#not assuming you have institutional access to anything but if you see any cites you want hmu | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

scripttorture · 3 years

Note

Not sure if this would really be relevant, but you're the best resource I can think of for prison systems. In a secluded supermax prison with all male staff & all male prisoners, they suddenly get a single (like 19 or 20 y/o) female prisoner who "can't go anywhere else & needs to be kept heavily restrained." What's the warden's best option for making sure she's safe & treated with respect for the first few days/weeks till they can get female guards? Modern setting, mostly American style prison.

I feel like I know enough about this to be helpful but I’ve never claimed to be an expert on prisons and I think you should try to double check what I say. Partly because I think that the ‘best option’ in a case like this would be heavily biased by opinion and what you consider the best outcome to be. I don’t want you to mistake my opinion for fact or discount the idea that you might think differently presented with the same evidence.

I also think this is the kind of case where there’s a big difference between what should happen and what would likely happen.

It’s also worth stating at the outset that, in my opinion, the American prison system is set up in a way which inherently makes abuse more likely. And that makes a difference. When the system itself is already set up in a way which makes torture more likely the efforts of individuals within those systems are… less likely to be effective.

We’re talking about a system where solitary confinement is the first rather then the last resort. Use of solitary confinement over the safe period (1 week) is routine, with prisoners in maximum security facilities often being kept in isolation for months or years.

Which causes mental health problems to a disabling degree and drastically increases the chances of suicide or self mutilation.

Rape is still common and while it’s often discussed in terms of attacks by fellow prisoners, a lot of attacks are by guards. Especially when you’re talking about women prisoners and juvenile prisoners. Incidentally it was only in 2012 that the US started recommending against cross-gender searches of women prisoners.

And a lot of guards in American women’s prisons are men. I found figures of 40% based on data from 2007 and up to 70% for federal facilities from 2011. Both of these were cited figures from books I don’t have full access to. I can’t confidently say how accurate these figures are or how the authors came by them. I can confidently say that there are male guards in female prisons and that this has been linked to abuse (based on the testimony of rape survivors in American prisons).

While we’re on the subject the kind of restraint use I think you’re referring to is torture. You can find descriptions of its use in Chinese prisons over here.

Essentially humans are not designed to withstand long periods with little to no movement, or holding the same position for a long time. It is unhealthy. It causes a significant amount of damage to the body. Sometimes it’s lethal.

Now if you didn’t know this that is OK.

I’m here because I know a lot of this kind of information isn’t common knowledge and that it’s hard to find. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing something, we all learn sometime.

We’ll circle back to restraint tortures and alternatives in a moment. For now let’s focus on prisons

I think that the most likely thing to happen in an American prison is that this character would be thrown in solitary confinement and kept there.

You can read about how harmful that would be here.

I also think that it’s unlikely an American prison, having decided to house a woman in a male prison, would hire female guards specifically to accommodate one prisoner. And I think a woman in this environment would be especially vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse.

You can read about that here.

There’s an in-depth Reuters investigation on the deaths of women in American jails that you can find here. It contains a graphic description of a dead baby, born in a jail, as well as descriptions of systemic racism towards black women and abuse of the mentally ill. (Seriously if you’re a black woman and pregnant or a mother of a young child don’t read it.)

If you want to write a female character being put into an institution designed for men in America… that’s what it looks like. Higher rates of preventable deaths.

Here’s the thing though: You do not have to make the situations in your story as bad as they are in real life.

There is nothing wrong with deciding that the characters in your fiction get treated with more care and respect then is the norm in real life. It might not be realistic but we are writing fiction.

And there is a difference between a story which is unrealistic in favour of the torturer and one which is unrealistic in favour of the victim.

Having said that: If you want to create a fictional, less abusive prison system for this story it will not look anything like an American prison.

I have… some rather complicated feelings about the idea of setting the story in America and then presenting the prison system as better then it is. Remember that I am a pacifist and I was raised in Saudi Arabia. I say this because I feel as though the abuses in the American prison system are whitewashed in the media America exports.

If I was writing a story set in Saudi which involved imagining a better, less abusive prison system I’d feel confident my readers would know this didn’t reflect the reality. I feel like they would understand without being told that I was trying to imagine a better version of my home rather then trying to accurately show the prisons there.

I do not think that would be the case if you did the same thing in an American setting.

I’ve talked enough about the negatives. Let’s move on to how we can make this idea work.

The way I see it the big choice here is whether you want to keep the setting and the abusive use of restraints or whether you want the character to be safe and treated with respect while incarcerated.

If you’re picturing the character being held in a way that renders her more or less completely immobile (like a restraint chair or a bed) then there’s a pretty decent chance she’d die within the first couple of weeks regardless of any other abuse. There’s a reason restraints aren’t commonly used in hospitals and mental health facilities any more: they increase the chances of sudden death. Even in young healthy people.

There’s a case you can read about here that’s a decent example. Young, 27 year old man, partially restrained for ten days after a mental health episode. Dead from a heart attack in ten days.

Obviously not everyone who is completely restrained for weeks dies of a heart attack. But bed sores exist. So do bladder infections caused by catheters and muscle wastage and a host of other ailments that are cured by simply letting someone move around.

Honestly combined with solitary and the high chance of sexual abuse I think that full body restraint is probably throwing too many tortures into the story. Because all of these individually are complex issues and the harm each of them does is routinely downplayed. Handling all of them in the same narrative would be really tough and the restraints are the easiest one to get rid of.

If you’re picturing something more like the restraint torture (constantly wearing hand and leg cuffs) described in the Chinese case I linked to above, survival is a lot more likely. That’s to do with the degree of movement victims are capable of.

A person who is immobile with their muscles under strain is in a stress position. The death rates for those rise sharply after 48 hours. A person who is immobile when their muscles aren’t under strain (eg restrained to a bed with six point restraints) is not in a stress position. But they’re at greater risk of a heart attack or stroke and after weeks they’ll start to develop bed sores (assuming they’re not lying in a pool of their own waste.)

A person who’s restrained in a way that lets them walk, but slowly, lets them stand, but not straight, is experiencing a restraint torture. They probably won’t get kidney failure (the cause of death in stress positions) and they’re less likely to get a heart attack or a stroke.

There are still serious health effects. Muscle wastage and weakness afterwards is very common. Survivors of this particular torture tend to report chronic pain and joint problems. I’m not entirely sure what causes this but since it’s very consistent I’d guess it’s a physical effect of long term restraint use.

Survivors also tend to report some mobility problems afterwards. There’s a loss of fine motor control and often some difficulty performing day to day tasks that require raising and lowering the arms. Like putting on a jacket unaided or hanging washing on a line or taking things down from a cupboard above the head. This could be due to nerve damage, damage to muscles or ligaments at the joints or both.

These sorts of restraints don’t leave victims in a stress position; which is why they can survive for months or more rarely years while restrained (stress positions are only consistently survivable up to 48 hours.) But nonetheless they do leave victims in a constant state of pain. The restraints dig in. The position and inability to straighten is painful, especially for the joints. A lot of victims report being unable to sleep because of the restraints.

And sleep deprivation causes it’s own problems which you can read about here.

I might be on the wrong track here but generally no one has to be restrained. So the inclusion of that in the ask made me think this story might have elements of fantasy, sci fi or super hero genres: a character with a special ability that can only be used under certain circumstances.

I had a problem with something like that in one of my stories recently. The character in question can manipulate how people think and feel using her voice. And I racked my brains trying to think of a way the police in the story could keep her imprisoned once they caught her. I looked up all sorts of sedatives, thought about solitary and all kinds of over the top abusive stuff that fiction teaches us is a go-to practical solution.

I didn’t want to use them. I didn’t want her to be tortured.

And then it hit me: her guards could just wear noise cancelling headphones.

Sometimes the answer really is that simple.

Think about this character’s power set, if that’s part of the problem here. Really consider what she can do and how she does it. Have you got an underlying chemical process going on? If it’s magic what’s the cause and effect for it? What are her limits? What is her range?

Use that to think about when the power breaks down and why. And if you’re writing fanfiction based on a canon with poorly defined magical abilities…. Make something up to define how she does what she does.

Focus and concentration is a commonly used way of doing this. I saw a brilliant program a while back where the main character actually had no idea how his powers worked and was as surprised and elated as everyone else when they did. I try to come up with strict, simple definitions of a character’s powers/abilities. Then I work to try and find inventive ways of applying that. Find a method that works for you and don’t be afraid to try a few different approaches.

Unless you’ve written yourself into a corner, chances are this character (like mine) doesn’t need to be restrained or isolated.

And if you have written yourself into a corner, you can write yourself out of it again. Either with the choices you make now or by going back and editing what you already have.

On a similar note if you want this character to be in a better, less abusive system does she have to be in a male prison and does she really, absolutely have to be in America?

Because if you want the lowest possible rates of violence and abuse today that means the Scandinavian prison system. You can find out more about it here and here for Norway.

You can read more about global prison systems here.

The gist of it is that there are huge systematic differences. Prison guards in Norway are trained for 2-3 years on specially designed course and the ratio of staff to prisoners is almost 1:1. (For contrast in the UK, which is closer to the US system training takes 12 weeks and the ratio is 1:4.) Prison guards in Norway are well paid, facilities are well staffed and guards are allowed generous breaks and holidays.

This creates a system where staff are not overly stressed, sleep deprived or pressured to achieve unreasonable ‘results’. Training focuses on conflict resolution, this along with a less pressurised working environment this creates a better overall environment for staff and prisoners. Force is really considered a last resort and staff are provided with the tools, training and support necessary to make that a reality.

There’s also effort put into the physical construction of these facilities: cells aren’t cramped, overcrowded or unsuitable for human habitation.

I’m not trying to claim these prisons are perfect. There is still a big trend of prolonged solitary confinement use in Norway and other Scandinavian countries. There is still abuse in prisons.

But- Well I can’t compare directly with US prisons because I didn’t find statistics using similar measures for violent attacks. However I can compare with the UK. With a prison population of about 3,200 Norway had 181 attacks on staff. The UK, with a prison population of 83,300, had a little over 10,000 attacks.

I think if you really want to write something with the least potential for abuse then you’re better off imagining an international (or explicitly Scandinavian) institution built more along the lines of the Norwegian system.

If you’ve got your heart set on an American, male prison being the only place this character can be then I think the ‘best’ thing a well intentioned warden in that position could do is throw her in solitary and have her kept on suicide watch.

The safe period for solitary confinement is about a week.

After that she’d start to show signs of mental health problems which would get worse the longer she was held. By about the 1-2 month point these problems are probably going to be permanent. Beyond that the chances of self harm and suicide attempts starts to rise. So does the chance she’ll have a psychotic break and start hallucinating. After a year you’re looking at multiple suicide attempts and chances of self mutilation. By which I mean things like trying to destroy your own hands, legs, face etc.

The decision about what’s right for your story is always yours. You know these characters, the setting and the kind of narrative you’re telling best.

Pick the options that best fit with what you want from the story and the characters. Because that’s the best decision for the story.

But if you’re writing about an abusive system don’t gloss over the abuse. If you’re writing about a torturous practice in prisons (like solitary confinement) don’t ignore the life long damage it causes.

I hope that helps. :)

Disclaimer

Available on Wordpress.

42 notes · View notes

rametarin · 3 years

Note

What's your takeaway on the whole "men have built this world's problems so they don't get to feel bad about it affecting them" take? Or the new surge of hatred towards men due to Bill Cosby's release (and the idea that men in general get away with sexual assault regardless of class)

Same old shit, anon.

Before they gave that point of view a name and an organized set of beliefs, they'd just sneak that rhetoric and direction into any conversation about any given problem between the sexes. At least in this modern day they'll call it The Patriarchy- rather than just use flowery, neutral, benign seeming language to have plausible deniability about it.

Take the right to vote, for example. Women had the right to vote, as did men. Then it was revised so UNLESS you were someone that had to go to war and die for your country, you didn't get to vote. And women were exempted from going to war for biological reasons, economic reasons, and just simple ergonomic reasons. So, naturally, they couldn't vote.

When the suffragettes fought to give women the right to vote, how did they fight for it? Did they fight to remove the draft for both sexes and fight for women to get the right to vote on the basis of citizenship, not applicability for serving the military? No. Did they argue to also draft women, because women deserved the same rights and responsibilities as men? No, they wanted the rights but didn't want the responsibilities or obligations the men did. Did they do anything but revise it just enough to say, "Women can vote just by being alive :^)"? No.

The minute your group claims it's for civil rights and you have the opportunity to change something to improve it, but only for your demographic, you become responsible for that group's continued abuses. That's why we don't attribute slavery to Britain that continued under the newly formed United States' rule. The moment that country was founded and didn't immediately abolish slavery (and there were practical and economic reasons not to for a bit) they became responsible for that.

And similarly, the suffragettes and feminists are not exempt of responsibility for giving themselves the right to vote on the basis of sex, but not men. They had the opportunity to either change the rules to allow women to be inducted by the draft, abolish the draft as the prerequisite to being able to vote for anybody, etc. They chose to endow themselves with a right purely for their sex and say, "fuck you, I got mine, you aren't my responsibility" to the men. The men that supported them, the men that consented for their little princess party that changed the right to vote from one of given by drafted, compulsory military service, to a national, civil right based on being alive and a citizen- if you're a woman. Not contingent of dying in a war.

Most problems men face today are like that. Because feminism dusted its hands, went, "Not my problem, you're the oppressor. I'm out for mine because freeing me frees the people that matter." And then smugly passed the buck on for men to change things for themselves if they wanted anything at all.

This is why feminism does not and cannot speak up on behalf of men's rights. They only see men as a secondary extension of women, and think whatever rights are endowed to women do not belong to men equally, as equal rights on the basis of being a man threatens their endowed, sexual budgets and entitlements from society.

As for Bill Cosby; it was inevitable. I don't know whether or not Bill Cosby actually dateraped all those women. I'm going to assume he did, because he accepted responsibility. But the outrage over his recent release was inevitably going to spill into "convuhsayshun uwu" about "male privilege," and his release rather than dying in prison, proof this society treats men like gods and women like tenga eggs.

Never one to waste opportunity to try and shape the imaginations and minds of young women to turn them into emotional, radical, bitter teenaged Social Justice Warriors, naturally The Conversation would be how Cosby being released for whatever nebulous reasons "must" be proof.

While simultaneously turning a blind eye to the fact the reason rape is so narrowly defined around if a man forcefully had sex with a woman, and the reason most all domestic violence arrests are men, is because of radical feminist policy making, proving not only are they just as cemented in our institutions, but our institutions also lean towards erring on the side of caution to give women the benefit of the doubt in all cases.

They'll happily point at much publicized examples of people like Cosby getting off free, whether that's true or not, and then use that as background dressing for their rant about how misogynistic and androcentrist this "society" is. While kicking under the rug just who, by the Duluth model, gets to go to prison if the police are called for a domestic violence dispute.

Unless the circumstances are BLATANTLY, BRAZENLY, OBVIOUSLY one sided, like a woman is stabbing a man that's holding a baby with a steak knife, an arrest WILL be made, and the "taller," "larger," person will be taken in, as an arrest HAS to be made for a domestic violence call. We do not arrest women and stick them in prison just because men call the cops; you cannot say the same when it comes to women.

Similarly for rape. You could be a woman, strap on a big ole horse dick and dilate the buttholes of half a county's worth of questionably aged minors, and in the past, not one legal definition of, 'rape' would stick, because rape was defined as using a biological penis, and/or being a biological male. You weren't male? You couldn't be charged for rape. Just sexual assault and battery.

And then radfems would want to have "convuhsayshuns uwu" about how men are bad and the rape statistics about whom is raping whom would prove it. Because, you know, "As a feminist, I an committed to FACTS and LOGIC and actual RESEARCH to support MY points. Not feelings and outrage and baseless assumptions! I'm a secular realistic FEMINIST!"

Then barrage you with bad faith requests to, "see your statistics and studies :^)" Knowing full well academia wasn't readily available to fucking gradeschoolers unless their parents were creepy intellectuals or something, and access to ones that didn't have this ideological confirmation bias was even more rare. If you couldn't produce any almighty holy writ evidence or counterargument based on these "professionals" writings, they'd do the verbal equivalent of today's "KUNG POW PENIS LOL" and then mock you in front of their friends, and shit.

So they had the very criteria that cops and feds used to record the incidences of rape based on bad, skewed values, designed to spare women from being charged with responsibility for rape or abuse. Then they cited these statistics that skewed so badly showing 90%+ of all rapes and domestic violence charges were from men.

So they could just “stawt a convuhsayshun” making broadsweeping, inflammatory statements like, “men commit practically all the violence in the home,” or, “men are rapists because they’re men and men rape very frequently and it’s very common,” and talk about it like that’s just a thing MOST men do, boo on men, men bad.

And if you dared challenge them on it, out come the cooked statistics and bias in the professions that led to them, where they then “humbly” try to get you to put forth counter-evidence. Since they assert unless you have any, then your opinion is worthless and you’re an emotional crybaby. They will not hesitate to insult your character or intelligence and assert their use of “objective facts” makes their argument sound and yours shit.

Youtube atheists doing that shit learned these lessons by diffusion from their millenial childhoods being tormented by these disingenous groomed baby radfems.

So them using the Cosby thing to sow this outrage is nothing new.

5 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 4 years

Text

The Weight of a Name

Some meta on Shigaraki, Kotaro, All For One, and the Japanese adoption system.

So, I was thinking the other day about Shigaraki, family names, and the illustration of power that is All For One wresting Shigaraki from the Shimura family into his own. To wit: I had occasionally wondered about Kotaro's resentment of his mother; about whether his adoptive parents, whoever they were, were cruel or distant with him, or whether he was so deeply wounded by his perceived abandonment that no arrangement would have been happy or supportive enough to lessen his trauma. Also, why in heaven's name wasn't his name changed? If Nana was concerned that All For One might hurt him to get at her, why wasn't the simplest and most basic aspect of his identity, his family name, altered? Upon further reflection, though, I remembered some of what I've read about family law in Japan and came to a realization: I don't think Kotaro was adopted. This has significant implications for both his own upbringing and the statement All For One makes in “adopting” Tenko.

While adoption numbers look high in Japan--the second-highest in the world--in reality, over 90% of adoptions in the country are adult adoptions of men in their 20s-30s, usually for the purposes of inheriting businesses. Foster care is rare now and was once even rarer; the majority of children in the care of Japanese child services grow up in overcrowded, understaffed institutions, and scant few of these children are even eligible to be adopted due to family law stating that putting a child in an orphanage does not equate to surrendering one's parental rights. Often, children are placed in orphanages due to the parents' financial difficulty or history with abuse, with the possibility that they might come back for those children when they get their lives back on track--though in reality, this is quite rare.

Why are these ties kept so strong? Well, it goes back to family ties and bloodlines, and the ways in which modern Japanese society is built around those things on some very, very bedrock levels. In the West, we have individual documents for our major life events, but in Japan, since the 1870s, there has been the koseki.

