ideas?
Most of the understanding of things around us are taught from home by parents and extended family members who usually pass on what they learnt from their elders. This is mostly dogmatic and superstitious rather than scientific even though the end result is meant to educate.
Educational institutions are good grounds to teach modern scientific ideas. Ghana can boast of some of the best science institutions such as the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology as well as research centres such as the Noguchi Memorial institute.
We also have some of the most renowned Medical Teaching hospitals in the West
African region such as the Komfo Anokye and Korle-Bu Teaching Hospitals. Ghana
has the only Planetarium in West Africa which is 1 of only 3 on the continent,
which HAG members patronise and promote. There are also science programmes and
quiz competitions amongst schools on TV.
What are the main barriers to teaching critical thinking and modern scientific ideas?
Lack of infrastructure, dedicated science teachers who are poorly paid, medical personnel and government interest has made our science sector struggle as compared to more developed countries.
The average Ghanaian sees science as more theoretical and career-specific than practical. The understanding of science is seen mostly as a ‘Western’ construct than a global one. This could have stemmed from the fact that most modern inventions known to us came from Europe and the USA.
As a Ghanaian and African, what seem like the positives and negatives of religion
and religious fervour on individuals and communities in Ghana and Africa in
general?
Using the major religions like Christianity, Islam and Traditional worship, the positives of religion are that they give a sense of community, feelings of love, boosts self-esteem and gives hope and inspiration. The negatives however, are countless.
Many of which include spiritual leaders taking advantage of people financially and sexually, having delusional thoughts out of superstition and religious indoctrination, self- loathing, and guilt from unnecessary thoughts, a sense of false hope, illogical reasoning, lazy attitudes towards work and charity, a false sense of entitlement, mandates to abuse yourself and others most of which turn out to be fatal, etc.
What big obstacles (if at all) do you see social-progressive movements facing at the moment?
1. Lack of governmental/State support
2. Lack of funding or insufficient funds
3. Mismanagement of funds
4. Lack of public support
5. Inadequate and outdated rules of law
6. Insufficient legal backing and law enforcement
How important do you think social movements are?
Social movements are very important especially in 3rd world countries in being the voice of the people and putting pressure on government and the people to review and approve the living conditions of people and the state of affairs of a country and its environment in the best interest of everyone.
This is because despite democracy being adapted as a system of rule in most African countries, most of the time, cultural, traditional and religious biases steer the governments in the wrong direction and also because most of the countries may not have enough funding to care for its citizens and infrastructure.
In November, 2015, you became President of the HAG and in July, 2016, the Chair of the IHEYO African Working Group. What do these elected-to positions mean to you?
In the beginning of joining the humanist movement, I honestly never really saw myself as a leader. I just wanted to contribute my quota. However, I started to realise I had it in me to do great things for my group when I wrote my first article and got the most hits online! I received over 200 comments within days of posting it.
Most of the comments were negative but I felt I had left a mark and got people thinking. It also got the group recognised. I was recommended to IHEYO for a position as Secretary of the African working group in 2014 and at the time, I did not have much on my portfolio as an activist so I was so surprised and over-the-top excited when I got the news that I had been elected by international humanists who barely knew me from a record number of nominations!!!
I was grateful that they read through my nomination and entrusted me with the position, which I held for 2 years.
I took it very seriously and had a lot of guidance from the IHEYO EC whose President was Nicola Jackson. I saw how long the working group had been dormant, and so many things I could do to bring it to life and so many ideas started coming to me.
I increased social media presence on our Facebook page for the African Working Group and membership increased from 12 to 183 members within 2 years (It is now over 230). I also started a new Twitter page, @IheyoAfwg, with 130 followers including local and international humanists and humanist organisations.
I helped create a network of African humanists and humanist organisations that are in regular communication via email, skype and WhatsApp and I discovered several African humanists and organisations that I am in constant contact with to advise and guide.
In December 2014, I together with the Humanist Association of Ghana, hosted the 2nd West African Humanist Conference (WAHC), sponsored by HIVOS and IHEYO. Please see below for links to the videos of the 2-day event which was aired live online setting a record for my group: Day 1 — Day 2– I founded the HAGtivist podcast project and started it with other volunteering members of HAG.
I had been a contributor to the IHEYO newsletter Youthspeak personally and from various member organisations in Ghana and Nigeria, and I represented the working group at the recently held General Assembly (GA) in Malta this year.
I was part of the team that helped to organise the first ever continent-wide humanist conference held in Kenya called the African Humanist Youth Days (AHYD 2016) in July. This year, I knew that if I won the election as Chair, there would be so much more I could do to lead the Working group and despite a new resolution to have only Working group MOs voting this time, I came out victorious once again.
I am grateful to my fellow African humanists for their support and belief in me. It was on the same day I also received news of our election from HAG that I had also gained the position from Interim President in November 2015 to President elect in July 2016.
It was truly humbling that my work was recognised and my fellow members had given me the responsibility of representing our group of highly intelligent, creative and wonderful people.
These 2 positions come with the responsibility of representing Africa positively, dedicating a lot of time and resources, being passionate, bold, charismatic, firm, principled, professional, discerning, and diplomatic.
I believe that history is to be made this time around with young African humanists, and I am really happy to have the opportunity to be one of the ones at the forefront of change at this time setting a foundation for generations to come.
Who are personal heroes within the culture?
Historically, there are many personalities that are celebrated in Ghana. Some of my personal heroes are Yaa Asantewaa, an Ashanti Queen mother who, in 1900, led the Ashanti rebellion known as the War of the Golden Stool, also known as the Yaa Asantewaa war, against British colonialism. Her courage and bravery for a woman of her time inspires me.
Our first President of Ghana, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah is also one of the most renowned figures in Africa. He was born in a small village in Ghana and was able to finish his education in 1 of the most prestigious institutions in the world at Oxford University, returned home a humanist and fought for Ghana’s independence from the British, making Ghana the 1st African country to be free from colonial rule in 1957.
He was able to transform Ghana by providing us with our first and largest Hydroelectric dam, free basic school education, universities, science centres, Highways, our only International airport, our biggest port, etc. which we enjoy to this day.
In modern times, I have come to admire the work of our current Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Nana Oye Lithur. Although Christian, even before her Ministerial appointment, as a Lawyer, she has helped fight for the rights of the LGBT community despite serious opposition, worked Pro bono to solve many domestic cases especially those against women and children and is working tirelessly through her Ministry in assisting alleged
witches banished from their communities.
What is your favourite scientific discovery ever?
Electricity! It forms such an integral part of modern day living that I cannot imagine where we would be without it.
What philosopher(s), or philosophy/philosophies, best represent your own views about aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and politics?
I do not follow any philosophers in particular because I have not read about any. Instead, various documentaries have helped shape my thoughts on various aspects of life. I am a lover of nature, science and art. I am not interested much in politics and I derive my ethics from logic, constant research and debates amongst friends and members of HAG.
Who seem like the greatest anti-scientific representatives in Ghana?
Religious leaders!
What about the greatest anti-scientific and anti-humanistic movements within Ghana?
Ghana’s greatest enemy in the progress of science and technological advancement is religion. It is the only and greatest barrier because it allows for so much wrong to go on with little or no opposition.
From faith healing, false prophecies, work ethics, illogical theories, women’s oppression, authoritarianism, human rights abuse, bribery and corruption, etc. Ghana is highly religious in the sense that everything that happens is attributed to a deity or superstition or both! If something good happens, it is “By His (God’s) grace”, if something bad happens, it is “God’s will” or “the devil’s work” or “a bad spirit” or “angry ancestors”.
It is almost impossible to argue with people no matter how educated because of this train of thought. Religion is not a private matter as most religious countries practice. Here, it is allowed everywhere and anyone who stands in the way of their ideology or spiritual leader is an enemy of progress to them.
Most homes force relatives to pray at odd hours loudly and some go on the streets at midnight to pray or preach. In the public buses, herbal medicine traders who also double as Christian pastors are allowed to stand and preach for hours during the journey.
At work, highly religious entrepreneurs and Managers force employees to sing and pray before and after work. All official meetings and occasions, private or public begin and end with a prayer. Our entire lives are circulated around prayer and worship of one deity or another. There is little space for intellectual conversations and critical thinking.
What can external associations, collectives, organisations, and even influential individuals, do to assist you in your professional endeavours in Ghana?
I implore all external associations, collectives, organisations to partner with legitimate, active organisations here especially HAG. I advise that not only should they support the work of HAG, but also keep following up on our work.
You may support the activities of HAG through bringing in substantive ideas, financial aid, materials such as books, clothes, Resource persons, promoting our activities on social media and mainstream media and influential people can also visit to help promote our work and start fundraising campaigns that would be widely reached.
International women’s empowerment, equality, and rights are important to me. What is the status of women regarding empowerment, equality, and rights in Ghana?
I am very happy to be born at a time when women empowerment is starting to benefit the masses. However, there are several factors that are hampering empowerment and gender equality in Ghana, which include Cultural and religious beliefs. I wrote an extensive article regarding this issue in March 2016.
Can humanism improve the status of women in Ghana more than traditional religious structures, doctrines, and beliefs?
Most definitely it can! This is because, humanism emphasises the value of all human beings regardless of gender and promotes wellbeing of people whereas religion and superstition creates an illusion of differences between the gender making men feel superior than women. Humanism also brings about a sense of selflessness and working to better the lives of the deprived in society which are mostly women.
Thank you for your time, Roslyn.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
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In Indonesia, men don mini-skirts to end violence against women
According to the Daily Mail, men in Indonesia have begun to put on skirts in protest against the persistent discrimination against women. An individual, Syaldi Sahude, recollected
the statistics that about 85% of Indonesian women have suffered from “violence at the hands of their partners” and remain in those relationships.
“There were women’s empowerment, legal aid and trauma programmes for survivors but the root cause of this is men,” said Sahude, who was working at a women’s rights group at the time.
Protecting women human rights defenders in Honduras
Global Report reports that there is a great need to defend women human rights defenders within Honduras, especially that women “shouldn’t have to risk your life to demand respect for your rights and the rights of others.”
“Hundreds of defenders” have face various threats, and even murdered, and without prosecution or investigation into the either. Honduran women human-rights defenders spoke out.
They sent a “message to United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, Michel Forst” in August, who put out a joint press release stating, “Honduras is one of the most hostile and dangerous countries in the world for human rights defenders.”
Sex workers’ rights in public discourse in Latin America
According to The Frisky, there is, and has been, a movement for the labour rights for sex workers in the world following the summer of 2015 “when Amnesty International released
a declaration identifying workers’ rights as human rights.”
Germany and New Zealand have legal sex work with concomitant reductions in violence against sex workers and sexually transmitted diseases of them compared to other nations that have, by default, made sex work illegal.
The dialogue has continued to increase through the 13th conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, especially with the push in that region for the rights of sex works.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/10/09
Tunisian women fight for their rights
According to CBC New: World, Tunisia had a revolution in 2011 that ended a 22-year long dictatorship, which created a series of “popular uprisings” across the Middle East. This was the Arab Spring.
Tunisians overthrew President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. That “spurred a jubilant sense
of unity.” However, women, in general, developed “dread” post-revolution over the status,
or potential non-status, of their rights. What if an Islamist conservatism swept the country?
President Ben Ali’s reign for over two decades had rampant “corruption, human rights abuses and tight restrictions on free speech and political opposition.” 1957 marked the instantiation of women’s rights, and 2014 the re-affirmation, in Tunisia.
Polish abortion law debated in European parliament
According to European Parliament News, the recent events in Poland, the protests over the proposed abortion law called Black Monday, “sparked a heated debate in the Parliament on Wednesday.”
Poland has the most regressive abortion policies in the continent of Europe. The proposed bill or law would make them even more regressive with respect to women’s rights, which means even
more “stringent sexual and reproductive health laws.”
The European Parliament is in a contested moment over the debate of the subject matter. Justice Commissioner, Věra Jourová, opened the debate with a declaration that “the European Union has no powers over abortion policy and cannot interfere in member states’ policies in this area.”
Saudi male-guardianship laws treat women as second-class citizens
According to The Guardian, Saudi Arabia’s male guardianship system imposed on women is a “set of bylaws and state-sanctioned discriminatory policies and practices that restrict a woman’s ability to have a wide range of choices unless permitted by her male guardian.”
That male can include the son, brother, husband, or father of the woman in question, or simply women in general. Women lack full recognition as “full legal adults” by this standard. That is, women in Saudi Arabia are nor recognized as adults by the state.
Female activists have joined forces in the country to abolish the system through “a petition and massive online support. “Women activists submitted a letter to the Royal Advisory Council” during 2014 in the hopes that there would be change, but the council members expressed no support for “significant change.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/10/06
Istanbul summit to bring together women for justice
According to Daily Sabah, the Second International Women and Justice Summit will be hosted next month from November 25-26 with the theme of “Speak Up for Justice!” for women to discuss problems faced by women.
The summit will be hosted by NGOs including Women and Democracy Association (KADEM) and the Ministry of Family and Social Policies. It will “start on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.”
Two foci exist: “Women in Peace Processes” and “Syrian Refugee Women and Their Problems.” The hope is to raise awareness of women’s issues. There will be “workshops on cultural codes and manhood, women and peace, domestic violence and women refugees from Syria.”
Mike Pence’s Record On Women’s Rights Barely Came Up At The Debate & That’s A Problem
According to the Romper, During the first and only vice presidential debate of 2016, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine took the stage to discuss, and essentially defend, their respective presidential nominees and the important issues their campaigns plan to address
in the hopes of currying favour with potential and would-be voters come
November.
But while the debate was flooded with information, Pence’s record on women’s rights barely came up at the vice presidential debate — which is an utter failure, as over half of voters are women, an estimated 53 percent.
Pence’s political track record on reproductive rights and women’s health care is not only disturbing, it’s something that should have been highlighted on a national stage at great length, as Donald Trump has claimed Pence will be the “most powerful vice president in the history of the United States.”
Bid to ban abortion in Poland sparks heated Strasbourg debate
Radio Poland reports that Left-wing European Parliament deputies on Wednesday slammed a “medieval” bid to ban abortion in Poland, while conservative MEPs stressed the controversial measure is not a government initiative.
But in a move that surprised many, a Polish parliamentary committee on Wednesday rejected the bill, which has triggered street protests and fierce criticism on social media.
Malin Björk, a Swedish politician for the Left Party, said in the European Parliament debate in Strasbourg: “This new [proposed] law is a huge blow against women’s rights.”. Gianni Pittella, president of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, the second largest political group in the European Parliament, said: “The Polish proposal to toughen abortion [laws] goes against the EU’s values and threatens the right to health of women.”
But Jadwiga Wiśniewska, who hails from Poland’s ruling conservative Law and Justice party, told fellow MEPs: “You are trying to debate [a measure] in Poland that doesn’t exist yet and you are talking about something on which you don’t have the right to legislate.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/03
In Indonesia, men don mini-skirts to end violence against women
According to the Daily Mail, men in Indonesia have begun to put on skirts in protest against the persistent discrimination against women.
An individual, Syaldi Sahude, recollected the statistics that about 85% of Indonesian women have suffered from “violence at the hands of their partners” and remain in those relationships.
“There were women’s empowerment, legal aid and trauma programmes for survivors but the root cause of this is men,” said Sahude, who was working at a women’s rights group at the time.
Protecting women human rights defenders in Honduras
Global Report reports that there is a great need to defend women human rights defenders within Honduras, especially that women “shouldn’t have to risk your life to demand respect for your rights and the rights of others.”
“Hundreds of defenders” have face various threats, and even murdered, and without prosecution or investigation into the either. Honduran women human-rights defenders spoke out.
They sent a “message to United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, Michel Forst” in August, who put out a joint press release stating, “Honduras is one of the most hostile and dangerous countries in the world for human rights defenders.”
Sex workers’ rights in public discourse in Latin America
According to The Frisky, there is, and has been, a movement for the labour rights for sex workers in the world following the summer of 2015 “when Amnesty International released
a declaration identifying workers’ rights as human rights.”
Germany and New Zealand have legal sex work with concomitant reductions in violence against sex workers and sexually transmitted diseases of them compared to other nations that have, by default, made sex work illegal.
The dialogue has continued to increase through the 13th conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, especially with the push in that region for the rights of sex works.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/10/28
Worldwide war against women
According to The Village Voice, there is a war against women around the world. The article notes that “a conservative Muslim president announces that women who don’t stay home and bear children are ‘deficient.’”
Russia’s Duma represents a campaign to decriminalize domestic violence, where the majority of victims are women. India has an editor of a liberal investigative magazine put his hand up a cornered employee’s skirt. The incident, or crime, is dismissed as “drunken banter”.
Within the Philippines, “the new president jokes about” missing the opportunity to
lead a gang-rape, which reflects consistencies among individuals in power, or men in stations of authority in the world.
Canadian Rights Record for Women’s Equality record under review
Net News Ledger reports that the Canadian rights record for women’s equality is under review at the United Nations in Geneva with the 65th session of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.
The new federal government, with the self-identified feminist Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and son of the late ex-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, calls for a “nation-to-nation relationship, and acknowledges that ‘poverty is sexist’.”
The Net News Ledger states that “Canada needs a comprehensive and holistic national gender equality plan that addresses all forms of discrimination against women and girls. It must take an intersectional approach, recognizing that particular groups of women and girls—including First Nations, Inuit, Métis, racialized, disabled, refugee, immigrant, transgender, lesbian, bisexual and single parent women and girls—experience particular forms of discrimination and deepened disadvantage.”
UN recognizes Afghan’s women’s ability to fight extremism
UN News Office notes that following an Afghan civil society meeting with representatives meeting in Kabul that women’s rights are key to the overall strategies to combat violent extremism.
The meeting was a part of a larger day entitled Global Open Day to assist women. It was themed on peace, security, and women. The UN Secretary-General’s Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan, Pernille Kardel, and the Country Representative for the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), Elzira Sagynbaeva took part.
Kardel said, “In Afghanistan, ideologies imposing discriminatory belief systems continue to deprive women and girls of basic human rights such as freedom of movement and access to education and health.”
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Donald Trump and reflection on the status of women and girls
According to The Jakarta Post, Donald Trump is the “buffoonish, hyper-narcissistic, xenophobic, misogynistic, mentally and emotionally retarded Republican presidential candidate…”
The author article goes on to use to present statistics about women and girls in addition to the International Year of theGirl Child and its “Girls’ Progress = Goals Progress: A Global Girl Data Movement”. They report that 700 million women have been married prior to the
age of 18, and “more than one third were married before 15.” It is economically related, too.
Poor girls are 2 ½ times more likely to marry in childhood. “Pregnancy happens soon after marriage, even when they are not mentally or physically ready”, the author said.
California porn star says enforced condoms violates her rights
According to The Guardian, a porn star considers the enforcement of condoms on porn sets a violation of her rights to do what she wants with her body, which is an argument made by Tasha Reign.
Reign was recently handing out pamphlets in San Diego, California at UCSD to protest Proposition 60, which is for the mandatory wearing of condoms for adult entertainers while filming sex scenes Reign is a self-identified feminist.
“It’s extremely difficult for somebody to be able to maintain an erection for 45 minutes, and to be able to pop with a condom…I hate the idea that some man is going to tell me what I can and can’t do”, Reign said.
Scarlett Johansson speaks for women’s reproductive health
Motto reports on the recent statements by Scarlett Johansson on women’s rights and the right for women to choose what to do with their bodies in addition to her accepting an award for work done with Planned Parenthood.
Johansson said, “Planned Parenthood has always been there for me and for the 2.5 million men and women who rely on their services annually”. She is a “strong advocate” for reproductive health organizations such as Planned Parenthood.
“A woman’s right to choose what to do with her body shouldn’t just be a woman’s rights issues”, said Johansson, “It’s the year 2016 and this is a human rights issue. A woman’s right to choose is a deeply personal one and should not be a part of anyone’s political platform”.
In Liberia, Barzon advocating for women’s rights
According to All Africa, the “Head of Liberia’s delegation” who went to the Rural Women Land Right Summit in Tanzania made a calling for the government to make sure that women in the rural areas have their rights to own land upheld.
Madam Jesadeh G. Barzon made firm statements about that land not being taken away from them. The importance to not take the land and, therefore, their livelihood away from them.
Barzon, Chairperson of the Zwedru Rural Women, stated that she climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in order to have women’s voices heard for their “rights to land, investment and inheritance and the abolishment to early marriage.”
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Women’s rights organisations’ funding on a five-year decline
According to The Guardian, the funding to women’s rights groups have continued to decline by over half through the previous five years, which contrasts with recent reports on the improvement in the lives of women in the long term through women’s rights organisations’ activities.
There was a financial support review of the major donor countries. According to the Gendernet report, which is a “subsidiary body of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development” (OECD), only .5% or £144m was dedicated to promotion of gender equality in poor countries.
The number in 2011 was 1.2%. In short, the monetary funding has decreased substantially from the previous amounts. “Only 8% of the funds earmarked for civil society went” straight to the developing country groups with a “fraction” to local women’s groups.
Muslim women challenge polygamy and triple talaq
According to the Daily Mail: India, a “war of words” emerged in the wake of All India Muslim Personal Law Board’s (AIMPLB) boycott of a “questionnaire on authoring a common code for issues such as marriage, divorce and property rights.”
The AIMPLB made the accusation that the law panel acted as “an agent of the Narendra Modi government.” That is, the proposal for the Uniform Civil Code threatens the diversity and pluralism of India. Many Muslim women activists stated that the AIMPLB does not speak for “the entire community.”
President of Maulana Arshad Madani, Jamiat-Ulema-e-Hind, said, “If a uniform civil code is implemented, attempts will be made to paint all in one colour, which is not in the interest of the country.” Many Muslim women challenged the legitimacy of the practices of triple talaq and polygamy.
Women climb Africa’s highest mountain in call for land rights
According to Reuters, a Kenyan woman’s, Ann Ondaye’s, husband died and the deceased husband’s brothers took the widow’s possessions. Ondaye is left with three young daughters.
There were attempts to oust her from her “matrimonial home” with claims about her children not being entitled to the father’s land. Why? They’re girls. Elders in the Luo community, and women activists, fought for Ondaye to stay on the 2.5-hectare lot of land.
“Ondaye is one of hundreds of women from more than 20 African countries meeting in Tanzania this week to write a charter” that will make explicit demands for the improvement of “access to and control over land.” The fittest will climb Mount Kilimanjaro to sign the charter.
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Anti-scientific politicians a growing problem in the U.S.
According to Scientific American, in an article by Shaw Otto, there is a warning about a growing anti-scientific movement, which appears to gaining momentum and possibly becoming a “growing problem in American democracy.”
That is, politicians holding anti-scientific beliefs can instantiate positions in direct opposition to “the core principles that the U.S. was founded on,” which are founded in “no king, no pope and no wealthy lord” being more “entitled to govern the people than they [are] themselves.”
Otto describes the current political situation as a post-fact. The regularized denial of scientific principles, laws, and facts become dangerous to an informed electorate. The normalization comes from “political, religious or economic agendas of authority.”
Native Americans are not anti-science
According to Salon, authors Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker, the Native Americans, or American Indians, have fewer reasons to be anti-science than most and there is a history of “science…used in service of U.S. political agendas to dispossess them of their lands and subjugate them.”
Jason Antrosio, Professor of Anthropology at Hartwick College, claimed “many Native Americans refuse to participate in genetic studies,” where there seems to be a “belief
that Indigenous Americans somehow owe their DNA to genetics studies…”
“…and that when they disagree, they are automatically deemed to be against science.” The authors note the case of astronomy, which appears to be one of the first sciences. They state the commonality of all people, at one time or another and as with Indigenous peoples, through reading “the heavens to keep track of time.”
Other primates can read minds like humans
According to Science Magazine, there’s a classic experiment to test for theory of mind (ToM), which is “the ability to attribute desires, intentions, and knowledge to others.” That is, the test is for the ability to have an internal model of another mind.
Humans were thought to be unique in this capacity. As it turns out, other primates might have this ability that, to a limited or less great extent than, human beings. In particular, there’s the phenomena of knowing when someone holds a false belief, a counterfactual view
It is an ability “believed to underlie deception, empathy, teaching, and perhaps even language. But three species of great apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans” can tell if an individual has a false belief.
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Anti-science is becoming an international “contagion”
According to Environment 360, British Labor MP Jo Cox was assassinated by a right-win nationalist last June after having tweets “about oceans, fishing, and trawler fleets” on her Twitter account.
Cox made reference to the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES), which is one “the oldest international scientific institutions in the world…founded in Denmark in 1902” to scientifically explore the oceans.
ICES scientists measure fish stocks. This can inform politicians in reasonable quotas for fishing. Nigel Farage described quotes as an attack on national sovereignty for Britain. These are but two of attacks on “science-driven policies of the EU” grounded in “the scientific process” and “evidence-based policy.”
Nobel Prizes for strange states of matter
According to QC Online: International, Nobel Prizes were awarded to three men – David Thouless, Duncan Haldane, and Michael Kosterlitz – with the possibility that their work could contribute to “more powerful computers and improved materials for electronics.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, their work showed the properties of matter’s stranger states of existence. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said, “Their discoveries have brought…theoretical understanding of matter’s mysteries and created new perspectives.”
The Nobel Prizes, co-won, came with monetary reward as well. It was about 8 million kronor. 4 million kronor to Thouless alone, and 4 million kronor to Haldane and Kosterlitz together. Haldane received the call about the prize. “My first thought was someone had died,” Haldane said. China National Genebank openingAccording to PR Newswire, China has officially opened the China National Genbank (CNGB) to facilitate and conduct international genomics collaboration for the provision to scientists around the world access to “the world’s most comprehensive and sophisticated biorepositories.”
The aim is to produce innovative research in human health and to contribute to “global biodiversity conservation efforts.” CNGBis a billion-dollar enterprise with over 47,500 square metres of coverage.
It was “initiated by China’s National Development and Reform Commission in 2011.” It was developed out of the Beijing Genomics Institute, which is the largest genomics organization. Ultimately, “the mission of CNGB is to preserve the essence of billion years of evolutionary history and deposit the life foundation of billions of people.”
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Times when US presidents ‘banished’ science
The Atlantic reflected on the time the differences in American presidents and their advocacy, or lack thereof, of science in the political sphere for an impact of US public life.
Harry Truman used to confide in William T. Golden. Golden made a recommendation for an official science advisor to the president in 1950, which was a fortuitous move for science.
However, in “1973, Richard Nixon” had “grown increasingly dismissive of the advice
coming from scientific experts, and…abolished the position entirely.”
“Geeking Out for Science”
According to Scientific American, the GeekGirlCon occurred from October 8-9 with representation of science for kids, so that they could “explore the world of science and engineering with creativity and hands-on fun.”
Some dressed up in the event. It was aimed to inspire girls to become interested in science. The purpose is the need for future science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates.
The future economy and jobs market is, as is becoming apparent to more and more, a
knowledge economy. Events like this support those endeavours. The National Science Foundations in the US created a competition for high school students interested in STEM.
Bones into Jelly!
Science Magazine notes that 10,000 years ago in the Stone Age, in other words our ancestors, hunter-gatherers actually built houses, hunted, and conducted shamanic rituals out in the “wetlands of North Yorkshire.”
“Archaeologists uncovered” a Mesolithic dwelling called the Star Carr (1948). There were highly preserved animal bones, wooden and bone tools, and headdresses. More recently, the researchers found Star Carr breaking down.
In fact, the “waterlogged wood rapidly mysteriously” broke down in addition to the bone turning into a jelly, which were, in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, termed “jellybones.”
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Patient Zero for HIV ‘cleared’
According to BBC News, Gaetan Dugas was one “of the most demonised patients in history” and “has been convincingly cleared of claims he spread HIV to the US”, which diminishes the demonised, “legendary status”.
Dugas was a homosexual flight attendant. He acquired the name Patient Zero. Via a publication in the prestigious journal Nature, he was shown to be one of among thousands infected with HIV/Aids.
New York was found to be a nexus for the incubation and spread of HIV/Aids. It was
recognized in 1981 when unusual symptoms emerged among gay men. Researchers have been able to look back farther in time with stored samples from 1970s hepatitis trials, which contain HIV.
Probe glitch possibly behind Mars probe crashing
According to The Guardian, the European Space Agency (ESA) describes how a potential computer glitch might have caused the crashing of the probe that was sent to Mars.
Apparently, the plummet began a couple miles up. Further satellite images “confirm”
that the probe, or spacecraft, was travelling at about 300km/hr and “smashed into an
equatorial Martian plain on October 19th.
“After a flawless start to its descent, the craft’s landing sequence appears to have gone out of kilter” and The ExoMars 2016 lander put out its parachute much too early, and the retrorockets should have been on for 29 seconds but only were on for 3. The plummet and crash followed.
Science budget unaffected post-Brexit
The Register reports that Jo Johnson, Science Minister, promised the United Kingdom government will continue to allocate funding to the science budget “to underwrite EU funding following Blighty’s departure from the European Union.”
PM Theresa May notes the Brexit negotiation will take place following the Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty “triggering” in March, 2017. Johnson made assurances that the government committee devoted to this is “working hard.”
According to Johnson, there is a “strong commitment” on the part of the UK government to “not use any of the £26.3bn science budget pledged in April 2016” in support of monetary support cut by the EU.
Bad scientific climate a problem for the practice of it
EurekAlert notes that an acrimonious political context can slow down science and its progressive effects, which is especially important as a consideration in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and in a Knowledge Economy.
“The House of Representatives Science, Space & Technology Committee has been operating in lockstep with the combative political climate this election season” with detrimental consequences on science.
There have been 25 subpoenas since “last year.” These were raised to investigate the activities of science agencies and others. Some “scientists say the efforts are having a chilling effect” rather than bringing any problem behaviour to the fore.
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Dan Rather supports science
According to Scientific American, Dan Rather supports science and says that it is more important than ever in the modern world. Some questions might be raised about the presidential election of 2016 by future historians.
The Trump Administration will need to work on the scientific front because of the pressing concerns of the modern world that require scientific solutions and pursuit for their alleviation.
“The political press treats science as a niche issue. But I would argue that it is central to America’s military and economic might,” Rather said, “that it shapes the health and welfare of our citizenry, and that our governmental support of the pure pursuit of knowledge through basic research is one of the defining symbols of American excellence.”
“Supermoon” is here
Space.com reports that there will be a November “supermoon” on November 14 that can provide “an extraordinary sight for skywatchers,” which is “a full moon is at its perigee, or closest point to Earth during the lunar orbit.”
It will be the brightest and biggest moon, supermoon that is, to date in about 69 years, where the next one is expected to come on November 25, 2034. It is a rare event, and a rarefied experience for those that had or have the chance to see it.
NASA’s Noah Petro, Deputy Scientist of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, said, “The main reason why the orbit of the moon is not a perfect circle is that there are a lot of tidal, or gravitational, forces that are pulling on the moon.”
New Zealand shakes and kills
Science Magazine said that an earthquake hit New Zealand on November 14, which killed 2 people, and that New Zealand has convoluted seismic activity based on the judgment of experts.
James Goff, Seismologist and Tsunami Expert at the University of New South Wales in Sydney,
Australia, said, “[New Zealand -seismology] is a lot more complicated than we thought…We are finding out again that there is seismic activity that we didn’t really know about.”
The US Geological Survey found the epicenter was a 7.8 magnitude earthquake near kaikoura, which is a coastal tourist town. The shallow quake from the earthquake “caused extensive damage to infrastructure.”
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Comet hit 10 million years after the impact that killed the dinosaurs
According to Science Magazine, a small comet impact kicked off the PETM, stirring up the carbon just 10 million years after a similar event decimated the dinosaurs.
A group of scientists claim that here were rising temperatures by as much as 5°C to 8°C with concomitant huge wildlife migrations 56 million years ago. This is called the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM). Researchers did not know its cause for some time.
However, in an article this week in Science, a very prestigious journal, scientists presented findings of “glassy, dark beads, set in eight sediment cores tied to the PETM’s start.”
These are spheres “associated with extraterrestrial strikes.” – spheres that are often associated with extraterrestrial strikes. The spheres appeared to be “microtektites,” which is “debris” caused by comet or asteroid strikes against the Earth at high speeds.
Nerd-in-Chief for the US as 300 million USD in science funding unveiled
According to CNET, the United States unveiled 300 million USD funding for science through President Barack Obama. It is “federal and private money earmarked for support science and technology.”
There is 165 million USD devoted to “smart city initiatives” for the reduction of traffic congestion among other things. 70 million USD is meant for researching in brain diseases such as “Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression and other diseases.”
There will be 50 million USD for “small-satellite technology that enables high-speed internet” and 16 million USD to improve the medical care for Americans through the Precision Medicine Initiative.
Wales aims for more scientists
According to Science Magazine, Wales wants more scientists and has the Welsh government has developed the Sêr Cymru initiative in 2012 as part of a larger set of governmental science strategies.
The aim is to make Wales world-class in areas of possibility for being the among the greats in the world in those domains. There has been a commitment of £50 million “to bring prestigious research chairs to Welsh universities.” A second £60 million…phase of Sêr Cymru” was launched in December, 2015, through offerings for mid- to early-career scientists. Chief Science Advisor for the Welsh Government, Julie Williams, said, “Our ambition is to grow research.”
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American women have same abortion rate with medication and surgery
According to Religion News Service, US women have begun to end pregnancies with medication at about the identical rate as they would do with surgery, which marks an important point “for abortion in the
United States.”
This comes in the wake of a recent net decline in abortion whilst the decision, or choice, to have an abortion remains a controversial subject along political and religious lines in America.
It was the basis for a “fiery exchange in the final debate between presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.” Medication-induced abortion was expected to overtake the surgical option when it won US approval 16 years ago. It might, but now it’s only equal.
Faith in progress and technology for happiness.
Quartz reports that religiosity has been overtaken by faith in progress as the way to make people happier within secular societies. Traditional, orthodox “religious belief best bolstered well being” in the past because it provided a sense of control.
University of Cologne, Germany social-psychologists state that science “satisfies the secular” quite a lot, and that technology has become the default as opposed to prayer, for an example.
1,500 people were surveyed in the Netherlands. The were surveyed about “values, religiosity, personality traits, beliefs about progress, and so on. They concluded “that both belief in scientific-technological progress and religiosity were associated with higher life satisfaction.”
Archbishop of Canterbury praised UAE on freedom of religion
The National reports that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby who is the senior-most cleric in the Church of England, stated that the United Arab Emirates set a good example of permitting Christians to practice their faith.
“I am concerned that this is becoming the exception rather than the rule though in many parts of the world,” he said, “It will be a joy to worship today at St Andrew’s Church here in Abu Dhabi.
“Many politicians and religious leaders came together in the UAE for discussions and discourse on how to “promote tolerance and understanding.” The aim of the meeting was to have pragmatic ways to have freedom of religion within societies.
Author looks at the decline of religion in America
According to The Catholic Sun, Kenneth Woodward published a book entitled Getting Religion: faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama.
“Woodward was the religion editor of Newsweek Magazine for nearly 40 years until his retirement. He wrote about everything, he knew everyone, and he saw it all. This makes him unique,” The Catholic Sun said.
Woodward chronicles the continual decline of religion within America in what is seen as decreases in “both religious principles and religious liberty. This is what first made America exceptional in the history of the world.”
Author looks at the decline of religion in America
Oxford University Press Blog says that modern Pagans are challenging the traditional definitions of religion. That is, “Pagan religions, both newly envisioned and reconstructed on ancient patterns, are growing throughout the world,” OUP Blog said.
Druidry, Wicca, and so on, have been maintained by individuals within the English-speaking world and this comes along with other attempts around the world to retain aspects of “indigenous or tribal traditions.”
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Trump supporters strong among religious far-Right
Vox reports that that 2016 American presidential election is “about values” and the larger vision of America amongst the voting population, which comes in the two representatives of the Democrats, Clinton, and Republicans, Trump.
Prominent “white evangelical Republican voters themselves are still there” as “values voters” and are among “Donald -Trump’s most stalwart defenders.”
Many of these supporters with deeply held religious convictions are bound a narrow range of issues including “abortion, same-sex marriage, school choice and school prayer, and deeper problems with a hypersexualized mass culture that takes sex outside of marriage as a given.”
Civilization VI has religious victory route
Eurogamer notes that one of the new big video games, Civilization VI, contains various religious elements as with the previous series of the game, where players can win via religion, for example.
To spread a preferred religion within the game, the player will need to acquire Faith with continuous quantities of the resource throughout the game to be able to strike a Faith-based victory, or a Religious Victory.
The Religious Victory can be had through the training and sending out of Apostles and Missionaries to “help spread the good news.”
Baha’i members say Iran want to ‘crush’ the religion
According to ABC News, the Baha’i International Community has expressed deep concerns about the attempts by Iran to “crush the religious minority” and that this has increased under the Presidency of Hassan Rouhani.
There was a 122-page report with statements that there is a “campaign to incite hatred against Baha’is” such as the spreading of over 20,000 bits of anti-Baha’i propaganda via the Iranian media.
Rouhani was inaugurated in August, 2013. There have been 151 Baha’i arrests in addition to 388 “incidents of economic discrimination” that have included intimidation, threats, and shop closings.Indian Supreme Court will not debate greater meaning of Hindutva
According to the Hindustan Times, the Supreme Court, in India, will not enter into a greater debate as to the meaning of Hindutva, but, nonetheless, asserted that “asking for votes in the name of religion was “evil” and “not permissible”.”
The Supreme court was revisiting the judgment in 1995 about the Hindutva as a “way of life and not a religion” and that this might imply disqualification if candidates invoke religion for votes.
Chief Justice, TS Thakur, said, “It is difficult to define religion. There will be no end to this.” This was an observation and comment made with elections only five months away.
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Bangladeshi murder suspect arrested
According to NDTV, the central suspect in the murder case of secular Bangladeshi blogger has been arrested as of recent.
The secular Bangladeshi blogger, Nazimuddin Samad, was a law student and was murdered after the publication of a blog post critical of Islamists.
Counter-Terrorism and Transnational Centre unit and Detective Branch of police arrested the suspect, Rashidun Nabi, from Sayedabad.
Chinese government cracks down on parental ‘luring’ of kids into religion
The Independent reported on the government China’s call on friends, neighbours, and relatives that might be “luring minors into religious activities” in one province of China with the largest Muslim population.
November 1 in Xinjiang will be the first implementation of the education rules. There will be removal of children from their parents’ care and send them to “receive rectification” at specialist schools” in the case of the luring into religious activities.
With the “significant ethnic Uighur population” in this region of China, the limitations or restrictions are being “enforced on the practice of Islam” with the implementation of the new rules resulting in even further punishment.
Secular father prevents circumcision of newborn
According to Arutz Sheva, a father prevented a circumcision. The father very shortly before a circumcision of his son prevented the circumcision. It was the secular father’s newborn son.
The ‘sandak’ was to be performed by Rabbi Kanievsky. Sandak is a term for an honoring for a child at a Brit Milah or circumcision ceremony in the Jewish tradition.
The report states: “A number of families were participating in the joint event, and when the turn of the child in question came, his father suddenly appeared, grabbed him up, and fled.
Secular Student Alliance sells souls to religions
According to Daily Texan Online, the Secular Student Alliance has set up an auction for souls to be able to raise funds for the alliance.
It was called, and was the first, the Soul Auction. Various formal religions were represented with different jars such as Mormonism, Islam, Catholicism, and so on.
Based on the greatest amount of donations to a particular religious denomination, the SSA would attend a service of that religion.
Kaine and Pence debate seen as “honest” and “sincere” regarding faith
According to Salon, Longwood University, which is a public university in Virginia, was host to “the first and only vice presidential debate” with many calling the “most honest” and “most sincere” debate in some moments.
These were moments marked by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Gov. Mike Pence
(R-IN) having open discussions about their faiths. Pence made open appeals to the abortion and life’s sanctity concerns of the Christian right.
Kaine made clear emphasis on individual choice and the “moral responsibility of honoring” it. The Salon article author notes that the “focus stemmed from the fear, particularly among white southern evangelicals, of disturbing an old order based on white supremacy, heterosexuality and female domesticity.”
High Holy Days unavoidable for secular Israelis and diaspora Jewry
According to Haaretz, diaspora Jews and secular Israelis can learn from one another during the occurrence of Yom Kippur.
The High Holy Days remain “unavoidable” within the borders of Israel. This “religious New Year permeates the country’s natural rhythms.”
Both diaspora Jewry and secular Israelis take part in them or rake advantage of these special days. It is noted secular Israelis, for instance, might use them as “pseudo-holidays”.
Bart Ehrman and Robert Price debate
According to Chicago Now, Professor Bart D. Ehrman and Dr. Robert M. Priceare having a debate on October 21 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on the topic of Jesus’s existence or non-existence.
Ehrman wrote five New York Times bestsellers to date in addition to be a distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is considered
a “leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity.”
Professor Robert M. Price is a former Baptist minister with a PhDs in systematic theology and the New Testament. He is the “professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute” and considers Jesus a mythological figure.
School works to keep secular status
According to The Record, a school is working hard to keep its secular status after two Muslim students were discriminated against.
The students wanted to pray and were not allowed to pray. The school, Webber Academy, is fighting to keep its secular status based on this.
The Alberta Human Rights Commission decision, last summer, was upheld by a lower court judge in addition to the $26,000 fine.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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A rainbow in religion
The Guardian reports that there was a slogan on London buses in 2012 to target Christian groups’ comprehension of sexuality as binary rather than a “spectrum of many shades” in terms of moral valence.
Some have viewed this as a binary adversarial perspective about the rightness and wrongness, and degrees of it, for the ethical implications of individual and groups decision about sexual activities.
“The tragedy here is not just the absurdity of trying to purge the world of its crazy variety,” the Guardian said, “but in the pain and hurt it causes those who can’t or won’t force themselves on to our reductionist templates.
Israeli government backs call to block Muslim prayer
Christianity Today reported on the controversial ban on mosques to be able to have a Muslim call to Prayer within Israel, which won support from the government after a measure bolstered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The prayers are traditionally called from minarets five times per day, and these have been the “battleground” of the conservative or Right wing of the Israeli political movements.
It has been stated that this is not an attempt to “harm freedom of religion but rather to prevent the harming of people’s sleep.”
Baha’i members say Iran want to ‘crush’ the religion
According to ABC News, the Baha’i International Community has expressed deep concerns about the attempts by Iran to “crush the religious minority” and that this has increased under the Presidency of Hassan Rouhani.
There was a 122-page report with statements that there is a “campaign to incite hatred against Baha’is” such as the spreading of over 20,000 bits of anti-Baha’i propaganda via the Iranian media.
Rouhani was inaugurated in August, 2013. There have been 151 Baha’i arrests in addition to 388 “incidents of economic discrimination” that have included intimidation, threats, and shop closings.
Muslim College Chaplains Extend a Hand Across Religious Divides
The New York Times said that a Muslim chaplain, Fardosa Hassan, helped a woman, Emma Bloom, through a time spiritual doubt through helping her “feeling more settled in her soul.”
She, Hassan, considers doubt as a necessity in terms of belief rather than “its irreversible solvent” because “divine texts can be interpreted by human hands and in modern ways.”
The conversations with Ms. Blom and Ms. Hassan (the Muslim chaplain) took place for close to 2 months before the settling feeling of Ms. Blom’s “soul” began to solidify in their place.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Russia’s 5-100 plan under scrutiny
According to The PIE News, Russia’s major internationalization project for higher education, Project 5-100, is being called into concern by the Minister of Education and Science, Olga Vasilyeva.
Vasilyeva said, “The budget should be spent very carefully,” which was a warning from the new minister. The investments from Project 5-100 will be huge. This makes the Vasilyeva focused on the expenditure of the budget, which she argues should be in a careful manner.
“We are currently suspending any further consolidations of Russian universities for an indefinite period of time…The programme involves huge investments in the development of certain local universities; however, there is a big question, whether these funds will be repaid,” Vasilyeva said.
Discussions opening over the importance of international rankings for schools
According to The Times Higher Education, some universities rise in the international school ranking because of increases in the pay of professors and instructors at their institution, which has raised questions about international rankings.
Duncan Ross, Data and Analytics Director at Times Higher Education, said, “One of the most frustrating questions I get asked by people at universities is: ‘How can I go up in the rankings?’ which is one of the least interesting questions about the data we have.”
Ross would prefer questions about being better at things considered important by the institution and its membership. Vice-Provost for Planning and Assessment at Pennsylvania State University, Lance Kennedy-Phillips, considers rankings context-providing and not the driving force behind university operations.
Chinese value and pay high prices for international educations
According to The Christian Science Monitor, Sustainable Development Goals (MDGs), which followed the Millennium Development Goals, of the United Nations have 14-year ambitions to train “69 million new teachers” for the needed slots in education.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released statistics stating the need for those 69 million teachers for “263 million children worldwide who do not attend primary or secondary school.”
Silvia Montoya, UNESCO Institute for Statistics Director, said, “Entire education systems are gearing up for the big push to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4 by 2030…[but] education systems are only as good as their teachers.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Questions from Rudd over “one size fits all” university education
According to The PIE News, there are questions being raised about the viability of “one size fits all approach” to post-secondary institutions, especially with the “hundreds of different universities” on offer at the moment.
Amber Rudd, United Kingdom Home Secretary, said, “foreign students, even those studying English Language degrees, don’t even have to be proficient in speaking English.”
Rudd spoke of lower quality courses without specification of details. She described the current university system’s acceptance all students “irrespective of their talents and the university’s quality.”
Rising cost of education makes students turn international
According to The Daily Trojan, the price of university tuition and living costs are making many students in the United States look internationally for their education, which can often mean European institutions of higher education.
The value of a university education is consistently mentioned as crucial to American students “from the moment students enter kindergarten.” Students come to the realization just how much tuition cost, and therefore move out of the States for their education.
Kasumyan says, “The U.S. does not entirely leave students to fend for themselves, but neither does it prioritize education as much as it should, evident in its meager budget when compared to the billions dedicated to military expenditures.”
Chinese value and pay high prices for international educations
According to Bloomberg, Chinese students are paying the expensive costs for what is considered prized international education. It is reported that expatriates with children see international schools as the “only realistic choice for an education in a foreign country.”
That is, the best option appears to be international education for Chinese students, which implies international education at home and abroad. The idea of international schools internal to China for Chinese parents and students might seem odd.
However, this is a common phenomenon and this is becoming an increasingly prevalent phenomenon. The Bloomberg video in the hyperlink explores this in greater depth for those with an interest.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Brock University has inappropriate” category for costumes
According to The Gazette, the Brock University Student Justice Centre has encouraged students to look into their website for the Halloween outfits, which is to ensure students do not wear “inappropriate” costumes.
Indeed, there is a category labelled inappropriate. That is, as noted in the report, “on the topic of cultural appropriate their check list appears like a dull reaction to last year’s blackface fiasco.” A time that four boys dressed as a Jamaican bobsled team.
The Student Justice Centre at Brock University provided a set of questions for students to reflect on and “should ask themselves before dressing up in a particular costume.” Some banned costumes are “cultural headdresses, Caitlyn Jenner depictions and even a Donald Trump mask.”
Education crucial for acceptance of transgenders
CBC reports that in Windsor a transgender woman, Lorraine Sayell, states that education is crucial for the proper comprehension of “issues” faced by the LGBT community, which is an ongoing issue itself.
Sayell said that there is a rejection of services to genderqueer individuals, or those that don’t “identify as male or female” and can be a consistent struggle in communities in life for them.
“Particularly in the last five years or so, the issue of transgender has become very public…It is very much talked about both in positive and negative terms. So, this is something that is not going to go away. We have to get ahead of it,” Sayell said.
New US President will not spend finances on reforms in the schools
According to The Economist, the new president will not be prioritizing school reform. Only 12.7% of the total USD600 billion is spent on the federal government in America. There are the states and the 13,500 districts that split the rest.
Furthermore, the US spends more than most nations to produce some of the worst educational outcomes, which is highly inefficient. George W. Bush and Barack Obama spurred reform through the power of the federal government.
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 was one aspect of this. Another was the “Race to the Top” initiative beginning in 2009. The former was Republican. The latter was Democrat. Regulation school reform, as an era, is ending. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was passed a recent replacement for the NCLB. Power is given back to the states for standards and tests.
Higher education institutions need to integrate with modern technology
Business Wire reports that Technavio put out an analysis entitled global higher education m-learning market to highlight the “most important trends expected to impact the market outlook from 2016-2020.”
Individuals with stakes in post-secondary institutions know that they need to integrate newer technology into their systems. That means upgrading their current systems or purchasing more advanced ones altogether for new infrastructure.
“This has led to the adoption of education technology solutions across various institutions” for the improvement of the learning opportunities and outcomes of students, but the cost of this “digitization” has been an issue.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Theresa May defends creation and expansion of grammar schools
According to The Guardian, Theresa May has plans for the allowance, and has defended, the “creation and expansion of grammar schools. May made calls for supporters of a “selective education to submit evidence of their success.”
The speech was considered “defiant” by May. Independent schools and universities are being asked to take part in the public sector, which was “indicated” within the speech at the “event on the terrace of the House of Commons.”
Only 2.6% of grammar pupils come from poor backgrounds. Six Conservatives have expressed concerns about these plans so far. “The government is consulting on this,” May said.
Amazon Web Services new cloud educational service
According to Street Insider, Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services, Inc. made an announcement about new web capabilities intended to improve global initiatives for cloud-related learning for educators and students.
The service is called AWS Educate. It contains more than 25 individually paced modules called “Cloud Career Pathways” devised of “instructional videos, lab exercises, online courses, whitepapers, and podcasts.”
These provide “four overarching job families…: Cloud Architect, Software Developer, Operations-Support Engineer, and Analytics and Big Data Specialist.”
Dubai Cares commits money for education in emergencies
Relief Web reports that Dubai Cares made an announcement about USD 20 million towards to the International Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) in order to “promote access to quality, safe, and relevant education for persons affected by crises.”
It is a large part of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiative. Initially, this will cover three programmes including Lebanon, Niger, and Sierra Leone. More programs are to
be announced this year.
Dubai Cares “launched a new community awareness and fundraising campaign, known as #LastILearned, in support of its Education in Emergencies strategy. The campaign will run for one month and aims to raise funds and build awareness of the plight of children affected by conflict and natural disasters.”
Teachers protest no pay for part of September
The Jerusalem Post reported that starting on Rosh Hoshana educators began to protest because, to their surprise, thousands of shekels had been missing from their September paycheques without warning.
The Education Minister claimed that the reduction in pay or the deduction from their paycheques was due to the reform in the transportation for the public, which led to the Finance Ministry making the changes.
The Ministry of Education notes that is understands the anger of the protesting educators and that they are a “backbone” to the society, and hopes to rectify the situation soon.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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One religion dominance not allowed in public institutions such as schools
According to The Times Live, 6 former Model C schools had pupils recite prayers from the Christian faith in assembly. Students had to “pray before sport matches and describe themselves as having a predominantly ‘Christian ethos'”
They are having to defend the right to follow a single religion in the courts. The Johannesburg High Court will be hearing the case and this will have “implications for any state school that promotes one religion.”
That promotion would include “dress code, prayers or readings – even if the religion reflects the belief system of the majority.” The “OGOD, the Organisasie Vir Godsdienste Onderrig en Demokrasie,” noted that the constitution and the National Policy of Religion disallow one religion dominance in public institutions.
US broken education system caused Trumpism
The Toronto Star described the nature of the Trump phenomenon, Trumpism, as resulting from the breakdown of the American educational system, which comes from the abandonment of the educational system.
The author congratulates Canada on having a good educational system, and thinks that as long as it can be maintained then the nation will not crash as “our next-door neighbour has, a backyard of flaming wreckage and oh no, where are the nukes.”
“Education is the key to civilized life” the columnist asserts and the underfunding of US schools tied to the absence of teachers and the inadequate salaries for teachers has eroded the educational system in America.England’s unsustainable educational system according to the Financial Times
The Financial Times describes the “tatters” of England’s educational system because of the unsustainable level of funding given to the system, which means that the funding levels will need to change at some point in the future.
Alison Wolf, Professor at King’s College London, states that the increasing numbers of university graduates creates one funding system that cannot keep up and the “technical qualifications below degree level have suffered” resulting in a decline in “student numbers.”
That is, the current demographics of the university graduate population cannot be sustained because of the poor suitability for the current job market, and those that could fill them will be able to fit into the market. Thus, the situation is described as having “serious flaws” with high levels of expense and involves “a major misallocation of resources.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Creating the Africa of the 21st century
According to All Africa, the closing of the two-week Third Country Training Programme (TCTP) came with grand statements by Shem Bodo, Senior Programs Officer with the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA).
Bodo said, “Probing and thinking critically is what will make Africa a continent of the 21st century… inculcating skills at an early age is the key.” This is one statement among a growing movement.
Africa has a continental vision with the African Union in its Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want. That document makes an explicit call for a “revolution of education, skills and active promotion of science, technology…”
Nerd-in-Chief for the US as 300 million USD in science funding unveiled
According to CNET, the United States unveiled 300 million USD funding for science through President Barack Obama. It is “federal and private money earmarked for support science and technology.”
There is 165 million USD devoted to “smart city initiatives” for the reduction of traffic congestion among other things. 70 million USD is meant for researching in brain diseases such as “Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression and other diseases.”
There will be 50 million USD for “small-satellite technology that enables high-speed internet” and16 million USD to improve the medical care for Americans through the Precision Medicine Initiative.
Turkish teacher recruitment process systematically looks for affiliations
According to Al Monitor: Turkey Pulse, the post-putsch massive purges included the governmental suspension of 28,000 teachers with the intention of uprooting the followers of Fethullah Gulen, who was accused as mind behind the coup.
Many Kurdish teachers and trade unionists allied with “the opposition were also caught in the net.” The government announced 20,000 replacement teachers for vacancy filling with written exams and an interview, the new part, for the recruitment process.
The questions in the interviews have been about religious and political affiliations of the candidates, and in a systematic way, to determine the kind and level of support for the rule Justice and Development Party (AKP), according to the Education and Science Laborers Trade Union (Egitim-Sen).
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With two weeks until the US Election, Russian punk band Pussy Riot sparked controversy through a viral video entitled “Make America Great Again” protesting the comments of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
In the beginning of the month, there was a video released showing Trump using offensive vocabulary when talking about women. The band clearly alludes to the video when singing “Grab them by the pussy,” an expression that became the mark of the scandal. Pussy Riot member, Nadya Tolokonnikova, said, “…Trump’s words are not just words. Those words lead to violence.”
The single, however, does not represent the group’s support to Hillary Clinton, who as far-Left supporters were on Bernie Sanders’ side for the Democratic candidate. “Let’s just say his policies appealed to me more,” Nadya told TIME. “But it’s not good to talk about that now. It’s a harmful conversation. Their wish is to make a strong presentation against Donald Trump.”
The video released on Thursday was not as radical as Pussy Riot’s previous productions and their own political belief. “Of course we wanted to just say, ‘F—k Trump” Tolokonnikova told TIME, “But we didn’t do that. We wanted to get our message across to people who might not be as aesthetically radical as we are at Pussy Riot.”
Apart from this critique, Nadya also raised other polemical issues that marked Trump’s electoral campaign. The lyrics to the song highlight pressing issues in the world including Mexico, Syria, Palestine, African-American lives, and the status of women, even torture and killing.
The viral video was intended to be graphic. It was to highlight the implications of Trump’s words. His words imply real-world consequences. There were previous videos such as “Organs” and “Straight Outta Vagina”.
These sparked controversy and discussion for the public and the fan-base of Pussy Riot. Organs was based on government oppression and women’s sexuality. Straight Outta Vagina was themed on women’s empowerment in general.
These songs are part of a consistent tradition by the punk rock group to protest what they see as injustices against women and government oppression. Their protests can have negative consequences for them.
They are known for being a feminist punk rock music group, protesting and opposition to Vladimir Putin (who they compared Trump to in Make America Great Again), and advocating for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights.
In fact, these are not the first time Pussy Riot tried to shake things in the political scenario before meaningful elections. In 2012, two members of the group, Nadya herself and Maria Alyokhin, were arrested because of a public anti-Putin protest in Moscow. It was one day prior to the one that got him re-elected.
Putin has connections with the Russian Orthodox Church. Indeed, protests from Pussy Riot against Putin have been seen as attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church, according to The Guardian.
The members have fought back in legal cases. For example, in May, 2015, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, along with others, filed a suit to the European Court of Human Rights.
In the suit filed, they claimed there was police inaction in addition to the refraining from prosecution of Cossacks who had assaulted Pussy Riot in the midst of a video shoot. The video was for the Sochi Winter Olympics, and entitled “Putin Will teach You to Love the Motherland”. In an earlier interview by Esquire, Pussy Riot lead singer, Nadya, said, “I wouldn’t say Russian society is misogynistic. Our country was one of the first to give women the right to vote, in 1917…So we have a good history of feminism and state-supported feminism.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Swedish chess players and the US Champion, Nazi Paikidze, have been outspoken about their refusal to wear the hijab in Tehran, Iran for the Women’s World Chess Championship.
At the moment, many of the more pertinent arguments are centered around what benefits Iranian women. This makes sense, considering the restrictive dress code for women in Iran. What seems to have been forgotten, however, is that women have a right to boycott Iran simply for their own rights as individuals not to wear the hijab. Even if boycotting the tournament hurts Iranian women, neither Paikidze nor the Swedish players have an obligation to play in Iran if it means wearing a clothing item that is enforced for women and not men.
There are two angles from which to consider the boycott. First, the question of what will promote Iranian women’s participation in public life. Second, the less discussed angle about individual rights, especially as applied to individual women in this instance. Each perspective has validity.
Let’s consider the angle of Iranian women’s participation in public life first. If the tournament is held in Iran, girls in Iran will see women in an international professional capacity. Right now, Iranian women make up 60 percent of Iran’s university students, yet less than 20 percent of the country’s working population. In 2015, an Iranian football player was unable to play in an international tournament because her husband did not permit her to travel. Seeing the Iranian women’s chess team compete in an international tournament could have a positive impact on young girls in Iran who wish to be a part of their country’s workforce, and particularly those who wish to become athletes.
Women Iranian chess grandmasters, Sara Khadem and Mitra Hejazipour, consider the boycott detrimental to women’s sports in Iran, as it would deprive them of what Hejazipour describes as “an opportunity to show our strength.” This is a fairly solid argument against the boycott, if the tournament does end up taking place in the Islamic Republic.
If, however, the Swedish and American players can push the tournament not to be held in Iran, then their decision to boycott is for the best. It will make the statement that this tournament will not be held in a country that tells women what to wear. Young Iranian girls will still get to watch Iranian women play chess, even if it’s on a television screen. But if the tournament cannot be moved to another country, then they should not boycott the championship, because they will be denying Iranian women a major opportunity.
Now consider the angle of the individual right of Paikdze to not wear a hijab. Individual rights to freedom of dress are important because the individual is the fundamental unit within society, nationally and globally. A woman exercising her own right as an individual to not wear a piece of clothing is making a stand for the collective rights of women.
Which angle is more important? This is a question for all progressives to consider. The individual rights of the Swedish and American players, which is a part of the universal right of women to not wear a veil? Or the inspiration for girls in seeing powerful female role models in a country where women are often discriminated against in the public sphere?
If worst comes to worst, and the tournament officials insist that the tournament be held in Iran, then the Swedish and American players have every right to boycott the tournament altogether due to their own rights as individuals not to wear the hijab. But, again, will it benefit Iranian women more than the opportunity to compete in a tournament while wearing the hijab? The answer to that, we believe, is no.
If, however, the Swedish and American players are able to push the tournament to be held in another country, their boycott of Iran could be a success. This way, chess players of all nationalities will be allowed to compete wearing whatever they choose to wear.
Something is, nevertheless, straightforward: this is surely a very pivotal time for the larger discourse concerning women’s rights. A dilemma for feminists has emerged, a dilemma that will, you can be sure, have far-reaching significance.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Benjamin David
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/23
The Gay Science (1882) is a much-revered text written by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). He was a German philosopher and philologist. In the text, he provides an unsystematic representation of one conceptualisation of power. There are a number of aphorisms in it, which are simply pithy observations, tinctured truths. Nietzsche’s aphorism 125 represents a morbid forecast of a world in the aftermath of God’s murder. What would that look like to him? The aphorism, entitled “The Parable of the Madman”, tells the story of a “madman” who, with lantern in hand and crazed importunity, dashes into a marketplace searching for God:
“I seek God! I seek God!” — As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. ‘Has he got lost?’ asked one. ‘Did he lose his way like a child?’ asked another. Or is he hiding?’[…] [the madman responds]: Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?
Nietzsche wrote the parable over 130 years ago. This aphorism continues to be important today, especially given the increasing degrees of irreligiosity spreading across the globe. In general, religion continues to increase, internationally, with irreligion increasing in particular areas, especially in Western Europe and North America.
Even with this particulate increase and overall decline in irreligiosity, how is Nietzsche’s rather anomalous aphorism above at all relevant to us today? It centers on the death of God and in the powerful phrase, “We have killed him.” God has been killed. By whom? We did it. We murdered the all-powerful creator of the universe. It is direct, personal, and powerful, and especially accusative. Traditionally, that would be meant in a Christian sense. We killed Jesus, or God incarnate, on the Cross. But, then again, what does this really mean?
To answer this question, it would be useful to begin with an explanation of the proverb. So, what’s Nietzsche on about here? Let’s focus on the historical context in which Nietzsche is writing The Gay Science.
He was in Continental Europe. His homeland was Prussia. He was witness to increasing numbers of people discarding their belief in God, or a deity. This was particularly fascinating, and also hauntingly worrying, for Nietzsche for many reasons. The principal reason for this concerns the trap of nihilism. Nihilism is the rejection of every moral and religious principle in life. A world and life without firm values and precepts. Some might argue this leads to the view of life as meaningless and without true moral values – the “why” starts to lack meaning.
With religious Continental Europe and Prussia rejecting God, and so becoming irreligious Prussia and Continental Europe, the question arose for Nietzsche: can we be certain that our previous source of values – e.g. heaven – is able to be supplanted straightforwardly with a new source? It could have been convoluted, even impossible. Nietzsche’s main concern, as seen in the haughty derision of the madman’s interlocutors, is that many of us (Nietzsche had in mind the British-utilitarians) are so smug in our conviction that all our values will be just as consonant as before in a post Judeo-Christian world that any worries we might have concerning the justification of our values preceding God’s death would be met with confused glares – if not malicious mockery.
Now, what about us today? Whilst Nietzsche thought that a trans-valuation of values was necessary – the principle of the task being the quasi-naturalistic drive in all life he called the ‘will-to-power’ – was crucial to overcome nihilism, many might discount that as an alien idea and, actually, a little overblown. Is the task of really that pressing as Nietzsche thought? Put another way, is the danger of nihilism as threatening as Nietzsche insists? Let’s first explore the worries in more detail.
If we decide to kill god, murder him, many would claim that the end-result will be that we’ll find ourselves unequivocally standing upon a flimsy sort of ethical shifting sand. So, ‘whither is God?’ No God; thus, an unsound foundation for morality at face value. That is, grounds that will, whether we like it or not, cave-into a state of subjectivity in which our values, and the sense of morality that manifests, become a mere subjective product – an objective ground of values has thus decomposed. Nothing less than momentary desires, wants, and whims in each person is brought to pass in the aftermath of God’s demise.
Why, in the face of the dissolution of our objective source of morality, should godless people not just gall, exploit, or even harm those around us? What’s the point of doing anything, let alone anything traditionally ‘good’ as opposed to ‘evil’?
Whilst I cannot possibly contend this rather face-value-only view in thorough detail, I will try and give a brief compendium of why many of us are not bereft of the invaluable structures that afford us a solid ground upon which our values are sourced. Like many misunderstandings about value-theory, Nietzsche sadly joins contemporary exponents of the view that values can only be sourced, exclusively, in a timeless supernatural realm. Where, then, are values to be sourced? What other than the supernatural, or the magical-mystical, to found values?
