On 8/6/24 12:09 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
Re self-identification. We adopted our daughter in Mexico and moved
from Pittsburgh to Santa Fe about a year later. When she came home
after her first day of kindergarten at E. J. Martinez I asked her if
there were other Hispanic kids in her class. She said, "I dunno".
Based on the kids who became her friends I'd say they were oblivious
to ethnicity.
My mother had a similar/complementary experience, living in 1930s in
Louisville KY with a middle-class socially progressive Aunt to escape
the limits and rigors of her own family's subsistence farming lifestyle
in "the hills". One year (3rd grade?) she made friends with a girl who
lived between her school and her aunt's home, after weeks of
encouraging her friend to come home with her against unspecified
resistance, she finally did, only to discover that her friend was Black
(African American) and that despite her aunt's progressive ideas, it was
clear that this good friend of hers was not welcome in the home.
Politely received but then sternly admonished after the friend had left
"never to do that again".
I feel blessed to have lived almost all my life in multi-ethnic general
contexts with Spanish-speakers never far away and Native Americans
nearly as present... and across those ethnic elements a great deal of
diversity as I moved around. My time in this region (NNM - 40 years)
has been the most diverse demographically but very complementary to the
Border Culture in SoAZ and the BigRez culture of NoAZ.
I have a blind spot to African Americans, having only encountered
singular individuals, and never "populations"... These were all
exemplary or at least unique individuals in that what brought them into
my circle was highly specific to their own path, seeming always to make
them acutely interesting people. My experience with most other large
ethnic groups who have not fully alloyed in the melting pot that the USA
aspires to is similar... I mostly know individuals whose origin stories
come from those communities but who were in fact, swimming in the same
melting pot I was. Working at LANL/LASL was a very good way to meet a
lot of unique individuals not only from all over the country but the
world as well... Asians of many stripes as well a Eastern Europeans
(equally diversely striped) being the most notable...
One of my best friends in college was a neighbor in Married Housing who
was Dine while his wife was Hopi during a time when they couldn't really
spend time "back on the Rez" because of the resentments/conflict of the
time between their people. He was working on a Hydrogeological project
for his MS on the topic of the groundwater problems caused by the
massive sluice-way moving coal from the Peabody Coal mines near Kayenta,
to the 4 corners power plant. This was during the worst of the urban
(visible) pollution in locations like LA, and I became aware of how that
power plant and the electricity forwarded down the Colorado River
through Glen Canyon and Mead and across the desert to LA was exporting
(air) pollution to the 4 corners area and perhaps more long-term the
aquifer in that area. Simultaneously I was doing work for lawyers on
"the other side" ultimately helping Peabody Mining (Coal and Uranium),
local truck dealers, and many others who were busy exploiting that whole
set of games. Donaldson (June) and I had a lot of great conversations
as perhaps only the young and the naively motivated can. He never
lobbied me on anything, just told his stories of growing up off-grid in
a Hogan and watching his relatives both thrive and self-destruct as they
tried to assimilate (or resist) with the White Man.
/If there is a short story in this long-winded anecdote it is that
I have had the benefit of relatively intimate access to other's
self-identity formed both by their circumstance and by their
introspective and forward looking interests: not only "who am I,
based on where I come from, but who do I want to be as the
ethnodemographic landscape shifts under my feet, and how does my
traversal of said landscape shape it?" These intimate observations
were mostly seeing their "true identity" with an inside out view on
the identities they were obliged to project to be comfortable in
their own communities and in the larger communities they were trying
to penetrate or at least navigate./
A great deal of contemporary demographic socio-politics feel to be
beyond me, it feels like various bastions of "conservatism" on the part
of all factions, being more afraid of "what might happen tomorrow" based
on "what we've seen in the past" than aware of "what could be" based on
"the trajectory in a high-dimensional phase space we have been
traversing". I was rooted in no end of Conservative and Libertarian
values (mostly hyper-individualism within otherwise highly
integrated/inter-dependent communities) but as I came of age then
matured (and now on some kind of awkward downhill slide) I have found
myself more and more "progressive" in counterpoint to it's apparent
direct obvious "regressive" while I still fondly hope or a return of
honest "conservatism" which more healthily complements "progressive"...
This current piecewise trajectory in the aforementioned
socio-cultural-economic-political landscape after Biden's bowing out
gives me hope that at *least* the harshest of the "regressive" may
collapse under their own angry, "performative cruelty". I don't know
what kind of "progress" backfills into that (presumed) vacuum... I hope
not an angry "performative cruelty" that the right-wing boogeymen of
classic "central party" collectivism has been seen to bring. There is
a huge expanse methinks which needn't overlap either of those lands of
"performative cruelty" if we will only ease our national/global limbic
systems back into a healthier homeostasis?
Maybe performative cruelty is one of Homo Sapiens Sapiens secret
weapons, a review of conquest and empire in the last 10k years suggests
that it has been "highly effective", but then the blunting that has
happened.