The koseki is a family registry--one is entered into one's parents' registry at birth, with all information about the family's births, deaths, marriages, divorces and adoptions being kept in the same place. The registry for a given family is maintained for two generations, with children typically only beginning their own family registries when and if they marry--sometimes not even bothering until they have a child! The koseki--theirs and each of their parents'--will also have references to one another, allowing a diligent person to track a family line and its major events back for generations by simply following the paperwork. Being recorded in a koseki is the primary indicator of Japanese citizenship. "Family" as recorded in the koseki governs inheritance rights, and in turn carries expectations about children looking after their parents in the latter's old age. While in recent years, limits have been placed on who can access koseki, as recently as 2008, anyone who was even curious about someone else's koseki could walk into the relevant government office and ask to see it for only a basic fee. This contributes to enormous privacy concerns and societal pressure to not do anything that would "sully" the family koseki, as doing so could not impact just peoples' views of you, but of everyone else in your family. (cite)

The whole schema for the koseki assumes a heterosexual, nuclear family dynamic, with a predictable difficulty in forcing that framework fit outlying cases--single parents, international or same-gender marriages, divorce, surrogacy arrangements, gender changes, and--most relevant to this discussion--adoption. Because of the perceived sanctity of the koseki, adoption of children for purposes other than inheritance remains vanishingly rare--combine that with the rarity of parents who give up their children ever returning for them, and what you have are too many children in too few facilities, a recipe for misery. Children in Japanese orphanages are often considered--by both people in society at large and even the children themselves--as "unwanted." Studies about children who grew up in such institutions suggest they lag behind the rest of their age group in development and in school, that they have little experience in forming long-term bonds with others; "many struggle with basic interpersonal skills like empathy and regulating their emotional state." Adults who come out of such institutions often fail to finish school or seek higher education and wind up working low-paying jobs or relying on government assistance. (cite, but also see: Bubaigawara Jin)

While Kotaro--if he was raised in an orphanage--clearly overcame the odds very admirably regarding his schooling and employment, he equally clearly came out of the experience still nursing emotional scars and ill-equipped to deal with children of his own. This glacial societal resistance to mucking with family records probably also explains why his name was never changed--if he was never adopted by another family, there would be no other koseki to register him to, and Japan doesn't have a witness protection program.

What all of this illustrates to me--along with shedding some light on what Kotaro's childhood post-Nana was probably like--is what exactly is being communicated by All For One's adoption and subsequent renaming of Shimura Tenko. Kotaro was leashed to the Shimura name all his life, even after his mother gave him up, even after she died. He could never escape his status as "an unwanted child"; anyone who wanted to look him up could do so (including, very possibly, All For One himself, depending on how much of Shigaraki's backstory you think was orchestrated from the beginning).

By contrast, Tenko is severed cleanly from the Shimura family name, given another name not listed on any koseki (at least not one updated within the last two hundred years). He's cut out of the Shimura family entirely, adopted at a young age by a man who wants him, a man with such utter disregard for societal systems and values that he's able to just take the child he wants, difficulties with adoptions and names and family registers be damned. In a stroke, at his whim, the unyielding weight of Shimura is nullified, and instead, Tenko becomes Shigaraki Tomura, a child who doesn't exist anywhere. Not recorded on a koseki, he is thus without family or nationality, his Quirk unrecorded, his date of birth unknown. There is nowhere any proof of his existence. All told, it's a pretty profound statement about the lengths All For One is willing (and happy) to go to in stamping out all traces of the One For All bearers' legacies.

(...And yet, perversely, Shigaraki also kind of fits the model for Japanese adoption--All For One explicitly intends him to be a successor, after all. In that light, you could say that he was adopted into the Shigaraki family to inherit the family business. I have to imagine that All For One thought this was pretty funny, though probably no one else agrees with him.)

A note: The stats and info I reference above are relevant to modern-day Japan and, of course, My Hero Academia isn't set in modern-day Japan, not quite. It's set in Japan 200-300-odd years in the future, with the caveat that the development of super-powers and the resulting massive social upheaval stunted societal and technological growth such that the setting still looks mostly like modern-day Japan, only with super-powers. That being the case, do we assume that the ongoing updates to the koseki system had already been made as of the emergence of Quirks, enduring through the plot as we know it, or do we assume that changes to the system were made on a roughly even time-scale as in modern times--e.g. did employers stop being able to ask for a copy of one's koseki in 1974 or merely "forty-five years ago"?

Given the chaos that was wrought by the appearance of Quirks, the alleged lawless periods, as well as the existence of a mandatory Quirk registry and the phenomenon of "Quirk marriages," I am disinclined to believe that the problems represented by the koseki have been addressed much at all since early-2000s Japan. If anything, the conservative influences in the Japanese government that are so resistant to legislating changes to how the koseki functions today would probably have even more reason to push back against those changes if faced with Sudden Super-Powers. My Hero Academia is intended to speak to a modern Japanese audience--the issues facing its villains, in particular, are reflective of real problems people face in Japan--and thus, to me at least, it's counterintuitive not to interpret the series' characters with that modern Japanese context in mind. Who is Horikoshi writing for, and what in his society is he trying to comment on? With that lens in place, I think the koseki is exactly as much a problem in MHA's world as it is our own--possibly even moreso.

#my hero academia #boku no hero academia #shigaraki tomura #shimura kotaro #all for one #tomura shigaraki #my writing #bnha #bnha meta

147 notes · View notes

meta-squash · 4 years

Text

Les Miserables 1.1.8 After Dinner Philosophy - Atheism and pleasure for the rich, God for the poor.

I think I’m a little too late to catch up to the current Brick Club that’s happening, but I am rereading Les Miserables and I want to write some meta and stuff.

I’ve just reached Book Two but I want to go back a little ways and go over 1.1.8 and the monologue by the Senator the Comte de ----- on humanism, atheism, and self-reliance etc, because this was a monologue I wanted to close-read my first read-through of the Brick but never got around to it because I was busy with school.

So the Bishop goes to visit Senator Monsieur le Comte, who is described as not a bad person, but relatively self-centered. Hugo writes that he thought “himself a disciple of Epicurus, though he was probably simply a product of Pigault-Lebrun.” Epicurus’ philosophy was that of self-reliance (though he encouraged friendship) and the pursuit of pleasure by living wisely and with sober reasoning, maintaining awareness of pleasures that may cause suffering to oneself or others. Pigault-Lebrun, on the other hand, was a French novelist/playwright who was staunchly anti-Christian (and write a book of anti-Christian quotations that apparently was banned but published anyway?). Everything I’ve looked up about Pigault-Lebrun points out that while his writing was somewhat popular with the middle class, he basically had absolutely no effect whatsoever on the social or political institutions pre- or post-Revolution. So essentially what Hugo is saying is that the Senator thought himself a great philosopher but really he was just a guy who was well-liked by the middle class but ultimately unremarkable and with no lasting social impact.

The Senator then goes on to monologue about his own philosophy, specifically atheism. This begins with a hatred of Diderot who he accuses of “basically believing in god” (Diderot was a deist in his early days) and of being a revolutionary (he was friends with Rousseau) and a demagogue (probably because of his popular but raunchy novel The Indiscreet Jewels). He calls him “more bigoted than Voltaire.” The example he gives re: Voltaire is the feud between Voltaire and John Needham, where Voltaire circulated the myth of Needham being an Irish Jesuit due to an argument regarding one of Needham’s theories. Needham believed in spontaneous generation (the idea that living organisms can develop from non-living matter) and did experiments attempting to prove this theory. Voltaire, on the other hand, disagreed with the theory because he was afraid that it would encourage or prove atheism. Hence, our atheist friend the Senator calling Voltaire bigoted.

The Senator moves forward with Needham, citing Needham’s experiments with “eels” (nematodes) apparently springing to life in water. The Senator says that this spontaneous generation proves god unnecessary. He likens the creation of earth to vinegar and dough, because of the way the reaction between vinegar and yeast will make bread rise. To the Senator, man is the eel who spontaneously generates on earth, rather than being created by god. Therefore, god is useless. He also accuses deism of creating people who are starving both physically and intellectually, presumably because they don’t indulge in pleasure through food or in any sort of pleasurable intellectual passion aside from religious texts.

He then goes on to show off his Epicurean ideas. First he mocks the Bishop by saying that he’s “confessing” to him, as he is a pastor, that he’s “not wild about your Jesus, who preaches renunciation and self-sacrifice in every field.” Then he rambles about his lone-wolf philosophy, how every man should be for himself and it’s more natural to be looking out only for oneself rather than bothering to help others who are suffering. It’s funny to read this section: two hundred years later and we still have guys who think themselves philosophers going, “Look at nature! Wolves don’t help other wolves, why should humans help other humans heh heh heh.” The Senator does the every man for himself spiel and also a “there is no god or afterlife, so this is the only life we have and I’m going to use it to help myself, not others” spiel.

He does say that others have encouraged him to think more seriously about philosophy: good and evil, justice and injustice, right and wrong, because he will be judged after death. He rejects this, insisting that there is no afterlife: “After I’m dead it will take minute fingers to pinch me. I’d like to see a ghost grab a handful of ashes.” He says “There is no good or evil, only vegetation.” Because of his next few sentences, I assume what he means is that there isn’t any divine good or evil, no god or devil to push you in a direction, only the actual physical earth. Man is generated from the earth, not god, and so there is no afterlife or god to go back to. Because he then moves on to say that he thinks immortality and life after death is just a false promise, an illusion, a “will-o-the-wisp”. He mocks the idea of heaven, the idea that souls remain in the sky somewhere, going from star to star, mocks the idea of angels.

He calls god a “monstrous myth,” but he does admit that he’s not going to say that publicly, he’s not going to publish it anywhere, but he will say it to friends. To the Senator, using your time on earth to try and get to heaven is useless, “like leaving your fortune to a corpse.” He points out that he did not exist before his birth and therefore will not exist after death, and that he has the choice of pain or pleasure on earth, and he’s going to choose pleasure. He doesn’t say it outright, but it’s definitely a jab at the spartan way of living that Myriel and other religious people choose. His next few lines can be summed up by some of the new lines written for the 2012 Les Mis movie: “Everyone’s equal when they’re dead.” The Senator’s thought, essentially, is that everyone is equally nothing when they’re dead, so he’s going to take advantage of the life he has and live it for pleasure, without worrying about other people’s suffering. He mocks god as a fairy tale for adults, because no matter what good or bad you did in life, when you’re dead, you’re dead and it doesn’t matter anymore. He says “Live, then, above all else; use your self while you still have it.” He tells the Bishop that he thinks the poor and unfortunate are the only ones who are desperate enough to have religion, which are “myths and chimeras” that they’re given to nourish the soul. The Senator says, “He who has nothing else has the good Lord--the least good he can have.” He gives no objection to allowing the poor to have a false belief, but boasts that he holds the truth of atheism for himself.

Of course, Bishop Myriel then does his good-natured response in order to gently mock and/or reproach thing. He immediately points out that the Senator’s “pleasurable” way of life is materialistic, and mocks this atheist belief. Once you’ve got all this stuff, he says, you won’t let yourself be fooled by religion or the idea of self-sacrifice. Once you’re an atheist with epicurean ideals, you won’t feel obliged to help other people if you see a political wrong (Cato) or a religious one (St Stephen) or a historical/military one (Joan Of Arc). People who believe in materialism, in this total self-reliance, will shamelessly take anything and everything because they believe they deserve it, since they have the ability to take it. The Bishop interrupts himself to clarify, “I’m not referring to you, my dear Senator.” But he does go on to point out that this “philosophy” the Senator has just expounded on is only accessible to the rich, that only the rich can actually indulge in the pleasures the Senator thinks are so important. He mocks the Senator’s last words, saying “you are good princes” to allow the poor to believe in god instead of actually helping those who are suffering, “much as the goose with onions is the turkey with truffles of the poor.”

It is this conversation, I think, and the later one with G---- that really establish the Bishop’s opinions and beliefs regarding people with differing religious, philosophical, or political opinions. You can pretty easily contrast the two, in that by the end of the Senator’s monologue, the Bishop has a fairly well-constructed argument against his philosophy, because he can see how the senator’s status and politics inform his crap opinions. By the end of his conversation with G----, the Bishop’s ideals and beliefs have been somewhat shaken, and he’s realized that G----’s politics and experiences have actually formed a philosophy that is for the people, and that G---- actually is worth listening to. The difference there, of course, being that the Senator is fairly rich and G---- lives in a hut in the middle of nowhere, alone. Again, quite an obvious contrast, the Senator living large but only thinking for himself, G---- living very much alone except for one young servant, thinking of the people and his former acts for them, and the Bishop in the middle, living with his sister and Madame Magloire, thinking of the poor and essentially Robin Hood-ing his own expenses. One that the Bishop tries to teach (or at least reprimand) and one that the bishop learns from.

#les miserables #les mis #les miserables meta #1.1.8 #after dinner philosophy #bishop myriel #les mis meta

1 note · View note

thinkinginadifferentbox · 4 years

Text

Inclusive Education: We’re Not Doing It Right!

To Whom It May Concern:

“Count to 5” are the instructions. That’s all you must do. Your teacher sits in front of you with a clipboard and a judgmental look on her face, knowing as a 6th grader you can’t count to 5. Well, you can but you can’t speak. You know the quadratic formula and have memorized every movie you have ever seen in 7 different languages. You are non-speaking, so people think you don’t even know how to read pictures. Your teacher shakes her head and writes on her board. Frustrated, you start to cry and panic, you are dubbed disruptive, and taken out of class. This is the life of a non- speaking student. This was my brother’s life for 12 long years as well as mine. I had to sit by and watch as he would cry every time, we pulled up in the school parking lot. No voice in his education, he would go again and again to school and attempt to count to 5. Even though my family knew he could do so much more. Something had to change. Some might say that kids with special needs don’t know age level curriculum or act out too much to be in a general education setting. I can assure you that they do know the curriculum and should have access to this material as well as a chance to receive a high school diploma. Inclusive education is “holding high expectations and guaranteeing them (special needs kids) access to not only the general education classroom but also age level curriculum to the greatest extent is best practice” (NCIE,2011).

Inclusive education is the best practice by the Nation Center on Inclusive Education after 30 years of research, yet we still seclude kids with special needs. This is because each student is diagnosed with a disability at a young age which defines them for the rest of their lives. Dr. Rachel Morgan, an expert in the special education field and a mom of someone with a disability says ”A decision regarding placement for my son was based on his diagnosis and prior to an initial assessment ...A pre-judgment was made based on communication and learning differences…”(Morgan,pg.5). At the age of 3, kids with special needs are judged and sent away for the rest of their educational career. My brother and my mom had to fight for his education. They had to prove that he was “smart” enough to be in a general classroom like any other kid. This battle is still ongoing, but should it be one that families have to fight? The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 states, “The ECSE program, by law, has to provide the least restrictive environment for kids with special needs” (ECSE,1975). Yet, over 70% of children receiving special education services were receiving most of their services outside of the regular education setting (Morgan, 2017, pg.4).

In personal experience, the reason this law isn’t followed is that it is up for interpretation. People like my brother who are non-speaking are assumed to know little to nothing because they can’t physically speak what they know. This automatically puts him into a segregated classroom with little to no access to age level curriculum. IEP’s (Individualized Education Program) are a huge part of this issue as well. The development of IEP’s have its own concerns with lack of support from administration and staff along with the IEP being perceived as extra meaningless paperwork with unreasonable demands (Gallaher &Desimone,1995). IEP’s are super important to a child's success. I have sat in a few of my brothers IEP’s and as a team, my parents and staff work together to help my brother achieve his goals. It can be done, that 70% statistic can be made 0%. All that is needed is a change in attitudes and beliefs in these students.

It is important for the administration and family to talk and work together collaboratively so that more non-speaking kids can have the opportunity my brother is blessed with having. Some say that kids with special needs don’t know the curriculum or act out in general education classrooms, so they should just stay segregated. Some medical and psychological professionals say that these behaviors are embedded in their personality. While these professionals tell you that, what they don’t tell you is that they are using this excuse to make money off families who have children with disabilities. “The U.S. mindset shifted after World War II to more of a service economy where special education was seen as a way to make money” (Sailor, 2016 pg.4). This idea has brought on this mentality that more resources, therapy, and professionals are the best option and will “cure” these kids. When in reality, these people just want to waste the family’s money. They don’t need to be cured or fixed. If they are acting up it is because they are frustrated that the people around them see them as broken and something needed to be made right in the first place. How would you feel if someone looked at you like a broken toy with no brain or emotion, just a problem waiting to be solved? With no voice to say anything differently, you just sit there as people say things about you in front of your face like you aren’t there. I know I would be frustrated too. Right now, there is a lot broken in this system. It sets kids like my brother up to fail. Every kid with special needs, verbal or non-verbal, should have access to age-level curriculum and be able to have a high school diploma.

My brother is 18 years old and is part of the class of 2020. He will walk across that stage with a cap and gown and I, along with my family, will be there cheering him on the whole way. We have fought for him to have this, but we shouldn’t have to. My brother wrote a book with other non-speaking adults who talk about their experience. My brother Adam writes, “I am very intelligent…. But showing people that is near impossible...I am trapped inside a body that is broken, my only way of showing you who I really am is through my iPad; it is my voice “(Morgan, pg.49). We aren’t the only ones who have a non-speaking student graduate, getting a real high school diploma. My brother is not an exception but an example, the rule to be followed. I hope that things do change because there are kids who still need help to find their voice. Right now, 2 levels down from this room in a tiny corner of our school, kids are sitting there staring at those same numbers 1-5, internally crying for help. They look up and wish they are sitting in the seats we are and have the same privileges we take for granted every day. These are our fellow classmates, so what are we going to do about it? We need to make it so that one day, they can listen to their families cheer their name as they walk across that stage, diploma in hand, ready to change the world.

Sincerely,

Paige C. Morgan (Sister of Adam Morgan & Sophomore in High School)

Work Cited

Gallagher,J.,& Desimone,L. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education,(1975).

Morgan, Adam J. “My Choice, My Voice, My Right.” Leaders Around Autobiographies of Autistics Who Type,Point,& Spell to Communicate, edited by Edlyn Vallejo Pena, pp. 1–186.

Morgan, Rachel C. “Inclusive Education for Preschool Learners with Autism: A Program Evaluation.” Lindenwood University, Pro Quest, 2017, pp. 1–206.

“The National Center on Inclusive Education Summer Institute.” Ollibean, 10 Nov. 2016. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act, (1975).

#inclusion autism techmakeslifepossible believe presumecompetence notanexception AMF

1 note · View note

sophieakatz · 5 years

Text

Thursday Thoughts: “They” Is Not A Neutral Word

My mother sent me a link to a Slate podcast interview with Farhad Manjoo, a New York Times op-ed writer who recently began going by “they/them” pronouns. In the interview, Manjoo states that they are a cisgender man, but they no longer want to be referred to with “he/him” pronouns. They talk about the negative impact that forced gendering has on people – citing their young daughter’s stubborn belief that presidents must be men – and posits that everyone should be referred to as “they” instead of as “he” or “she.”

Manjoo’s idea is initially intriguing. As a society, we slap gender onto our children right away. When a child is born, the first question anyone asks the parent is, “Is it a boy or a girl?” And as innocuous as this may seem, a lot of baggage comes along with this early labeling. Studies show that adults will treat a baby differently if they are told that the baby is a boy than if they are told that the baby is a girl – describing the same baby behavior as “angry” if they think it’s a boy or “happy” if they think it’s a girl, and allowing supposedly-boy babies to take greater risks than supposedly-girl babies. Adults don’t realize that they’re treating the babies differently based on their assumptions, but they are.

Additionally, cross-analyses of studies of the human brain indicate that there is no significant difference between male babies’ brains and female babies’ brains – but there are significant differences between adult male brains and adult female brains. Along the way, the way the children are treated changes them, and Manjoo’s anecdote about his daughter’s early political opinions shows one of the negative results of this differential treatment.

In a world where we didn’t really care about gender at all, where we didn’t tell a baby right from day one the kind of person that they should be, perhaps everyone would be truly free to explore our own gender and figure out our personalities without the impact of stereotypes. If we didn’t split up sports into “men” and “women” categories, and instead had everyone compete based on physical ability, then athletes like Caster Semenya would not be mistreated by the highly problematic sports institution of “sex testing.” We could move on into a world that cares more about individuals than categories. The idea is appealing.

What gives me pause is Manjoo’s assertion that the “just, rational, inclusive” thing to do here is for everyone to go by “they.” Manjoo seems to think that the “they” pronoun is not only a gender-neutral pronoun, but also a completely neutral concept. They also seem to see nothing wrong with a cisgender man telling other people what pronouns to use.