Let’s first think about who we are and build upwards from there. I think it would be rather uncontroversial to claim that most people would be willing to concede, that who we are is, in many ways, a product of our culture, indeed I am certain of the fact. We are constructed from the building blocks of the arts, the humanities, the sciences, the people, the places, the relationships, the cultural customs and norms, and so on, of our environment.
Our beliefs, the power which we are able to yield in our comportment, our tacit knowledge, gender roles, etc., are largely constructed in virtue of the community – however large or small – with which we are principally associated. This should not be seen as a moot point. However, this should not be seen as some unavoidably determinate condition of our behaviour. Rather, such communal structures can, alongside those more innate components of who we are, provide a strong basis for a structurally grounded, but nevertheless individuating, sense of self.
Every product is a result of the various evolutionary selective pressures on us. That is, there will be universals within most or all cultures because we are, as is a truism about every living thing, a product of evolution. What’s more, we are a common species. All more than 7 billion of us. In evolution by natural selection, we have a natural process creating living things, organisms, capable of culture. Our cognitive architecture and subsequent outputs in interaction with the environment; our physical abilities and concomitant limitations. Each the product of evolution, and so with the suite of derivatives from them, especially those under the rubric of “culture”.
Organisms are naturally evolved and culture is derivative of evolutionary processes as products of some species like ourselves. A proper response to Nietzsche’s concern about nihilism follows from this. That being, there need only be face value concerns about nihilism. In fact, upon further examination and brief consideration, our evolved tendencies, moral senses and sensibilities, culture, are naturally grounded, and unavoidably so from a modern scientific standpoint, for the vast majority of us (some within-species variation).
And so we have a sufficient universalism in moral senses, or an affirmation of most within a species having an inter-subjectivity, a common range feelings, which is a solipsism with acknowledgement of our being social creatures. We can’t help it. It’s how we evolved. So even if God is dead, a la aphorism 125, and even if we are the culpable murderers of Him, then nihilism is the first conclusion. What else follows from this?
It is something probably best termed sufficient universalism. It is a good-enough, evolved moral sensibility. It develops over time. As with every other organism, every trait we have is the product of evolution, which is a truism. And many of these wax and wane throughout the course of the developmental life course from child to adult to elder. A moral sensibility developing through the life course within a single species is sufficiently universal, and answers the face-value concern of Nietzsche’s “The Parable of the Madman”.
So we can say to Nietzsche and his disquieting disciples: have more faith in us humans. Whilst we (impressively) slay god, whilst we entomb him, whilst we dole out his will-arrangements, we can (impressively) lead valuable, structured and deeply moral lives after he’s dead whilst, of course, gleefully dancing on his grave whose epitaph reads: “God is Dead – So Let Man Hopeth That His Suffering Doth Die, Too.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Terry Murray
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/06
On October 25, 2016 Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addressed the United Nations Security Council, in an open debate entitled Women, Peace and Security, reaffirmed the urgent need to have women in the security and peace-building operations on the ‘international stage’.
A key goal is equal representation and women’s participation in UN peace processes. “Women have a vital role to play in preventing conflict and building and maintaining peace,” Mr Ban said, “…this is now widely recognised, far too often, women are prevented from full participation in peacemaking and peace-building.”
There is a consistent history of underrepresentation of women and girls in peace and security building operations. The Executive Director of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women noted the previous Resolution 1325 appeal for women’s inclusion in the peacebuilding process which dates back a full sixteen years from Ki-moon’s address. This shows how little progress has been made on past resolutions and prompted UN women chief Ms. Mlambo-Ngcuka to reiterate that commitments to the further cooperation with women in peace processes should not be on the books alone, but should be incorporated into practice within countries stricken by conflict.
As well, Executive Director of EVE Organization for Women Development, Rita Lopidia, speaking for non-government organisations devoted to the Working Group on Women, Peace and Security reaffirmed women’s role within “prevention and resolution of conflicts, peace negotiations, peace-building, peacekeeping, humanitarian response and in post-conflict reconstruction.” She further emphasised the need to prioritise the protection of girls and women in conflict situations where existing gender injustices are aggravated.
According to Mr. Ki-moon, at the start of the National Action Plans on Women, Peace and Security, there were only four countries involved in total, which is simply miniscule and rather piddling. However, over time that number has grown to the present point where there are now sixty-three. That is a remarkable achievement that has allowed the largest marginalised population in the world to be incorporated into the framework, as they should have been from its inception. Many women and girls are affected, their worlds shattered by conflict, which means sexual violence in both conflict and post-conflict contexts. Violent extremist groups such as Boko Haram or ISIL target women and girls in areas activated by conflict. Often their bodies become the battleground on which the most barbaric acts of aggression are expressed.
In addition, justice requires a global response to the gender deficit in peace-building because of the ethical obligation that women and girls be accounted for and protected in areas of conflict. This is an ongoing problem for which practical tactics and solutions are needed.
The Vatican responded with ostensibly positive rhetoric emphasising the need to give girls access to education, this playing a vital role in their poverty reduction and civic participation.
However, girls and women must also have leadership and decision-making roles in determining the content of education, or else improving their access to ‘education’ will do little to redress socio-political gender inequalities or the second-class social status given to women and girls.
Women must be involved in setting the education agenda and curricula, not just in delivering it or learning. Moreover, emphasis on women’s special roles in ‘reconciliation’ and ‘healing’ in post-war situations should not be prioritised over their participation in law and justice, strategy and political conflict prevention. Otherwise their ‘participation’ will resemble little more than complacent forgiveness and permanent victimhood. Responses must be as effective as they are diplomatic.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Emile Yusupoff and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/08
It may seem hyperbolic to describe atheists as an oppressed minority from the standpoint of living in a Western secular liberal democracy. However, from a global perspective, and even in developed countries that purportedly cherish freedom of belief, atheists face endemic and systemic legal and cultural discrimination, even to the point of death based on their beliefs. The main, real bastions for the non-religious in the world, especially atheists, are China and Western Europe.
That is, from the standpoint of the average citizen living a decent life in Western Europe and (to a lesser extent) North America, the idea that atheists are an oppressed minority may seem outlandish. The claim can seem odd at face-value true because atheists in numerous countries in these regions of the world experience tremendous freedom from a historical perspective. This can be used positively or negatively. But that’s what freedom means. It may entail responsibilities, but people should be free to live up to this or not.
However, the freedom of religion in the sense that the state does not actively impose particular beliefs does not necessarily translate to societal tolerance and respect. In the United States, for example, atheists are widely mistrusted and viewed as inherently immoral. There are Gallup, and other polls and studies, indicating that atheists are the most negatively viewed demographic, and particularly unsuited for public office.
The perception that being an atheist means being ‘un-American’ appears to be difficult to combat. Take, for instance, President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s rival to be the 2016 Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, Bernie Sanders. The mere suggestions or rumours that they were atheists forced explicit and pronounced public denials. It’s not that they are, or are not, atheists. It’s the public resentment, fear, and loathing (in America, not just Las Vegas) for those that might have explicitly irreligious and atheistic beliefs. There are currently no (open) atheists in Congress.
Similarly, ad hominem criticisms of a public figure’s character are often framed in terms of their purported irreligiosity. Hillary Clinton, right now, has been criticised for not attending an art event. And, as a result, has been accused of being a devil worshipper who performs Satanic rituals. Whilst this is an extreme example, it captures the extent to which irreligiosity is used as a proxy for any purported failure of character, real or imagined.
Tragically for a country explicitly founded on freedom of religion, legal discrimination against atheists still exists in many states. Seven US states continue to technically prohibit atheists from holding political office, in spite of this being in violation of the first amendment and article VI of the constitution.
Whilst Europe is comparatively more liberal, it is hardly a beacon of enlightenment either. Discrimination against non-belief and restrictions on criticising religion are prevalent. The IHEU’s 2013 Freedom of Thought report, which analysed the rights and treatment of the non-religious around the world rated no European country other than Kosovo, Netherlands, and Belgium as “free and equal”. Switzerland, the UK, and Sweden experience “systemic discrimination”, whilst Greece, Denmark, and Germany experience “severe discrimination”.
There are laws prohibiting blasphemy in Greece, Austria (de facto), Denmark, Poland, Ireland (de facto) and Germany. And it was only very recently that they were repealed in countries including Iceland (2015), Malta (2016), and The Netherlands (2013).
Across the rest of the world, the picture is even worse. Preferential treatment of the religious in Latin America is endemic, particularly due to the Catholic Church’s continued influence and control of education (which is more honestly called religious indoctrination).
The most extreme persecution exists in Middle Eastern and North African countries, where, out of 20 countries, apostasy is illegal in 14. This is particularly striking given the growing numbers of non-believers across Muslim-majority countries, meaning that millions of people are affected and threatened by such laws.
Worse, in a total of 13 countries, being an atheist is deemed a crime deserving of capital punishment. As noted by Anna Vesterinen in New Humanist:
-Iran: Frequent executions of people found guilty of moharebeh (enmity against God) and anti-Islamic propaganda.
-Mauritania: Penal code outlaws apostasy, punishable by death if the accused does not repent in three days
-Maldives: All Maldivian citizens are required by law to be Muslim. Leaving the religion is punishable by death.
-Nigeria: Under some Islamist controlled areas, apostasy is a capital offence.
-Saudi Arabia: Apostasy from Wahhabi Sunni Islam punishable by death, as are blasphemy offences. Frequent executions.
-Somalia: Especially in areas controlled by the Al-Shabaab, apostasy is punishable by death.
-Sudan: Apostasy punishable by death, however, executions rarely take place
-UAE: Apostasy from Islam is punishable by death. However, no known prosecutions in court have taken place.
-Qatar: Converting from Islam is a capital offence. However, there have not been recorded punishments since the country’s independence.
-Yemen: Apostasy from Islam is punishable by death, but government does not enforce the death penalty.
Even where there is no official state sanction, in many countries expressing irreligiosity results in an effective death sentence at the hands of citizens, who in many cases fear no reprisals from the authorities. In fact, in 2015 alone, four secular bloggers were murdered in Bangladesh, with similar events occurring in 2016. These were highly publicised cases, but it cannot be known for sure if they were the only such examples.
Let’s take the opposing consideration into account, where are the death penalties in secular democracies for being theists? No. Is this proportional? Not even close. Does the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights have anything to say about freedom of belief? Yes, the Preamble states, “human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief”; “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” There’s no extra bit about being able to belief one thing or another, and to then believe one thing or another, and then having to be killed over it based on the whims of the, usually male, conservative, fundamentalist, authorities. Does this make secular democracies for more, just, and aligned with the universal human values determined by the United Nations in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights? Yes.
We argue the religious have the right to believe, teach, practice, worship, and observe as they deem fit for their individual selves as does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and without discrimination and fear for their lives; in addition to this direct statement, we argue the irreligious have the right to believe, teach, practice, worship, and observe as they deem fit for their individual selves as does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and without discrimination and fear for their lives. That means atheists, those without a belief a God or gods, simply deserve the same rights and privileges as the others.
Still, it may appear that this is not specifically an issue faced by atheists per se, but rather a problem of religious intolerance generally. For instance, apostasy laws apply to anyone who renounces Islam, regardless of whether they renounce God entirely or, say, develop a special affection for Jesus. However, this misses the extent to which atheists and secularists are explicitly targeted and are regarded as an active threat by authorities in religious countries.
Likewise, it is worth noting that even amongst conservative religious states, there is often comparatively greater freedom of worship than there is freedom of belief more generally. In Iran, for instance, although the freedom to practise Judaism or Christianity can only be exercised within limits, atheists have no official status, and must identify as belonging to a religion.
And, as discussed, many Western countries that are generally liberal and secular have laws that are specifically prejudicial to the irreligious and have cultures that are actively hostile to non-belief. It is worth noting that even proto-secular champions of freedom of religion, such as Thomas More and John Locke, only extended this liberty to those who did worship in some form or another.
Why is this? Why can people reach the stage where they are capable of tolerating worship of a God or gods that is incompatible with their own but not a lack of belief altogether?
We suggest that it comes down to religion being fundamental to many people’s identities and sense of right and wrong. For some, this is underpinned by explicit or sublimated fears grounded in supernatural beliefs about eternal fire and torment in Hell. Whilst people of other faiths are not yet saved, they are fundamentally saveable, given that they also share the basic premise. Atheists do not, so are closer to damnation.
Similarly, for many people God-as-lawgiver is the linchpin of morality. People of other faiths may have different practices and traditions, but they share the same fundamental perspective of acting righteously and avoiding sin. Atheists, by this logic, are inherently predisposed to immorality. As such, there is something especially disconcerting and suspicious about anyone who does not believe in God or the transcendental.
Furthermore, in many countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, religion is intertwined with political authority and national character. At least culturally, a similar phenomenon exists in the US. Atheism is, then, inherently disruptive and threatening to social order. Indeed, across much of the Middle East, it is true that many of the most vocal critics of governing regimes are atheist and secular activists.
Ironically, this simply provides more reason for us to express solidarity with and champion the cause of those, across the globe, who simply demand the freedom to express their beliefs without fear of oppression.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Angelos Sofocleous
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/03
International rights stipulations provide the basis for fundamental human rights. As Ban Ki-Moon has said, “We are all different from one another, but we all have the same human rights. I am proud to stand for the equality of all people – including those whose are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.”
Numerous resolutions, from both the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly, make human rights inclusive of LGBT peoples, and LGBT rights distinct and important too. These are not some distant considerations, but immediate, impacting people’s lives, and violated on a consistent basis – hour-by-hour. One recent national event, from Chad, came from a distressing ratio of votes – 111 to 1 – and reiterated this perennial truism
Last month, Chad’s National Assembly voted for a new penal code which criminalises homosexuality with 111 MPs voting for it, 1 against and 4 abstaining. This made Chad the 77th country internationally, and was the 37th country in Africa to criminalise homosexuality. Under the new law, people engaging in homosexual acts can be heavily fined (£60-£600) or serve a 20-year prison sentence.
In fact, according to a legal report by the US Library of Congress all African states, with the exception of South Africa, recognises and permits same-sex marriage. More specifically, in Nigeria, Sudan and Mauritania, homosexuality is punishable by death. This action of Chad’s National Assembly comes after Gambia passed a bill imposing life imprisonment for homosexual acts.
The fact that the vast majority – only 1 exception and 4 abstentions – of Chad’s National Assembly supported the new penal code is worrying. This bill was also supported by the country’s former Prime Minister, Delwa Kassiré Coumakoye, who mentioned that “homosexuality is condemned by all religions. We do not have to forgive something that God himself rejects because Westerners have said this or that”.
There are two issues we need to discuss here: First, the fact that religion plays a role in determining what is legal and what is not. Second, the fact that the former Prime Minister considers that it is a strong point of the new penal code that it does not conform to “Western” styles and principles.
In an era that nations fight for secularism, supporting the complete separation of church and state, some African nations, including Chad, make decisions solely on religious grounds. What is more, Chad’s cabinet mentioned that the new penal code intends to “protect the family and to comply with Chadian society”. It is indeed a worrying fact how nations, like Chad, commit the argumentum ad antiquitatem (appeal to tradition) fallacy and base a whole penal code on tradition, family values and religion.
There is no reason or logic involved in supporting the new penal code apart from subjective statements of this nature. And it is scary to think that because of subjective
statements people are going to end up in prison or get heavily fined. The former PM even called the bill a “fair balance”. This leaves us wondering, however, what may ever be “fair” about the bill when it criminalises basic human rights.
Furthermore, there is every reason to argue that anti-Westernisation is not considered a valid reason for supporting the country’s new penal code. In fact, it shows quite the
opposite – its weaknesses. First of all, the issue is not even about what Western countries do. It’s what humans do. As the great journalist and religious critic Christopher Hitchens has said: “I say that homosexuality is not just a form of sex, it’s a form of love — and it commands our respect for that reason”.
Granting homosexuals the right to engage in relationships, sexual acts or marry is itself the same right we are talking about when talking about heterosexuals. No difference is or should be made. In fact, criminalising homosexuality is itself an act that does not serve to protect people of any society or tradition as it on its very basis does not take into consideration that a respected part of the population is attracted to people of the same sex, or even to people of both sexes. Any appeal to religion or tradition fails to provide us with a logical basis on which to support the claims that supporters of Chad’s new penal code which punishes homosexuality make.
Indeed, this “form of love” can be outlawed, and made extraordinarily risky and even lethal in its practice because of cultural and legal factors. Take, for example, the case of Tanzania suspending the outreach programmes for HIV. Why would there be a suspension for outreach programmes for HIV? The reason: homosexuality is outlawed within Tanzania and, therefore, within the logic of the system, seen as not worth considering for appropriate, and needed, outreach for HIV.
And it is not like there aren’t campaigns devoted to the implementation of the international rights via international movements – the UN Free & Equal is one such campaign, and “is an unprecedented United Nations global public education campaign for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) equality” (OHCHR, 2016b). These are old prejudices, and they keep cropping up. Again, why? It is easier to hate than to love, at least in the short-term.
Which leads back to the international Moral-Educator-in-Chief, Ban Ki-Moon, who said, “It is an outrage that in our modern world so many countries continue to criminalise people simply for loving another human being of the same sex…Laws rooted in 19th century prejudices are fuelling 21st century hate.”
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/04
The Economic Times recently reported on a Supreme Court consideration concerning the role of secularism in India. There is an ongoing, heated debate about the role of religion in attempts to garner votes by politicians. Is it good or bad? Could religion (and caste) in India be used to instill “hatred during elections?” It’s an important question. The Supreme Court decision read thus, “Secularism does not mean aloofness to religion but [giving] equal treatment to every religion.
Religion and caste are vital aspects of our public life. Can it be possible to completely separate religion and caste from politics?” It is a point for further reflection on the international state of secularism, especially coming from the world’s largest democracy. There’s over a billion people in India.
It is important to note that secularism is, by definition, the provision of equal opportunity for all religious and nonreligious citizens within secular states, which tends to mean secular democracies. Societies dominated by religion are normally little more than theocracies; one need only look at Iran and Saudi Arabia for current, living examples. Secularism seems to us a prerequisite for democratic ideals, such as egalitarianism, self-determination, and freedom of conscience, to proliferate and flourish.
In a similar manner to the fundamental democratic ideal of ‘one person, one vote’ as well, the enshrinement of secularism in the constitution, in law, and in larger society mean the flattening of the landscape of privileges and rights enjoyed by one belief system over another. Secularism is the freedom to dissent from the majority viewpoint, to stand up for the ideals in which you believe as an individual, and see them given equal merit, regardless of your identity.
No belief system, religious or irreligious, should be above any other by democratic standards. Secularism ensures it, too. In contradistinction to the opposing instantiation of all religion over nonreligion, or one religion over other religions (and irreligion), secularism does not permit the generalised bias, prejudice against, or tacit preference of one belief system over another. It makes for a fairer, more just, society. A society conducive to the implementation of human rights, which are universal values.
This is not something that we are merely saying for the sake of it. Rather, we are recalling the first line in the Preamble of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states:
“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,”
The “equal” status of everyone, whatever group they might, more or less, belong to, and the “freedom” and “justice” in the globe can be further assured with the introduction of secularism into democratic societies. Indeed, it might not be the key to democratic ideals, but, certainly, it is deeply tied to the greater opening angle of the door once unlocked. “Inalienable” is not something to be taken lightly. It is of tremendous import in secular, democratic, pluralistic societies because, no matter the individual citizen’s status, they have been promised, in the highest international document on human rights that they deserve those rights.
We find statements reflecting the kind of egalitarianism that should inevitably come with secularism throughout the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, if you will indulge us while we list a few examples: in the Preamble, we see “highest aspiration of the common people…human rights should be protected by the rule of law…equal rights of men and women…”; in Article 1, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”; in Article 2, “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status”; in Article 6, “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”; in Article 7, “All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law”; and ‘punched’ home in Article 28, “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realised.” The coda to all of that: equality for all, before the law.
Not a bad starting point, is it? And it is one that can come exclusively through secular values. And as, quite succinctly, described at the outset, secular values ensure the freedom to and from the belief systems of individuals in any society; whereas, the lack of secularism can prevent, and quite likely eventually destroy, that freedom and its basis for pluralism in a society devoid of ideological conflict between individuals holding one belief system or another.
Secularism and freedom of religion enshrined in the very constitutions and legal systems are the most reasonable route that we see towards a fairer, more equal society. Any country or indeed legal district that privileges one religion over another, or one system of beliefs over another in law is inherently discriminatory from its very inception. How can we fight for greater rights for minorities and those discriminated against when a significant portion of the population would already face biases and roadblocks from the birth of a country’s legal system? The answer is, of course, that it is impossible, and that is why secularism should be, and indeed is, the only way.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Author(s): Benedict Nicholson and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/04
Recent research out of the University of Helsinki notes that those with supernatural belief systems understand the world less than those without them. The study notes that those with supernatural or paranormal beliefs comprehend the material world less, and instead explain events in terms of supernatural entities and paranormal activities.
Supernatural in this context means something beyond the natural, whether entities, energies, or forces. Paranormal means something occurring without scientific explanation. In short, these are related ideas in opposition to the natural and that which can be explained by science, or occurrences that are describable by science in principle.
“In the results, it was found that religious people usually act on instinct over critical or analytical thinking,” Mo4ch News said. Put another way, the basis of the relationship between critical thinking and supernatural/paranormal beliefs is negative whilst the relation between critical thinking and naturalistic beliefs is positive.
The study took 258 people of Finnish origin and asked them to what extent they believed in an “all-powerful, all-knowing, loving God” before being asked about their beliefs in what we might term paranormal events, such as ghosts and telepathy. Their answers were then matched with results on analytical and critical thinking tasks.
According to RedOrbit ‘The researchers found that people who believed in an all-powerful, omniscient deity, as well as those who believed in the supernatural, were comparable to those with autism spectrum disorders in that they struggled to understand the realities of the world in which they lived.’
In further detail, the original research paper, by Marjaana Lindeman, Annika M. Svedholm-Häkkinen, and Tapani Riekki, entitled Skepticism: Genuine unbelief or implicit beliefs in the supernatural? (2016), highlighted three main points and had three studies.
For the highlights, first, an examination of explicit and implicit religious and non-religious supernatural beliefs. Second, the level of skeptic implicit supernatural beliefs. Third, the “non-analytic skeptics” supported “confusions” that might predispose individuals to various supernaturalistic beliefs.
According to the outline of the study:
‘Study 1 had 57 subject read a religious and a naturalistic story about death. Study 2 looked into the relations between religious and non-religious paranormal beliefs and implicit views on the imaginary/real status of religious and supernatural phenomena. Study 3 had 63 subjects researched under speeded and non-speeded conditions. The third study was to parse subjects’ “supernatural beliefs and ontological confusions” in those tests based on rapidity of responses.’
“The results indicate that skeptics overall do not hold implicit supernatural beliefs,” Lindeman et al said, “but that non-analytically thinking skeptics may, under supporting conditions, be prone to biases that predispose to supernatural beliefs.”
Russia Today reported that scientific “explanations for physical and biological things such as flowers, volcanoes and wind were less likely to be understood by those with religious or supernatural beliefs.”
Our extrapolation from the findings of the study is that one’s way of knowing the world evolved from supernatural, paranormal, or religious beliefs to more critically grounded naturalistic beliefs. To us, the reports and the research, even though only one study, seem to indicate preliminary indications for the development of critical thinking marked by the transition from supernatural to natural epistemologies. Man species with one identity.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/08
Sometimes, a Canadian approach to communication, with tact and politeness, can, in no doubt well-intentioned civility, leave out vital truths. Petition e-411 became passed not too long ago. I like most of it. “We, the undersigned, Citizens and residents of Canada, call upon the House of Commons to join us in recognizing that extremist individuals do not represent the religion of Islam, and in condemning all forms of Islamophobia,” petition e-411 concluded. Mr. Samer Majzoub from Pierrefonds, Quebec, submitted the petition on June 8 at 5:45am (EST). The Canadian House of Commons adopted the petition to raucous applause.
In full, petition e-411, which garnered 69,742 supporters, contains truths about issues important to every Canadian community based on the hate crimes faced by individual Muslim citizens and groups because these individuals and communities are fellow individual Canadians and their respective communities. Petition e-411 stated:
- Islam is a religion of over 1.5 billion people worldwide. Since its founding more than 1400 years ago, Muslims have contributed, and continue to contribute, to the positive development of human civilization. This encompasses all areas of human endeavors including the arts, culture, science, medicine, literature, and much more;
- Recently an infinitesimally small number of extremist individuals have conducted terrorist activities while claiming to speak for the religion of Islam. Their actions have been used as a pretext for a notable rise of anti-Muslim sentiments in Canada; and
- These violent individuals do not reflect in any way the values or the teachings of the religion of Islam. In fact, they misrepresent the religion. We categorically reject all their activities. They in no way represent the religion, the beliefs and the desire of Muslims to co-exist in peace with all peoples of the world.
The denouncement, the denunciation, and the resistance of hatred, internal and external, seems like a good thing in most cases to me (of course, tolerance of the intolerance can be bad, too).
Denunciation of hatred, prejudice, and bias against religious individuals based on their religion seems like a good thing. It’s contestable whether Islam as a set of beliefs and suggested practices is actually represented in its full by the individual, ordinary Muslim, or even the Muslim community in Canada at large. Petition e-411 appears as good-intentioned, half-truths, in this light. That is, Muslims and the Muslim community appear to follow the doctrine, practices, and beliefs of Islam, as with other religious systems, texts, individual religious community members, and the larger religion’s community to one degree or another.
The claims in the beginning of the petition remain true. I respect ordinary believers of all faiths everywhere in addition to the noble aspects of the traditions and the contributions to global civilization over millennia. Muslim scientists, philosophers, and leaders have contributed consistently to global civilization for ~1,400 years. Individuals and majorities of societies have done so following some, most, or all of the tenets of Islam – positive things done in the name of Islam deserving of praise. Indeed, the same, or similar at least, argument applies to Christianity for ~2,000, for instance. More positive things deserving approbation. In simultaneity, while speaking of history and religion, individuals and societies committed aggression in words and violence in deeds, with the majority, following some, most, or all of the tenets of Islam (or Christianity). Both the positive and the negative remain true in historical contexts for ~1,400 years. Petition e-411 states truths on the positives and leaves out the negatives in the ~1,400-year history of the religion. Canadian politeness and tact seem like concerns in this context, of communication of “good-intentioned, half-truths,” to me.
I hold other mild concerns with petition e-411 – namely, the amorphous term “Islamophobia.” On the one hand, hate crime laws can cover the ongoing, deplorable, mildly prejudice, hate, and violence against individual Muslims (or fellow Canadian citizens), e.g. women harassed with racial slurs, and forced to wear or not wear religious symbols, and vandalization of religious community property, e.g. setting ablaze important community buildings like Mosques, which implies denouncement of other religious, ethnic, or gender based bias as well – verbal, emotional, social, and physical. If that is meant by the term, I affirm NDP leader Mulcair in his approval of petition e-411.
Neither persons nor property of communities deserve such ill-treatment. On the other hand, those well-meaning within and without Muslim communities sometimes conflate criticism of religious beliefs, ideas, and practices with ridicule of individual believers or communities thereof. Indeed, some, in an irony fitting for Monty Python, have critiqued those critiquing Islamic principles as “racist”, thereby shedding light not on the minds of the accused but of the accusers. The non-scientific, by which I mean non-taxonomical, idea of ‘race’ needs to be kept in mind to claim to read racism in others’ hearts and minds, often where it is neither justified nor present. Besides, Islam equates to ideas and acts – theology plus recommended practice, not people or a race. If that is meant, then I disagree with Mr. Mulcair. However, as this term proliferates, knowingly or unwittingly, in its vague, ill-defined form, both interpretations seem dependent on the individual. Signatories to petition e-411 might sign with one interpretation or the other in mind. That’s another problem. Hence, the opening about half-truths.
It amounts to well-intentioned half-falsehoods in some ways and truths in others. These extremists and terrorists don’t represent all Muslims, but the implication appears to be that Muslims can’t be extremists and terrorists because extremists and terrorists aren’t “Muslims”. You see the problem -that’s not true. The violent extremists and terrorists from religions represent terrorists’ and extremists’ interpretations of religions, as, for this example, the majority ordinary Muslims represent the ordinary interpretation of Islam. To only see the negative would be anti-Islamic bias, to act on it would be anti-Muslim prejudice, it’s like sexism. To only see the negative seems like hostile sexism, men appear all bad or women appear all bad. To only see the positive seems like benevolent sexism, men appear all good or women appear all good. The undercurrent, respectfully, is Mr. Samer Mazjoub, and the non-partisan set of signatories, speak for those “over 1.5 billion people worldwide.” They are guilty of that which they criticise, stereotyping – benevolently stereotyping, especially as the signatories and Mr. Mazjoub speak for a sector, but not even close to the entirety, of the Muslim community. Indeed, and therefore, to only see the positive, as petition e-411 does in one religion, is to be benevolently prejudiced for a religion, and in this case for Islam. (Q.E.D.)
My hope and expression in solidarity with ordinary Canadian Muslims, as with Mr. Samer Majzoub and the sector of the Canadian-Muslim population that he represents, is to “categorically reject all” extremist activities, but, in contradistinction to him on a crucial point requisite for a panoramic perspective, with acknowledgement of the extremist activities as an interpretation of Islam with real consequences by an “infinitesimally small number.” We live in the developed world’s upper echelons of well-being and standard of living in a culture bent towards politeness and tact. It is too easy to speak of the good of religion alone because the environment of Canada in general remains positive. The act of speaking in honest terms would neither embolden enemies nor diminish allies, but represent the breadth of religion via acknowledgement of the good and the bad.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We are not separate from the universe in the sense of the cat in the experiment of Schrodinger.
Rick Rosner: Let’s assume the universe is a huge informationation processing entity, which may imply consciousness, it might not be. But there are things the universe knows and doesn’t know. The micro-structure of what the universe knows and doesn’t know is in its quantum mechanics.
It is in its physics of incomplete information, where particles exist incompletely. They have imprecisely defined energies and momentums. They are only defined as much as the universe can interact with them to define each aspect of the universe.
The universe has a vast but finite amount of information. That information is and the lack of complete information is expressed in quantum mechanical physics. Things that exist as complicated information processors.
If we can mathematically represent the information processing in consciousness in us – that is, we have information spaces reflecting the state of our information from moment to moment, then that information space would also be governed by quantum mechanical physics.
It would reflect the state of our knowledge from moment to moment. There would be quantum mechanical entities within this information space. But from the point of view of the universe, the quantum mechanical entities that would comprise our information spaces aren’t made of the quantum mechanical particles that comprise the universe.
It is a separate space with separate entities. These entities reflect a different separate of information that we have knowledge and lack of knowledge about, which is reflective of the universe or indicative what we have learned about the universe.
But it is a physical space or information space. That the larger universe would not even be aware of. It is a quantum mechanical universe. It exists in a different space and is on a smaller scale. It has the same basic principles of the larger universe.
It is another level of superimposed order on the physical processes of the universe. But that relationship isn’t clear, yet.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In a universe bound to a digital physics, to a perspective of the universe as constructed via information, what will the net information of the universe tend towards as the arrow of time progresses in its apparent forward direction?
Rick Rosner: Under IC, the tendency of a universe is to increase in order, given the right conditions. The conditions being that there’s an armature or a support structure in place that facilitates the increase of information within a universe.
With this increase in information, it is reflected in an increase in ease in order of the universe. Although, we still don’t know how to measure that, and we know that the increase in order is embodied in the macro. The large-scale distribution of matter, the clumping of matter, into stars, galaxies, superclusters, and massive filaments that traverse much of the universe.
We know even less about how micro order, localized order, like on a planet that has evolved life and the life that it has evolved. That local increase in order, its effects on the overall order in the universe. There are two extremes as to what the effects could be.
One could be that micro order as close to zero effect on the large-scale order or information content of the universe. That all these evolved beings or the things that they at a certain point, say with technology, they order into something.
They are confined to their planets or little areas of their galaxies. They really have no practical effect on the ordering or the overall ordering of the universe. That is at one extreme. The other extreme is that those evolved beings and those things that they create, given enough time, end up having a significant effect on the ordering of the universe.
That you give a civilization enough time; it will go out and traverse its galaxy perhaps heading to the center, where there is a lot more manipulatable matter. The matter that is down a blackish hole with a million, ten million, or fifty million year civilization, with sufficient technology, would have time to get to a center of a galaxy even with the speed of light being an absolute speed limit.
Because galaxies are on the scales of hundreds of thousands of lightyears across. So, a sufficiently old civilization would have the time, perhaps patience and impetus, to interfere with a galaxy. By getting to the center – I haven’t thought about this stuff in a long time, if galaxies go through periods of dormancy or collapse, of being turned back on, this process would tend to obliterate planet-based civilization that didn’t take measures to protect itself.
So, a persistent civilization that persists across millions of years might travel to the center of a galaxy and might find sanctuary in or around the central blackish hole. There is actually some science fiction in the 70s.
It could be more than one science fiction author has suggested that civilizations can hide out in stasis fields that, basically, have some of the principles that might be associated with blackish holes. If you have an ancient civilization that has the power to traverse its own galaxy, and, perhaps, mess with some of the processes, it could be that highly ordered and local entities might have a lot to do with the overall ordering of the universe.
They might be able to manipulate how large-scale structures behave. They might be able to mess with the business of a galaxy. That is a bigger deal than colonizing a solar system. You were pointing to the quantum mathematicization of individual entities versus the overall quantum mechanical structure of the universe.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, from a long time ago, you used a phrase. You said, “Agents of the universe.” In the first example of Schrodinger’s Cat, you spoke to a human being as an observer and a cat in a box as an observer.
What does “an observer” mean in an IC context? How does this work with “agents of the universe”?
Rick Rosner: It is easy to get confused because the universe observes itself. You can use “agents of observation” to apply to observing apparatuses within the universe, observing-and-information-transmitting apparatuses.
Those apparatuses can be something as simple as photons that record the state of something as they are emitted and then spread that information out. An agent of observation can be something as complicated as a conscious being plus some technology that transmits information.
Human beings that build broadcast apparatuses. All those are part of the universe and all of those can be part of how the universe observes itself or fails to observe itself. The universe transmits information about local conditions across time and space.
The sum of all these transmissions defines the universe. There is so much information that a finite universe can transmit about itself. So, the universe is only finitely defined. Things are blurry at the quantum level.
All information transmitting interaction is part of how the universe defines itself. Yes, we, humans, with our information-transmitting activities are part of the way the universe transmits information. But our significance is very local.
Although, we can imagine more advanced civilizations have more information transmitting significance across greater distances. You can imagine a Star Wars galaxy where that civilization transmits information across what we could consider vast distances.
They set up a network that transmits information across a big chunk of their galaxy, which kind of requires breaking the laws of physics in the Star Wars model; in that, you can’t break the speed of light. It is possible that there is a civilization that has figured out how to conduct business across the distances between stars.
That would be part of the informational business of the universe. But it is still pretty limited, especially if some civilization learned how to live long enough and to do business across an entire galaxy. That is still only one out of a hundred billion galaxies of the universe.
So, the significance of even a galaxy-wide civilization in terms of the overall information business of the universe may still be trivial. But the issues of how trivial this stuff needs to wait on an overall model of an information-based universe.
Where the macro affairs of evolved civilizations of the universe may have almost nothing to do with how information is perceived and processed within the consciousness of the universe itself, which may be more based on the overall or macro distribution and dynamics of matter in the universe if the universe is itself a conscious information processor or even if it is an unconscious information processor.
Jacobsen: If the universe is a conscious information processor rather than an unconscious information processor, how does this change the Schrodinger’s Cat experiment, as this adds a global third observer?
Rosner: It doesn’t. It doesn’t. The nature of the business of the universe isn’t changed, which is the sharing of information.
Jacobsen: How can this be misinterpreted in an IC context?
Rosner: We don’t have a good model yet. Nobody has a good model of the universe as an information processor. That means that you’re subject to nothing but a misunderstanding. But one thing is clear, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, the situation doesn’t change, regardless of the overall nature of the universe with regard to the information that is confined in the box with the cat.
It doesn’t matter if the universe is conscious or not. It can’t get to the information inside of the box because the universe, including us, set it up that way. You can’t get the information in the box regardless of the overall state of the universe.
Jacobsen: Why doesn’t box count as an observer?
Rosner: Because the box is the wall. When I say the universe is transactional, I mean things that happen in the universe don’t matter, as if they didn’t happen at all, if they are not communicated to the wider universe; it is an “as if” universe.
If information about what happened someplace is not recorded in the wider universe, it is as if that did not happen. There are subtleties to that, where it matters to us locally. You can build a whole planet inside of a Schrodinger Box. You could build a whole Schrodinger Box over the whole Earth with the entire probability of everyone on Earth dying or not being 50/50.
It is the analogy between the fate of humanity and the fate of the cat. But if you set up a shield between the Earth and the rest of the universe, it is as if the events happening in the rest of the shield never happened, because they never got information out.
Things signify locally if the information is conveyed or signaled locally. They only are signified wider if their information is signified to the wider universe. It is similar to consciousness. Some of your consciousness can be aware of some events that other parts of your consciousness are not aware of.
In the most brutally mechanistic way, there are people who have been subject to split-brain surgery. Some people with epilepsy have their corpus callosum severed where there is no direct way for each side of the brain to share information with the other side.
These people still have a complete consciousness. In that, they still find a way for the brain to be exposed to roughly the same information. You have two eyes feeding each half of the brain and so on. Those people function relatively normally, even though they have split-brain.
But you can sow with specialized experiments that they have two consciousnesses in that brain, where each awareness has a slightly different experience base and analysis base than the other. It is perfectly possible for parts of consciousness to aware of things that other parts of that same overall consciousness is not aware of.
It is all part of the transactional deal. Things only signify to the extent that they can share information with other parts of the universe. Then you can get into the wider argument that there is no permanent existence.
In that, if you wipe out the information in the universe, so there is no absolute existence of anything Because information can be obliterated.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How does metaphysics jive with naturalism in some fundamental way, e.g. Laws of Logic and such?
Rick Rosner: If you want metaphysics to be a useful term: we were talking off-tape that if metaphysics is something applying to principles beyond the natural world, and if everything you discover about the principles of existence can be part of the natural world, then there is nothing for metaphysics.
It becomes a useless term. The way to make metaphysics a useful term is to say that metaphysics applies to the principles of existence that are reflected in the laws of the natural world. You have to divide someplace between physics and metaphysics.
Depending on how each is defined, you can have the set of things confined within metaphysics as zero things. Or you can say metaphysics applies to general principles that help determine the laws of physics. The natural principles like the principles of non-contradiction and self-consistency.
Except when you look at quantum stuff, for macro stuff to exist such as an apple, that apple has to have a non-contradictory set of attributes. It has to exist at a certain place, a certain time. It has to exist in a certain number. A non-contradictory apple can’t be both one apple and two apples at the same time.
Unless you set up some kind of experimental apparatus that really makes the indeterminacy explicit. When you’re talking about that, you might as well talk about Schrodinger’s Cat, which is the canonical indeterminate, macro experimental setup.
Jacobsen: Does this change with one observer outside or several billion observers outside in terms of the level of indeterminacy of the cat as dead or alive?
Rosner: The Schrodinger cat is set up to make the indeterminate state as explicit and macro as possible. To explain for people who may not be familiar, Schrodinger’s Cat is a cat in a box with a vial of poison that is attached to a detector of a radioactive particle; that has a 50% chance of decaying within a given time period, triggering the poison.
In the experiment, you run it for a half-life of this radioactive particle. You turn off the apparatus. After five minutes, there is a 50% chance that the cat is alive in the box and a 50% chance that the cat has been poisoned and is dead.
You cannot see into the box. The only way to check the status of the cat is to open the box. For right now, the box is yet to be opened. So, the cat exists as either alive with 50% probability or dead with 50% probability. That state can be characterized by a quantum mechanical waveform.
You can apply all the math of quantum physics that deals with indeterminate states to the state of the cat, which is unusual because the math of indeterminacy is typically applied to micro phenomenon like a radioactive particle or to the position of an electron or something small. This has been set up explicitly to be large.
Whether one or a billion observers through the internet of a live feed of the box, it does not change what is inside of the box; so, it has been set up that way. The box is closed off informationally from the rest of the world in order to preserve the indeterminate state of the cat.
Of course, PETA would hate this experiment. Over the last couple of days, they have argued if a responsible person then you will use certain terms, or if you are a good person then you will stop using stop terms: “Kill two birds with one stone” to “feed two birds with one scone.”
There are a lot of idiots in PETA. But, maybe, they aren’t that dumb with the good publicity for the idiocy of their stance here.
Jacobsen: Let’s take two examples, I will start with the first one. One, does the probability change if the cat has some level of self-awareness and all the internal walls of the box are mirrors?
Rosner: Nope, nope, it doesn’t change it. Everything is set up so that everything inside the box is different than what is outside of the box. The deal is, you set a part of the universe closed from the rest of the universe.
Things only have significance in the universe if that information can be communicated and you’ve set a special apparatus to keep the contents of the box closed off. Just because the box is a part of the universe does not mean the rest of the universe knows what’s going on inside of the box.
The universe defines itself via its interactions that include us setting up experiments. We, as part of the universe, have set up an experiment where part of the universe, in the box, has been shielded informationally from the rest of the universe.
So, in practical terms, if that box is never opened, if you take the box and throw it into a crematorium without checking the status of the cat, you can make a situation in which the universe and the people in it never know what the state of the cat was before you threw the box containing the cat into the crematorium.
If you obliterate the information before it has the chance to escape via observation, that will remain forever indeterminate.
Jacobsen: What does this mean for black-ish holes?
Rosner: People have been debating the information state of black holes since they have been a thing. The principle is the same. If the information does not get out, and if the information is shielded from the rest of the universe, the effect it has on the rest of the universe is nil.
A black-ish hole is a hole that is more favorable for the transmission of information than a purely black hole. A black-ish hole can transfer information.
Jacobsen: Can you measure this rate of information exchange from a cat in the box to the black-ish holes?
Rosner: In theory, it would be part of an overall framework or some theory of black-ish holes.
Jacobsen: What would this imply? For example, the black-ish hole would presumably, be very close to the shape of a sphere.
Rosner: You would use some measure like bits per second or bits per square centimeter of event horizon per second. You would have the overall information transmission rate. You would have a transmission rate per unit area of the surface of either the black-ish hole itself or of space around the black-ish hole.
You can talk about stuff like black-ish holes but with event horizons; these come with black holes. Unless, I am confusing myself, and that is likely. That the math of the event horizon is such that nothing gets out. Although, that is not entirely true because event horizons radiate via the production of particles outside of the event horizon and the strain on space.
The strain on space is so charged with gravitational potential around the event horizon that there is enough strain there that the particles can be spontaneously created. Particles can always be spontaneously created via the rules of quantum mechanics.
Even more so in space that is under such tension from gravitation, that you’re going to see more matter pop into existence around an event horizon than you would see in less stressed space. In that case, you have particle creation; two oppositely created particles to serve everything that is created.
In an event horizon, one particle goes into the black hole and one escapes. You have one particle escape the black hole in this scenario. Where, before, it is just the black hole. Now, it is the black hole plus the particle escaping the black hole.
Even a black hole with an event horizon, it emits information. A black-ish hole that is more permissive of the flow of particles and radiation in and out of it; it is going to have a higher rate of information exchange with the rest of the universe.
We have talked about the universe being an as-if thing. Everything is transactional in the universe. Things didn’t happen if the wider universe does not have a way of knowing about it. Or if the part of the universe that you’re concerned with – because the rest of the universe does not care if you have an alive or a dead cat in a box, it is only the people on Earth who care about a dead cat in the box.
There is a rate of information exchange with the cat in the box and the universe beyond our solar system. Even if you open the box, the odds that the state of the cat is going to have a significant impact on the universe beyond our local solar system – the odds are pretty low.
Because people like to say that other civilizations on other planets might be monitoring the transmissions of our TV broadcasts and radio broadcasts. They might come and see us because they intercepted signals from radio and TV, which might pique their interest.
But the odds are certainly larger than if you did an experiment with the cat; that that information would be intercepted. Is it really likely that other civilizations have been able to capture our broadcasts? Because they would be super attenuated and noisy. You would have to decode them to make them understandable.
Even that is a fairly unlikely thing, the odds that if you actually did the Schrodinger’s Cat thing. That some alien civilization would be surveilling Earth to see the state of the cat. That is even more minuscule.
At some point, we get into larger issues of an information-based universe. Do the micro events in each corner of the universe do anything or pertain at all to the larger business of the universe? The answer is mostly, “No”; unless, the events in the corner of the universe lead to a civilization that explicitly spreads itself across greater and greater distances.
That is just a wild guess. The events on Earth do not have much to do with the overall story of the universe and the overall information transactions of the universe unless we become the civilization that develops a network that shares our trivia explicitly with the rest of the galaxy.
But, at this point, I have pretty much confused myself.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the idea of cognitive hierarchies as applied to ideas like television?
Rick Rosner: The new season for broadcast TV is on. It has blurred out with the new channels now since there are a gazillion channels. For ABC, NBC, CBS, they roll out some new shows in September. Carole and I have been checking out a couple of shows.
One of them is called Manifest. It is the list of passengers on a passenger jet. The concept of the show is a plane takes off and then lands 5.5 years later Now, all these mysteries unfold: why did this happen? Some people appear to have destinies and abilities.
It follows a dozen characters or so. What’s interesting and also annoying is that since it is broadcast as opposed to cable, the characters are all pretty straightforward, they are all really easy to read. Any quirks that they might have may mean that it will likely be pertinent to plot twists at some point.
There is a certain lack of complicatedness and sophistication. It is an NBC show, I think. This calculation has been done by CBS for a long time, as it has the oldest demographics. Old people watch CBS.
They have a bunch of murder shows, genius shows, and so on. Every show is forensic detectives solving a murder. All the CSIs and NSIS, and Scorpion and half of a dozen others. What these shows have in common is clarity of execution for old people and people who do not want to think too hard, and also a little bit of flattery: “We will show you a show about geniuses. You will understand it. You will feel a little bit like a genius. Same with the mystery shows.”
It seems similar to some of these other cables shows. They are making shows for people who are comfortable not thinking too hard. It seems like an overall cultural phenomenon in America. Fox News is predicated on enjoying it without thinking too hard.
The majority of their programming is bright and simple. It is based on the idea of making a shit ton of money by catering to people who don’t want smart information or entertainment. So, you could argue that in America; there is a formation. Maybe, it has always been there.
But it is becoming more explicit: a stratification in thought styles. You could call this a cognitive hierarchy or cognitive layering, where there are plenty of resources for entertainment, for lifestyle, for people who are not comfortable being cognitively challenged.
There is clear and straightforward non-intellectually demanding information and entertainment. Not being challenged mentally. Those people who are at home with unsophisticated stuff, with a lack of ambiguity.
With straightforward and clear plotting and no grey areas, and this works for people who are older in their 60s and beyond and may not have the mental flexibility, there is a hint of mentally challenged for some of that demographic, e.g., a chunk of old people — not everyone but it is a part of the experience of growing old for a lot of people.
I assume that you could set up a ladder of how demanding various forms of news and entertainment are, and then separate out three or four different layers of complexity. If you like stuff that is tricky and springs surprises on you and takes a long time to play out, it is different.
Better Call Saul gets a lot of prestige and rave reviews from high falutin’ quarters, so does the show Black Mirror. These are shows that have a lot of ambiguity. Some stuff that takes many episodes to resolve if ever. The greatest unresolved show in history is The Sopranos and went to black.
Several years later, people are arguing about what it means when it cut to black. Does it mean Tony Soprano was assassinated or simply that it went to black to end the series? People have loved to argue about it for many years now.
Jacobsen: We talked before about the functionally illiterate population in America. There are 32 million American adults who are illiterate. 14% of the entire adult population cannot read.
Rosner: Functionally illiterate means, I assume, that you can get along in life. 1/3rd of the population just doesn’t really read or may have difficulties with more than casual reading. I assume that’s what you mean. That reading is not a large part.
These people can read labels, traffic signs, and the headline on a news channel. They don’t read books, newspapers, or magazines. Reading is simply not a big part of their life if at all.
Jacobsen: It is the impact of modern media on people’s ability to consume information.
Rosner: Another 40% of that 1/3rd absolutely cannot read. They know enough words to go to the grocery store and can get what they need. They know what traffic signs mean. If given a slug of copy, they could not read it. If presented with a newspaper article and asked to read aloud, they would fail to read it.
Jacobsen: Given developmental psychology, you would find more boys and men in those categories. Girls and women speak and read earlier and maintain that advantage throughout life.
Carole Rosner: That’s true. A study just came out about that…
Jacobsen: Go ahead, Carole.
Rick Rosner: Go ahead, Carole!
Carole Rosner: I just heard on standardized tests that girls perform so much higher in all those categories.
Jacobsen: That’s right. It was about equal some time ago. But since that time, we have been seeing more disparities. It is not that the disparity is girls doing that much better. They are doing better. But the boys are doing much worse. They are declining.
Rosner: It used to be that girls underperformed because they got the messages. There was a Barbie saying, “Math is hard.” Maybe, now, girls are getting messages or are messaging themselves to work hard while guys are bros now who are working harder at the gym than anywhere else — or at the gym.
Jacobsen: Even there, they don’t. If a draft, the majority of men would not meet the minimal standards.
Rosner: Men are lazy and undisciplined now. To bring this back to cognitive layering, there has probably been a population that has been functionally illiterate or comfortably dumb. But it is only in the last 40 years that dumb or the lazy have been mobilized and catered to.
Fox News, “We are going to go after the dumbs and we are going t make them our own. We are going to lead them around and turn them into a force, a political force.” We are dealing with the consequences of that now.
It is the day before the Kavanaugh vote. If you follow the news, there is so much stuff about how Kavanaugh is the least popular nominee in history, how the National Council of Churches (covers 100,000 churches with 45,000,000 members) has come out against Kavanaugh, how John Paul Stevens — a retired Supreme Court Justice — has come out against him, how there is a list of 1,800 law professors who have come out against him, how there are 100 civil rights organizations. Nobody wants him demographically.
No one with this level of disapproval has ever gone through, but he will probably go through because has a strong Republican base who can live their lives without seeing this information; it will be about how Kavanaugh is this put upon and a wrongly accused guy; it is a brutalization against America, against liberty.
They will be able to confirm him, the Republicans, because their base doesn’t adequately consume news.
Jacobsen: What about the conservative women in disagreement with him?
Rosner: I think there are enough of them still in play and sticking with the Republican side. Here is the deal: Kavanaugh is a terrible deal for the country because he is 53 and could easily be on the court for another 30 years. He is obviously biased.
He is being put on the court to do the dirty work for conservatives. The damage of Kavanaugh on the court will be decades. Him not getting on the court will lead to Democrats not winning the House, which would be its own disaster. It would be another 2 years of unbridled Trump and entirely Republican domination: Republican House, Republican Senate, Republican Supreme Court, and Republican President.
It is a toss-up of Kavanaugh being confirmed and doing 30 years of damage versus Kavanaugh getting confirmed — and the thinking being born out via polls — and the Republicans going from moderately apathetic to being more active and then becoming more active.
The thinking is that if Kavanaugh is elected then Republicans will be calming down. It is bad if Kavanaugh gets confirmed but it also might be bad if he doesn’t get confirmed. At this point, I almost undecided at the outcome.
I want him to not be confirmed and the Democrats to take the House. If either, I am undecided. But I am a guy. The harm to me with Kavanaugh would be less than for women.
Jacobsen: There are one risk and two follow-ups or silver linings with that particular line of reasoning. If he gets in, Roe v Wade will be part of the scrap heap of history, especially with the endorsement of people like Pence and all the people and organizations that are the undergirding of them.
Two other things come to mind. One is that more women are politically active now than at any other time in history. That’s silver lining one. Two is that Trump or Republicans are at the lowest approval rating of women probably ever at 27% or lower.
So, it is a very tight cadre of women who would need to be very, very highly active, where we’re talking 3-to-1 in terms of pushing weight to truly combat the centrist or even far-left-leaning sides.
Rosner: Except if the Democrats don’t take back the House, then the Republicans have another two years of owning the government, which, every day, is a fresh outrage. The EPA deals that have been going on that most people do not even realize had been going on, such as repealing safety ratings of radiation and environmental toxins. There is so much going on; that the Republicans are accomplishing not only all these objectives.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is statistically likely to happen in the next two years with Kavanaugh passing into the Supreme Court only a couple of days ago?
Rick Rosner: If you want the most accurate predictions, you can go to 538.com. I like RealClearPolitics as well. But I like 538. Right now, they weight all the polls based on how accurate and reliable they are.
Right now, they are giving Democrats roughly a 74% chance of taking back the House and only 22% of taking back the Senate, and with the only 22% based on specific races may be too optimistic. Unless the Democrats make everybody surprised and show up in the mid-term.
It may happen with widespread rage.
Jacobsen: Who’s rage?
Rosner: Most women, though probably most Republican women are still behind him, Republicans only represent 1/3rd of the adult population and possibly less than that. So, everybody else.
Most women, about 2/3rds or 70%, and if you want to be even more accurate, then probably 28% of women support Kavanaugh. 20% don’t and 20% don’t have a clue. Republicans probably take back the House and then start a series of investigations into whatever they can investigate mostly Trump-related stuff.
Maybe, they can look into Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh has done a lot of stuff in a less partisan, Republican-dominated world would have been disqualifying and was actually perjury. If the Democrats take over the House, they start a lot of investigations.
These will have the effect of making Trump unreelectable in 2020. But he was thought to be unelectable in 2016 and got elected. Given that his popularity has remained at roughly 40% and that only bad stuff will come out about him if the Democrats take over the House, I don’t see him getting enough of a bump in approval to be elected to a second term.
Although, the Democrats have to come up with a person that they can get Independents to vote for. Kavanaugh on the court does not immediately lead to the rollback of a bunch of human rights stuff including the right to abortion.
Because all that stuff takes a while to get to the Supreme Court. You cannot simply go to the Supreme Court and then say, “We want a case on this.” It has to go to the lower courts first. Cases around abortion are designed to provide a pretext to throw out Roe v Wade are probably peppered throughout amenable courts, lower courts throughout the land.
It will probably take a year or a year and a half for those cases to make it to the Supreme Court. If Roe v Wade is overturned. It almost certainly will be given the composition of the court. Abortion could become illegal in a majority of the states.
Jacobsen: What will happen to the wellbeing of women?
Rosner: Well, all this stuff will take time to play out. If people are lucky, the fully playing out of the end of Roe v Wade will take until after the beginning of 2021 when there will be a Democrat, very likely, in the White House.
It is conceivable Trump could quit and then Pence would run for president while being president. It is possible Pence could be more electable than Trump. I’d give it at least a 60% chance of there being a Democrat winning the next presidential election.
In terms of the actual implications for women in roughly half of the country, you have half of the population – women – who will be in states where abortion will remain illegal because it will be up to the states.
Jacobsen: In the Handmaid’s Tale, New York was a holdout.
Rosner: Did they have to invade New York?
Jacobsen: I do not recall exactly.
Rosner: Since they changed the names of everything, we don’t know if that is taking place in Michigan or elsewhere. Everybody is trying to get to Canada. I assume they were trying to get out of New York and then to the border.
Anyway, half of the population will still be able to get abortions fairly easily. The other half may have to drive for hundreds of miles for the nearest state where abortion is illegal. Although, some states could make it illegal for you to drive out of state to get an abortion.
I do not know if that would be enforceable. I do not know how they would enforce it. Half of the population would face the end of reasonable abortion. Although, there is a historical trend. The rate at which people get abortions has been steadily dropping thanks to liberal policies of sex education and making contraception available.
The purpose of Planned Parenthood is not to give abortions. It is to give all sorts of health services that help people. Nobody wants the abortion rate to not decline. Liberal policies tend to help reduce it. The teaching of sexual education, non-abstinence sexual education, is helpful.
Liberal policies, which have been a force for decades, have been helping to steadily reduce the rate of people getting abortions. It isn’t to say that the situation won’t be dire for a lot of people but things will be much less fucked up than right before 1973 when Roe vs Wade made abortion legal for everyone.
What people have been missing, given that all the news has been Kavanaugh for the past four weeks or more, Trump has been rolling back all sorts of completely reasonable environmental regulations. For example, the insane rolling back of limits on radiation and other dangerous toxins.
As long as he remains president, he will probably make it through his term. It is just crazy, against all logic rollbacks of common sense policy, and widely agreed upon health and safety regulations. Who the fuck in the world was going to the government saying, “We need to make it so that there is more radiation in the atmosphere”?
No one, it was simply Trump and his ideologues. That will go on for 2 years. His people have realized that there is so much news that they can do whatever they want, and what they do will be lost in the avalanche of awfulness.
The huge story about the Trump family avoiding paying taxes through fraud for the most part on a billion dollars. Instead of paying the $550 million, they are paying $50 million. They, basically, defrauded the US government out of $500 million.
It makes them one of the biggest financial crime families in US history. But probably if you took a poll, and people should, most followers would say, “Yes! Fuck the government, it shows you’re smart.”
So, this stuff will keep going on. But the Democrats will slow down on stuff that can’t be done by presidential decree or whatever. The stuff that actually takes the House to okay it. The stuff it takes to slow down or stop.
Trump’s approval may be eroding a little bit from 41% to 35% approval over the next 18 months. As the investigations of the House of Representatives rollout, we are still looking for Mueller to drop all of his biggest shoes.
If that is given the most likely outcome of the mid-terms that Democrats take over the House; but if the 26% of the Republicans being in control, then you are looking at not an actual slide into a dystopia in terms of how day-to-day life is lived.
But a bunch of dominoes will get knocked over that set up a shitload of stuff that will need to clean up the next time Democrats have control of some branch of government, and it may be that the Republicans will use the next two years to figure out how to hold on to government even longer against the disapproval of the majority of American.
For one thing, the next census, which happens in 2020, may contain the question, “Are you a US citizen?” There is no better way to get undocumented aliens to not fill out census forms than to ask about citizenship.
The deal is, the census is based on everyone living in America, whether they are living in America or not. You have to understand the composition of the nation, regardless of the immigration status of some of its citizens.
It is one more way to fuck over the blue states because the blue states tend to have more undocumented immigrants. I am not positive about that, but I am pretty sure about that. There will be more voter suppression.
It is conceivable that if the Democrats don’t take back the House then the Republicans will continue to manipulate the system to continue to have majorities in the House and the Senate, and may even be able to get another Republican elected or Trump re-elected.
Even though, substantial and growing majorities of Americans do not want any of that. But likely, the most likely thing is the Democrats get the House and slow down some of the Republicans. One more thing, that 74% likelihood of the Democrats taking back the House.
Some caveats on that: a) polls can be inaccurate and improbable stuff can happen, b) the anger at Kavanaugh being confirmed hasn’t yet hit the polls so I would guess that the likelihood of the Democrats taking back the House will rise into as high as 80% in the next week or so with 3 weeks to go.
Everything always tightens up. It might to 80 or 82. It has been as high as 82 or 83 before the Republicans got all motivated because of Kavanaugh. It might get up there again for a week or two. But then races always tighten up in the last week or two. It may peak at 80 or 82 and then go back down to the 74 we’re seeing now.
It may be nervous-making until November 6. Election day is November 6. But the new Congress doesn’t come in until the first week in January, so it is conceivable that in the lame duck session – the two months between the election and the Republicans losing the majority – the Republicans could pull some crazy shit.
I do not know exactly what they could pull. But in the recent past, they pulled stuff that nobody ever believed they could pull. Given that they have nothing left to lose, and everyone already hates them, and if they lost their majority, there is no telling what they would do.
That’s it.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Causality and the forward-flow of time are both concomitant or go along with the all of the universes that we’re talking about. They’re either something that works or something that allows us to talk about what works.
As things collapse, as things clump up, over time, matter coalesces and clumps. The driving force for this is, at least, apparently gravity. Gravity is the apparent culprit in most of the, if not all of the, aggregation of matter in the universe.
Not exactly, though, the electromagnetic attraction between positively and negatively charged particles also help with the aggregation. Over time, matter coalesces from chaotic soup in the Big Bang universe to where everything is ionized.
There are no electrons attached to any protons. The universe expands enough that the free radiative energy declines to the point electrons and protons can come together. You also get what is clouds of individual atoms clumping up and eventually forming galaxies, planets, and stars.
As they do so, as all this clumping happens, radiative energy is released: photons. Every time there is a clumping or combining event, an electron falls into orbit around a proton, then a photon is emitted. A bunch of atoms come together to form a celestial object, a planet or a star, then they bang into each other and they exchange kinetic energy in the form of photons.
These photons eventually make it to the surface of this body and then go zipping across the universe. Then you have fusion where protons come together and more or less fuse with each other, an electron, and emit a positron, and also a neutrino.
The neutrinos go zipping across the universe. As these long-distance particles, photons, and neutrinos, go zipping across the universe, they lose energy to the curvature or expansion of space. I would say a nice beginning claim to IC is energy lost via long-distance particles to the curvature or expansion of space is proportional to the rate of expansion of space, subject to all sorts of mathematical corrections.
The average density of long-distance particles passing through each unit volume of space and the number of particles, protons, etc., in space that you have to divide by – and then taking 3 dimensions into account.
But roughly, the energy lost to space by long-distance particles is proportionate and – not exactly the driving thing but – the same thing as the expansion of space, which also happens to be decelerative. In a big bang universe, everything starts hauling ass.
From T=0, the central point explodes into the surface of a 4-dimensional sphere. That point becomes all of space. The universe doesn’t expand into anything. It is that the space that is the universe gets bigger and bigger. That expansion has been generally thought to be decelerative.
The same way if you throw a ball into the air then it gets fast, slower and slower, and then V goes to zero at a peak and the ball falls the other way. Similarly, the universe is this point that expands into all of space but the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter in all of the space starts to slow it down.
It starts to slow down the expansion. You can look at it under IC as that what happens when long-distance particles lose energy is sharing information. It is like a game. When an event happens that releases energy, it is an informational event.
As long as the particle created or released by that event keeps releasing energy across billions of light years and billions of years of time, that information is being shared with the structure of space. As soon as that photon gets captured, that is equivalent or could be looked at as the creation of the particle as answering a question, “What happened?”, and then, “This happened!”
When it gets captured, it is like asking the question. The capture of a particle is not, in terms of the amount of information in the universe, the amount of information in the universe stops. But as long as particles are losing energy to the curvature of space, information is being shared and that is leading to a more complex universe that is actually increasing the amount of information that it contains.
It is decelerative. Which seems perverse, in that like all long-distance particles, they have momentum. You have seen someone get hit by a bullet in the movies and they fly backward. A system or an atom that absorbs a photon will acquire that photon’s momentum. It is a push in the direction in which it is going.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: We are aware of three things we’ve been talking about. The math of consciousness, which we do not have a good enough math to do yet. Consciousness itself and the material world that supports consciousness on an everyday basis.
We are aware that we think. We are aware of the material world. We are not aware of any mathematical framing of the information in consciousness. Under IC, we experience the material world.
Under IC, the material world is the mathematical framing of information, probably within some vast consciousness. We don’t experience that vast consciousness. We certainly don’t expect some external framework that supports the information structure that is the universe.
We experience the material-seeming aspects of this informational map that we claim can exist. It is not the clearest thing. But IC claims the universe is made of information. That information is part of something part of a self-consistent information processing apparatus or consciousness (possibly).
In that, under IC, any sufficiently large and complicated information-processing system is generally the self-knowledge that it would experience itself in a way that is consciousness.
Jacobsen: I want to make a buffer point here too. Creationism is the dominant belief among most people. It’s wrong. The right theory is not the most accepted theory, which is unguided evolution.
Rosner: By creationism, you mean directed development of the universe and the beings in it. By creationism, you mean somebody is in charge. Some external and powerful being is running the show to some extent.
Jacobsen: I would confine creationism or directed evolution, and unguided evolution, within biology as an analogy to make with IC. IC comes from digital physics. Digital physics is a minority view within physics in a similar way string theory is a minority view within the physics community.
But it is one among several competing theories. IC would amount to a branch of digital physics. It would be considered a branch of an established physics, which simply needs further development because it is a newer take on a more established branch of physics.