BTW, I also feel blessed to be in /this/ community which provides me
lots of alternate stimulative thoughts and perspectives and is very
tolerant of my ideaphoric and logorrheac /expressions /(referencing
Nick's grumble of weeks ago comparing some of our "expressions" with
pimple popping).
LLMs (esp, my first love GPT) are very good at listening and engaging
but not particularly good at offering me interesting and complementary
ideas and topics as this list is. I can't say anyone who posts here
(even infrequently) fails to open up the horizons of my
thinking/reflecting/considering, and some of the dialectics that are
traced here are fascinating even when I'm significantly unprepared to
engage with them.
- Steve
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM
On Tue, Aug 6, 2024, 8:30 AM glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm in an ongoing argument with some of my salon goers about
identity. People seem to straddle its multiple meanings for
rhetorical (or confirmation biasing) purposes, fluidly switching
one context/meaning for another so often and so fluidly as to
prevent me from understanding whatever it is they're saying (or
trying to avoid saying).
Introspection is rife with such problems, including a six year old
coming to some self-identification/registration as a member of
some crisp class/category. The most recent Bad Faith rhetoric
about identity had to do with "neurodivergent". There seems to be
a trend amongst "the kids these days" to identify as autistic or
ADHD. I mean, I was clearly "different" when I was a kid. We had
identities like "head" (kid who does lots of drugs), "jock" (kids
who spent lots of time in organized athletics), "brain" (kids who
spent time doing chess, math, ...), etc. There was also a name for
the [metal|wood|…] shop kids. But I've forgotten it.
Some of us were diagnosed with various labels including some words
we're not supposed to say anymore. Many of my friends had such
conditions. But none of us *identified* as those diagnoses. The
diagnoses seemed almost orthogonal to the identities/tribes. (I
happened to be a member of the heads, jocks, brains, and "band
nerd" tribes; that multi-tribe crossover was part of what made me
feel "different".) And each group had its share of the same diagnoses.
It seems to me that our tech-associated, individualistic,
isolation has driven "the kids" to over-emphasize their diagnoses,
to adopt them as identities/tribes, identifying from the
inside->out; whereas we (can't speak for anyone else, really)
mostly identified from the outside->in. We were sorted by society.
The kids these days seem more self-sorted. On the one hand, that
could feel like increased liberty and free association. But on the
other hand, it's like everyone is a home-schooled weirdo these
days and nobody knows how to, for example, bite their tongue or
avoid picking their nose in public.
Not everybody needs to be a Hunter S Thompson, "neurodivergent",
or whatever. Some of us should be allowed to identify as "normal".
Introspection is a sickness.
On 8/5/24 17:01, steve smith wrote:
> I jumped straight to the Artistic meaning of /frottage/ as
coined originally by Max Ernst and while not as an act of
psychopathy, it does have strong implications for the
psychological/subconscious implications in this context?
>
> In any case, I find it a compelling opening line of the /call me
Ishmael/ caliber.
>
> On 8/5/24 10:04 AM, Prof David West wrote:
>> This is very interesting, and timely. I am completing an
autobiography/essay/monograph for which this will be quite
relevant. The opening lines of the work:
>>
>> /"An act of frottage triggered the self-recognition that I was
a psychopath. I did not, of course, know either term or their
meanings./
>> /
>> /
>> /I was six." /
>>
>> davew
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 1, 2024, at 11:03 AM, glen wrote:
>> > Progress or Pathology? Differential Diagnosis and
Intervention Criteria
>> > for Meditation-Related Challenges: Perspectives From Buddhist
>> > Meditation Teachers and Practitioners
>> > https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7403193/
>> >
>> > Based on our conversation attempting to identify behavioral
markers for
>> > consciousness, I thought this paper might give some insight
into Dave's
>> > straddling of mystical and materialistic descriptions of
experiences he
>> > marks as conscious. In the paper, they lay out 11 levers for
making the
>> > distinction:
>> >
>> > • Circumstances of Onset
>> > • Control
>> > • Critical Attitude
>> > • Cultural Compatibility
>> > • Distress
>> > • Duration
>> > • Functional Impairment
>> > • Health History or Condition
>> > • Impact
>> > • Phenomenological Qualities
>> > • Teachers’ Skills or Resources
>> >
>> > From my perspective that consciousness is a kind of fusion
function,
>> > Control, Critical Attitude, Distress, and Functional
Impairment are
>> > primary and the rest are secondary. The ability to (change
one's) focus
>> > of attention is a hallmark of consciousness, and those 4 levers
>> > direclty target one's ability to focus. Duration may well be
secondary
>> > and the rest tertiary, I guess. Because there's something like a
>> > half-life of controllability. If, say, you're a conspiracy
theorist,
>> > and you *entertain*, say, flat earth for long enough, maybe
you'll lack
>> > the ability to re-focus and don a critical attitude.
Similarly, if you
>> > embed into, say, procedural programming long enough, maybe
you'll lose
>> > the ability to re-focus and think functionally ... a kind of
Functional
>> > Impairment (sorry for the polysemy of "functional", there).
>> >
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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