It troubled me that this podcast did not have any voices from the transgender community contributing to the conversation. It further troubles me how difficult it was to sift through the Google results of cisgender people arguing over whether singular “they” is “grammatically correct” (language changes based on the needs of the speaking society, and is not forever beholden to the rules of the past – deal with it) and find a non-cisgender writer commenting on the deeper moral issue here. It isn’t surprising to me that the loudest voices in this conversation about pronouns are people who have never struggled to get other people to use their proper pronouns, because privilege comes with a platform, but that doesn’t make it right.

I finally found Brian Fabry Dorsam, an agender writer. Where Manjoo claims that gender is a cause of “confusion, anxiety, and grief,” Dorsam points out that gender itself is not the cause of these negative things. Misgendering is.

When someone refers to Dorsam as “they,” it is not a neutral statement. For Dorsam, “they” is an acknowledgement of their pronouns, of their identity, of the way they want the world to see them. It is an affirmation, a positive act, a specific act.

Manjoo may not care about their gender – again, they say that they are still a cisgender man, and that they do not mind being called “he” – but Dorsam does, and so does an entire world of transgender people. Manjoo has never had to struggle to get people to take them and their gender seriously. People have always looked at Manjoo and assumed their gender correctly. Perhaps that is why Manjoo thinks that it is no big deal to give up their pronouns, and why they think that everyone should go by the same pronouns.

Manjoo’s mistake is assuming that treating everyone “the same” is the same as being “inclusive.”

If we were to take Manjoo’s advice and slap the same pronoun onto everyone, then we would be treating everyone “the same.” But if you call a transgender man who uses “he/him” pronouns “they,” you are not making a neutral statement. You are saying, “I do not recognize you as ‘he.’ I will not call you what you want to be called. I know better than you what pronouns you should use.”

This is not being inclusive. This is not treating someone with respect. This is being oppressive.

“Nothing is inclusive when it is forced,” says Dorsam. “True inclusivity is the recognition of each individual’s humanity on their own terms. Anything else is erasure.”

Dorsam suggests – and I agree – that there are two things that we must do instead.

First, we must do everything we can to raise our children in a gender-neutral manner. This means recognizing our subconscious biases about gender and putting an active effort into providing our children with access to all kinds of clothing, toys, stories, and role models. This will allow them to develop their own ideas about who they are.

Second, we must stop assuming other people’s pronouns. Instead, when we meet someone, we should ask for the person’s pronouns.

“Hi, I’m Sophie! My pronouns are she/her. How about you?”

It can be as simple as that. “What are your pronouns?” or “May I please have your pronouns of reference?” are other ways to phrase the question. You can also ask a mutual friend about someone’s pronouns, if you don’t yet feel comfortable asking the person directly.

If you do not know someone’s pronouns, it’s okay to use a gender-neutral term – such as “they,” “my friend,” or the person’s name – until you learn the proper pronouns. Once you do know the person’s pronouns, you must use those pronouns.

While chatting with my mother about the podcast and the surrounding issue, she pointed out that having everyone use “they” is the easy way out. Treating everyone the same, she said, is “less work than to care about individuals.”

She’s right. This takes work. Respect and inclusivity always take work. Manjoo is encouraging the easy way out, the way of erasure, the way that lets them feel above the “gender problem” while in reality they are causing more discomfort for people who face a daily struggle to have their genders taken seriously.

I think it’s worth the effort.

#they #pronouns #agender #nonbinary #transgender #gender neutral #farhad manjoo #thursday thoughts #nonfiction #social justice #psychology #neuroscience #gender #inclusivity #respect

1 note · View note

ontarioyoga · 3 years

Text

How Do You Do Transcendental Meditation

New Post has been published on https://www.ontarioyoga.net/how-do-you-do-transcendental-meditation/

How Do You Do Transcendental Meditation

On My First Visit Before My Lessons Began I Sat Down With Dlf Teacher Mario Orsatti And Dlf Cofounder And Executive Director Bob Roth

They’re best friends of 40 years, and were fun to talk to — not at all the terrifying cult leaders I was afraid they might be.

As they put it, TM is a simple but effective technique. The $960 fee offers lifetime access to all TM centers and teachers across the world, and it funds operations and the modest teacher salaries that allow them to teach people for free. If people seek out TM and cannot afford it, they can apply for scholarships.

I Returned For My Introductory Lesson Two Weeks Later On A Pleasant Fall Friday Late In The Afternoon

Roth and Orsatti offered me lessons with a fee waiver, as they had done with other journalists, so that I would have more context for my research.

I stopped off at the bodega down the street from the DLF office to buy some fruit and irises for the “traditional ceremony” I’d be participating in. I felt like I was about to step into one of Lynch’s surrealist films.

How Is Transcendental Meditation Different Than Other Meditation Techniques The Ocean Analogy

Bob Roth, from David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, has explained the difference between transcendental meditation and other mindfulness-based types of meditation with what has come to have been known as .

He likens an overactive mind to being in a boat in the middle of the ocean, with tumultuous waves swelling around you. The ocean appears to be in upheaval, but in reality, it is only so on the surface. At its greatest depths it is naturally silent.

Unlike TM, most forms of meditation rely on quieting and controlling your thoughts. Those with particularly hyperactive minds may end up finding this frustrating.

Typical meditation helps you observe the waves from a place devoid of apprehension or worry. TM teaches you to maneuver the boat to get through the waves more efficiently.

Transcendental meditation is particularly well suited to such hyperactive folk. Completing a successional session takes less discipline compared to more common mindfulness techniques. TM has also been shown to achieve levels of relaxation deeper than your deepest level of sleep when practiced correctly.

The Law Of Attraction Is An Universal Truth Law Of Attraction And Transcendental Meditation

It’s been figured out by quantum physicists that the Law of Attraction is genuine since “Like draws in like.” There is a practical application if we let our thoughts be our truth as we acknowledge it today.

They form every element from simply how much cash gets in one’s life , whether love finds us at all if there was any chance for romance with another individual who might not have turned up or else.

The exact same adverse sensations bring in much more negativeness to oneself is what triggers health and wellness issues when tension degrees get expensive – think about somebody hopping on an aeroplane next time.

It likewise applies straight in the direction of attaining goals.

What Is The Difference Between Transcendental Meditation And Other Forms Of Meditation

Transcendental meditation has its roots in India’s ancient Vedic traditions. Its main difference is the repetition of a chosen mantra as a technique to calm the mind.

It became popularized in the West by a spiritual guru from India. When the monk Swami Brahmananda Saraswati passed away in 1953, he had passed the technique down, adapted from Vedic practices.

One of Guru Dev’s followers, a man called the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, made the practice known to the rest of the world starting in the late 1950s. Tagging it as the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, the Maharishi promoted it as “a secular path toward mental, emotional, and physical well-being.”

The name “transcendental meditation” was heavily used for two reasons: to clearly differentiate it from other forms of meditation, and to distance it from Hinduism and other religions and ensure that it stands on its own.

While the movement did enjoy a moderate level of success prior to the late 1960s, it received a welcome boost because of its acquisition of four high-profile believers: none other than the Beatles. Soon enough, other stars in various entertainment industries followed in John, Paul, Ringo, and George’s bell-bottomed footsteps. Meditation soon became the “trendy” thing, and the Maharishi’s method was in the spotlight.

Do Not Question The Law Of Attraction Law Of Attraction And Transcendental Meditation

The Law of attraction might resemble some astonishing idea, yet it’s not.

The Law of attraction is a guideline that can be placed on anything in your life in addition to you will see the outcomes if what are requesting aligns with what you truly desire.

No matter specifically how tiny or significant something may appear due to the fact that everything concerns when applying this concept- also ideas!

You should constantly have positive power so as long there isn’t any negative feelings existing then all excellent ideas will certainly enter into our lives no question asked .

An individual that has actually raised positivity within themselves attracts far better individuals or scenarios towards them that makes the trip a lot less complicated than in the past.

Envision experiencing anxiousness while being bordered by individuals who are like-minded. The effects may be compounded in the workplace.

Ultimately, learn to trust yourself as well as deep space will definitely take care of you. The Law Of Attraction is a doctrine that mentions “like brings in like.” It implies people, circumstances as well as additionally events in our lives are attracted to us by some sort of power or stress based upon what we consider frequently; whether it be adverse thoughts that reel in even more negativeness right into your life while hopefulness brings excellent concepts towards oneself – such as success! Law Of Attraction And Transcendental Meditation

Be Grateful For What You Do Have Law Of Attraction And Transcendental Meditation

Do not fail to remember to count your true blessings. The law of attraction is an effective point. You can attract what you desire by being grateful for the important things that are presently in your life and focusing on them instead of house means too much concerning just how they’re insufficient or sensation like there’s something missing out on from all of it.

Such unfavorable thoughts will only keep us stuck where we presently stand without adjustment to discover anytime quickly!

You could want to start counting your true blessings because this could be just an additional step closer to achieving your goals and also similarly making sure that whatever appears probable even if initially glimpse some might have believed otherwise or when looking back on their lives thus far.

What Is The Difference Between Transcendental Meditation And Other Meditations

We often assume all meditations are the same and achieve the same goal. There is no such thing as ‘one kind-fits-all’ meditation since each offers a unique benefit and helps one achieve different goals.

The difference between transcendental meditation and other meditations is quite simple. While most of the meditations concentrate on training the mind and its way of thinking, transcendental meditation allows the mind to go beyond the mental boundaries, which results in freedom of mind, concentration, and growth in creativity. Even better, you feel calmer, happier, and relaxed!

This is why this type of meditation is taught in schools, offices, and other educational institutions. All age groups practice and benefit from this meditation.

Tmrw X Todaywhy You Should Try Meditating For The First Time And How To Start

The difference between this practice and other forms of mindfulness or meditation is that TM is an independent, passive process. It is not guided by someone else who gives you suggestions about what to think; it’s entirely internal.

Transcendental Meditation is not about learning to do something that will your help your mind relax. It’s about learning to do nothing. In fact, teachers of TM often stress that the process should be absolutely effortless. Once you get into the right zone, it happens by itself.

I was intrigued enough to sign up, but also highly skeptical of something so simple.

“You don’t do anything?” I asked my meditation teacher. “So then what am I even doing?”

“Exactly,” he said.

I was worried again that this wasn’t for me. Nevertheless, I took solace in the fact that, in addition to The Beatles, TM is hailed by a number of reliable celebrities: Oprah Winfrey, Hugh Jackman, Tom Hanks, Katy Perry and Jerry Seinfeld have all cited TM as being an integral part of their success. Seinfeld has said in interviews that he has not missed a day of TM since 1972. Perhaps it’s no coincidence he created a show about nothing! And if it’s good enough for Oprah, there must be something to it.

I wanted to document my journey to see if I would experience the same benefits cited by these successful people, namely feeling more focused, more creative and far less stressed. Here’s what happened:

What’s The Difference Between Transcendental And Other Types Of Meditation

Science has proven that not all meditation is the same.

Whereas most types of meditation attempt to focus energy, thought and effort into training one’s mind and honing one’s thoughts, this particular form of meditation is meant to transcend ordinary thought and carry the practitioner beyond the upper structures of the thought processes, down into ‘silence’ – the absolute stillness of thought.

The sensation and subsequent results of transcending one’s surface thoughts are not unlike an athlete being ‘in the zone’ or some brave souls recounting how they simply didn’t think about the danger to themselves while rescuing someone in need.

Thankfully, you don’t need a dire emergency where life hangs in the balance in order to reach that state. You only need to cultivate stillness to tap into that wellspring of power.

Don’t other types of meditation also cultivate that stillness?

In fact, they don’t.

Ironically, the most popular types of meditation, such as Qi Gong or Zen, the Japanese style of meditation that evolved out of the Chinese Chan school all call for a focus onto an object, be it a mantra or something tangible. Such thinking causes more activity in various parts of the brain, not less.

Equally, today’s buzzword in meditation, mindfulness, also spurs brain activity even though the practitioner is merely visualising events, rather than targeting thoughts.

Find out also if guided meditation is right for you…

How Is Transcendental Meditation Different From Other Types Of Meditation

Unlike other forms of meditation, TM does not involve clearing the mind of thoughts, no controlling of the mind, nor mental monitoring. Practices such as mindfulness and focus meditation require moderate to strong effort, whereas TM is more effortless and relaxed. In this practice, the aim is to allow your mind to settle and arrive at the most silent and peaceful level of your awareness.

Myriad of Benefits

TM is a simple and effective form of meditation that is shown by research to be quite effective at managing anxiety, stress, and cardiovascular health. During TM, the brain produces Alpha waves associated with relaxation, happiness, and focus. TM produces a unique state of “restful alertness,” and a greater sense of self by activating the default mode network in the brain.

Several forms of meditations use breathing techniques, visualizations, and movements.

TM, on the other hand, uses mantras. Mantras are words, phrases, or sentences consisting of vowels with no meaning—it only relies on vibration and sounds to focus on for the entire meditation session. This is so to avoid creating or visualizing a particular image in your mind associated with that word. Mantras such as the well-known serve as a vehicle for you to keep focus and experience stillness.

How I Went From A Meditation Skeptic To A True Believer After 30 Days

For many of my friends, spending a year at home led to the discovery of delightful new pastimes: baking, knitting, reading — one of my friends even a book.

Meanwhile, I had only discovered new ways to stress myself out. As the months wore on, I picked up a number of bad habits without even realizing it: constantly reading the news, doomscrolling, reflexively checking social media, and letting my mind race about the implications of the pandemic and why I hadn’t found any hip new hobbies.

Most of all, I had difficulty focusing. On many occasions I would get myself all set up on the couch to read a novel I’d purchased in March. The cushion positioned just right, the house calm and quiet, I would crack open the cover ready to be transported to a faraway land on wings of literature … and then I’d instantly fall asleep or check my phone. Several months later, my bookmark remained on the cover page. I’d even developed temporomandibular joint disorder, aka TMJ, a stress-induced jaw condition.

After a string of sleepless nights, a friend of mine suggested I try meditation. I downloaded the most popular meditation apps and searched for guided meditations on YouTube, but I found myself unable to take any of it seriously. My inability to relax made me all the more stressed. Meditation, I decided, wasn’t for me.

We Sat Down In Sofas At Either Side Of The Room And Began Meditating

The technique itself is simple, consisting of sitting upright in a chair, closing your eyes for 20 minutes, and repeating a mantra — a meaningless “vibration word” provided by your teacher — in your head at no particular rhythm. It is recommended that one practice this twice daily, once in the morning and once in the evening.

For most people, including myself, TM is easy to learn but takes a couple weeks to practice naturally. It’s why your TM teacher checks in for a few followup lessons after the initial four-day introduction.

Imagine What You Desire And Additionally Feel Excellent Worrying It

It is impressive specifically just how powerful your ideas are, and additionally just how they form your fact.

You might guess that if you feel great, then a lot more favorable vibrations will certainly become part of one’s life because of those positive sensations!

The first step we should certainly absorb order to attain our goals, or complete what we require to obtain done – for instance, we need to imagine ourselves as healthy and balanced, toned muscle mass, and so on. Law Of Attraction And Transcendental Meditation

Orsatti Had Me Take My Shoes Off And We Walked Into A Darkened Room

He led me to a corner, where there was a small altar with an illustration of Brahmananda Saraswati, also know as Guru Dev . Guru Dev was the teacher of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of TM, and we were there to honor him before learning the technique.

Orsatti handed me one of the irises and began solemnly reciting what I assumed to be a Sanskrit prayer. He proceeded to light candles and arrange the fruit and other items before him. I found it interesting, but I wouldn’t figure out what was actually happening until weeks later.

Where Did Transcendental Meditation Mantras Originally Come From

The word mantra is a Sanskrit word that has been derived from two verb roots. The first root word is a which means mind, and means tool or vehicle. A mantra is, therefore, a tool or vehicle of the mind. This vehicle brings its calmness and spirituality to mind. Evidence of the same has been found in the Vedas of ancient times.

The Vedas mention meditation and mantras. The evidence has been found not only in the Hindu scriptures but also in the Buddhist ones. As a form of meditation, the mantras were carved into rocks. Using mantras is believed to have started even before 1000 BC.

Rigveda defines it as a structured idea conforming to the reality of poetic formulas offering inherent fulfillment. A transcendental meditation mantra is not restricted to any specific religion and is used by almost everyone. This was a way ancient people connected with the divine.

How To Get Started With Transcendental Meditation For Beginners

Leave a Comment

Transcendental meditation has become increasingly popular over the past decade. It has been shown to improve mental health. Besides that, it also helps you live a more healthy lifestyle. What is transcendental meditation? How does it benefit you? How about finding out more?

Here’s everything you need to know about practicing transcendental meditation for beginners.

List of Transcendental Meditation Apps

Things You Need To Know To Talk About Transcendental Meditation Dean Sluyter

Transcendental Meditation is having a moment. After making a big splash in the peace ’n’ love era, it largely faded from view, but now everyone from Lena Dunham and to and is into it. David Lynch has had a foundation dedicated to it since 2005, and earlier this year Jim Carrey’s commencement address at a TM university went viral. But what TM? Is it some kind of Scientology-like cult? A trendy thing to add to your self-improvement agenda? Could it be something actually worth trying?

To help you decide, or so you can simply prep to be a TM aficionado the next time the topic comes up at a cocktail party, we turned to Dean Sluyter, who taught TM from 1970 to 1993. Sluyter, who has practiced extensively in Advaita Vedanta, Tibetan Buddhism, and Bhakti Yoga, is the author of The Zen Commandments, Cinema Nirvana, and Natural Meditation: A Guide to Effortless Meditative Practice, and for the Huffington Post. Here, Sluyter gives a rundown of what you need to know about the suddenly hot-again practice.

It feels good. TM allows the mind and body to settle into a quiet state of “restful alertness.” Usually, people come out of it feeling refreshed, energized, and at peace.

Its benefits have been proven … kind of. Forty-plus years of research has shown that TM can do everything from slowing or reversing the progression of changes that underlie cardiovascular disease , but even if half of them are bogus, what’s left is still impressive.

How To Do Transcendental Meditation Step By Step For Beginners

To learn Transcendental meditation properly, you must visit a center near you. If you feel you cannot afford it, then here is the process step by step.

Turn off your phone and pick a location where you can sit in peace for 20-to-25 minutes at a time without any interruptions.

Put your hands on your lap and close your eyes while seated on the ground.

Pick a mantra that resonates with you. Repeat it slowly in your mind. Repeat it until it comes to your mind.

Repeat the mantra without forcing it. Let it wander wherever it wants.

In case you feel that you have drifted away, slowly return to position and repeat the mantra.

Practice for twenty minutes and set a reminder or alarm at the end.

Continue to sit in the same position for five more minutes without opening your eyes, and then relax.

Resources For Practicing Transcendental Meditation On Your Own

As mentioned before, one of the biggest questions is: when does one know one’s time to meditate is through?

One way to measure time is with a selection of music; my personal favourite is the soundtrack to Johnathan Livingston Seagull.

It was a simple task to select tracks totalling about 30 minutes into play files; come time to disconnect from the world, I simply choose one of the files and drift away on the sound of waves and soaring chords.

Naturally, there are other musical selections that are ideal for meditation; perhaps you already have some in your music collection.

Your meditation music should be tranquil; no peaking vocals and only gentle percussion. Repeating themes would also help, especially if you are new to meditation. The tempo should be about the same throughout; you may even enjoy music with water trickling in the background.

YouTube has a whole list of videos for meditation; some play continuously and others last anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. Some are narrated, meaning a soothing, pleasant voice directs your meditation while peaceful music plays in the background.

Other websites, such as Music 2 Meditate and Free Meditation Music have created meditation playlists. You may choose from piano or strings, from Devotional or the intriguing-sounding Mantra, a collection of music with traditional Indian tones.