Does that seem fair?
Rosner: Yes. Let’s take a detour. Creationism implies a creator. The absence of creationism implies unguided evolution. Evolution itself includes the idea that it is not guided. But the 20th century and the standard understanding of evolution is that it is this random thing.
Because if you do not have a creator, or intelligent design, or any of the things that religious people try to sneak into evolution, then what you’re left with, naively at least, is pure randomness. But! That’s not exactly the deal either.
Because evolution is nothing if not opportunistic. The systems of the world are opportunistic. In that, they take advantage of self-consistencies that work. That you don’t have people sproting tentacles randomly from their foreheads.
You do not have planets randomly exploding. The universe is not chaos. It is not directed. But the processes of the universe take advantage of things that work. It is an interplay randomness and the persistence of structures that are good at perpetuating their own existence. Right?
Jacobsen: Yes, it is based on the broader principle of persistence, of order.
Rosner: Order is a part of evolution. It is not imposed externally by some creator. But things that are good at existing continue to exist. It is an interplay between things that work.
Jacobsen: It leads to rhetorical questions too: How old are atoms? How old is DNA? How old are cells? How old are multicellular organisms? How old are individual species? There are structures that last shorter than their precursors but allow more complicated things to exist and do not last as long.
But they, if you get into a field like biology, have a tendency to live longer.
Rosner: Yes, both an IC universe and a Big Bang universe embody causality. A causal framework is an efficient way of encompassing information. But let’s get off of that before I talk myself into a really tough cul-de-sac with that.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the review of IC by others?
Rick Rosner: You could do a Star Trek transporter to duplicate the brain, as with our brain, that has a mind. You could have a model of somebody’s mind by having their brain. We do not know how the mind is in there.
But here is their brain, the brain is the copy of their brain which also contains their mind, so do what you will with it. That’s a terrible model of the mind, because you have not done any digging as to how the mind comes out of the brain or results from the brain – and what that model might be.
At the very least, you can model via duplication of a brain. A better model would be to come up with a mathematical system that shows how the information in the mind is expressing that information, contains the information in an understandable and analyzable way.
You can also take the brain, the duplicate brain so you don’t kill the person and then scan the brain slice by slice in 3D. You can take inventory of the synapses and dendritic connections to say, “Now, I have a huge document that has an exhaustive linking of which synapses are linked to what other ones and, somewhere, in there is the mind.”
Again, it is a crappy model. Because it provides no analysis or insight into what the mind actually contains. Eventually, as we develop a more sophisticated understanding of consciousness and information, we will be able to come up with a model of an informational map of each instance of consciousness.
It would at a minimum be possible to do it. It would allow us to look in the consciousness and understand what that consciousness is experiencing. You have three things. You have the brain. It is the hardware. You have the mind.
It isn’t exactly the software, but it is a manifestation or an experiential manifestation of what is going on in the hardware. You have this third thing. It would be an informational map of consciousness that allows third parties to understand what is being experienced in consciousness based on the information contained within consciousness.
Independent of the hardware and supported by the hardware; you don’t need to take the hardware expressly into account to understand the contents of consciousness. You could argue that this kind of two or three part deal is also what is going on with the universe.
That in everyday life we are aware two of three parts we’ve talked about. We are aware of what is in our minds. That our brains exist in a material world. That we would not have the material world to support our minds now.
20 years ago, people were either religious or more Cartesian. Either there is this magic stuff supported by God, or is this stuff in a magical realm. Now, 200 years later, people think our consciousness lives in and is entirely supported by our brains.
There is no magical extra thing. Consciousness is a pure product of the material world.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the shape of the future? How does evolution provide an insight into this?
Rick Rosner: The deal is, certain things show up again and again throughout evolutionary history. Eyes have evolved a gazillion times. I bet you an evolutionary biologist who understands the whole history of evolution can show a half of a dozen different times eyes have evolved.
Eyes did not evolve from only one organism. They keep evolving because eyes are helpful and every step up the way to fully developed eyes is also helpful, which is a nice helpful ladder. It is spotted on the surface of an organism that can detect differences in light intensity. No images but moving away from hot and cold light levels.
Then you get lenses and so on. Eyes pop up again and again because every step towards a fully developed eye gives you an advantage. Also, every step is evolvable. That it is something that can be accomplished via evolution as opposed to laser beam eyes or an internal gasoline powered engine.
It is less likely that some organism has evolved a gas-powered engine within itself. In that, it might be helpful but there aren’t steps towards that in evolution. How would you evolve pistons or a means for drilling for petroleum products?
Gas-powered engines are a product of technology and not of biological evolution.
Jacobsen: According to the Utah of University, 550 million years have passed since the oldest found eyes. It has evolved independently 1,500 times.
Rosner: Wow! If you leave organisms to their own evolutionary devices, whatever optical stuff they have will continue to evolve towards fully developed eyes, either from nothing or from eyespots, or brightness detecting spots.
Eyes are easily evolved.
Jacobsen: It starts with a flat light-sensitive patch and then has over 1,800 tiny improvements until you have a complex image-forming capable lens. Then there is improving that image too.
Rosner: It keeps happening again and again. There is a bias in existence. Given eyes have evolved on our planet 1,000 times, you can expect, wherever we go to populate the galaxy and run into alien life, that it is super likely for there to be aliens with eyes because they are super common and evolvable.
I assume there are historical steps that are so helpful and so doable that they are unavoidable given the right circumstance. You are not going to have creatures evolve eyes in a cave. If you put creatures in consistently dark environments, they continually lose eyes.
With no light, it is a waste to have eyes. But given some reasonable circumstances, brains will evolve. I think brains are highly evolvable. That will show up again and again. They are doable and super helpful in evolution.
Jacobsen: The complication comes in having those light-sensitive patches and having those evolving in unison with a basic information processing unit.
Rosner: Yes, given the right circumstances, once technology starts, it will keep going. The right circumstances might be a non-aquatic environment. It is difficult to form technology underwater. Dolphins and whales do not have much in the way of technology.
They have a highly sophisticated culture. But they do not have machines because it is hard to build machines underwater. You need surface creatures existing in an environment of air or of a gas rather than of a liquid.
Maybe, some liquids are conducive but, really. Given the right circumstances, technology will arise. It is apparent that once technology arises then you’re going to have an information processing revolution.
That in the future, we are going to be transformed. Eventually, the information processing technology is going to outstrip evolved biological abilities. That’s coming. We are right on the cusp of our technology outstripping our biology.
It will transform to the extent that more and more people and entities will acquire more and more non-biological powers.
Jacobsen: In that way, there will be a drive to more rounded consciousness.
Rosner: Yes, information processing will transform consciousness.
Jacobsen: Because one argument in sophisticated theological thought and social commentary is technology improvements not improving moral behaviour, but, in fact, if you can design it then you can redesign the fundamental substructure of people’s ethics, in a way, so that they’re not only more rounded in their capacities but the world around them and how they act in it, potentially.
Rosner: This transformation is going to happen. Nobody has ever been able to hold it back. It may some countries, as you’ve discussed. Some countries may keep its nation living at a 12th century level of technology with political suppression.
Jacobsen: Or knowledge, if you take Turkey with Erdogan, he banned evolution in schools.
Rosner: Nice.
Jacobsen: He wants a poor population for, at least, the next decade.
Rosner: That’s horrible, but only in one country. This is a kind of unstoppable wave. 100 or 150 years from now, what’s going on currently and politically in America, it will not matter. It will just be a blip.
The tide of history will move, regardless of the local political conditions. It is mostly good because the tide of history tends towards the good. There is the Martin Luther King quote about the arc of moral history.
That is largely true, I believe. The tragedy: if America cannot get it shit together, the tragedy is local and limited to America. 150 years from now, the people of that time will look back with only a limited amount of empathy if America falls apart.
They will be part of a big world. The tragedy will be for us now. We will be, because of dysfunctional politics, more shut out and have less of a chance of participating in the future because our country is now run by corrupt idiots.
But that tragedy will be limited to us because the tide of history will move on and flow around us and beyond us. We will be a bunch of assholes from 150 years ago.
Jacobsen: You make a strong case. Add to that, America is only 5% of the global population. So, it’s only 5% of the population jumping off the ship. If we take the Turkey example with the banning or removal of evolution, it affects a generation if kept on for a generation.
It impacts biological sciences and medical sciences. Evolution is the fundamental idea in biology.
Rosner: The Soviet Union, it was an official requirement to believe in Lysenkoism. It is a bad view of evolution. It is a view of evolution that does not work.
Jacobsen: You characterized some people in America as social darwinists who do not believe in Darwin.
Rosner: Darwin himself was not a social darwinist. I think he lived long enough to be appalled at what was being done with evolution to justify vicious business practices.
Lysenkoism, for those who do not know, is the belief that somehow organism are able to pass on traits based on what those organisms experienced in their lives with the stadnard example being if a giraffe spends its life having to reach for higher and higher elaves, then the giraffe will give birth to a generation that has longer necks.
It is not how evolution works. Evolution says, “Among a population of giraffes that use this strategy of giong for the higher leaves; giraffes that go for the higher leaves and can reaclh them wil be genetically favored, but there is no switch within giraffes that says that reaching for leaves will leave offspring with longer necks.”
It is not entirely true because there is epigenetics, which allows for a certain limited amount of that. But the Sviety Union had, in the 1940s and 1950s, under penalty of death – because Stalin liked killing people – you had to believe in this other thoery of evolution, which is largely untrue.
It hampered their agriculture for decades. It led to famine and other horrible things.
Jacobsen: In the United States, it does not have to be instituted and legalized as in Turkey with Erdogan or in the Soviet Union with Stalin. So, in America, the sociocultural context is 35% in 2017 numbers believe in aliteral creation of Man from dust and Woman from rib.
It is the image of the world.
Rosner: History’s fruit will flow out and around those people. They will be little blips in the historical record. The beings of 150 years from now will look back on them and us the way we look back on people in the Civil War era. Those who were struggling to make sense of the world trapped in political an economic systems that make our lives limited and miserable.
They were trapped in history. We are trapped in and trampled by history. Okay, I am talked out…
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the Doomsday Argument? Why have you been thinking about it?
Rick Rosner: I often ask myself, “Isn’t it weird to be living at the end of human history or unaugmented human history?” It seems to me, possibly you, and a lot of people that with the changes in technology and medicine in the next 100-200 years will upend human society.
Not every human will live in weirdness. But the way humans have lived for the past 5,000-10,000 years, many of the components of what we consider normal human life. You live in a building that offers shelter. You wear clothes.
You couple up with people. You reproduce. You eat. You poop. You breathe. You consume goods. You buy stuff. You work. You create stuff. Tech is going to mess with all that stuff. It is hard to find an area of life that super high technology will not turn inside out.
If you look at the timeline of human history, you can argue that humans go back at least 100,000 years and, maybe, 1,000,000 years. For most of that timeline, humans struggled like every other, most other, or a lot of other species.
There weren’t many humans. It was us versus the natural conditions. We had skills. But our culture was just beginning to develop. We were probably, over time, getting better at passing on our skills. But you have many tens of thousands of years where there may have been 30,000 humans on the planet total.
It may have dipped to 3,000 during tough times. But the population didn’t start exploding until we had a lot of the components of human culture in place, staying put in some place and building settlements with shelter.
That we either modified to suit ourselves like caves or we learned how to put up structures – first by stacking big old leaves or who knows what. We got better at it. By the year zero, by the time of Jesus, there were roughly a quarter billion humans. 250,000,000 humans are approximately the population of the US today. It is about 4% of the world population today.
We were doing okay by then. We sputtered along at the same pace. We only doubled that population after 1,500 years with the Rennaissance to get to 500,000,000. In the last 500 years, the population has increased 15-fold.
There are 7.5 billion humans more than have ever lived before. Yet, we find ourselves at the end of this 10,000-5,000-year run of humans living more or less comfortably in the world via agriculture and industry, being able to make and grow our own stuff with specialization.
Where people do different specific jobs rather than everybody doing everything, so, there’s a mathematical argument to be made, which is called the Doomsday Argument but with different titles and guises.
It argues that if you are living at a time when there are a whole bunch of other fellow humans alive. Then you’re probably living next to the end of humanity. Because if you take the hockey stick exponential curve of increasing population, and if you add the further assumption that there will be a catastrophic end to, in this case, humanity, it makes a certain sense that we live at the far end of the hockey stick.
The end of the hockey stick that has gone crazy. Say the planet blew up tomorrow, tomorrow would be the day that the most humans were ever alive. This mathematical Doomsday Argument says that if the population is going to go crazy and then drop to nothing.
It makes a probabilistic sense that most humans are living rather than when 30,000 humans were out on the Savannah in Northern Africa. This can be extended into the future if you look into the Wikipedia argument or article with the argument.
If you assume that there will be an end to humanity, we can argue probabilistically that it will be sooner rather than later. It is some time between now and when I peeked at the article prior to starting this session.
It will be now and the time the total human population reaches 1.2 trillion. That’s many more humans than we have now by a factor of 1,000. But given exponential growth, it is not that far in the future. It is not the strongest mathematical argument.
But I will make a different commonsensical argument that makes the same point. It is simply this. The reason that we have the largest living human population of 7.5 billion humans out of the 107.5 billion humans ever is that we have technological dominion.
I am misusing the word but not entirely. There are Dominionists who are these a-holes, Bible-based assholes who say that the Bible gives us the right to dominate and exploit the resources the planet offers. Scott Pruitt, a-hole of the EPA, appointed by Trump belongs to a church that says we are religiously obligated to burn oil and coal.
It is a Dominionist argument that it is our right and obligation to go out and hunt. That God in giving us the Earth is not going to let us completely screw it up. It is like the old Doritos commercial, “We’ll make more.”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: We have more technical skill than ever before. Technology helps make life easier and makes it easier for there to be a lot of humans because we are good at providing stuff for ourselves. But it also leads to the end of humans in a really commonsensical way.
As I said, our extreme technology will soon turn human civilization inside out. There are a bunch of people who call what to come and what will become of humanity for the most part “Post-Humanity.” As we move into the future, not even generation to generation because the generation thing doesn’t keep happening because if people live to 700 or 800 years, instead of creating new generations what people will become will keep going as themselves rather than die off; as we move into the future, we will become more and more tech-augmented post-human in the words of these tech-looker adders.
Most people who use the term post-human welcome future changes because we’ll have much more control over our lives and the world. We will live as long as we want. We will combine ourselves with other thinking entities. We will live in artificial environments.
We will be closer and closer to lords and ladies with dominion over all space and time, at least simulated. We could make ourselves into superheroes. We can do that. But we won’t want to do that for long because we will get too smart for that to be too fun.
We will find other exciting and fund stuff having vastly expanded powers especially information processing powers. At some arbitrary point depending on who is keeping score, what many entities will be will no longer be traditionally human, it means we will see the end of normal humanity in the next couple centuries.
It is not the total end of humanity because there will be people thousands of years into the future; there will be people who want to live a normal human life as we know it into the future. But those entities will be overwhelmed by the new beings who live wildly different post-human lives.
100 years from now, you may have 12 billion humans living more or less traditionally and, maybe, 1.5 billion augmented entities living in weird and new ways. 20- years from now, you have 3.5 billion humans living traditionally and 100 billion – with the number fluctuating microsecond by microsecond – post-human entities doing stuff.
They come together to work on computational tasks, some AI and some partly biological, which will be a flowering or explosion of different ways to exist. 300 years from now, you’ve got 1 trillion conscious beings that have little resemblance to humanity and still a couple billion humans living traditionally for whatever reason, which will look kind of like the end of humanity.
It is not a horrible end. The Earth will not die screaming as it is burned to a nuclear cinder. But the forefront or the leading edge or the demographic explosion will be in post-human entities.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the current status of IC in terms of development?
Rick Rosner: The reason that a straight Big Bang universe can’t be a model for thought is that if the universe as experienced in a given moment – a given long moment with a moment of the universe being many hundreds of millions of years long – for that analogy with thought to apply then there would have to be some steadiness in the size and scale of the universe.
Because, by analogy with our brain, our minds process a limited range of information from moment-to-moment; that is, the amount of information in our brains at 10 o’clock is not different than at 1 o’clock or 3 o’clock – unless asleep – and so are humming along and dealing with the same amount of information dealing with different sorts of things.
If the universe is an information processing apparatus, you would expect provisions for steadiness within the operations of the universe; whereas, a Big Bang universe is unhomogenous over time. Science like homogeneity, similarity.
It is related, in some way, to Occam’s Razor. That you don’t want to set up special conditions to explain what is going on at any one time or any one space. The history of science has been getting away from specialness. That we started off as the center of the universe.
Then the Copernican system moved the Sun to the center, then further developments move us to an absolutely average galaxy to 10^11th galaxies in an unexceptional space. In that, all space that comes from a Big Bang is pretty much the same as any other place in space.
The Big Bang includes absolute spatial homogeneity. Space is the same every place, except in some places, have galaxies and some don’t. But the distribution of galaxies is homogenous. Things are the same through space.
The price you pay for spatial homogeneity is temporal complete specialness. Every moment is a time of the Big Bang is a unique point because the universe is always changing in size. But if the universe is an information processing apparatus, you would expect that there would be some steadiness from moment to moment in the universe.
That the universe can be the same size a billion years from now and a billion years ago, as it is now. For that to be true, you can’t have a strict Big Bang. We’re also assuming or guessing that the universe is much older than the apparent Big Bang age.
That means that there have to be ways to keep the universe lit. That is, you have to recycle galaxies or create new galaxies. There are some possibilities. You have to create new galaxies that will light up, burn out, and fall away – to be replaced by newer new galaxies.
Or you have to have a way for old galaxies to be relit, and/or you have to have a way for some galaxies to stay lit indefinitely for many, many hundreds of millions of years. By analogy with what happens in our brains or our minds, you would expect both.
You would expect some galaxies to stay lit. If galaxies are some information processing units, you would expect things like a language or perspective processing unit. You would expect that to be on whenever the universe is away or we’re awake.
We are always processing words. We are always looking at our surroundings through a perspective processing apparatus. We always orient ourselves in space via the part of our brains that turns what we see into 3-dimensional space.
We never, unless we’re doing acid or screw up these processes, see the structure space break down around us, so we never understand 3-dimensionality. There are other galaxies or other information processing units, memories, or whatever; that we would expect to cycle in and out as needed.
We need some physics that relights old galaxies, keeps some galaxies lit and lets you bring in new galaxies. That points at neutrino action in parts of the universe that have an extreme amount of gravitational curvature. That would be at the apparent beginning of the universe at T=0, and around blackish holes.
That something should happen around the parts of the universe with the greatest gravitational strain on space. That pulls fused matter apart. By fused matter, I mean neutron star stuff. I mean matter that has been fused into heavier and heavier elements.
There should be processes that rip this stuff apart back into more raw protons and electrons and lighter elements, which implies neutrino abosroption. Where a neutron gets hit or sucks a neutrino and then comes apart – I always get confused by neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, you need to have most processes in the non-extremely curved parts of the universe are fusion processes.
Lighter elements fuse together into heavier elements, turning protons plus electrons into neutrons. You need places in the universe where the reverse happens. Those places should be extremely curved places, as around blackish holes.
Hawking even talked about the matter being able to escape fully black holes because the strain on space adds enough energy to space around the event horizon that matter can be spontaneously created at the event horizon with matter duals popping out.
Like a piece of matter and its anti-matter counterpart spontaneously popping out of space right near the event horizon, one particle falls into the black hole and the other can struggle out of it. That is how black hole evaporation happens.
In IC, you do not have fully black holes. But you should be able to have similar stuff happen in, and around, the vicinity of black holes, where the matter gets torn apart and some stripped matter, some torn apart matter, that is not yet fused becomes available again to the, I would assume, rest of the galaxy.
Other processes include the strain on space allows for the tearing apart of matter that can allow for anti-neutrinos that are wiped out when a neutron is torn apart into a proton plus an electron. I would also assume those same parts of space are less transparent or more opaque, better able to absorb neutrinos, than less curved parts of space.
That neutrino fluxes, that pretty much every galaxy is a neutrino generator as normal matter fuses and as protons and electrons come together into neutrons releasing neutrinos; you would each galaxy to be a huge net producer of neutrinos because it is tough for normal matter to absorb them. I would guess that you’ve got these large filament structures in the galaxy.
Which, I assume, maintain relationships among longstanding structures in the universe of, specifically, galaxies and, perhaps, the filaments that they are a part of that stay lit for much longer than you’d expect a galaxy to stay lit, I would expect that you would have stable spatial relationships along these filaments with all the matter lined up along these filaments – to some extent focusing neutrino flux and keeping the galaxies lit and helping to maintain the spatial relationships, or the network or the filaments, longer than you would expect them to be maintained.
Jacobsen: That makes sense in two senses. One is the principle that larger structures tend to last long past a certain point. Similarly, two, small structures tend to last longer at a certain point.
Rosner: I agree with that. There is also the possibility that curved structures – the places where space is massively curved – as with the huge 1 million to a billion weight blackish holes at the center of galaxies. Those might act in a certain way like tent pegs or nails into the overall structure of the universe or the distribution of matter in the universe, where those are harder to move.
Those are more resistant to being pushed around gravitationally than smaller structures or less curvy/pointy structures because a gravitationally curved area is like a point or as a nail in a 4th gravitational dimension.
Those nails may hold the universe to a more set structure.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the current status of IC in terms of development?
Rick Rosner: This is a review. IC stands for Informational Cosmology, which is the idea or principle that the universe is made of information. It is an information map of itself; the universe is built from the relationships among its constituent particles.
The relationships among the particles determine the shape and dynamic of space and the flow of time. These relationships are informational. They are pretty much brought down. One thing about information is that it is the most stripped down characteristic that you can have of an object.
For example, there is something called the Leibnitzian Monad. It was Leibnitz’s attempt to have the most stripped down thing, besides nothingness. Nothingness is no help. What is one step up? It is the Monad, which is something with one thing.
It is similar to a piece of information in one of two states. It is binary, which everyone is familiar with now. It is the most stripped down element. It doesn’t have hubcaps or fenders. It is stripped down as either 1 or 0.
There is evidence the universe is stripped down elements. Quantum mechanics is filthy with informational qualities. That quantum mechanics is like a crime scene with all evidence pointing to information as the structuring factor.
The principles of existence tend to be emergent and determinative; they are opportunistic. Whatever works, works, binary works because it is simple. You can probably find things in existence that are non-binary.
But there are a lot of things that, in physics, have a binary quality to them, e.g., an electron is either linked to a proton or it isn’t. That is-isn’t thing is a binary thing. You can argue quantum mechanics isn’t purely binary in the way I just said an electron is either linked to a proton or it isn’t.
That isn’t true quantum mechanically. In that, there are many things that are indeterminate in quantum mechanics. You don’t have enough information to decide something is or isn’t. There is a rough framework of binary, but the states in the framework are not as neatly defined compared to a classical system that does not have the fuzzy states.
Fuzzy is ad hoc, fuzzy, and whatever works then works. Under Informational Cosmology, we highly suspect the Big Bang universe isn’t purely Big Bang, but, rather, has Big Bang looking aspects because these aspects have informational implications; that an efficient map of information in a closed or nearly closed informational structure which is also a conscious structure would have a Big Bang structure because it is an efficient way of embodying all the different forms of information existent among all the different particles.
That implies Big Bang physics or Big Bang cosmology, which is basically a set of solutions for the entire universe based on the equations of General Relativity, allows for expanding universes and contracting universes.
I would argue an expanding universe looks redshifted, where the farther a galaxy is from you, an observer, the faster it looks like it is moving away from you, which is a redshifted universe. A blue shifted universe is a collapsing universe, which is allowed under the equations of General Relativity.
That’s where the farther away a galaxy is from you, then the faster it is moving towards you. It is blue shifted. It is as if there was an explosion, but the explosion lost oomph over time – and all the stuff that was flying away from you is now being pulled back towards you by mutual gravitational attraction with the ultimate result being everything being brought down to a point.
Under IC, you never see a blue shifted universe because it doesn’t make sense informationally. The stuff most relevant to you also most distant from you. You could see an IC universe that looks like it is getting younger but that’s a heating up and a melting away of the universe.
It still has forward causality but that universe, a universe that looks like it is getting younger, has lost the ability to hold as much information as it once did. You still have forward causality, but the amount of information it holds decreased with time and it looks like a younger, hotter universe but without the blue shifting.
It looks like a big bangy universe but a smaller Big Bang expanding universe; although, you can certainly have local regions that collapse gravitationally. You can have a galaxy that runs out of juice, which runs out of fusible material and collapses, not entirely; it has this cinder-like stuff, old burned-out stuff, e.g., brown dwarfs, neutron stars, black-ish holes, and so on.
Under our vague understanding of IC, that universe gets pushed to a hotter, apparently younger, part of our universe. Anyway, all that is general and hand-wavey.
Jacobsen: This framework exists within a Big Bang-like theorization of the universe, of the physics of the universe, but that physics of the universe equates to a physics of mind and that implies an armature. What is the armature? Why is the armature necessary?
Rosner: The easiest argument is from the minds to the brains. We live in our minds. Our minds model our external and internal reality. Our minds tell us where we are within the physical world in which we live.
Also, they tell us what we are thinking about that world and whatever else we’re thinking about. The only way we currently have of communicating what is in our minds to other people is to tell them about, “I am thinking this. I had this dream. I saw you yesterday.”
Or it is to generate imagery. You make a movie based on thoughts that you’ve had or make a painting. We can only use our standard information inputs and outputs to share what is in our minds among each other, among ourselves.
But it is possible to imagine that there would be a mathematical description of a mind. That you could specify in terms of hardware, if you wanted, without having a mathematical system for understanding what the mind contains.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Filaments are large-scale objects in the universe. They are comprised of galaxies.
Rick Rosner: They are strings of galaxies, basically. It turns out if you map the universe. I guess, most galaxies lie along these strings and planes that are enormous. Generally, more than 100 million lightyears in lengths.
If the structure of the universe incorporates memory, then you’re going to be able to activate galaxies associationally. I don’t know what other models you would use for memory except that if you think of enough things associated with a memory then the memory will light up, via association.
Jacobsen: In your mind, certain networks activate. Other ones de-activate. So, it amounts to a selective activation dependent upon activity.
Rosner: But it is associational.
Jacobsen: But it is not willy-nilly associational. It is associational based on more established structures as people get older.
Rosner: If you can trigger a memory through a string of words like “second-grade teacher,” you will remember her/him once you remember what that word is. Same with a smell and other sensory triggers. A memory pops up once there are enough associational triggers.
The time frame in your brain is generally less than a second. Unless you are struggling to find the memory. You root around and try to find out what you’re trying to remember via association. For instance, sometimes, I have trouble remembering something, particularly if the name of the thing starts with a “b” or a “w.”
I can narrow down to starting with a “b” or a “w.” If I think about it for a while, the thing may pop up. Or I may have to give up and try again in a few minutes, once I have cleared the clutter I created trying to dredge up the memory. It is generally associational and happens in less than a second.
We don’t know. But if the universe is an information processor, that associational thing is on a scale of many billions of years. Pulling up a galaxy or a string that incorporates the memory, that thing would take, at least, a good chunk of the time of the apparent age of the universe.
But the mechanics of it, I have to read more on the filaments. But I would assume this much mass tends to gravitationally focus radiation. There’s gravitational lensing. Where if you have a massive body between you and a star, or a galaxy, that massive object will bend more light from that star or galaxy towards you, than you would get otherwise.
In a perfect lens situation, you would see a ring in the sky centered on the massive object with that ring being bent light from the distant star or galaxy. I assume if you have a whole string of galaxies, then those would tend to focus radiation.
It would mean neutrinos and photons for the most part. As they travel close to the string over a length or across 100 million lightyears or more, that string of massive galaxies would tend to act like not just one lens but a whole string of lenses that would tend to pull more and more radiation in, and focus it on various different points on that filament.
If you have that going on, I saw a picture or a map of the filaments along the Milky Way. There are 4, 5, or more. If you have lit up filaments, 2, 3, or more of those feeding into a galaxy. I would assume that would be enough to light up an old galaxy.
By feeding into, I mean, you have a bunch of galaxies along these filaments. Due to gravitational lensing, though it should be called something else because it is a string of them, you could call it gravitational filamenting, but that is terrible. Anyway!
All those areas would tend to be focused on a non-lit up galaxy and, maybe, would light it up again. The question then becomes, “Why isn’t everything lighting up all the time?” My guess, the filaments are linked by what was lit up when that galaxy was first precipitated into existence, associationally.
That is, as the universe progresses, we have talked about how the universe is both expansive and decelerative if energy lost from photons is adding to the information in the universe, where the universe gets apparently bigger and bigger but related galaxies, while growing somewhat more distant from each other, grow closer to each other in terms of the Hubble Shift.
As the galaxies cluster in terms of the Hubble Shift, that leaves room at high Hubble velocities, or apparent velocities, for the new matter to be pulled in at the edge of the universe around T=0. It is not pulled in willy-nilly. It is pulled in response to which galaxies or parts of the universe are lit up and doing the jobs of expanding space and expanding information at the time.
New matter precipitates out of the mess, at the beginning of time.
Jacobsen: If you look at the decelerative nature of the universe as well as its expansion, if you were to look at it in the Big Bang structure, you would see a slow, steady formation of new types of large-scale objects, very large-scale objects, over time.
That could amount to certain types of information processing coming online. It matches the story in development of minds. More systems begin to interact, come online, and produce novelty with prior similarity.
Rosner: I mostly agree with that. That is a fractal kind of phenomenon.
Jacobsen: There would be repetition but more distinct novelty, though.
Rosner: As you have room for larger and larger clusters or spatially associated structures to form, you will form, as you said, bigger and bigger ones. A universe with 2 atoms can’t form any clusters, really, because there is not enough stuff.
A universe with 20 atoms might be able to form a couple level 1 clusters. Those with 2,000 atoms might be able to have level 2 clustering. But when we get into larger levels, in our universe, there are various levels of clusters. You have solar systems, galaxies, superclusters, and filaments.
I don’t know if there is stuff in-between.
Jacobsen: There are.
Rosner: So, there are different levels, which are associational clusters and relate to what is active in the universe at the time the new matter is pulled from the edge of the universe. It means not everything is connected to everything else. Instead, you have a loose weave.
Jacobsen: I notice different processes relevant to different types of information processing at different time scales. Small things happen at shorter time scales. Large things happen at longer time scales.
Rosner: At the largest scales with these filaments, I would guess there would be various, multiple braided but not strongly interactive filament structures.
Jacobsen: They could act as anchors. I see them as noodles in molasses.
Rosner: There is this deal. When you have a bunch of liquid polymers, and you dip a pencil in, you can pull out a bunch of gunk because the filaments line up as you pull this snotty stuff out of your liquid. But I would guess that it is not all one filament.
There are sets of filaments strongly connected to each other, interwoven among other sets of filaments that are strongly connected to each other with only weak filamentary connections among various sets of very strongly filaments.
With that, I got to break.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If this science fiction future produces superbeings, how much will these entities care about us, relative to their capabilities?
Rick Rosner: The superbeings of the future may not even give 1% of a crap of the feelings of cows. There are a lot of ways this stuff could go.
Jacobsen: This could be something like the distance cognitively between ants and cows, which could be the distance between the superbeings of the future and us. Why would a cow even care about a whole colony of ants?
Rosner: Yes, it will be about the degree to which the Golden Rule is operative in the dominant technologies and societies of the future. The Golden Rule, we do not have a lot of respect for ants. We do not think about them much.
Whatever their level of awareness, they do not seem able to be conscious of that much suffering. Although the colony as a whole may experience misery, that seems unlikely. I do not know if we will ever have a lot of respect for ants.
I do not know what will be the manifestation of the Golden Rule in the future when you have these beings or melded consciousnesses that are 1,500 times more powerful than regular human conscious, according to some scale of consciousness in the future.
Jacobsen: It may be a cognitive horizon too. Someone much smarter than another is not extraordinarily smarter, if given that kind of 1,500-times-more-powerful scale.
Rosner: I do not even know how that scale would work. The IQ scale is a crappy scale. It is a thing in which somebody would have an IQ of 150,000, which is a senseless idea. Although, there is a science fiction book from the 50s called Brain Wave by Poul Anderson.
It is about the Earth passing out of a region of the galaxy that is effectively dampening the brain functions. All of the sudden. Everyone has 5 times the IQ they had before. Everyone has an IQ between 500 and 800/900. I liked it when I was a kid. It is probably unreadable now.
We do not know what form vast information processing will take and how much room it will have for us.
Jacobsen: I want to take the idea of cognitive horizon seriously. If human beings can imagine some level of consciousness for ants but can only extrapolate similarly upwards in terms of what superbeings look like vis-a-vis science fiction, something super smarter than us may have a similar ability to have a wider range of consideration.
So, it may have a more fine-tuned sense of an ant life and its worth.
Rosner: Yes, they could be like hyper-decent, hyper-moral. Or it could be that it becomes so cheap to be moral that people go ahead and be moral because “Why not?” It becomes cheaper to make Fermat’s Wager for everybody.
Just give everybody an afterlife because, maybe, it is ethically good to do that if it only costs $1.50 per person.
Jacobsen: Even now, there is very sufficient evidence to say being moral is much cheaper than being immoral. Mark Twain had that quote about if you tell the truth then you do not have to remember anything.
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: In a similar way, if you are moral, you do not have to look behind your back. You can continue on in life in the comfort that you did the best you could with the resources you had at the time.
I think our reiteration with slight modification and expansion of the Golden Rule, especially with rich interconnected information-processing, is a re-envisioning in a greater robustness of it. It is a reaffirmation in modern terminology.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is needed for good mathematical training?
Rick Rosner: To be a real quantum physics guy, you probably need 2 or 3 semesters undergraduate plus 3 or 4 semesters of graduate school, but I never went to graduate school. There is this thing called the Boundary Condition(s).
You have to set up a logically consistent structure. The first exercise in QM is the Potential Well. The well is this abstract well, which you have this quantum particle in. You have to set up the mathematics of the well so that it reasonably contains this mathematical simulation of a quantum particle.
I suspect the T=O conditions found at the edge of the universe, which you find somewhat in black-ish holes, exist more as boundary conditions than as necessary conditions for the matter in the universe. Rather, it is a logical requirement that this is what you find if you journeyed there, but most matter does not journey there – back to T=0 or T=10^24th of a second after the Big Bang or after time started.
There is no information there. Everything is so hot and messy. You may or may not pull information from it. Information may pass through it. But you are not going to get any actual observable information from that super early hot mess.
It is simply logically required to be assumed to be there. The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/05/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, this will be our Jerry Seinfeld show, which is about nothing.
Rick Rosner: [Laughing] Okay and to put that in context, I have got this YouTube thing where I argue with a conservative, my buddy Lance, and he wanted to talk about Christian apologetics, even though we are both Jews but apologetics in general, which is the field of established religious metaphysical explanations for religious principles.
Why the world exists from a religious philosophical point of view, you cannot say the world exists because of God. That leads to more complicated metaphysical issues and often these metaphysical issues have been thought about by religious philosophers.
There is sophisticated philosophical reasoning behind things that attempt to be proofs of the necessity of God. That God created the world. So, anyway, one of the topics Lance brought up was the idea of from nothing comes nothing and this is an idea that is pervasive not only in religion but also in scientific thinking.
It is the principle that unless there is some motivating or creative force that the default state of existence is nothingness. That without something to push things along, without a creator or some physical impetus a loaded vacuum.
A vacuum that is packed with energy for instance in physics, without that the default state of being is no being, is nothing. I increasingly have a problem with this and it has led me to think about the idea which we’ve talked about.
For one thing, we’ve talked about the set of all possible worlds. These would be the worlds, the universes, not prohibited by the principles of existence. If you have a complete set of the principles of existence, I do not know if that is even possible, but say you’ve got a fairly exhaustive set.
All the reasons and rules that the universe can exist, then we know because we exist. That is not a null set. That the set of possible worlds that we and by not too tough extrapolation all the past moments of our world and a bunch of future moments – all those are possible worlds.
So, it is reasonable to assume that the set of all possible worlds if it can be enclosed in a set or encompassed by a set contains perhaps an infinitude of possible worlds, which you would think could be of various sizes because we live in a universe that is huge with something 10 to the 85th protons and then a bunch of other associated particles, a bunch of bunch of protons.
A bunch of particles with 10 to the 11th galaxies each with roughly 10 to the 11th stars with each star consisting of roughly 10 to the 58th or more particles protons and neutrons; so, a big-ass universe.
Then it is possible for us to imagine a null universe and a number small universes and by extrapolation you can imagine universes of any size in between. That to me suggests a possible principle that is that there may be no upper limit to the size of a possible universe.
That there is no bias against any size universe under the rules of existence, the principles of existence. Universes of any finite size can exist. That doesn’t mean that any arbitrarily structured topsy-turvy universe of any size can exist, but under the principles of existence there may be no principle of existence that sets an upper limit for the size of the universe, which seems a richness of existence especially when compared to from nothing comes nothing.
From nothing comes nothing means that unless you do some special trick of creation, you cannot have something because the default state of things is nothing, so you have to do some magic or some special physics to have existence come out of nothingness, which is the default state of things.
This bias, it is a crazy bias; it is a special bias; that exists both in religion and in science that everybody is subject to this bias in favor of nothingness being the default state. I do not know how many other beliefs there are that are cross over beliefs between religion and science.
So, it is pervasive. It is persuasive. But we know it is not a prohibitive rule because we exist. Something happened or there is something about the principles of existence that doesn’t stand in the way of existence.
That the “from nothing comes nothing” rule doesn’t rule because there is something-ness and if nothingness ruled then there would not be. So, we already have proof that it is possible to have something-ness.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/05/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We have been talking on and off tape about an information universe grounded in the decades and decades old field of digital physics, which amounts to a field with physics, statistical thermodynamics, information theory, and related fields.
Rosner: So, what we’re saying is that in an information-based informational cosmology universe, there is an implied zero information.
There is an implied history that contains, as you work your way back at some point, the amount of looking backwards information contained goes to zero. Your ranges may go up and down, but ranges all the way from 0 up to the present amount of information.
That means from nothing you can get something. That the conservation of matter; that is, the matter can neither be created nor destroyed. That rule is a more local rule and doesn’t apply to the entire expanse of existence of a universe.
That there are ways to bring in more matter, more information at the edges of the universe and also for information to evaporate at the edges of the universe.
That the principle that there are whole all sets of the third sets of processes that let you create what matter can be created and what matter can disappear and that the principle from nothing comes nothing and the related principle from the current amount of matter comes every future amount of matter in a given universe: those principles do not apply.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/04/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You were listening to PR and Brian Greene. We were talking about dark energy off-tape. Can you expand on this, please?
Rick Rosner: Alright. So, I was listening to NPR and they had on Brian Greene, who is a pretty famous physicist who has made part of his calling writing books for general audiences and trying to explain physics to the public – particularly cutting-edge physics, cosmology, string theory, and stuff like that.
He was talking about dark energy, which is according to observations made in the last 15 years or so. The expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating instead of slowing down, which is what you’d expect.
If the death star blew up a planet but they did not give enough of a push to the planet so that the pieces of the planet did not have mutual escape velocity, the planet would fly apart but more and more slowly and then eventually collapse back into itself.
That is basically one possibility of a general relativistic dynamic of the universe that it either is a Big Bang and the universe flies apart but it doesn’t have enough energy to overcome the mutual attraction of all the matter and it falls back into itself or maybe it does and it keeps going.
But in either case, the pieces after the initial explosion, the initial push, should not fly apart from each other faster and faster. With the gravity pulling on the universe, with a mutual attraction among all the matter in the universe the things should accelerate as they fly away from each other.
That mutual attraction should slow things down at least a little bit, but recent observations indicate that is not the case. Now under IC, we’re skeptical that these observations measure velocity as opposed to maybe something that is more informational, or it could be a mix, or it is purely velocital but the velocity is generated not by an initial Big Bang but is generated by the scale of the universe getting tighter as the universe incorporates more information into itself.
So, to get back to Brian Greene, he mentions that this acceleration can be mathematically characterized as a cosmological constant, which is an added factor that Einstein put into general relativity and then felt bad about because it contradicted some observational stuff and it was less mathematically elegant than the rest of the theory.
However, the cosmological constant can be set wherever you want to conform to experimental observational evidence and what it is; it is a dial for overall gravity whether on a universal scale gravity works the way we think it does based on local observations or whether on a universal scale there is a push outward that would account for the acceleration.
You can also dial it the other way and if there were experimental observations says the universe is slowing down faster than you’d expect. That is another position on the dial. But according to the observational evidence, there is a push.
A counter instead of gravitation on a universal scale pulling everything together is pushing everything apart. I have been skeptical of dark energy, but Brian Greene mentions this number. This tiny number that would be sufficient in terms of a push to account for the observed acceleration in the recessional velocity of the universe.
That makes me wonder if there is some mathematical parallel or equivalence that can be drawn between at least the apparent expansion of the universe and the amount of matter that is lost per unit time by photons being red shifted because the red shifting is a loss of energy due to the curvature of space.
So, there should be a direct equivalence between photons losing energy and the apparent size of the universe increasing or that is at least a possibility that as the universe gets more information from localized information being shed by individual photons and that information being spread out to the rest of the universe through the red shift.
You should see a gradual change in scale of the universe as the information leaking out of the photons more sharply defines all the particles in the universe which is equivalent to the universe being apparently larger.
Tighter looking particles, it is the same thing as the same sized particles in a larger universe. So, anyway, maybe, there is some math to be done to establish equivalence between the energy that is always being lost by a gazillion photons and what is happening with the apparent expansion of the universe.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/04/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In an IC universe, as a theory or framework for explanation, the default seems like existence rather than non-existence, which implies different considerations on the nature of nothing, nothingness and its types, and the universe as we know it.
Rick Rosner: Alright. So, we live in a world that is super existent; it is existent to the tune of 10 to the 85th protons or so, which is a hundred billion galaxies each with roughly a hundred billion stars with each star consisting of almost ten to the 60th particles; it is a big universe.
Now, implied in the existence of our universe is a point of nothingness. The universe has an apparent age of 13.8 billion years and if you believe in the Big Bang; which more people do now than do not if you took a survey of the entire planet.
If you trace the Big Bang, the further away you look, the more and more distant objects you observe using telescopes of various types and of increasing power now that we can use computational techniques to pulse weak signals from far away and far away means closer and closer to the time that the universe, according to the Big Bang, came into existence because the farther away you look, you are looking at stuff where light took longer and longer to get to us to cross these vast distances, and so it is from an earlier time.
We have some observational techniques that can get close to what looks like the apparent or beginning of the universe under the Big Bang. We have the background radiation from the first photons that escaped the processes of the early universe that are said to be from only about 300,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe became transparent for a while.
Before 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was such a hot soup that photons couldn’t get out of there. Then at 300,000 years, that was the end of the first ionization era where electrons got together with protons, which made it possible for photons to be emitted as electrons locked into orbit around protons.
Then you have the earliest photons; that was the deal. However, anyway, the Big Bang universe has an implied history that if there was a Big Bang then there was a point where in space and time, more in time than in space because the Big Bang encompasses all of space. There is no point in currently existing space where the Big Bang started because all of space, since space started at roughly a point that blew up to huge proportions after 14 billion years.
Anyway, there is a point in time where things started and then it becomes a philosophical point whether you can even talk about what happened before that which you cannot, but you can talk about what initiated the process.
You can call it a God moment or you can call it an unstable vacuum moment, but there is still this initial point when the universe pops into existence and it is philosophically and scientifically sloppy to talk about the universe popping into existence out of nothing because there wasn’t even any nothing that the universe popped into existence from.
There is no from; there is the universe popping into existence. So, there is this implied beginning and not implied but a beginning with all sorts of observational evidence for the universe popping into existence though in terms of the Big Bang Theory.
It is not that all this matter came into existence because there was nothing for it to come into existence from because there was no time before the Big Bang. So, as long as there has been time, there has been the amount of matter/energy in the universe that there is now.
So, nothing was created or destroyed; the universe popped into existence with the amount of matter/energy that it has now, it was in a tight hot little volume that blew out, that expanded crazily to the huge size it is now.
So, you could argue that this doesn’t violate the principle that matter can neither be created nor destroyed because as long as there is been time there is been the amount of matter that our universe contains.
However, if that is not super satisfying because still “why this amount of matter?” and “how did we get this amount of matter?”; it is still not satisfying because we have this deep bias against non-nothingness.
We think nothingness should be the thing and that anything else needs a super-duper explanation. But we have this big-ass universe and it may be that the rules of existence permit any size universe, any finite size universe from zero to almost infinitely bigger.
You cannot say almost infinitely because there is no such thing. It is either infinitely or not, but still you get the idea that there could be universes that are so damn big they almost feel infinitely bigger than ours to us.
Then universes that feel almost infinitely bigger to the people in that super big ass universe and so on out to infinity; inconceivably huge yet finite universes because there may be no bias against any possible finite size of the universe.
Now, you might be able to make probabilistic arguments or statistical arguments about the relative, if you had a set of all possible universes within this set the ratios of the various sizes of possible universes or you may not.
This may be an entirely terrible way to try to do statistics but for the sake of arguing maybe there is only one null universe according to the rules of principles of existence. Something that contains no space, no time, no information; there may only be one of those because if there were a bunch of different flavors, say eight different flavors of a null universe, then that universe isn’t a null universe because it contains at least the information about which of the eight different null universes it is; which flavor, which color, whatever you want to call it.
Which of the eight? Oh, this is possible universe number five. Well, that five is information so there must be a simpler null universe that doesn’t even contain that one characterizing piece of information.
So, there should be one simplest most information-less universe I guess. Then as you get more complicated universes, there should be a greater variety of these. Then as you get out to the huge universes, there should be a huge possible variety of these or maybe that argument for some reason doesn’t hold up.
Maybe since we can only exist in one universe at a time and cannot even set rules for the probabilities of other universes. I do not know; nobody knows yet because this is a form of thinking that hasn’t been done yet.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/04/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have OCD and obsessions in math and health. These may have played a role in the mathematics aspects of being “born to do math.” What have been your obsessions in the past?
Rick Rosner: Yes, I have got OCD fairly. Unless, you watch me closely. You would not necessarily notice it. I am not as OCD-d out as the worst people, but I am probably 40% of the way there. Then you might make the argument that high IQ people might have a tendency to get to pursue odd interests way too far.
If I can list the stuff that I have been obsessed with over the course of my life, let’s start with age six where I obsessively turned in clockwise circles and chanted to God. Around age ten, I became obsessed with figuring out how the universe worked and started taking all sorts of notes on little scraps of paper.
In junior high, I briefly became highly interested in solving one of those math problems that everybody wants to solve, but nobody in the world has been able to solve for decades or centuries. So, I pursued trying to prove the four-color theorem or trisect an angle or Fermat’s Last Theorem. There were periods of going after that stuff.
Then in high school, I became obsessed with transforming myself into someone who could get a girlfriend which included changing the way I talked, I went from somebody who got a doctor’s note to get out of PE to somebody who did 6,000 push-ups a day.
So, that was the beginning of an exercise obsession, beginning 17. The obsession with being a guy who could get laid.
I rolled over into my early 20s, where I became a bouncer and a stripper and then developed obsessions around how many bars I could work in or how many jobs I could hold simultaneously. After a bad breakup, every time I felt bad I would go out and get another job to the point where I had eight jobs simultaneously.
All of them five hours a week or no more than ten hours a week each while I was going to college. But among the sub-obsessions to having a bunch of jobs or “how many bars could I be stripping in?” and “how many bars could I be bouncing in?”, I became obsessed with catching the most fake IDs of anybody, becoming the most accurate fake ID catcher at the doors of bars ever.
I developed a model, a probabilistic schema for catching IDs to help me decide the hard cases. I would to think that there were periods in my bouncing history for months at a time. I was close to 99% accurate at nailing fake IDs and close to a 100% accurate at not turning away anybody who was of age when most bouncers will maybe catch about a third of the fake IDs that come past.
We’re talking during the fake ID era, say 60’s through the 90’s when you wanted to have a fake ID to go to bars to try to hook up. That era’s over because now we have the Internet for hooking up.
At various times, I have been obsessed with getting my body fat down to under 5%. Right now, it is around 4.8 to 5 something percent depending on what I have been eating for the past few days, whether the diuretics are working.
Right before I turned 21, I became obsessed again with trying to figure out how the universe worked and that has lasted for the last thirty-six and a half years. I am more obsessed with it sometimes than at other times, but it is a long-term interest, sometimes obsessive.
In 2000, I was on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ and got a flawed question that led to me basically losing the game and became obsessed with studying millionaire questions to prove that they screwed up.
I ended up analyzing about a hundred and ten thousand millionaire questions from close to 20 different countries. So, that required me to be able to start… this was before Google Translate, I had to become my own Google Translate and learn how to decode millionaire questions in a bunch of different languages.
I got hired to be a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live! and became obsessed with getting stuff on the air and cranking out a huge amount of material. For my first two years there, I did not allow myself to go home until I generated at least 10 pages of material per day, which is nuts and also was annoying to Jimmy.
But while I was there I wrote close to a hundred thousand jokes. Right now, I have got this YouTube series with my conservative buddy Lance where I posed shirtless for a painting he is been working on for almost a year and we argue about politics and given my anxiety about the current political situation and maybe a little anxiety because my dad is not well.
When my stepdad became seriously ill, I started taking huge numbers of vitamins and supplements; about 70 a day, which I continued to do. But seeing my stepdads mortality made me obsessed with becoming as healthy as possible at least in terms of filling myself with pills.
Now, that my real dad is having health issues plus the anxiety about Trump world and being shirtless in this YouTube series. I have been working out even more obsessively than I have in the past. I celebrated my 27th anniversary of not missing a day at the gym since 1991.
For the past four years, I have gone to the gym at least five times a day except for four days out of those four years where I fell asleep before my fifth workout. For the past year, I have done at least a hundred sets of weights a day and for the past 43 days I have done at least 200 sets a day.
So does that cover? Oh! I have written the longest book in the form of a tweet thread that is ever been written. It’s half of a sample from a book I am trying to get a book deal for and it rolled into being a bloggie thing when I felt I couldn’t give away too much more of the book for free. Its two thousand tweets long. That probably covers most of my obsessions.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/04/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the apparent age of the universe?
Rick Rosner: So, I mean the deal is that if you have stuff in the universe that’s older than the universe, then the universe can’t be the age that way you say it is.
And that may be the case with a bunch of super massive celestial objects found in what should be the young early universe which seems weird because the Big Bang seems thoroughly established as what has to be the shape and the mechanics of the universe.
It’s what the universe looks like but the Big Bang as a theory has only been the leading theory of the universe for 50 years and we’ve had a complete picture of the distribution of matter in the universe for only a hundred years or less; make it 80.
It wasn’t until a hundred years ago or less that we even knew that there were other galaxies besides our own. And it was only within the past 80 or 90 years that we found out that the farther away a galaxy is the larger it’s apparent velocity away from us; the Hubble constant.
And it was only in 1964 and ’65 that we discovered the old early photons, the tired old photons from the first possible moment that the universe was transparent to photons.
Before about 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was so filled with ionized matter that too much stuff was crammed too close together that there was no way for photons to travel through the mess and get free.
Then at 300,000 years the universe becomes big enough that the ambient energy held by all the matter comes down and protons and electrons start combining into hydrogen and helium atoms and at that point it’s like the fog clears and photons can escape.
And some of the escaped photons just kept going from that point in time for us to intercept them 13 and a half billion years later. So it seems as if there are a zillion reasons; observational and theoretical reasons why we live in a Big Bang universe.
But a lot of those reasons can also be applied to an information-based universe with a big bang looking universe being the optimal forum for information to take.
And one thing to consider is that we live among the most normal-looking of the forms that Big Bang universes can take. Well, one of the issues in Big Bang cosmology is whether the universe is open or closed which also involves the term flat.
A flat universe according to general relativity is the universe that has just enough kinetic energy among its parts to keep on expanding forever, to keep on overcoming its mutual gravitational attraction; the gravitational attraction that every galaxy has for every other galaxy and for the universe to keep growing forever, but just barely.
The other possible Big Bang universes include a closed universe which doesn’t have enough energy to overcome galaxies mutual attraction which is like a hundred thousand people standing on the surface of the earth, all throwing a ball up into the air at the same time; the ball goes 30 feet into the air runs out of energy and all heads back down together to collapse together.
So imagine that except minus the earth with everybody throwing the ball. Everybody throws the ball up, the attraction among the balls pull them all back together because they don’t have enough oomph or enough kinetic energy to get away from each other.
Then there’s the open universe where the balls, the galaxies have way more energy than they need to never fall back into each other. And the Big Bang universe; the universe we live in; our particular universe seems to have exactly as much energy as it needs to overcome mutual gravitational attraction.
But then there are some additional… as theories get older they acquire additional refinement and often additional, say corrections to account for anomalous observational experimental data.
So, the Big Bang universe being 80 or 50 or however many years old, has accumulated various corrections for inflation and for hyper-expansion; good inflation is hyper-expansion but dark matter effects accelerated expansion if you look back at the apparent expansion of the universe. It looks like the universe is actually expanding faster over time.
It says if you threw a ball up in the air and it started traveling upwards slowly and then just gained more and more velocity as it rushes up in the air away from you, which is consistent with final some theories of what dark energy but also can be taken as serious quibbles with Big Bang Theory.
Kuhn, about 50 years ago, wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolution. He said that theories are formed are resisted by established science but eventually win because they account better for experimental for observations than the previous theory but as the theories age they accumulate more and more quibbles, more and more things that appear to be wrong with them until those theories are often in their own turn overthrown by the next theory.
And it’s not unreasonable to think that the Big Bang which is our first successful comprehensive theory of the overall structure and dynamics of the universe will eventually be overthrown or severely modified.
Perhaps the greatest theory in the history of physics, Newtonian universal gravitation, reigned for two and a half centuries until it was severely modified by general relativity and was overthrown in part, the parts being theoretical basis in that Newton described universal gravitation which says that the attraction between any two objects is the product of their masses divided by the square of their distance.
But it didn’t really say why while general relativity says that the why is because matter curves space. Matter helps to determine the shape of space.
You can continue to use Newtonian gravitation as long as you’re dealing with relatively small masses at relatively large distances but when you get into super compact masses or big masses you’re going to have to correct for general relativistic effects.
The first one to be verified was a precession in the orbit of mercury around the Sun where planetary orbits are ellipses and the ellipses don’t stay in the same place in space over long periods of time.
They kind of drift, so they’re not exact ellipses; they’re loops that don’t quite loop back around exactly in the same place, the loops travel in a circle around the sun, kind of like spirograph pattern if you’re old enough to remember those.
They instead of an ellipse forming around the Sun you get a flower pattern of largely overlapping loops, so eventually orbits revolves all the way around the Sun and comes back on it’s own.
In the first great victory for general relativity, the rate at which the ellipse formed by Mercury’s orbit was shown to process at double the rate it would under Newtonian gravitation.
So, Newton’s theory of universal gravitation was overthrown by general relativity but still survives because it’s still what you use in any kind of normal situation; situation where you want to figure out, say how far a baseball might travel on earth coming off a bat under normal circumstance like that.
And it’s not unreasonable to think that the Big Bang will be subject to at least a partial revolution especially if physicists or astronomers keep discovering more and more objects that can’t reasonably be shown to have been able to be formed in the time that’s elapsed since the Big Bang.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/03/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking off-tape on IQ and a World Economic Forum article on the diminishing returns of intelligence on leadership. It seems interesting, where beyond 128 the leadership can be worse. Can you expound on our points a bit?
Interviewee: Yes, for one, you have to preface anything that involves IQ by saying IQ is a sucky measure of intelligence. Though, there isn’t a better one. Using reasonable assumptions, 111 is in the neighborhood of the average high school graduate. It is not that high.
Also, the average IQ for people walking around is also about 100, 105, 106, because people with IQs at the low end are not walking around. They are in institutions, riding short buses. However, anyway, it is hard to tell exactly how they set up their 100.
There are points of comparison. In other words, what’s the phenomena, e.g. leadership? It is crazy how low that is. 128 isn’t even high enough to get into MENSA, and MENSA is the sluttiest, one of the sluttiest IQ groups.
Almost anybody, if they try can get into MENSA, the average leader who has risen to 128 and, thus, become less effective because leadership peaked at 120. The one who has already gone over the hill and down the other side still cannot get into MENSA.
However, I’ll start with saying my wife worked at a bunch of companies that were mid-level companies. She worked for some big ass companies too. Until she had her current job at a school; she never had a job she liked, largely because a large percentage of the people around her were a-holes.
In fact, when you look at the stereotypical mid-level manager as presented in movies and sitcoms, there is always at least one jerk to propel the strife and the comedy. The Michael Scott character in The Office.
Everybody else in The Office was a sap in one way or other. That may reflect a certain reality that mid-levels of leadership, the people who end up in those positions maybe suck, maybe the organizations that they are leading suck.
Because they are made up of people who are them, then when you get to higher levels, where leadership skills are even worse at IQs at 128, it may be because people with IQs at 128 suck even more than people with IQs at 120.
Because I mean one they might be Aspergery or they might be conceited dickheads or over confident, pricks. Because you also said that these were mostly guys, too, right? Alright, so did this study do comparisons across gender?
They were on IQ is what you are saying. I have seen other studies that show that happiness and success and leadership, all that stuff does reach a peak, and then start declining before IQ reaches a limit.
The studies I have seen, it is more around 140. Or maybe I assumed that. There are plenty of reasons for that. The reasons we’ve mentioned—dickishness and overconfidence. However, there are also, as you get up above 140 and stuff, the smart people can be, or people who are good at IQ tests, which isn’t necessarily the same thing, can be distracted by the butterflies of weird intellectual pursuits.
It is easier for super smart people to chase off after their curiosity about the world, which may overwhelm or their ability to figure out stuff may overwhelm their ability to stay on track. That could be the one way that society.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/03/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: So, this is more like born to not do math in the case of our president who talks about how he went off to Wharton which makes you think if you’re an American that he got an MBA from Wharton. He actually doesn’t have an MBA; he doesn’t have an advanced degree in business, he went to Wharton as an undergrad.
Wharton is a branch of the University of Pennsylvania and unless you’re trying to be deceptive you just say you went to UPenn, but he wants people to kind of think he’s an MBA. So, he says he went to Wharton, so the bullshit starts right there.
And then his lack of business understanding doesn’t begin with this tariffs thing that we’re right in the middle of, it probably begins with him bankrupting three casinos. It’s really hard to bankrupt a business where people just come and they give you their money but he did it three times though he is clever enough to have sucked out a bunch of money for himself before the casinos went bankrupt and lost 99% of investor’s money.
Anyway, this tariff thing is a huge move that is going to according to anybody who’s knowledgeable about business and economics will harm us and possibly the rest of the world by setting up all sorts of trade barriers and possible trade wars. Gary Cohn who’s his economics adviser had threatened to quit months ago because Gary’s Jewish and Trump was kind of supporting white supremacists and Nazis but he was persuaded to stay.
But now, Gary Cohn; one of the few people who knows what he’s doing in the White House is now quitting because he thinks the tariffs are so stupid as does just about everybody else and some numbers.
Trump wants to impose a 10% tariff on foreign aluminum, 25% on foreign steel; he thinks this will revitalize domestic aluminum and steel industries. Everybody’s saying no but those industries changed forever especially in the way of going away 30 years ago and you’re not going to bring back industries that went away 30 years ago.
Currently, there are three hundred and one thousand steel and aluminum workers in America but the tariffs could raise prices for hundreds of millions of Americans and could lead to reduced sales, increased prices, and reduced business.
The last time in 2002 that we try to tariffs on I believe steel under George W Bush, it cost the U.S two hundred thousand jobs before people realized it was a terrible idea and rescinded the tariffs. This latest round of tariffs, if they go through, it’s estimated that they’ll cost America maybe around a hundred and eighty thousand jobs.
So, there you go; born to not be able to really do math but to be able to demagogue in the case of our president.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/03/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I was watching a short Business Insider clip with Brian Greene from Columbia University and in it he was talking about renormalization.
Rick Rosner: Physics professor?
Jacobsen: A physics professor, specializes in string theory and some fundamental work alongside Witten and Kaku, who are some of the founders in string theory. Witten is known for being something akin to Einstein within that field, where he really blazes new trails to use that cliché.
And one of the points in that Business Insider clip that I was noting is his discussion of infinities. When he was talking about those infinities, he was looking into renormalization in quantum field theory.
I see there are a few types of infinities that are different than that. So, let’s cover two types of things first: one on how renormalization in quantum field theory deals with one type infinity, but how I see the other type infinities having different types and forms and consequences.
Rosner: I haven’t looked at the math of renormalization theory in a while, but basically the equations generate infinities at some points. You need to do tricks that aren’t precisely allowed by the rules of math to cancel out infinities.
And once you do that, you end up with numbers that really accurately predict the values, the things that are being described by the equations in the real world. The equations, once you’ve done these forbidden tricks to them, accurately describe real physics, but you don’t have to assume that this means that the universe itself is cancelling out infinities.
It’s a better way of thinking to think that it doesn’t quite have the right math; it’s good math, but it doesn’t quite encompass all the actual processes that are happening in the world down to the nth degree.
There are all sorts of things that have hidden infinities, but not the world itself. When we’ve talked one of the principles, we talk about that we live in a world that has vast numbers in it, but none of those numbers reach infinity.
And the world is approximated by things that include infinity, for instance, when an object goes from point A to point B in our geometric model, our mental model of traveling from point A to point B has it hitting every single infinite point.
We’ve been taught in school that a number line has an infinity of points along it and not just a countable infinity, but the trans-countable infinity; not just the rational numbers on a number line, but also the irrational numbers, which are uncountable.
There’s so many of them. You can’t even count them using the lowest level of infinity and so you think of things moving along a line and you think they’re hitting an infinite number of points. But we live in a quantum world where position in space isn’t precisely defined.
Things that are happening in a physical framework that’s established by quantum rules; you can’t pin down an object with such precision that you can say that it travels through an infinity of points to get from one point to another. Space isn’t defined that precisely.
There is another set of hidden infinities with counting numbers. The counting numbers seem as finite as you can get; 1, 2, 22, 104… those are finite numbers. But every one of those numbers has an infinite number of digits beyond the decimal place. 223.00000… and the zeros go out to infinity.
One is precisely one to an infinite degree; it’s precisely defined. We just deal with objects in the world as if they are infinitely precise in their unit-ness. If you have two eggs, you have two eggs. 2.000… all the way out to infinity and there are other hidden infinities just in counting numbers, where their infinite precision is actually defined by an infinite series of relationships among each other.
That the prime numbers are distributed along the number line in such a way that they determine the infinite precision of counting numbers. But the deal is those infinities in numbers don’t necessarily reflect actual infinities in the world.
You have one apple. You have 12 eggs. But the oneness of the apple and the twelve-ness of your dozen eggs don’t reflect an infinite precision in the number of things that you have. The world itself is defined by the relationships among the less than infinite particles in the world.
So, objects in the world are highly precisely defined, but not infinitely precisely defined and the oneness of one apple of the dozen-ness of a dozen eggs are abstract characteristics with hidden infinities assigned to the objects that are not infinitely precisely defined because they’re real and they’re in a finite world.
You mentioned off tape of the infinity the ratio of the circumference of a circle, or a wheel, or a tire to its diameter because pi just keeps going for an infinite number of random feeling digits. Its pie is infinitely precise, but when dealing with real objects you can’t infinitely precisely measure or define that ratio.
That ratio is an abstract thing you are assigning to this wheel or tire you’re dealing with; and the wheel or tire is made of atoms and molecules that are held together by Van der Waal’s forces and other electromagnetic intermolecular forces, plus their atoms are held together with nuclear forces and the more electromagnetic forces between the atom, the electrons, and the protons.
But all those particles are imprecisely defined in space. There are probability waves and because they’re imprecisely defined, your tire and the ratios that you’re assigning to it, the ratios can be infinitely precise, but they don’t reflect an infinite precision in the position in space and the shape of the tire and the relationships among its constituent particles.
