Beyond Rivalry - community

RIP Jdimytai Damour (1974? - 2008)

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:30:00 -0500

You've probably heard about the Wal-Mart worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, who was trampled and crushed by a stampeding crowd of early-morning shoppers at a Long Island Wal-Mart on Black Friday -- shoppers who then "went on to scour the shelves for sales, even after being told a man had died." Damour died apparently of a heart attack of asphyxiation after the sliding glass doors he was holding shut shattered under the weight of the crowd of 2,000 or so who were trying to get in as the store opened at 5 a.m. for after-Thanksgiving sales. (Ludicrous comment by a Wal-Street employee in the store's electronic department: "'It was crazy. .. The deals weren't even that good.'")

Here's a bit of Damour's story, and here: "He loved to chat about movies, Japanese anime and politics. ... [H]e had a great sense of humor. ... He was the guy who was always lively." He was "an easygoing literature buff -- a fan of poetry and the late novelist Donald Goines -- who would put himself out for friends."

The Likeness

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:47:00 -0500

Just finished The Likeness by Tana French, which follows on her evocative debut of last year, In the Woods, both set in Ireland. The Likeness would be a great readlike for Donna Tartt's The Secret History, with its focus on a closely knit group of college-aged students (grad-school-aged, in this case) who have secrets.

French's writing and emotional sensitivity are both superb.

The elements that most interested me are the thread of sacrifice woven throughout the book, French's evocation of sadness, and her portrayal of the settled, harmonious, familial, habitual, insidious, dysfunctional, oppressive, romanticised and idealised relationships and lifestyle among the five friends. I think that besides sacrifice, one of the major themes of the book is home: what constitutes home, family, the places we are free, the places we are held; and how some people sacrifice everything to create home, and some feel it a threat they have to run from, and some never find it, and some luck into it for a week, a year, a decade, a lifetime.

Sacrifice

"I don't tell people this, it's nobody's business, but the job is the nearest thing I've got to a religion. The detective's god is the truth, and you don't…

Welcome Home, Stranger!

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:24:00 -0500

I. love. it. Travellers welcomed home at the airport by 20 total strangers carrying signs, banners, balloons, and flowers.

The Bali Bombers, Mimesis and Me

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 11:50:00 -0500

I've been reading in recent weeks about the so-called Bali Bombers, three men -- two brothers (commonly called Amrozi and Mukhlas) and an Imam/computer technician -- who were tried and found to be instrumental in the killing of 202 people -- most of whom were foreign nationals, including 88 Australians -- -- at nightclubs in a tourist area on the Indonesian island of Bali [in green] in 2002, to protest the US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. (Bali is overwhelmingly Hindu, however.) Another 209 people were injured. (More at Wikipedia)

For their roles in the crime, their execution, which may occur by this weekend has now occured, will be by ritualised firing squad on another Indonesian island, off Java, the spot (or perhaps three separate spots) in the woods already decked out with chairs and crosses, after five years of legal appeals that apparently the bombers themselves had no interest in, as they have said throughout that they are ready and happy to die as martyrs, preferrably by beheading, in the Islamic way. They admit the crime and show no remorse but have apologised for killing Indonesian Muslims during the attacks.

Meanwhile, their family and other supporters are surging towards the…

Jury Duty

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 06:23:00 -0400

Why are these accounts always so interesting, funny? (And timeless: originally published May 2003)

"I am nervous. Spending half a week passing harsh judgment on your fellow Manhattanites just seems so… well, when put like that, it sounds just like every other day."

"The judge is Irish, fast-talking, and hilarious. 'Is there anyone among you who likes crime?' he asks. I consider the question. I do like some crimes: I love jaywalking; I love watching people turnstile-jump; I enjoy committing pre-crime. I say nothing. Neither does anyone else. Thus begins my suspicion of lies beneath the black and white world of the law."

"Potential juror#1: Then when I was 10, my parents moved to a suburb of Philadelphia.
"Judge: Did they take you with them?"

"I am in the jury box. I make snap judgments. I have no opinion about the defendant, but I'm ready to send the Zionist down the row from me to the electric chair; she's wasting our precious time blathering about her good deeds for Israel while we could be happily smoking."

"I want that jury power so bad I can taste it. If I don't get picked today, I may have to re-enter therapy. I feel…

Collective Violence - Examples - Part VIII

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:16:00 -0400

It's been six weeks since I last blogged about mob violence. I've been away most of that time, but no matter where we go or what we're doing, collective violence continues in many forms. Below are some of the latest incidents reported as mob violence or mob justice. (And here's why I'm doing it.)

August to the present (also December 2007, and in 1999): Violence against Christians continues in Orissa, on India's east coast, since the 23 Aug. assassination of a Hindu swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and four of his followers: "Though Maoist insurgents took credit for the killing, Hindu extremists blamed Christians. They mounted mob attacks on churches, as well as homes and villages populated by Christians. More than 100 people reportedly have been beaten, hacked or burned to death since the mob violence began. It is estimated tens of thousands of Christians have fled their homes, many remaining in seclusion in forests and others in relief camps with police guards. ... Christians reportedly make up about 2.4 percent of the state's 36.7 million people." A BBC news report mentions the religious rivalry of the region: "Hindu groups have long accused Christian priests of bribing poor tribes and low-caste Hindus to…

the Good with the Bad, Taking

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:40:00 -0400

"Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people."

-- G. M. Trevelyan, 'Bias in History'

The Value of Education -- Deciding What to Worship

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 07:55:00 -0400

David Foster Wallace, postmodern author who ended his life last week at the age of 46 (RIP), talks about the real value of education in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech.

I'm going to be away until the end of September and won't be posting, but I leave you with Foster's exceptionally honest words to college grads, which include these:

"Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence.

"We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to…

Remembrance of Things Past: Victims

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:22:00 -0400

At Overcoming Bias today, report of a study finding that "when we are reminded of when others have victimized us, we are less able to see that we victimize others."

Researchers reminded participants from the U.S. and Canada, and, separately, North American Jewish participants, of various attacks and atrocities, including, variously, the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S., the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Nazi atrocities in Poland during World War II, a deadly terrorist attack in Sri Lanka, and the genocide in Cambodia.

All the groups were less likely to perceive "the distress the [Iraq] war has caused many Iraqis, and less likely to feel collective responsibility" when they were reminded of an attack in which they felt themselves to be victims.

For U.S. participants, reminders of both the 9/11 attacks and the attack on Pearl Harbor caused participants to feel less guilt or responsibility for the distress of Iraqis than when reminded of the tragedy in Poland. The Jewish volunteers, on the other hand, felt "reduced guilt and responsibility for Israeli actions that cause suffering among Palestinians when they are first reminded about the Holocaust, compared with when they are reminded about the genocide in Cambodia." Canadians showed no…

Curiosity

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:00:00 -0400

Pema Chödrön talks about the trait or activity of curiosity in Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (1994). There are lots of ways to be curious: one can be intensely curious about one subject or one person, widely curious about everything or many things, curious about new places and experiences, sexually curious, culinarily curious, curious about how machines work, and so on.

I think I am particularly curious about the way people think and behave, individually and in groups, and I'm also curious about the details of stories, the details of experiences that happen to other people, and the details of beings in the natural world -- So I hear myself asking questions about what colour and shape things are, how many there are of each kind, exactly what it felt like, every item they wore, what they ate, what other people thought about what happened, how the factors were related, how they got from A to B, what happened in that small time period you skipped over in your narrative, and so on.

Here is some of what Pema says about curiosity:

She talks about "the burden of maintaining your own private happiness," and suggests that we…