That would be highly appropriate, seeing as meditation is an ancient Indian art!

But Why Whats The Secret Of Transcendental Meditation Mantras

And why is it that superstars are able to attract avalanches of wealth and success so easily – while most people battle for years just to keep their heads above water? How can they learn transcendental meditation practice and get all of it’s benefits and you can’t?

What makes these “stars” so special?

The answer is so simple that most people NEVER see it.

Stars like Oprah are manifesting from the Core of who they are – what we call their Core Energy.

In other words, ALL their energy is lined up and working together. They are not trying to manifest fragments of desires or things they are not sure if they really want or not. They are manifesting what they TRULY desire as a UNIFIED whole.

And that’s what makes them so darn powerful.

That’s why they attract masses of abundance like a magnet… Because they are COMPLETELY allowing the energy that creates worlds to flow through them as a unified whole. Makes sense?

Now here’s the best news…

YOU too can learn how to align with your Core Energy and manifest all that you truly desire from that place. How do you do this?

Mind-Body Training practices that integrate your primal Body, Heart and Mind energies, while at the same time developing inner skills of mindfulness and inner presence, are obviously essential. You can find out more about these here:

Another secret is to learn to connect to your joy, your passion and your excitement in your life.

What Does Transcendental Meditation Feel Like My Experiences Leave a CommentMeditationPhil Ashton

Interested in TM and what to know more about it? In this article, I’m going to do my best to answer, what does Transcendental Meditation feel like?

For me, it feels like I’m “lost” in my subconscious. Able to feel all the stress, tension, and pain in my body and mind float away. I come out of it mentally refreshed, physically energized, and with a profound sense of calm.

How To Teach Yourself Transcendental Meditation For Free

As a society, we’ve come so far and achieved so much. We’re supposed to be living in the greatest time in human history. But whatever happened to happiness? We have so much pressure on us to work harder, to buy more, and to be more. And we’re constantly connected yet, somehow we’re lonelier than we’ve ever been.

Depression and anxiety is a global pandemic. In Australia alone suicide is a leading cause of death for people aged 15 – 44. According to the World Health Organization over seven hundred and ninety thousand people die every year from suicide. That’s one person dying from suicide every 40 seconds. Most of those are men.

So obviously something that we’re doing isn’t right. But there is a way that we can all manage stress and anxiety naturally and to feel happier and calmer and more content in our lives. And we can do that through meditation.

Meditation is amazing. it has the ability to physically rewire our brains chemistry and to take us out of a reactionary fight-or-flight response and to put us in a calmer more alert state. But most of us are so busy in our day-to-day lives that we never really experience this state.

The Buddhists call this pure consciousness and it’s something that we all have inside of us but we rarely see it. So a good way to explain how meditation works is to think of the mind as an ocean.

So when it comes to concentration meditation we’re taking all of our awareness and focusing it on one single point and that could be the breath.

Is The World Of Transcendental Meditation Truly Peaceful

Organizations founded on the foundation of It typically promote world peace. They suggest the idea of a peaceful community working together to ultimately raise consciousness. But is that really the case? One incident that led to the murder of Levi Butler in the It movement’s Maharishi University of Management cafeteria truly puts into question the supposed peaceful disposition of its followers. Because of the anti-medical views of the school’s authorities and the general avoidance of antipsychotic medication, a college student went through a psychotic episode wounding one and killing another.

Without any provocation in the throat and face with a pen. When MUM administrator took Sem aside he questioned him on his It technique. He was then placed in the custody of the MUM dean of men. No campus security or Law enforcement was called. Dean of Men Joel Wynsong took Sem to his off-campus apartment with the intention of correcting his It technique. While Wynsong began his own It session, Sem was able to escape his apartment. Wynsong located Sem and followed him to the schools dining hall where he decided to watch Sem talk with students. Suddenly Sem began another unprovoked attack, stabbing and killing Levi Butler.

Sem was taken into custody and upon psychiatric examination, it was found out that Sem had chronic paranoid Schizophrenia and was previously treated with antipsychotic medication but had stopped taking the medication several weeks before coming to MUM.

What Are Health Benefits Of Transcendental Meditation

The health benefits of It are said to be numerous. From lowering blood pressure to the lowered risk of heart disease It seems to heal a number of ailments naturally. It is even said that It minimizes the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. There are many meditation practices specialized for physical health. Though It has frequently been associated with alternative medicine, studies suggest its effectiveness.

With a little quiet time, in the world of Transcendental, almost anyone can get rid of a number of health problems. But how true are these studies? In a comprehensive view of the It movement, Aryeh Siegel writes about an attack of convulsions making him unable to walk or even stand in an upright position after practicing it. Members of It organizations frequently boast about the studies been done on TM technique, claiming it has been predominately beneficial for health. Critics, however, have deemed most of these studies to be of poor quality. A ranging number of mistakes are supposedly present such as biased design, self-reporting, conflict of interest and cherry picking. Multiple critics have spoken about how the researchers themselves have been affiliated with MUM and other foundations centered on the It movement. This seems to directly point at a conflict of interest and biased view of It when it comes to scientific studies. The National Institute of Health, however, does not consider zeal or faith to be conflicts of interest.

Dylan Dreyer And Sheinelle Jones Practice Mindfulness

A few weeks later, I saw a documentary about The Beatles and their fabled trip to India. In 1968, they visited a small city in northern India called Rishikesh to learn a specific type of meditation I didn’t know much about beforehand: Transcendental Meditation.

In the interviews John, Paul, George and Ringo describe feelings of “complete inner peace,” “boundless creativity” and feeling “high on life.” This sounded slightly more appealing than my night sweats and teeth grinding. The next morning, I signed myself up for a Transcendental Meditation course.

Transcendental Meditation Frequently Asked Questions

Can TM be taught online?

Can anyone learn?Yes, TM is so simple, natural and effortless to practise that even children from the age of 6 can learn! And you are never too old! Anyone who can think can meditate!

My mind is always too busy/I can’t sit still – I could never meditate!Many people say this before learning, but the real purpose of meditation is not to still the mind or the body . There is no effort made to concentrate or control the mind because just as much as it is the nature of the mind to be active, it is also the nature of the mind to be still, given the opportunity. Any organism in nature that can be active must, by definition, be able to be less active, and ultimately totally still. This includes the mind. You’ll have no problem once you understand how to meditate properly. Even children with diagnoses of ADHD can practise effortlessly!

From your list of benefits of TM, it seems you’re saying that it is a panacea for all the world’s ills. Isn’t that a bit of an exaggeration?Any doctor or healer will admit that it’s the power of Nature that heals. And nature’s power is unlimited in its potential. The effectiveness of any approach is in its ability to allow you to connect with the deeper, more powerful levels of Nature. And TM is the purest form of , which means integration of life – the most natural and effective way to connect with the power deep within you.

How Is Tm Different From Other Meditation Techniques

As weightlifting, tennis, and ballroom dancing strengthen specific muscles and produce different overall effects in the body, so do focusing on a candlelight, repeating mantras or trying to dispassionately observe one’s mental content result in different outcomes.

MEDITATION AND BRAIN: Some of the best, most revealing research on the effects of meditation practice has involved different methods of neurophysiological brain imaging. Photo: University of Illinois.

According to research, the practice of Transcendental Meditation is unique in many a sense.

For one, TM seems to turn on the whole brain and make it function as a holistic unit. This is a common feature of those people who report peak-performances in business, art or sports.

Another peculiar feature of the TM technique is that there is no difference between brainwaves of experts and beginners — one masters it quickly. In fact, the positive effects of practice are usually apparent already from the very first TM session.

Practising Transcendental Meditation With A Teacher

Transcendental meditation is a relaxation and personal development technique which is a bit different from some of the other types of meditation. In fact, unlike some of those more mainstream meditation activities such as mindfulness, you don’t need to put in that much effort or concentrate that much.

However, you will need a guide who’s happy to practise daily and you will need some training, which we’ll cover later.

Find out about hot yoga near me here.

Transcendental meditation centres on an awareness of your body and a sense of inner peace, using a mantra, silently repeated, to reach beyond conscious thought.

Your mantra can be a word, sentence, or idea which your tutor will help you discover or will assign to you. The idea is to repeat this mantra, in accordance with what your instructor is telling you to do.

For authentic transcendental meditation training, your teacher should have been trained by a Maharishi Mahesh Yogi organisation.

Your given mantra is a more thorough, more personal message than Zen meditation, for example, which many people commonly associate with religion.

Nevertheless, we can illustrate, in broad strokes, essentially how a transcendental meditation session would go:

You should be seated in a comfortable position where your body is fully supported. Such a place may be on the floor or in a chair; as you will be sitting for around 30 minutes, it would be a good idea to choose a setting most conducive to relaxation.

How To Do Transcendental Meditation: A Walk Through

Meditation is a powerful tool that involves training the mind to achieve long-lasting mental clarity, balance, and mindfulness. It has been proven to be an effective way to manage stress, anxiety, depression, and promote overall well-being.

There are many types of meditations that each caters to different purposes. One of the popular types of meditation is Transcendental meditation. What was once a practice in the East has now become a part of the lives of people in the West that even celebrities such as Hugh Jackman and Ellen DeGeneres have claimed the positive effect of this form of meditation. It also caught the interest of the English rock band, the Beatles, which then took part in a training course in India to learn how to do Transcendental Meditation.

How To Learn Transcendental Meditation By Yourself

You might have heard the phrase before and thought it was some sort of weird hippy dippy cult thing, or maybe a spiritual journey that you’d have to undergo months in the Himalayan mountains to master. The truth is, Transcendental Meditation holds no ties to any group, spiritual belief system, or philosophy. It’s so simple that anyone can practice it pretty much anywhere. Follow along, and we’ll teach you how to learn Transcendental Meditation by yourself!

How To Do Transcendental Meditation Without Paying

Transcendental meditation involves silently and repeatedly focusing the mind on a single mantra. This mantra can be different for every person depending on personal characteristics. Transcendental meditation can help you improve your relationships, make you thrive at work, regain your inner peace, and even make you become calmer! How can you engage in this rich and helpful form of meditation without having to pay for the usually expensive courses?

Transcendental meditation can be practiced, without paying for transcendental meditation courses, by simply following its rules, and choosing a mantra that works for you. The mantras help to create a state of awareness while the meditation takes the student into a tranquil state.

Unlike the popular mindfulness-based meditations that focus on clearing the mind of thoughts and gently bringing the attention back to the present moment when the mind wanders, transcendental meditation is based on focusing the mind on a single mantra. Is it possible to teach yourself this form of meditation, and how can you do it without paying? How can you choose the right mantra? Keep reading to get all you need to know about this rich and beneficial form of meditation.

Learning And Practicing Transcendental Meditation

Unlike some forms of meditation, TM technique requires a seven-step course of instruction from a certified teacher.

A TM teacher presents general information about the technique and its effects during a 60-minute introductory lecture. Thatâ€™s followed by a second 45-minute lecture in which more specific information is given. People interested in learning the technique then attend a 10- to 15-minute interview and 1 to 2 hours of personal instruction. Following a brief ceremony, they’re each given a mantra, which they’re supposed to keep confidential.

Next come 3 days of checking for correctness with 1 or 2 more hours of instruction. In these sessions, the teacher does the following:

Explains the practice in greater detail

Gives corrections if needed

How To Practice Transcendental Meditation At Home

One of the easier methods of meditation is transcendental meditation. It does not require any preparation at all. You do not need a specific place to do it. While at work, at home, or even while traveling, you can do this.

All you need to do is be comfortable. It can be done on a bed, a chair, a train, in a car, anywhere, as long as your body is comfortable. Seat yourself comfortably, but not in an uncomfortable position or a lean position.

Just close your eyes and chant the mantras in your mind feeling them. This should take about 20 minutes. Silently repeating a mantra is part of this technique. You need not chant the mantra aloud. The mantra will allow you to transcend the physical world and enter a spiritual, peaceful realm. It’s just as easy to do.

How To Do Transcendental Meditation Step By Step

In my previous post, I have talked about the Vedic Meditation i.e. the Transcendental Meditation . So, if you do not know what Transcendental Meditation is then checking it out on this site. Today, in this article I am going to talk about how to do Transcendental Meditation step by step. So, let’s get started to know how to do Transcendental Meditation techniques for beginners…

Transcendental meditation is a form of Bhavatiya meditation mantra yoga or chanting yoga. In Transcendental Meditation, a person is given a special mantra to each person according to their nature.

Mahishi Mahesh Yogi was the master of meditation. This is a simple and natural meditation method. In this meditation we do not have to make any effort, it starts automatically. As you now know what is Transcendental Meditation method, you can see that it is very similar to mantra meditation because it uses some special mantras.

The TM makes your mind super calm as well as lightens your body. The popularity of Bhavantya meditation is growing day by day. This meditation method can also be certified by scientists. Even in foreign countries, big institutions are open to teaching how to do Transcendental Meditation step by step. In this method, the learned teachers teach how to do Transcendental Meditation step by step to achieve all the benefits of Transcendental Meditation.

How Are Transcendental Meditation Mantras Chosen

Mantras are somewhat meaningless sounds. In transcendental meditation, it is generally accepted that the more we don’t know about our mantra, the better. Mantras are positive sounds that will help you grow in your meditation. Usually, mantras are suggested by certified transcendental teachers to their students. These mantras are assigned based on your experience in practicing transcendental meditation.

Examples of transcendental meditation mantras include:

When chanting these mantras, they sound like:

Kiiiiiiiiiiririmmmmm Kiiiiiiririmmmm

Aiinnggg Aiiiiiiiinnnnnggggggg

It is right that you vary the length and tone of each letter of your mantra while you’re chanting it. This way, it will be easier to bring about the ‘trance’ effect on your mind. How you chant your mantra does not matter as long as you chant it throughout your session.

If you are doing transcendental meditation on your own and notice the mantra you chose reminds you too much of something in real life, pick another completely meaningless to find what works for you.

How To Do Transcendental Meditation By Yourself

If for any reason, you are unable to avail a guide for transcendental meditation, you may follow these steps.

Switch off all your mobile devices for the next 25 minutes. Set a timer or put a clock nearby to alert you.

Sit in an upright but comfortable position, eyes closed, feet on the floor.

Choose a simple mantra; it should be a sound, and not necessarily a word, that you can easily say and think of. For example,

Repeat your chosen mantra silently, in your head, letting it flow within with minimal effort. Make sure that you don’t drift off, though. Focus on the mantra, and just the mantra. Let go of any ill feelings or thoughts.

Keep going for 20 minutes.

For the few remaining minutes of your meditation time, sit in silence, with your mind completely empty.

Law Of Attraction And Transcendental Meditation

Do you have any kind of clear objectives for your life? Do you have concepts on exactly how you desire your life to be? Law Of Attraction And Transcendental Meditation

Do you need to compel on your own to just visit a job site as well as gradually toxin your body with short-term delight via functioning? Or would it be far better to just make changes and locate tranquility for a long time?

Just how is your life going now? Is this the course that you are on? Or should you seek your passion while changing jobs completely? Am I where I wish to remain in life today, or would certainly living somewhere else make you better?

These are all concerns worth asking before making any kind of kind of substantial decisions or modifications.

Act As If You Already Have The Thing You Desire

There’s a saying something like “fake it till you make it.” Well, this is the law of attraction at the office. If you place on an act as if something currently happened.

As an example by putting on apparel that make one look thinner and even just grinning routinely- after that it will absolutely take place!

It has to entail taking enthusiastic tasks to accomplish what we desire; such points can consist of: climbing early in addition to working out prior to work so when arriving at the workplace there’s no demand to feel worn down from lack of remainder do all jobs with power rather than dragging oneself through them.

It is necessary to have a common sense of self-care which entails not ignoring our really own requirements nevertheless instead put ourselves initially once more while keeping our mind on our goal of coming to be healthy and fit given that doing otherwise can lead us down.

This Is Your Brain On Transcendental Meditation

Whatever your particular health concerns or New Year’s resolutions may be—sharper memory, lower blood pressure, less stress, looser-fitting pants—conventional wisdom leads a lot of us straight to the gym. But decades of research paints a fascinating, promising picture of what an effortless relaxation technique called Transcendental Meditation can do you for instead—without setting foot on that treadmill.

Yep, we said effortless. Transcendental Meditation, or TM, is 20 minutes, twice a day, of profound rest and relaxation, according to its fans. Meditators use a mantra to guide their minds to a place of stillness that exists within all of us—we’re just too stressed and stretched too thin to know it’s there. If the goings-on of our buzzing, frazzled minds are like the waves on top of the ocean, the inner quiet is like the silence at the ocean’s depths, says Bob Roth, executive director of the David Lynch Foundation, which brings TM to at-risk populations like domestic abuse survivors, inmates, and inner-city students.

This Is Your Body On Meditation

Another recent PTSD study, funded by the David Lynch Foundation, found that TM helped decrease medication use among military members with the condition. After a month, nearly 84% of the 37 meditators had stabilized, decreased, or stopped anxiety meds, while about 11% increased their dose. Among the 37 who didn’t meditate, 59% were able to stabilize, decrease, or stop their meds while 40.5% had to increase them.

Transcendental Meditation Is Mantra Meditation

The main difference between Transcendental Meditation and other forms of meditation is the mantra you’re asked to repeat during a meditation session. “In TM, the mantra, used as the vehicle to help the mind settle down, is a meaningless sound versus other types of meditation that use words, phrases, or visualizations during the meditation practice,” says Pink. By focusing exclusively on your mantra, you aim to achieve a state of perfect stillness and consciousness.

I feel a sense of calm, and when I’m done, I have more energy and feel more focused and productive.

While some meditation practices encourage emptying the mind of all thoughts, TM encourages thoughts to come and go, like the passive activity of watching a cloud float by. According to Pink, this is an incredible strategy to manage daily anxieties created by worrisome thinking. “It teaches you how to create a space between you and your thoughts and become an observer.”

Currently My Favorite Online Meditation Course

If you haven’t seen it by now, my buddy , developed a fantastic step-by-step 5-week meditation course, that I’ve taken myself as well and found valuable.

This course has 35 daily video lessons, organized by week – each with its own unique themes, goals, and insights. These videos cover everything, from showing you how to make meditation a daily habit, to teaching you all the different meditation techniques .

I wholeheartedly suggest this program because it teaches you to practice meditation from the “inside out” – independently.

P.S. You can get this course for only $97 which means that you’ll pay $2.7 for each lesson. That’s crazy cheap.

The Whys And Hows Of Transcendental Meditation

Learning This Technique

Transcendental meditation, also known as TM for short, is a simple and effective form of meditation that is shown by research to be quite effective at minimizing anxiety, helping people manage stress, and even lowering blood pressure?? and carrying other benefits. It gained popularity in the 1960s, even attracting the attention of the Beatles, as well as other celebrities and notable people since then.

You can learn this form of meditation from a certified TM instructor in a few days, but you can also learn the basics here. Those who practice transcendental meditation may experience a decrease in stress and anxiety within minutes. As with other forms of meditation, long-term practice can lead to even more positive changes, including resilience to stress, lower overall anxiety, and even greater life satisfaction. It’s definitely worth taking a few minutes to learn more.

Where Does Transcendental Meditation Come From

Transcendental meditation was inspired by Indian spiritual traditions and was introduced into the West by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1995. Maharishi helped give Indian meditation a new lease on life.

We’re talking about the 6 million people who were taught this technique around the world. A number who, despite a few controversies, are basically trying to find the keys to happiness.

Meditation is first and foremost a way to gain self-awareness, understand what’s happening deep inside yourself, and a way to battle stress and depression. In addition to these benefits, there are also a number of physical benefits to practising transcendental meditation such as feeling more relaxed and reducing your blood pressure.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi .

Born in 1917 and died in 2008, he became a symbol of an American counter-culture and was featured in a number of publications, most notably .