Everything’s a little fuzzy and the fuzziness reflects a lack of infinity and a lack of infinite precision.
Jacobsen: And then I see that resolves the distinctions of some infinities. In the description of both, renormalizations in quantum field theory as well as infinities of things around infinite digit spans in numbers as well, but in the end that resolves an issue to deal with…
Rosner: We use the tools we have and our tools are symbols. Our mathematical systems are abstract. They contain all sorts of hidden infinities and they work really well when describing a world that is very well defined, but not infinitely precisely defined.
Our tools are not perfectly accurate, if you wanted to perfectly accurately define a tire in space you could do it using quantum mechanical description. For instance, there’s a well-known principle from the beginning physics of the De Broglie matter wave as a wavelength that is inversely proportional to its math.
So, an electron is not weighing much at all. It’s very fuzzy in space. You can’t really pin down an electron very well.
You can pin it down, but only to a limit and the usual example that I’ve seen in physics textbooks is that you compare the matter wave of a baseball and the uncertainty in the space of a baseball to the uncertainty in space of an electron since a baseball weighs like 10 to the 28th or 29th, 10 to the 30th times more than electron. A baseball is 10 to the 30th times more well-defined in space.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/03/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There has been recent experimental evidence showing the earliest discovered stars formed as early as 180 million years after the Big Bang.
Rick Rosner: There is early light from 300,000 years after the Big Bang. Any earlier and the universe was opaque because there was too much stuff going on. There were various phases in the early universe.
You enough electrons and protons to be with each other for light to get through, enough electrons orbiting protons when you have a hot soup of that not happening – which is an Ionization Era. There is no way for light to get through.
The deal is, the matter in the universe went through certain phase changes as a whole. The modern universe is inhomogeneous in a lot of ways. You have huge expanses of almost nothing, a vacuum, and then you have blips of matter and stars.
But in the universe, as it is conceived as the Big Bang in the early universe, everything was a soup. This soup went through phase changes as a whole. One of them was going from ionized matter, which is separated electrons and protons, to electrons and protons combining into hydrogen atoms.
Until that phase change happened, you can’t get light escaping from the soup because it is scattered by free electrons. You get hydrogen atoms forming at a little after 400,000 years the Big Bang. That is the earliest light that we can see.
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, we detect that in the form of radio waves. There is a lot of it. There might be more of the ancient free photons than from later on, There are still a lot of them. They do not affect us so much because they are so redshifted, so weak, from being so old.
But in terms of absolute numbers, there are a bunch of them. You do not get certain amounts of light until lights start forming and shining. They found using some sophisticated radiometric techniques dips in background radiation that indicates this is the part at which you start getting stars.
This was 180 million years after the Big Bang. I do not know if that is sooner than they expected it to be. But they are talking about it being the earliest that you could possibly expect stars to form after the Big Bang.
According to IC, we do not believe in one big bang. Though the universe looks very Big Bangy, if there have been any big bangs at all, it has been through a series of Big Bang-like events or just the universe rolling along in not necessarily a Big Bang way with the Big Bang appearance being a characteristic of information.
Under IC, the CMB would be noise that hasn’t been filtered out because the universe isn’t sufficiently defined. It doesn’t have an infinity of matter or an infinity of information. So, you will have noise that isn’t filtered out.
If information is arranged in a Bang Bangy way, the amount of information in the universe is proportional to the apparent age of the universe and the amount of matter in the universe and the scale of the universe – that is, the scale of a proton diameter to the diameter of the entire universe, then all of those things are consequences of the information the universe contains the apparent age of the universe being proportionate to information; you would expect the information to be arranged in a way that is temporal and causal as an apparent history with some of that history being actual history.
Some of it, though, as you get farther and farther away from the active center of the universe what looks like redshifted and younger galaxies and stuff has more and more to do with incomplete information.
The parts of the ‘beginning’ of the universe are where there is a lot of incompletely defined information relative to us and also relative to the other parts of what looks like the early universe. You could view the absence of complete information as at least allowing the existence of noise.
In that, if you had a universe with infinite information, it would appear to be infinitely old and any information from the apparent beginning of the universe – any light from the apparent beginning – would be redshifted down to zero information and the noise level would be zero.
We are still confused about things. We think in IC the universe is a lot older than it appears to be with the apparent age being the amount of information it contains, but one of the areas of confusion is “Does this very, very old universe have Big Bang-like events?” The answer is “probably yeah.”
“What is the scale of those?” When a part of the universe becomes informationally active when it wasn’t before if you’re retrieving old frozen information and making it active, does that make a Big Bang looking event?
The answer is “probably yeah, but it would be incorporated into something like the apparent Big Bang, which is the way the universe appears.” One of these little bangs that meld into this apparent Big Bang.
“How big of an event is that?” Does it cover the entire visible universe? The deal is, under IC, we still need a framework that accounts for all of the apparent manifestations of a single Big Bang 14 billion years ago.
If IC is an actual thing, an information-based universe that functions a little bit like thought does, you have to have mechanisms that account for information processing over a super long period of time and also informationally do not contradict the observational evidence of the apparent Big Bang.
Every time that you get an experimental result like somebody found the light from the earliest possible stars 180 million years after the Big Bang. You have to figure out what is happening.
Somebody has to figure it out, how it works informationally. If it is not a Big Bang, then informationally, what is the deal with the first light from the first star – apparent first light from the apparent first star – showing up as some dip in radiometric observations showing up 180 million years after the Big Bang?
Based on how information is in our brains, we know there is a lot of stuff that information processing apps, modules, or modes are pretty much on whenever we are awake like spatial information processing, there is never a time unless you do LSD.
That the parts of your brain that process spatial information into a sense of 3D space around you. There is never a time when that is turned off and space is scrambled. Do not take LSD.
But if you happen to be exposed to LSD, you can really hamper a lot of those modules. When you are awake, there is never a time that those modules are not processing faces, so that a face looks like a face.
That it is readable as a human face with expressions and recognizable features, but if you happen to be on LSD then those modules get screwed up. You see incompletely processed faces, which look like CG effects.
That the faces haven’t been smoothed into rounded faces. You get these lizardy badly processed faces that look like wireframe faces. The kind of faces you may see in early video games. That haven’t to manage human-looking faces.
I supposed with enough LSD that you could turn off your spatial processing modules and have a really hard time navigating and figuring out where walls, routes, and doors are and their relationship to each other because the modules have been turned off.
Also, you dream in 3D and in faces. Even when you aren’t working, those modules are always on. Others are only turned on as needed, whatever modules you need to be a ski racer.
I assume there is a skill set and a set of perceptions that mostly you turn on when you are racing or practicing racing. In an IC universe, you would have some parts always on and processing information.
Then you would have modules that you could turn on. An IC universe needs to have always on stuff and stuff that gets turned on and then turned off as it gets used and is no longer useful.
It falls away to the cold and frozen outskirts that look like close to T=0 and has to fit into a structure that looks Big Bangy. So, that is what we are trying to resolve or would be trying to resolve if I weren’t so lazy.
The end.
[End of recorded material]
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: But it is not like the quantum world phenomena necessarily reflects the operations explicit in the macro world. I think you can draw helpful analogies, like the idea that every driver is like a black box, which is basically defensive driving. That driver is, to some extent, unpredictable.
Then you can base this on your experience of drivers in similar cars. You can assign a probability cloud to what people will do. Where a 1988 Cadillac driven by an old person will have a different probability cloud then a 2007 Audi driven by a 28-year-old guy with his satellite radio.
One is more likely to—the Audi is more likely to pull a dick move on you, to pull into your lane because your lane has fewer people in it. Whereas the 1988 Cadillac is more likely to be going under the speed limit or drifting out of lanes because the person driving the car is more careful.
There is the idea that every person having a ‘probability cloud’ associated with them, which is a fine analogy. But another issue can be making probability clouds too tight, at least in LA, where people can pull a dick move at any time.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: You can come up with a zillion. In the 70s, there was something about chlorophyll, which is plants absorbing light. What does toothpaste have to do about absorbing light?
Jacobsen: [Laughing] One was from Newton being a phallic representation of the universe, and the Principia as a rape manual [Laughing].
Rosner: You try to apply the Uncertainty Principle all over the place. The Uncertainty Principle inevitably disturbs the—you never get an undisturbed situation, but that is a purely quantum situation. You can draw analogies about it. There are certainly ways to draw analogies to things in the macro world.[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Two things come to mind from that. One is an older discussion, which I am recalling around “buffers” of order preservation in the universe at various scales. Another one is the utility of using an IC framework in general.
If you’re using an IC framework, there are distinctions that you can make between fields that are sufficient, so that misuse of terms outside of their proper field then makes non-sense. So, you may use sociological terminology in physics.
Rick Rosner: Feynman lived in the early era of media. He was pissed at modern advertising, which was being pissed at the loose use of the word “energy.” He had a precise meaning in the context of physics. He hated its use in advertising because it never referenced actual physical energy.
It always referred to some young woman because she was heavy and jumping up and down.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: In an expanding universe, a moving photon is moving away from – the farther and longer it travels then the more it is moving into the neighbourhoods of galaxies that are receding from its point of origin, so the longer it travels the faster the galaxies or the average expansion velocity of space is relative to where it came from.
So, it is going to be wretched. But that loss of energy—I just read that there are many more photons than there are massive particles. Particles that have rest mass. In every cubic centimetre, there are roughly 400 photons leftover from the Big Bang.
I guess from the Cosmic Microwave Background. Where the average number of massive particles is one proton for every cubic metre, so that means like 400 million times as many Big Bang photons or Cosmic Microwave photons as there are protons.
That doesn’t even include all the photons that have emitted since. Another place to hide disorder might be black holes. Where depending on what the rules for black holes are, I mean, Stephen Hawking and people like him have spent their careers debating the informational rules and black holes with regards to information.
Whether information is lost when stuff falls into a black hole, whether it eventually comes back out, does it come back out with any amount of information that went in, in any way? Under IC, black holes aren’t entirely black and can, maybe, be possibly seen as semi-independent information processors.
So, not only do they, they might be sources of order rather than additional information and order – rather than relentless black holes of information, constantly destroying whatever gets close enough to fall into them. So, one narrative framework for IC is that it might be good for talking about the universe in the context of the universe being an order-generating system in contrast to the random doomed-to-have-zero-information of the 20th century. That’s it.
[End of recorded material]
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Then you have Big Crunch theories of the universe where everything collapses back in on itself, everything heats up because everything comes back together, but it is one other means of order eradicating everything. There isn’t any big time 20th century Big Bang theories of the universe that support the growth or preservation of order throughout the universe indefinitely.
Which feels right to people because it basically says there’s no free lunch anywhere, and you can’t win, say that under IC, IC would be a good framework for talking about the negentropic universe. A universe in which order can increase.
Where the order in the universe does increase due to the gravitational clumping or the clustering of matter, and where waste heat and noise can be sequestered or absorbed, with the result being that you have a net increase in order, which means that the universe isn’t a closed thermodynamic system.
You have places where waste heat is either converted into something else or is hidden, so that it is not a thermodynamically disruptive and entropic deal, one way energy can be absorbed and turned into order is the loss of energy by long-distance photons.
With the absorption by space by photons that travel billions of light years, where it is the Hubble Shift, where the farther away a photon comes from, then the less energy it has, apparently, because it is climbing up a—
[End of recorded material]
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: You’ve got the heat death of the universe, which is a universe that keeps going and expanding. A heat death to the universe doesn’t mean that the universe ends up hottish. It means that there are no available sources of energy.
That the universe is at the same temperature, which is going to be low because it is going to be trillions of years in the future. All the sources of energy have been used or burned, and then expelled as waste heat to the point where everything is the same temperature and you can’t pull energy out of anything.
When everything is the same temperature, there’s nothing left to burn. Everything is lukewarm.[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It is social reinforcement. It is not just that these physical characteristics are dramatically influenced by genetics. It is also that it is shaping our minds as well. So, our evaluative structures for what is attractive change over time in proportion to that physical structure change in our minds.
Rick Rosner: There are levels of explanation that are more useful or convenient depending on what you’re doing with the thing you’re analyzing and your explanations – if you’re writing a spec. sitcom script—your operative explanations are going to be different than if you’re doing a study on the neurochemistry of love.
Unless, you’re a great writer and can get jokes out of neurochemistry. With regards to IC and information cosmology, the most applicable set of explanations, if it is true, in one area that I’ll risk saying that it has a possibility of being true is whether the universe is entropic or not.
The Second law of Thermodynamics is the one that everyone talks about. It is the interesting one to the point that it is not interesting to talk about at all. It says in a closed system only disorder can increase. So, the energy you expend cleaning a messy room is greater – the heat you generate is a greater force of disorder at a thermodynamic level – than the energy you spent stacking up your crap.
You cannot win. You cannot ever increase the order of a closed system. That seems like the dominant idea of order in the universe. I’d say for most of the 20th century. Where you have local outbreaks of order on Earth, where order and complexity increase, maybe throughout the universe, but the models of the universe have it winding down one way or another back into complete disorder and chaos, or just a complete lack of useable energy by the end of time.[End of recorded material]
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That seems to me like one half of the signification. If people are looking for the short-term partner, depending upon the reference there, which appears to be innate.
Rick Rosner: …People are just looking for easily understood because they are babies at knowing what they want.
Jacobsen: I think that is the same, functionally. It is based on innate hardware. Over time, men statistically do not change their preferences over time. Women do. Women look for different signifiers of status, resourcefulness, emotional stability, and so on, rather than the symmetries and signifiers of health that you were mentioning before.
I think there are various aspects of that. People like to say men and women; others like to say spectrum, but it is more a bimodal distribution along XX/XY.
Rosner: You can bring this back to sociobiology with eggs expensive and sperm cheap, and knocking somebody up is expensive. In high school, most people are not much into raising a family. They don’t take that into consideration.
Later, that may become, depending on how your society is structured, more important to women than to men. Also, men masturbate more than women. So, men are constantly going back to the things that help them have orgasms.
[End of recorded material]
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Then there is a principle behind that, which is that people whose features are easily decoded might be more beautiful. You can view these features as valuable. Asymmetry is often a symptom of lack of sexual or reproductive fitness.
If someone has a droopy face, for instance, or something on their body, people are analysing attractiveness, but if you’re writing a spec. sitcom among high school freshman. You don’t need to necessarily go into the various framings of things.
It is just hot-on-hot. People have been using the football player and cheerleader shorthand forever. Now, it is totally hack, but if you want to write about that stuff – then you might do the exact same deal. Except with cheerleader and football player, it could be the modern equivalent. What would be the modern equivalent?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: A fit person with high status.
Rosner: Something equivalent to a fit person in 1980 with status then and now. It is somebody who is physically healthy and attractive. It is not necessarily anything beyond that.
[End of recorded material]
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Everyone, as they’re trying to feel out their place, has hot on hot as the safest bet. So, people don’t know what they’re doing yet. When people get older, you can call it “settling” or “becoming more sophisticated” or some combination plus some other stuff.
Where people learn to value other stuff than pure hotness or coolness, they learn the purely hot or cool may be nightmares. Also, there is also what makes being hot or being cool is something that needs to be taken back to a demonstration of reproductive health.
The more physical features that replicate reflect other features that represent reproductive fitness too. If you look at butts, and other things that look like them, then they can look like an amalgam monster of reproductive health.
There are fractal theories of patterns that are repeated in people, where those repetitions in shapes over and over on their body might be more beautiful than someone who doesn’t have that, which is semi-BS.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/06/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The frames can be mixed up too. There’s a biological anthropologist named Helen Fisher. She studies love. She studies long-term love with three separate concepts, but then ties this to different personalities and different dominant neural circuits, and the neurotransmitters, associated with it.
She has this nice scaling up. She applies this to statistical models. O believe she has been an advisor for Match.com. There are cool things that you can do. But I think it also helps separate the “wheat from the chaff.” You can differentiate that kind of anthropological work and biological work from pseudo-work like the Law of Attraction.
That appear to be popular in America and are bogus.
Rosner: You mean Oprah’s The Secret. You think positive thoughts and so on. Yea, that’s just bullshit. There are actual mechanisms for making it happen.There are all sorts of ways of talking about falling in love. You can talk abut evolutionary theory and sociobiology.
There is shorthand stuff, like for middle school or high school. Hot people will hook up with each other. IN 8th grade and 9th grade, the pioneers in hooking up are, for the most part, the very coolest kids. They have the highest demonstrated value.
[End of recorded material]
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/06/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you remember when we were talking about Errol Morris a little while ago?
Rick Rosner: Yup.
Jacobsen: So, his idea of the framing of a photo. Usually, when talking about a universe of discourse, it is a well-defined set of parameters for discussion on a topic within traditionally well-defined fields. IC lenses are fuzzy lenses, it is continually keeping in mind what is outside of the frame in a fuzzy way.
If it is biology, you understand, at the end of the day, that this has an underlying root in physics. It is just that this is a more convenient way to talk about this scale of organization. So, you use these scales and these stories.
Rosner: Yea, you talk about couples falling in love with mating behaviours rather than the biology or chemistry of it with the release of serotonin. You could go farther with out serotonin and dopamine work to regulate synaptic whatever, and then you can take it further and further down into the constituent molecules, but at that point you’ve gone way too far.
You are way out of the context of couples forming for most discussions. Some people’s jobs are to talk about the chemistry and biology and feelings of falling in love, but you don’t need to go that far when you’re talking about falling in love – within a…
If you’re asking someone for help about how to write a romantic comedy, the chemistry and biology may not come up.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One thing from IC are narratives or stories that describes things relevant to your informational framework.
Rick Rosner: That may just be a general idea from philosophy. If you want to explain something, then you want to explain something that is most appropriate to the context, where people expect that all of biology and all of chemistry will eventually be able to be boiled down or eventually built up from physics.
That includes that we as natural humans do. So, physics would not only include the hard sciences but the soft sciences like psychology. You can run this back to how atoms behave. That kind of idea that everything would boil down to physics probably inspires some people to be fearful that biology and chemistry would go away.
That probably wouldn’t be the case. You mentioned – off-tape – a universe of discourse, which probably means everything gets its own context.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: If the universe – if particles are made of – is made of information, then why? Why do we have to think that? Particles can be made of anything, at least in naive first glance. Why information?
Without going into some rock bottom foundation philosophical thinking, one why is particles must be made of information because that is what they appear to be made out of. That there are a lot of fundamental particles or elementary particles or subatomic particles.
That are nakedly just information. that don’t have any moving parts. That aren’t anything but the mathematical description of what they are: photons, electrons – don’t have, as far as we know or all evidence, smaller constituent elements.
Protons and neutrons have been found to be not fundamental. Protons and neutrons have been shown to consist of quarks plus the particles that hold the quarks together. So they are kind of complicated, but electrons appear to be just point-wise particles.
That exist in the form of probability clouds.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: But that doesn’t mean that you have to see everything through the lens of multi-worlds theory. There are probably other theories that have a similar deal. String Theory may become a more powerful tool for describing the world, but, right now, it hasn’t delivered enough specific predictions to be very useful.
But at some point in the future, String Theory could be worked out so that it might be a framework that is helpful in certain instances. Feynman, there’s a Sum Over Histories principle that says particles take very possible path between point A and point B.
That is a helpful framework for doing certain quantum tasks. But it is not something—if you’re sufficiently trained in quantum mechanics, you may have this in the back of your mind, but you don’t need the Sum Over Histories principle to do quantum mechanics.
None of which gets to the question of why we exist rather than not, and the reason for the ways we exist. That is, 3 spatial dimensions, roughly with an asterisk and that asterisk being quantum effects at small scales, and the curvature of space at huge scales.
One temporal dimension too.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: But you want to talk about the Many Worlds in that way, that is not just acceptable, that is pretty much undeniable but when I talk about Many Worlds like some thing across an abstract space like the set of all worlds in which you’re able to see JFK assassinated. Those things may have some mathematical legitimacy. In that, you might be able to itch some quantum wave signature that could have another world and another time in a quantum wave that describes a universe like ours, but JFK didn’t get assassinated. But whether that means that that world has a kind of existence, you could probably argue it either way.
And probably it doesn’t matter, except as something that is fun to think about and is a convenient framing device. And it is something that you can also do physics without. You can’t do quantum physics without quantum indeterminacy, without addressing big systems where there is not enough information to assign one definite state to some aspects of that system.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Perspective like the Many World perspectives helps understand things better. There will be optional ways to frame existence that may or may not be provable. But are convenient for things. I feel that Many Worlds is a possibly unprovable proposition, but is convenient for talking about certain aspects of the world. There are some aspects of Many Worlds theory that are woven into the universe. Quantum Indeterminacy, Schrödinger’s Cat deals, except subatomic particles, those are real alternate versions of the world that can be presented via some very precise quantum math.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/05
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Perspectives like the Many Worlds perspective. I have a feeling that when we understand things better. There will be optional perspectives, optional ways to frame existence that may or may not be provable. I feel like Many Worlds is possibly an unprovable proposition, but is convenient for talking about certain aspects of the world. There are some aspects of Many Worlds theory that are definitely woven into the universe.
Quantum indeterminacy, Schrodinger’s Cat kind of deal but with subatomic particles, those are definitely real kind of alternate versions of the world that can be presented via some very precise quantum math. If you want to talk about Many Worlds that way, that’s not just acceptable. That’s pretty much undeniable, but if you want to talk about Many Worlds across some abstract space like the set of all worlds where Kennedy didn’t get assassinated and so on.
Those things may have some mathematical legitimacy because you could describe some quantum wave signature. If you had world enough and time, you could describe a universe like ours, except Kennedy didn’t get assassinated. But does that mean that that world has some kind of existence? You could probably argue it either way and it probably doesn’t matter except as something that is fun to think about and is a convenient framing device.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/04
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: We have the principle that you can only be in one world at a time, or that at least macro objects that you interact with are unitary and not shapeshifting. They are consistent and not shapeshifting from being—your phone isn’t shapeshifting as if it changing places with phones across alternate worlds. Macro objects embedded in history don’t behave that way, embedded in our worldline.
There are processes going on that keep us confined to a world that is shifting and non-existent, except for the natural processes of physics, biology, and chemistry, and everything. The only allowed changes among the allowed things in our environment are based on physics and causality and random shifting among many worlds is precluded. That’s a good first step for talking about the whys.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/03
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: You wanted to talk about the whys of informational cosmology. We have covered the hows. We have covered the whys to some extent. We can try to cover them more systematically. This will be pretty hand wavey and flailly. We can start with the principle that things exist. The principle that things exist. The obvious—if you start with the statement, “things exist.” It is because we experience things exist.
Things may not exist in the way we think they exist, which is kind of the Matrix Principle. That what we’re experiencing is not necessarily reality. There is no permanent existence. That is, when we die, our experience of the world goes away and everything may eventually wink out of existence, but within the frame of existence that we seem to exist in a world that exists. We can talk about that apparent existence as something.
Whether it is true or not rather than pure nothingness because we don’t experience pure nothingness, we experience the world and ourselves, regardless of the deep reality of that experience of existence. Then you can get into existences of “Why can it exist?” versus “Why must it exist?” Those questions you’d hope would boil down to the same question. That when you have the things that can exist, that leads to further questions.
“Why this world among all of the possible worlds that exist?” That leads to things like the Many Worlds Theory. It says, “Any world that can exist does exist. We only see the world that we’re in. Why can we see this world and not other worlds?” Because we’re made of an informational relationship between this world. We have a history of interaction with this world. This is the world we’re in and interacting with.
It has a tautological stink to it. But if we were in another of these possible worlds, we’d be other people who would exist within the context of having a history with those other worlds. So it goes back to the question that kids ask, “Why am I me and not somebody else?” It is because you are defined by your memories, tendencies that have been set up in your brain for how you process information.
Your history as yourself. All of which constitute your identity. If you were somebody else, you’d be that other person because all of your information pertains to you, which has the stink of tautology. So trying to sort out why this world must be our world versus other possible worlds, there are arguments to be made that the other possible worlds are not possible for various reasons such as that we have a history with this world that precludes a bunch of other worlds.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/02
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Another thing you can do by correlating variables that by combining variables that are strongly correlated with one another. There is as it turns out a strong correlated between parental income and SAT scores. Alright, so, how about a correlation between grade point using AP scores – giving a bonus point for taking AP classes – and grade point not taking AP classes? Those are probably correlated.
So you throw out AP grade point, no AP grade point. You take the two highly correlated variables and then combine them. In a universe, in an IC universe, some variables should be highly correlated. If we’re looking at protons as representing some kind of variable, highly correlated variables should be spatially proximate. They should be close together. If they are super close together, then they pretty much act as one thing in the information space.
They should be locked together, say in a nucleus – or at least in a molecule. A molecule is a looser aggregation of protons, neutrons and electrons than a nucleus is, but they both represent a locking together. If we’re right about matter representing information in variables, then it is a locking together of correlated variables.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Another thing you can do by correlating variables that by combining variables that are strongly correlated with one another. There is as it turns out a strong correlated between parental income and SAT scores. Alright, so, how about a correlation between grade point using AP scores – giving a bonus point for taking AP classes – and grade point not taking AP classes? Those are probably correlated.
So you throw out AP grade point, no AP grade point. You take the two highly correlated variables and then combine them. In a universe, in an IC universe, some variables should be highly correlated. If we’re looking at protons as representing some kind of variable, highly correlated variables should be spatially proximate. They should be close together. If they are super close together, then they pretty much act as one thing in the information space.
They should be locked together, say in a nucleus – or at least in a molecule. A molecule is a looser aggregation of protons, neutrons and electrons than a nucleus is, but they both represent a locking together. If we’re right about matter representing information in variables, then it is a locking together of correlated variables.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/30
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: You can set up an information space to see how these variables correlate with each other and the dependent variable that you’re trying to suss out, which is success in college. Some variables are going to be less correlated with each other in this N-space than others. Let’s say geographic location or latitude – or longitude—say longitude and college grade point, it will be all over the place.
If any correlated at all, it will depend on if the kid grows up in a city or a rural area. Cities and rural areas are not randomly scattered, but scattered throughout the country, so longitude will not be any indicator of academic success. You can reduce the dimension of your N-variable because that is a crap predictor. Ideally, what you’d want to do is boil down the complicated N-space into a more compact thing in N-space.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/29
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: The alternate IC interpretation is all of that stuff still happens, but protons represent some nugget of information – say a variable that contains its own axis. Loose protons out in the universe or ionized protons out in a cloud out with ionized electrons, so it’s an energetic cloud.
They are only loosely linked via proximity to the other ionized particles in the cloud, but a lot of gravitational energy has yet to be released. These axes are each represented by a proton. These variables are free to vary in the same way as if you had two things not strongly correlated. It is statistics.
N-dimensional information spaces, say you have the n-variables that might predict how well a kid can succeed in college. You can probably come up with 20 variables that might have an impact, SAT scores, GPA, parental income, age within the school year – whether December or April being born, extra-curriculars and what ones.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/28
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Stars, it is easy to fuse raw protons, which are Hydrogen nuclei, together. The easiest thing to do in a star is to fuse Hydrogen into Deuterium, Tritium, and then Helium. Mostly. That takes the least amount of pressure. It takes more pressure to turn Helium into stuff. As stars cook down, they do a lot of stuff. They cool down, expand, and sometimes blow off the outer shell. Depending on how much the various elements are in the star depending on the size of the star, some stars can hang up to the point where they are almost entirely Oxygen and Carbon.
That’s a smaller star. A bigger star, the one the size of our Sun can keep cooking until it is almost entirely Iron. But at some point, there’s no more energy to be gained from being further cooked down and smushed down. Most stars stop, but some bigger stars can keep going to become neutron stars, and can be mushed down – probably not the right thing to say – and they are kind of one big nucleus.
Other stars can keep going from that point until they are a blackish hole. Iron is the last element that you can produce as a huge percentage of the mass of a star. The elements beyond Iron are kind of produced in like artisanal batches by supernova explosives, where the pressure wave pushes through heavy nuclei and smushes them further together, but the curve of binding energy. It is the curve of how much energy it takes per nucleon – per proton and neutron—
It is the binding energy there is released for each nucleon in that nucleus. It reaches a peak at Iron. To get any heavier elements, you will not be creating energy. There will not be any large scale burning. That’s how heavier elements are formed, in the interior of stars as they boil themselves down and then explode.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/27
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why elements, or heavy elements, in an IC universe?
Rick Rosner: If IC is true-ish, you have to answer “Why heavy elements”? from two perspectives. You have to answer it under the Big Bang and the IC perspectives. Some elements formed from protons smashing together in the early history of the universe. You know, the first few seconds, where you have a ratio of 12 Hydrogen atoms to every Helium atom to small percentages of Lithium and Beryllium.
Everything else has to form within the interior of a star, where things cook down under huge pressure. Stars run from fusion. Fusion is protons being fused together into heavier and heavier nuclei. When two protons are fused together into heavier nuclei, into Deuterium, one of the protons flips into a neutron, which is basically what happens in all of fusion. When you have proton-rich matter that gets smushed into heavier and heavier nuclei, and more and more protons get flipped into neutrons, there is energy released from each act of fusion.
Because it takes, naively, energy to pull a nucleus apart, which means that when you put a nucleus together you release energy. It is in a lower energy state than when its contents were separate. You mush two protons or you mush two nuclei together into a bigger nuclei. You generally release energy because that combined thing is in a lower energy state. That’s what power stars.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/26
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: By working locally, you can achieve a lot of efficiency without achieving optimal efficiency.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That’s funny. Maybe, that’s the reason for segmentation into relatively definite structures at various scales in the universe.
RR: Yea, I mean, the interactions among particles have highly local aspects. Where you can envision two atoms, you have two atoms. They are a centimeter apart. You can picture on atom emits photon and the absorbs it. You can draw a line between the atoms based on the photon exchange. Feynman says or anyone good at quantum mechanics says you can draw the line, but it takes place across all of space and time.
So optimization in space and time reflected in the structure of space and time is mostly local, but that the optimization is good but imperfect, which makes sense in that it reflects a sloppy universe that we live in.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: You can start to build a time out of association. Where you’ve got atom A and atom B interacting a lot, we also see that atom B and atom C interact a lot. But as you look the different interactors, that you can further order things so that you can make further efficiencies because A and B may interact a lot at a given time and A and C may interact a lot at a different time.
I don’t know how you pull time out of it. Anyway, the universe is built on space and time, and space and time are built on efficient arrangements of association, of highly associated particles.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So they’re aren’t maximally then, as a closing statement, but they are optimally efficient given various constraints.
RR: They are sloppily efficient. You’ve got these interactions. You have these informational efficiencies and rules for informational efficiency, or for the efficient structuring of space based on the interactions – space and time based on associative interactions. Based on interactions, which are themselves associative, those—you can assume that there’s going to be some of those principles of ordering space and time are going to be efficient without being maximally efficient.
Because they probably depend on local efficiencies. But there is a multi-model approach here too. You can represent the information here in various ways. There’s that underlying efficiency.
SDJ: There are the higher-order efficiencies too.
RR: There’s the “Travelling Salesman Problem” or the salesperson problem. You have to figure out the order of cities that minimizes the overall distance the salesperson has to travel. It turns out to be a problem that blows up computationally the more cities that you have. There’s not an algorithm that can find you the overall shortest distance without doing a huge amount of calculation.
Let’s say, and I don’t know the math exactly, this is probably not the case, but computationally it is similar to the case that you have to look at all 11 factorial paths. 12 factorial path, among the cities to find the shortest one, that is a number that blows up hugely when you go to 20 cities and 100 cities. To find the absolute shortest path would eat up a lot of computer time.
But there are some algorithms that find you some good paths based on just comparing a few cities at a time, like 3 or 4 and building the shortest path among those 4 proximate cities, then the next 4 proximate cities until you’ve established a locally minimal path among each set.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/24
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: They’re all just little Tinker Toy parts. It is a handshake between atom A and atom B. There are 10^160th of these handshakes. How are you going to arrange them sensibly? Well, you can start grouping them by – you may notice that as you shuffle the contents of the bag – certain pairs of atoms. They may have exchanged 10^7th photons. You find that many handshakes between two particular atoms.
You find a bunch. Then you find a bunch of other interactions where they’ve had only 1 handshake in your bag between A and B. You set all of the sets of handshakes. You set all of the combinations of 10 million handshakes with each other into one pile. These are ones that are heavily related to each other or associated with each other. On top of that, you decide in our universe that the more interactions that two particular atoms have with each other, then the closer we’ll put them.
It minimizes something. It minimizes the distance that photons have to travel in the space that we’re constructing because the more associated things are then the closer we’ll put them together and that’s an efficiency. You can build something out of that association.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/23
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: The clumping is—if you have a library of interactions or the set of all interactions in your system, space and time are ways of orienting those handshakes between particles in such a way that the total aggregate distance is minimized. In the space that’s established, particles that do a lot of interacting with each other are going to be closer to each other. It minimizes the distance of these interactions when they’re a lot of them.
If those particles are interactions a lot, you put them close together to minimize the distance in the space the interactions are creating, and minimizes the time the photons have to travel. A reasonable arrangement of space minimizes space-time, basically. It puts things closely associated with each other close to each other in space and time.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So the mass in a given cubic volume of space can imply the amount of information or information processing potential. The greater the mass in a particular volume, then the greater probability for high levels of information processing; the lower the mass in a particular volume, then the lower the probability for high levels of information processing.
RR: I guess so. Another way of looking at it. There is no essential difference between two atoms a millimeter apart exchanging a photon and two atoms that are 10 billion light years apart exchanging a photon. There are huge differences, but there are some essential similarities. For one, in both instances, the photon experiences zero time in transit between the atoms.
SDJ: Yes.
RR: because photons travel at the speed of light. Something travelling at the speed of light doesn’t experience space or time. It sees space as infinitely compacted and time as infinitely dilated. If a photon were able to experience the world, it would leave one atom and arrive at another atom a blink of nothingness. It wouldn’t be traversing any space or any time.
SDJ: But relative to space, the time it takes for exchange for photon contact with whatever the thing is proportional to the relevance of the information. So the farther away something is in the universe, then the less relevant something is, mutually.
RR: Say you’ve got a bag that has 10^140th photon exchanges. You’re trying to arrange those things in an efficient way. They’re all the same.They are a photon leaving one atom and hitting another atom. The bag is your universe, even 10^160th interactions. You build a universe. Build a universe that makes sense. All of these interactions are basically the same.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: You’ve got tacit and present information. I don’t know if they are sharp divisions or exactly how they work in the universe. Obviously, each coin in the universe is processing based on its vantage point, on what it sees. What it sees is what radiates at it at any given instant, the radiation can take various forms. It’s probably by, if you’re going to do a census of the radiation passing through a point in space that may or may not have matter in it, I would assume most of the radiation would consist of photons.
You would still have a lot of neutrinos. If matter in that space, you have lots of evanescent particles like pions and gluons. Stuff that keeps track of keeps nuclei together. You’ve got both virtual particles and real particles. Virtual particles, you could consider maybe even a different form of tacit information. A sea of understoodness that provides a base of framework in which the real particles can have their interactions.
So you’ve got those forms of information. Then you’ve got the manifestations of those information. One large manifestation is the distribution of matter in space. The clumps you see when you look out at the universe. The nuclei and the distribution of molecules and crystals, the Solar System, galactic clusters, galactic arms – which are temporary clusterings of stars, then galaxies and clumps of galaxies and filaments of galaxies at the largest scales.
There’s information in all that clumping. I assume that the mega-clumping, the macro clumping, is or provides information that can fit into the history hopper if you’re going to provide classified information by historical, tacit, or present information. That clumping represents a vast history. Then you’ve got the flux through space of photons and other particles. Though it is a sloppy division because it is the flux of particles through space that provides the information about the clumping that you see.
You don’t see anything without the flux, without see the distance radiation of the universe.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That’s where the main associative part comes in. No connection between parts, micro and macro, in the universe and no information processing there, in the major way at least.
RR: Yea. So that’s pretty much it.You can stipulate or say that one thing that is going on is that things that are clumped together and closely associated with each other have more interactions with each other. A clump of atoms or a given cubic inch of ionized atoms in the center of the Sun will more mutual interaction with each other per second than an atom in the center of the Sun than an atom in 10 billion light years away.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/21
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Another thing is where the information might be in the universe. I tried to systematize it. I see three types of information. Although, this is not an inclusive list. This is what sloppily comes to mind. Information based on history. That’s kind of past information. I don’t know if that is its own category because that’s macro stuff. Particles to a great extent themselves do not have a history or a capacity for history.
Looking at protons or electrons in isolation, you can assume certain things about their history. But electrons look all the same. To a great extent, protons look the same, but you can look at their guts. You can look at their fleeting internal configurations, probably detect them. But not much history, the history they do have is fleeting. Any history you find in the universe is a reflection of what’s happened and is accessible in the present will be at the particle level.
Then you have tacit information, which is things happening in the universe that don’t disrupt other things in the universe. The lack of disruption means that the universe is assuming those things happened anyway. Then you have present information, which is you have things in the universe happening and disturbing other parts in the universe – whether that part is ten angstroms away or 10 light years away.
It is the adjustment of the universe to new information and other things happening in the universe. So tacit and present information work together. It is the unfolding and incorporating of information into the universe. If there’s—basically there’s this particle flux through space, where every millimeter of space has a gazillion photons flowing through it at any given instant.Those photons are either going to hit something and cause an absorption in space or not.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/20
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: There’s an idea or a shade of meaning that you know pretty precisely, but there’s no one word that hits close enough to be satisfying. So you either have to string words together o better ou abandon that precision and go, “Well, who gives a crap? It’ll be close enough.” What’s weird about the world is that close enough is good enough, we reach out to grab something. Our reach and our grasp is sloppy and never infinitely precise, but we can still grab stuff.
The universe tolerates imprecision. None of our actions are infinitely precise. Yet, we can still do stuff. That’s due to the macro-structure of the world where you’re not trying to line up one atom in your finger precisely over one atom of the thing you’re trying to grab. The diameter of your finger is – I don’t know – 10^8th atoms wide and the thing you’re grabbing if it’s a grape is also that—
If you grab that grape a 100 times, your average or the average offness—or standard deviation of where you grab that grape might be 10^5th atoms or 10^6th atoms or more, but every time you are able to pick up the grape because you can pick up these even with this vast imprecision. We are macro things in a macro world and that macroness allows us to exist and over a long period of time as opposed to things on a micro level because they are incompletely defined in the world.
Our macroness allows us to exist and to interact with other macro stuff.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/19
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Also, off-tape, we were talking. What you were describing in things, it brought Gödel to mind. His two incompleteness theorems, where you’re dealing with partiality of information. A universe with incomplete information, but built on simple principles, would come up with, likely, just by natural development or an organic development, an associative form of information processing, which is both incomplete but probably the most efficient given its conditions.
Rick Rosner: I think one reason people are fascinated with Gödel incompleteness theorem is that it generates all sorts of objects in the mathematical sphere like propositions that are either true or false, but can never be proven true or false. I think there’s the idea that any axiomatic system that is sufficiently complex will generate weirdly undecidable propositions. So that’s one thing that’s interesting.
It’s scary in that one of the efforts of 100 years ago by Whitehead and some other people was to put mathematics and logic on an unassailable foundation of pure—it was to have an infinitely defendable and concrete system of math with a completely unassailable foundation. That Gödel says, “No, there are always going to be pitfalls and exploding principles and that it introduces the fear that there may some aspect of math that makes math blow up.
That it is fundamentally inconsistent and you can’t prove anything, which is apparently not the case. You may not be able to prove anything to an infinite degree of certainty, but we live in a world that’s highly existent. At the same time, at the smallest scales, it is completely nebulous and fuzzy and only on the borderline of existent. It is only when you get macro objects that you get definite existence.
So even in a Gödelized world where there is not an infinite certainty or precision in anything, you can still build a solid world.
SDJ: Our language reflects that too. When we describe things, they are not complete, but given certain conceptual mappings. They describe something incompletely, but you string a bunch of sentences together that are appropriate to context and that provides a sufficient mapping in the other person’s head based on their interpretation, if similar culture, similar conceptual mappings, similar language to relate to those. But it is incomplete. It is rough.
RR: When you’re trying write, one thing that frustrates me is that when you’re trying to write as precise as possible you’re trying to reach into lexical space for the right word. Sometimes, you can get nearly the right word. Other times, there’s just a missing word.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/18
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Basically, the interactions define their position and given all particles are defined by a bunch of random interactions. All of those particles are going to have roughly the same velocity, roughly the same uncertainty in position. Every one of them is going to be roughly as jittery as every other particle in that gas, excluding border conditions where particles in the corner of a container, say, will have different interactions than those in the middle of the container.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That’s intriguing. It’s effective theories again. Not only effective theories, as you’ve explained, as we’ve talked about, describing liquids and gases, which means the physics appears to be very established. If you take a 10-degree turn on that into digital physics lane, IC lane, you come into the thought, at least for me from what you’re saying, of an effective theory of information.
Where things are being defined within a given volume over a certain amount of time, that can be described as an effective theory of information. An effective theory of the definition of data in a volume plus time, range – time range.
RR: Yea. When you say effective, I think practical.
SDJ: Yea. In colloquial terms, in common language, it’s a “for all intents and purposes” theory. Right?
RR: Yea. What’s crazy is that quantum mechanics, which is introduced to people with all sorts of disclaimers saying, “This is not the world you know. It is kinda crazy. If you think you can picture or understand quantum mechanics, then you probably don’t.” You can probably pick up a bunch of quotes from big physicists like this such as Feynman. That things are so absurd or strange compared to our macro world.
But in a way, quantum mechanics is supremely pragmatic. How can you define the world when you can’t define the world precisely? How can you know things when you can’t define things completely?
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/17
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: So if you go to the two-slit experiment, and it doesn’t have to be just two slits or two holes, it could be a Swiss cheese experiment, where if you shoot a photon at a screen that has a bunch of holes in it and then you measure that there’s a screen and there’s your target, the screen is between the gun and the target. The screen has holes. These holes are the only holes the photons could go through.
Say it is sheet metal with holes punched through it, a detector behind the metal screen. It turns out that this setup – if you don’t have individual detectors on each of the holes to tell you which specific hole the photon passes through, then you will get an interference pattern on your target wall that shows that each photon more or less, to some extent, passed through every hole on the way to the target.
Given that photons tend to travel, roughly—well, I mean, if there’s a hole that’s like 10 miles away, you won’t get the much of the photon passing through the distant hole. But if the holes are a few centimeters or millimeters away, and you’re shooting from a couple ten meters away, and if you’re shooting each bullet of light one at a time, each goes through a hole. Which says informationally that if you don’t have any way to determine by setting up your detectors which hole the photon went through, it will go through all of them.
So that information only exists to the extent that in the universe it is defined by its relationship with other things in the universe. To the extent that everything is defined in the universe, everything is defined by objects’, particles’, mutual interactions. It is a bit like the number line thing. I suspect there are an infinite number of twin primes because there is not enough information in the mutual interaction among the various prime values to stop there from being an infinity of twin primes.
Similarly, you can’t have enough interactions to infinitely precisely define every object in the universe. You can set up an experimental apparatus to really pin down particles or the aspects of a particle. Its position and velocity. Some things can’t be really precisely defined. But you can define some particle or system if you hang enough scientific apparatus on it, on a system, then you can detect a heck of a lot about it.
But this is at the expense of the universe. By focusing on some particles, other stuff will be less defined. You have a choice about what you want to define. Everything in the universe is roughly defined to the same extent in just normal interactions due to random action. Like the molecules in a gas are, generally, somebody would do a statistical analysis, but there is an average definition of a particle in space. Particles define one another via their interactions.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
Everyone is for globalization. It depends on what you mean by globalization. It can mean the grassroots form through which people gathered together in communities and cooperatives to form networks from the bottom up.
Or, it can mean the networking and structural integration of large-scale companies across the globe from the top down. In either case, people like the idea of globalization because it is the wave of the future and it is continuing at an increasing pace.
It will unlikely be stopped outside of some catastrophe. That means that we need to get our house in order to prepare for a global economy, which we have to a large extent. At the present time, ethical and sustainable fashion can be an moderate and integral part of this.
It is something that needs to be expanded upon and explored. Since it is such a new large-scale phenomenon, we need to take to account that there are avenues that will not work and other avenues that will work to varying degrees.
The vast amount of networking that needs to be done is the place where exchange of common values can breed exchange of common knowledge. The exchange of knowledge can let us know what works and what doesn’t work with respect to globalization.
For the bottom up, that means from the artisans and the producers in small to moderate sized businesses. I see nothing wrong with this. It’s good. Anyway, I remain a bit on the fence because I see the need for a pragmatic approach with respect to the inter-linkages of small to moderate size companies and even some large-scale corporations.
Because the infrastructure is so deeply embedded that it would seem nearly impossible to simply remove it, but it can be shifted. And I love hearing about the stories of individual makers, artisans, and ethical and sustainable fashion company owners.
These are the people that are forming the basis for a movement and a new form of consumption. Forms of consumption that are consonant with the sustainability goals of the United Nations. It’s an exciting time. And globalization is an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of this form of productivity and economy.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
By the end of the century, I would project the majority of energy will be either nuclear or solar (or both). Those forms of energy production will lead to different forms of consumption.
The kinds of things that the world needs are different sources of energy to meet the increasing demands of energy consumption. We can live sustainable lifestyles. These can be moderate in benefit, if diligent.
On the other hand, we do need to take into account the increasing needs of technology in our lives. Our collective energy consumptions are higher in spite of the increased efficiency of technology.
This is a common trend. This will be a continuing trend. However, the energy consumption will continue to increase because of the higher number of devices in our homes, in our cars, and our buses, in our schools, and, even possibly, in our clothing.
Even so, the efficiency will continue. Our knowledge of energy production and consumption gives us options, and those options breed both higher consumption and greater efficiency. It’s just that the efficiency isn’t keeping up with the consumption.
It can be counterproductive to use terms like ‘good’ and ‘evil’, or ‘dirty energy’. They don’t mean much, really. Because this can lead to simply labeling something as good or bad in terms of emotional valence, emotional value.
Rather, descriptions of impacts on individual lives and the reasons for certain things being better in the long term might be more effective, though less emotive. Solar energy is an increasingly desirable source of energy because the price of highly hydrocarbon producing energy sources continues to go up while the price for alternative energies such as solar, geothermal, wind, and someone, keep going down.
If you take the same amount of energy produced in the cost of producing that energy for each source of energy, alternative energy sources are becoming more economically viable. Tie that to a lifestyle, or make it part of it, we got it made.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
Science matters. Science, or natural philosophy, finds patterns and principles about the world. Those come from the linkages and associations between facts found out by science. Facts are important. Facts bring to light the nature of the natural world.
That is, natural philosophy means science because science discovers the patterns and principles about the natural world. The nature of important global problems come from scientific matters. Of course, we have terrorism, religious extremism, malnutrition, disease, genetic disorders, natural disasters, possible and improbable threats of large asteroid impacts, and others.
Nonetheless, one major problem is climate change or global warming. Global warming stands atop or near the top of major problems. The facts that comprise the trend line of increased parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere and increased temperature over the recent centuries and decades point to a warming earth.
That means local weather and global warmth are changing because of this. This is human industrial activity among other things. We can mitigate the problem by taking into account our own patterns of consumption, and acting on it. That’s where ethical and sustainable fashion can make a mark. We can waste less.
We can wear biodegradable clothing. Companies can advertise and market towards increased awareness about this. Of course, my own slant is that as far as the science is concerned. The nature of climate change is an engineering problem.
It is too big for individual nations or corporations, or collections of small-to-moderate sized businesses to manage. Each of the small and moderate businesses do their part. However, I know the fact that the major solutions to do with geothermal, solar, wind, nuclear power to ‘combat’ global warming are large-scale engineering projects such as solar power fields or nuclear power plants.
At the end of the day, in the next 25 years, we will need to transition into nuclear and solar power. In the next century, we will likely by the end of it come to a dominance of solar power. Although, sunlight hits the earth at incredible rates. The total global consumption is about 1/10,000th to 1/5,000th of the total radiation or sunlight that hits the earth.
Therefore, our consumption is quite limited with respect to solar constant. The amount of radiation from the Sun impacting the Earth. Much of certain wavelengths of light reflected back into the Earth increase the heat of it. All of these are engineering feats and discoveries with engineering solutions. It might require geo-engineering.
For our part, with respect to clothing and fashion, can bring awareness to the problems, the facts, and to the responsible consumption patterns of those in the most developed countries in human history. That means us.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
I have an idea about a minimum pledge not to do with a pledge for minimum wage. Not to do with a minimum pledge for fundraising, rather, it’s a minimum pledge for change in lifestyle. This could mean changing light bulbs. Using less water through laundry, or in dishes. So, a minimum pledge for making small change to sustainability in personal life.
Professionally can be included to because aspects of professional like include a work environment that doesn’t necessarily promote sustainability. So, do you want to take the pledge? Sustainable living is an attempt, albeit an optimistic one, to limit the carbon footprint of an individual, which includes yourself or myself.
There’s lots of ways to do it. You can look at your means of transportation. It doesn’t have to be absolute. You could use a car some of the time. You could use the bus at other times. You could bike some of the time or walk at other times. Also, you can look at your own energy consumption with electricity or gasoline. You can look at the diet that you have.
For instance, some diets have a larger carbon footprint than others. Much of the carbon output comes from the home. Another major kind is meat consumption particularly beef. I don’t recommend this trend of living off the grid. It seems pretty involved and probably ill-advised to me, but if that’s your thing then okay.
You can look at having solar panels on your roof. It’s becoming much more feasible as a form of energy in terms of its cost especially. You could look at hybrid cars or electric cars. There are more charging stations and grids for electrics cars being put up internationally and more companies and cars being put up that work with those electric means of transportation.
You can look at newer cars with more efficient engines because the design, the chassis and the engine, might be lighter in weight than older cars. And a minimum pledge would simply imply that we use just one of these means. Or others that aren’t listed. So, want to take the pledge?
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
One of the major parts of women’s rights, empowerment of women, and international women’s rights comes from knowledge to the individuals, the women – and men too (in an inclusive, humanistic, and respectful way), and each of these areas from NGOs, companies, and campaigning in labor rights organizations.
NGOs are non-governmental organizations that can work on the behalf of women in the garment industry or for international women’s rights in general. Companies can implement working conditions and pay that is adequate to the task.
And campaigning and labor rights organizations can focus on the specifics of day-to-day work life for women throughout the developing world, even in the developed world. NGOs, for instance, can focus on women’s access to decent and well-paid work in addition to redistribution of unpaid care.
Unpaid care can mean things like gender responsive public services. Men don’t give birth. Women tend to choose to have children. That takes time from work, and possible career advancement – if the job implies it.
Look at poor urban or peri-urban areas in Ghana or South Africa, even India, the raising of consciousness, raising awareness about sexual and reproductive health rights is important, too.
If you educate individual women or groups of women in these areas, word-of-mouth can be another way for further education through community organizing from the information acquired from NGOs.
One of the benefits of NGOs and companies and labor rights organizations that work towards international women’s rights with the empowerment of women is that there will end up being less gender inequality and sexual discrimination.
If you can provide women with some means of earning money that can allow them to be not economically dependent upon men, or just economically independent, it can permit them to be able to freely associate and freely work as they see fit, and allow them to likely have less violence or to be able to leave conditions of violence because they have the funds to do so.
That is also related to being economically dependent upon either some company or a possible partner. Other things that can be put into the workplace, for instance, or in the local area, can be things like anti-harassment telephone helplines that can help provide backup for women. This can be safe and secure and the people that are on the other side of the line can be knowledgeable and help women in poor conditions.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
When I reflect on human rights, I can’t not think about international women’s rights. Women all around the world have rights to many things. This can include freedom from oppression. You can include a promotion of the recognition of current rights.
It can mean civil rights to food, housing, education, to the right to vote. I think these are all important. And I wish to express that these are very important things in the world right now because women have for most of history never had these.
I mean for a lot of recorded history. Women have been economically dependent upon men. I mean economics is the basis for currency and currency’s the basis for buying things. Money is the access point to most things in society. If it’s gonna be a car, then that means travel.
This can be a house, which means shelter. It can also mean socioeconomic status which is related to income. Especially in the current year of high university tuition prices, that can lock out women because they do not have as well-paying jobs as men.
That means their ability to gain access to education is worsened compared to men. If you look at the single parenthood rate, it is mostly women. There are more single mothers than single fathers. It is almost tautological to say this because it is so common knowledge. I think so.
Actually, the single motherhood rate is rising all throughout the world at a consistent rate. It does not seem to be slowing down. That means single parenthood, which is mostly women, is going to be increasing, and so the same for single motherhood rate. It’s going to be increasing.
And we are seeing extraordinarily promising trends, we are seeing glass ceilings go away for many, many areas. We’re also seeing problems for boys and motivation. But that’s different than ceilings. But the fact that more women are getting educated than ever before means that they can gain access to take their jobs at higher rates than ever before.
And jobs that were traditionally seen as less respect worthy are gaining more respect. I think of nursing. Most nurses are women. Also, the positions have a tremendous amount of respect and cachet in society are being taken by women such as medicine and law.
These are promising trends. Women gain the right to vote in the United States in the early 20th century. And the right to vote in Saudi Arabia in the early 21st-century. These are positive trends, but there is a lag time culturally for changes to happen for women.
A lot of this is tangled up with international women’s rights. Women’s rights are one of most important parts of societal development because if you take something that I’ll call a meta-metric for measuring women’s advancement comes from looking into the empowerment of women in each society. The more that women are empowered, then the more that the society thrives on every relevant measure.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
Bold title, this seems like a necessity to me. But not as much as the need for highly trained scientists in the knowledge economy and Computer Age, we can’t not do without it. We need it. Without the technological know-how to comprehend the natural world with precision, well, we’d be in a real mess.
We won’t get our scientific answers from religious texts. You won’t get it from pseudoscientific ideas like Reiki or Chi. Never have, and very likely never will, at least accurate, real, natural pictures of the world.
Although, we might find moral guidance on these issues. We need to send out our questions to the natural world through experimentation and wait for an answer. And that leaves us to ask about what experiments have been done, data has been gathered, and concerns, problems, and issues for human survival that have come out of this. Answer: many.
Environmental science is an interdisciplinary academic field. It works within the confines of information science, biological science, and physical science. It is a vast field. But it does have important elements. Relevant to major issues such as overconsumption and the waste from it, and climate change or global warming.
If we know that there is vast amounts of overconsumption and waste, the answer seems clear to me. We have run experiments. Well, not me or we, but the professional scientists. The answers have come back from the natural world. The answer is that we have tampered with the environment to such an extent as to produce what some call the Anthropocene.
It is a period of such power for humankind based on our technology that we have sufficiently altered the chemical and biological makeup of the atmosphere and biosphere to cause mass extinction and pollution. The pollution could end us.
Climate change or global warming is an immediate concern as well as for the long-term. That means engineering and other disciplines are relevant to it. Now if it’s the case, and it is, we need to move forward in development of technologies that can better integrate our societies into nature with current levels of living.
Because people tend to not want to lose their standard of living. Especially for the children, they want a better life for the kids and grandkids. So I want to make a call. A call for action on education.
And an educational movement for more environmental scientist to work on these issues immediately. It will take half a decade at least to train people to then be put in the field. Once in the field, these individuals would be sufficiently skilled and knowledgeable to advise, design, and implement technologies that could weaken the affects of climate change and overconsumption.
We are already doing too much. We have already caused a lot of damage. Our descendants will feel the effects of all this activity. But I think that we can at least make major moves fast to reduce the effects of the problems we’ve created.
This could be issues like reduction of biodiversity, endangering species, soil contamination, water pollution, greenhouse gases, airborne contaminants, noise pollution, light pollution, surface runoff, and other panic-stricken concepts.
But it doesn’t have to be. And we can do something about it. We can do something now by training the next generation of some of the most needed scientists of the early 21st century.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
Lima culture comes from Lima, Peru, which was an indigenous civilization to Peru. It lasted from the years 100 to 650. The society was known for its ceramic artwork. It is constructed many, many temples. At present, Lima is one of the major population centers in Peru.
It is part of the early Indian culture, which was a time that the indigenous peoples created an oasis in the desert. The cosmology of this culture was magical in orientation. They lived in mythology and world by their light of spirit and the spirit influence the health and wealth of the land and people.
There was a drug use associated with coca leaves, which appears to have a hallucinogenic effect. There were sacrifices made to appease the various guns. These propitiations can be found, in remnants, via human burials of children.
The culture began to decline around 600 to 2 climatic and environmental alterations through droughts and El Niño. That prior indigenous conglomerate Alina disbanded and was dominated by other groups passively.
These ancient Peruvians never developed a system of writing. However, they did develop images and signs that were then woven into cloths and painted on fabrics, which was a pictorial language that communicated their cosmology.
With regard to textiles, they used cotton and animal first such as llama and alpaca. Textiles were an important part of the culture because of the consideration of wealth and status through them. Depending upon the textile, poor could not acquire or purchase sometimes.
But the rich could buy or acquire certain textiles. The textiles have evolved through it hits history to have various tapestries and blankets with differential natural dyes, which have various anthropomorphic and animal science, and geometric organizational and structural patterns.
These were the everyday clothing. There were ceremonial robes. And then there were the textiles that were made for design of religious worship center such as temples. The zippy things like wall hanging textile patterns woven into cloth.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. The development, adaptation, and speciation of species. The theory comes from that text. Early evidence is followed from the HMS Beagle voyage. Evolution is true; evolution is hard, too.
It’s often the target of illogical counterarguments and counterexamples. Because of misunderstanding, deliberate and unintentional. Evolutionary theory defines various classifications via taxonomy.
Taxonomy is about classification; the scientific study of classification. This is in biology. Evolution defines us, human beings, as one single species. It is not in a vague reference such as groups, races, ethnicities, genders, but, rather, we are defined as a single species via scientific classification. What does this mean?
It is such as a profound insight as to seem redundant, and so it’s hard. One reason is tautological seeming things are skimmed over. And it’s incredibly nuanced and deceptively simple. It means one of the most profound social and cultural interpretations from natural science in the modern era.
Over the last century and a half, this has not gotten enough press. It is a profound fact that all the conversations around ethnicity and race are in some fundamental, objective ways inaccurate. Even public science communicators such as Bill Nye say about the same thing, but he argues for it as a single race.
I disagree with Bill Nye on that single point. That’s an outmoded term ripe for wrongful interpretation picking, selective quoting. Species is scientifically accurate, though race might be a colloquial olive branch. I am making an identical if not highly similar argument to him from the science of evolutionary theory, biology, and biological taxonomy.
The tree of life is a literal representation of taxonomy in a visual format for ease of interpretation. It’s from single-celled organisms to multicellular organisms to mammals to proto-humans to primates such as humans.
Human beings as a species are one. It’s a little less ‘airy fairy’ to me. And it is concrete. It is based on naturalism, empiricism, and science. That appeals to me. Not only that part, but it is true. But if you look at the international landscape and the timescale of evolution, the human species is only 100,000 years old.
And that means the 2,000, or 6,000-year-old civilizations are a blip on the evolutionary radar. That makes the idea of a single species profound. It breaks the barriers and boundaries of concepts that are quite minor by comparison, and even anti-scientific, pseudoscientific, or even junk science.
You can note the distinctiveness of cultures involved in sustainable fashion including the Maori in New Zealand, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis in Canada, Native Americans in Americas, the Incas and Mayans in South America.
And the suite of others throughout the world. These individuals are remnants from ancient historical periods and civilizations. On the evolutionary timescale, all ancient and old civilizations are a blip on the evolutionary record, of the human species.
Ethical and sustainable fashion is based around nuances and differences in clothing, which are part of cultures, sub-cultures, and personal identities. Cultures that are simply various facets and expressions of individual human beings that are part of one common human species. We’re all one, even the science says.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
I want to have some fun exploring some of the so-called ‘deep’ issues of sustainability through science and rationality and weave these back into the context of textiles. For the first part of this series, we will join together in an argument for science as a branch of philosophy and this should set the stage for part two to do with rationality, which will pave the way for part three devoted to science and rationality together as applied to environmentalism and how this includes textiles in a fundamental way – economically, too. Besides, this is a mere scratch on an iceberg, and the rabbit hole is rather deep, but if you’ll entertain my musings then I hope to return the same to you.[i]
Philosophy has come under a bad wrap recently, and this seems pretty wrongheaded and ahistorical, but, in sympathy and understanding, this makes perfect sense with some thought and seeing where others are coming from here.
We live in an area of the ascendancy of science and technology, or natural philosophy and its products, which originated with Aristotle in the 4th century BCE with the foundation of biology and taxonomy (animalia and plantae as the two original classifications for animals and plants, respectively).[ii][iii]
That is, the domination of the functional knowledge from the scientific process and the technological implementation of its knowledge in society.
In the developed nations, we can’t not see it, and the developing nations are going to be continuing to have to pay attention to it with even the simple consideration about the ubiquitous representation of cell phones. But what is science? It’s not so easy. Most have ideas, but these involve implicit premises about its definition, and its extent by implication.
So, what is it?
Science, any system of knowledge that is concerned with the physical world and its phenomena and that entails unbiased observations and systematic experimentation. In general, a science involves a pursuit of knowledge covering general truths or the operations of fundamental laws.
Some posit an epistemological naturalism for the foundation of science, but, in principle, science does not close off to these aspects of the world outside of the naturalistic. However, the tendency in history without formal argumentation seems like the trend towards natural explanations for natural causes. There’s even disagreement about the definition of the word physical. Does it mean simply material?
Physical is an issue. It’s mostly empty space and relative to an organism capable of detection of the sensory world, where “sensory” originates from the senses in conjunction with the central nervous system, mostly the brain receiving signals from the spinal cord and efferent nerves.
So if the physical world is a bit naïve, then what’s physical – material?
That can be an issue as well because the definition of the material of the world can be a bit fuzzy. An ancient school of philosophy called the atomists posited the fundamental units of the world as atoms, where the basic constituents of every single thing in the universe are indivisible units of stuff, atoms – which is pretty much a direct translation of the modern term. So physical becomes material becomes atoms.
So physical, if it means material, means atoms. Is that really accurate? Well, up until the 20th century, it seemed convincing, but the march of science changed the conceptual landscape of the world. It only gets worse, no joke. Although, the gruesome nature of the nature of the plumb’s length is pretty much the joke, if that’s your kind of humor.
And these sorts of assertions about the principles, let’s stick with principles, of science show a jagged refinement of the process. It’s not only certain monoliths. It’s got dynamic parts, as well. Constituents that manage the general nature of its processes, or its overarching operations. Well what are they, hotshot? They are observation, review background information, state the problem, form a hypothesis, design and perform the experiment, collect and analyze data, and draw conclusions.[iv]
And if this is seen as the scientific method, that really, really gives the whole game away because science is not just knowledge, or organized networks of information and assertions that define disciplines – nope, nope, triple nope. It’s a bit of those, but those are derivative; they come from the scientific process practiced by people in coordination with machines and tools, too.
I think of it as upstream-downstream with technology at the top and this feeding down into the economy, general culture, social life, public policy and so on. And, once more, this needs some backdrop. First, science means natural philosophy. Or, more properly, natural philosophy means science, because natural philosophy derives from philosophy – and natural philosophy garnered the name in recent intellectual history.
[i] Alice in Wonderland: Chapter I (n.d.). states:
In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs.
She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled `ORANGE MARMALADE’, but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.
`Well!’ thought Alice to herself, `after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!’ (Which was very likely true.)
Carroll, L. (n.d.). Alice in Wonderland: Chapter I.
[ii] Del Soldato, E. (2015). Natural Philosophy in the Renaissance. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
[iii] science. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/09/15
Bobbi Paidel, founder of Tribe of lambs is a Canadian Nonprofit company working to empower and enrich the lives of at risk children in India. Through the sale of their ethically made, high quality jewelry line. Read more about Bobbi and her work!
How did you get involved with ethical and sustainable fashion?
I ended up in India for 7 months after I worked in the fashion industry in Toronto for a few years. I had become a bit jaded with the superficial and unethical sides of the mainstream fashion scene.
It wasn’t who I wanted to be, so I ended up in India. I was volunteering in an orphanage, when I really began to recognize the situation for children there. At the same time, I started working with jewellers and artisans making pieces of jewelry, clothing, and accessories.