While some dubbed it a sect, Maharishi founded a university, schools, and colleges around the world. His success is in part due to just how simple the technique can be and the fact that there were a lot of stars who got involved.

Check for pregnancy yoga near me here.

How Transcendental Meditation Alters The Brain

Lauren Sharkey

Transcendental meditation involves sitting with eyes shut for 15–20 minutes twice a day while saying a mantra. The practice has several advantages for mental health but, until now, it was unclear how those effects came about.

TM differs from other meditation practices in that it does not require concentration or visualization.

Instead, TM practitioners come up with a mantra, which is a word or phrase that has no real meaning.

The practitioners silently think this mantra, allowing the mind to naturally transcend, while both the mind and body remain awake, yet relaxed.

Most people can learn TM in a few months, and benefits from regular practice may include reduced feelings of stress and anxiety in a person’s everyday life.

Research has found some evidence of this. A 2013 study, appearing in Military Medicine, listed TM as a feasible treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder in active-duty military personnel.

Similarly, a study appearing in in 2014, concluded that a TM program was effective in reducing psychological distress in teachers.

A 2016 study from the same journal found significant reductions in symptoms of trauma, anxiety, and depression in prison inmates who practiced TM.

With benefits seen in a relatively short period, one field of study has dived deeper into TM to find out exactly how it helps.

Now, new findings published in Brain and Cognition point to measurable functional effects in the brain of TM practitioners.

Transcendental Meditation: Your Complete Guide Meditation

Are you looking for a newmeditation technique that is backed with science or that will offer you an abundance of benefits?

If yes, then your search ends here!

This is your complete guide to transcendental meditation. A form of meditation that recently got super famous and has nearly 5 million practitioners benefiting from it. So, are you ready to join this troop?

No, need more motivation?

Well, many celebrities including Ellen DeGeneres, Jerry Seinfeld, to name a few have claimed that Transcendental Meditation has changed their lives.

If they can, why do we miss this amazing meditation technique?

Let the journey to explore Transcendental Meditation begin…

What Does Transcendental Meditation Feel Like

The goal of TM is to achieve a positive state of mind and a deep sense of inner peace.

Meditation is always hard to explain to someone else in fine detail, as the feelings and experiences vary from person-to-person.

For me, however, I’d say that while I’m practicing TM I feel a deep, profound, sense of relaxation.

A much deeper state of relaxation than regular meditation. I can feel my heart slowing. Hear and feel every breath. I can feel stresses, aches and pains, and other tension I’m holding onto both physically and mentally literally floating away.

I come out of it after 20 minutes feeling a rush of mental alertness, physical energy, and a sense of clarity that’s hard to explain.

Since I started practicing, I’ve noticed a marked improvement in how calm I am at all times, improvements in my memory and concentration, and loads of positive benefits in how I handle relationships in my life.

My friends and family noticed the changes in me too.

From a scientific standpoint, TM are known to help:

Lower blood pressure

Help improve focus, attention span, and concentration

Promote emotional health

Reduce stress and anxiety

Improve sleep

– Struggling to meditate? Read how to get into a meditative state.

What Are Mantras In Transcendental Meditation

The great teacher of Transcendental Meditation Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said,

“Mantra is a specific thought which suits us, a suitable sound for us which we receive from a trained teacher of Transcendental Meditation. By using this mantra, the practitioner experiences the thought of that sound and starts minimizing that thought to experience the finer states of that thought – until the source of thought is fathomed and the conscious mind reaches the transcendental area of being.”

To put it in simpler words mantras are positive sounds that will help you grow in your life.

Characteristic Of Transcendental Meditation:

You can do this anytime and anywhere

We have 20-20 minutes to this meditation method

While doing these Transcendental Meditation basics, we have to utter some mantras, which you will get from the institution

We need to focus on something

In this meditation method, we do not need any kind of effort

We do not need any kind of concentration in this meditation

You do not even have to control your mind

This meditation is a scientific certification for depression and peace of mind. That is how does transcendental meditation work.

Transcendental Meditation How To Start Today

That’s exactly what I want to share with you today.

Trust me on this: When you know how to connect to your passion, you not only enjoy a lot more wealth, success, love, abundance and fun, but you also see your entire life taking on a more vibrant color, richness, and value.

It’s not just your bank account that is full — you also feel more fulfilled inside. The sense of struggle and having to push is gone. Everything seems so much more worthwhile. You’re excited to share what you’re doing with those you love and with the world! You feel like you’re a vital part of Life, contributing something special as only you can.

So, if you don’t currently feel that sense of burning joy and excitement in your life, what can you do about it?

The first step is to learn to read your signs. As you go about your life, notice what sparks your interest and curiosity. Let me give you an example…

Now I don’t watch much TV, but I discovered I like watching a bit of reality TV, because I find all sorts of people engaged in doing interesting things that they love – things that I would have never thought of, or never thought possible.

The point is that the various passions and paths are unique.

But what excites and interests YOU?

If money was no object and you could do anything you wanted all day, what might that be? What is important or fascinating to you?

What would you like to share with others?

If you’ve lost your feel for that, here’s a simple thing you can do to get it back:

Common Mantras For Transcendental Meditation

This meditation relies heavily on mantras that serve as a vehicle for the individual to concentrate on a particular style of mental functioning. So it’s important to choose the right mantra.

This may sound weird, but this synchronizes with the sound of your breath and is very effective.

Repeat this mantra as you breathe, so as you breathe in and hum as you breath out.

It has great vibration, which is essential for a mantra.

Hu hu hu hu: You will feel all the negativity leaving your mind as you recite this mantra. A simple mantra, it also works well.

Bodhi Svaha: This is a Buddhist word or mantra that gives peace to the mind and body.

Check out these transcendental meditation mantras according to your age and gender.

Why Should You Try Transcendental Meditation

Plain simply – Transcendental Meditation is the easiest form of meditation.

A lot of beginners of meditation are advised to do guided meditation as their intro to meditation. Personally, I tried numerous apps and while they’re helpful to understand the practice – they’re not as good as having control of your meditation at your own pace. Tm requires no concentration, no control of the mind, and no mental monitoring. These aspects of TM make it perfect for beginners.

Moreover, TM can be performed anywhere – while you’re waiting in line, at busy airports, etc. All you need is your mantra. No phone, no apps, no internet.

Lastly, there’s a lot of research that supports that TM greatly helps in reducing stress, anxiety

Benefits For Heart And Cardiovascular Health

One study from 2007 concluded that transcendental meditation “can be effective in improving the quality of life and functional capacity of African-American congestive heart failure patients.” Another study reported that the technique had a profound effect on the self-efficacy, perceived stress, and mental and physical quality of life of financially constrained mothers in Uganda.

Can I Teach Myself Transcendental Meditation

The official recommendation on transcendental meditation is that it must be taught by a certified teacher for four consecutive days. This is because the learner may not know if they are doing it correctly. Also, the mantra you are given as a learner, and not sharing that mantra, is an important part of the meditation. Engaging the service of a certified transcendental meditation teacher is often expensive, hence many people seek to learn it on their own.

Teaching yourself this form of meditation has its benefits. In fact, with persistence and continuous improvement, the learner may become very good in the practice with time. You can start slowly, and many people have said they have experienced good results by learning transcendental meditation on their own. There are many helpful books and videos on this form of meditation that anyone interested in the practice may use. Overall, what a transcendental meditation course gives you, that you can’t get on your own, is accountability and the support of a group of like-minded people.

Some Famous Transcendental Meditation Quotes

Sometimes quotes perfectly capture how someone feels about something. TM has some high-profile practitioners who have been very outspoken about how it’s changed their lives for the better.

Here are a few of my favorites:

I do transcendental meditation, which is, I suppose, derived from Vedic or Ayurvedic principles, which is sort of Hindu principles – Russel Brand

I’m actually big into meditation, transcendental meditation, and that really helps create not only a sense of balance, but all the other stuff this is gonna sound cliché… serenity and kind of a calm state of mind. And not that I’m like that all the time, but it helps me deal with life’s ups and downs, coming from more of a centered place. Also it helps with creativity – Eva Mendes

I think is what people need. They don’t need high minded talk, they need results – Paul McCartney

Transcendental Meditation is a mental technique, so you travel to this field through subtler levels of mind, and then subtler levels of intellect, and then, at the border of intellect, you transcend and experience it – David Lynch

The goal of the Transcendental Meditation technique is the state of enlightenment. This means we experience that inner calmness, that quiet state of least excitation, even when we are dynamically busy – Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

If world peace is to be established, peace in the individual must be established first. Transcendental Meditation directly brings peace in the individual life – Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Ask On Your Own Why This Is Happening To You

It’s continuously excellent to assess your life and likewise ask on your own what you’re grateful for.

What are the excellent ideas that have struck me?

What do I such as regarding my life currently and additionally precisely how can these be used as a stepping rock towards attaining more of those very same goals/dreams in future years beforehand?

These issues will absolutely aid us figure out if there’s something we need or want from our lives, which can then lead flawlessly into activity 6!

How Do I Practice Transcendental Meditation

Many reports support that T.M. technique should be practiced with a certified teacher while other advice that this seven-step course can be learned on your own. So we are covering both the aspects of practicing TM in this write-up.

Learning and Practicing Transcendental Meditation with Teacher

If you are planning to learn TM technique through a certified teacher you have to go through a seven-step course of instruction. This is what this seven-step TM procedure will comprise of:

1. In the first step of the TM technique, the teacher shares the relevant information and impact of it through a 60-minute introductory lecture.

2. This is followed by another specific information related lecture of 45 minutes.

3. Further people who find the TM technique interesting and wish to learn it attend a 15-minute interview.

4. This is followed by 1-3 hours of personal instructions.

5. After this, a mantra is given to them .

6. The correctness of practice and mantra chanting is seen for the coming 3 days. It is done by 1-2 hours of instruction so that mantra chanting becomes perfect and a part of an individual’s daily lifestyle.

7. Over the coming months, the teacher meets the practitioner regularly to ensure that they are practicing the TM technique correctly.

Learning and Transcendental Meditation on Your Own

Here is a step-by-step for you to follow and practice TM:

What Are Transcendental Meditation Mantras

So what are those mantras we spoke of before? Well, the word mantra translates to ‘mind vehicle’ is derived from Sanskrit: man = mind, tra = vehicle. For the TM technique – they are meaning-less sounds. These mantras hold value in the quality of the sound of the mantra rather than any special meaning.

Should You Begin Transcendental Meditation

The official website of transcendental meditation presents four major reasons to try the method.

It promotes the technique as one that does not require a disproportionate amount of effort or mentally taxing skill just to work. In fact, they outright state that the method is by no means intended to “empty the mind,” and that even children diagnosed with ADHD would have no trouble performing the practice.

Transcendental meditation courses are tailored specifically for the practitioner. The technique is taught by a single teacher to a single student, and is crafted based on your needs and preferences. Furthermore, only official transcendental meditation instructors are permitted to teach you the technique. That’s why there isn’t a single routine or formula that one can pull up and just follow to a T.

It’s purportedly “guaranteed” to work. As a matter of fact, it even comes with a satisfaction guarantee.

Perhaps the most compelling reason: the science checks out. According to their own tally, there are hundreds of research studies that have been published in the past few years, attesting to the transcendental meditation technique’s significant impact on preventing heart diseases, neurological functionality, and relieving stress.

1 note · View note

pnwdoodlesreads · 3 years

Link

"Our goal in the remainder of this paper is to identify key factors that constrain national park visitation among people of color. We believe a constraints perspective will illuminate why people of color do not make greater use of NPS areas, particularly those parks that are remote and where outdoor recreation and scenery are major attractions. This brief review will aid NPS staff and its partners as they continue to diversify the park service and create programs and offerings that are relevant to a broader spectrum of Americans.

[...]

Discrimination and White racial frames.

Lack of formative experience with outdoor recreation activities and national parks reinforces the belief that these recreation amenities and destinations are culturally irrelevant to people of color. The procurement of this belief is linked to discriminatory and exclusionary practices in the past and present. Indeed, members of dominant groups engage in boundary maintenance of their own which often results in their resisting the inclusion or assimilation of outsiders.

Discriminatory and exclusionary practices go back generations and have long constrained people of color in their efforts to visit parks or engage in various forms of public recreation. Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many people of color were legally barred from, or segregated at, public recreational sites, including national and state parks (Shumaker 2009; Lee and Scott 2016). Efforts to integrate recreation areas often resulted in physical violence. Simultaneously, many conservationists who were instrumental in the establishment of national parks expressed little interest in encouraging minority citizens’ visitation (Jordan and Snow 1992).

The impact of racial discrimination on leisure and outdoor recreation participation in contemporary America is well documented. Many people of color have noted that they routinely encounter acts of discrimination onsite or during their travels, which negatively impact their enjoyment and subsequent behavior (Lee and Scott 2017). Discrimination by other visitors is among the most frequently cited form of mistreatment, and may range from hostile stares to physical attacks (Sharaievska, Stodolska, and Floyd 2014). People of color also note that they have been the victims of discrimination from park and recreation workers.

Professional staff may simply be inattentive to the needs and interests of people of color, which may embolden other visitors to engage in acts of hostility (Fernandez and Witt 2013).Other researchers have acknowledged a more nuanced relationship between discrimination and outdoor recreation among people of color. Discrimination may actually stem from a variety of everyday interactions and unconscious assumptions (Young 1990) that are regarded by employees and stakeholders as legitimate and fair. Inequality is perpetuated over time, according to Scott (2014), by a variety of “practices and beliefs that are firmly embedded in the normal, everyday functioning” of how park and recreation services do business (p. 47).

Although these practices are outwardly neutral, they “systematically reflect or perpetuate the effects of preferential treatment in the past” (p. 48). For example, researchers have documented that White managers of parks, forests, and wilderness areas often assume that the majority of visitors are Whites, so interpretive exhibits and stories in these areas tend to predominantly celebrate White Americans’ history and heritages (Taylor 2000). Stories and contributions of people of color are often ignored or distorted (Loewen 1999; Lockhart 2006).

Central to the perpetuation of institutional bias is what Feagin (2013) called a White racial frame, which he defined as “an overarching white worldview that encompasses a broad and persisting set of racial stereotypes, prejudices, ideologies, images, interpretations and narratives, emotions, and reactions to language accents, as well as racialized inclinations to discriminate” (p. 3). The idea here is that Americans routinely and often unconsciously view White people and their behavior positively and represent the standard for evaluating what is good and moral.

In contrast, people of color and their behavior are regarded with suspicion, stereotypes, and notoriety. A White racial frame permeates how Americans institutions operate, including park and recreation delivery. Since its inception, the NPS has codified appropriate behavior and ways of experiencing national parks that are rooted in 19th-century White middle- and upper-class ideas about respectability and decorum (Cosgrove 1995; Byrne and Wolch 2009). In a nutshell, national parks are to be used for education and inspiration. This view is reinforced by the media, including nature documentaries. Among staff and many visitors, this translates into a form of enjoyment that gives primacy to quiet contemplation of nature rather than noisy, active use of nature.

Throughout the United States, many public spaces are equated as White spaces. Despite civil rights laws that legally forbid the exclusion of people of color from public facilities, many parks and public areas remain the province of Whites and off-limits, at least unofficially, to people of color. Austin (1997–1998) observed that many White Americans have a proprietary attitude about the public places they occupy and rules for appropriate behavior.

People of color who venture into White spaces, including national parks, may be treated rather coolly and, not surprisingly, feel unwelcome and remain on their guard (Carter 2008). Moreover, their behavior in White spaces often comes under severe scrutiny. Leisure among young African American males, in particular, is often viewed as pathological, disruptive, anda major source of disturbance in public settings (Austin 1997–1998). This has led to no small amount of racial profiling and monitoring in public parks and recreation areas. It can be surmised that many people of color in the United States are constrained from more fully accessing a wider range of outdoor recreation activities and NPS areas because of the existence of a firmly entrenched White racial frame.

A White racial frame makes it daunting for people of color to participate in outdoor recreation activities and visit parks where they are in the minority. Mikhail Martin, a young African American from Queens and co-founder of Brothers of Climbing, explained why so few Blacks participate in rock climbing: “In the black community, there’s this misconception that, ‘Oh, Black people don’t do that. Only White people do this.’

And they have every right to believe that, because their outlet to the world is what you see on the TV and internet, and if you don’t see any Black people, or any people of color climbing, you’re not going to think you can do it” (REI 2017). J. Drew Lanham (2013), a serious birdwatcher and African American, offered nine “rules” for African American birdwatchers. An abbreviated list is as follows:

• Be prepared to be confused with the other black birdwatcher

.• Carry your binoculars—and three forms of identification—at all times.

• Don’t bird in a hoodie.

• Nocturnal birding is a no-no.

Some White visitors are vociferous in their opposition to the NPS’s efforts to promote ethnic and racial diversity in the national parks. The following letter to the editor, publishedin National Parks magazine, blasted the NPS for what the writer regarded as a misguided initiative: “Your recent article ... was way off target. To modify the National Park System tolure ethnic minorities would be a disaster and one more facet of our country that would be changed to please a few, ignoring the desires of the majority…. If minorities do not like goingto the parks, it is their loss. But please don’t let us be duped into thinking it is our loss. Many of us look to the parks as an escape from the problems ethnic minorities create. Please don’tmodify our parks to destroy our oasis” (Lucier 1994: 6). Three other letters were published along with this one and they too were critical of the NPS in its diversity efforts.

CONCLUSIONS

Despite NPS’s efforts to diversify its staff and create sites that reflect the history of all Americans, people of color are far less likely to visit many national parks compared with Whites and they face formidable constraints to visitation. We have argued that non-visitation can be boiled down to limited socioeconomic resources, cultural factors and boundary maintenance, and discrimination and a White racial frame.

These constraints limit visitation and the acquisition of leisure preferences that define outdoor recreation and NPS destinations as culturally relevant and appropriate. Is there anything the NPS can do to alleviate these constraints? Webelieve that service provision for people of color can be improved by ensuring that programs and facilities are affordable, accessible, culturally relevant, safe, and welcoming.

0 notes

bluewatsons · 4 years

Text

Amy Koerber, From Hysteria to Hormones and Back Again: Centuries of Outrageous Remarks About Female Biology, 1 Rhetoric of Health & Med 179 (2018)

In this persuasion brief I suggest how rhetorical-historical insights into the scientific and medical discourses of female hormones are relevant to current organizational and institutional diversity initiatives, especially those that aim to increase the number of women in leadership positions. Many of the examples I cite in the essay make specific reference to hormones, and as I argue, hormones often serve an enthymematic function in these expert arguments, both past and present. More specifically, I argue, discourses about hormones allow people who do not possess any scientific expertise to make authoritative-sounding claims that resonate with popular beliefs about women's bodies and brains. Uncovering these historical tendencies in scientific and medical discourse offers new perspectives on the obstacles that women face in today's workplaces. In this persuasion brief I aim to discuss these perspectives in ways that make the findings of rhetorical-historical research relevant to the many different stakeholders, leaders, and policymakers who are currently working to help women rise to leadership positions in many different fields.

When Google engineer James Damore recently wrote an internal memo arguing against Google's diversity efforts, he made several authoritative claims about female biology. These claims were meant to support his larger argument that the gender disparities in the high-tech industry are a result of biological differences between the genders—not a result of gender discrimination. As Damore explained, "men and women biologically differ in many ways" (n.p.). Hormones played an important role in Damore's argument, as is often the case in popular and expert explanations of sex difference. For example, Damore supported his claims about biological difference with several "facts," including a statement that the differences he identified "often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone." Then Damore went on to say, "these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership." He listed several examples of these biologically determined differences:

Women "have a stronger interest in people rather than things."

Women have "higher agreeableness," and this means they have "a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading."

Women experience "neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)," and "This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high-stress jobs."