We decided to make a difference by having a crowdfunding campaign for the kids. The campaign was such a success we decided to launch a full non-profit. When I returned back to Canada, I partnered up with two friends Dani and Phil. Together we started what is now Tribe of Lambs.
What do you think is the most important part of ethical and sustainable fashion now, especially with being jaded?
People are focusing more on things that are organic, how they’re living their lives, and living in compassionate and meaningful ways. It is trickling down into ethical and sustainable fashion. People are really asking themselves important questions…Why does this shirt cost this much? Who made it?
Before, we never thought twice about it. It is an exciting time to be a part of sustainable fashion because it is progressing so quickly. People are turning towards that rather than bargain sales and mass produced products.
What was the origin of the title Tribe of Lambs for the company?
The name came from brainstorming with my friend Sarah who encouraged me in India (and also designed our logo and website with her company Superfein Creative Agency). The name stands for the tribe or the community that we’re building of conscious shoppers and people into social causes, and the togetherness.
The lamb is representative of the kids we’re supporting. Standing alone and; not supported, they can be weak and vulnerable, but together we can help empower them to have a strong and powerful life.
What are its feature products at the moment?
We have sold a lot a variety of jewelry and; accessories. However, we are currently streamlined to focus on rings. We use a motto: “One ring, one heart.”
Each of our rings are named after children that we support so that we can honour their stories and; keep connected to our mission of supporting children living with HIV. We have unisex rings as well as bracelets, necklaces, tote bags, and scarves.
What other work are you involved in now?
Tribe of Lambs, as part our business model, focuses our funding on our Compassion Projects, which works for the support of at risk and HIV positive children through partnerships in India.
We are currently partnered with Ray’s Home for HIV Positive Children in Jaipur and together we have launched our 6th Compassion Project; the School Scholars Project. We’re raising $13,000 to send 54 kids to school for a year. That’ll be tuition, books, bags, and uniforms. Everything that they’ll need. We are at 65% of our goal since launching in the summer.
We also have a sponsor who is supporting our mission and projects. It’s a heating and plumbing company in London, UK called Ramki which is run by a friend of the Tribe who uses the buy1give1 model for his business.
The Compassion Projects are really what we’re focused on besides selling jewelry and fundraising initiatives to maintain a sustainable income for our organization.
Where do you hope Tribe of Lambs goes in the future?
Our two big long-term goals are on either side of our business model. Firstly, we would like to create our own jewelry cooperative in India to train and employ HIV positive men and women handcraft our designs and offer them independence through employment.
We are currently outsourcing our jewelry. I go there and design it, but I work with a small family operation who produce everything. I trust them completely to work very closely through the process but we want to offer the same opportunity to adults with HIV, as well as have complete transparency of our supply chain and production methods.
Our other goal in the next five years is to expand Ray’s Home. They currently have space for only 57 children, it is our goal is to help them increase the capacity by double or triple, as well as increase the living conditions of the children currently there.
There are 3000 children living with HIV in Jaipur city alone, with enough housing for 200. It’s a scary statistic. We want to work to improve it.
Any thoughts or feelings in conclusion?
It is to have the opportunity to share our story and hopefully to inspire people to shop ethically with other products. There’s always an avenue online. Consumers have such options, limitless options, to buy products that are made ethically or have an after-impact.
You can buy something you’re going to buy anyways and can empower the life of somebody else while you’re at it.
Why not do something good with the power that you hold when you purchase something?!
Thank you for your time, Bobbi.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/09/14
Christine Dubin believes in the vision of creating a better world. Her business MIOU is a socially and environmentally responsible knitwear company that stays true to the principles of producing fair-trade and eco-friendly products.
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
I am originally from France, but I now live with my family in the charming little town of Gibsons, BC. I studied fashion design in France, and have always gravitated toward classic, quality-made clothing. When I became a mother, I became very interested in children’s fashion and wanted to come up with a line of clothing that reflected my values.
What is the importance of ethical and sustainable fashion to you?
It is evident to most of us by now that our rate of consumption is not sustainable; we are polluting and damaging our precious environment, and we are starting to see some changes in weather patterns due to global warming. Sadly, our innocent children will suffer most from our mistakes, and this does not seem right to me.
Also, being a mother in Canada, I have been blessed with a good standard of living. It is so upsetting for me that mothers in developing countries are vulnerable and suffer great hardships; they are struggling to earn a decent living and care for their children.
This is why it was important for me to create a business that takes environmental and social issues into consideration and do my part in helping to alleviate these issues in the best way I can.
What is Miou – source of its title, and its mission, productions, and vision?
Miou’s mission is to have a minimal environmental imprint and improve the lives of the women we work with. We strive to grow and improve, create increased opportunities for impoverished women in Peru and worldwide, and also continue to reduce our environmental impact.
We want to create a holistic business that has the balanced energetic flow of providing and receiving so we can help heal our people and planet while creating one-of-a kind, quality clothing.
What makes the company unique?
We have strong ethical principles that we prioritize over profit. We offer quality clothing that is unique and produced slowly and skillfully. Each piece is like a work of art, and we are very lucky to be working with an exceptionally talented group of women.
What challenges arise in founding a company?
It can be challenging to find a balance between juggling business and family. When I founded my business, my youngest was not going to school yet, so I had a limited amount of time to dedicate to growing Miou.
Creating my business also added financial stress as I had to take on loans without a guaranteed outcome. They were many ups and downs, but through perseverance and learning, Miou is now more stable and continues to grow.
Any advice for women in business?
As a woman, I am operating my business in the spirit of care for others and the environment. I think that this is an important characteristic; as more women own businesses, this can help us create a better world.
My advice to other women is to stay true to their feminine principles while doing business so that we can influence the mainstream business world towards a broader perspective of harmony.
Any advice for new business owners?
To be patient. Success does not happen overnight for most business owners. It takes time. When starting a business there is much to learn, and the likeliness of making mistakes is quite high, especially for new projects.
At Miou we have learned that if we are working on something we’re unfamiliar with, we invest small amounts of money so that if it does not work out it won’t be devastating, and can still be a good learning experience.
We have also learned to take the time to contemplate what we have accomplished, even if we are not profitable yet. It is easier to stay the course when we feel passionate about what we do.
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
I love going to Peru and meeting with the wonderful women who create our knitwear; these women are beautifully warm and also very proud, and they are grateful to be able to use their skills to earn an income, as the unemployment is very high in rural Peru.
I feel privileged to have them work for me, and it is important for them to feel appreciated and respected, as Miou would not be what it is without their talent and perseverance. We have a symbiotic relationship—working with the knitters and being able to make a difference in their lives is very satisfying to me.
Being creative is also important for me, and brings me deep joy; it’s my unique expression.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
We live in a world in crisis due to overconsumption. Products are often of poor quality, profit is the ultimate goal for many corporations, and environment and social rights are secondary.
Now that consumers are becoming more aware and wanting to care for the earth and the people who create their products, they are looking to purchase from ethical businesses who share the same values. As more businesses work from an ethical principle we can tip the balance to create a better world.
Thank you for your time, Christine.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/09/09
Over the past twenty-four years, Green Apple Active founder and veteran athletic designer Cristofer Smith and his team members have pioneered 13 brands with wild success, winning several international design awards for his unique fusion of comfort & style.
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
I’ve been in this business for 25 years. I was finishing a Masters Degree in International Business. A good buddy in school, his parents were manufacturing some of the best tennis shoe brands.
So, we would go to her factory and look around to have a couple beers at night and said, “Man, we can do this better.” That’s what brought us into this. We took our student loans and parleyed it into six sewing machines, built a cutting table out of plywood.
That’s how the journey began. 25 years later, 14 brands through all the world’s largest accounts, I now do my own brand because it is a vegan, organic brand. So, not everybody was into it, I said, “Okay, I’ll do it myself.”
I put my own finance into it. That’s what brought me here. There’s more to it, obviously. That’s my plan. That’s I got here in a design studio on the beach.
(Laugh)
(Laugh)
If you want to go before that, I grew up with 5 sisters. My mom was a model. We were from the Bay Area. She was trained by Jack LaLanne. We’ve always been in the health and fitness industry.
I raced motorcycles for a living. After I got older, I went back to school. My buddy and I decide to take our student loan and make this happen. That’s how it all happened.
What is the importance of sustainable fashion to you?
Of course, the most important to us here is something that is comfortable, feels good, looks good, and is healthy to the Earth. All of our stuff is certified bio-degradable from Nelson laboratories in Utah.
When I developed this fabric, this textile, which is our textile exclusively. We sent it up to Nelson Lab. That’s the US Lab for anti-terrorism. We put it up for many tests such as metals, pollutants and so forth.
No heavy metals, they couldn’t detect anything. It was also antibacterial. It protected 100% UVA, almost, and was the most breathable fibre on earth by nature without chemical treatment.
The fascinating part was when they put it into earth soil and sunlight, then it biodegraded within 42 days without any harm. That was the real positive part for us because the plastics – the polyesters and the nylons – never go away.
I’m repenting. I did polyesters for athletes for 18 years. People still ask me to do it, Scott. I have to decline the offers. I appreciate them. But if it’s not going to be this type of fibre, it’s not me anymore. I have three boys. One graduated from college in May.
In a nutshell, I started from the ground up. I am self-taught. Edward’s mom knew how to do everything. She was from Nicaragua. She taught us everything. The rest of it is trial and error. We built our own cutting tables, did our own markers and patterns by hand.
Now, it’s all computerized. So, I’m raw.
(Laugh)
(Laugh)
What is Green Apple Active?
Eco-active wear for free souls. It’s an active brand that is based on comfort and sustainability. Since I’ve been digital 100%, I stopped selling the big to big retailers a year ago. I went back and learned digital business.
I meet with people every week. Since I’ve done that, we’ve listened to the consumer now, which is what I used to call the end user. It’s very enlightening on why they purchase this brand.
90% purchase it for the comfort. The sustainability is second to the comfort. What I’ve done is based the line more or less on bottoms and pullovers, and jackets, the other stuff is carried. So, they can wear something vegan.
But I’m not into the high fashion mode. The end user has changed us. When you follow sales online, you get to see everything. We found out 85% of our sales were comfort with sustainability as a backup. We decided to go into that arena.
I got out of the competitive bras, tops, towels, and socks. By the way, I started Green Apple with the Golden State Warriors. They got my towels, sweatshirts, and socks. They freak out about it. That you can make a vegan athletic garment.
This is like 9 years ago. So, they bought it. They were the first ones to delve into it. I don’t talk about it because I didn’t get a license. I did it with the owner. He loved it. One of my cohorts and I flew up there.
They took good care of us. We went into the condominium there and the stadium. By God, it was a lot of fun. Now look at the Golden State Warriors, right?! I’m like gosh darn it. They wanted me to get the license and continue. But Adidas was all over us. I didn’t feel like going into that war.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
Besides being a dad, I design. I’m designing the line. I do all of the design currently because when I went digital I thought, “Let’s regroup this.” I stopped designing about 6 years ago. I brought on a couple of ladies.
I taught them the ropes. They did great at it. One of them wanted to move forward into another company. I said, “Go for it!” So, I took back the reins. I do production and design myself.
I have a partner. He’s from Asia. He’ll be over in a couple of weeks. We are opening up in Asia and Russia within the next 60 days. It’ll be digitally controlled, but I formed an alliance. I was in Shanghai. I think 5 weeks ago.
We got a good thing going over there too. We’re excited. They really like that California lifestyle there. It should be fun. For us, it is so cool to be able to experiment with a totally different culture.
I mean 100% different. So, this is funny because I told Eddie. My alliance over there. I said, “Don’t you think you guys should design it and do the website?” He said, “heck, no. This will build value in the brand. They like California brands.”
So, we are redesigning the website. We are going to release it this week. It’ll come in 5 different languages. It’s not redesigned for each different country. It’s the same one that we run in California.
We’ll run it here. They’ll do SEO there. We do design here in California. Isn’t that funny? It’s cool, bro.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
Being part of the ecosystem, the most important part for all of us in sustainable companies is multi-faceted, obviously, because we need to do our productions in a clean way, try to make sure our warehousing and distro is all solar energy, and everything should be done as close to home as possible.
I understand athletic apparel is a niche market and it’s special. So, it’s tough to get it done in America, tough period. When they say ‘America, getting it done here’, there’s not one American in the factories.
And I owned factories. I can vouch for it. It’s multifaceted. It’s about being solar powered, doing clean fibre, processing it in a clean way, and going as far into your company as you can, and being as environmental and sustainable as possible.
Saudi Arabia, that’s my Middle Eastern customer.
(Laugh)
Breaking through, for us, in a nutshell, that’s it. We’re trying to get everyone into solar power, even the dye house has solar power.
Gradually, the business is changing. Let me tell you, it is the stubbornest trade because everything’s on sale all of the time. So, there’s no money to invest in infrastructure. It’s been a very tough journey for me.
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
I want everybody to come along on the journey. Think about what they’re purchasing, try to help us with vendors out here build a better world, make a healthier garment, and look forward to having our kids wear something that is a little cleaner.
For me, it’s so profound I can’t tell you. I lost a sister to environmental cancers. So, for me, it is very profound as a statement. Clothing is, and especially in the athletic trade, right next to the largest living organism called the skin.
Polyester is a direct derivative of plastic. So, when you read about plastic, you’re reading about polyester. It’s a few versions down. It is prudent to teach mom’s, who are getting hip on that.
I have gotten fed up with preaching. So, I’m not going to preach to you. It’s been a real long ten years. Ten years of working on going green, and I slept around in China when there was nobody over there in farmlands trying to find the right plants.
I went to Austria to find things like eucalyptus. I wet around the world to find the right plant for the active lifestyle. Bamboo came out ahead of everybody.
Thank you for your time, Cristofer.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/09/08
We have a chat with Mallorie Dunn of Smart Glamour, an affordable, fashionable, and customizable ethical clothing line for people of all sizes.
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
My name is Mallorie Dunn – I am a 29-year-old fashion designer living in Astoria Queens in NYC. I’ve lived in NYC for over 10 years now. I started making my own clothes and teaching myself to sew as a preteen.
When I was a junior in high school, I began fashion sketching classes and then sewing classes as a senior. I continued to study Fashion Design at FIT in 2005, and then studied Art and Design Education at Pratt Institute.
I worked in corporate design, in the Juniors ready to wear sector – for about 2.5 years, and then left after feeling creatively stifled and frustrated at the varying negative attributes of fast fashion.
I switched to freelance and part time work – doing everything from tailoring, to tutoring, to technical design, to custom pieces – and during that year, I had the creative and physical energy to start thinking about what was really important to me when it comes to fashion. I landed at accessibility, ethical practices, and quality garments – which led to me to launching SmartGlamour in February 2014.
What is the importance of ethical fashion to you?
Ethical fashion is important to me for many reasons. As someone who handles every part of design – from conception to execution – I strongly believe that workers should be treated fairly and paid appropriately.
No matter how large SmartGlamour grows – the production of our garments will always, always be ethical. Additionally – I don’t feel fashion is truly ethical – unless it is accessible to all bodies; this is a cornerstone of SmartGlamour.
What is the importance of sustainable fashion to you?
Sustainable fashion is important to me also – for many reasons. I believe in quality over quantity and I believe fast fashion is hurting the planet in numerous ways. We devalue ourselves, so we buy low quality inexpensive clothing that doesn’t fit properly – because we don’t think we deserve better.
We throw it out and hurt third world countries in the process. It’s a dangerous cycle.
What is SmartGlamour?
SmartGlamour is a body positive clothing line of ethically made, customizable fashion basics for sizes XXS-6X and beyond. We promote self acceptance and body love.
We have three main very broad goals: to empower women through clothing and help them on a road to body acceptance, to make good quality clothing that is sold at affordable prices, and to cut away at women on women hate that stems from insecurity and the belief that beauty and brains can not go hand in hand.
What makes the company unique?
What doesn’t? Everything about SmartGlamour is unique. The fashion world as a whole – is very exclusionary and pretentious – and that’s something I detest about it. Clothing and expressing oneself should be for everyone – and so SmartGlamour is for everyone.
When I say all, I actually mean all. I do not shy away from the reality of human being’s bodies/shapes/abilities/differences – that is what makes the world a beautiful place. So I highlight those things – by dressing everyone, and celebrating everyone.
We also do this ethically – with available customizations. I have not found any other company that does what we do.
What is the greatest challenge in founding a business?
The greatest challenge in founding my business specifically is simply doing everything myself. I not only design and hand make every item we sell – but I also take care of social media, customer service, public relations, photography, videography, marketing, and more. There are never enough hours in the day.
What meaning or personal fulfilment does this work bring for you?
Phew – everything. SmartGlamour would simply not exist without it’s message of body acceptance and self love. I’ve had customers cry tears of joy in my pop up shops, decide to show their arms for the first time, buy their first swimsuit, etc – having accurate representation of bodies – and giving all bodies access to the same fashion is powerful.
It is teaching everyone that their body is not wrong – contrary to what the mainstream media is trying to tell us.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
Well – I think they were always important. But, I think consumers are becoming more conscious of the companies they spend their money with and where their clothing comes from. Even if not just for the ethical stand point – but because they want to get a quality garment for their hard earned money.
They want clothing that fits. They want to spend money on brands that they believe in. And companies that are ethical not only in production but also in practice and in representation are leading the way.
Any advice for women in leadership?
Love what you do. Stand up for yourself. Ask for what you want. And don’t forget to take care of yourself.
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Follow SmartGlamour on social media – @smartglamour, and shop with us! At www.smartglamour.com We also host one-day pop up shops around the country – so request your city, and come out when we are nearby!
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/09/07
INLAND is a Canadian designer shopping event, a platform for designers and brands to sell their collections directly to shoppers, read on to know more about INLAND and Sarah. The founder and creative director behind the event.
Tell us your story of how you got into fashion.
I started doing a degree in communication studies, which lead me into a variety of roles including not-for-profit. It oddly involved me in getting a teaching degree, in education. I did a lot of travelling through it with the time off. I was Germany. I really, really came in tune with some of the design scene happening around the area.
Europe is pretty phenomenal. I was not comfortable in what I was doing. I returned and went to school for fashion. I went to the clothing show in 2007, which was a 25-year running semi-annual trade show that brought in about 300 vendors. It was international. There was this boutique section, Katie’s Desires. I became fascinated with that area.
I went on to do some other things. I decided several years later to revisit the idea. The clothing show has collapsed. I was looking at this transformation of the retail environment, even locally and looking at local designers. There’s significant work around fast fashion.
Many organizations are looking to bring light into the harsh and troublesome reality of all of that.
I rolled into the Canadian design scene, local manufacturing. I decided it was the perfect time to start a show that focused on promoting those things. That’s where INLAND came to life.
What is the importance of ethical and sustainable fashion for you?
If we want to preserve humanity, if we want to preserve out creative culture, we have to look outside of the fundamentals of now, what looks good or fashionable. It is not about what is made fast and cheaply alone. It is about human beings who are in the living environment. We need to consider all of these aspects and put them together.
At another level, it comes down to survival. It comes down to survival of multiple species and in a healthy way. It is about education, ground-up networking. It is about educating children. It is about lobbying against corporations. Everything works better in the social fabric to think ethically and move in that direction.
With respect to expanding, you have mentioned in a short promotional video the need to or the hope for expanding into other parts of the world. Other major fashion centres. How would intend to go about doing it?
The concept of pop-up, which is what INLAND is founded on, is immediate short-term reach out opportunities for a curated environment for contemporary designers. They come together. The nature of that business means that it is not static. It is not tied to brick-and-mortar situations.
It is able to move around the city, the country, the globe and gain international recognition. We live in a global world now. So, to take Canadian design on a global level, that recognition of the different brands and labels that exist. Unfortunately, fashion does have this need for glitz and glam, and credibility.
Canada has not made its mark internationally, but there is the opportunity to make that happen by taking the brand outside of the country rather than trying to build inside it. It is trying to do it from both directions. That is the reasoning behind it. The process for doing it is taking a show and popping up in different cities and growing from there.
One of the ways that this seems to be done is propping up certain fashion design people, have been around for a while, and have become personal heroes to people. Are there people that have become personal heroes for you?
First and foremost, I respect the emerging designer. I respect all designer, but the emerging designer is someone facing a vast landscape of competition, challenges, personal and social ethical debates on how to pursue a collection, how to engage with your customer.
So, my heroes are the designers that take the lead deeply into their passionate field.
That is to design. It is very, very, very, tough to survive in that marketplace. I have to put it back on all of them. It is hard for me to point out a particular individual.
The majority of garment workers are women. Sometimes, children are a majority, dependent on the region.
Do you see ethical and sustainable fashion as concomitant with women’s rights, child rights, be implemented – e.g., good working conditions, children don’t work, children aren’t slave, women have decent working conditions, women have decent pay, and so on?
Absolutely, absolutely, it is a fundamental part of ethical and sustainable manufacturing. It is to ensure that we are all living in a healthy, social situation, and not just in “developed nations,” but across the world.
That’s a given. There’s no reason for anybody to live that way. I think this revival of traditional methods of manufacturing: small batch, slow fashion, shopping local.
It gives the public an opportunity to learn about the process. It has made pursuing that craft for everyone quite ‘sexy’ now. Before, people weren’t pursuing fashion design sewing careers.
Now, people are taking on the craft. I am hoping that this is going to grow with regard to being in Canada and North America so that we can have a balance on a global level.
Absolutely, women and children in poor countries are the typical person doing these jobs.
What other work are you involved at this point in time?
I work full time at the art gallery in Hamilton. I am the digital marketing and social media communications coordinator. So, I work in an arts community in Hamilton. I’m from Toronto. It is an industrial town built on industry. Therefore, there’s large, large factory warehouse areas with extremely cheap real estate everywhere.
It is a growing design and creative culture area. Hamilton is becoming the new Queen West in Toronto, or even the Brooklyn through New York. There’s a lot happening in the city. There are artists taking up spaces and starting businesses. Hamilton has a lot of idea. My 9 to 5 is working at the art gallery in Hamilton.
What personal meaning and fulfilment does this work, INLAND and the art gallery, bring you?
It allows me to connect directly with designers and creative people. I find that fascinating and inspiring, which pushes me to continue to want to promote them. I did go to fashion design school. I didn’t produce a collection. I didn’t have the determination or skill set, or patient, to be able to do that.
What I do have is an extraordinary enthusiasm for the art of design and I wanted to be able to promote that, that’s what I wanted to focus on. Being in those environments fuels my energy and pushes me forward to help them out.
Last question, any thoughts or feelings in conclusion?
I think potentially just speaking to the ethical and sustainable fashion point. There’s lots of questions and ideas surrounding what is made in Canada. Running a sustainable fashion pop-up, I get asked that a lot.
It is important for the industry to come together and start defining it and to look outside of that term for the sake of the designers and businesses that are here and have a good mind about what that means.
It is about who made the clothes and not where they were made. That’s what I have been focusing on for change and hoping that’s a positive one, where that takes me.
Thank you for your time, Sarah.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/09/06
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
Born and raised in Vancouver, BC, my love of fashion started at a very early age. By the age of four, I received my first real sewing machine and I enjoyed a lot of mother-daughter bonding as she taught me how to sew.
A moment stands out in my memory of a time when my cousin and I were playing with Barbie. She disappeared into the other room and quickly reappeared with a miniature bathing suit she had sewn herself! The idea delighted me and I honestly think that’s what planted the seed in my mind that I wanted to create fashion.
After graduating from Kwantlen University Fashion Design program and several design and patternmaking positions, I bought a patternmaking service bureau called Fashionmark. In total I spent 20 years perfecting my craft and honing my ability to design excellent fit across all size categories before starting my first fashion brand; Diane Kennedy.
What is the importance of ethical and sustainable fashion to you?
Along with fashion, my other true love is gardening. When my son was little, he would play in my backyard often as I gardened and I realised very quickly that I absolutely did not want my young child sitting and playing on a lawn pumped full of chemicals and pesticides.
This lead me to think more about what we put in our body, as well, and I made the decision to change our lifestyle to one of a more organic nature.
I guess you could say that when I became a mother, I became a bit more “Mother Earth”, too. From how I take care of my family to how I take care of my business, I want to make sure I am leaving a positive impact on our environment.
In terms of the ethical qualities of my business, when I hear tragic stories of factory accidents in Third World countries, it breaks my heart and only bolsters my resolve to uphold my social responsibility to the global community as a business owner and consumer.
I strongly believe that it should not be anyone’s goal to make a profit at the expense of another’s quality of life.
In general, what is the company Diane Kennedy – its mission, productions, and vision?
Diane Kennedy’s mission is to provide comfortable, yet flattering clothes to mature women of all sizes. We endeavour to accomplish this by ethically working with local factories & vendors and using Canadian made goods where possible.
Being a plus size myself, my vision for Diane Kennedy is a fashion line dedicated to making women feel beautiful no matter their size. We want our garments to find women who have struggled to find clothing that’s tailored to them. We want our clients to feel included and respected by the fashion industry (and by everyone!) by giving them something everyone wants: choice and inclusivity.
Aside from those basic descriptions, what makes the company unique?
Diane Kennedy is unique because nearly everything we sell is made from Certified Organic Bamboo that is knitted in Canada. As well, we only work with Canadian vendors and factories, so we can proudly say we’re truly “Made In Canada”.
The Canadian-made bamboo itself is incredibly luxurious and comfortable to wear because the fibres are very smooth and non-irritating, making it an excellent choice for those with skin allergies. The weight of the fabric gives a very elegant drape without being too clingy.
It’s a high-end, luxury fabric with the comfort level of your favourite pyjamas. On top of that, our line is well known for our fit. While many fashion lines use one pattern to cut their sizes, we create 2 patterns; one for Regular & Plus Sizes, to ensure the best fit.
You sell sustainable, eco-friendly, and organic clothing. What is the importance of these fashion trends?
It’s funny that you should categorize them like that. What others may consider a “fashion trend” has been part of my business model since the very beginning, nearly 10 years ago.
“Fast Fashion” is a real problem in the industry right now.
I think it’s incredibly important that both business owners and consumers make choices that contribute to our global community and does not support the manufacturing of poor quality, “disposable” garments. I want to be part of an industry that isn’t the 2nd largest polluter on the planet. We are a business in this industry that creates quality, timeless fashion.
You use organic bamboo. What are the benefits of bamboo for selling clothing?
I love the fact that the bamboo fabric we use is knitted right here in Canada, at a mill that uses eco-ethical practices such as Hydro-electricity and dyeing methods which meet high Canadian Standards. The fibre holds dye remarkably well, and the colours on our fabrics are rich and deep. Our black bamboo fabric is such a gorgeous, true black.
This means that, in addition to being incredibly sustainable (bamboo is incredibly flood/drought resistant, does not require pest/herbicides or water irrigation to quick grow high yield crops) it is also incredibly resilient, making it a long lasting textile, perfect for garments that are expected to be worn often!
You aim to create figure flattering clothing. What does this mean in more concrete terms?
My experience as a plus size woman, in addition to my extensive design and technical background gives me great confidence in my understanding of a woman’s figure and how to highlight our best features.
In my years of dressing women, I pay attention to how we dress and how we wear our clothes. For example, mature women like to have freedom of movement in their back & shoulders, while still having coverage for their arms.
As well, women like to have a choice of pant widths to accommodate areas of varying sizes of bumps like at the hips, thighs and knees. A smooth silhouette in the front to accommodate a curvier bust and torso as well as extra fabric in the tummy area are all considered. These are just a few of the things I need to keep in mind when designing to flatter all body types.
What is the importance of a plus-size movement and plus-size garment niche?
While other brands are starting to finally recognize the Plus Size community as a relevant market, Diane Kennedy has always had all inclusive sizing from Small through to 3X.
When I began research for my brand, I came across some very telling comments from women in our target market. It quickly became clear that Plus Size women wanted to shop for the same clothing and brands that are readily available in regular sizes.
It was dismaying for them to have to shop in the back corner of the top floor of a department store. These women wanted the respect of not being treated differently because of size.
And so, it became my mission to focus on providing a fashion line geared towards great fit on both plus and regular sizes.
You work out of Vancouver, BC. What benefits come from having the company there?
Vancouver has a burgeoning but thriving fashion industry, fuelled by such local (but internationally recognized) clothing companies like Lululemon, Arc’teryx and MEC. These companies are very well known for their social/eco-conscious practices and it’s wonderful that we are all based in a city that is quickly becoming one of the most well known “green” cities in the world.
Our studio and warehouse is right in the heart of our garment district, where many of Vancouver’s clothing factories are located. This is such a boon for us, as it means we are within walking distance to many of our factories, giving us the ability to oversee production easily.
Where do you see the company heading into the future?
While the Fashion Industry is constantly evolving and developing new fabrications and technology, we like to keep our roots firmly planted in the idea that the fabrics we use are proven to be of exceptional quality.
Our clients appreciate the classic look of our items (like our Flex Pant & Serene Pant) and while we are always updating our catalogue of styles, we owe it to our loyal customers to always stock favourites. We are looking towards options for allowing a more personalized experience for our customers.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
Several years ago, we launched a brand new fashion line which we can also proudly say is “Made In Canada”. Cherry Velvet Dresses is a line of retro-inspired dresses geared towards women of all sizes (from S-3X) who love the classic look of Vintage/Retro/Pin-up style.
While Diane Kennedy’s core values center around Eco/Ethical practices, Cherry Velvet revolve around challenging the mainstream beauty ideal by catering our designs towards underrepresented sizes and providing empowering content with our social media presence.
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
I feel so incredibly lucky to be living out my childhood dream. While so many people are tethered to their 9-5, it gives me great joy knowing that what I do every day will make so many women happy.
It’s such a pleasure to see my clients in my designs and hear them talk about how great my clothes make them feel (both inside and out)! It’s a satisfying feeling to know that every design I produce is created with love, thought and consideration for how they’re made and who they’re made for.
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Thank you for the interview. It was a pleasure to chat with you about my passion for size inclusiveness and eco-responsibility in the Fashion Industry.
Thank you for your time, Diane.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/09/02
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
My name is Maryanne Mathias. My business partner Molly Keogh and I cofounded Osei-Duro in 2009.
I was born on a small Island on an “intentional community” off the coast of British Columbia, and moved to Vancouver when I was five. I attended the Vancouver Waldorf School from kindergarten to grade 12. There was a strong emphasis on working with the hands, and I developed a love for making things from an early age.
I studied Fashion Design and Technology from Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver, and after graduating promptly moved to Montreal to start a small fashion company. I made all the pieces myself, and hand dyed them all myself.
After growing frustrated with the fashion industry in general, I decided to take a research trip around the world, and designed textile based capsule collections in Ghana, Morocco, Egypt, and India. This was the genesis for Osei-Duro.
What is the importance of ethical and sustainable fashion to you?
At Osei-Duro we believe that business should be intrinsically ethical, and should exist to support society both by creating helpful goods and services, and creating gainful employment. Unfortunately, that is not the case, so we try to do the best we can with our business.
What is Osei-duro – source of its title, and its mission, productions, and vision?
Osei-Duro loosely means “noble medicine” or “powerful magic”. We aim to support local handicrafts in emerging market countries, with our main focus on Ghana.
What makes the company unique?
We were the first to bring rayon and silk for batiking in Ghana. Since then over four companies have begun to do the same. We try to champion new techniques and ideas from traditional methods, to expand and support the apparel industry in Ghana.
Where do you see the company heading into the future?
We look forward to expanding our facilities in Ghana, while looking to other countries for production and inspiration.
What is the importance of respecting the rights and aesthetics of local workers?
We work in countries that are not our own, so it’s particularly important that we understand the culture and norms of those places. We try very hard to consider these when making decisions.
How does respecting rights and aesthetics of local workers improve the products?
This is an interesting question. At Osei-Duro we strive to preserve the traditional techniques from a country or region, but we reinterpret the traditional aesthetic. For instance, with our batiks, we use the traditional method of cutting stamps from wood or foam and dipping them in wax to form a resist before dying the cloth.
But we develop new prints that would not necessarily be considered traditional or even beautiful in Ghana. But I think our batikers are encouraged by making something new from the old. And find inspiration in that. Even though sometimes it can be challenging.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
I became a fashion designer because I loved making things. And as the business grows I find myself more and more aught up in the business development side of Osei-Duro. So I’ve decided to make things for pleasure on my time off. At the moment I’m making concrete and copper plant stands and pots, and cotton canvas painted wall hangings. I’ve also taken up a small balcony garden.
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
Whenever I get overwhelmed from the stress and consider quitting Osei-Duro I think of our first employee Kwaku. He is very hard working and loyal, and we’ve really seen him grow as we grow. If the business stopped he’d be out of a job, as would a bunch of our other employees and artisans.
So I’d say it’s the work and relationships and knowing that in some small way we are making an impact.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
Ethical and sustainable fashion is where fashion as a whole, is heading.
Thank you for your time, Maryanne.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/09/01
What is Efaisto in terms of its vision?
Fashion is a trillion-dollar industry worldwide. We are all affected by it. However, we think fashion is broken. We want to fix it by making fashion custom-made. That means ethical and sustainable. In order to do this, we need to build a global network of artisans.
The vision is to bypass large fashion brands to go straight to the makers of the products. By doing this, we are able to provide ethical products to the consumer, produce custom-made products from the producer.
Now, we are starting and sourcing in Vietnam with the artisans. We are selling mainly to clients in France and Belgium. It is to start. It is to expand sourcing countries because there are many artisans throughout the world.
Of course, it is selling to other countries. We want to expand to the rest of Europe and then the US.
In terms of Efaisto and its production line, what are the most prominent products?
We started two months. We began with four products: shirts, leather shoes, leather bags, and wallets. We want to start on a focused basis. We know there’s a market for these products. There’s not question about that.
We can redefine the product range by the fact that the products have a value to all customers. It is all handmade – by human hands, by artisans. We have a story to each product. With these two factors, custom made and handmade, this creates the product range.
Already, we know a lot of artisans doing a lot of great work on many, many products such as furniture too. Also, we have contact with people in South Africa, Peru, and Bolivia. At the moment, Vietnam is the major focus.
We start there, but the vision is to create a global network.
How is the relationship with the producers and the company?
Our relationship with the producers. I think they like us. They have been working in the neighbourhood for 40 years. They have been doing their business, doing it well, and doing it locally.
They are under pressure now because Vietnam is opening into the global market. So, we have to take global fashion brands. All of the Vietnamese consumers buy mass market. They are not going to artisans anymore.
They have been making products forever. Customers in Europe love what they do them. We say, “We can help you sell to them. Keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll sell in London, in Paris, in Singapore.”
They love our clothes.
(Laugh)
These artisans. These makers. They want people to live from what they do, to become fashionable. They value the consumer feedback. What they’re doing is not only selling clothing, but they consider the craft as an art, the sales in Paris is important.
When we send them pictures of the customers wearing the products in Paris and Brussels, they’re so happy. We offer them recognition other than including better working conditions.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
We launched two months ago. We are still making sure that we can scale the sales. We are selling more and more. We have to make sure the customers receive what they ask for. That’s for all business. Next step is to work on the volume.
We need to make sure the whole process is working smoothly. That’s for the team. For me, I’m in Brussels right now, as you can see.
(Laugh)
(Laugh)
I am meeting investors in another two weeks. We view ourselves as a textile hub. We refer to artisans. As such, we view this as artwork that we can sell. Now, we need investors. We are raising funds at the present time.
What meaning or personal fulfilment does this work bring for you?
I was I’m not into fashion at all.
(Laugh)
I’ve worked in finances before, for the corporate world. Going shopping in the mall or with my girlfriend has always been an ordeal, and then I discovered Vietnam, I discovered the market where I can fabric and leather.
I discovered the makers. I would enter the shop and pay $30 for a custom-made, tailored shirt. It was my shirt. I was the only one wearing it. The price I paid went right into the maker’s pocket. I knew the guy has a son.
He was studying abroad. The whole family was supporting the son abroad. I’ve always wanted to use my skills to have an impact. A real impact on the world based on my skills. Here, with my partner/co-founder, he’s a software guy. I’m more on the business side.
We use what we’ve learned to improve everyone’s lives such as the artisans or the consumers. We are doing something. Something that we consider useful for others. We are doing better.
It is a feeling of self-fulfillment, self-actualization. We want to do something meaningful. We think it’s needed too. We think the fashion world has a big problem at the moment. Many industries are being disrupted by technology and innovative skills.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
We have a niche. It is not about fashion, exactly. We support eco-fashion and ethical issues. Of course, we want to bring more ethics into fashion. We think this will work only if we bring something more.
Many ethical fashion brands only advertise themselves as ethical. It’s their main selling point. It’s a good vision and needed now. But to get out of a niche market of people who will only buy ethical, we need to bring something else, which will appeal to other people.
We want people to think, “Rationally, it is better to buy from them.” You can get a custom-made product for the same price, which is the whole innovation. It is amazing as such. We combine ethical aspects and the custom-made.
We think this appeal to a larger portion of the market rather than being ethical or custom-made alone. Those markets appeal to certain people. We think combining both emotional and rational is the way.
We’re not only an ethical business. We’re both. We can see this working. Our customers, we ask them, “Why are you buying from us?” It is the custom-made aspect. It is important. It is convincing the consumers.
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Trusted Clothes is, obviously, about ethical and sustainable fashion. As I said before, we believe that ethical business must be strong on both aspects: ethics and business. That’s why we are working on these two dimensions.
We want to use all business and technical skills to promote the concept and more relationships. The only way to change the environment of fashion and to have a large impact is by combining these dimensions, which are equally important.
Of course, that’s how sustainable fashion can take over the world!
(Laugh)
(Laugh)
Thank you for your time, Bernard.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/30
Jessie founded the sustainable watch brand Berg and Betts in 2013, selling casually on Etsy then launched her very own website at BERG+BETTS.
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
I am a mom to two little boys under the age of three, a wife to my wonderful husband, and I am the founder of the sustainable watch business BERG+BETTS.
I have formal education in human nutrition and for most of my twenties I worked in that industry with a fire in my belly that said I was meant to do something different. I come from a family of makers and creative entrepreneurs and I always knew I was destined to work for myself in one capacity or another.
My passion for re-purposing started very young with an attitude that if I wanted something, I could make it, and if I didn’t have the materials, I could find them. This passion for re-purposing combined with the desire to be my own boss lead me to start BERG+BETTS.
What is the importance of ethical fashion to you?
Ethical fashion is very important to me as a producer, a consumer and as a human. It’s important that we all strive for transparency in our supply chains and that we support businesses who are making an effort to upcycle, re-use or re-purpose materials, pay fair wages and who treat employees with dignity and respect.
The shift to slow fashion won’t happen overnight but businesses and consumers recognizing the need – that’s important.
What is the importance of sustainable fashion to you?
Sustainable fashion is the foundation of BERG+BETTS’ mission. We’ve all heard it before, but the fashion industry is the second largest polluter in the world and perfectly good, often new textiles are filling our landfills. Finding ways to reduce waste and sustainably produce clothing and accessories is absolutely imperative to the longevity of the industry and our environment.
What is BERG+BETTS?
BERG+BETTS crafts sustainable timepieces out of surplus scrap leather that would otherwise go to waste. We believe you shouldn’t have to sacrifice style for sustainability and it is our mission to provide eco-friendly products that are sophisticated, responsible, and affordable.
What makes the company unique?
Not only do we not produce textile waste, we actually take waste, re-purpose it and eliminate it. Watch straps require such a small amount of leather that it was a no-brainer for us to source scraps from the biggest waste producing countries in the world and turn it into fashion forward timepieces.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
Being a mother. Hands down the hardest, yet most fulfilling job in the world. Between my two boys and my business, I have three children that require all my attention and competing priorities are a daily struggle.
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
A lot. I am creatively fulfilled and I am learning more about business everyday. More importantly, I am doing something really good and important for our environment while setting an example and paving the way for sustainable fashion in Canada.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
They are the way of the future. They need to become the new normal. It’s rare that a business can change its practices overnight, so we need to support those who are conscious of the need for change and who are moving us in the right direction.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/26
Under The Root is an intimate apparel design house that encircles and creates hand structured lingerie, loungerie, and boudoir accessories by Jennifer M. Brown. Read more about the interview below:
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
My childhood story is not one for the faint of heart. There are no warm fuzzies and financial support backups or luscious love stories. The story is one of reclamation. I was the oldest of three in a single parent household.
My father was a victim of the Vietnam War and subsequently abandoned our family when I was 9 years old. My mother did her very best although made poor choices which landed us all in the world of sexual, domestic, and emotional abuse. The one constant in my life was dance classes. I began working in the dance studio for trade of classes at age 14.
When I was 15, my decision to take a sewing class spawned an impetuous desire to somehow connect the impoverished world to the fantastical by means of an apparel tightrope. The skills gained in the next 2 years were to be quite literally danced over.
In my adult life, dance had taken over and fashion flipped to leotards, warmups, wrap skirts, and pieces for body mover comfort. Most of the time the materials were upcycled and/or refurbished, used clothing pieces. As whimsy as some may think a dancer’s life is, quite the opposite is true.
There are bruises, sweat, poignant falls, flips, aches, salt baths, body strategies and negotiations, grand or minuscule maneuvers. The breadth of challenge can be described as being submerged in the star-crossed love between pain and power.
It is at this particular crossing where Under The Root began to take shape. I did not take the conventional, educational path to fashion design though. I studied dance, practiced as a performance artist, designed costume for stage and film, then styling for boutiques. There is a compendium of these creative skills, which bleed into the designs and brand today.
What is the importance of ethical fashion to you?
Ethical fashion and the decision to purchase ethical fashion sits heavily on the individual buying decisions. The options for ethical apparel choices are vast, impeccable, and essential. We now have the ability to research the aspects of a company and ask questions, which receive genuine answers.
The influence of ethical fashion has shown a positive outcome that gives way to an exceptional planet and peoples. The respect of human rights, environmental impact, and a transparent supply chain are three main values that take an active role in poverty reduction, sustainable livelihood creation, plus minimizing and counteracting environmental concerns.
Ethical fashion represents an approach to the design, the elements of manufacturing, the benefits to the people and communities, and the overall acknowledgement of a brand’s social responsibility.
What is the importance of sustainable fashion to you?
Sustainable fashion is a category related to and included within the ethical fashion concept. While ethical is directly affected by an individual’s values, cultural perceptions and points of view, sustainable fashion generally refers to the methods, materials, and processes of garment production.
The sustainability of a garment is crucial and one of the basic ingredients for high quality workmanship.
What is Under the Root?
Under The Root specializes in the compassionate and transformative revolution of sensual alchemy for body movement visionaries. The affectionate brand continues to conjure designs that support the channels to a sustainable planet, imprint an expression of functional sensuality onto your skin, and offer a fair wage in exchange for high return in quality work.
These intimate apparel pieces provide a practical, yet ethereal wickedness with a mission of equilibrium.
What makes Under the Root unique?
Under The Root creates intimate apparel for the modern, minimalist, body mover who activates with a subtle alchemy.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
There are irons in the fire at this point of original designs for dance companies and performance artists. I just signed up to work on wardrobe stylings in a local, Seattle theatre. Also, a collection including rune casting cloths, tarot reading cloths, altar cloths, and tool satchels launches in October 2016.
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
This question has an extensive answer although I will work towards paring it down to the underlying reason Under The Root exists. It goes without many more words that I forged this brand from the ashes of my frustration with the intimate apparel industry and the greed that was running rampant without regard for the planet and its peoples.
When I began to dig a little deeper as to why I was driven to continue on, here is where my values rested first:
Sensuality is inherent with every human body. The word may begin with the letter ‘s’ but it is quite different than sexuality. It claims the right of a body without repression or compartmentalized pleasure zones, and it is a natural, whole being submersion in sensory exploration. You do not need drugs to hold hands with it, and it creeps over you when lingering too long as a shadow.
Sensuality is freedom and there is never a wrong way to ingest it with yourself. You can wash with it in the rain, dry in the light breezes, lay on the rocky ground cover, or bring it to the fire. It is yours to claim. Even a quick moment of non-action sends it the message to smolder with you.
These words above are a personal calling card to make room for it in yourself and others. Do away with the judgment of what it is supposed to look like, talk like, act like, or be. It is yours; every last drop of the blood of it is yours. Others may see it just as you may see others, but make no doubt that it belongs to the only one who sees it as a completed circle… you.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
We are beyond the need to explain the worth of the ethical and sustainable companies. It is time for innovation across all facets of the industry. In order to sustain the evolution, the acceptance begins and ends with authentic, design leadership.
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Thank you for your dedication, appreciation, and care to the evolution of our fashion industry. Certainly, it is to take a village as we enlighten the populace and change the status quo.
Thank you for your time, Jennifer.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/24
What is Nuvango – its title, mission, productions, and vision?
NU-VAN-GO, rhymes with mango – comes from the idea of “the new Van Gogh”
The changing landscape of the art world makes room for new creatives to blossom and show their work on the versatile medium of apparel.
Nuvango is a fashion and lifestyle brand focused on collaborating with international artists to create wearable art for the masses.
The associations of “wearable art” and “the masses” usually do not go hand in hand, but at Nuvango, our goal is to make art accessible. Our apparel is unique, well designed, produced ethically and sustainably, and is affordable. Not to mention, we give back to the artists that we collaborate with.
Our mission is to inspire die hard creatives and people new to the art world to curate their bodies like a gallery. To mix and match, make political and social statements, and to be bold. To reimagine beauty, and rewrite history by telling a story with your visual identity.
What makes the company unique?
Nuvango has a unique story. Starting out ten years ago as Gelaskins, an art inspired tech accessory brand, Nuvango was born two years ago when the founders Drew Downs and Jamie Pichora decided to expand their vertically integrated manufacturing business and add apparel manufacturing to their product offerings.
The most unique factor that sets Nuvango apart from other businesses is not that we work with artists, or that we are produced in a major North American city.
Our unique factor is our on-demand manufacturing process. Aside from small boutiques, home sewers and mass customization factories, Nuvango is pioneering the on-demand approach in the fashion realm.
This highly sustainable business model allows us to produce only what is ordered, eliminating waste and need for warehouses full of inventory. A garment is only produced after a customer has ordered and paid for it, then the unprinted cut garment has artwork applied to it and is sewn together and shipped out.
This business model is a reaction to the fast fashion apparel business which produces the most waste of any industry in the world. Without holding an inventory, Nuvango is able to keep on trend and adapt quicker than most businesses, if a style is not selling we can discontinue it without having to sell through, or dispose of old stock.
The other defining factor of Nuvango is the factory itself, set in downtown Toronto, this three story historical building is a hub of creativity and inspiration to those who work there and visit. Previously a macaroni factory, the Nuvango headquarters house our head offices as well as our vertically integrated production facility. Upon entering the building, you are hit with beautiful original artwork, quirky installations, and friendly faces that make Nuvango so unique.
Our production facilities look and feel very different than most garment factories. The production floor is bright and airy, spanning the first and second floor of this beautiful post and beam structure. Looking around you see many sewing machines, large printers and presses, and tables for cutting. It is quite an impressive set-up all under one roof.
The faces behind the machines are that of a diverse workforce. Young, new graduates of college sewing programs sit next to European veterans of the industry, they share jokes, experiences and knowledge. This is the new face of manufacturing in North America, one Nuvango is proud to be a part of.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
Just this year I taught my first lecture to Ryerson fashion students about 3D printing technology. I find teaching to be very rewarding and I like being able to share my knowledge and predictions about how the emerging technologies in apparel design are changing the industry and the way people design.
I am involved in a collaborative research project with several professors and PHD students analyzing the nuances of fitting garments to a body that is size 22 or higher. There is little research done on the different body types at this size and how to accurately fit clothing on this niche segment of the market.
Part of the research involves body scanning various individuals, analyzing measurements, and 3d printing custom body forms. I am acting as a technology and fit consultant on this fascinating research.
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
I like to keep my finger on the pulse of technology and new developments in textiles.
Continuing to learn is what keeps me inspired and coming up with new ideas. I hope to one day leave a lasting mark on the world of fashion by changing the way people think about the industry, by inventing a new technology or process that has a positive impact, and by continuing to push the envelope of what is possible in design and manufacturing.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
Many people believe that by giving garment work to factories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and China, we are giving people jobs and work that they need to sustain their own life, and build their economy. While in part this is true, unfortunately due to corruption, these garment factory jobs are not empowering people to provide for themselves.
The wages made by garment workers are unfit to sustain an individual, let alone to provide for a family. By giving certain overseas garment factories contracts, we perpetuate the acceptance of slave wages which will continue unless consumers demand more of their apparel brands.
Sustainable and ethical manufacturing is hugely important right now. I believe we are at the point of a paradigm shift towards transparent manufacturing. Companies are now considering environmental factors much more than before in part because of governmental laws, but also because sustainability is hugely marketable.
Apparel companies have realized this shift is coming and are using those ideals as a marketing tool. Consumers, now more than ever, are checking labels, reading about companies, and are willing to put their money where their mouth is.
The trailblazers of ethical manufacturing are paving the way for more businesses to become sustainable by figuring out the nuances of bringing production back to North America and competing in a society focused on the bottom line.
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Beyond the company we have built with Nuvango, we are also creating tools for other brands, bands, artists and designers. We are building an app that will allow anyone with a website to plug in the same manufacturing capabilities we use everyday at Nuvango. Stay tuned to www.notion.ca for more details.
Thank you for your time, Hillary.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/24
Hillary Sampliner is the creative and fashion director at Nuvango, an innovative sustainable fashion brand that is heading 3D printing for the fashion industry. Know more about Hillary and Nuvango below!
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
I grew up in a neighbourhood called Parkdale in downtown Toronto, an artistic and multicultural neighbourhood that provided me with profound social and cultural experiences that shaped the type of creative I am today.
Relentlessly pursuing artistic endeavors as a child, I was lucky to have the encouragement and support of my parents who would sign me up for art classes, entertain my ever changing crafting needs, and educate me artistically and culturally by taking me to neighbourhood festivals, museums, and art galleries.
It was no surprise when I had my heart set on attending Etobicoke School of the Arts (ESA) for high school. I auditioned and was accepted as a visual arts major where I met some of my closest friends and collaborators today.
I honed my artistic skills at ESA and developed a passion for design and textiles, designing a collection for the school’s fashion show, and as yearbook editor. I decided to attend Ryerson School of Fashion for University, gaining a Bachelor of Design Degree, and several awards for my final collection.
Graduating university is where my real adventure began, I decided to open up a small studio doing custom bridal and eveningwear in downtown Toronto, and simultaneously designing collections for my brand, Ruth Weil.
Named after my grandmother, Ruth Weil had a good run of three years showing at Fashion Art Toronto, garnering the attention of stylists, actors, and media, and helped me figure out my own strengths and weaknesses as a designer and business owner.
It came to a point where I no longer felt I was learning, developing, or feeling rewarded by my work. I was barely making ends meet, and I had a slew of service industry side jobs to keep me on my feet. I needed a change.
When most people go back to school for a masters, I decided to sell everything I owned and move to Europe for an unpaid internship. I considered this to be continuing the educational path that was right for me.
I wanted to learn new techniques, be challenged, and gain hands on experience working abroad for one of idols, Iris van Herpen. Moving to Amsterdam to work in a Couture house was one of the best career decisions I’ve ever made, I learned trade secrets of the Couture industry, was inspired into new ways of thinking about challenges, and gained confidence in my abilities as a designer and an artist.
Working with Iris was not fun or easy, she is a difficult person but also a genius. Learning skills like laser cutting, 3D printing, and participating in Paris Couture Fashion Week made the negative experiences all worth it.
I ended up leaving after 6 months and moving to the UK where I worked for Mary Katrantzou, a digital print based fashion designer. She was a wonderful mentor, boss and creative. I helped prepare for the Fall 2013 London Fashion Week showing with Mary and her team, and then moved back to Toronto to catch my breath.
In 2014 I attended the first 3D Printing for Fashion Design Masterclass in New York City at Eyebeam partnered with NYU and Shapeways. I was one of ten participants over a two-month course teaching the technical skills needed to create 3D printed apparel but also analyzing the social, economic, environmental, and aesthetic implications of designing using this technology.
I was connected with some heavy hitters in the 3D printing world and absorbed as much information as I could in the hopes of becoming somewhat of an expert in the field. I teamed up with two other participants to make a 3D printed garment that contains over 800 separate and movable parts interconnected to make a mesh-like structure.
This piece was displayed twice in New York City in art galleries, and was featured at Dutch Design Week, as well as written about in Wired Magazine, Huffington Post, and several other publications.
This piece had inspired other projects since its release in 2014 that have taken the concept a step further. Since coming back to Toronto for the second time, I began working at Nuvango, starting as an associate designer, and quickly moving my way up to become the Fashion Director.
What is the importance of ethical fashion to you?
Ethical fashion has been a part of my dialogue since first year university where we learned about overseas manufacturing, sweatshops, and the waste produced by the fashion industry. It made me passionate and aware, and was a turning point in my beliefs about the industry.
I vowed then and there to never work for a company whose practices were unethical. This made my career path that much more challenging because there are so few companies that follow a sustainable and ethical supply chain, but this also makes the work I do now that much more important.
After closing my business and before moving to Europe I was looking for work. I was working retail and wanted desperately to get back into design in some way. I applied for several design jobs in and around Toronto, landing an interview with a high profile fast fashion house.
I was never passionate about securing the job as print designer but I needed something. I was given a trial assignment to knock off a Chloe floral print to the best of my ability. I was shocked. I didn’t think it was right.
As I dug deeper I started to hear unsavory feedback about this company from current, and past, employees citing some of the companies’ best practices which included such actions as negotiating lower garment costs with overseas factories. Connecting the dots, I knew this also meant the people sewing the garments would be in unsafe conditions for slave wages.
Shortly after declining the position with this fast fashion retailer, one of their factories collapsed, killing over a thousand innocent people. I was happy I had made the decision to decline the job, but I was outraged that no one was taking responsibility.
In the race to the bottom, none of the companies who negotiate for lower garment costs wanted to admit that their decisions were directly related to slave wages, unsafe working conditions and thus, the factory collapse.
Ignorance was no excuse in my opinion, anyone who has ever sewn knows how much time and skilled work goes into making something as basic as a tee shirt, and that buying a tee shirt for under a dollar does not add up to fair wages or good working conditions.
I wanted to do something, I decided I needed to change the industry from within, from the position of the designer, of the business. I made it my goal to find a company that prided itself on local and ethical manufacturing, and to set an example of what an ethical business could look like.
I wanted to show that consumers are willing to pay a higher price to know that their clothes were made with care by people like themselves, who are paid fairly for their skilled work. I wanted to show that a seamstress, a printing press operator, and a garment cutter are respectable and highly skilled jobs that should be regarded as such.
I made it my career goal to find a company that shared this value where I could help shape the new face of ethical manufacturing.
What is the importance of sustainable fashion to you?
Sustainable and ethical fashion are one in the same in my opinion. Conducting a business in a sustainable way is ethical, in turn, part of being an ethical business means partaking in sustainable practices.
The apparel industry has evolved since the industrial revolution to become one of the most wasteful and fickle industries. The demand for trendy, disposable clothing is what drives the fast fashion industry to produce for volume at a low cost rather than quality.
The implications of fast fashion are only now being discussed despite the industry moving in this direction since the 1950’s. Before mass production, clothing was made to last and would be cared for, repaired and passed on for generations until it literally fell apart.
Eliminating disposable clothing in favour of quality, long lasting garments is the only way to move in a sustainable direction. Rethinking the way, we consume clothing as a society and reconsidering the perceived low value we put on garments will foster a new appreciation for garment workers, their skills, and a willingness to pay a premium for quality garments.
What is Nuvango – its title, mission, productions, and vision?
NU-VAN-GO, rhymes with mango – comes from the idea of “the new Van Gogh.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/23
More Than Half is a fair trade clothing retailer started by Melissa Stieber in downtown Kitchener. Read more below to know about More Than Half and ethical fair trade clothing brands.
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
Well I grew up outside of Baden, Ontario and lived there until I was married in 2007. I then lived in Toronto for a couple years with my husband where I managed a Ten Thousand Villages. It was there that I started to think more about Fair Trade fashion and why I couldn’t find any stores selling it or if it even existed.
We had moved back to Kitchener and I worked at a wholesale bakery for three years as retail/office manager. I worked side by side the owner learning about all aspects of business. I knew I wanted to eventually work for myself but wasn’t quite sure what that looked like.
With the knowledge, experience and confidence I gained at that job combined with my passion for fair trade and ethical fashion, I had my light bulb moment and opened up More Than Half in 2013.
What is the importance of ethical fashion to you?
It’s important because it’s the only right way to produce clothing. Exploiting people, mistreating animals and destroying to the environment is not worth it to just save a buck.
What is the importance of sustainable fashion to you?
The fashion industry is the second most polluting industry. Not sure I need to say much more than that.
What is More than Half?
MTH is a Fair Trade and organic clothing boutique. We sell women’s and men’s clothing that has been produced ethically and sustainably from raw material to end product.
The name comes from part of a quote an MLK Jr. Sermon, “And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world.”
What makes More than Half unique?
We are unique because we focus more on the people that produce the clothing than gaining the highest profit from consumers. Fair Trade is no charity but it helps to create opportunity in developing countries and to alleviate poverty.
We try to educate consumers about who is making their clothes and the process the garment goes through. Once consumers understand how clothing is made, the work involved and the effects it has, they start to think differently about their purchases.
What is the greatest challenge in founding a business?
Retail is tough, especially right now. You see many large retailers shutting their doors. There are many factors in whether you will be successful in retail or not, but right now we find that the market for our clothing is too small in Kitchener-Waterloo and a lot of people are shopping online. Focusing online will help us to target our market better.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
I currently leading a non-profit group, Fair Trade Kitchener. We are a small group of fair traders who wish to see Kitchener become recognized as a Fair Trade Town with Fair Trade Canada.
Involves a lot of education, promotions and support from the community as well as the Kitchener City Council. We have had a few events so far and hope to do much more this fall and for the holiday season.
What meaning or personal fulfilment does this work bring for you?
I don’t do this to make myself feel good, I do it because I don’t know what else to do. Fair Trade, ethically living just makes sense to me, life shouldn’t be any other way. We shouldn’t be harming each other for profits and it makes me sick every time i think about how we have treated each other throughout the years. Slavery is more prominent now than ever, racism, environmentally damage, it’s all at an extreme high, but so also is our denial and selfishness.
If I’m not doing something to better this world, then the life God gave me is just wasted.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
They are the future of fashion. They need to be supported if the fashion industry is ever going to change.
Thank you for your time, Melissa.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/22
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
I am driven and active, and have a passion for fashion and the great outdoors. I am a 3 times Ironman triathlete and mother of two amazing young children.
I graduated from University of Western Ontario with a Bachelor of Science, majoring in Statistics. I then went on to work at a large Marketing agency for many years, working with many large national and multi-national companies.
When I had my children my priorities changed and it was important for me to focus on my family. I decided to leave the big agency and corporate world to be involved in something I truly believed in. Something that felt good in my gut. Something that had more meaning…something I could really help grow and that’s how I ended up at Miik.
What is the importance of ethical fashion to you?
For us, it starts with the people. All of our clothes are sewn by people. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect, paid fairly and in proper working conditions. The apparel industry is the second largest polluter in the world…only second to oil.
I want to be part of the leading edge toward reforming the fashion industry. It’s a commitment to our belief in slow fashion and creating a healthier environment for future generations. I want my kids and their kids to grow up in a better place.
What is the importance of sustainable fashion to you?
Sustainability to me means renewing resources at a rate equal to or greater than the rate at which they are consumed. It is absolutely critical to protecting our future.
At Miik we of course use eco/sustainable fabric but sustainability is not just about the fabrics, it’s about the designs. We design our pieces to have a classic look, to ensure that they are going to be in style for seasons to come, not just for one season.
We call it, Style with Staying Power!! It’s also about our extremely small footprint – we produce everything locally, cutting down on transportation and supporting local business. We strive to incorporate sustainability in everything we do, even to the smaller things like using recycled boxes and shipping bags.
We also encourage our customers to focus on sustainability, knowing that even when our clothes leave us, they are still sustainable. 95% of the collection is machine washable in cold water…eliminating harsh chemicals and reduction of hot water.
What is Miik?
Miik is a Canadian luxury clothing brand that embraces ‘slow fashion’ in a world so consumed by disposable clothing. Milk strives to lengthen the time between the purchase of your clothing and its eventual disposal in two ways: by using sustainably sourced fabrics that don’t lose their shape, fade or pill like other natural textiles, and by designing timeless yet striking pieces that stand the test of time (or that can be enjoyed season after season).
Miik is challenging the status quo of fast fashion with our timeless pieces, commitment to sustainability, and custom milled luxury eco fabric that feels like first class. It is style with staying power.
What makes the company unique?
We believe less is more. In fact, our philosophy is quite opposite of that of most other fashion brands. We actually want consumers to buy less, but to choose and buy quality.
What really sets us apart and makes us unique is our luxury fabric and the fact that we have an extremely small footprint. We custom mill our sustainable fabrics locally. From yarn to hanger we do it all in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area); design, mill, dye and produce under fair working conditions.
By custom milling our own luxury fabrics, we choose what goes in it; the weight, the “hand” and the finishing. Our fabrics are milled to last; they hold their form and colour while offering uncompromising stretch, softness and durability.
For example, most bamboo fabrics are milled to a much lighter weight and usually with another fabric like cotton so they don’t have the same lasting power, softness or the luxurious drape of our fabric.
As well, bamboo yarn takes to dye and holds the colour better so our colours are more saturated and won’t fade even after years of wear. Miik is sustainable by design!
Since we produce locally we are able to control the quality at every step of our production. At any given time, I can personally go and see each step of the garments life…to ensure we are producing the best quality product.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
Miik is involved in many professional and charitable groups. Just recently we were a part of Fashion Takes Action “Design Forward” Fashion show. It featured Canada’s top designers who have made a commitment to ethical practices, without sacrificing style.
We also work quite closely with local fashion schools and their fashion shows and various different projects. We also were one of the very first fashion brands to sign on with Canopy and their new Canopy Style to support ethical practices and preservation of the environment, forests and trees.
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
My work brings me great joy and fulfillment. Not many people can say they love what they do every day! Knowing that I am making a small difference in the way we consume fashion and teaching my kids and the next generation about slow fashion really makes be feel good about what we are doing.
What is also so appealing is that Miik is a small company so I get to have my hand in both the design/creative side and then of course the numbers and the business side. I actually thrive on both sides of the business…and there are not a lot of jobs where you get to do both!
I also have some flexibility in my job. This is extremely important for me…it allows me to also be a Mom. I am able to bring my kids to school, work hard, make a healthy dinner, be active, attend field trips if necessary and balance work and life. Once the kids go to bed…I typically go back to my desk at my home office. J
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
It is actually very critical now for fashion brands to think both ethical and sustainably. The rate at which the fashion industry is destroying our environment is much quicker than we are able to restore it. Too many people are dying and working in unfit conditions…the health concerns are astronomical. The time in now!
Any advice for women in leadership?
Embrace it. Have confidence and own it…lead by example. Take ownership of your own success.
I really want to make sure that woman young and old can “unpack their fears”. Fear is consistently one of the biggest challenges woman face in the workplace. The fear that having a family and raising children will reflect negatively on their commitment to their careers. It is possible to do both successfully.
I want to make sure my kids see, understand and learn that leadership has nothing to do with what gender you are rather it’s about finding the best person for the job.
The fashion industry disproportionately affects young women in developing countries. I would love to be able to be, at least, a small part of making a change in their lives. Supporting ethical and sustainable fashion is definitely a big step in the right direction.
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
When it comes right down to it, the magic is in our fabric.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/19
Tell us about yourself – family/personal story, education, and prior work.
I learned to sew from my DIY dynamo Mom and pursued a degree at FIDM iSan Fransisco. Soon after graduation I began my own collection of women’s contemporary clothing, Bruiser.
Around that time, I joined forces with a baker turned dress maker Jenny Stadler. For more than a decade now, we have been reinventing what purpose fashion serves.
What is the importance of ethical fashion to you?