In the remainder of his memo, Damore elaborated his theory of presumed biological differences as a reason why we do not see more women in high-tech leadership positions. As he said, "These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life" (n.p.).

At this point, readers from any discipline might be asking why an engineer at Google feels qualified to make such extensive claims about female biology and its relationship to women's professional success. These kinds of questions about the expertise, authority, and credibility of those who make claims on a subject such as female biology are questions that rhetorical scholars of health and medicine are well equipped to address. We use a wide variety of methodological approaches to address such questions, and our research findings in this area have important implications that extend beyond our narrow academic field. As Judy Segal (2005) says, the findings of rhetorical research in health and medicine can be "useful" for "clinical practice and health policy" even if they cannot be "applied" in the same way that clinical research, or some social science research, can be applied directly to healthcare practice or policy (p. 4). In this persuasion brief I broaden the scope of Segal's claims about the usefulness of rhetorical-historical research in health and medicine to explore how the findings of such research can have relevance that even extends beyond clinical practice and healthcare policy. Specifically, in this persuasion brief, I address those stakeholders in the academy, and in the private sector, who are leaders in workplace diversity initiatives.

For every James Damore in the world, there are organizations and initiatives that are dedicated to helping women succeed in the academy, the high-tech sector, and elsewhere. These include freestanding organizations such as Catalyst, a "nonprofit organization with a mission to accelerate progress for women through workplace inclusion" (n.p.), but they also include efforts within organizations and institutions. In fact, Damore's memo was titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," and it was provoked by a diversity initiative that was underway at Google when he wrote it. His memo included scathing criticism of Google for, in his words, creating "several discriminatory practices" to try to help women overcome the obvious gender disparities that exist at Google. Specific examples that he mentions include "programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race," "special treatment for 'diversity' candidates," and "hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates" (n.p.).

What Does Rhetoric Have To Do With It?

In a rhetorical-historical project that I have recently completed, I explore a centuries-long pattern of language use that has developed around one of the concepts that played an important part in Damore's argument: hormones. One of the key findings of my rhetorical-historical study is that hormones have become a shorthand version of more complicated arguments about female biology. To use a term from rhetorical theory, hormones serve an enthymematic purpose—that is, they allow long, complex arguments to be condensed into something simple so that an engineer, or a politician, or a business executive, or a judge can speak with great credibility on a topic such as female biology.

In classical rhetoric, enthymeme was defined as an abbreviated syllogism—a deductive argument in which one of the premises is left unstated, usually because the audience already assumes this premise to be true, so leaving it unstated allows the argument to be more concise and impactful. In contemporary rhetorical theory, enthymeme has been defined more broadly to include any argument that is condensed or made brief by leaving a key component unstated. The omission that characterizes enthymemes makes such arguments especially powerful. Thus, enthymemes facilitate movement within the minds and bodies of audiences at a given time and place, but they also allow ideas to move across physical, digital, and geographic space, such as when a scientific study receives a great deal of media attention and then feeds into the frenzy of popular beliefs that can surround a topic that piques public interest.

My own findings about the enthymematic function of hormones in scientific and popular discourse emerged from an extensive rhetorical-historical study of a large number of scientific and medical texts, extending from ancient times to the present. My study reveals how in the early twentieth century the term "hormone" started gradually to replace the concept of hysteria—which had been used to explain female problems since the beginning of recorded history—while still allowing ancient ideas about female biology to persist in modern scientific texts. This study's findings are relevant to workplace diversity initiatives because they reveal some of the hidden assumptions and patterns of language use that pose obstacles to initiatives that aim to increase diversity and bring more women into leadership positions—whether in high-tech industry, the sciences, or the academy or private sector more broadly conceived.

To briefly summarize my research findings, the "mansplaining" of female biology evident in James Damore's memo is not really anything new. This kind of mansplaining has been going on for a very long time—all the way through recorded history, actually. A lack of qualifications, or of scientific facts, has never stopped self-designated "experts" from making authoritative claims about female biology. Throughout much of that history, it was hysteria (which derives from the Greek word for womb) that provided the dominant metaphor in these "mansplain-ations." However, when British physician Ernest Henry Starling coined the term hormone in a 1905 lecture to the Royal Society in London, the experts suddenly had access to a whole new vocabulary for diagnosing female problems (Koerber, 2018).

For at least a couple of decades before Starling first used the word hormone, experts knew there was a chemical substance that enabled the organs to communicate with each other to enable processes like digestion and respiration. However, they did not have a good word to describe these substances—they were using vague terms like "chemical messenger" and "internal secretion." None of these terms was powerful enough to win the argument, so the experts kept going back and forth, quibbling over how to interpret the same old evidence. But when researchers finally had a word they could all agree on, the science moved forward after decades of standstill. By 1915, endocrinology had become established, and this field continued to experience rapid growth for many years after that.

The impact of hormones on scientific understandings of the female body has been profound. The belief in hysteria, which spans the centuries of recorded history, was based on wild imaginings about the womb wandering around inside a woman's body, whereas the relatively new belief in hormones is based on scientifically verified chemical substances with resulting behaviors and systemic effects that can be measured, documented, and replicated in the laboratory. The short version of this story is that science has gradually come to replace mysticism and religious beliefs as the basis for understanding women's bodies and women's health.

As we see in examples such as the Damore memo, however, some aspects of the transition from the hysterical woman to the hormonal woman have been far less absolute than we might expect. The reasons for this are made apparent through close examination of the scientific texts in which this transition occurred. When medical experts first introduced terms like "premenstrual tension" in the mid-twentieth century, for instance, the language they used to describe symptoms was taken directly from medical texts in previous eras that described female symptoms affiliated with hysteria. Using the rhetorical concept of metaphor, which derives from the Greek term for "carrying over," we can see how the earliest configurations of the hormonal woman in mid-twentieth-century medical texts carried over meanings that, in the older medical texts, had been carried by the hysterical woman metaphor.

And even in the most recent medical texts, written within the last decade, researchers approach female hormones from perspectives that are shaped by centuries of belief in the idea that women's bodies are fundamentally irregular and much more difficult to manage than men's bodies. The very fact that there is a whole body of scientific research devoted to topics such as "pregnancy brain" is reminiscent of a distrust of the female body that has its origins in the centuries-long belief that the uterus has a special influence on the female brain and that women's health—both mental and physical—is defined by this problematic body-brain relationship. Furthermore, when we consider how this information is communicated to the public with headlines such as "Changing Hormones and Mood Swings: What You Can Do" (Bouchez, n.d.) and "Mommy Brain: Yes, It's a Thing" (Lucia, n.d.), it becomes even clearer that ancient beliefs about the female mind-body relationship have not entirely vanished from our popular imagination.

As rhetorical scholars of health and medicine, an important part of what we do is illuminate the processes through which new scientific terms and concepts gradually morph from older terms and concepts. This kind of rhetorical-historical research on language and meaning allows us to understand the history of medical beliefs on a subject such as female hormones as a rhetorical movement that is characterized by anything but progression along a straight line. Rhetorical-historical research suggests that the forms of movement that are evident in these scientific rhetorics are best characterized as folding, fluxing, morphing, and twisting. Through close examination of the scientific and popular texts that facilitate these forms of movement, we can see how a concept such as hormones never fully breaks from its history, but instead, comes to encapsulate key ideas from that history, reshaping these concepts in ways that fit the demands of ever-changing rhetorical contexts. This highlights a fundamentally conservative element of the scientific endeavor, suggesting that one reason why new ideas emerge is to preserve old ways of thinking—to make those old ideas acceptable to new audiences—rather than only effect a clean break from the past.

A Few Additional Examples

In a recent New York Times article, Gerri Elliott, a former senior executive at Juniper Networks, recounts a story about a workplace experience that was related to her by a colleague: "A presenter asked a group of men and women whether anyone had expertise in breast-feeding. A man raised his hand. He had watched his wife for three months. The women in the crowd, mothers among them, didn't come forward as experts" (Chira, 2017). And, turning to a less light-hearted example, in 2012, Missouri Congressman Todd Akin caught the attention of audiences around the world with his public comment that rape was not likely to result in pregnancy because "from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down" (Alter, 2014). And Akin is not the first modern public figure who has made remarks like this about the female body. Washington Post reporter Sarah Kliff (2012) traces a series of comments along similar lines back to at least the 1980s, documenting how such arguments, for several decades, have been used to deny the necessity of exceptions for rape in anti-abortion legislation. The common theme in all these examples, and a theme that also connects these examples to the claims that Damore makes in his memo, is powerful public figures making authoritative claims about female biology without any actual qualifications to do so—except that they are men who occupy positions in society that enable them to speak authoritatively on any subject about which they wish to speak authoritatively. Additional examples reported by Kliff include Stephen Freind's 1988 remark that during rape, "a woman secretes a certain secretion, which has the tendency to kill sperm," and Garance Franke-Ruta's 1995 claim that "The facts show that people who are raped—truly raped—the juices don't flow."

When a politician such as Todd Akin attests publicly that a woman cannot get pregnant if she is "legitimately" raped, it might be easy to dismiss those remarks as coming from a crackpot politician who has no scientific credibility. Of course, we can take some solace from the fact that Akin lost his election in 2012 after those remarks went viral. And we can take even more solace, perhaps even enjoy some laughter, from the fact that Akin made a complete horse's ass of himself two years later in a 2014 interview when he said, "I had a number of people in my campaign that were children . . . who were conceived in rape," and MSNBC host Chuck Todd responded by pointing out something that might seem obvious to most people: Akin's statement about all the people in his campaign who were conceived in rape completely contradicted his 2012 claim that women's bodies would shut down conception in the course of a "legitimate rape" (Alter, 2014). But now that we are living in a new reality, we cannot afford to feel quite so comfortable or amused by President Donald Trump's well-documented history of public misogynistic remarks, which often refer to specific aspects of female biology.

Through the many different examples I am providing in this essay, I am trying to make clear that there is a danger in setting aside outrageous remarks about female embodiment—whether they are made by a crackpot misogynistic politician who loses the election after making the remarks, or by a crackpot misogynistic politician who wins the election and becomes president of the United States after making these remarks. Rhetorical-historical research that explores the centuries of scientific discourse on female biology that precede the present moment offers us a unique perspective on these current discourses. Without understanding this preceding discourse, and without understanding how the earliest references to female hormones were literally built from the concept of hysteria that dominated expert beliefs about women's health for centuries prior to the 1905 emergence of the word hormone, we will never understand why the discourse of Todd Akin, James Damore, President Donald Trump, and so many others like them can keep surfacing and resurfacing, again and again, even in the twenty-first century. Specifically, the rhetorical-historical research that I have conducted over the last few years reveals a phenomenon that manifests itself in an endless number of rhetorical configurations throughout the eras of recorded history—configurations in which the female mind and body repeatedly emerge as foreign, mysterious, or defective versions of the male mind and body.

Action Items

Rhetorical-historical research in health and medicine is relevant to stakeholders involved in diversity initiatives at Google and elsewhere because, as Damore's memo makes clear, the problem that stakeholders on all sides of this controversy are addressing is fundamentally a rhetorical problem. Like any rhetorical problem, it can be viewed from many different, often conflicting, perspectives. From one perspective, when Damore makes these claims about female biology, he is benefitting from a long tradition that has enabled men to make authoritative claims about female biology, whether or not they possess any expertise in this area, and whether or not they have any credible scientific findings to sustain their claims. It is easy, of course, for those who would argue against Damore to depict him as misogynistic, ignorant, and ridiculous. But from another perspective, we need to be careful focusing too much on Damore as an individual because that might cause us to ignore the fact that a man like him has hundreds of years of "science" to back him up. If we do not pay attention to that long tradition of scientific discourse, it is hard to grasp why there will always be individuals like Damore or Akin who can make claims like these and be believed by some audiences. From yet another perspective—one that I find especially concerning—the same people who are likely to be the most vocal critics of the kind of language that appears in Damore's memo are, at the same time, often willing to accept casual claims about female biology when these claims appear in a less blatantly misogynistic manner. For example, it is not uncommon for women themselves to talk about the "pregnancy brain" that they experience, or about "feeling hormonal." And, in fact, when I have discussed my research in public forums, more than one woman has expressed concern that my rhetorical critique of such language might risk denying their capacity to describe what they are experiencing. I acknowledge this risk, but I still contend that until we interrogate the scientific origins of all of these patterns of language use—blatantly misogynistic language as well as the mundane phrases that seem less shocking—we cannot fully understand why it is that people like Damore and Akin keep resurfacing; nor can we fully appreciate the severity of the damage that is caused by any of these remarks.

Returning to the question of workplace diversity initiatives, one of the ways in which this rhetorical problem can be summarized has been expressed eloquently by a leading expert in this area who recently said, "it is difficult if not impossible to believe that you can be what you cannot see. If there's no one like you 'up there,' it's not likely you'll get there . . ." (Silva & Ibarra, 2012). This is a useful way to characterize this rhetorical problem because it captures the importance of the relationship between the images people see on a daily basis and their beliefs about what they can become or what they can achieve. And it's important to note that these ordinary images that people see on a daily basis are often less shocking and attention-grabbing than the obviously misogynistic words of Damore and Akin, both of which went viral and gained wide readership. But rhetorical-historical research on the scientific discourses of female biology is perfectly suited to exposing the layers of meaning that lie behind the surface of discourses that we see on a daily basis, similar to the manner in which archaeologists illuminate current practices by exposing layers of meaning from the past.

What I ultimately want to argue is that current efforts to address the diversity problem in today's workplaces, organizations, and institutions are always going to be hampered by the fact that they are only addressing the surface of the problem. I certainly applaud these efforts, and as an academic administrator at a large public research university, I am also actively involved in these efforts on a daily basis. But as long as we are only looking to increase the number of particular demographic groups who occupy particular positions, the changes we implement will only scratch the surface. Rhetorical-historical research lets us take the next step and see the patterns of language use that make it seem normal for women to remain underrepresented in the higher ranks, especially in areas such as the high-tech and financial sectors. Until we look beneath the surface of crackpot, misogynistic remarks and acknowledge that the assumptions stated in these remarks are actually embedded in the same expert scientific discourses that we have always treated as neutral and authoritative in the Western tradition, we will not fully appreciate why the battle we are fighting is such a hard one. Another important component of this is acknowledging that we often participate, perhaps unknowingly, in perpetuating such problematic assumptions when we casually use terms such as "pregnancy brain" or "feeling hormonal."

Before we can work toward a goal such as increasing the number of women in leadership positions, we need to step back and do an archeological dig that exposes and dislodges the deeply entrenched assumptions that, for many centuries before this, have made it seem impossible, or at least unlikely, that a woman could succeed as a leader. Instead, when we hear the word "diversity" in today's discourse, it is often part of a moral argument for an organization's obligation to increase its diversity, as visible on the surface. For example, in early 2017, after several media reports made clear that gender discrimination and sexual harassment were rampant at Uber, the company's CEO, Travis Kalanick, responded by acknowledging that only "15.1% of [Uber] employees are women." He also promised to improve "diversity and inclusion at Uber" and to "fight for and support those who experience injustice" (Swisher, 2017).

I am asking us (stakeholders interested in increasing diversity, myself included) to take a more expansive view, to start imagining diversity initiatives that go beyond scratching the surface. We need to re-frame the diversity conversation so that, from the beginning, we insist on the inherent benefits of diversity in knowledge production, reporting, and reception. The common thread connecting the varied examples that I have presented in this essay is that they are all examples of situations in which we grant too much authority to experts, just because they are perceived as experts, and even if they do not possess qualifications to speak on the subject about which they are speaking. It is not, by any stretch of anyone's imagination, a coincidence that most of these experts belong to the same demographic group: white Western males. Until we acknowledge the long historical tradition that has allowed this single group to speak authoritatively about women, we will have a hard time fighting against this tendency. There is a sharp contrast between the automatic authority that is granted to these experts in so many different domains and the absolute lack of credibility that is granted to women themselves to speak about their own experiences as embodied individuals. And unfortunately, sometimes women participate in these patterns—hence, the breastfeeding example above, and the use of terms such as "pregnancy brain." Certainly we can find other ways to speak and think about female biology, but it's going to require a lot of hard work.

The larger point I want to make, in closing, is that this is not just a matter of social justice, or of everyone getting a chance to sit at the table where expert knowledge comes to be. This is ultimately a pathway to making better knowledge. And here is where I am intentionally looking beyond the disciplinary borders that delineate what counts as the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM), and invoking some recent social science research that I believe complements our rhetorical scholarship in important ways. In addition to the obvious moral reasons why it is important to achieve greater diversity in institutions and organizations involved in expert knowledge production, I believe that recent research in the new field of social physics has the potential to help us think of this situation in terms of practical benefits. That is because social physics provides us with quantitative evidence that shows organizations function more effectively, and are more productive and successful, when mechanisms are in place to ensure that ideas are, as Alex Pentland (2014) says, harvested from everyone in the organization. Pentland defines social physics as "a quantitative social science that describes reliable, mathematical connections between information and idea flow on the one hand and people's behavior on the other" (p. 4). He and his team use this new science to provide empirical evidence that demonstrates the value of achieving broad input in decision-making from all sectors of an organization, rather than limiting decision-making authority to a few individuals located at the top of an institutional hierarchy. In Pentland's words, social physics "enables us to predict the productivity of small groups, of departments within companies, and even of entire cities. It also helps us tune communication networks so that we can reliably make better decisions and become more productive" (p. 4). Pentland goes on to assert that, "When decision making falls to those best situated to make the decision rather than those with the highest rank, the resulting organization is far more robust and resistant to disruption" (p. 211). Working with his team of graduate students and colleagues in the MIT Lab that he directs, Pentland designed a method of collecting data on all kinds of human interactions within specific organizations, including electronic communication such as e-mail but also precise counts of the quantity and nature of face-to-face interactions and phone calls. He claims that this groundbreaking method of data collection provides quantifiable evidence to show the monetary value that an organization can accrue by achieving a more diverse workforce and ensuring that everyone in this workforce is able to contribute good ideas.

Although Pentland's (2014) social physics approach is implemented in the context of specific organizations, and is thus geared toward business professionals, I believe the ideas established in his team's study can potentially revolutionize the arguments we make in favor of workplace diversity. Rather than continuing to depict this as a problem that individuals face and that institutions need to solve to benefit these individuals, we can come to understand diversity as a goal that will enable academic institutions, and the scientific enterprise at large, to produce more and better knowledge.

This social physics approach suggests that our whole world can benefit from achieving a knowledge-producing enterprise that is more inclusive—that is, achieving an apparatus of scientific knowledge production that incorporates contributions from a wider, more diverse group of knowledge producers. Similar ideas are also reinforced in recent leadership communication research. For example, Judith Baxter's (2015) study of gender difference in leadership teams is perhaps one of the first to offer close scrutiny of gender dynamics in different kinds of teams: male-only, female-only, and mixed gender teams. The most important finding about the teams included in this study is the value of diversity to team productivity. As the author concludes, "Gender balance and diversity within a leadership team enables its members to utilize a wider linguistic and business communication repertoire, leading to more supportive working relationships and the successful accomplishment of business leadership goals" (p. 448).

The approach that I am advocating allows us to understand that the problem with the long history of misogyny that permeates medical discourses of female biology is not just in the content of the ideas that it has perpetuated, but in the fact that the knowledge production has been almost entirely a one-way process, with men producing knowledge about women. This persistent pattern, accumulated over so many centuries, is why even in today's scientific discourse we see so many deeply embedded judgments that are made by men about women. If you live in a world in which there is a centuries-long tradition dictating that one group will be the knowledge producers and another will be the objects of knowledge, it is not surprising that the former group will be granted expert authority in everything they say, while the latter group will be perpetually depicted as mysterious, pathological, uncontrollable, and in need of further explanation.