Ethics to me are about lifestyle. Your ethics are reflected everyday in the choices you make, including what you wear, what you buy.
What is the importance of sustainable fashion to you?
The fashion industry is second to OIL in the amount of waste it produces. I have two young daughters who deserve better than what we are doing now.
What is Wolf Bait?
Wolfbait & B-girls is a retail venue/studio space for more than 200 local artisans.
What makes Wolf Bait unique?
More and more shops across the country now follow our model of supporting local talents that we began more than 10 years ago. That makes every shop like ours unique to the neighborhood it is representing. Logan Square, Chicago is an expressive community, and you can see what it has to say at Wolfbait & B-girls.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
My partner Jen and I explore lots of creative ideas outside of our clothing lines, from puppet making to falconry.
What personal fulfillment comes from this work?
I find satisfaction in all aspects of Wolfbait, and what it has come to represent. From the simple joys of following a garment from a concept all the way to the consumer in our humble space, to the big picture of supporting and encouraging the artisans of this city, and inspiring people to think differently about what they buy and why.
What’s the importance of them ethical and sustainable fashion companies now?
In fashion, in agriculture, in all areas of our modern life, it is important to make educated choices. The more everyone learns of the TRUE COST of their wardrobe/lifestyle the more they will have to think about those choices/purchases. Hopefully this will lead to a less wasteful and more humane practices in consumer goods of all sorts.
Thank you for your time, Shirley.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/19
The nature of sustainability is the nature of saving energy and one way to do that is to use less water in our daily routine.
My personal favorite is shorter showers instead of taking baths. I like the idea of a single short shower in the morning or what some may refer to as “navy showers”. A navy shower (also known as a “combat shower”, “military shower”, “sea shower”, “staggered shower”, or “G.I. bath”) is a method of showering that allows for significant conservation of water and energy by turning off the flow of water in the middle portion of the shower while lathering.
If I happen to work out or work outdoors for an extended period of time, then I will actually take the time to have a shorter shower in the morning and the night.
Most if the time, I have the time down to about three minutes for showers.
The second way I conserve water daily is to turn off the tap while brushing my teeth. Turning off the water while brushing your teeth Saves three gallons each day.
Cutting our water use and saving on water and energy bills doesn’t have to affect your daily routine. These simple changes can make a huge difference to the amount of water we use.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/18
The women’s empowerment principles were put out by UN Women to put forth the main thrust of women’s rights in addition to the economic benefits. The statement is that equality means business.
The first principle is that you need to establish high-level corporate leadership for gender equality. This means that you can encourage the ability of women to enter into the highest rungs of the corporate leadership ladder.
The second principle is treat all women and men fairly at work – respect and support human rights and non-discrimination. All this means is that in socio-cultural life individuals deserve respect and support with respect to their human rights. They should be treated on merit.
The third is the need to ensure the health, safety and well-being of all women and men workers. The equality that comes from this is that the well-being of men and women, their health, can then be better taken into account for the improvement of the workplace, the quality of work, and the society.
The fourth is promote education, training and professional development for women. This means that the women in societies have the ability to have access to education, and the encouragement of this to allow them to achieve their full potential.
The fifth is implement enterprise development, supply-chain and marketing practices that empower women. This is a subtler one. However, it can include the many, many aspects of women’s empowerment at the socio-cultural level through the influence of advertising and marketing targeted to women and their empowerment.
The sixth one is the need to promote equality through community initiatives and advocacy. This might be called collective action. It is a collective initiative to advocate for equality in communities, townships, cities, provinces, territories, states, and nations. This then flies out into regions of the world for women’s equality.
The seventh is measure and publicly report on progress to achieve gender equality. In other words, this means the ability to quantify, whether qualitatively or quantitatively, the progress of gender equality in all domains of domestic, public, and professional life.
Taken together, the whole floor of the society will rise and improve. These are the basic principles laid out with some examples from me or interpretations from me of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/18
Yogiiza is an organic clothing brand founded by Mark Oliver and his wife Dawn. Their aim is to make a clothing brand that reflects yoga values. Read on below to know more about our interview with Mark.
Tell us about yourself – familial story, education, and prior work.
My wife and I are business partners. We’ve been married 5 years. We’ve been together 7 years. We have a 22-month old son.
In terms of personal, story, how did this lead up into getting into Yogiiza?
Yogiiza is from my yoga practice. Also, it’s from my relationship with my wife. My childhood was spent in nature, in the woods, and surfing, and fishing. It deeply affects my character. It affects my vision for how I want the world to be for my children and the children after them.
Yoga and meditation creates self-awareness. It creates the realization that the world is a manifestation of the self or a reflection of the self. So, as the self goes, so does the world. To create a business, that business has to be a reflection of how I want to see the world.
Hopefully, it gives earth and nature lovers choices that bring about the change that they want to see in the world. So, when we decided to do a brand that services our relationships within yoga and the hospitality industry, we couldn’t do a company any other way. We had to do a company with conscious values.
Our first and foremost mission is to save the planet. It’s to give people choices to save the planet. Those individuals’ choices add up. Those organic and environmentally friendly choices.
Everybody wants to choose organic today. If you choose anything else, the environmental situation could change overnight. So, it’s up to us as entrepreneurs and conscious capitalists to give people choices that are a reflection of our values and have that manifest as the world we want to see.
Ghandi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Ghandi is one of the most famous yogis in the world.
(Laugh)
You picked a good source.
(Laugh)
It’s part of self-awareness. Yoga improves self-awareness. For example, when you practice how your foot is touching the ground, how your spine is, how your head is in relation to your shoulders, you cultivate a sense of presence.
For those conscious capitalists and entrepreneurs, any advice?
Take, for example, fire, it’s a good thing. It keeps your house warm. It’s a beautiful tool of mankind, but you don’t want to burn your whole house down. You should have your values, but keep an open mind.
Don’t be afraid of the middle path, when you’re too radical, there’s a certain violence in that mindset. Keep your values, but understand everything is the will of God. Otherwise, it wouldn’t exist. So, don’t beat yourself up too hard. Try not to be a fascist in your beliefs.
Fire is a good thing. Plastic has its uses. Plastic has its utility within the world. But do we have to wear it, sleep in it, eat with it, right? It’s too much.
Fascism never gets us anywhere. Anything that you make people do at gun point doesn’t work. (Laughs) It’s forcing your values on people at gun point like. They don’t work.
Try to work with what you have, be uncompromising, pick your values wisely.
It’s a bit like the artist versus the politician. The artist tries to seduce someone into way of life and the politician tries to do it at ‘at gunpoint’, as you noted, or by force in some way.
It may be just the opposite.
(Laugh)
Violent revolutions often come by artists like Che and Castro. The politicians, what their flaw is that they do compromise too much, they’re too malleable, too bendy, too wishy-washy. There’s no room for real leadership.
But there’s room for leadership in entrepreneurship. When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re in control of your vision, and so make sure you pick your vision wisely. You can go down a fascist path, but that doesn’t help anybody.
A lot of the businesses in ethical and sustainable fashion are small or moderate sized. What do you see as the importance of bringing them together in networks so that you can bring about larger effects in terms of consumers’ choices and getting the word out about it?
I think we all support each other on social media a bit. But, at the same time, reaching commodities of scale can be determined by your own beliefs, if you don’t believe it’s possible, then it’s never going to happen in the first place.
However, if you look at what’s happening, H&M is one of the largest consumers of organic cotton. Target is number two. Walmart is quickly becoming the largest distributor of organic produce.
We’re seeing prices being driven down within the organic niche. So, it’s possible for a sustainable brand to reach commodities of scale. We’re doing our best to do it.
We are targeting large brands like Royal Caribbean and Hilton Hotel because these large brand partners have the largest impact on the choices. I think your proposition that all of these brands are small, and they need to group together in some sort of co-op, is misplaced.
I think you need to expand your vision and understand, and do what it takes to realize your vision for an organic planet – or whatever it is for your business.
Where do you see the company heading into the future?
I see us moving into mass distribution and very large numbers to have as big an impact as possible. You need to have as big an impact of all of the other large brands to come around to being sustainable as well.
You have to show and demonstrate to them that the public demand is there. The most recent studies say that 65-80% of Americans buy organic products. The problem that we’re seeing is that only 3% of production is organic.
There’s this huge demand out there. But because it’s very small supply, it makes things more expensive. Pretty much in every way, shape, or form, to grow organic-based products is cheaper than conventional-based products. Organic costs less.
The reason why organic products cost more is because there is very little supply and very high demand. The notion that these brands are small is because of small thinking. That’s why they’re small. There’s plenty of demand out there.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time? Outside of the company, do you have any other projects ongoing involved with ethical and sustainable fashion?
We have Yogiiza, the brand. My wife has a hospitality business. She serves products. She has yoga services and wellness services. But that’s under the Yogiiza brand too. Also, we supply hospitality towels and linens. It’s a new business.
What we’re doing with that business is licensing the Yogiiza brand, we’re doing that under the Yogiiza label in organics. We’re getting hotels to move very large volumes of towels and giving the opportunity for them to choose organic.
It’s a quantifiable change and difference for these corporations on their environmental impacts. Let me explain. If you have one pound of conventional cotton, it takes twice as much carbon as one pound of organic cotton.
It’s an actual pound-for-pound difference. It’s 2,000 kilos of carbon for every 1,000 kilos of conventional cotton grown. It’s ~940 kilos of carbon for every 1,000 kilos for organic cotton. For every pound of cotton that we sell, it takes 1lb of carbon out of the atmosphere.
That’s just the carbon, then we get pesticides and herbicides. They cause all of the cancers. If you trade out for organic over conventional, we’re eliminating 1/3lb of pesticides and herbicides for every pound of cotton.
If you look at a hotel chain like Hilton, and if they were to go with organic for their sheets and linens, it would be 130 million pounds of carbon out of the atmosphere per year and 50 million pounds of pesticides and herbicides.
When you look at blue water pollution, you have an 90% reduction of blue water pollution from organic farming compared to the conventional, on average. If you switch every pound of cotton from conventional to the organic, you’re taking one pound of carbon out of the atmosphere. 1,000-room hotels can eliminate 200,000 pounds of carbon.
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
Oh my god! It’s awesome. Every day, I can’t wait to get up and go to work, contact my people, and have staff meetings. We’re on a real mission. If you look at these numbers, these environmental numbers. It’s huge. We’re stoked.
We’re stoked to give people choices. It’s a family business. It’s not even work that we do. It’s our life. It’s part of our lifestyle.
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
All peoples understand that it is their personal choices that are manifesting the world that they see. When consumers, all of us, look on the shelf and see this product is organic and the other is not, then choose the organic one!
If you’re an entrepreneur, please understand and create choices that bring about the change that you want to see in the world, it’s important. Business is the only thing that is going to create change. People wait for government to do something. It’s not going to happen.
It’s business that gives people choices that are a reflection of the world that we want to see.
Thank you for your time, Mark.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/15
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
My mother worked in garment production factories in Montreal throughout my childhood. I grew up with her sewing at the kitchen table after work, doing alterations for extra income.
Naturally I learned how to sew from her.
I taught myself how to design from taking apart vintage garments and seeing how they were put together, after spending many years as a vintage clothing buyer right out of high school. I love everything vintage and it remains to this day my main source of inspiration.
Vintage clothing, music, historic & modern architecture, vintage cars, vintage appliances…they have all withstood the test of time because things were built to last and because they’ve lasted the pieces leave behind a legacy with abundant stories to tell.
I have always been an extremely independent, resourceful and creative individual. Since childhood I’ve always been dreaming, inventing, creating, drawing, imagining, making imaginary worlds to live inside of.
With never ending ideas brewing, it was a natural direction in my life to pursue a career as an entrepreneur. It was only after I completed a Self Employment program at Douglas College many years ago that I was able to start a business as an independent artist/designer.
I started Adhesif Clothing in 2003, opened my own boutique in 2010 and never looked back. Adhesif Clothing is a Vancouver, BC clothing company that produces handmade memorable one-of-a-kind garments.
Every article of clothing has its very own distinctive personality with a visual array of eclectic prints & color compositions. The result brings a striking presentation of polished yet playful pieces that are also Eco friendly.
What is the importance of ethical fashion and sustainable fashion to you?
As we are all well aware of, today’s global situation concerning the environment and the commercial fashion industry is one of the major causes of waste and exploitation of poor third world conditions often providing unfair low wages and thus a low quality of living conditions for the millions of garment factory workers.
The low quality garments distributed for sale in the wealthier western societies like H&M and Joe Fresh are bought up because of the low retail price points and often discarded only after a wear or two.
The implications of manufacturing fast fashion/disposable textile items leave
a huge impact not only of the consumption of the worlds precious natural resources but this way of doing things also taxes the lives of the impoverished.
Said all this, much of the driving force and underlining passion for hand producing the garments for my clothing label, Adhesif Clothing, come from an endless desire to create cherished high quality pieces that will be worn and loved for many seasons while also literally reducing textile waste from the landfills. This thoughtful process is part of the slow fashion movement and I believe up cycling is the way of the future.
Fun fact, for every 1 pound of fabric that is recycled 70 gallons of fresh water is saved in the environment. Over the course of the last 12 years we at Adhesif Clothing have helped save a minimum of 20K pounds of discarded textiles for the landfill that probably counts for at least a lake or two!
What is Adhesif Clothing?
Handmade with up to 95% vintage + reclaimed materials + 100% HEART Adhesif Clothing produces locally made one-of-a-kind garments in Vancouver, BC.
Every article of clothing has its very own distinctive personality with a visual array of eclectic prints & color compositions, a truly well thought out process. The result brings a striking presentation of polished yet playful pieces that are also Eco friendly. This way you not only look good but feel great too!
What makes the company unique?
Everything we create is made by hand with up to 95% reclaimed materials, and is one-of-a-kind. There is literally no way for us to duplicate the same fabric composition of our designs within our collections. I always tell my clients that our garments have a heart beat and a story to tell with their own little unique personalities and they agree.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
I just completed the photo shoot for our Spring-Summer 2017 Collection and now I’m working on our Fall-Winter 2017 photo shoot taking place in Germany this holiday season with an amazing creative team I’ve had the pleasure of working with several times already.
I’ve also had the opportunity to work with Microsoft on character development on a TBA video game coming out this December 2016.
In the community, I am currently helping to co-ordinate group of 30 local artisans called the Coastal Creatives artisan group for the 1st annual Vancouver Mural Arts Festival. I’m also the main organizer for the Nifty for Fifty Sale now in its 10th year running by 2017 which promotes and supports the handmade work of 30 local artists and designers from the West coast.
Aside from hand producing my own pieces by hand and running my boutique 6 days a week, I also participate as a vendor at least a dozen artisan markets annually like this past Filberg Festival and the upcoming Circle Craft Christmas Market to name a few.
I’m working on my 5th publication with a US publication called Belle Armoire Magazine.
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
I always say there’s a fine line between brilliance and insanity. Doing this type of work requires an insurmountable amount of perseverance, hard work, confidence, foresight, genuine vision, passion and above all else love.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
Funny enough when I started my company well over a decade ago the term “upcycling” or “repurposing” didn’t even exist. Now everywhere I look be it social media or at art markets I see many designers implementing a reclaimed element to their work.
Sometimes I get asked if I feel threatened by the new completion but personally I think it’s wonderful to see slow fashion becoming a global movement. It’s not a passing trend by any means and I’m proud to be one of the founders for future generations to follow in the foot prints of.
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
We have an amazing Etsy shop that we post new pieces onto bi-weekly with currently 200 OOAK items to choose from.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/17
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
My background is in sociology so starting a textiles company was a big change for me. I have family in India and spent a great deal of my twenties traveling in the East (India, Pakistan, China, Mongolia, SE Asia, Iran & Central Asia) so it felt natural to base the tailoring in India, especially as the silk I use is manufactured there.
What is the importance of ethical fashion to you?
The fact that ‘ethical fashion’ is even an issue shows how distorted the industry has become. The tragedy of Rana Plaza in 2013 seemed to bring about the start of some form of change with high street chains agreeing to raise working standards for the workers but three years later, nothing substantial seems to have happened. ‘Ethical fashion’ should essentially just be ‘fashion’, the ethical side of it should be assumed.
What is the importance of sustainable fashion to you?
The fashion industry’s impact on the environment, especially the towns and villages where a lot of the raw materials and synthetics are produced, is far greater than most people can even imagine. Working with sustainable materials, like natural fabrics is beneficial for both the environment, but also for the consumer, natural fabrics are by far more comfortable to wear. In an ideal world, sustainable should be the norm.
What is The Ethical Silk Company?
Our product line is solely 100% eco-friendly mulberry silk products. Having begun with bedding and accessories, our range now includes ladies’ loungewear – silk robes, pants, slips and tops.
What makes the company unique?
The particular type of silk we use is a one of a kind. There are other types of eco-
friendly silks, but this particular mulberry one is really beautiful – it’s softer than regular silk with a pearly natural finish.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
At the moment I’m working on a new print for S/S17 and a future line for men & women using a different weave so that’s exciting. I also have a young family so things are pretty full on with that, to say the least…
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
For quite some time before starting The Ethical Silk Company, I knew I wanted to work for myself and as trying as it can be, both mentally and financially, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The company began small but as sales grew and customers returned, I knew I was onto something. Launching the loungewear last December and the response it got really gave me the confidence to move forward.
The ethical production in terms of the silk and the tailoring was always the direction I was going to take – the alternative is just not an option for me as I need to be able to stand above the company, its products and its ethos.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
It’s amazing to see how many start up fashion companies there are with such a focus on their ethos surrounding production. Now, more than ever, it’s hugely important for them to be supported and encouraged, especially as the high street stores don’t seem to be doing anything to change their labour practices.
As ethically sourced products generally cost more to produce, Ecommerce has opened up so many possibilities as customers have access to companies they may not have known about before and it also helps ethical and sustainable companies keep their prices competitive as a result of selling direct.
I feel transparency is central to running a sustainable business, being able to give your customers knowledge of the various stages along the production line.
Any advice for women in leadership?
Do your research, know your market and watch your cash flow like a hawk. Know your business inside out and the direction you want it to take. Listen to advice (lap it up) and bring in experts in the fields outside your expertise but at the end of the day, it is your business so remember that.
Thank you for your time, Eva.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/16
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
I am a wife, mother of two (an 8-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son) and a serial entrepreneur. I started my first business when I was in my 20’s. It was a wholesale fashion agency based in Toronto.
We represented a number of different adult fashion brands – both men’s and women’s, and sold them to stores across Ontario and the Maritimes. After the birth of my daughter in 2007, I felt a strong desire to do something different (in addition to running the agency) – something a little more creative and something I would ideally have more control over.
At the time I found it very difficult to find simple, good quality fashion basics for infants – especially ethically made basics and in neutral unisex colours. So drawing upon my fashion industry experience, I decided to start mini mioche and about 6 months later we launched our first collection of organic, Canadian-made infant basics.
What is the importance of ethical fashion to you?
To me there is no reason why it should be allowed or considered ok on any level for people in third world countries to be paid pennies and treated so poorly to make clothing for people who can afford and would be willing to pay a little more to know that no one is being harmed during the manufacturing process.
The clothing industry has become one that is all about margin and how to make things faster and cheaper and that is unfortunate. I think as the customer is becoming more aware and more educated, they are seeing the value in supporting businesses who don’t necessarily do it the cheapest but do it in an honest, ethical way.
Our goal is to produce clothing for kids that not only looks good and stands up to wear and tear but is made locally and by people we know personally – people we know are paid a fair wage and are treated well.
What is the importance of sustainable fashion to you?
Sustainable fashion and ethical fashion go hand in hand for me. I feel that our customer is willing to pay a little more for something organic and ethically made because they also know that it will ideally stand the test of time. A better quality garment means it will wash and wear well and can be passed down from one child to the next, to the next, to the next.
What is Mini Mioche?
Mini mioche is a collection of organic, Canadian-made fashion basics for infants and kids newborn to 8 years of age. In addition to our own apparel collection, the company also sells an edited selection of the best footwear, gear, toys and books.
What makes Mini Mioche unique?
We are the only company in North America that offers a full seasonal collection of organic, eco-friendly locally made infant and kids fashion basics. Our collections consist of styles we would wear but in mini size. We create clothing that looks great but that is also comfortable and functional for kids to wear (something that is not that easy to find).
We also offer a highly curated selection of fashion footwear for kids – the largest selection of footwear that is ‘take down’ from adult brands (basically mini versions of adult shoe brands such as Doc Martens, Adidas, Converse, Vans, Native, Sorel, People, etc.).
What is the greatest challenge in founding a business?
I would say for me the hardest part was figuring out how to make the business profitable without compromising on our company values. The reality is that making an organic product and making it locally means that it’s a lot more expensive to make and yet the retail price points on kids clothing need to be relatively competitive if you want to cater to more than a small, niche market.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
We just launched a new brand called Brockton Basics by mini mioche. It is a wholesale, private label company that offers the mini mioche infant and kids basics as blanks for other companies to print on. We have had countless requests from companies looking to print on our basics over the past few years and we are now in a position to offer that program on a wholesale level.
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
I definitely love my work but the things that I love most about it aren’t necessarily the daily ins and outs of my actual job – it’s more about the journey and who I am on it with. It’s learning something new all the time and being constantly challenged.
It’s having fun doing it. It’s creating something that is hopefully going to be long-lasting. It’s about making jobs for people and mentoring young colleagues. And it’s amazing to hear from customers and fans of the brand who write to us or tell us that it has actually impacted their lives or their child’s positively in some way.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
Like I mentioned earlier, I think that ethical and sustainable fashion is going to become more important to businesses moving forward. The consumer is becoming more aware and educated and cares more now than ever about where, how and by whom their clothes are made.
It’s slowly becoming less about fast fashion and cheap manufacturing and more about quality-made, ethically-made product at a reasonable cost. That’s a good thing.
Thank you for your time, Alyssa.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/12
Tell us about yourself – family background, personal story, education, and previous professional capacities.
I live in Sydney or on Qantas. My background is in youth worker, strategic planning, human rights and international development. I had one of those families that shifted around a lot and I had lived in around 20 houses by the time I was 20.
So I have learnt to make a home where ever I am. I live with my best friend who is my business partner and husband. We have an open home and always have people sharing our home. We have one daughter – who some people call a dog – our black Labrador Mo, some chickens and a sometimes thriving vegetable garden.
What is the importance of ethical fashion?
I don’t think anyone wants to be wearing someone else’s misery. Do you?
What is the importance of sustainable fashion?
We have moved to the “fast-fashion” cycle world where entire ranges and collections in stores can change every few weeks and consumers are expected to fit into this cycle and discard their old clothes and purchase the latest.
A fast fashion cycle requires the work force who creates the garments to be incredibly flexible and there for they can also be disposable. The work comes in fits and starts and to match that cycle.
What is STOP THE TRAFFIK?
STOP THE TRAFFIK in Australia is a coalition of around 30 organisations from development agencies, faith groups, businesses and trade unions. We campaign as consumers and activists to end human trafficking.
We work with business to raise awareness an help them with traffic-free business practices. Everyone who is trafficked is trafficked from a community to a community so the more people know what human trafficking is and what they can do about it, the harder it is for traffickers to operate.
What makes this pertinent now?
We now have more people in modern forms of slavery than the rest of history combined. It is not right and it is not sustainable. The world’s economic system cannot continue to operate on the exploitation.
How severe is human trafficking and slavery in developed countries?
Human trafficking is the fastest growing illegal crime and the International Labour Organisation estimates that the profits as in the range of $US 150 billion. Where ever there are countries with large numbers of people who are poor who perceive that they can have a better future in places that are richer, human traffickers can deceive them. In developed countries, it exists and it is growing.
What about developing countries – especially compared to developed countries?
When someone does not have an education or a job future they or their families are more easily deceived. Human traffickers prey on people’s hopes and dreams.
There are over 200,000 girls trapped in human trafficking right now.
There are 200,000 girls trapped just in a small area of India working in the spinning weaving and dying mills through a human trafficking scheme called the Sumangali Scheme. This area supplies most of the world’s cotton knit fabric.
Could that be a low estimate?
That estimate is probably low. The scheme has recently been expanded to a nearby state. There has been a decline in the use of the name “Sumangali” but the scheme still exists.
How are these metrics derived from their evidentiary bases, their empirical foundations?
It is very difficult to calculate exactly the number of people who are trafficked. It is an illegal crime so people attempt to hide it and to hide their profits and to hide the number of people they are trafficking. No-one puts on their tax return or profile, “Profession, human trafficker”
In Tamil Nadu where the Sumangali Scheme is operating, it operates in most mills, so my knowing the approximate total number of employees you can estimate the total number of girls in the scheme. There are local NGO’s and auditors who work in the factories and are able to provide fairly accurate figures.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
We work in the cocoa industry. Two thirds of the world’s cocoa come from west Africa where mainly young boys are trafficked from surrounding countries to work on the cocoa farms.
We work in tea where the form of poverty that tea pluckers and factory workers are kept in, generates a unique situation of poverty where human trafficking thrives. Here we are particularly focusing in Assam. We have been raising awareness about the trafficking in the fishing industry in Asia. We also work on raising awareness of the harm and abuse of trafficking in Australia.
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
I love that people who would not normally come together, will come together to work on how to end human trafficking.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them to you?
They are leading the way and showing how it can be done.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/11
Tell us about yourself – family background, personal story, education, and previous professional capacities.
I come from a hairdressing background, so I have dived deep into the chemical world, and witnessed the side effects first hand! Day after day, with my hands coated in chemicals, and fumes chocking me, and my clients- well, my conscious just kept at me- to walk another path.
Fascinated by products and beauty, I began to unearth just how toxic these industries really are! From a young age, I had always had a keen interest in natural chemistry, so I began to follow this interest, and learnt how to create my own skin care.
Combining my Naturopathy studies and my diploma in Spiritual Healing, I took a leap of faith into the unknown, and here I am- a director of my own natural skin care company, helping to support, educate and contribute to a better world- an eco-world!
What is the importance of ethical fashion to you?
Knowing that the clothes on my back have come from a source where people have been treated like humans, and paid well for their work, is what contributes to a fair world. I want to be part of that!
What is the importance of sustainable fashion to you?
Knowing that our clothes come from environmentally responsible resources, that respect the earth and its people, is the fashion I’m proud to wear!
The strive for Sustainability and Humanity, is constant conscious work.
I long for the day, when it will be legal, to provide my skin care range- from within Hemp Plastic! All things, Eco, Natural, Healthy, Sustainable and Conscious- are just common sense.
Chemicals are hidden within so much of what we use, consume and apply-daily. Teaming up with other companies that are for an Eco World-is what I live for, together we are stronger, together we can make a difference!
What was the inspiration for earth skin & eden – and its title?
I have been making my own skin care on & off for about a decade now. My concern about the petrochemicals within mainstream skin care is what lead to the creation of earth skin & eden. We source certified organic & superior natural derivatives to create our unique body products.
Our name is symbolic; it represents our purposeful meaning behind our natural skin care company.
Earth-gratitude for life, respecting all inhabitants & elements of the Earth.
Skin- respect for the health of humanity, providing organic & natural skincare, with a holistic foundation.
Eden- love for all that is natural, using sustainable sources from earths garden to nurture & repair your skin.
What makes earth skin & eden unique?
We have created a no foam Body Cleansing Crème that is naturally ecological! It is designed to not only gently cleanse & nurture your skin with pure naturals, but also teaches the user how to simply save water!
Our goal is Water-conservation; our focus is Natural Beauty.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
I’m a busy mum of 3 teenagers, so balance is crucial. I love to write and share what I know.
I love to help folk to awaken to a eco way of life, for the sake of their own health & well-being, and those who they are responsible for. I also brainstorm my formula’s to come…
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
Every day, I wake energized, because I know I am doing what I was meant to do! Helping to educate people about the dangers of hidden chemicals within skin care. By encouraging others to look at what they can do in their own lives, to contribute to better health and well-being is what makes me smile.
With regard to organizations/companies, and so on, like Trusted Clothes and earth skin & eden, what’s the importance of them to you?
Conscious Living contains the power to wake the people of the World!
The more we can support each other in our quests to leave behind a world that teaches our generations to come, how to ‘right the wrongs’ is a World that brings hope, health, shared wealth and happiness.
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Thanks for the opportunity to share a little about me and my skin care company!
Thank you for your time, Davina.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/10
Before diving into the main conversation, what’s some of your background – personal, educational, professional, and so on?
I was born and raised in Naples, Italy. There, I studied political sciences and, at 27, I moved to the north of Europe. I went to Berlin first for a short internship, then Brussels where I earned an MA in Geopolitics and worked at the European Commission and various UN agencies…
Also, you’ve worked with various European Union and United Nations agencies as a development aid manager. What tasks and responsibilities came these positions?
I did, I worked for as a development aid manager for about 15 years. I was supporting employment and institutional reform and was specialized in the socio- economic integration of women.
You founded SeeMe in 2012.[i] It’s an ethical fair luxury brand, which produces heart-shaped jewelry, and accessories. The products are handmade by women victims of violence and are used to support other victims of violence. With this in mind, what was the inspiration for its founding, and its name?
Well, after 15 years of mere reporting on various issues affecting women, trying to come up with solutions that are rarely put in motions, I really wanted to take matters in my own hands. I’ve always had the itch of doing something creative and SeeMe is the result of that together with my experience in politics and the deep desire to act and make people’s life a little better.
The premise was to create a product could potentially save the world in its own way, by looking good and creating wealth for all those involved. And SeeMe, well, it is a little inspired by my own initial and the desire to do my own thing (C=Me) as well as the idea that looking at problems isn’t enough, one needs to really see them. “SeeMe, don’t just look at me” was the first slogan of the brand.
SeeMe provides ethical sourcing for alternate fashion brands as well. What is involved in this?
When I created SeeMe I did not buy workshops, instead I helped build them and I never tied them to SeeMe. These workshops are independent, but SeeMe being Fair Trade certified, they are too, plus they are very professional and the quality they produce is fantastic.
I use this angle to appeal to well known fashion brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, Missoni or Karl Lagerfeld… It goes something like, “I know an amazing producer that does amazing things, completely handmade, for a fair price and great quality. Plus, they are fair trade certified!” And they love it!
Since the products themselves are hearts, the clients of SeeMe can join in the #heartmovement with the heartwarming purpose to have love replace violence. Where did this idea originate for SeeMe?
When I first left my job and started doing jewelry, I must say I was excited by all the possibilities and I started exploring different style directions… I really wanted to give my own twist to some of the amazing things I saw in the souks of Tunis or Ankara.
That’s how the traditional silver circle chain, widely used in traditional Tunisian jewelry became a heart… It really stood out from all the other things I was doing and decided to drop everything else and just go with this strong symbol. The chain literally became a heart and I find it a beautiful metaphor for what SeeMe is endeavoring…
Have you had any commentary or feedback from workers, the women victims of violence, about the benefits to their own lives from this work? What kinds of things meant the most to you?
Oh yes! I am in constant contact with the workshop in Tunis… The team is headed by a workshop director, then there are two master artisans, and all the girls. And the poor boys are not only their trainers and mentor on the job, they are also their protectors and counsellors…
They are all such an amazing family; it is heart warming… There is this one woman who worked with us for a while, when she arrived she was a shell of a person, alone with her son, completely lost…
After a year with us, however, she started regaining confidence and, after putting some money aside thanks to her job with us, she took her own leap of faith and opened a small afterschool space for children with disabilities… I am so extremely proud of this.
Now, SeeMe is about to support the United Nations through United Nations Women.[ii] That is, the collaboration with the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women.[iii] What are the contents and purposes of the support for the Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women?
We are so proud of this. In fact, the UNTF to End Violence against Women selected our heart as symbol for their 20th anniversary. Knowing that the official color of the cause is orange, we have created a whole Orange Heart collection including two necklaces, bracelets, and an upcoming tote bag (but the bag is still under wraps…).
There are some other serious issues to do with patriarchal cultures and single mothers. Single mothers will be shunned by that larger culture, which can create problems once out of their shelter homes and unable to find work. A job that can pay for them and their child or children. How can and do these women attain the appropriate training for work that can sustain a steady income?
The girls usually start their training while still at the shelter; they are then trained by master goldsmiths with decades of experience in the jewelry field and soon thereafter they are employing and start receiving a salary that allows them to pay rent and live comfortably.
SeeMe also provides funds for schooling and other necessities for the kids.
SeeMe has been a source of income and a safe resort in Tunisia and Turkey. Why these countries?
I worked extensively in these countries; this is where the idea of SeeMe was born, where I saw a necessity and where the quality of the handicraft allowed me to produce luxury products…
What other provisions does SeeMe give to women victims of violence – in obvious need of assistance?
On top of training, work opportunities, steady income and emotional support, the SeeMe women also get funding for their kid’s schooling and need and, most important but less quantifiable, they regain their pride, independence and love for their lives…
SeeMe does a form of outreach to other fashion world brands through positive influence of them such as Karl Lagerfeld, Tommy Hilfiger, Vogue International, and others. What is the process for positive influence of these additional brands in the fashion world?
SeeMe is the result of the desire to produce beautiful product while providing economic and emotional support to all the people involved… An idea that, in its simplicity, got wide support from the fashion world.
What are the most in-demand product of SeeMe?
The very first product created, a big heart hanging on a very simple chain, is still the most loved and has become our iconic product… Link – http://seeme.org/collections/necklaces/products/large-heart-with-long-chain-silve
What is the importance of the companies and organizations such as SeeMe or United Nations Women?
Violence against women is a complex issue that needs to be approached from different angles… Having brands providing training and job opportunities, organizations providing funding, and media providing coverage and shedding positive light on the issue all contribute to making the lives of less fortunate people that much better…
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
I am just so glad to see that more and more people are jumping on the ethical fashion train, embracing slow culture and minimal yet meaningful consumerism… Never lose faith in humanity.
Thank you for your time, Caterina.
No, thank you Scott, it is an absolute honor to be interviewed by you for Trusted Clothes.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/09
What is the importance of ethical fashion to you?
The importance of ethical fashion to me is based upon a holistic circular approach to designing, producing and consuming fashion and textiles in the 21st century. It is system that involves a consideration of our environment in its entirety — our resources; use/reuse/recycling of these resources, respectful modes of production that does not exploit cultures, modes of production, humans and/or animals and a focus on the development of alternative business models that will encourage the further development of the local production and consumption of textiles and clothing.
What is the importance of sustainable fashion to you?
The importance of sustainable fashion is more than just buying fabric made sustainably. It is a social and moral responsibility. In the 90’s when I was in design school, I was told I couldn’t do what I wanted to do because there was no market.
Flash forward 20 years and after 13 years of establishing my design studio and practice I am doing it. I believe that it takes more than just using resources that are deemed ‘sustainable’ to claim yourself as sustainable.
Yes, it is important that we address resources – they are finite. I however believe that sustainability begins with creative use and reuse and using materials that are already in existence or are by-products from other industries to produce new textiles, garments and accessories.
We have way more materials in our environment than we can even possibly consume and we are the first society in history to exist that has had to create landfills to deal with our waste. I think sustainable fashion is informed by ones’ value system, knowledge and experience and the design decisions that are made are driven to contribute to the greater good in some way.
I believe sustainable fashion is meant to be specialized and should be approached in this way. I think the more important element to sustainable fashion is telling a story that needs to be told.
What is Sans Soucie Textile + Design?
Sans Soucie Textile + Design is a zero waste textile and design studio established in 2003 in Vancouver, Canada that specializes in transforming pre-consumer textile waste, specifically waste hosiery produced in mills in Canada and the USA.
This material resource is dyed and printed using low impact dyes and inks before it is remade into new textiles for clothing, accessories and 3D forms. We use and reuse all the water, waste ink, threads and offcuts from our process into our bespoke made to order limited edition collections.
What makes the company unique?
We transform pre-consumer waste hosiery into new textiles that are produced anywhere else in the world. We produce by-products from this material resource into cultural products that are 100% Made in Canada. We also a supplier of waste textiles to textile artists and craftspeople who work with our waste textiles to produce jewelry, rugs and fine art.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
My current schedule includes costume designing, public speaking and educating on the value that waste textiles has to offer as a creative material resource in craft and design, and mentoring various sustainable projects globally.
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
Knowing that I am creating something that will live beyond my years on this planet and that fact that I contributing to the greater good.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
I think we have a long way to go but the movement has been started and in my opinion there is no looking back. I have spent time in the Southeast of the USA where the majority of textile and clothing production existed prior to offshore production taking over in the latter of the 20th century.
From my experiences, the impact of this departure was necessary. Although they are still trying to recover from this loss, the people and of these environments were exploited and underpaid.
A revival is occurring in this area and are operating from a more mindful, sustainable approach. The sad thing is that what left the USA and Canada has only repositioned itself offshore and continues to exploit cultures, humans and animals. The Fashion System as we know it is deconstructing and has been for some time.
The more awareness that is created on the issue will pave the way for ethical and sustainable to grow and be the future of fashion.
Thank you for your time, Katherine.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/08
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
I graduated from Ohio University in Athens in engineering– from there, I moved to Austin, TX to play music. I played & toured with my band, and worked as an Audio Engineer & publicist for artists for about 6 years. I got a little burned out at the slog and late nights– so I moved back to my home state of Ohio with my wife.
There, I met my soon to be close friend Chris Sutton. He’s the creative director and designer at Noble and the company was his brain child. We actually started playing music together (surprise) and had a really good go of it. We worked very well together creatively and practically, and he asked me to help him launch Noble.
I pretty much handled the operational side, and he handled the product & creative side. I had a natural inclination to computers, programming, organization and basic ‘left-brain’ stuff… so stepping into the role of C.O.O. felt very natural.
What is the importance of ethical and sustainable fashion to you?
It just feels like the right thing to do. Sourcing ethically and running our business with sustainability at its core was among some of the first tenants we put in place. Chris, his wife Abby (our CEO, and biggest advocate for sustainability) and myself started down that road early.
It was a need we saw in 2012 when we founded Noble– there weren’t a lot of denim companies or clothing companies for that matter who were successfully doing everything the way we thought it should be done. In truth, there are a few parts to it: sourcing, production & transportation.
A company like Patagonia (who we all very much enjoy) does a phenomenal job in their transparency and sourcing. But their factories are in Asia– even though they are run properly, that is a long way for those goods to travel to meet their American customers, and that is done on a container ship that spits out a massive amount of CO2.
We wanted to make things ‘closer to home’, source them sustainably AND work to find smaller factories that were hit hard by NAFTA. We felt that those three pieces would help us make our product the cleanest, most sustainable and ethical out there.
What is Noble Denim – source of its title, and its mission, productions, and vision?
Noble was the name of Chris’s grandfather. Not only does it have a personal connection to him, but the word itself sparks a lot of pre-existing feelings in people– ethics, quality, altruism. It seemed a perfect name to create a vivid idea of the product, along with that personal touch.
Its mission has been the same since we started– to make premium garments, in the most sustainable and responsible way possible. We leave no stone untouched in this pursuit (from organic inks or recycled packing materials, carbon offset shipments, sourcing within 200 miles, etc.).
We started doing all the sewing ourselves in our Cincy workshop, but quickly became overwhelmed at the demand… so at that point, we looked for help and learned about all of the factories around the Midwest who were highly skilled, but under worked due to NAFTA and companies moving operations to overseas. We decided to embrace that network wholeheartedly.
You’re a co-founder of Noble Denim. What is the importance of collaboration and teamwork with the creation of new companies?
Simply put, a single person can’t do everything. If they try, they certainly can’t do everything well. Chris and I were lucky at first since we both specialized in VERY different areas. He– with the eye on design, skills at the sewing machine and visual communication & me on organizing, problem solving, commerce and web.
That still wasn’t really enough though, and his wife Abby, and Chris’s college buddy, Sam, joined the team once we formally incorporated. They all brought very clear and unique skillsets to the table. We could all go about our own tasks without butting heads really at all– we trusted one another to be the master of their domain and still very much enjoy those roles.
One of Abby’s skills is understanding people, and bringing people together. So through her structure, we’ve all become a very tight-nit and comfortable team. That collaboration was so important at the beginning (and continues to be important).
What things become easier with co-founding a company?
You know that everyone has skin in the game, so the motivation is steady with all the partners. Since all of the partners head up different specialized departments within Noble, we can always lean on each other and rely on each other to get stuff done. That is incredibly refreshing.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
Noble isn’t for everyone. It is a premium product, made for someone who knows what they want. It probably wouldn’t be a great jean for someone who has never owned a pair of Raw denim. It is a lifestyle and requires a lot of devotion to make that pair of Raw jeans your own.
Plus, you probably wouldn’t notice all the extra features and thought we put into certain areas to make them more durable or comfortable. We realized this from the beginning, but we still had the dream to create sustainable garments for the masses. So, we started a sister-brand: Victor Athletics. It has taken up pretty much all of our extra time, and it’s awesome.
Victor makes vintage-inspired ALL organic athletic wear for men and women. All sourced and made in the USA (even the cotton is grown here). As I mentioned, it is a lot easier to acquire organic knit fabrics in the US than denim. With Victor, we use the same code of ethics as Noble, but decided to price the items direct to customers (so no wholesale, no extra markup for 3rd parties).
We wanted to take the barrier of entry WAY down for someone to get a USA made, organic cotton garment. So far, it has been met with open arms. We launched Victor via Kickstarter and to this day it is the 3rd highest grossing fashion Kickstarter campaign of all time. That was a big help in granting us affirmation on the idea.
Victor just turned 1 in the spring and we’ve been able to open a brick and mortar store in Cincinnati that doubles as the Noble Denim workshop. We offer custom hems, denim repairs and special small batch releases there, as well as stock all the Victor stuff. It’s been pretty fun.
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
I think the validation that people WANT what Victor and Noble make is pretty awesome. It has been a passion of all of ours to create sustainable garments, and now we are able to make them for the connoisseur (noble) and the general public (victor).
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
Since we started down the long road of making our product ethically, we’ve watch the climate of the garment industry shift. It is much easier for new companies to start up with very little funding, and the ‘field’ is that much more saturated.
Some follow what we’ve done and attempt to make their products close to home, but we still don’t see a large push for creating organic products. That was one dream of ours that we still strive for…we’d like to offer much more organic fabrics, but the fact is, they are incredibly difficult to source.
We’ve been able to offer organic knits and a basic indigo selvage… but as for different weights, colors, washes, it isn’t easy. Cone Mills in N. Carolina for example used to make organic denim, but stopped because the demand didn’t match their standard conventional denim. They have no plans to start up again.
This is certainly disappointing from a sourcing standpoint, but we still try to push the envelope and our customers do respond to it. Our organic products have sold very well and we are always getting requests for more options. I think this is one area we will continue to focus on to differentiate ourselves from the masses– plus, it is right on par with our mission: to create the highest quality garments, in the most sustainable way possible.
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
Glad to know that this idea of sustainable fashion continues to gain traction! Hopefully it isn’t just a trend and people will continue to vote on how they want businesses to run with their dollar.
Thank you for your time, Christman.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/06
Tell us about yourself – family background, personal story, education, and previous professional capacities.
I am a British Indian. My father and grandfather came to England in the 1960’s, as my grandfather was part of the British Army. At that time, being in the British army allowed families to resettle in the UK.
We are a close knit family. I have one brother, who is married and has three boys (the oldest of whom is in university). My family all live in one family house in Reading, England. I still have a room there too.
Unlike my family, I decided to live and work in various places in the world. I wanted to see more of the world than Reading or the UK. I have lived and worked in the US, Dubai and England predominantly, but have also had short stints in Colombia (travelling) and Lithuania (working for the UNHCR and teaching English).
My parents have no formal education (not even high school). My father is the oldest of three, and my mother was the oldest girl in her family (2 boys, 4 girls). As such, and in keeping with India at that time (and even now), they had to help with family work. My father worked on the farm and my mother looked after her younger siblings.
My father came to England at the age of 16 with GBP 3, no English and no education. Through hard graft he taught himself mathematics that would help him run a business, English and reading to a rudimentary level (though he still can’t write). After a number of labourer jobs, he started his first shop, and from there he went on to be quite successful as an entrepreneur.
I tell the above story because I also wanted to be an entrepreneur, but in a different way. As my father never had an education, he valued it higher than anything else. He wanted to make sure I had an education.
My father was also quite strict. I did well in school, and then went on to get my first degree, a Bachelors in Computer Science focusing on Artificial Intelligence from Aston University in Birmingham. I thought I was going to be a neural network engineer at the time, but that never materialized.
I took a year off to go live and work in Lithuania. During that time, I planned out what my next 10 years should be: complete my year abroad, Masters (1 year), and then work in several 2 year stints to gain the skills I needed.
So I worked as an IT consultant in London and Boston and with projects in Tokyo (2 years), strategy consultant in London and with projects in Paris (3 years), MBA (2 years) and then in finance in investment banking in New York and London (actually 3.5 years).
You can see that some of the jobs were longer than the 2 years I envisaged. This gave me a grounding in how to organize and run companies, as I had a good understanding of IT and ops, marketing, and finance.
During this time, I tried to volunteer my time to worthy causes. I used to work as the finance director at Yaa Asantewaa in London, a black arts charity, for 2 years, and at Junior Achievements in New York giving classes on everyday living.
When I moved to Dubai, volunteering became very difficult due to the restrictions on good causes and foundations, so I decided with my business partner at Isthmus (Javier Cervino to start up social impact projects instead (see below).
Along the way, I have helped to start-up a number of companies, both as a partner, and as a consultant for others. The most prominent is a finance consulting company, Isthmus Partners, which is a corporate finance company that has been operational since Feb, 2009 in Dubai.
I have also helped to started up The Carbone Clinic (see below), which has been a major part of the last 3 years for me. Chanzez is a startup that I have been working on for the last year, which is in its initial phases.
As stated above, along the way I picked up a degree in Computer Science from Aston University, a Masters (ADMIS) from the London School of Economics, my MBA from Columbia business school in NY (majoring in finance and economics, and entrepreneurship), and my CFA.
On the personal side, I live and work in Dubai currently, and am married to Marina.
What is the importance of ethical fashion?
First, we need to ensure we are speaking the same language. For us ethical fashion is clothing that is produced with labour that is provided appropriate working conditions, paid fairly and are managed assuming the dignity of workers. This is our main focus, and sustainability is a longer term objective.
This is important on a human level. I think everyone can agree with that, but many are happy to turn a blind eye, as it is too difficult and entrenched as a problem for any one individual to think they can help.
On a business level, this is important too. It reduces staff churn, increases productivity and helps service levels. This is not simple academic babble – we see it in the project we run. Ethical labour standards are the first thing we look for in each of our social impact projects, and we grow out from there, as you will see in how our clinic operates (see below).
What is the importance of sustainable fashion?
For us sustainable fashion is production, use and disposal of clothing in a way that will have the least impact on the Earth.
As sustainable fashion impacts so many people (through purchases and production), but also the earth (through the whole lifecycle of growing fibre such as cotton through to production with the use of chemicals through to disposal of clothing) it is an industry that needs a more sustainable production cycle. It is not even a question to ask why, but how and when can we help.
We are new to the sector, so we are still learning how to ensure sustainability. Essentially, we are focusing on one small part of the production cycle, but hope to vertically integrate over time, so we can be responsible for the whole cycle for our products.
How that happens will evolve over time. We are realistic about the learning cycle for us, as well as for the market and production.
Our current focus will be to purchase organic material, and not use chemicals in the process of cutting, sewing and packaging. We are still working through our supply chains, so this will be our first aim. Later, we will look at weaving and growth of cotton itself, but this is a longer term goal.
You work with start-up companies that have social impact. What companies?
Our main success story has been The Carbone Clinic in Dubai. This is a clinic for children with autism. We helped start this clinic because we saw the need (in the autism field), and the poor way in which services were provided in the region (no regulation, few qualified staff, and many clinics that operate purely as a money making scheme).
We are not a charity, a strictly for-profit company, an NGO or a non-for-profit company. We are a hybrid. We operate like a for-profit company. Therefore, we are as efficient as possible. We are competitive on market rates, salaries, and compete with everyone else in the market. The difference is what we do with the profit.
The majority of the profit goes towards raising awareness of autism, paying for services where parents of children cannot afford services (on a means tested basis), and helping to influence government policy (through trying to regulate Applied Behaviour Analysis correctly, as a treatment for autism).
With this method, we are never in a position of continuously asking for money, as we generate funds with which to run our social impact programmes. The minority of the profit is used to pay shareholders, as we do need to attract investment.
We also ensure internally that we run well provisioned staff. That means a lot of investment in training. As well as all the normal training employees should expect from a clinic, we also fund Masters programmes, the cost to become board certified, etc.
We do this with our administration staff also so our accountants become chartered, our IT staff upskill in new technologies, etc. Our staff also get real progression opportunities through promotion once they show they have aptitude for the next level and have taken advantage of the training we provide.
This mix of running like a pure for-profit company, having a social impact project funded by the profit and ensuring our staff are treated properly is evident in all our projects. We find that it helps both improve productivity and reduce churn of staff. People who work with us stay, grow, and ultimately make our services better. Over three years, the clinic has gone from a startup to being one of (if not the) most prominent autism clinics in the MENA region.
We also work with start-ups as consultants that want to make a social impact. For instance, we helped to finance Talah Board, a wood board production company that produces OSB board from palm tree waste (the fronds that are chopped off). 95% of this waste is either incinerated or dumped into landfills.
Talah Board will be able to take at least 20% initially of this waste to produce new wood board that can be used for multiple purposes, predominantly in concrete form work to start with in the development of new buildings.
We are also involved in the due diligence and financing of new bio fuel companies.
Why those companies with social impact?
We are looking to start social impact projects in a number of sectors. The important thing is to find markets that are large and where the impact is wide reaching. Healthcare, education, textile production, farming, and energy are all sectors that we would be interested in.
Your recent venture is Chanzez. What is Chanzez?
Chanzez is a clothing production company, which aims to initially produce ethically, and then look at more sustainable practices across the lifecycle of its clothing production. We expect people to want fashion, rather than need fashion. We aim to fill this gap in the mass market. So we are not looking to be high fashion or to produce eclectic designs.
We aim to fulfil the staple clothing functions, with designs that are contemporary and appeal to the masses. This means t-shirts (to start), jeans, button down shirts, etc. We will look to produce for men (first batch), women and children.
We are looking to produce on a mass scale, so we can sell at fair prices. Though our production costs will be higher, we aim to be profitable by reducing other costs such as marketing spend. We also are looking to make less in profit, but enough to attract investors.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
See above
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
That is a complex question. I firmly believe this type of work is a duty. I have the skills I have because an immigrant moved to an unfamiliar country where he had no money, could not speak the language and could not get a job that would pay him fairly.
That immigrant’s hard work gave me my education. I could use it to gain just for myself: I work in finance (which is a dirty word in many circles), which pays well. Why spend the time to do start social impact projects?
A couple of things:
1) It would be unfair to all those that were born into a country of no opportunity and whose parents did not have the chance my parents had (what little chance that was) for me to use my skills purely for personal gain. Using the skills, I have learnt for only a fraction of my time to help start social impact projects is not really that taxing on me.
2) I am fortunate. I like what I do. I don’t have a 9-5 job. Some people would find my job tedious and boring, but I like finance, economics, and negotiating contracts. I enjoy organizing, working through organizational structures and process charts. I like working with people and helping to train them. So I don’t see the work as a chore.
3) I used to think that I needed A, B and C to be happy. Over time I have realized that it is not A, B and C that makes a person happy, but the pursuit of A, B and C. It is the desire to get up and have purpose. Achieving A, B or C ends the journey. Ends are never as good as beginnings or the middle (I find). Also, I start thinking of A, B and C as less necessary.
With regard to organizations/companies, and so on, like Trusted Clothes and Chanzez, what’s the importance of them to you?
I think there should be more organisations out there like Trusted Clothes and Chanzez. Once there is a critical mass of such organisations, they will have a greater say in how things are done. What matters in this world is the power wielded by companies that have the ear of consumers.
That may be unfortunate, but in the large part true. So once companies that produce ethical and sustainable products have enough of a market share, suddenly things will start to change. For that to happen, ethically minded companies and organisations need to appeal to the masses, not by preaching, but by just doing.
Create the products people want regardless of how they are made. Make them sustainable and ethically in the background. People don’t really want to know how they are made, and don’t really care. Making the products people want is what is important. Companies should produce them ethically regardless.
So the importance of these companies is not as individual organisations, but as a market share. It doesn’t matter they do not relate, or even if they compete against each other. The point is that they have to become a larger piece of the overall pie.
Thank you for your time, Sukhdev.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/05
Tell us about yourself – family background, personal story, education, and previous professional capacities.
I was born and grew up in England. I spent a lot of time in Brighton, Glastonbury, and Southwest England. When I left school, I qualified as a hairdresser. I started travelling at the age of 20. I went on a trip to Australia. I was travelling, meeting amazing people, and studying philosophy and spirituality. I went to India at the age of 21. I started making jewelry and leather accessories. The business has expanded after that. I have always been into working with natural fabrics. I have one brother and one sister. Both are younger than me. They are in London. My parents live in the countryside.
What is the importance of ethical fashion?
It is to support the communities and not sweatshop labor. My ethic is that we work in an environment where everyone is happy and paid well. We a have a relationship with the people producing our line, our clothing.
Also, we are working more with natural fabrics. We are trying to find more sustainable fabrics. Fabrics that can be more of a solution rather than part of the throwaway fashion industry. We aim to make clothes that don’t fall apart. That doesn’t go out of fashion. Fashion is such a quick industry.
What is the importance of sustainable fashion?
It is making clothes that don’t fall apart. That are biodegradable and won’t pollute the planet. Cotton pollution is one of the biggest polluters in the world. It is finding more natural fabric solutions rather than contributing to the problem. We don’t want polyester fabric.
(Laugh)
What is the inspiration for Sundari Creations – and its title?
Sundari is a Sanskrit name. It was given to me about 10 years ago. When I was doing yoga in India, it means “Beautiful.” The whole Sanskrit name means “divine mother of inner beauty.” It is more commonly known as “beautiful.” When you break down “beautiful,” it means “Be-You-To-Full.” The whole concept of the line is to feel complete, to feel themselves to the full, and to feel confident.
What makes Sundari Creations unique?
It is to have more cutting-edge designs and using natural, sustainable fabrics. A lot of the natural clothing is often plain and simple – not so creative. It is our mission to create cutting edge designs with natural fabrics. It is targeting a wide range of people, too. For people that live in the cities, practice yoga or dance. It targets adventurous spirits as well.
It supplies wholesale clothing, jewelry, and accessories. Why these products in particular?
I am creative and love using different materials. We are more specialized with the clothes and the jewelry. The accessories are a fun product to make. It’s, for me as an artist, a fun material to make products with. I use leather because its strong lasting and natural and a by product. That’s part of the idea. It is working with natural fabrics. Fabrics that is strong. It’s because I am creative and like different materials.
(Laugh)
You have an offer of $1,000 for minimum orders. How does this improve the livelihoods of small businesses?
We give a small starting price because it is not a huge investment for small businesses. We do have to have a minimum because it’s easier for our production house and everyone involved. We have to dye the fabric and print it. We need minimum orders to keep it realistic.
You have a close relationship with pattern makers, seamstresses, and tailors, and do not have products from sweat -shops. How does this improve the ethical considerations for the products – consumer and suppliers?
It helps to pay more attention to the way that our clothing is produced. A lot of the stuff from the high street stores these days we have no idea where the products are coming from. I know that when something is sold for less than a fiver (£5). It costs me more than that to make.
So, whoever is making that item, they may not be being paid that well. When you’re buying clothes, it is important to consider how that item is produced. Animals have been mistreated, especially when demand is high. It is important to start noticing where our clothes etc coming from, where they are made, the fabrics etc.
The main value seems to be fairness. If someone is working in a condition, making a product, they should have adequate pay and fairness is part of that. Also, it is important to know what conditions are like for the person – to be more involved at that level. Obviously, the consumer can’t be involved at that level, but they can do some research at least – if they have the time. (Laughs) Support smaller labels and local designers.
What is the importance of that close relationship with the producer to you?
I love the people that I work with. I support them. Not just because I love them. I want to have fun, have good communication, and know everyone’s happy. Like in England or America, you want everyone to feel happy and feel appropriately paid for his or her work. In Asia and other places where a lot of clothes are made, there are people that are mistreated.
Conditions aren’t always so great. Everything these days in made in Asia, China, and Vietnam.
For me, I enjoy having the good relationship with my staff and know that they are happy, enjoying what they are doing, and everyone is getting paid right.
What other work are you involved in at this point time?
Mainly, I am working on clothing and designs. Also, I teach yoga, which I do volunteer for deprived children in the community and the neighborhood. I do some healing work.
What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
I love being creative. I am more, and more, working on the ethical and natural fabrics. I am trying to support the market for Eco ethical clothing. For the clothes, I feel that it is hopefully going to be part of the solution to the environmental problems that the fashion industry is creating.
Fashion, without plastic materials. I like that aspect. I feel like I can help be part of the solution making sustainable clothes. I love to express the creative side. I love to express my spirit and sharing what I’ve learned. It is being healthy and present. I think yoga is great for everybody. If you do a bit each day, you can feel vitalized by getting the circulation and energy moving. The healing, its good to help one another.
What is this healing?
I do many healing modalities such as Reiki and Theta; it’s a life style and adds to healthy living.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now?
It’s great. They are promoting ethical fashion. It is important in the current times with consumerism as the reality we’re living in, where things are mass produced and not really made to last. Trusted Clothes is great because they are supporting the same beliefs as me. They are making a change for people to be more aware of what they’re purchasing, what the materials are made from how it’s made, where it’s made. Is it what they really, really want or is it because it is a bargain and cheap? It changes the way we look at things to something more serious.
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
I don’t know.
(Laugh)
I think I’ve said it all. I promote holistic healthy lifestyle. That my label and designs are part of the holistic lifestyle. It is all, in essence, the same thing. It is looking good and feeling good. Eating well, everything is part of that.
It is good to eat well, eat healthy food, and know what you’re wearing. Be healthy. That’s what I’m communicating.
Thank you for your time, Sundari.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/05
To begin combating large problems, we need to collaborate and work together.
The nature of large-scale problems can be solved through collective action. Collective action via the small contributions multiplied over people.
Multiplied over, this can mean use of things that produce carbon to combat climate change or global warming. It might not mean the best economic system at the moment. But it does provide a survivable future for the next generation.
Upcoming generations will be dealing with the same issues as us, but with science we can make great progress. Collective action, scientific and not-so scientific, has compounding effects. It changes the policy, law, and production of society.
The production and energy consumption of energy as well as the production of the goods and services that consume that energy. That means moving from something like hydrocarbon producing energy sources to less hydrocarbon producing energy sources, or even solar or nuclear power.
If we can work together, get our ‘house in order’ and collaborate on small networks and small scales, we can have an impact that brings great change. It’s a bit like ‘think globally and act locally’. Every single contribution towards a common goal counts.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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There’s the nature of child labour in all its hellish combinations.
One example is child slavery. It’s a subset of it. Child labour is estimated above 200,000,000 children. That’s 18 times the number of children in Canada as a whole. It’s ‘jaw dropping’.
The kids in child slavery are a much smaller number and going through some of the most severe forms of degradation, humiliation, abuse, and exploitation. They might not know better either. But we do.
And that’s the point. If the world leaders don’t, and citizens don’t, do something about it, few others can or will.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Who are the Hopi – and basic “indigenous” definitions can help, sort of, but everyone’s different, peoples and persons?[i],[ii],[iii],[iv],[v],[vi] Glad you asked.
And while we’re at it, what are natural fibres? Also happy you asked. Natural fibres differ from synthetic or man-made fibres, can be plant or animal fibres, the plant cells as eukaryotic or non-prokaryotic, and both animal and plant fibres can be composted whilst synthetic or man-made fibres cannot decompose.[vii],[viii] ,[ix],[x],[xi] ,[xii],[xiii],[xiv],[xv]
But first, let’s chat about indigenous peoples a bit – indigenous peoples throughout the world continue to be under tremendous and forced pressure – which reflects ‘deep, systematic and widespread’ rights violations of indigenous peoples in the world – from the outside, and at times in violation of the international agreements such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which, in Articles 1 through 3, states unequivocally[xvi]:
Article 1 Indigenous peoples have the right to the full enjoyment, as a collective or as individuals, of all human rights and fundamental freedoms as recognized in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law.
Article 2 Indigenous peoples and individuals are free and equal to all other peoples and individuals and have the right to be free from any kind of discrimination, in the exercise of their rights, in particular that based on their indigenous origin or identity.
Article 3 Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.[xvii]
The international violations of rights have localized representations in the national contexts of many, many countries including, for brief examples, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, and even numerous examples throughout the continent of Africa.[xviii],[xix],[xx],[xxi],[xxii],[xxiii],[xxiv],[xxv],[xxvi],[xxvii] There are hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples throughout the world (some say 370 million and others say more than 400 million, and the numbers could be much lower or much, much higher) and the violations of human rights would be travesty enough, but this kind of violation stacks with human rights and, thus, becomes an issue for more than one single group of people.
So it leads to a joke, darkly, if you can name a letter, you’re likely to find a country name that starts with that letter with indigenous rights violations in addition to likely human rights violations as well, and the examination provided in the end notes is not even close to comprehensive. It’s a simple alphabetized listing. Not complex, in short; that means the issue can be graspable by most people most of the time, which compounds its…bad-ness.
And that Article 1 pertains to the United Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Two of the key documents in the international community.[xxviii],[xxix] What do they say? Well, the UN Charter can be read article by article, and it is a fundamental document, but the Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrines many of the collective values of the species. Take the preamble alone:
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,
Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,
Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.[xxx]
The consistent reference to a common people simply means a unified global citizenry (mirrors much of McLuhan with the Global Village) and to the rights and freedoms is simple music to my, and very likely their and everyone’s, ears and hearts, and minds, or in that great German song by, the greatest constructor of baroque sound, Johann Sebastien Bach: herz und mund und tat und leben or “heart and mouth and deed and living.”[xxxi],[xxxii],[xxxiii],[xxxiv],[xxxv]
By the way to avoid possible confusion, this is a document, or these are documents, rather, that pertain up to the present and through the United Nations, that is, they’re active now. And Articles 2 and 3 of the freedom and equality for indigenous peoples (as with everyone) and the freedom for self-identification with their own culture, and the “self-determination” to do so, and, thus, the summarization of rights, privileges to culture, and the choice to one’s own culture, that is, to pick one’s own culture and live by it: full stop, period, exclamation point.
Let’s go back to the first article, there’s the description about enjoyment of all, not one or some or most, but all – that is, every individual and identified collective/group, of the human rights (as people, as human beings, after all) And furthermore, these do not limit in any way to these kinds of contexts, because the nature of the problems of violations of rights (or, at least, universally agreed upon privileges for the long-term, first peoples in a land descendants) of indigenous peoples is an international issue (one feels like stating a crime) with the agreements made, tautologically, internationally; not in any national context alone, but in the generalized manner in which these are portrayed.
And take the subsequent earliest stipulations about the right to live their lives as they see fit:
Article 4 Indigenous peoples, in exercising their right to self-determination, have the right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to 4.Resolution 217 A (III). 5 their internal and local affairs, as well as ways and means for financing their autonomous functions.
Article 5 Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions, while retaining their right to participate fully, if they so choose, in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the State.[xxxvi]
That includes the culture and identity expressed through the production of textiles. This means the natural fibre world penetrates into this world of the Hopi (one of my favorite cultures on the planet at the moment).
So they have the right to live through their culture as they see fit insofar as individuals or groups within their community do not have their own human right or rights violated en masse or in small, and the possibility for their own way of life to be violated, and this is the cool part because of the neat art in their own community. So who are the Hopi, in brief?
The Hopi Indians, who live in the arid highlands of northern Arizona (located in the southwestern part of the United States), have inhabited the same place for a millennium, far longer than any other people in North America. They are not only the oldest dwellers in this land but are considered by most other Indians to have a wisdom, a knowledge of things, beyond average comprehension. Peace-loving and knit tightly together by clan relationships, they are intensely spiritual and fiercely independent. Their all-pervading religion is a many stranded cord that unites them to their stark, and beautiful environment.[xxxvii]
As with most cultures, they have a particular religion that represents their collective socio-cultural context and history and cosmology. They have a complex series of ceremonies, and chamber to do this called the kiva with the religious life surrounded by and devoted to the purported Kachina or Katsina spirits.[xxxviii]
And if you look at their intricate and unique textiles and designs, you can see, possibly, why I love that culture.
Or the more particular clothing style indicated in this image a dance in progress. That image is indicative of some of their foundational cosmology and philosophy of life, which is?
When people first emerged into this Fourth World, they asked Maasaw (the Earth Guardian) if they could live here. Maasaw offered a bag of seeds, a water gourd, and a planting stick, and explained that the people’s way in the Fourth World would be hard, but that the his way would provide a long and good life. Therefore, the ethic of self-sufficiency became the root of the present day Hopi people.
The Hopi trace their history back thousands of years, making them one of the oldest living cultures in the world. Hopi are a diverse people; the ancestoral Hopis, Hisatsinom (people of long ago), are known as the “Anasazi,” “Hohokam,” “Sinagua,” “Mogollon,” and other prehistoric cultural groups of the American Southwest. Some of the Hopi villages are among the oldest continuously occupied settlements in the North American continent. The remoteness and expanse of Hopitutskwa (Hopi land) has isolated the Hopi people from the outside world and has helped to preserve the culture.[xxxix]
I could be wrong on the interpretation because I am not an expert on the culture and people, but am intrigued by them. They could very well be one of the oldest civilizations or cultures to date alongside the Jewish and Chinese traditions, but founded in the Western hemisphere as opposed to the Eastern.[xl]
And some of their foundational philosophy and clothing seem to come out of a certain isolation from the rest of the world, sort of.
This was a weave from some of the Hopi themselves such as his man here.
This particular man’s story reflects some of the violations of individual rights instantiated via international stipulations given before:
Prior to contact with the U.S. American Government, Hopi men and women had one name given first at birth, and later as part of a religious society initiation. The name Duwahoyouma is associated with the Sand-Snake Clan as his initiated name. As the U.S. policy in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s was intended to “civilize” the Hopis, Kikmongwi Tawaquaptewa and his brothers were sent to the Sherman Indian School in Riverside California. It was during this forced educational period that Duwahoyouma’s name was changed to Charles Fredericks. Tawaquaptewa’s name was changed to Wilson Fredericks. And so the name Fredericks was falsely created as a proper name for the Bear Clan brothers.[xli]
They even have fancy pants experts with prestigious degrees come in and conduct research as well. One can assume. But if you observe the two people here, the lovely and intricate patterns of blues and orange, and green, and yellow weaved is simply lovely, I feel. Look closer; no pretense. I highly suggest looking more into them. And as noted by Fredericks, “we are still here.”[xlii] An echo across the indigenous people’s throughout the world: the dead, and the gone, and the living and violated.
[i] Hopi. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[ii] Hopi language. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[iii] Cultural Survival. (2016). Who are Indigenous Peoples?.
[iv] Who Are Indigenous Peoples (2016) states:
According to the United Nations, there are approximately 400 million Indigenous people worldwide, making up more than 5,000 distinct tribes. Together we are one of the largest minority groups in the world, spanning over 90 countries. While Indigenous Peoples total only about 6% of the world’s population, we represent 90% of the cultural diversity.
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES HOLD 20% OF THE EARTH’S LAND MASS. THAT LAND HARBORS 80% OF THE WORLD’S REMAINING BIODIVERSITY.
First peoples Worldwide. (2016). Who Are Indigenous Peoples.
[v] Who are indigenous peoples? (2016) states:
It is estimated that there are more than 370 million indigenous people spread across 70 countries worldwide. Practicing unique traditions, they retain social, cultural, economic and political characteristics that are distinct from those of the dominant societies in which they live. Spread across the world from the Arctic to the South Pacific, they are the descendants – according to a common definition – of those who inhabited a country or a geographical region at the time when people of different cultures or ethnic origins arrived. The new arrivals later became dominant through conquest, occupation, settlement or other means.
United Nations permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. (n.d.). Who are indigenous peoples?.
[vi] Who are indigenous peoples? (2016) states:
At least 370 million people worldwide are considered to be indigenous. Most of them live in remote areas of the world. Indigenous peoples are divided into at least 5000 peoples ranging from the forest peoples of the Amazon to the tribal peoples of India and from the Inuit of the Arctic to the Aborigines in Australia.
Indigenous peoples do not necessarily claim to be the only people native to their countries, but in many cases indigenous peoples are indeed “aboriginal” or “native” to the lands they live in, being descendants of those peoples that inhabited a territory prior to colonization or formation of the present state.
International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs. (n.d.). Who are indigenous peoples?.
[vii] natural fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[viii] man-made fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[ix] Wild Fibres. (2016, February 15). Animal Fibres.
[x] Wild Fibres. (2016, February 15). Plant Fibres.
[xi] Bailey, R. (2016, April 25). Plant Cells.
[xii] eukaryote. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xiii] prokaryote. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xiv] Bailey, R. (2016, April 25). Plant Cells.
[xv] University of Illinois Board of Trustees. (2016). The Science of Composting
[xvi] United Nations. (2010, April 22). Rights Violations of Indigenous Peoples ‘Deep, Systemic and Widespread’, Special Rapporteur Tells United Nations Permanent Forum.
[xvii] United Nations. (2007, September 13). United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
[xviii] Brazil’s treatment of its indigenous people violates their rights (2013) states:
Not since the dark days of Brazil’s military dictatorship, when the indigenous people were regarded as “obstacles to progress” and their lands were opened to massive development schemes, have they faced such an assault on their rights.
The fortuitous discovery of the landmark Figueiredo report, which documented appalling crimes against Brazil’s tribal peoples during the 1940s, 50s and 60s and led to the creation of the tribal rights organisation Survival International in 1969, has re-ignited debate, and serves as a warning at a time when the denial of land rights and killing of indigenous people continues.
On one side is an intransigent president whose unilateral view of development looks set to turn the Amazon into an industrial heartland to fuel Brazil’s fast-growing economy. On the other there are Brazil’s 238 tribes, determined to defend their hard-won constitutional rights and protect their lands and livelihoods for future generations. Tellingly, Dilma Rousseff is the only president since the fall of the dictatorship in 1985 who has not met with indigenous peoples.
This is a battle for the rule of law and the right to self-determination, a cornerstone of the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. As the Coordination of Indigenous Organisations of the Brazilian Amazon, or COIAB, recently stated: “The current government is trying to impose its colonial and dominating style on us … [it] has caused irreversible harm to indigenous peoples using bills and decrees, many of them unconstitutional.”
Watson, F. (2013, May 29). Brazil’s treatment of its indigenous people violates their rights.
[xix] UN human rights report shows that Canada is failing Indigenous peoples (2015) states:
Indigenous peoples and human rights groups say that a new United Nations report on Canada’s human rights record should be a wake-up call for all Canadians.
The UN Human Rights Committee, which regularly reviews whether states are living up to their obligations under the binding International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, today made more than a dozen recommendations for fundamental changes in Canadian law and policy in respect to the treatment of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.
The Committee was so concerned about issues of violence against Indigenous women and the violation of Indigenous Peoples’ land rights that it called on Canada to report back within one year on progress made to implement its recommendations on these issues.
“Today’s report shows that we need action now on our collective agenda for closing the human rights gap,” said Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde. “It is significant that a report on human rights in Canada focuses so much on Indigenous peoples and Indigenous rights. This speaks to the extent of our challenges and the urgent need to address them. The report is yet another call to action for Canada to work with First Nations as partners to realize our human rights, including our Aboriginal and Treaty rights.”
Amnesty International Canada. (2015, July 23). UN human rights report shows that Canada is failing Indigenous peoples.
[xx] Violations of Indigenous Peoples’ Territorial Rights: The Example of Costa Rica (2014) states:
This study explores the issues of widespread illegal occupation of indigenous lands on a national scale. Approximately 6000 non-indigenous persons are occupying at least 43% of the areas belonging exclusively to indigenous peoples.
The study presents a comprehensive analysis of the multidimensional nature of the law regarding indigenous peoples’ lands, territories and resources, along with its relationship to their cultural integrity and survival. This is explored in detail with reference to three particular territories: China Kichá, Térraba and Salitre. In addition, the relationship between territorial rights and the right to self-government, self-representation, effective participation in decision-making and the legal personality of indigenous peoples is explained.
The authors examine the issues in the light of Costa Rica’s obligations under national legislation, as well as the country’s obligations under international law. Special attention is given to the case law of the Inter-American Commission and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
MacKay, F. & Garro, A.M. (2014, February 17). Violations of Indigenous Peoples’ Territorial Rights: The Example of Costa Rica.
[xxi] Inter-American Court condemns Ecuador for violating rights of indigenous people of Sarayaku (2012) states:
Ecuador and all other signatories of the American Convention must establish processes of free, prior and informed consultation before initiating any projects that could affect either the territories of indigenous peoples and communities or other rights essential for their survival.
This was confirmed in the sentence released today by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, regarding the Kichwa People of Sarayaku v. Ecuador case. The victims were represented by the Association of the Kichwa People of Sarayaku (Tayjasaruta), Ecuadorian lawyer Mario Melo and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL).
In the words of CEJIL’s Executive Director Viviana Krsticevic, “the sentence issued by the Inter-American Court on the Sarayaku case represents a real milestone in the defense of the rights of indigenous communities on the continent, as it establishes much clearer rules regarding the right to prior consultation in relation to development projects with consequences for the survival of these peoples”. The Ecuadorian legal representative Mario Melo asserted: “this sentence requires the Ecuadorian State to regulate the right to prior consultation established in the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008, in accordance with the highly detailed standards set out in International Human Rights Law”.
CEJIL. (2012, July 26). Inter-American Court condemns Ecuador for violating rights of indigenous people of Sarayaku.
[xxii] Continued Human Rights Violations against Indigenous Populations in Guatemala (2013) states:
On May 10, 2013, Guatemalan ex-dictator Jose Efraín Rios Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity in an historic case. With this incredible achievement, it may appear as though the state of human rights in Guatemala is drastically improving. However, human rights violations, violence and oppression at the hands of the government remain the lived reality of Indigenous communities around the country at this time. Under the administration of the current president and ex-general in the war, Otto Perez Molina, there has been a resurgence of violence against Indigenous communities, especially those who are defending their lands against exploitation by international mining and dam companies.
Cultural Survival. (2013, May 16). Continued Human Rights Violations against Indigenous Populations in Guatemala.
[xxiii] Indigenous peoples’ rights violated and traditional lands in Guyana threatened by mining (2013) states:
At the beginning of 2013, indigenous peoples in Guyana are becoming increasingly alarmed over continuing and growing disregard for their legitimate rights by miners and government agencies and gross rights violations which have been endorsed by the judiciary in two recent cases. In 2012, the mining lobby publicly attacked indigenous peoples’ land rights in the Guyanese press and pledged to oppose recognition of customary lands. Meanwhile, the government agency responsible for regulating the mining sector appears to be accelerating the issuance of mining permits and concessions on Amerindian customary lands, despite the fact that these same lands are the subject of legal actions in the courts seeking recognition of traditional ownership rights and/or unresolved village applications for land title and title extensions.
Akawaio lands desecrated and rights trampled
Recent events and court rulings on mining conflicts on Akawaio Village lands in the Middle and Upper Mazaruni are tragic examples of this blatant violation of indigenous peoples’ rights by the mining sector. In response, Akawaio leaders and communities are standing up for their rights and challenging mining encroachment on their traditional lands and waters. For the past year, Kako Village in the Upper Mazaruni District has been forced into a court battle brought against them by a miner when they refused her entry to the Kako River to start a mining operation. The Village leader (Toshao) has also been cited for contempt of court and now faces possible imprisonment after his people took peaceful direct action to prevent the miner from entering their land in contravention of a court issued injunction that the miner be allowed to proceed unhindered.
Forest Peoples Programme. (2013, February 18). Indigenous peoples’ rights violated and traditional lands in Guyana threatened by mining.
[xxiv] Bell, L. (2015, March 18). Indonesia’s indigenous people still suffer human rights violations, says report.
[xxv] Indigenous Rights Are Still Violated in Mexico: CNDH (2016) states:
In Mexico indigenous peoples are still victims of violations of human rights because of discrimination, inequality, and poverty, President of the National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH) Luis Raul Gonzalez Perez said on Monday.
During the opening ceremony of the Summit for the International Day of Indigenous Peoples, the state official said that despite the government’s efforts to address the issue, including constitutional reforms, these had not been properly applied in practice.
Quoting an estimate from the National Social Development Policy Evaluation Council, Perez said that seven out of 12 Mexican indigenous persons were in a situation of poverty – and this figure barely changed in recent years.
He called on Mexican authorities and society to respect human rights of indigenous peoples, saying laws need to be properly implemented.
“We energetically disapprove any kind of exclusion, discrimination or marginalization against indigenous peoples, whether authorities commit them out of action or omission,” he said.
Recent statistics showed an increase of modern-day slavery cases against indigenous peoples. One of them was reported by the Ministry of Labor earlier in March, involving 200 Tarahumaras, rescued from subhuman conditions.
teleSUR. (2015, August 3). Indigenous Rights Are Still Violated in Mexico: CNDH.
[xxvi] Violation of Indigenous People’s Rights in the Philippines (2015) states:
Indigenous communities in the Philippines are in a continuous struggle to protect their history, culture, & their ancestral land from outside forces like the government, foreign corporations, & other invasive groups. Filmmaker & activist Hiyasmin Saturay, Vennel Francis Chenfoo of BALSA Lanao, Sister Ma. Famita Somogod of Rural Missionaries of the Philippines-Northern Mindanao Region (RMP-NMR), & Amirah Ali Lidasan are shedding light on the human rights violations faced daily by these communities (like the Lumad & Moro people) & urges others to join the fight in preserving their culture.
Kababayan Today. (2015, August 11). Violation of Indigenous People’s Rights in the Philippines.
[xxvii] Indigenous peoples in Africa – a general overview (n.d.). states:
Indigenous peoples in Africa are discriminated against by mainstream populations and looked down upon as backward peoples. Many stereotypes prevail that describe them as “backward”, “uncivilized” and “primitive” and as an embarrassment to modern African states. Such negative stereotyping legitimizes discrimination and marginalization of indigenous peoples by institutions of governance and dominant groups…
…The main problem faced by indigenous peoples in Africa is land dispossession, which is caused by a number of factors such as dominating development paradigms favouring settled agriculture over other modes of production; establishment of national parks and conservation areas; natural resource extraction; agribusiness etc. The land dispossession undermines indigenous peoples’ livelihood systems, leads to severe impoverishment and threatens the continued existence of indigenous peoples. Legal frameworks promoting and protecting indigenous peoples’ lands are very weak or non-existing, and policies are most often negatively biased against indigenous peoples and tend to undermine rather than support their livelihoods…
…Indigenous peoples in Africa are often victims of violent conflicts. In eastern and western Africa there are numerous violent conflicts between nomadic pastoralists and sedentary farmers as well as inter-community conflicts between pastoralists themselves. These conflicts are further exacerbated by effects of climate change and increased competition over natural resources, and they lead to massive suffering, impoverishment and displacements. In countries such as Niger and Burkina Faso the situation is extreme involving organized massacres of entire villages. Indigenous peoples are also victims of abuses committed by the military and armed militia groups…
…Many indigenous women in Africa face double discrimination since they belong to marginalized indigenous communities while often also suffering from traditional cultural discriminatory practices. Indigenous women in Africa suffer from many forms of marginalization and human rights abuses including violence, sexual abuse, harmful cultural practices, exclusion from decision making processes, lack of access to education etc.
At the same time, indigenous women in Africa play a key role in the protection and reproduction of indigenous cultures and societies and for the welfare and upbringing of their children and families. Strengthening indigenous women’s participation in decision making processes, land governance/ management structures, conflict resolution fora as well as enhancing economic empowerment opportunities for women is therefore an important aspect of strengthening entire indigenous communities.
International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs. (n.d.). Indigenous peoples in Africa – a general overview.
[xxviii] United Nations. (n.d.). Charter of the United Nations.
[xxix] United Nations. (2007, September 13). United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
[xxx] United Nations. (n.d.). Universal Declaration on Human Rights.
[xxxi] Marshall McLuhan. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xxxii] Baroque Music (2016) states:
Baroque music, a style of music that prevailed during the period from about 1600 to about 1750, known for its grandiose, dramatic, and energetic spirit but also for its stylistic diversity.
One of the most dramatic turning points in the history of music occurred at the beginning of the 17th century, with Italy leading the way. While the stile antico, the universal polyphonic style of the 16th century, continued, it was henceforth reserved for sacred music, while the stile moderno, or nuove musiche—with its emphasis on solo voice, polarity of the melody and the bass line, and interest in expressive harmony—developed for secular usage. The expanded vocabulary allowed for a clearer distinction between sacred and secular music as well as between vocal and instrumental idioms, and national differences became more pronounced.
Baroque music. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xxxiii] Western painting. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xxxiv] Johann Sebastian Bach. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xxxv] BWV 147 Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben (1723) states:
First Part
- Chorus (S, A, T, B)
Heart and mouth and deed and living
Must for Christ their witness offer
Without fear and falsity
That he God and Savior is.
- Recit. (T)
O thou most blessed voice!
Now Mary makes her spirit’s deepest feelings
Through thanks and praising known;
She undertakes alone
To tell the wonders of the Savior,
All he in her, his virgin maid, hath wrought.
O mortal race of men,
Of Satan and of sin the thrall,
Thou art set free
Through Christ’s most comforting appearance
From all this weight and slavery!
But yet thy voice and thine own stubborn spirit
Grow still, denying all such kindness;
Remember that the Scripture saith
An awesome judgment shall thee strike!
Ambrose, Z.P. (1723, July 2). BWV 147 Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben.
[xxxvi] United Nations. (2007, September 13). United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
[xxxvii] Restoration. (2016). About the Hopi.
[xxxviii] Ibid.
[xxxix] The Hopi Foundation. (n.d.). The Hopi Way.
[xl] Spengler. (2014, January 10). Common traits bind Jews and Chinese.
[xli] Fredericks, M. (2015, May 16). Provenance of a Hopi Textile.
[xlii] Provenance of a Hopi Textile (2015) states:
A travelling photographer took this photo that shows the two blankets used as a prop for a publication. Duvanyumsi, Anna Fredericks was an expert weaver of the Hopi wicker plaques in her own right. The child Deliah was about two years old. The blanket on the right was given to a granddaughter for her college graduation present by Anna. Both textiles were woven by Duwahoyouma. The youngest child of Charles and Anna Fredericks passed away in 2014 at the age of 109.
One blanket, one man, one family, many generations live on today as represented by two woven Hopi textiles. We are still here.
Fredericks, M. (2015, May 16). Provenance of a Hopi Textile.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
And then there was a thought: I was thinking about it, and reflecting on the fact that I knew that natural fibres are made of either plant fibre or animal fibre.[i],[ii],[iii],[iv] Plant fibres are those composed of cellulose.[v],[vi] Animal fibres are those comprised of proteins like amino acid arrangements.[vii]
And then that got me thinking about sustainability and the cycle of growth, harvest, manufacture, distribution, and decomposition of the fibres, and so this one’s going to be a bit winding, just for fun and because I think it’s important for this particular topic and reasonable for this article.
Growth is what they do naturally. Harvest is either dehairing the coats off the animals or cutting and gathering the crops for the plant fibres.
Manufacture is the creation or construction, or more precisely the often textile weaving and knitting by rural and indigenous peoples (sometimes both as the same time), of clothes and other practical necessities of life (many times fashionable).
Distribution to many, many areas of the world that have these things in demand because, in general, if there are many, many, workers for something then there are even more consumers (paid wants or free needs) for these same things.
Lastly, decomposition is the recycling aspect of the natural fibre lifecycle as I call it, which becomes fertilizer to be used to lead into the growth cycle once more.
And I’ve been thinking about cellulose, and didn’t know how it broke down, and so I looked into it, and found some neat things.[viii]
Cellulose: what is it? How’s it related to sustainability? How does it break down?
So, to begin at the beginning, naturally, what is cellulose?
Cellulose is a long chain of linked sugar molecules that gives wood its remarkable strength. It is the main component of plant cell walls, and the basic building block for many textiles and for paper. Cotton is the purest natural form of cellulose. In the laboratory, ashless filter paper is a source of nearly pure cellulose.
Cellulose is a natural polymer, a long chain made by the linking of smaller molecules.[ix]
That’s going to take some unpacking; so, pretty please (!), bear with me. Everything has a history. Everything exists in a context.
Cellulose is no different, but there’s a different definition of context here. The history is wherever the cellulose comes from and the context is the decomposition of the material for us.
First of all, sugar molecules are the “numerous sweet, colourless, water-soluble compounds present in the sap of seed plants and the milk of mammals and making up the simplest group of carbohydrates.”[x]
Second of many, chained together sufficiently, they can develop the strength typically seen in trees, for instance, and, thus, can be, by deduction and implication be viewed as a lot of the reason for the construction materials for plants in general and their strength.[xi]
Plant cells are eukaryotic as opposed to prokaryotic that don’t, which means they have membrane-bound nuclei (nucleuses?) and organelles.[xii],[xiii],[xiv] And organelles themselves are busy-bodies, they create hormones, enzymes, and provide energy for the cell too; it’s almost a jack-of-all-trades or jane-of-all-crafts.[xv]
Plant cells, quite simply, make up the constituents of the plant fibres. So plant fibres are made of non-prokaryotic or eukaryotic cells, and cellulose in the plant fibres are links of smaller molecules. And there go, nature tends to repeat patterns in slight novelty.
From this, we can develop the general form of the nature of nature, or the “nature of things” based on what works, is efficient, and is generalizable as a seeming methodology of biology (maybe).[xvi],[xvii]
How’s it related to sustainability?
You asked for it (rhetorical). Sustainability is a bit like wellbeing or ethics, and in fact, a consequence of comprehensive and coherent, and careful, reasoning of the two together – ratiocination.[xviii]
Wellbeing is basically a search for better or worse ways to live with a preference for the better ways of living; ethics is pretty much the practice of better or worse ways of treating one another, and there’s plenty of ethics on hand to try and describe these things.[xix],[xx]
It’s keeping things going for ourselves in self-interest, for kin and others in rational self-interest, and for other living things and their life support systems in an assertive, pro-active, and constructive Golden Rule ethic – pretty straightforward, I suppose.[xxi],[xxii]
Sustainability has to do with the generalized application of these ideas with respect to our relationship, in a standard interpretation, with the environment and one another. Right there, the intersection, apparently a popular term (or ‘intersectionality) in academic circles, of wellbeing, ethics, the Golden Rule, and sustainability; take sustainability as the practical outcome of these ideas in simultaneity.
And keeping a market or trade system, an environment, sets of habitats, cultures and lifestyles, and peoples of all stripes with wellbeing and acting ethically towards one another, the nature of the interrelationships becomes the nature of sustainability. If one does not keep these in some manner of framework, some theoretical and practical structure capable of persistence, then sustainability is pretty much a nil possibility.
The lifecycle of natural fibres takes this into account with a market system for textiles (for example), far reduced impact on the environmental devastation caused by climate change or global warming through low carbon ‘footprint,’ and this reduced impact permitting the continued flourishing of habitats and ecosystems, the rural lifestyles of people that don’t necessarily want to lose their way of life for a more modern and high-technology lifestyle, and trade between people tends to reduce tensions among them and that increases wellbeing.
Those baseline considerations, in the order of presentation before, for these aspects of sustainability and cellulose, and cellulose itself can biodegrade, as the basis for natural fibres.
But how does it break down?
It begins with enzymes for the systematized, evolved, and natural degradation of cellulose from plant cells.[xxiii],[xxiv],[xxv],[xxvi]
[i] natural fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[ii] man-made fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[iii] Wild Fibres. (2016, February 15). Animal Fibres.
[iv] Wild Fibres. (2016, February 15). Plant Fibres.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Nutrient Review. (2016). Cellulose.
[vii] Wild Fibres. (2016, February 15). Animal Fibres.
[viii] Nutrient Review. (2016). Cellulose.
[ix] Senese, F. (2015, August 17). What is cellulose?.
[x] sugar. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Bailey, R. (2016, April 25). Plant Cells.
[xiii] eukaryote (2016) states:
any cell or organism that possesses a clearly defined nucleus. The eukaryotic cell has a nuclear membrane that surrounds the nucleus, in which the well-defined chromosomes (bodies containing the hereditary material) are located. Eukaryotic cells also contain organelles, including mitochondria (cellular energy exchangers), a Golgi apparatus (secretory device), an endoplasmic reticulum (a canal-like system of membranes within the cell), and lysosomes (digestive apparatus within many cell types).
eukaryote. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xiv] prokaryote (2016) state:
any organism that lacks a distinct nucleus and other organelles due to the absence of internal membranes. Bacteria are among the best-known prokaryotic organisms. The lack of internal membranes in prokaryotes distinguishes them from eukaryotes. The prokaryotic cell membrane is made up of phospholipids and constitutes the cell’s primary osmotic barrier. The cytoplasm contains ribosomes, which carry out protein synthesis, and a double-stranded deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) chromosome, which is usually circular.
prokaryote. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xv] Bailey, R. (2016, April 25). Plant Cells.
[xvi] Gatehouse, J. (2013, November 18). The nature of David Suzuki.
[xvii] CBC Radio-Canada Curio. (2016). The Nature of Things.
[xviii] Ratiocination (2016) states:
1: the process of exact thinking : reasoning
2: a reasoned train of thought
ratiocinative play\-ˈō-sə-ˌnā-tiv, -ˈnä-\ adjective
Merriam-Webster (2016). Ratiocination.
[xix] Well-being (n.d.). states:
noun
1.a good or satisfactory condition of existence; a state characterized byhealth, happiness, and prosperity; welfare:
to influence the well-being of the nation and its people.
Dictionary.com. (n.d.). Well-being.
[xx] Ethics (n.d.). states:
The field of ethics (or moral philosophy) involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior. Philosophers today usually divide ethical theories into three general subject areas: metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. Metaethics investigates where our ethical principles come from, and what they mean. Are they merely social inventions? Do they involve more than expressions of our individual emotions? Metaethical answers to these questions focus on the issues of universal truths, the will of God, the role of reason in ethical judgments, and the meaning of ethical terms themselves. Normative ethics takes on a more practical task, which is to arrive at moral standards that regulate right and wrong conduct. This may involve articulating the good habits that we should acquire, the duties that we should follow, or the consequences of our behavior on others. Finally, applied ethics involves examining specific controversial issues, such as abortion, infanticide, animal rights, environmental concerns, homosexuality, capital punishment, or nuclear war.
Fieser, J. (n.d.). Ethics.
[xxi] The Golden Rule (n.d.) states:
The most familiar version of the Golden Rule says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Moral philosophy has barely taken notice of the golden rule in its own terms despite the rule’s prominence in commonsense ethics. This article approaches the rule, therefore, through the rubric of building its philosophy, or clearing a path for such construction. The approach reworks common belief rather than elaborating an abstracted conception of the rule’s logic. Working “bottom-up” in this way builds on social experience with the rule and allows us to clear up its long-standing misinterpretations. With those misconceptions go many of the rule’s criticisms.
The article notes the rule’s highly circumscribed social scope in the cultures of its origin and its role in framing psychological outlooks toward others, not directing behavior. This emphasis eases the rule’s “burdens of obligation,” which are already more manageable than expected in the rule’s primary role, socializing children. The rule is distinguished from highly supererogatory rationales commonly confused with it—loving thy neighbor as thyself, turning the other cheek, and aiding the poor,
homeless and afflicted. Like agape or unconditional love, these precepts demand much more altruism of us, and are much more liable to utopianism. The golden rule urges more feasible other-directedness and egalitarianism in our outlook.
Puka, B. (n.d.). The Golden Rule.
[xxii] Teaching Values. (2009). The Universality of the Golden Rule in the World Religions.
[xxiii] Jin, X. (2010, November 28). Breaking Down Cellulose.
[xxiv] Nutrient Review. (2016). Cellulose.
[xxv] Bailey, R. (2016, April 25). Plant Cells.
[xxvi] enzyme (2016) states:
a substance that acts as a catalyst in living organisms, regulating the rate at which chemical reactions proceed without itself being altered in the process.
A brief treatment of enzymes follows. For full treatment, see protein: Enzymes.
The biological processes that occur within all living organisms are chemical reactions, and most are regulated by enzymes. Without enzymes, many of these reactions would not take place at a perceptible rate. Enzymes catalyze all aspects of cell metabolism. This includes the digestion of food, in which large nutrient molecules (such as proteins, carbohydrates, and fats) are broken down into smaller molecules; the conservation and transformation of chemical energy; and the construction of cellular macromolecules from smaller precursors. Many inherited human diseases, such as albinism and phenylketonuria, result from a deficiency of a particular enzyme.
enzyme. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
Do you ever wonder about vermicompost? Me neither, barely knew what the word meant, so I looked it up. But it’s important, and especially because it’s a simple concept to swallow. Vermicompost: “composting with worms.”[i],[ii],[iii]
But wait, there’s more! It’s a lovely story of sustainability, and lust with Wormeo and Compostiet. And as with many of these narratives, I go to the substantial, authoritative source of Encyclopedia Britannica, and this time on worms, which states:
any of various unrelated invertebrate animals that typically have soft, slender, elongated bodies. Worms usually lack appendages…Worms are members of several invertebrate phyla, including Platyhelminthes (flatworms), Annelida (segmented worms), Nemertea (ribbon worms), Nematoda (roundworms, pinworms, etc.), Sipuncula (peanutworms), Echiura (spoonworms), Acanthocephala (spiny-headed worms), Pogonophora (beardworms), and Chaetognatha (arrowworms).[iv]
Phyla are basically the major subgroups of animals or a scientific means of classifying animals via the discipline of taxonomy that is devoted to this process or cataloguing life – the rest pretty much follows from this idea.[v],[vi],[vii]
And so that’s the groundwork, and the scientific framework of the currency of vermicomposting: worms. What kind of worms, and stuff, are needed – like the ingredient list in a recipe for proper composting?[viii]
You need worms, a container, and bedding. One of the basic means of composting is cold composting, or throwing things onto a pile and waiting for them to decompose, which natural fibres will do and synthetic or man-made fibres will not, where natural fibres count as animal and plant fibres.[ix],[x],[xi],[xii]
Cold composts are different than hot composting, and cold composts are slower at the process of decomposition of the relevant biodegradable stuff but they are easier to get going with those three basic parts – a bedding, a worm, and a container.[xiii],[xiv],[xv]
There can be discussions, and so on, about trade-offs between time spent and output of the eventual fertilizer post-decomposition of the animal or plant fibres. However, the basic concern remains about effort versus output.
Lower effort and lower output, a direct correspondence, for the cold composting; a greater effort and a greater output for the hot composting. Take your pick, the other bits will come from there.
If you’re in a lazy season, or don’t have heavy-lifting assistance to shovel the compost or whatever into a pile and do all of the fine work, then cold compost might be the one for you.
If not, and if time, then hot compost is the one for you, especially if you have a deadline for the need for fresh fertilizer for some vegetable plantation in the home garden.
Now, to the main course, as it were, the bedding, the container, and the worms. The bedding is simply the stuff on top of the ground from which the to-be composted material can then be placed for decomposition over time, which can newspapers, vegetable and fruit peels, leaves, so on, and so on.[xvi]
The container is the container, bit tautological, but true! Next, are the worms; so you’ve decided on the bedding, and the kind and style of composting, and the arrangement for the bedding and the compost, but next in the actual vermicomposting.
Well, that’s the sticky part. What kind of worm. Is it a common worm that is pervasively used because of it’s efficiency for human agriculture, or a bunch of different ones for specific tasks and for the breakdown of particular materials?
The answer is straightforward and two words: red worms, or red wigglers.[xvii] The great thing about them is their level of productivity within the soil because they can “swallow great quantities of organic material, digest it, extract its food value and expel the residue as worm castings.”[xviii]
And some of the basics about vermicomposting, one of the great uses for them, and highly relevant to the sustainability minded and ethically conscious of us around here at Trusted Clothes (and all of the great fellow writers, who’s stuff you should check out, seriously!)
I mean, there’s lots of great material out there to be composted, and this includes all of the natural fibres such as plant fibres – alpaca wool, angora wool, camel hair, cashmere, mohair, silk, and wool, and animal fibres – abaca, coir, cotton, flax, hemp, jute, ramie, and sisal.[xix]
And, I think one of its main benefits, is the increased capacity to compost at a faster rate and end up with fertilizer that is more nutrient-rich, which can be used to provide rich soil to grow plant fibres, for instance, or grow the crops that feed the animals that then go through dehairing. Each as part of the different harvesting processes for natural fibres. But, there’s lots of non-vermicompost methodologies, too.[xx],[xxi],[xxii]
So, to vermicompost or not to vermicompost, that is the question.[xxiii]
[i] Planet Natural. (2015). Using Worms.
[ii] Green Action Centre. (2016). Vermicomposting.
[iii] [TED-ed]. (2013, June 26). Vermicomposting: How worms can reduce our waste – Matthew Ross.
[iv] worm. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[v] Encyclopedia of Life. (n.d.). Animal Phyla.
[vi] BBC. (2016). What is a phylum?.
[vii] Taxonomy (2016) states:
Taxonomy, in a broad sense, the science of classification, but more strictly the classification of living and extinct organisms—i.e., biological classification. The term is derived from the Greek taxis(“arrangement”) and nomos (“law”). Taxonomy is, therefore, the methodology and principles of systematic botany and zoology and sets up arrangements of the kinds of plants and animals in hierarchies of superior and subordinate groups.
taxonomy. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[viii] solid-waste management (2016) states:
Another method of treating municipal solid waste is composting, a biological process in which the organic portion of refuse is allowed to decompose under carefully controlled conditions. Microbes metabolize the organic waste material and reduce its volume by as much as 50 percent. The stabilized product is called compost or humus. It resembles potting soil in texture and odour and may be used as a soil conditioner or mulch.
Composting offers a method of processing and recycling both garbage and sewage sludge in one operation. As more stringent environmental rules and siting constraints limit the use of solid-waste incineration and landfill options, the application of composting is likely to increase. The steps involved in the process include sorting and separating, size reduction, and digestion of the refuse.
solid-waste management. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[ix] natural fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[x] man-made fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xi] Wild Fibres. (2016, February 15). Animal Fibres.
[xii] Wild Fibres. (2016, February 15). Plant Fibres.
[xiii] Almanac. (2016). How to Compost: Hot and Cold Methods.
[xiv] Vegetable Gardener. (2009, February 10). Composting Hot or Cold.
[xv] Kitchen Gardeners International. (n.d.). Which is better: hot or cold composting?.
[xvi] Fong, J & Hewitt, P. (1996). Worm Composting Basics.
[xvii] Red Wigglers (2016) states:
The most common type of composting worm! As they feed, Red Wigglers (Eisenia foetida) swallow great quantities of organic material, digest it, extract its food value and expel the residue as worm castings which are very rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and many micronutrients. Under ideal conditions, E. foetida can eat their body weight each day. They also reproduce rapidly, and are very tolerant of variations in growing conditions.
Planet Natural. (2016). Red Wigglers.
[xviii] Ibid.
[xix] Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2009). Natural Fibres.
[xx] Planet Natural. (2015). Using Worms.
[xxi] Green Action Centre. (2016). Vermicomposting.
[xxii] [TED-ed]. (2013, June 26). Vermicomposting: How worms can reduce our waste – Matthew Ross.
[xxiii] The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (2016) states:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.–Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.
Shakespeare, S. (n.d.). The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
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Natural fibres, as opposed to synthetic or man-made fibres, have a long history, and as with most things that tend to gain traction over the long haul.[i],[ii] They, well, develop many, many associations with lots of unlikely things and people. That include famous people, prominent places, various associations and organizations that are purposed one cause or another, and so on and so forth. In the case of moral causes such as the international campaign to end violence against women, it’s come along the way of many people and organizations throughout the world.
And in the midst of these interactions, whether with individuals or groups, they’ve found allies. Let’s take, for example, the specific relationship, relevant to Trusted Clothes, of natural fibres, textiles, and so on, and the international campaign to end violence against women.
First, some information on the international campaign to end violence against women; and then, second, some information about the relationship between the two – ending violence against women and natural fibres. Who’s involved? Innumerable individuals and multiple prominent organizations. Amnesty international is, obviously, an international organization with sectors devoted to women’s rights as fundamental in and of themselves, and as an extension of humans rights as well.[iii]
An organ of the United Nations called United Nations Women devotes substantial resources to this endeavour as an international organization bound by various agreements amongst member states of the United Nations.[iv]
What’s the United Nations, exactly? The United Nations was founded in 1945 throughout the world via international agreement as a replacement for the League of Nations.[v],[vi]
Countries – 193 of them – that are a part of it are called member states, and these, in varying numbers, are a part of the main bodies, bodies, and various committees: General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council, Trusteeship Council, International Court of Justice, the Secretariat, and others.[vii]
Everyone’s leaders are, in most cases most of the time, aiming to contribute to the flourishing and wellbeing of their respective, and other member states’, citizens and the solution to pervasive problems, such as violence against women. Why wouldn’t they?
We have International Women’s Day, Women’s Equality Day, and Women’s History Month, but the serious work comes from organizing, planning, and implementing on the national and international stage as opposed to small contributions through celebrations. Also, United Nations Women has been up to some neat things, and saying just as good, positive things of high morla calibre. Like what?
Women’s right to live free from violence is upheld by international agreements such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), especially through General Recommendations 12 and 19, and the 1993 UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women.[viii]
Here they’re talking about more the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which seems self-explanatory as an attempt to substantiate the end to the violence against women through human rights claims – where women’s rights are human rights.[ix],[x]
It’s tautological.
Or their General recommendation No. 12: Violence against women, which states “legislation in force to protect women against the incidence of all kinds of violence in everyday life (including sexual violence, abuses in the family, sexual harassment at the workplace, etc.)” in its primary stipulation.[xi]
Even General recommendation No. 19: Violence against women, which states “Gender-based violence is a form of discrimination that seriously inhibits women’s ability to enjoy rights and freedoms on a basis of equality with men,” and that’s pretty unequivocal.[xii]
Or take the February 23, 1994, Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, too.[xiii] Another self-explaining document for the prevention of violence against women.
And onward into the United Nations Women Commission on the Status of Women, further details in the endnote, but another high-level and international compilation and coordination of efforts for the end to violence against women – a global problem.[xiv]
Finally, this comes to home, for many of us reading here, the Government of Canada has implemented actions in five main areas including:
Support for Victims of Crime[xv]
Protecting Aboriginal Women and Girls[xvi]
Combatting Human Trafficking[xvii]
Preventing Violence Against Women and Girls[xviii]
Addressing Family Violence[xix]
So it’s national, and definitely international, and ubiquitous – everywhere. Where does this lead? I think into the aspects that are relevant to the textile industry and natural fibre materials harvest, manufacture, and distribution network, too.
And with all of these taken into the general accounting of the issue concerning the war, or the fight (ironic terms), or the international efforts and movements, and organizing, to end violence against women as much as possible (no utopia expected), it can, and does, relate in its own way to textile industries and their associated materials.
It can be the small stories such as those reported by UN Women reported on some of the on-the-ground activities for the benefit of women, as follows:
In Colombia, through the business venture ‘PROVOKAME’, rural women produce, market, and distribute biodegradable plates made from natural fibres, recycled paper and seeds that may germinate after disposal.
In Uganda, BanaPads Social Enterprise employs young rural women to manufacture and distribute sanitary pads produced from natural agricultural waste materials. The enterprise provides young entrepreneurial ‘champions’ with a complete start-up kit of inventory, training and marketing support.
No need to comprehend the deep details of the geography, culture, people, or the style of manufacturing, but the important point from these two examples is the bottom-up organizing of by rural women in terms of “natural agricultural waste materials” and “biodegradable plates made from natural fibres, recycled paper and seeds that may germinate after disposal.” That’s so cool.
This is the kind of thing that Trusted Clothes is about; and not only that, these are windows into other activities and people doing the same or similar things all over the world with natural fibres and other environmentally conscientious and ethically conscious materials.
It can be the big stories, too, such as an entire people. For instance, Amnesty International reports on the indigenous peoples of Colombia and, in particular, the “principal economic activity of the Zenú is agriculture and beautiful weaving with natural fibres. Like other Indigenous Peoples, the Zenú have suffered grave human rights abuses as they have sought to defend their territory and their rights.”[xx]
One can imagine their human rights being violated in this way, and as with many areas of violation of fundamental human rights, there’s concomitant violence against women, and children.
[i] natural fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/topic/natural-fiber
[ii] man-made fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/technology/man-made-fiber.
[iii] Amnesty International. (2016). Women’s Rights Are Human Rights.
[iv] UN Women. (2016). Ending violence against women.
[v] United Nations. (2016). Overview.
[vi] League of Nations. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/topic/League-of-Nations.
[vii] United Nations (UN). (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/topic/United-Nations.
[viii] UN Women. (2016). Ending violence against women.
[ix] United Nations Humans Rights Office of the High Commissioner. (1979, December 18). Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women New York, 18 December 1979. Retrieved from http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CEDAW.aspx.
[x] Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/topic/Convention-on-the-Elimination-of-All-Forms-of-Discrimination-Against-Women.
[xi] United Nations Humans Rights Office of the High Commissioner. (1989). *General recommendation No. 12: Violence against women.
[xii] United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner. (1992). General recommendation No. 19: Violence against women.
[xiii] United Nations General Assembly. (1994, February 23).Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women.
[xiv] United Nations Women. (n.d.). Commission on the Status of Women.
[xv] Government of Canada: Status of Women Canada. (2013, December 5). Support for Victims of Crime.
[xvi] Government of Canada: Status of Women Canada. (2013, December 5). Protecting Aboriginal Women and Girls.
[xvii] Government of Canada: Status of Women Canada. (2013, December 5). Combating Human Trafficking.
[xviii] Government of Canada: Status of Women Canada. (2013, December 5). Preventing Violence against Women and Girls.
[xix] Government of Canada: Status of Women Canada. (2013, December 5). Addressing Family Violence.
[xx] Amnesty International. (2015). The Peoples.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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First things first – as always super-duper quick, here’s a crash paragraph in natural fibres:
Natural fibres differ from synthetic or man-made fibres, can be plant or animal fibres, with plant fibres being made of complicated sugar arrangements called cellulose (which enzymes have a hard time breaking down because of their arrangement) and animal fibres being made of amino acids for proteins, with the cellulose as simple long chains of sugar molecules, and the plant cells as eukaryotic or non-prokaryotic, but both animal and plant fibres can be composted whilst synthetic or man-made fibres cannot decompose (There!).[i],[ii] ,[iii],[iv],[v],[vi] ,[vii] ,[viii] ,[ix],[x] ,[xi],[xii],[xiii],[xiv],[xv]
Synthetic fibre production continues to increase in contrast with the natural fibre industry.[xvi] What does this mean for the present and the future? What’s its history? Here’s a fantastic summarization of much of the information about its historical context and their demand in the international marketplace of fibre goods – natural vs. man-made, but it’s a bit dense and with a note on the origination of synthetic fibres (who am I to speak, though?):
artificial silk using cellulosics by De Chardonnet in France in 1892. Regrettably the business declared bankruptcy in 1894! However, not to be discouraged, the industry continued to develop other cellulosics and acetates until the arrival of nylon, which was discovered by Wallace Carothers at DuPont in the 1930s. His discovery brought the first truly MMF to the market. Initial applications including military uses during World War II and replacing silk in women’s hosiery. Nylon was followed by the ICI development of polyester, discovered in the early 1940s by two British scientists working for Calico Printers.
From these early beginnings the MMF industry was born, and through continuous development it recorded demand in 2014 of 55.2 million tons (122 billion pounds) of synthetic fibre, in addition to man-made cellulosic fibre demand of 5.2 million tons. The natural fibre industry, including cotton and wool, has a demand of 25.4 million tons.[xvii]
Chardonnet trained under Louis Pasteur as a civil engineer and began the development of artificial fibres in 1878, and six years later in 1884 got a patent on a fibre.[xviii],[xix] But wait, there’s more! In the Paris Exposition, in 1889, he presented the rayon productions to the public for the very first time; after which, he began to bring about the first factory for the first commercial factory, “Société de la Soie de Chardonnet (“Society of the Silk of Chardonnet”) in Besançon,”for the world’s first commercial synthetic or man-made fibre called Chardonnet silk.[xx]
So, that’s the time it started and was then mass produced for public consumption, and now we’re here with the issues of environmental degradation and pollution, only thirteen years from 1878 to 1891, literally. As noted, the business declared bankruptcy in 1894, but mass industry comes out of our mass demands (or our ancestors) and alternatives were discovered and made by them.
Anyway, that’s a far cry from the present. Why is it a far cry from the present? Because the industry has changed and gone from Chardonnet silk to cellulosic acetates, to nylon, and even polyester, and the polyesters are becoming dominant (did you see the close-up of the chart at the outset?), that is, synthetic fibres are dominant.[xxi],[xxii],[xxiii],[xxiv] Take, for instance, the latter parts of the description about the 2014 sales in the millions of tons.
That’s 55.2 million tons of synthetic fibre were sold compared to 25.4 million tons of natural fibre, which comes out to 55.2/25.4 or a synthetic or man-made fibre sales to natural fibres sales ratio of 2.2:1. That’s a lot, and that’s even the low number because if you take into account the other materials such as the man-made cellulosics and add that number to the synthetic fibres, then the ratio’s representative disparity is even higher.
So, take, for example, once again, the 55.2 million tons of material and add that to the 5.2 million tons from the man-made cellulosics. So that’s 55.2 plus 5.2 and comes to a sum of 60.4 million tons, which becomes 60.4 million tons of synthetic or man-made fibres to 25.4 million tons of natural fibre, or 2.4:1. That’s pretty amazing, and it’s likely greater at this point in time.
The article continues to say that the polyester synthetic fibre is the main one “, but nylon, the oldest MMF, still plays an important role in the fibre business with 4 million tons of global production in 2014”; and thinking about it further, China represents about “69 percent” of the global polyester production and, therefore, the greatest demand is for polyester, the greatest production is in China, and the most fibres being produced are synthetic or man-made ones with an enormous weighting towards polyester, and so the Chinese workers are producing the most synthetic fibres in the world.[xxv] That means the centre of the non-natural (though everything is ‘natural,’ technically) fibres is in one country, and it’s going up and up in both demand, and thus production.
And so polyester is the issue, but it’s pretty close to it, and the nature of the synthetic production line is continuing forward. As of 2014, it was at a 2.2 to 2.4:1 ratio between synthetic or man-made fibres or natural fibres. Also, an issue going forward, but these do need some more consideration for the 2015 and 2016 years going forward.
We cannot predict with utter certainty, but can see the centralization of much of the world’s production in the synthetic or man-made fibres from one country, China, and the, though disparate, surprisingly close nature of the two types of fibres in sales, at least on a gross analysis. Unfortunately, the utilitarian attitudinal stances towards production and consumption have gone for the narrow utilitarian analysis with the value in the short-term pleasure and ease of synthetic fibres via polyester (mainly) – and like those old corny cartoons gone up, up and away.
[i] natural fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[ii] man-made fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[iii] Wild Fibres. (2016, February 15). Animal Fibres.
[iv] Wild Fibres. (2016, February 15). Plant Fibres.
[v] Nutrient Review. (2016). Cellulose.
[vi] National Institutes of Health: U.S. Library of Medicine. (2016, April 5). Amino Acids.
[vii] National Institutes of Health: U.S. Library of Medicine. (2016, April 5). What are proteins and what do they do?.
[viii] Senese, F. (2015, August 17). What is cellulose?.
[ix] sugar. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica..
[x] Bailey, R. (2016, April 25). Plant Cells.
[xi] eukaryote. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xii] prokaryote. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xiii] Bailey, R. (2016, April 25). Plant Cells.
[xiv] enzyme. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xv] University of Illinois Board of Trustees. (2016). The Science of Composting
[xvi] Textile Fibre Industry. (2015, February 3). Man-Made Fibres Continue To Grow.
[xvii] Ibid.
[xviii] Hilaire Bernigaud, count de Chardonnet (2016) states:
Hilaire Bernigaud, count de Chardonnet, (born May 1, 1839, Besançon, France—died March 12, 1924, Paris) French chemist and industrialist who first developed and manufactured rayon.
Trained as a civil engineer after completing scientific studies under Louis Pasteur, Chardonnet began to develop an artificial fibre in 1878. Obtaining a patent in 1884 on a fibre produced by extruding a solution of cellulose nitrate through fine glass capillaries, he worked for several years on the problem of reducing the flammability of the new substance. At the Paris Exposition of 1889 he showed rayon products to the public for the first time. Soon afterward he opened a factory, Société de la Soie de Chardonnet (“Society of the Silk of Chardonnet”) in Besançon, which in 1891 began to produce the world’s first commercially made synthetic fibre, sometimes called Chardonnet silk to distinguish it from other forms of rayon.
Hilaire Bernigaud, count de Chardonnet. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xix] Louis Pasteur. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xx] Textile Fibre Industry. (2015, February 3). Man-Made Fibres Continue To Grow.
[xxi] Ibid.
[xxii] cellulose acetate. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xxiii] Nylon (2016) states:
Nylon is a polymer—a plastic with super-long, heavy molecules built up of short, endlessly repeating sections of atoms, just like a heavy metal chain is made of ever-repeating links. Nylon is not actually one, single substance but the name given to a whole family of very similar materials called polyamides.
Woodford, C. (2015, November 12). Nylon.
[xxiv] Polyester (2016) states:
Polyester, a class of synthetic polymers built up from multiple chemical repeating units linked together by ester (CO-O) groups. Polyesters display a wide array of properties and practical applications. Permanent-press fabrics, disposable soft-drink bottles, compact discs, rubber tires, and enamel paints represent only a few of the products made from this group.
Polyesters most commonly are prepared from a condensation reaction between an organic alcohol (containing hydroxyl [OH] groups) and a carboxylic acid (containing carboxyl [COOH] groups).
polyester. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xxv] Textile Fibre Industry. (2015, February 3). Man-Made Fibres Continue To Grow.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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I hesitated a bit on the title of this piece as “Plant vs. Animal Fibres” or “Plant versus Animal Fibres” because these do not seem at odds to me, but, rather, at differences with the massive synthetic or man-made fibre industry.[i],[ii] ,[iii],[iv],[v] ,[vi],[vii],[viii],[ix] All under the rubric of textiles and fibres. And I only intend this as a general comparison and reflection between the two general categories with respect to sustainability. No okie dokie this time (you’re welcome!), just kidding okie dokie here we go:
Natural fibres themselves are very hairlike material from an animal, vegetable, or mineral (!), which can then be turned into various fabrics and yarns.[x] And this breaks up into the plant and animal fibres, as a general principle of division or classification. If you take the title “natural fibres,” then you can imagine two divergent branching lines for “animal fibres” and “plant fibres.” Subtleties follow from there. Some redundant starters are plant fibres come from plants and animal fibres come from animals, but what animals? What are the main ones in other words?
For the animal fibres, the core ones are alpaca wool, angora wool, camel hair, cashmere, mohair, silk, and wool; for the plant fibres, the central fibres are abaca, coir, cotton, flax, hemp, jute, ramie, and sisal.[xi],[xii] ,[xiii],[xiv],[xv],[xvi]
Plant fibres, as pointed out to me by a more knowledgeable-on-the-subject woman friend, have a lower carbon output in the whole harvest and production cycle, which makes sense, I guess.[xvii],[xviii],[xix],[xx] I think about cows and methane output, whereas plants, I would think, do not have that level of output.[xxi] That does a few points to plant fibres over animal fibres right off the bat.
Some concerns to my mind with the animal fibres is that you’re dealing with, though generally cognitively limited, a somewhat thinking, instinctive, and feeling being with pain receptors, a central nervous system, and so on and so forth, and this leads right into proper treatment of animals.[xxii],[xxiii]
They’re de-haired and sheared by the professionals, the farmers, and then the particular proteins are gather from the batches. And we here at Trusted Clothes do have concerns about the nature of the ethical acquisition and creation of fashionable goods. Cognizant, more or less, animals deserve due consideration.
Plant fibres, on the other hand, do not have issues to do with pain – no nervous system and no pain to be felt.[xxiv] By that moral calculus, it matters less, and only matters insofar as it’s a resource for other living things with a strong preference for cognizant beings. It’s an argument for tacit expansion of the moral sphere. But since animal fibres might cause less suffering, then plant fibres might be the more ethical choice in the decisions over the sustainable.
Animal and plant fibres come in many shapes and sizes – no surprise plus and even with the bonus cliché. But their uses can differ, and they’re being seen, together, as increased replacements for the synthetic fibres based on increased knowledge about the pollution in the environment.
So even under and below the synthetic versus natural fibres aspects of the industries, millions of tons of the man-made fibres, or synthetic fibres, thrown into the trash heap and not recycled to ruin possible decent life for our collective descendants, the natural fibre basic divisions, animal and plant fibres, might have additional ethical consideration based on the potential for pain of farming animals rather than plants for fibres. We have the technology. We have the demand. Can we make the consideration?
[i] natural fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[ii] man-made fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[iii] Wild Fibres. (2016, February 15). Animal Fibres.
[iv] Wild Fibres. (2016, February 15). Plant Fibres.
[v] Bailey, R. (2016, April 25). Plant Cells.
[vi] eukaryote. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[vii] prokaryote. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[viii] Bailey, R. (2016, April 25). Plant Cells.
[ix] University of Illinois Board of Trustees. (2016). The Science of Composting
[x] natural fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xi] natural fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xii] man-made fibre. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xiii] Wild Fibres. (2016, February 15). Animal Fibres.
[xiv] Wild Fibres. (2016, February 15). Plant Fibres.
[xv] Bailey, R. (2016, April 25). Plant Cells.
[xvi] Bailey, R. (2016, April 25). Plant Cells.
[xvii] University of Michigan: Centre for Sustainable Systems. (n.d.). SUSTAINABLE MATERIALS SELECTION TOOL: LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT OF NATURAL FIBERS FOR AUTO APPLICATIONS.
[xviii] Time for Change. (n.d.). What is a carbon footprint – definition.
[xix] Bio-based News. (2015, April 8). Carbon Footprint and Sustainability of Different Natural Fibres for Biocomposites and Insulation Material.
[xx] O Ecotextiles. (2011, January 19). Estimating the carbon footprint of a fabric.
[xxi] US EPA. (2016, April 15). Overview of Greenhouse Gases.
[xxii] nervous system. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xxiii] pain. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica.
[xxiv] Wild Fibres. (2016, February 15). Plant Fibres.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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I have noticed that some of the benefits about writing seriously and sincerely about a subject does do something to learning. It motivates, and guides. I don’t know about you, and it might be similar for some of you. You need less of a threshold for it than me. And kudos to you for it if so. But there’s a sense in which the process of writing something seems to inculcate a love for something, knowledge breaks barriers – which makes barriers likely signs of ignorance, ruh roh.
Its principles are simply wonderful: ethical, sustainable, and fashionable. And so I think I’ve hit upon a niche past the point of writing about the Hopi. Their textiles. Their rights. Their status as indigenous persons and peoples. And if you think about it more homeward bound, I come to indigenous persons and peoples in Canada. I feel as though you can relate with the idea and reality of indigenous peoples. Its title is relevant to hundreds of millions of people after all.
You might think about the Maori in New Zealand, or the Blackfoot or Iroquois in the United States, or the First Nations, Inuit and Metis in Canada. What one matters the most? It depends on the individual, I guess. And as I learn about the ways and customs of each, I like most that I’ve seen or read about a bit.
But I gave my ace of spades with the Hopi, I think. Probably to do with the language use of these peoples and persona and linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf’s controversy about it, and with the involvement of Steven J. Pinker too. You can look at that whole thing here.
So there’s that. But there’s more, always (?, probably). So let’s have a look at one national example, relative to Trusted Clothes (Ontario, Canada) and myself (British Columbia, Canada). That leaves three main groupings: First Nations, Inuit and Metis. What d’ya think? Let’s do Inuit, the far north of one of the hugest, biggest plots of land in the world. Canada: Home.
There are about 135,000 Inuit in the world, self-identified. That’s a large minority of the country with only 36,000,000 peeps, and the size of a decent sized city. They fall within the standard societal classification of indigenous peoples along with the, as noted before, Metis and the First Nations. Each have their own subdivisions as well.
So there’s also that. It’s unlike the Hopi who have only ten or twenty thousand in their total population. There’s some dark history to depict that narrative, the unfortunate narrative. I don’t know about this particular photo with respect to tribes and nations and so on, but these are definitely Norse fighting and killing Aboriginals, and vice versa.
So who are the Inuit? Encyclopedia Britannica says these can be people with the title Innuit, Inuit, or Eskimo. One might need to bear in mind sensitivities about particular words and their associations for some people, and even that consideration can depend on personality and context too. These people relate to the Aleuts, and are basically the chief inhabitants of the Arctic north of Canada, Greenland, the United States, and even Russia.
Of those 135,000 that live in the Arctic north, there are about 85,000 in North America and 50,000 in Greenland, and some super-minority in Siberia. And as with many, many peoples throughout the world, whether European or African or Australian or Latin America or South American, or Indigenous for that matter, these populations are diverse within themselves. Not only between their grouped selves.
The self-status of the Inuit can be Inupiat, Yupik, or Alutiit, too. And that basically into the meaning of the basis of the differences but unity. In that, the translation, into English, is pretty much “the people” or, more properly, “the real people.” That makes senses, I think. What do you think? It could be a bit of an issue with the kinds of individuals within the group. We’re all human after all, right?
So the same pluses and minuses of grouped and community living should come out cross-culturally. The name Eskimo was given in the 16th century by the Europeans to the those in the Arctic. That could be a point of contention. I wouldn’t feel well if I was given a name against my will from another group, likely. Eskimo itself is a reference to snowshoes – not “eaters of raw flesh. The culture developed in landscapes and geographic environments akin to Siberia. Very cold, very snowy, long winters.
What about the clothing, Scott? Okay, okay, (or okie dokie), it’s great. Clothing isn’t just fashion. It’s survival too. It’s a way to keep from the bitter cold. That’s an important question about adapting fashion, right? What’s the kind of stuff that can help with that kind of extreme weather? Our genomes as a species haven’t changed substantially in over 200,000 years. So we’re not like polar bears or something that has these adaptations of thick winter coats, but our tool use is a major advantage to adapt more rapidly to the environment.
The main types of clothing material used by them are furs and skins. Over enough time, this becomes instantiated in culture. It becomes a means of connecting with ancestors emotionally from person to person. It’s a way to connect to the earth, and a sort of edificative or spiritual practice to make one’s own clothes. I feel. Though I’d be bad at it, but from many of their persons’ points of view, I suspect a consistency there.
The Inuit textiles can come and scarves which one can see. For instance, see below, the various text off of the Inuit. And I don’t know about you, but one of the more interesting things to note about the textiles is that today, as with most cultures, you can probably note the consistency amongst the cultural productions and the milieu in which a society or culture lived and worked and created these objects.
And as discussed about the environment and the need for survival as a primary and then the fashion of the culture as a secondary, the clothing and textiles and materials themselves are going to reflect this necessity for survival. So, you can look at some of the aspects of the scarfs the tubes the hats coats and so on. And many, many aspects of this or simply reflection of the dire need to not be cold and stay cozy-ish warm. Or to simply ass on the cultural stories, mythologies, traditions, lessons, allegories, etc, onto the next generation:
And one of the little cool things I have noticed, if you look at the clothing and the styled, lovely frizziness, it’s bot fashionable and functional. If I’d be in the freezing cold, and with the biting nature of the cold, I’m trying to prevent that from hitting me too much. It’s to buffer the wind chill and the regular cold.
For instance, temperatures in the Arctic north weather in Siberia, Canada, Russia, and elsewhere can be an issue. So if it is something to do with survival pressure and basic needs, the ability to keep a consistent a culture from which individuals within a group, that is, this particular indigenous culture, then passing on the cultural rituals rights to making skills and textiles is really key. And these simply aren’t things that had occurred to me off the bat. It’s these kind of small things, realizations, and readings, and so on, that I feel are humbling.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Provocative, non-controversial question: do we have a moral duty to the environment? (Yes.) I think there’s a definite literature on the nature of moral development and the ability of individuals to meet those ethical standards. I feel as though there’s a certain sense in which the generalized moral development of an individual reflects groups, societies, and onward.
Do you agree? That is, is there a reflection of the individual to the society? It seems intuitively either right or on the correct path, doesn’t it? And that in turn likely reflects a certain perspective on sustainability and the environment.
There was a psychologist, or maybe a moral/ethical psychologist, by the name of Lawrence Kohlberg once upon a time. No individual tends to deserve grand claim to fame or some cult of personality around them, so please bear that in mind, it’s the ideas that matter much, much more to me – though an important person to the discipline of psychology.
I came across him whilst doing research for various academic paper and poster presentations. And I liked the thought. I like the idea of justice. That means just people, just societies, and so on. Why do I think this? I think I feel, and think, this because of the inclusion of compassion within this idea of justice. Why compassion? Well, that’s a bit tough, and we can get to it in gentle time. ‘Cause its super-duper important as a thought experiment (blegh!), or imaginative playful thing-a-majig (hooray!), on the environment.
He developed six stages in three levels of potential moral development for human beings. Of course, any model of a person will tend to be quite limited, but it’s a neat concept. It included the general levels of pre-conventional morality, conventional morality, and post-conventional morality. Straightforward enough.
As the chart shows above, the pre-conventional morality derives from obedience and punishment and then individual interest. So stage 1 is about avoiding harm and gaining pleasure. Stage 2 is pretty much about whatever’s good for me is good for me, and that’s all that, right? It’s the absolute consumer, maybe. What do you think? I bring these for reflection, not as someone standing at the pulpit or podium to make some grand statement.
Conventional morality is about person-to-person and the larger societal morality.
That means stage 3 deals with the approval of one’s peers, one’s groups, one’s larger social network. Stage 4 deals with the general authority and is really, deeply around the concepts of not being that proverbial squeaky wheel. Who wants to be that, right? So that’s’ all o’ that one.
And the post-conventional, a pretty darn cool one for the neat kids, it’s about equal consideration and treatment of individuals and then actions and thoughts in accordance with universal principles – like compassion and love, fairness, equality, and justice, and so on, I think. I’m sure you can think of others, and more.
And that brings about stage 5 with the social contract and that contract about, “Okay, I made a deal with you. You made a deal with me. We respect one another as equal parties in this endeavour with respect to consent. You have given me your consent. I have given you my consent. Now, we can get down to business in these social endeavours.”
Stage 6 is pretty much the moral geniuses. Those around us with absolute moral autonomy and authority derived an internalized, highly developed moral center. That brings us back to the original point about children and adolescents and adults. There are definite, fluid stages of moral thinking, changes for them.
And as kids grow up, there’s a definite advance in their awareness and treatment of others. And when I think about it, there’s a definite trend towards concern for oneself, one’s family, one’s kin, one’s principles, and so on. This, I think, can quite easily be thought of as a general expansion of some moral consideration – an expanding compass, as if becoming more precise, moving more northward. Not perfection, not ungrounded idealism, but a sense of development.
Think about the gruesome lives of ancient major civilizations in treatment of those thought of as non-persons. Who? You know who and how many and in what ways. It’s an old, ancient, continuous struggle for justice. And I’m pretty certain you can think about exemplars, really great examples of the people that show these principles in action and deed and thought.
For me, I think of John Stuart Mill, who, in an extraordinarily important essay, said quite frankly, directly, and with a definite moral force. He co-wrote this with his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, and I think his daughter Helen, too. Their closing paragraph from On The Subjection of Women:
When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification — first in the loss of the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow-creatures (otherwise than by making them responsible for any evil actually caused by it), dries up pro tanto the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual human being.
Whether international women’s rights, or the individual person’s development morally, there’s the continuous progression forward, with occasional regression.