Although they might use different words, like suggesting that women have "juices" that control reproduction or that their bodies can "shut the whole thing down," hormones or something like them have a special role to play in the diverse examples I have used in this essay to highlight the contrast between the knowers and the objects of knowledge. Recall that in the Google memo that I discussed at the beginning of this essay, "prenatal testosterone" was the scientific foundation for the Google engineer's theories of biological difference. In revealing how deeply embedded such patterns have become in our everyday lives, rhetorical research also identifies openings and gaps where it is possible to introduce twists and turns and mutations. Although this might not mean we can escape the old patterns, it can help us find new ways to live with them, and it can reorient our approach to diversity initiatives in the private and public sectors.

References

Alter, Charlotte. (2014, July 17). Todd Akin still doesn't get what's wrong with saying "legitimate rape." Time. Retrieved from http://time.com/3001785/todd-akin-legitimate-rape-msnbc-child-of-rape/

Baxter, Judith. (2015). Who wants to be the leader? The linguistic construction of emerging leadership in differently gendered teams. International Journal of Business Communication, 52, 427–451.

Bouchez, Colette. (n.d.). Changing hormones and mood swings: What you can do. WebMD. Retrieved from http://www.webmd.com/women/features/escape-hormone-horrors-what-you-can-do#1

Catalyst. (n.d.). Who we are. http://www.catalyst.org/who-we-are

Chira, Susan. (2017, July 21). Why women aren't CEOs, according to women who almost were. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/sunday-review/women-ceos-glass-ceiling.html?mwrsm=Facebook

Damore, James. (2017, August 5). Google's ideological echo chamber [Web log comment]. Retrieved from https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320

Kliff, Sarah. (2012, August 20). Rep. Todd Akin is wrong about rape and pregnancy, but he's not alone. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/08/20/rep-todd-akin-is-wrong-about-rape-and-pregnancy-but-hes-not-alone/

Koerber, Amy. (2018) From hysteria to hormones: A rhetorical history. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

Lucia, Carole Anderson. (n.d.). Mommy brain: Yes, it's a thing. FitPregnancy and Baby. Retrieved from https://www.fitpregnancy.com/parenting/real-mom-stories/your-incredible-shrinking-brain

Pentland, Alex. (2014). Social physics: How good ideas spread—the lessons learned from a new science. New York: Penguin.

Segal, Judy Z. (2005). Health and the rhetoric of medicine. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Silva, Christine, & Ibarra, Herminia. (2012, November 14). Study: Women get fewer game-changing leadership roles. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2012/11/study-women-get-fewer-game-changing.html

Swisher, Kara. (2017, February 20). Uber CEO Travis Kalanick says the company has hired former Attorney General Eric Holder to probe allegations of sexism. Recode. Retrieved from https://www.recode.net/2017/2/20/14677546/uber-ceo-travis-kalanick-eric-holder-memo

#science #science communication #biology #sexism #political discourse #women's health #female biology #feminism #leadership #diversity #embodiment #hysteria #hormones #misogyny #rhetoric

0 notes

terabitweb · 5 years

Text

Original Post from SC Magazine Author: Victor M. Thomas

At the risk of potentially alienating a high-demand workforce that potentially can jump to a new company for seemingly minor perks such as company-paid cafeterias or flex time with little oversight, CISOs today find themselves with a challenge. In order to protect their corporations against data breach from internal and external sources, CISOs have a tool that is effective at identifying breaches but some employees might find a bit too intrusive: analytics. The move to analytics-based security — be it behavioral, threat intelligence, big data, or one of a myriad of other analytics technologies — could be interpreted as Big Brother watching over the employees.

The potential damage that an insider attack can inflict on a business is massive, a reality that prompted some enterprises to use analytics, keystroke capture, and digital video to track insiders. But are the risks of a company alienating its employees and contractors worth it? Are analytics even an effective means of neutralizing insider threats?

When exploring insider threats, it is critical to focus on the distinctions between a potential and an actual threat. The potential threat is significant with insider attacks, given that these are people who already have legitimate credentials to a company’s systems and who, one way or another, exceed their authority on the system and do something unauthorized such as sabotage servers or steal company data and sell it to a competitor.

But the true threat from insiders is a matter of debate with some experts saying the actual insider threats seen are small compared with today’s external attacks. Then there is the question of how one defines an insider threat in the first place. Forrester Research, for example, defines an insider threat as any breach that is caused or facilitated by an insider, whether it is an “accidental insider or malicious insider,” says Forrester Principal Analyst Joseph Blankenship. Forrester considers accidental insider attacks as ones where the insider had no malicious intent — perhaps an employee accidentally left a port open and an attacker leveraged that to gain access or saved a file to an insecure thumb drive so they could work at home rather than remain in the office.

Using Forrester’s all-encompassing definition, Blankenship reports that insiders were responsible for 24 percent of all data breaches last year. But when limiting the definition to just malicious insiders — the definition commonly assumed in IT and security circles — that percentage drops to closer to 11 percent, he says. That suggests that 89 percent of all attackers were external.

“Some of the vendor marketing may be overblowing the insider threat,” Blankenship says.

IDC uses a similar insider threat definition as does Forrester, also including unintentional insider acts that facilitate external attacks. “The number goes down pretty dramatically if you start to remove things that are unintentional,” says Sean Pike, program vice president for security products at IDC. “Malicious is always a pretty small number, but they are very impactful because they have so much access.”

Another important component of an insider threat analytics strategy is whether to try and keep it secret or not. The “keep it secret” argument focuses on preventing any employee or contractor backlash from them being monitored so precisely. The “disclose it” argument speaks to deterrence, suggesting that the main reason for launching such analytics is less to catch insider evildoers than to discourage anyone from trying.

Indeed, the deterrence argument is made quite handedly by some companies that say that they are monitoring employees, when they really are not. Danny Rogers, the CEO of a Dark Web intelligence company called Terbium Labs, used to work with a casino that populated its money-counting rooms with fake cameras with little red lights on them. He calls it “security theater.” That way, the casino got almost all of the deterrence of true monitoring without almost any of the cost.

That works until an incident occurs and the company has to fess up publicly that it has no footage. But even then, would employees assume that all cameras are still fake? The cat-and-mouse game of loss prevention psychology will get a full workout.

Setting aside the psychodrama of “Are they or are they not tracking us,” the better question to ask is “Should they or shouldn’t they be tracking us?” Rogers positions himself in the “they shouldn’t” camp and he says it is for several reasons.

“When it comes to limits of mining employee data for signs of insider threats, I worry these efforts have already moved too quickly into the realm of ‘pre-crime,’ in which false positives result in employees’ benign activities being interpreted as threatening with employees being wrongfully terminated as a result,” Rogers says.

Danny Rogers, CEO, Terbium Labs

“The truth is that it’s very difficult to define ‘normal’ behavior for an employee,” he continues. “Often, one’s most productive and creative employees regularly engage in seemingly abnormal behavior as part of their work. In fact, onerous employee surveillance can have a chilling effect on innovation within a company. Generally, I think too much reliance on limited or biased AI (artificial intelligence), whether in looking for anomalous behavior of employees, software, or networks, is resulting in everything from alert fatigue to the increased risk of wrongful termination litigation. You have to have trust in the people in your organization.”

Rogers’ concerns here break down into two basic points. First, it is a bad idea to surveil because of where it might lead. Secondly, it most likely will not work anyway.

As for why it likely would not work, Rogers’ argument is that deviation analytics, which is typically what machine learning does, needs to know what to look for. “You can’t really define abnormal until you define normal. Can you actually define a narrow ring of normal for any given user?” Rogers asks. “It may sound nice in a marketing sense, but I don’t think you can define a narrow enough definition of normal for this to work.”

Rogers’s argument is that for the analytics to work well, it needs to be given a large number of samples of what network activity looks like when there are no insider attacks and it ideally also needs to be shown what it looks like when there are such insider attacks. But that is a challenge in logic, as a company would presumably never have complete confidence that there were no insider attacks happening during any sample period.

David Pearson, principal threat researcher at Awake Security, a former adjunct professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories, agrees with Rogers’ concern about the quality of the initial dataset. “How great would it be to be the attacker who got in before your fancy baseline was established as the norm?” Pearson asks rhetorically.

IDC’s Pike vehemently disagrees with both Pearson and Rogers. “It’s a little silly as an argument” that a company would never have a perfect snapshot in time of noncriminal activity, Pike says.

Sean Pike, security products program vice president, IDC

“You’ve got to start somewhere and you may very well need to start at a place where there is rampant fraud happening. As the system goes on, those behavioral patterns will change,” Pike says. “You might spot a pattern (of fraud) and go back and say ‘Now I see it.’”

Pike’s position is that companies must start by looking for the easy things, “the low-hanging fruit” such as employees logging in at odd times, starting to come in early or leaving late when that was never their pattern, their browsing activity, where they are logging in from, and which files are they trying to access. “It’s not so incredibly intrusive,” Pike says. “It’s sort of nonthreatening to employees.”

But is aggressive tracking an overall effective tactic to thwart insider attacks? Pike maintains that it generally is. First, there is a lot of monitoring that is required. “There are regulatory obligations to do some sorts of surveillance,” such as recording phone calls with customers, Pike says. Indeed, some surveillance “has been lifesaving,” such as when the system detects that an employee is acting suicidal.

As for employee pushback and potential resentment to extensive surveillance, Pike does not think that should be a significant concern. First, he does not believe that the surveillance should be announced. “I like my surveillance with a side of secrecy,” Pike says. “It really all depends on what you do with that information. The bad actors will probe ‘What can I get away with here?’ It’s only when you act on anything, that’s where you start alienating folk.”

For example, Pike says, if a manager cracked down on an employee for coming in late based on network analytics and cited the network analytics as the reason that could cause problems. It is better, Pike says, to file away such information and wait to observe corroborating evidence personally. “Even though you have the information, you don’t have to act on every single piece,” Pike says.

Anton Chuvakin, research vice president, distinguished analyst, Gartner

Forrester’s Blankenship agrees. “How much are you advertising that you’re doing this monitoring? For example, has anyone been fired as a result? The employees may not even know that they are being monitored.”

Blankenship also points to the level of monitoring and how far it goes beyond what employees expect and assume companies are doing. And that perception changes sharply from one another with defense contractors and banking employees assuming far more surveillance than might be the case with agriculture and hotel industry employees.

“In the U.S., most employees would say that if they are working on a company device, that they would expect (monitoring) to happen,” Blankenship says.

Anton Chuvakin, a Gartner research vice president and distinguished analyst for security and risk management, says the attitudes about surveillance and analytics, especially as it comes to insider attack threats, sharply changes as the geographies and verticals change. “The European Union and Europe in general tend to be on the ‘do not do it’ side,” Chuvakin says. “The U.S. government does it a lot. And U.S. corporate is somewhere in the middle.”

Although Chuvakin offers questions about keystroke logging — “Is it creepy?” he quips — he stresses that the question is truly perceptional. “It is very heavily in the eye of the beholder.”

There is also a strategic question of how much time and effort should be focused on security dealing with the insider threat. For many in security, it is just not much of a priority. “People are too busy fighting malware to even think about insiders,” Chuvakin says.

When it comes to security and privacy, Europeans often look at the topic differently than their counterparts in North America. Catherine Flick is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Committee on Professional Ethics as well as being a reader (the British rough equivalent of a tenured professor) in Computing and Social Responsibility in the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University, a public university in Leicester, England. She has strong feelings about privacy.

One of the never-ending problems associated with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and copycat laws cropping up in North America, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 on the ballot in November 2018, is that these regulations impose restrictions on what data can be retained and how it can be used. With analytics and employee monitoring, that simply increases how much sensitive data needs to be processed.

“There’s more than just the legal aspects of data analytics. Much of the law is still catching up. GDPR only just came into effect, and we’re still waiting to see what the real-world impact of much of that will be beyond annoying consent agreements on websites,” Flick says. “The [ACM’s] code [of ethics] has always had things to say about data privacy, security, and other ethical issues to do with analytics. Merging of datasets needs to be done with care to ensure privacy is protected; de-anonymization is bad [while] informed consent and user control over personal data is good.”

Flick says she is inclined to think that aggressive employee monitoring for the purpose of thwarting insider security threats is “not an appropriate use of that technology” in general, although she adds that for some high-security businesses such as banks, “it might be appropriate.” She argues it is better to focus on all security matters and “to trust (employees) and assume that they’ll be professional. It’s taking a sledgehammer to an ant situation.”

Flick notes that in the U.K., email and messaging communications cannot be examined by a company if it is explicitly labeled “union business.” She adds: “It can have an overall negative impact (on business operations) if employees feel that they’re not being trusted to do their job.”

Pearson says the kind of analysis and monitoring that is typically dealing with insider threats can deliver far more headaches than it is worth.

Catherine Flick, member, Association for Computing Machinery’s Committee on Professional Ethics; reader, De Montfort University (United Kingdom)

“Decrypting and analyzing traffic makes it much easier to spot mal intent, but is also a great way to sow distrust with employees. When traffic is decrypted, it’s an area that’s ripe for abuse,” Pearson says. “Obviously, knowing that somebody is searching Google is one thing, but knowing that and why they’re searching for specific medical problems is something much different. Additionally, decryption offers another employee-focused crown jewel to any organization that does it. What if an attacker can access it?” he notes.

Pearson also argues that those kinds of employee-tracking techniques could undermine security if it drives employees to avoid such systems deliberately. “If knowing that the people controlling the analytics are seeing your private information causes you to actually engage in more risky practices, such as aiming to bypass a system by installing less trustworthy apps or using out-of-band devices, then the value of those analytics are significantly degraded,” he says. “Instead, efforts should be made to find a more amenable approach, which may be analytics of intent associated with encrypted traffic without having to peek into the payload.”

Doug Barbin, principal and cybersecurity practice leader at Schellman & Company, Inc., an independent security and privacy compliance assessor, talks about monitoring software that his company uses and how it works well, but mostly because his managers put limitations on it.

“Web monitoring software has been dancing this line for some time. Our firm, with almost entirely field-based professionals, uses a security proxy that protects our professionals from harmful networks and themselves. By default, it can see everything, even perform TLS (transport layer security) inspection of encrypted traffic,” Barbin says. “Could we see employee connections to banking institutions or healthcare? Absolutely. Correspondence with potential employers? Certainly. But we don’t and that is because we made a decision not to.”

Barbin points out that some verticals have non-security reasons for monitoring and it generates quite a few inappropriate incentives.

“In professional services, excess monitoring in such can cause you to miss context and flaws in the workflow. A manager could be penalized for projects going over budget, only to find out there was a project coding problem or the associate was incorrectly billing. Worse, firms have plenty of history of gaming chargeability and other metrics and/or asking associates not to bill all of their time to make project margins look better.

“Move out of consulting and look no further than healthcare where one treatment decision is made over another for the purpose of a better performance metric which drives funding and resources,” Barbin continues. “There is no easy answer other than good managers overseeing the analysts and asking why. Ethics professionals can also play a role going beyond their current mandate of privacy and protecting personal data to use of that data.”

Barbin also argues that metrics that some believe raise questions of improper conduct might signal nothing at all. “From an insider threat perspective policy scenarios, what are you monitoring for?” he asks. Do you disable USB thumb drives or transfers to certain web sites? For example, if an employee was sending files to Dropbox, would that not be a more worrisome situation? Perhaps or perhaps not, Barbin says. He notes that some of his clients post sensitive files on Dropbox if the file exceeds the size limitation of email, which makes lots of large files transfers to and from Dropbox non-suspicious.

Vast amounts of data moving today is not necessarily a bad sign at all. What if employees are just downloading a movie to watch at home that night? “I struggle where all of this wouldn’t be yet another instance of chasing your tail,” Barbin says.

The post Inside-out analytics: Solving the enigmatic insider threat appeared first on SC Media.

#gallery-0-5 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-5 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Go to Source Author: Victor M. Thomas Inside-out analytics: Solving the enigmatic insider threat Original Post from SC Magazine Author: Victor M. Thomas At the risk of potentially alienating a high-demand…

#SC Magazine

0 notes

rametarin · 3 years

Text

Amusing interlude.

So an acquaintence of mine just experienced something I’d like to share with some of you as an educational experience.

This nameless person somewhere introduced a statement: “Which mental illness make you the most violent?”

So my acquaintence copy&pasted them something from ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The person direct messaged them and said, “Go jack off to some dead deer, you boot licker.”

And I’m like... that’s hilarious. My acquaintence wasn’t really sure what happened here, but I recognized exactly what happened by previous patterns.

Okay so. What happened here was this person was trying to use this technique radical feminists and guerilla socialists would use to try and “start conversations” by the water cooler. Capitalizing on how most people aren’t walking encyclopedias of facts and information they can prove on the spot, they “start the conversation.”

Statements like that have no roots or origins or seeming ulterior motive in anything else, but they absolutely are when in the context of how this type of person uses them. But the ice breaker. “Which mental illnesses do you think make people the most violent?”

If you’d said schizophrenia, or bipolar, or borderline personality disorder, then their next step would’ve been to say, “And why do you think that?”

Do you see what has happened here? Unprovoked, without the other person making any proactive statements for or against anything, by querying and controlling the context of the discussion and the topic, they have forced and coerced the other person to proactively stand for something. They have forced the person to either admit they do not know, which itself will become clay the speaker will mold, or they’ve forced the person to prove their statement that they have voluntarily given and put forwards.

They have forced someone to make a claim and put them on the spot, disguising this provocateurizm as simple water cooler talk.

Radfems would do this shit of bad faith questioning when I was a kid, and next thing you knew you’d said something inflammatory, BECAUSE YOU’D BEEN SET UP TO DO SO by the topic of conversation and the direction, and then depending on how you respond, they try to use you.

If you admit you do not know, their next diatribe will be about how, “people who don’t know assume, and our culture vilifies the mentally ill.” They’re PROBING you. To see if you know, one way or the other. Because if you don’t, they’re going to claim they know.

And as they’ve pre-meditated this topic, they likely have some cherrypicked statistics or an academic and book that states something, one way or another. THEY’RE SO GLAD YOU ASKED.

If you make a declaration from a place of confidence, they’ll “kindly” ask that you prove it. And since this technique relies on the recipient and the group not being well read or career members of this field, capitalizing on how most people don’t know, aren’t in the circles to be informed about it, and are absent any sources to check for spur of the moment flareups of intellectual discussion and debate, most people cannot prove it.

In which case, the disingenuous conversation starter garrotes the person that cannot support their stance, which they will, regardless of whether or not it was made from a place of absolute confidence, treat as if they have. Treat the person and their ignorance like it’s only not malicious because the person, “didn’t know better,” and then talk about how perpetuating falsehoods is endemic of an “ablist society that hates the mentally ill for being different.”

That’s when they declare the person to be a victim of society demonizing the mentally ill, but not having any evidence to support the common consensus.

The person they just chose to make an effigy of societal wrongthink can then flounder and doubledown without proof and then be mocked and derided and patronized for “not knowing what they’re talking about, by their own admission. Do you HAVE any PROOF!? No? Then shut up.” while leftist-funny-man “laugh now” facing the peers and audience, just to let them know if they wrong-think in public the mocking mob will make them lose social standing, too.

By just asking loaded, probing questions that beg an answer, they give the illusion of empirically minded, scientific and scholarly. When the truth is they only know enough to use as a weapon in a game of social clout and perception, starting conversations by shitting all over someone else and making it look like a, “teachable moment.” By pausing to speak in the abstract, they basically get a free pass to call you a bigot by actions you’ve been tricked into taking and then spun to endorse.

They deliberately find groups of people that may not know the particulars of this topic specifically to have this “conversation.” Feigning being feely compassionate and how stereotypes are harmful. Then throwing out, “Actually, the mentally ill are much less violent than sane people! These stigmas against the mentally ill are largely just vilification and heroification of mentally well people.” As if a person that thinks they see ghosts and shadowmen is the same as a person that keeps picking fights with strangers compulsively.