And the sustainability of the environment, too. The animals’ suffering and general wellbeing and the ability of every person to fulfill some general capacity and natural talent if they have it, and then to cultivate it and use it as they see fit. For millions of people, that’s the basic ability to weave thread, or harvest plants, or shear animals.
But this is a common thing, I feel. It’s simply matter of making those small steps for us, and our descendants, or others’. And the modern face is increasingly becoming other animals’ wellbeing and the generalized health of ecosystems. On of the ways Trusted Clothes is interested in pursuit of this is in the fact of the mistreatment of people, even kids. There’s a better quality of life in certain ways with modern technology. But there’s still the fundamental right and choice. People can choose how to govern their own affairs, lives, communities.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Where in the world do the military clothes go? Like that old Carmen San Diego song…
It would seem ironic, but fitting, that the industry devoted to the defense of a nation and to aggress upon other nations would imply that the men and women in uniform would be contributive to the major devastation on the planet.
Perhaps, we can call this a covert, and unacknowledged, war on the planet, which contributes to climate change or global warming, pollution of the water and environment through the addition of synthetics, man-made, fibres aka “non-biodegradable materials” or just Ice Cube – in the biz (who did use the word biodegradable in some lyrics, in unrelated news), into the landfills and the oceans. Can we declare a war on that, too? You betcha. So how about a war on the war on the environment? But it’s covert. Okay, how about an overt war on the covert war on the environment? That’s enough of that.
That’s the question I want to ask with respect to the military and it’s clothing. In fact, it has to do a lot with the recycling cycle for the synthetic fibres or the man-made fibres, and the massive amount of men and women of uniform that wear clothing that is built to withstand to the pressures of combat, particular pressures of combat, that can result in clothing that is a very resistant to bio-degradation simply because they’re synthetic, which is the aforementioned issue.
One of the main fibres for military application came from World War II on December, 1941, where the War Production Board stated all nylon production is permitted for military use. Nylon even replaced Asian silk for the material used to produce parachutes. That’s pretty cool. I think there’s a sort of domino effect, where the purchase of one type of fibre begins to cascade throughout an industry – whether some small area or the military at large, just idle speculation.
Take, for instance, the extension into other military supplies, ponchos, ropes, tents and ties – and even for the production of higher-quality American currency. And so, since this the outset of the war, cotton has ruled as a dominant fibre – as more than 80% of the fibres used turn out to be cotton.
Even up to the present, specialized combat fires are needed for the strenuous wear and tear of combat and environmental pressures on them, all of this is not to say that don’t do cool things. In fact, the current forms of combat units and military clothing, and fibres throughout military applications, are pretty remarkable.
Let’s take one particular example call Aramid, those kinds of fibres are a particular class of strong heat resistant synthetic fibres that have use in the aerospace and military applications. Early experiments the 1990s, in vitro experiments, showed that it had some of the same affects on particular cells in the body as did asbestos, this raised the carcinogenic implications of the clothing, possibly, to the wearer. In other words, it can, does, or did have serious effects on human body based on being worn since the 1990 research showed some of this.
Although, there was a further research into 2009 that did show that inhaled particulate matter of this kind of fibre did not pose a particular threat to the body because it could be quickly cleared from the body. Nonetheless, it does have a large use within the military, and in general, because it’s general output is within the 40,000 to 50,000-ton range possibly more.
So, that’s a little look into the military and fibres. Bear in mind, especially when Uncle Sam wants you, as one of the most generalizable rules of thumb or heuristics for comprehension between the synthetic, or man-made, fibres and the nature fibres deals with decomposition. If a fibre can decompose, then it’s, typically, natural; if it cannot, it’s, typically, synthetic or man-made. And that means the military is contributive to the non-biodegradable material pollution in the environment.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Back once more with respect to finding out, what, Scott? Camel hair! What is camel hair? Well, for one, it is made out of… Camel hair. It is different than any kind of specific categorization of camel hair or animal hair or some kind of other thing. However, the basic premise does stand that is that camel hair and, therefore, it is a natural fibre.
In particular, an animal fibre, for those that have not been following this particular series, deals with one of the basic premises behind those close to the sustainability movement, even closer than newbies like me. That is, the focus on ethical, sustainable, and healthy fashion with the emphasis on natural – animal and plant – fibres over synthetic fibres. There might be subtleties unknown to me, known to you, or known to the veterans of this trade and business, but I don’t know about them at this point in time. Think for yourself.
So, the main differences are between synthetic or man-made fibres, and natural fibres. Natural fibres divide into animal and plant fibres. Plant fibres are those, at least primarily, made of cellulose and other things. Animal fibres are made of proteins in particular things like amino acids, which makes proteins.
Synthetic fibres or man-made fibres are not made of either cellulose or amino acids/proteins. In fact, when something is not made of cellulose or proteins/amino acids, the bio-degradation of the product will actually not occur because the synthetic fibres that are made by human beings don’t permit it. It’s basically like the way plastics, which are synthetic, do not bio-degrade as far as we know about them. And the ones that are made by nature are made of it because of a common evolutionary history in which the enzymes around it and that co-evolved with it can break these particular things down to their more fundamental constituents.
I want to make the distinction between natural fibres as plant/animal fibres, and synthetic or man-made fibres. You can then make the distinction between those that can decompose more or less, and those that cannot decompose. In other words, this means that the natural fibres can decompose, hot or cold composting, and the synthetic fibres do not.
So with some of that in mind, or all that in mind, we can now discuss some of the aspects of camel hair, which is a particular type of animal hair that can break down and is from camels. Our big ol’ double humpbacked friend! Or single humped buddy.
Camel hair is a fine kind of hair, which is made of an outer and an inner part in terms of its growth patterns. It’s outer protective hair or guard hair, which can be coarse and flexible, is often combined with another kind of fibre called wool – a more common form of fibre. The hair has various applications. You look at the camels and their hair, and their sales.
They do have particular specialty hair that can be utilized as a specialty fibre, which is useful in the textile fibre industry. But it comes from a particular type of camel known as the Bactrian camel, which we did talk about it one article a few weeks ago. It can actually grow to quite long. It is a fair sustainable fibre, which also has an insulating undercoat.
Now, what comes to mind here, the coat itself, which can be used as a high-grade form of a fabric. The fabric is mainly used for knitting yarn, blankets and rugs and many, many other textiles.
The Bactrian camel does remain native to the Eastern and Central Asian areas of the world with the current herd size, according to 2009 estimates, of about 1.4 million animals. Oh! And the actual shearing or dehairing occurs during the time of moulting, the moulting season, which is a period of time between six to eight weeks of shedding.
Yuck! It can hold up to, one of those camel can yield up to, about 5 to 10 kilograms of annual fibre output. That’s quite a lot. In fact, it can actually produce a lot more than one might expect in normal circumstances. The center of the production appears to be in Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and, as seems usual (or so I’m catching on), China and a lot of minor aspects can come out of Afghanistan and Iran.
I find it interesting that it can be centralized to Eastern Asia and the Middle East in terms of its Harvest and production and manufacture prior to distribution to other parts of the world. I’m going to assume that some of the major consumers of the fibre itself, the animal fibre itself, are North American and European in destination or origin depending upon the point of view. The international market shows that there’s about 2,000 tons of coming from China and 500 tons coming from Mongolia according to 1990 estimates.
That’s not much with some of the other estimates of other fibres taken into account. Many estimates coming from Mongolia from peasants or low technology societies that are likely indigenous to that area probably produce money that amounts to millions of dollars or a great amount of their well-being, livelihood, and income might be coming here so that involves the children, adults, and the elderly in terms of their ability to live within their own culture of which, which is one of the fundamental human rights, far as I’m concerned. So, it’s a lot for the peasants and a little for the world – so to speak, and in a literal fashion as well.
Some interesting uses of camel hair can make things like yurts or the houses of the nomadic herders as well as exporting yarns and overcoats and coats and blazers and suits and jackets and sweaters, and even winter accessories such as small things like gloves and hats and scarves to help knit some warm stuff for the body’s outer extremities.
Well, what are the major aspects of this is a mixture with wool? Why would it become mixed with a wool over other possible fibres? That’s a reasonable question, and I asked it myself. Well, it does seem to be mixed with the wool to make it more economical because of the low output of camel fibre relative to international standards of other fibres, which can range from the thousands to the tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands, and even more, tons of material. So, it really, really depends on the area and the type of fibre that you want to take into account.
However, with respect to the global perspective, the 500 tonnes are quite miniscule relative to the rest of the world. Even though, the number of products that are made are quite diverse. The actual amount of them is quite low. Therefore, the admixture between wool and the camel hair is likely for a good reason.
That’s all for now, folks!
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Nationally, and internationally in fact, we can see representation of synthetic fibres or man-made fibres in industry, and culture, and social life, and especially in the economy with huge amounts of selling of certain fibres such as polyester, which are produced mainly in China are based on our consumer demands in North America and Europe.
Personally, we can also see the inclusion of natural fibres and economies, and cultures, and social life, especially in our own little way with Trusted Clothes. (Read the other bloggers/writers, they have great stuff! We’ve got many things for all sort of people.) A little way that comes out with a big dream. Our dream is to influence many, many people at some point in the future through our initiatives.
I think that’s a noble goal. I think it’s a good goal. I think it’s a wonderful dream and I think that is something that is possible actualization in the world. And if it can be actualized in the world, but I think that it is worth pursuing. And if it’s worth pursuing then it’s worth discussing. And if it’s worthless cussing, and is worth reading about, and therefore I’m writing now.
Internationally, we can see some more representation of natural fibres with respect to an entire day that was devoted to natural fibres by the United Nations organ called the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. It was the year 2009, and this was an important year, because the International Community recognized the need for sustainable agriculture, manufacture, distribution, and production of fashionable goods throughout the world for all kinds of cultures and economies.
In 2009, they noted that like agriculture, there were multiple aspects of textiles that are a fundamental part of human life, or at least by their claim, since the dawn of civilization. This spans from 5000 BC in Mexico and Pakistan up into the present. This is all this is a very important thing to pursue. Some of the fibres of the included for alpaca, abaca, angora, camel, cashmere, mohair, silk, wool, jute, and multiple others. This included a total of 15 fibres, plant and animal fibres.
They provide a tremendous amount of information about these things that seems relevant still to this day, to me, (I know, I know – it’s only 7 years onward, not even) and this seems of particular emotional valence too many individuals because it is covering a wide swath of a global industry that produces millions of tons of fibres. These fibres have been a part of our global culture, even though the global culture was fragmented and didn’t know about each other and still is to some degree, but this was a part of a larger initiative of human activity that seems innate (I’d hypothesize as an extension of normal human activity, like varieties of dance and writing or linguistic facility expressed in superficial differences in language) because part of human activity includes the harvest, manufacture, and the knitting of flavors for human clothing.
This clothing and then becomes fashionable for men and for women, and for other genders. This diversity then becomes a fashion statement. And this can then be extended to the dawn of the fashion industry.
It is a lot more broadly-based than what I’m presenting here, but it is something that I think is very important. I think it’s very important because it’s a very valuable resource. You can find it here. That’s all that I wanted to express in this particular note because the industry does have representation at the international level.
And anything that is represented at the international level tends to be of importance to many, many actors or Member States within the United Nations. And if it’s represented in the United Nations through many, many Member States, then it tends to have ratification or inclusion on many things that are relevant to the International Community, which means the global community. And that was represented in 2009, which is the why part of the whole deal.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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And we’re back again once more with a very short discussion on natural fibres! It is a discussion around shaking the conceptual apparatuses and foundations of sustainable and ethical and healthy fashion industry as I knew it. I want to talk about something completely new (to me), but a quick little reminder before we talk about regenerative fibres.
So there’s a basic distinction between natural fibres and plant fibres. Some might claim that synthetic fibres are not natural fibres, as in from nature. However, that is completely illogical because everything is from nature. The premises behind are the definition are probably around the idea things from biology – that’s probably what is meant, which is then, of course, true, but words have meanings.
Anywho or nonetheless, natural fibres divide into animal and plant fibres. Plant fibres tend to have cellulose. And fibres are the ones with the amino acids or proteins, which means that the proteins are made of the amino acids. So those are some basic distinctions to be made. Some natural fibres are cotton, linen which is made from flax, silk, wool, cashmere, hemp, and jute which is a basically for carpets mainly.
Synthetic fibres and seltzer synthetic fabrics are kind of plastic fabric, which means they don’t decompose. Natural fibres, and one flat her, actually do not decompose which is an issue in terms of the health of the environment this present point in time because we have a microplastics putting things into the environment that one of the main issues and contributive factors such as these two are the major Schuster for every single nation and the globe called global warming or climate change. Some comments that fabrics are polyester, spandex, and nylon.
Another major distinction to be made between these two is that natural fibres actually have a lifecycle whilst the other one has a one-way arrow which is not a cycle. Natural fibres have a cycle. That cycle basically includes the growth of the plant or the animal, the shearing, or dehairing, of the animal, and the harvest of the plant to get the fibres. And from this, we can then use it to make a very Starbucks and then put that into a particular or any of your most fashion trees. So this stereotyped polar bear might not be sheared or dehaired (that lack of self-esteem trophy goes to camels and bunnies in general), but it is going to shed a tear for its and our environment.
The end result of these productions can then be thrown away to decompose and made into fertilizer, then be used to grow for the plants or the crops for the fields that the animals with the clothing fibre then graze off. (nom, nom, nom.)
Unfortunately, synthetic fibres do not have that. They have a system in which they are made and then they were tossed into landfills or the ocean, which leads to the problem to do with pollution. So, the natural fibre clothing might not last as long, but will leave a definite lower impact on the environment.
Synthetic fibres will last forever or a lot longer because of biology’s inability, as far as w know, to decompose them – so they’ll end up in pieces in the ocean or landfills in one form or another whether bits or pieces. However, the intelligent decision in terms of the environment would very likely be natural fibres at this point time as far as I know.
There’s something I didn’t quite know about, and I hadn’t even covered, but I think that it’s something that is worth covering in this little short article here today. It is something that neither plant nor animal fibre. Therefore, it is not a natural fibre. Rather, it is a non-natural classification of fibre, not even a synthetic fibre. It is a regenerated fibre. Huh?
Basically, it is a natural fibre to begin, or more particularly a plant fibre, that is broken down in terms of the cellulose components of it – in many instances (there are others, apparently). These are broken down by a chemical process.
The chemical process is known as the viscose method. The viscose method involves the breakdown of the cellulose via various chemicals, and then the regeneration of the parts that were broken down with another chemical that then makes a new fibre. In other words, it is a little like removing some particular aspect of something and then filling in the holes was something else of that which was removed.
Some of these things don’t necessarily need to be referred to an ethic of good and evil or morality of right and wrong or even utilitarian analysis correct incorrect choices in particular set of possible futures. One can simply look at the way that products are made via harvesting manufacture.
They can look at the distribution networks. The distribution networks being those who are the source of materials. Those who are the transporters of material. And those are who are the recipients of the material. Out of this, we can then extract a systems-based view about the nature of fibres.
With respect to regenerative fibres, there is a sense in which a plant fibre is first needed because of the cellulose-based nature of the fibre itself. Then there needs to be a reference to the particular type of process that’s required for it called the viscose method. After that, then, the issue then focuses on the material itself, the regenerative fibre.
It might be able to be used in similar or the same fashion ministry. Maybe it’ll be worn by the same people as the synthetic or the natural fibre fashion industry without any ill health consequences. It might be able to be brought into the general consumption that works with the 60+ million tons of synthetic fibres worn by the general public within emphasis on polyester.
Or, the 25.4-million-ton industry of natural fibres with an emphasis on the 15 animal and plant flowers around the world. Nonetheless, it has to focus on the new type called regenerative fibre. Now, please bear in mind as I believe that noted at the outset of the short article, that the nature of the regenerative fibre is something that I wasn’t necessarily familiar with. It has to do with another categorization of fibre.
It is something that is originally a natural or plant fibre. That is, something that was a plant fibre, had the cellulose removed, say, and then had a chemical admixture to become a regenerative fibre.
Now, I’ve mentioned the viscose method a couple times. But what is it? Viscose method includes two parts: extrusion and precipitation. What is extrusion? What is precipitation? Extrusion is simply the act or process of pushing something out, and in this case, I assume, it means the cellulose via some chemical means (too much detail!), and then the precipitation is basically what you get with some of the weather cycle, or the water cycle of the weather cycle.
At the end of it, you will get some regenerative fibre that is capable of being worn by pretty people in ads. (Gasp! Shudder.)
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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So, once again, we find ourselves in the roles of narrative-maker and reader. Is that breaking the fourth wall, third (?)? I don’t know. There are the aspects around natural fibres to begin with. Do you know about or have you heard about Lauryn Hill? Well, you should. Why? Hell if I know, but I get some joy listening to the music. Been listening to her while writing at times, annnnnd….cue the lyrics:
You act like you ain’t hear him then gave him a little trim
To begin, how you think you really gon’ pretend
Like you wasn’t down then you called him again
Plus when you give it up so easy you ain’t even fooling him
That’s pretty good, right? I think so. Let’s review what we know about fibres. Natural fibres are made of plant fibres, animal fibres, and mineral fibres.
I’ve written on some of these fibres in previous posts, and I had stated that natural fibres have only two categories: plant fibres and animal fibres. However, I was wrong. I recently learned about a new category: mineral fibres.
Civilizations around the world have used natural fibres, such as flax and wool, for millennia. Natural fibres are very different from synthetic, or man-made, fibres. Unlike natural fibres, synthetic fibres cannot decompose, which means they are polluting the environment. For instance, we have 4.54 trillion micro-plastics in our oceans, which affects the lifeforms in this ecosystem. In addition, we have a tremendous amount of plastics from synthetic fibres in landfills as well.
Synthetic fibres dominate – by more than two fold – the fibre industry. Natural fibres have less than half of the productive output in the global marketplace. That is concerning.
The productive cycle of synthetic fibres compared to the that of natural fibres is absurd.
While the production of the synthetic fibres takes time, once created, the fibres move directly on a one-way street to waste, whether into landfills or the ocean. Natural fibres, however, go back into the environment as they decompose, and then we harvest the fibres again.
Climate change is an immediate and ongoing concern. CO2 in the atmosphere is reflecting light from the sun back into the atmosphere at a higher rate annually. It is capturing certain wavelengths of light that would otherwise bounce off and go back into space. Long wavelength light is absorbed and re-emitted and stays within the Earth. We’re running the dumbest slow-cooker experiment in human history.
This is an alarming set of trends that started with the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution did improve our lives in many ways – in the developed nations. Nonetheless, the continuous burning of fossil fuels is a major contributor in overloading the Earth’s atmosphere with greenhouse gas emissions. Authors of professional reports and in the peer-reviewed academic journal articles have discussed these greenhouse gas emissions and their effect on the Earth endlessly.
Of the experts who are spending their professional time researching the subject, 97% agree on the reality of global warming and its consequences. For instance, we are seeing glaciers and polar ice caps melting, extreme weather events, alarming transformations of the animal and human environments throughout the biosphere, and higher sea levels, which might sink coastal cities around the world by the end of this century.
So, we can see that the popular media, the academic world, and the general populace at large are increasingly throughout the world becoming more aware and active in terms of the knowledge and hoping to contribute to the reduction of the production of carbon emissions in the atmosphere. You may have heard of the phrase “carbon footprint.” That simply points to the measuring of peoples’ contributions to the global warming of the earth. It’s nothing esoteric. Nothing hard. It’s a simple trend line over time based on parts per millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
This is an extraordinarily strong positive correlation possibly because of the warming of the earth in addition to the concomitant effects that are listed before to do with melting of the glaciers, warming of the earth, sinking of the coastal cities and other populated places (usually the poor places of the world), rising sea levels, and other things. By which I mean, it’s obvious. I think the logic is another issue there was a famous logician named Kurt Gödel.
The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material [from which they are derived] or in the laws [governing their formation]
Said Kurt Gödel, which was pretty good, but not as punchy as this one:
But every error is due to extraneous factors (such as emotion and education); reason itself does not err.
Although, he shot himself in the foot with this one in contradistinction to the last one:
Reason and understanding concern two levels of concept. Dialectics and feelings are involved in reason.
Feelings ain’t so extraneous; or even with a hint of the metaphysical:
Either mathematics is too big for the human mind, or the human mind is more than a machine.
Or consider what a man named George Gilder (an American investor) to say about this man:
The progenitor of information theory, and perhaps the pivotal figure in the recent history of human thought, was Kurt Gödel, the eccentric Austriac genius and intimate of Einstein who drove determinism from its strongest and most indispensable redoubt; the coherence, consistency, and self-sufficiency of mathematics.
Gödel demonstrated that every logical scheme, including mathematics, is dependent upon axioms that it cannot prove and that cannot be reduced to the scheme itself.
With all this in mind, natural fibres in the natural fibre cycle, the synthetic or man-made one-way cycle, ethics, sustainability, environmentalism and environmental ethics, other global issues that could lead to ruin, and the importance of straightforward logic and not even the advanced form brought forth by Godel with the two incompleteness theorems, Tarski with the undefinability theorem, or any of the number of logics available (computational, formal, informal, mathematical, modal, philosophical, predicate, propositional, or – gasp! – non-computational).
The reasoning seems pretty clear. And I think if the ethic is pretty clear to, then the logic and reason is pretty clear, and therefore the feeling is pretty straightforward to me as well. It seems like an emotional imperative. Seems like enough fun. Rational does not preclude emotion. What do you think? About that thing? (Or those things.) We can change our habits and be ready for the future, and we can learn about it. Thankfully, it’s not hard to take it all in, that’s just life, right? Hill?:
This life is a process of learning.
And as with everything written, I could be wrong, incredibly wrong – think for yourself and come to your own conclusions. I’m human. I’m a writer. I have biases, fallibilities, and quirks – even some funny ones. My words aren’t gold, nor are they a calf. (And no bull!) Although, I will milk it.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
So, I want to talk little bit about set theory as it relates to things like categorizations and the definitions of fibres. Set theory is an advanced form of abstraction based around the categorization of things into sets, which are contained in supersets. Supersets contain sets contain elements.
The fundamental units of the sets are elements. A set with an element is called an empty set. But this is some of the strange and weird abstract language that is used to describe this discipline, which is one of the most fundamental domains of discourse for pure mathematics, mathematics, and even physics that describes the natural world.
So, let’s run a little bit of a thought experiment and a simple symbol manipulation experiment with respect to set theory and how we define natural fibres. We can take a squiggly bracket for opening, similar to a parenthetical statement, and a closed squiggly bracket, then we can come up with something like this:
{}
If we take a symbol such as x, y, or z, or actual numbers such as one, two, three, and so on and so forth, we can label those elements. As noted earlier, we can then define the set as the composition of the elements. If we take a set A, we can define it as the most fundamental set, which relates all other sets, which is an intersection of all of them because of the nothingness that contains nothing. Something that contains nothing, in this definition, can then, therefore, relate to everything else. (Huh?) And the Empty Set is such a set:
{} or ∅.
In this case of set A, as an empty set or The Empty Set, will be the representation of it, this means that nothing is contained at this moment in time. If we extrapolate to add elements, let’s say the letter x for an unknown variable, and the number 1for a known variable, we can then have three factors now, we have A, the unknown variable x, and the known variable 1.
We have some fundamental concept sin set theory, too. We have the element, the set, the superset, and the known and unknown variables. Elements make up sets and superset. The latter two do not have much discussion, if at all, in the formalized textbooks, but it’s interesting to note that any set can have elements in them and not know what the precise variable is at that moment in time.
It’s a bit like memory, long-term memory. There’s stuff we know that we know, but don’t have the immediate access it. It’s right at the “tip of my tongue” – so to speak. It’s in our mind, but not known. That’s what I mean. You might have inferred another concept. That a set in a superset is another thing, entirely, which is true: the subset. Let’s put the known variable and the unknown variable into the set now. It will look something like this:
{x, 1}
What else is entailed by this? Two other sets are duplicated or implied by this. One is another set B that contains only the unknown variable x. Another is a set that contains only the known variable, 1. So, we have sets A, B, and C.
Note, the empty set, or the set that contains no elements x, is, thus, intersected between set A, B, and C. If we extrapolate this into the definitions of natural fibres, and synthetic or man-made fibres. We can define natural fibres as set B and synthetic or man-made fibres as set C. Something’s missing here. That’s right.
Set A is the superset of sets B and C. Note, set B and set C are new sets with the same title as the ones before in addition to set A as the superset of sets B and C, the new sets. All of the other definitions of fibres would be elements within A. All natural fibre definitions would be elements in set B.
All synthetic or man-made fibres would be elements in set C. For sake of ease, we can label the old sets A-C the sub-a kind and the new sets A-C the sub-b kind – sub simply means that hyphenated letter placed in front of and below the capital letter representing the set:
A = {}
Aa = {x, 1}
Ba = {x}
Ca = {1}
Ab = {natural fibres, synthetic/man-made fibres} = {Bb, Cb}
Bb = {natural fibres}
Cb = {synthetic/man-made fibres}
See, simple, you can do it, too! You can then infer or deduce properly downwards into subsets and elements that are further composed of these. That’s a small introduction to set theory.
If we were to straightforwardly label the sets themselves, we could come out with him something a little bit interesting with regard to the composition of the definitions. We can replace the F4 mentioned unknown acts and the known one with the titles fibres, natural fibres, synthetic or man-made fibres, and so on and so forth.
It would look something like this: acting like a little bit of a phonics but thought experiment to run! Sorry if this is a little bit of a bore, but I think that this is a viable subject and a very important subject matter and of itself to both think about, pursue, and to play around with as an idea, especially with respect to something else as practically important as natural fibres and textiles. Here’s what I came to with all of that!
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
Climate change is one of the major issues in the world at the moment. Climate change, or also known as global warming, is what some might deem the major problem in the world today with respect to the weather of any particular area of the world and the catastrophes seen via its effects around the globe over many, many decades.
To me, this is an important point in time to keep in mind that I feel like no one individual is necessarily at fault, but that large international entities such as hydrocarbon producing companies and corporations are at fault. At the same time, the consumers, us, seem to be a fault to me as well. So, it runs both ways, in two examples.
This is a major issue for so long, and it is something that I have grown up with. I really can’t, even after a few minutes of pause and reflection and attempts to remember a time without this as something in my life. It just kind of is. Something that I have grown into, something that I have known in more of my cognizant life than not.
And it is something that I haven’t and probably will not be able to escape in terms of its importance to my considerations of both national life and international responsibility. Is this a healthy concern? Is this proportioned a consideration? I ask myself these questions about this topic because it’s something that is not going to disappear, and will likely remain with me until I die.
So, there’s two kinds of response: let the ‘inevitable’ happen or think about solutions. I’m the latter person more often than not. Besides, the former splits into two kinds of folks: the panic-stricken and the complacent. The panic-stricken are the ones that are unable to permit themselves the ability to calm down and think about the variables at play in the situation.
Although, I do know that this is a very relevant feeling and emotion for those that individuals that are worried about the state of the climate. I would feel the same way, if I did not know about the facts of the matter. Facts the matter that we can do things. It is a matter of mindset followed by action.
The complacent are of a similar sort as the panic-stricken because they, in terms of their actions, do not do anything. By not doing anything, they don’t change a thing. When they don’t change anything, it seems marginal in terms of the source of the lack of action. I feel like that is this source of the concern from my side is in light of the fact about the darkness of action of the complacent and the panic-stricken, i.e. without any action.
I do not mean political or environmental or economic activists necessarily. I mean those that would build new technologies for instance. Those that would enact laws in place that are devoted to the well-being and safekeeping of our life-support system, which is important with respect to our own well-being and survival of her children and those that come after us. So,
I’m of the latter form. The kind of person, I feel at any rate, that aims for solutions for increasing the level of discussion. To me it feels like it is a travesty that was thrust onto me and others growing up at this time.
And the issue doesn’t limit itself to groups, I feel, the discussions about groups, discussions about identities and identity politics and so on, are not necessarily the core thing at the moment, even though they dominate young people’s academic lives much of the time.
In fact, these discussions will not be able to be had without the solutions needed for climate change or global warming implemented immediately and in the long-term. So this is something that has been in personal and social life for a long time.
If I don’t get my act together in terms of my own personal behavior with respect to this major issue, then I’ll be letting down in an enormous number of people who are similarly concerned and working towards these issues. I know that if I fail at attempting to adapt to the major issues of the climate in our time, then I will tacitly be letting down others.
Even so, I do feel a little bit concerned in terms of upcoming generations. And I have nieces, nephews, others that I love very much, and this is not only then a concern for me but also a concern coming from me to them. I feel concern for them. I feel concern for others.
I’m trying to do some things within some skills that I have, such as writing and researching, interviewing, and presenting the facts of the matter, but this does not necessarily mean that this is the most productive manner in which to tackle this topic.
For instance, when in attempting to make contact emotionally, one can tackle it constructively and proactively through advice. So, I feel like there are some more things to take other than just the general from this. There can be emotional appeals when reason and argument fail.
And so once we’ve gotten through all of the other issues to do with the anxiety, the complacency, the identity politics, and so on, I feel like the fact of the matter is the way to think about these things. The facts of the matter are not necessarily the most convincing to people.
In fact, I would argue that most people most the time are not necessarily convinced by reason, but, rather, by emotion, emotional appeal, and a general feeling about something of whether it is a threat or not. In fact, I feel as though that might be the reason behind the complacency in terms of its emotional aspects.
It is just so far away. It is so in the distance that it is beyond the horizon of feeling like an urgent thing. However, it’s right here. It’s happening now. So count me, I feel the need to double down on facts, arguments, and some appeals to emotion for individuals.
I disagree with some of the pleas that are made emotionally, but I think that expressing one’s personal perspective, experience, and vulnerabilities and potential helplessness on this issue have their place. And if each of these has a place, then there are different formats from which to tackle climate change.
And good, it’s a very good thing that these avenues exist. I don’t have much else to say, and I don’t have any references, numbers, or block quotes for this particular piece, but I those are some just my own general thoughts, feelings, and reasoning at a very superficial level. I could go onto the tales of brave Ulysses…but I digress.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
Today’s natural fibre will be jute. However, I want to discuss a novel aspect of this particular series. When you think about it, what is sustainable fibre? To me, it means something that is capable of being circuitous in its production as well as the management of its life cycle.
In that, it does have a life cycle. To be sure, I mean eco-friendly resources, which can sustainably be grown as fibre crops or even with recycled materials. For us at Trusted Clothes, it is something of importance.
We are at a point, and have been for some time, for the need of sustainable solutions in terms of the net human population’s production and consumption patterns. Our patterns of consumption now are not only affecting us now, but will affect those in the future. For those of you with children or grandchildren, that means them. And the population is projected to go up to 9, even 10 or 12 billion people from the current 7.3.
For those of you with loved ones or neighbors or still citizens, everyone, that means them as well. It is a global issue. (Dun, dun, dun!) As with most issues at this time of globalization, it is happening in larger, and larger, amounts. And the changes to the environment will impact on us because we are part of the environment. That is, the environment, of which we are a part, is our life support system. Okie dokie, now some background…
Natural fibres are under the classification of fibres. Man-made or synthetic fibres are under the same classification. Natural fibres can decompose. Man-made or synthetic fibres cannot decompose, as far as we know. Synthetic fibres can include things such as nylon and polyester. Natural fibres can include things such as alpaca, angora, camel, cashmere, coir, and wool. Natural fibres themselves divide even further into plant and animal fibres.
Plant fibres being the fibres that are made mostly of cellulose and come from plants, of course. Animal fibres are those that come from chains of amino acids known as proteins come from animals, even more of course. So to the main course, what is jute?
It is one of the longest fibres and most used of the natural fibres. To some classifications, it can be known as the golden fibre, given that it is has a golden brown color. It is environmentally friendly and one of the most affordable natural fibres around. In other words, those on a tight budget, such as students or most single parents, this can be something to look into for you.
Jute is a bast fibre, and that means that the bark of the plant is what is used for the fibre itself. That is bast. It has been used in history in India for centuries. And it was typically twisted. Sometimes, the fibre was/is extracted for use in fires.
Now, the main producers are commercial growers. It was exported in the 1880s with spinning and weaving in Dundee (Scotland); however, the juice products were replaced by hemp, for instance. And by 1970 and into the late 1990s, jute fibres were replaced by synthetic fibres.
Used to be it an industry of 3 to 3.7 million tonnes per annum for its production but this reduced to 2.6 – 2.8 million tons. None the less, and even in spite of the decline, jute is a prominent fibre probably second only to cotton. As noted that it is environmentally friendly, I have a low carbon footprint and is biodegradable it. It feeds on soil and air.
Therefore, it is good for the air in the soil, and is a good source for wood pole. It does not need any fertilizers or pesticides. We can work this out. And can enrich the soil with micronutrients. It can support fish populations even when there’s a flood. In fact, he can help clean the air because it can assimilate 3 times more CO2 and convert it into oxygen than the average tree.
Now, with this, it is an extract of the white plant. And it typically flourishes in lowland tropical areas where the humidity of about 60 to 90%. Therefore, the consumption of food plants of about 15 tonnes will release about 11 tonnes of oxygen, which is a good thing in the era of global warming or climate change.
Its yield is about 2 tonnes of dry food fibre per hectare. Note, it is also one of the strongest fibres around. Present, Bangladesh and West Bengal in India are the world’s main work or food producers. There are about 4 million Farmers earning their living from this. This supports 20 million dependents. A 1 to 5 ratio for a 5 to 1 ratio depending upon the matter.
And so come we come to the production and trade and uses of you to close off this short article. The production of jute fluctuate depending upon the weather and environmental conditions in addition to the prices of the market for a 2029. India produces about 60% of the world productive capacity of Jude in addition to Bangladesh making most of the rest, as noted for their production.
Most of the exports of Bangladesh can be about half of the Roth IRA. And in most of the food produced by India is consumed domestically in other words it is produced internal to the state. The uses of Judah of being the well-documented up since about the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which is a couple that was centuries ago, and it has been known that she has been replaced as never before by blacks and Hunt, but it can be used as things like curtains, carpets, rugs, or can be Blended to make other Goods such as lampshades or shoes.
Some of geotextile Zara from juice that are about flexible can absorb moisture come and are biodegradable, and this can prevent soil erosion Landslide well that’s all I’m good for today 1, that should provide a decent picture of what it looks like as a very important favor for one of the most populous nations in the world with the round 1.25 billion people.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
I was doing some brainstorming on one of the most prominent and controversial political topics in the current era, which does not equate to a controversial topic within the academic and scientific communities because well over 97% of the worlds climate experts agree that climate change or global warming is real, that is it is happening, and that human beings are major contributors to this problem. When I was brainstorming on this topic, or simply reflecting on it, I was thinking about the nature of the production cycles in the global marketplace and the consumption patterns of billions of people, and the general production of carbon emissions.
If you take a look at the consumption patterns, not only in terms of the raw quantity but also the sheer variety of things that people consumed, the data can seem overwhelming at first glance or on face value. Even so, at the same time, the nature of the general costs of things such as fashion, textile production, and harvesting growth of animal and plant fibres – or production of synthetic or man-made fibres, the data seems more clear because the net numbers have been organized, parsed, catalogued, and put into comprehensive and simplified frameworks. These styles of consumption or consuming patterns dictate the raw CO2 output or carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
As a side note, we have other global issues such as terrorism. For examples, Boko Haram and ISIS, Irish Republican Army and Naxal/Naxalites, and so on, as well as the threat of nuclear war with respect to major nations in the world having large numbers quantities of nuclear armaments prepared to launch. These should be reduced in number because of the threat of possible failures in the computer systems that prevent nuclear launch and other known vulnerability of the systems.
Nonetheless, one of the long-term issues that needs implementation at present and continuing into the near and far future is climate change or global warming. Most nations in the world conceive of this as a problem based on the data provided by such respected international scientific and climatological bodies as the international panel on climate change for the IPCC. Given that this is an international organization; it is known as a scientific intergovernmental body under the auspices of the United Nations with respect to the global community. It was founded in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environment Program.
In other words, it has been producing research for decades. It has been producing reports for about that time as well. There are thousands of scientists and experts that assist the production or writing and outputs of the organization. The reportage of the organization aims to include information on human impacts or contributions to global warming, the consequences of it, and the possibilities or paths for mitigation and mediation for this. In other words, that includes the levels of human contribution, how we affect the environment, and the ways to avoid the worst of this.
Now when I reflect on this further, the nature of things like natural fibres are important because these do not necessarily contributions to the environment. In fact, some fibres such as natural fibres can be either net minimal carbon producing in terms of the total lifecycle, or even net neutral, or even most beneficial net negative in terms of the carbon emission. This is an important fact. Things like synthetic fibres such as polyester, especially, do not by necessity produce zero carbon over their life cycle.
In fact, they can make things worse with such things as heavy levels of productions of micro plastics into the ocean and the landfills. The major threat of climate change, of course, is the fact that when the climate becomes warmer then the oceans become warmer, and anything such as water expands compared to a prior state. Cold things contract; warm things expand.
This has been called anthropogenic climate change because of the high probability or high positive correlation between human industrial activity that is deeply associated with high levels of carbon output through such things as the burning of fossil fuels for high levels of hydrocarbon placed into the atmosphere and, subsequent, warming of the atmosphere. The long way wave length light is not leaving the atmosphere. The carbon is capturing that light and warming the atmosphere, among other things.
So, when I think even further about things like fashion culture and sustainable fashion culture, some that have not been introduced to it might come forth towards it with a certain skeptical nature or mindset, which seems healthy and in most contexts, and might associate typical stereotypes about fashion culture as frivolous, devoted to superficial things, and not of any particular importance. However, one could, quite easily, argue, that the nature of fashion changes when the focus becomes the nature of its inputs prior to becoming fashionable goods. Fashionable goods that are then put on models for fashion shoots or work for them to be walking down runways and wearing them, and so on.
Certain changes in mindset can bring a freshness of perspective, this means things that we thought non-important before suddenly become important. It is a shock to the system. A new perspective for an individual, like you and me. And I think that that is something to reflect on.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
I want to bring something to your attention. Something that came to mind for me from reading. I was reading about the United Nations. I was reading about the United Nations Chief Ban Ki-Moon. And he had pointed out the 10 champions and pioneers of social entrepreneurship for corporate sustainability. I thought, “Cool!”
These aligned or are meant to align with universal principles of human rights, environment, and anticorruption. These are common terms in the United Nations. These, I think, are important awards. I feel as though these get impetus to modern problems. Issues of sustainability. Concerns over climate change. Problems of corruption getting in the darn way of the processes.
We need changes and big ones. And we can scale to the big or small depending on the problem. The founder, Zubaida Bai, created a for-profit social venture called ‘Ayzh.’ It provides health and livelihood for impoverished women throughout the world. Neat, all of it around the UN Global Compact. Ten basic principles, and other stuff, about businesses being sustainable and socially responsible. Important stuff, right?
I want businesses in my society to reflect international standards. If they didn’t, how would that reflect on the country, on the corporation or business, and the citizens that permit it? It’s constitutional democracy with almost unprecedented freedoms and ability to organize socially. Why not organize, socialize, or corporatize (in Bai’s case)? We need to align corporate interests with international principles. Principles of human rights, environment, anticorruption, and labor.
There’s other precedents too. Things like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals also known as the SDG (almost like a rap group).
All of this awarding and mentioning took place at the Global Compact Leaders Summit. Mr. Moon congratulated 10 major people, rightly. And so the emphasis of the event was on with a strengthening engagement for business and the sustainable development goals. These folks had a vision. They pursued, and accomplished that vision. And that’s not even the half of it, not even close. Because there’s projected to be trillions of dollars to be spent on infrastructure throughout the globe. That’s incredible! It’s an incomprehensible sum of money, especially to most people working regular jobs and not running international corporations or economic ‘powerhouse’ countries. Which means this is money influenced by the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (meant for completion by 2030), I argue money being put to good use.
This would be invested in infrastructure to create a clean-energy, climate resilient, and sustainable set of economies. These awards got me thinking. What about ramping up the scale o this stuff or the small players? Most will never have international recognition. Some will have local recognition. Why not scale our efforts appropriately? Blogs, networks, companies, form committees or working groups to set up sets of awards in categories for sustainable fashion. These all geared towards small players, e.g. new businesses or new models or novel ideas for reduction of carbon output on your local fashion scene, yo.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
Welcome to Trusted Clothes. The clothes we wear have some staggering costs beyond the price tag, and most people don’t even know it. Trusted Clothes is about to change that. Our mission is to empower consumers to understand the issues and hold global retailers accountable for the true cost of clothing.
Our organization has roots dating back two decades, and everything we have done has led to this point. Our background is diverse: we have been involved in everything from pioneering renewable energy projects in Canada to global marketing campaigns for the world’s largest companies. We’ve travelled the world and seen both beauty and despair through the eyes of locals.
We’ve had the privilege of meeting people from vastly different worlds: those who live in poverty, earning $2 a day, as well as billionaires. Now is the time to do something about it. Trusted Clothes is not the start of something. It’s the result of something. The garment industry was the most natural starting point.
In terms of environmental impact, the industry is in the same ball park as fossil fuels and factory farming, making it a significant contributor to global environmental and health issue. Secondly, the nature of the industry and supply chains creates a starting point for poverty and slavery, child labor, human trafficking, abuse, safety issues, and many other very bad things.
We have personally witnessed the evolution of organic agriculture from very small niche farmers in the 1990s to today’s supply chain that covers a wide footprint in today’s grocery stores. Now, almost 20 years later, a similar movement is under way in the global garment industry. And we are in a unique position in history, that we have the ability to help in this transformation and accelerate it.
Our approach is very simple. We are mobilizing a global team of likeminded individuals who can each contribute a piece of the overall solution, which includes: awareness. Raise awareness, celebrate success stories and bring issues to the forefront. Educate: educate consumers to understand how buying behaviors shape this industry. Closing the Gap: transform the industry from within by changing consumer behavior to demand businesses to be accountable.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
Truths bear repetition. It’s the lifeblood of culture change. Truths need legs. I wanted to express more thoughts on why sustainability is important to me. Sustainability is important to me on one level (at least). It’s the international community. It agrees on its importance. Individuals can differ. Some corporations can differ. Even some sustainability groups can differ on ethical nuances like the use of animal products, and which ones, and produced by what means, all decent considerations. I’m kind of democratic in that sense. All views matter, but not all views are by necessity valid. (True!) It’s one big family trying to decide on dinner, and the timer is running out – like climate change or sustainability of consumption patterns.
The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations called 2009 the year of the natural fibre. I use that resource and continue to use that resource for professional work on sustainable fibres and natural fibres. Sustainable fibres link up with the textile industries and ethical fashion. I consider ethical fashion and sustainable fashion connected to sustainability and important as well. I like the idea of sustainability. I find the people involved in this endeavor interesting. I like their stories and narratives. It is a really interesting, rich, and committed community of intellectuals and citizens. All throughout the world invested in one goal: sustainability.
I consider sustainability a straight engineering problem. But I also consider sustainability a crucial aspect of the 21st-century in daily life. We have billions of people on the earth. We have many medical and societal reasons to thank for that fact. That means sustainability on the individual level deals with people. People like myself. People like yourself. Sustainability as an international goal is something that brings it down to the individual level for everyone, including me. I think about fashion. I think about laundry. I think about lights. I think about cars and buses and transportation in general. I think about the consumption patterns for food.
I think about supply chains. I think about the production lines and modes. All of this matters to me. All of this matters because the nature of sustainability impacts every area of human endeavor because every area of human endeavor has waste associated with it. The question then becomes, “Do we want a sustainable future or not?” I think we do. At some level or another, even those that are most against it for monetary and economic reasons, or reasons of ease, they want the same. It’s a bit like a holdout situation, where everyone knows we need to alter at least a little bit in the end.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016
I had another idea. It is related to the notion of awards for the global ethical fashion heroes/heroines/exemplars. And the same idea laid out about the local exemplars themselves. What do you think it could be? I l like the idea of organizations getting together for the same purpose geared towards writers. Writers tend to be in need nearly always; fashionistas an fashionistos are in need too.
People read; folks wear. It’s all part of the same deal. So how might is come about? Well, it’s a little hard, tad difficult, to narrow in on specifics. But the notion seems well supported. Take, for example, the fashion world’s well-published authors. They tend to get the most eye-time. That time is amped up with more exposure. Media coverage begets media coverage.
So once those folks are in the cycle, they stick. It’s like horoscopes and Georgia Nicols in Canada. She has a firm position on the minds of Canadians with her purported abilities. Or the commentators on hockey, there’s some strategy, some gaming, and lots of professional discussion. Highly advanced discussion on a sport. That is more of the same principle: exposure begets exposure. And one way to pass the Canadian cultural torch is through the recognition.
And I say awards. Imagine the Canada Reads fabulous selection of books this year. Imagine (no religion?) the nature of the enterprise of poets and novelists earning awards in this literate country. Many would not be known without those awards. These can be marginalized voices. Individuals are individuals and character content matters, and the same individuals can represent common experiences of communities and groups. Bam! They get known. They get deserved recognition.
And their ability to expand the cultural conversation continues forward. That’s great for everyone. Writers for fashionistas and fashionistos, fancy folk, comes out of this too. Same principle. These individuals can be beacons for the sustainable fashion community. We can award them for productivity, novelty, or creativity of output, timeliness of message, beauty of the writing, or comprehension and delivery of a technical topic. Different categories awarded in blind-to-name-and-associations-submissions (hyphen city, sorry!). That’s the other idea.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/04
Tell us about yourself – family background, personal story, education, and previous professional capacities.
Hi, I’m Jo and I live in Suffolk in the UK with my husband Rob and two young sons. I grew up in the South of England and have a younger brother, Chris. My Dad passed away from cancer when I was 10 so my Mum had to work really hard to bring us up. She grew up on a farm in Ireland so would send Chris and I over there in school holidays so she could work. We both loved the freedom of life on the farm and running around the countryside with our Irish cousins! My Mum and her family are catholic and I’m sure that her strong beliefs in sharing and duty have shaped my thinking about Fairtrade and justice.
I attended catholic schools and did well enough to get to college and obtain a degree and then I worked for our main Telecommunications provider, BT. I had a number of roles, including technology, channel management, business and marketing. I always had a keen interest in Fairtrade and International Development though and was involved in lots of fundraising whilst studying for a Post Graduate qualification in Development Management in my own time. When the time was right I left BT to set up as an ethical business consultant and then eventually founded Where Does It Come From? in 2013.
What is the importance of ethical fashion?
For me ethical consumerism generally is about inspiring people to make more thoughtful choices. Do I need to buy this thing? How was it made? How much will it be used? What will happen to it when I no longer need it?
Clothing is an area where the last 30 years or so has seen a massive growth in fast fashion, with a huge culture change in the way that most people buy and discard their clothes. Fast fashion is the opposite of thoughtful – people buy on a whim, shop as a social hobby, wear once or twice and then throw in the bin. Brands encourage this behavior through rapidly changing fashions (that’s so ‘last week’) and by offering such low prices that consumer expectation is all about the cheap and throwaway. The effects of this were admirably outlined in ‘The True Cost’ movie – problems for garment producers, the environment and even for consumers, as we become constantly dissatisfied with what we have and be looking for the next fix to make us happy.
Ethical fashion – with emphasis on clean supply chains and justice for garment workers is about re-educating the consumer. You CAN buy beautiful clothes without other people (or the planet) suffering for it.
What is the importance of sustainable fashion?
Similarly, to above, sustainable fashion is really important as it is behind culture change in the garment industry, creating clothing with only positive impacts on our planet and its people and looking at the whole life span of a garment. How a garment is made and what is used to make it e.g. dyes, energy, fibre, chemicals are all so important as well as how that garment will be recycled at the end of its life. There are some fascinating sustainability projects going on looking into different fibre sources (bamboo, hemp, organic cotton), the using of recycled plastics instead of polyester and how to split mixed (polycotton) fabrics at end of life so that the separate elements can be reused or recycled.
What is “Where Does It Come From?”?
Where Does It Come From? (www.wheredoesitcomefrom.co.uk) is an ethical clothing brand that creates beautiful, sustainable clothes with a totally transparent supply chain. Our core ethos is around connecting our customers with their makers and so each garment comes with a code on the label so that the customer can unlock their garment story. The customer can then explore the processes used to create their garment and get to know the people involved in making it. We believe that connecting with your clothes will make people love them more and treat them (and the makers!) with greater respect.
We launched in 2014 with a range of denim childrens’ clothes and have since added organic childrens’ shirts and 15 designs of ladies’ scarves. We are currently in production of adult shirts and are just coming to the end of our crowdfund where pledgers can pre-order a customizable shirt with options for colour, buttons, sleeves and they can even design their own print (www.crowdfunder.co.uk/where-does-it-come-from).
We use traditional handwoven khadi fabric (as promoted by Mahatma Gandhi as part of his Indian Independence movement) and techniques such as block printing. All our clothes are virtually carbon free as the work is done by hand or using carbon energy. Our dyes are azo free (no harmful chemicals) – we would love to use purely natural dyes and this is a balance we have had to make as our customers want bright colours that will last through many washing machine cycles! Our clothes are all made in co-operatives linked to the khadi movement. They have a strong Fairtrade ethos and most of the workers are rural women. The co-operatives ensure that they are supported and paid fairly and that they can work in their rural environments.
What makes “Where Does It Come From?” unique?
The stories that come with our garments make us unique. Customers love finding out about the people who made their clothes and how they live and work. For example, you may learn that your spinner comes from a family that traditionally does not allow women to work, but through working with the co-operative she has managed to change this view. You may find out that your weaver comes from a long line of weavers and has encouraged his children to continue the family tradition. This can altar how you think about the fabric you are wearing. Personalising the supply chain is our unique feature!
You are a mother. How does this change perspective about the future and consumption patterns and the education of the next cohorts?
I love being a mother (plus my sons model for me….) but I’m not sure it really changed my perspective on ethical clothing. It did change my practical thinking on design as I soon found how quickly children grow out of their clothes and so we have implemented a number of growth-spurt features in Where Does It Come From? such as button elastic, adjustable poppers, tunic designs and long length jeans!
Being a Mum has also given me access to other parents and also to schools. I give talks in local primary schools and always find that the children respond very enthusiastically to finding out how their clothes were made and the people behind them. I really hope that the next generations turn the thinking around on sustainability. Education has a lot of power.
I certainly encourage my children to ask questions and ensure that what they buy is driven by their choice and not by that of advertisers or media, or even their friends.
What is the importance of awareness about child labor?
Parents hate to think that the clothes they buy are created by children, but it’s amazing how they can turn a blind eye when shopping, especially if the price is low! This message needs to be really hammered home so that they can’t ignore it – if something is cheap then there is a reason, and you won’t like the reason.
With Where Does It Come From? we focus on the positives i.e. How it IS made, rather than how it is not. However, I think it is hugely important to make customers think about the alternatives and to get them to question. Brands certainly won’t tell you if something is made by children or slaves and if their pay is low and working conditions dreadful. They won’t volunteer facts about waste and toxicity. You need to ask and you need to think about it. If they are not telling you then it is more than likely that you won’t like the truth.
What is Moral Fibre Fabrics?
Moral Fibre Fabrics is a business run out of Ahmedabad, India and our first production partner. The founder, Shailini Sheth Amin, is driven by environmental goals and a keen supporter of khadi production. We got together (via LinkedIn!) when I was exploring ethical fabric production. It was extremely challenging to find producers that could provide the levels of traceability that I was looking for and an initial partnership failed as they just could not provide me with the information I wanted.
Shailini and Moral Fibre Fabrics were producing hand created fabrics using the khadi model and we started discussions on Skype and email. When I explained about the traceability that I was after she was very enthusiastic, which was a different response to the negative ones I had been getting! She wanted to be able to share the stories of the khadi workers and was keen to be involved. Since then we have run 4 productions with them and are currently working on the fifth. Shailini has family in England and has visited several times and I visited Moral Fibre and the co-operatives in April this year. Our partnership is so strong that I stayed with Shailini and her family whilst there.
How has this partnership been mutually beneficial for the cooperative aims?
The co-operatives run very effectively, supporting the rural artisans and creating beautiful fabric that is also naturally environmentally friendly. We have brought the traceability element to their work which means that they now have a channel to share their stories. We have provided the link from the end customer right back to the workers.
There are also the more practical benefits of providing work which ensures that the co-operatives can function.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
My work in Where Does It Come From? is focused on funding and creating new ranges, marketing the clothing we already have on sale and running the business. I also spend time on ethical fashion writing articles and giving presentations such as a recent Fashion Revolution presentation in India at a fashion design college. I recently ran a panel event on ethical fashion where we showed True Cost Movie followed by discussion.
I am a member of our local Fairtrade Steering Group and work with others to encourage businesses, shops and schools to use Fairtrade products and to campaign for more awareness of Fairtrade. The Fairtrade market in the UK is growing but shops and supermarkets have to be encouraged to keep it on the shelves. Just as with ethical fashion, people can turn a blind eye to the situation producers find themselves in – we need to keep the message loud and clear!
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them to you?
I’m really enthusiastic about the growth in ethical and sustainable fashion companies. The more brands there are, with lots of diversity on different ethical elements such as Fairtrade, organic, re-use, bamboo etc., the more consumers will become aware of the need to think about ethics in their buying choices. It also means that the ethical fashion market will grow which will give more choice and make consumers more likely to have ‘ethics’ as one of their shopping criteria.
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
This is a really exciting time for ethical business. I believe that we have reached a peak in consumerism where many people are turning away from the blatant waste and lack of consideration for producers and the negative effects on our environment. Younger people seem to be rejecting the more self focused ideology that has pervaded in the last 20 years or so and even politically there seems to be such a divide between those who want to put barriers up and ignore key global issues (whilst wearing the clothes and consuming the produce created by others!) and those who want more openness and sharing. The next few years will be extremely interesting and, I sincerely hope, enlightening!
Thank you for your time, Jo.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/04
So, I wanted to explore something new with respect to Canadian culture, briefly to start. That new aspect has to do with fashion icons that we can find throughout our lovely, multi-faceted Canadian culture. One individual that is highly prominent in Canada goes by the name of Jeanne Beker. She is a Canadian journalist, media personality, and fashion entrepreneur. She began her career as an actress with a turn right into radio and television. She has been known on the breaking of the series TheNewMusic and a CityPulse News as an entertainment anchor.
In terms of her education, she was educated at York University. She was married to Bob McGee and they have two children, daughters, named Rebecca and Sarah.
One of her most prominent positions, which has been around for over 27 years and aired in over a 130 countries in terms of its viewership is a fashion show. It is as an internationally syndicated television show host called Fashion Television.
She has been the editor-in-chief of FQ and SIR magazines in addition to the publication of five books. And she has been a contributing editor for such major newspapers as the Toronto Star. This is an exemplary series of accomplishments and work alongside the best Canadian outlets for news and fashion, which to me makes her definitely worthy of a profile. In addition, she has been a featured style columnist for the Globe and Mail and Post City magazine. In other words, she has numerous editorial, and writing style and lifestyle, positions throughout her long career to date.
One of the most impressive parts of her resume is in light of the fact that she had a 2014, or recent, appointment to the Order of Canada for her support of Canadian fashion and the Canadian fashion industry. That’s quite an accomplishment. It’s probably the or among the highest honors in the country as far as I know. As well as this, she earned the 2012 Canadian Award of Distinction from the Banff World Media Festival in addition to an honouring a Canadian Screen Achievement Award for alterations to the manner in which Canadian citizens watch television. These are some of the impressive parts of her resume. So, that should be a good profile to start us off for this new series on Canadian fashion icons, which I believe and feel Ms. Becker is an exemplary model of the fashion culture in Canada.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/03
Tell us about yourself – familial/personal story, education, and prior work.
I’m grateful to be in this an inspiring industry for over 12 years. My experiences range from working with a variety of companies to owning successful businesses. I had a company named ShortStak Boyswear, which was nominated for most innovative new company. After learning about the impact fashion has on the environment, I decided to start my own organic apparel line, called Pur Blankz Organics, which was nominated by Apparel Magazine as a top 40 innovator.
For the past 12 years, I’ve been visiting factories offshore, establishing relationships and understanding the manufacturing process. I’m lucky to work with numerous factories who all give me access to any part of there department to better understand their process.
Over the years many designers have approached me about the production process and how to go about manufacturing. Source my Garment was created to help designer entrepreneurs manufacture overseas, due to many roadblocks that are faced entering offshore manufacturing. My mission is also to help grow smaller factories that are equally responsible. I aim to help both factories and businesses grow and build relationships.
What is the importance of ethical fashion to you?
Ethics is the bottom line; without values a business is empty and the products lacks the right “energy” to succeed.
I spent a lot of time working with the factories overseas. The Rana Plaza tragedy put a focus on transparency. There are a lot of issues with factories. But There are also factories doing good things, not all are bad. I help build relationships. That’s the most important part about ethical manufacturing and transparency.
My mission is to help improve the work-life workers overseas. Manufacturing garments is an art and both skill and hard work go into every pieces that is made; regardless of quantity. Currently Source My Garment is working on a platform to help people managing and working with factories offshore.
What is the importance of sustainable fashion to you?
Source My Garment is a social enterprise; balancing profit and both helping workers offshore and caring about the environment. We help clients build products with minimal impact.
What is Source My Garment?
Source My Garment businesses manage and guide the process of responsibly manufacturing any product made from fabric. We help source, guide manufacturing overseas and deliver your products to your door.
What makes Source My Garment unique?
There’s not a lot of people who understand both ends of the process. I have been on both sides of the spectrum, founded companies and understand the challenges designer face. I also work very closely with factories and also know the struggles they face. Knowing both sides we truly help to grow both sides of the business and help build bridges. I feel like I’m a mediator with helping both parties achieve success.
With respect to building the relationship between producers and yourself, how does one develop that relationship?
The biggest thing north Americans businesses need to understand is that when your working with a factory it is no different than hiring an accountant. It’s a vetting process and relationships are built on building trust. You should pick up the phone and talk to factory, or Skype if you can’t go see them.
Any factory that is taking an order based on minimum quantities is doing that buyer a favor If you’re working on minimums, the factory is only 30% efficient. They are not making as much as they could; so ultimately they are doing the order in hopes the quantities will grow.
They want to start understanding the product, what your quality standards are, and it makes the process easier in the long run. Getting to know them takes time; just like any other relationship.
What is the greatest challenge in founding a business?
I feel like there are so many challenges start-ups face. One if the big ones that stand out is keeping up the pace and cyclical nature of fashion is very difficult; especially if your doing it solo. Start-up continually feel they need to reinvent the wheel each season; but this isn’t necessarily the case. People don’t realize big corporations use the same pattern, and typically only changing material, in order to reduce costs and speed up the process.
Designers don’t realize the amount of work it takes to create one style and the amount of time. To keep up with the cycle, it is so hard. By the time you’ve shipped your first order, you should be placing your next order so you don’t run out of stock.
It’s competing in a well-dominated, long-dominated market. One of the difficulties is adapting to the system in place. There’s economic inertia
Yea! Definitely, the manufacturing process takes a long time as well. Once everyone is done with the product development, they want products right away, but that’s another ball game as well.
There’s sourcing from the factories end. They’re procuring the fibre, weaving it, dyeing it, and so on. That takes a lot of time. And to produce something of quality also takes time.
What other work are you involved in at this point in time?
SMG is building Product Lifecycle Management platform which guides SME’s through the process of responsible manufacturing. Due to the increasing demand for SMG services; it has brought about the idea to scale and automate their process with a Saas (Software as a Service) model. This is a first of its kind platform based on their trade secret. The end to end solution, includes action calendars, workflow charts, approval features, library resources, file management systems and logistics. Based on fair trade values, we enable businesses to transparently collaborate with factories streamlining the offshore manufacturing process. We are currently building our prototype and are looking for investors.
I am also working on a book called The Entrepreneurs Guide to offshore Garment Manufacturing. The Offshore manufacturing process seems to be somewhat of a mystery to many. If you Google this stuff, it’s not there. It’s not taught in the schools. I don’t know how people are going to be able to work with offshore manufacturing with that restriction in knowledge. So, that’s why I’m working on the book.
(Laughs) What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?
I feel like this will help many people who are afraid to work offshore and do not know how to build ethical and fair trade products. The more I help educate businesses, the fair trade products will be out there. Consumers will then be able to access fair trade a lot easier.
With regard to ethical and sustainable fashion companies, what’s the importance of them now? In other words, if you take the things that you’ve been saying in addition to the timeliness of the global problems such as climate change, pollution, micro-plastics in the oceans, and so on, then companies with ethical and sustainable aims can make a small effect. And if multiplied over businesses, it might make a moderate, reasonable impact.
It will help improve peoples lives and the environment. We have more power. I feel like the government is leaving it to businesses because I don’t feel like they are doing as much as they could be doing.
I feel like this is something that we can control if we create a product. We can do this in an ethical and sustainable way. We can help give back as well.
Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion?
I have lots to say.
(Laugh)
Start ups are afraid to work with offshore manufacturers because they are afraid that they going to get bad products that and are unethical. People don’t ever hear the factory sides of the story. They have a side to their story too.
Everyday, large corporations order garments and then default on their payments. They are expecting net terms and not even paying retainers (or 50% deposit – a fair trade policy) to procure fabrics and help pay workers. How are factories going to take thousands of dollars of orders and not have any funds to pay for workers or materials over at least a 3-month period? It makes no sense and is extremely unethical.
Large corporations are putting too much pressure on factories as well. They want something two cents cheaper and decide to change factories. This screws the factory because they’ve invested in the machinery, kept the space on the production floor to them, and invested a lot of time understanding the buyer’s standards.
What I want people to know is that there are two sides to the story, it is rare that a factory will go to all of that trouble to ship a bad product. It is so counterproductive. Why would anyone do that? 9/10 times any factory that is accused of shipping bad product will ask the buyer to return it’s they can replace it. Many reasons, including poor communication can cause issues. But business don’t want to return the products; they just put the blame on them.
I don’t think the factory side of the story gets told.
Thank you for your time, Adila.
No problem!
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Trusted Clothes
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/02
So what’s the animal or plant this time?
That’s the funky part. A big giant white bunny rabbit (and it’s not even Easter). Am I kiddin’ you? Nope! You can see it above. Isn’t that cool? So, what is Angora? It’s an Old World domestic rabbit with one main trait. It can grow hair twice as fast as the other rabbits. It is farmed greatly in semi-darkness with hair removed every three months. A single Old World Angora rabbit can produce about 1.5kg per year of animal fibre. Think about that: a rabbit. That’s a heck of lot!
What is the fibre like?
The hollow fibre is the silky white hair of the Angora with standard classification as wool. It’s about 14-16 microns, so tiny, and one of the, supposedly, silkiest fibres around now. So that means it’s soft to the touch. The fibre type makes the hair itself light, water absorbing, and easily dyed.
That’s a picture of a part of France that is really cool. Anyway, where is it made? Who is the major producer? Who is now the major producer?
It’s different than Cashmere. It’s different than mohair. Up until about the 1960s, the main producer of Angora fibre was, in fact, France. That’s pretty neat for such a small country. In other words, things have changed. China is now the main producer of this form of fibre. As a major producer, it outstrips Argentina, Chile, Czech Republic, and Hungary in their production of Angora fibre.
And most of that fibre that is produced in china is only about 2,500 to 3,000 tons. But China itself exports approximately half of its production for processing in Europe, Japan, and even Korea.
What are the major uses of angora fiber? Thanks for asking!
It’s used, typically, for warmth, especially various knitted things such as pullovers, scarves, socks, and glove, and they’re light too! So, no weight burden and warmth benefit, super, and to many, many folks, that makes it ideal insulation from cold weather. So if you have arthritic troubles, or even wool allergies, you can get the same kind of feel without the hassle of allergic reactions, blegh!
But there’s the fact that the angora wool itself can be too fine to provide some consumers’ individual needs at the time, and that means the fibre can be mixed with others. That can increase the elasticity and the ease of feel of the clothing when worn.
What d’ya think?
My opinion: I think this is a neat production line, but with some ethical issues to do with possible cruelty in factories and production lines. It’s an animal of a lower-order, but feels pain! So, maybe, a plant fibre is preferable.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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