When, no, statistically, those who tend to be insanely violent and instigate violence with strangers, tend to be insane in some form or fashion. Clinically diagnosed, or not.

But you see, this amazing interaction that capitalizes on peoples usual inability to breach the gap beyond their own station. With the help of a google search and resources from professionals and institutions with the empirical medical and scientific data to speak for them, this acquaintence of mine gave the disingenuous speaker nothing and no one to rail against. They were not given an individual’s subjective opinion with which to then accuse them of personal emotional and enlightenment failings. They were not given, “I don’t know,” and then the person that claims to be informed tries to lead them around with cherrypicked “facts” or subjective opinions or charitable interpretations that basically amount to, “my ideology is right and you wouldn’t know one way or another.”

No. All that was side stepped by removing the acquiantance from the equation. This Mr. Magoo of a person I know let them play chess with a robot.

So rather than continue down that line of conversation, this asshurt loser that now had nothing to work with basically called my acquaintence a redneck fascist and ran away, for seemingly no god damned reason.

Usually what happens when you do this, if you can play dumb for them until they feel confident enough that they might trust what you say as the truth on a subject you allegedly know nothing about, they count on there not being anybody coincidentally around that can disagree with prove them wrong. So they’ll take what is definitively said for granted and not question it. Sure, whatever, “The mentally ill are less likely than sane people to be violent.”

But if you reveal your powerlevel and reveal yourself to be an expert, especially in front of a group of people they were playing to, to sow doubt, and you undress their statements, and can then cite the exact books, chapters and lines as proof and may even have those definitive sources on you somehow, they look bad. Good ones try to suss out what the audience knows before pulling this shit stunt. Bad ones... heh.

If you then undress them publicly enough and force them to walk back their statements, they eventually resort to the tired, classic, “I was just twying to have a convuhsayshun about da mentawy iww.. uwu.” Pouting bottom lip and big dewey rose tinted lenses eyes.

Or they’ll just simply start walking away. Either trying to appear casual about it or stomping off outraged at you (generally the latter is socially acceptable, if female.) And if you try to pursue them to keep them in the discussion, they’ll SCREAM and make the immediate discussion the priority of you following them.

But. Really. The miraculous thing is how cell phones and ease of access to these sources have passively innoculated so many to this bad faith technique. It’s truly amazing. The contrast is like living in a world with syphilis and living in a world where it can be cured..

4 notes · View notes

richmeganews · 5 years

Text

‘Privacy Is Becoming a Luxury’: What Data Leaks Are Like for the Poor

When Jayne checked her email on the morning of February 13, she didn't expect to find anything particularly exciting. The 34-year-old, who asked her real name be withheld out of fear that speaking out could affect her housing benefits, was enjoying a rare moment of relative peace on a snow day in a household with five kids. But when she opened the attachment from a note sent by the Seattle Housing Authority, she did not see the routine newsletter she anticipated. Instead, she was staring at a list of names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and tenant code numbers for the more than 500 clients of the city’s Scattered Sites low-income housing program, which includes low-income complexes that are typically smaller and more family-oriented than bigger housing projects. Jayne's own name and personal information were included on the list.

Americans, of course, are no strangers to data collection. The last few years have featured some of the largest and most potentially damaging data leaks in history, like the Equifax credit breach. But low-income Americans often find themselves trading personal information for access to benefits ranging from food to housing to childcare. Clients of Seattle's Scattered Sites program, which is part of the Seattle Housing Authority and receives both federal and city funding, for example, report being asked to provide employment pay-stubs, birth certificates, and social security cards for everyone in their household, and health records if they are claiming disability status as part of their application. In exchange, they receive reduced-cost permanent apartment units that are, according to the website, "located near transit, with easy access to shopping, parks, schools, and neighborhood services that meet the needs of low-income residents."

It's a trade many residents are glad to make, especially when the alternative might be homelessness. But when a privacy breach occurs, it raises the question: what exactly are the poor giving up in order to survive, and what are the potential consequences?

“For low-income people, the stakes [of a data breach] are higher,” said Michele E. Gilman, director of the Saul Ewing Civil Advocacy Clinic at the University of Baltimore, and a former Department of Justice civil rights attorney. She cited examples of former clients whose utilities were shut off after someone opened a false account in their name and failed to pay, or who were picked up on warrants for crimes committed by someone else under their name. For people without money to quickly reinstate a utility service or hire a criminal attorney, those types of errors—even if eventually rectified—can have long-lasting consequences, including job loss or child protective involvement.

Those fears hit home when Jayne saw her name on the list that day.

"I was really shocked at first," she said. "And then I was insulted…. I felt like my identity or whatever didn't matter to them."

On the same day of the original email, the Seattle Housing Authority sent the list-serv a follow-up note asking the attachment with names and addresses be disregarded. It would not be until February 19, almost a week after the email was sent out, that the Seattle Housing Authority acknowledged the specific kind of error that occurred, and apologized.

"The file did not contain what is referred to as 'personally identifiable information' (social security numbers, birth dates, etc.)," that subsequent note stated. "However, we sincerely apologize for the error and ask that you please delete any copies of the Excel file that may still be on your device."

But Joseph Namareth, a security analyst at Cvent, a large events software provider, suggested personally identifiable information should be properly understood to include addresses, full names, and e-mail contacts, which were included in the mistakenly-sent file. He also argued the SHA incident sounds like "a little bit of negligence, especially assuming they're dealing with PII [personally identifiable information], and a fair amount of PII. In my opinion, that's an organization not doing proper diligence for that kind of data."

Alex Muentz, senior security adviser at Leviathan Security Group, a private information securities firm, suggested this specific type of mistake could be avoided using a fairly common technology called Data Loss Prevention (DLP). "What it does is before you’re able to move a document out off one system to another, it looks through the document automatically and looks for types of information that are controlled." Essentially, the DLP program should flag an email before it's sent if it includes information that it has been pre-programmed to protect.

Kerry Coughlin, the communications director at Seattle Housing Authority, said the agency does use an email security system, but that it was only configured to prevent the release of data like social security numbers, credit card info, and driver's licenses. So the attachment, which did not include that type of information, did not raise alarms, at least initially.

"It was one of those human error things," Coughlin said. "It wasn’t really a data breach or anything like that; the data was handled properly, the person who was doing it is experienced and well trained in data handling. They just literally attached the wrong file." She explained that the Scattered Sites newsletter was e-mailed out to the list-serv in two batches. One batch did, in fact, receive the newsletter, a .pdf file that included information about a staff change, mold prevention, and online rent paying. A second batch of recipients, which included Jayne, instead received an Excel file with clients’ names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and tenant codes—an internal figure Coughlin described as "a completely meaningless, random code," but which Jayne said she was required to include on all of her rent checks and had been used to look up her file in the past. (Coughlin noted the Excel document was only sent to 150 recipients total. )

For her part, Gilman argued that many times, names and addresses can be enough to commit the types of identity fraud she has helped her low-income clients battle. “It can cost time and money to clean up the effects of identity theft because low income people are already living on the economic margins, any loss of funds can be catastrophic," she said.

"You have less privacy as a poor person," Muentz added. "Privacy is becoming a luxury.”

Of course, it's not all that often that Americans hear about something like last year's Medicare and Medicaid security breach, or the Department of Housing and Urban Development's 2016 blunder, when the agency publicized the personal information—including social security numbers—for more than 425,000 public housing clients. But that doesn't mean these types of mistakes aren't happening. Security breach notification laws require disclosure when information like bank accounts or social security numbers get leaked. But if it's addresses, contact info, or the fact of whether someone uses public assistance, such leaks do not necessarily have to be disclosed (specific disclosure laws vary by state).

So even though basic personal information could be damaging if collected, clients may not know that it's been publicized. In fact, Muentz suggested organizations that serve marginalized populations were more susceptible to poor security protocols precisely because they could get away with it. "If someone's data has to be breached, breach the poor person because there's lower chance of repercussion," he said wryly. "It's harder for someone with a lot of stuff going on to pursue a complaint."

The experience of Denisha Jones, a mother of four who has been an SHA client for over a decade and whose information was included in the mistaken attachment, bolstered Muentz's theory. "It did give me concern," she said of the recent email incident, "like, ‘Dang, my info is that easily breached,' but I don't have too much time to be concerned." She had been working as a nursing assistant at Swedish Hospital, a leading medical provider in Seattle—until she was forced to leave her job when her husband was incarcerated on a probation violation last November, she said. Now she is struggling just to keep her family clothed, housed, and fed. She's bothered by the leak—but she doesn't have the time to pursue those feelings. (So far, she hasn’t seen any negative outcome as a result of the leaked personal data.)

Not that low-income communities are ignorant about this issue. A 2017 survey by Data & Society, a New York based research institute, suggested that people making less than $20,000 annually were both aware of and highly concerned about their data vulnerabilities. One especially serious concern, which Jayne cited on behalf of her neighbors, is that some clients of low-income housing programs might be fleeing domestic violence. Targets of intimate partner violence are often also subject to financial abuse—one study found that as many as 99 percent of domestic violence survivors were also abused financially—leaving survivors disproportionately in need of public services. And it is well documented that domestic abuse survivors are at heightened risk of being murdered by their abuser when trying to escape them.

“In most cases where we are aware of a domestic violence situation, the person will give us an alternative email or alternative mailing address,” Coughlin, the communications director at the Seattle Housing Authority, said, though she added that she couldn’t say this was true for certain of every domestic violence survivor in the program.

In reality, the February e-mail sent by the Seattle Housing Authority with the wrong file might not have any grave repercussions. It was relatively small in scope, and did not include financial information or the kind of sensitive data that is most commonly used to defraud someone. But the event highlights a larger issue: Poor people in this late capitalist moment have little control over what information they must give out to survive, and what happens to it once it's in the hands of the government or some other entity, well-intentioned or otherwise.

Follow Elizabeth Brico on Twitter.

The post ‘Privacy Is Becoming a Luxury’: What Data Leaks Are Like for the Poor appeared first on .

from WordPress http://www.richmeganews.com/privacy-is-becoming-a-luxury-what-data-leaks-are-like-for-the-poor/

#Breaking News

0 notes

legit-scam-review · 5 years

Text

The Incomplete List of People Speculated to Be Satoshi Nakamoto

Ten years ago, on Jan. 3, 2009, the Bitcoin (BTC) network was created as Satoshi Nakamoto mined the genesis block, also known as block number zero.

However, the identity behind the Bitcoin creator has remained one of the biggest mysteries in the crypto community since the original white paper was published by Satoshi in October 2008.

Various journalistic investigations have attempted to unveil the person or group of individuals responsible for creating the top digital currency, but Satoshi’s real identity remains unknown to date. On his P2P Foundation profile — which went inactive in late 2010 — Nakamoto identifies as a 43-year-old male who lives in Japan, but he almost never posted on the Bitcoin forum during local daytime. Other clues, like the British spelling of words like “colour” and “optimise,” suggest he was of Commonwealth origin.

So far, the media and community have come up with numerous results of who might be the real Satoshi, none of which have been confirmed. On June 14, 2018 the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said that it could “neither confirm nor deny the existence” of Nakamoto after a Motherboard journalist requested information on his identity through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Here’s the (incomplete) list of potential candidates.

Vili Lehdonvirta

Suspect credentials: a 38 year-old Finnish professor at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology

Source: Joshua Davis, The New Yorker

One of the first attempts to reveal Satoshi’s identity dates back to October 2011, when journalist Joshua Davis wrote a piece for the New Yorker. During his quest to identify the Bitcoin creator, Davis found Michael Clear, a young graduate student in cryptography at Trinity College in Dublin, who had worked at Allied Irish Banks to improve its currency-trading software and co-authored an academic paper on peer-to-peer technology. Clear denied he was Satoshi, but offered the journalist the name of “a solid fit for Nakamoto” — a thirty-one-year-old Finnish researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology named Vili Lehdonvirta, who used to be a video game programmer and studied virtual currencies.

However, after being contacted by Davis, Lehdonvirta also claimed he was not Satoshi. “You need to be a crypto expert to build something as sophisticated as bitcoin,” he said. “There aren’t many of those people, and I’m definitely not one of them.”

Shinichi Mochizuki

Suspect credentials: a 49 year-old Japanese mathematician at Kyoto University

Source: Ted Nelson

On May 17, 2013, American IT pioneer, sociologist and philosopher Ted Nelson suggested that Nakamoto could be Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University, who worked mostly in number theory and geometry. Nelson’s evidence was largely circumstantial, however, as it mostly rested on how Mochizuki released his solution to the ABC Conjecture, one of the biggest unsolved problems in mathematics.

A few days later, Nelson told Quartz that he would donate to charity if Mochizuki denied being Satoshi Nakamoto:

“If that person denies being Satoshi, I will humbly give one bitcoin (at this instant worth about $123) to any charity he selects. If he is Satoshi and denies it, at least he will feel guilty. (One month time limit on denial– bitcoins are going UP.)”

In July 2013, The Age reported that Mochizuki denied Nelson’s claims, but did not specify the source.

Dorian Nakamoto

Suspect credentials: a 68-year-old Japanese American man who has done classified work for major corporations and the U.S. military

Source: Leah McGrath Goodman, Newsweek

On March 6, 2014, Newsweek published a lengthy article written by journalist Leah McGrath Goodman, who identified Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a Japanese American male living in California as the original Bitcoin creator.

Goodman learned that Nakamoto worked as a systems engineer on classified defense projects and computer engineer for technology and financial information services companies. Nakamoto reportedly turned libertarian after being laid off from his job twice in the early 1990s.

There were other clues besides his birth name. Goodman argues that Nakamoto confirmed his identity as the Bitcoin founder after she asked him about the cryptocurrency during a face-to-face interview. “I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it,” he allegedly replied. “It’s been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection.”

However, in a following full-length interview with The Associated Press, Dorian Nakamoto denied all connection to Bitcoin. He said that he had never heard of it before, and that he thought that Goodman was asking about his previous work for military contractors, which was largely classified. Interestingly, in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” interview, he stated he had misinterpreted Goodman’s question as being related to his work for Citibank. Later on the same day, the Nakamoto’s P2P Foundation account posted its first message in several years, stating: “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”

Nick Szabo

Suspect credentials: (supposedly) a 55 year-old American man of Hungarian descent and creator of BitGold, a predecessor of Bitcoin

Sources: Skye Grey, researcher; Dominic Frisby, financial writer

In December 2013, researcher Skye Grey published results of his stylometric analysis, which indicated that the person behind Satoshi Nakamoto was a computer scientist and cryptographer named Nick Szabo.

Essentially, Grey searched for unusual turns of phrase and vocabulary patterns “in particular places which you would expect a cryptography researcher to contribute to,” and then “evaluated the fitness of each match found by running textual similarity metrics on several pages of their writing.”

Szabo is a decentralized currency enthusiast who developed the concept of “BitGold,” a pre-Bitcoin, privacy-focused digital currency, back in 1998. In his May 2011 article on Bitcoin, Szabo wrote:

“Myself, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney were the only people I know of who liked the idea (or in Dai’s case his related idea) enough to pursue it to any significant extent until Nakamoto (assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai).”

Additional research carried out by financial author Dominic Frisby, which he describes in his 2014 book titled “Bitcoin: The Future of Money?” also suggests that Nick Szabo is the real Satoshi. In an interview on Russia Today, Frisby said: “I’ve concluded there is only one person in the whole world that has the sheer breadth but also the specificity of knowledge and it is this chap [Nick Szabo].”

Nevertheless, Szabo has denied being Satoshi. In a July 2014 email to Frisby, he reportedly stated:

“Thanks for letting me know. I’m afraid you got it wrong doxing me as Satoshi, but I’m used to it.”

Hal Finney

Suspect credentials: an American cryptographic pioneer who died in 2014 at the age of 58

Source: Andy Greenberg, Forbes (who eventually denied his own assumption)

On March 25, 2014, Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg published an article on Dorian Nakamoto’s alleged neighbor, a pre-Bitcoin cryptographic pioneer named Hal Finney, who received the very first BTC transaction from Nakamoto.

Interestingly, Greenberg reached out to the writing analysis consultancy Juola & Associates and asked them to compare a sample of Finney’s writing to that of Satoshi Nakamoto. Reportedly, they found that it was the closest resemblance they had yet come across — including the other candidates suggested by Newsweek, Fast Company and New Yorker journalists, along with Ted Nelson and Skye Grey. However, the company established that Nakamoto’s emails to Finney more closely resemble the style that the original white paper was written in when compared to Finney’s emails.

Greenberg suggested that Finney may have been a ghostwriter for Nakamoto, or that he used his neighbor Dorian’s identity as cover. Finney denied he was Satoshi. Greenberg, after meeting Finney in person, seeing the email exchanges between him and Nakamoto, and his Bitcoin wallet’s history, concluded that Finney was telling the truth.

On Aug. 28, 2014, Hal Finney died at his home in Phoenix at the age of 58 after five years of battling amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Craig Wright

Suspect credentials: a 48 year-old Australian computer scientist and businessman

Sources: Andy Greenberg, Gwern Branwen, Wired; Craig Wright (himself)

On Dec. 8, 2015, Wired published an article written by Andy Greenberg and Gwern Branwen that argued an Australian academic named Craig Steven Wright “either invented bitcoin or is a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.”

On the same day, Gizmodo ran a story that featured documents allegedly obtained by a hacker who broke into Wright’s email accounts, claiming that Satoshi Nakamoto was a joint pseudonym for Craig Steven Wright and his friend, computer forensics analyst and cyber-security expert David Kleiman, who died in 2013.

Wright promptly took down his online accounts and disappeared for several months until May 2, 2016, when he publicly declared that he is the creator of Bitcoin. Later on the same month, Wright published an apology along with a refusal to publish the proof of access to one of the earliest Bitcoin keys. Cointelegraph has published several articles on why Wright is most likely not Satoshi. Nevertheless, Wright continues to claim that he is Satoshi to this day.

In February 2018, the estate of Dave Kleiman filed a lawsuit against Wright over the rights to $5 billion worth of BTC, claiming that Wright defrauded Kleiman of virtual currency and intellectual property rights.

Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry

Suspects credentials: U.S. and German residents, occupancy and age unknown

Source: Adam Penenberg, Fast Company

In October 2013, journalist Adam Penenberg penned an article for Fast Company, where he cited circumstantial evidence suggesting that Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry could be Nakamoto. King and Bry reportedly live in Germany while Oksman was claimed to be based in the U.S.

Penenberg’s theory revolves around the claim that King, Oksman and Bry jointly filed a patent application that contained the phrase “computationally impractical to reverse” in August 2008, which was also used in the white paper published by Nakamoto in October that year. Moreover, the domain name bitcoin.org was registered three days after the patent was filed.

All three men denied being Nakamoto when contacted by Penenberg.

Elon Musk

Suspect credentials: a 47 year-old American technology entrepreneur

Source: Sahil Gupta, SpaceX intern

In what seems as one of the most absurd Nakamoto theories to date, Sahil Gupta, who claims to be a former intern at SpaceX, wrote a Hacker Noon post speculating that Elon Musk was probably Satoshi Nakamoto. Gupta emphasized Elon Musk’s background in economics, experience in production-level software and history of innovation to speculate that Musk could have invented Bitcoin.

The post was published in November 2017 and was soon disproved by Musk himself, who tweeted that Gupta’s suggestion “is not true.”

Government Agency

While there is no actual evidence that Nakamoto is a government agency, it makes for a great conspiracy theory that contains a vast amount of reasons as to why the U.S. (or any other state) would want to create Bitcoin. For instance, a 2013 Motherboard article theorized: “Bitcoin could be used as a weapon against the US dollar. It could be used to fund black ops.”

It then suggested a theory “that Bitcoin is actually an Orwellian vehicle that would allow governments to monitor all financial transactions.”