Tech entrepreneur Julio Rivera knows what its like to search for a place of belonging.

Growing up as an Afro-Latino child of immigrants in the predominantly white Connecticut suburbs, he often felt out of place. Rivera felt the same way when he began visiting Buddhist centers as an adult.

Introduced to meditation through the popular app Headspace, Rivera first practiced in his twenties at the Shambhala Meditation Center of New York City before finding his spiritual home at New York Insight Meditation Centers People of Color Sangha.

For the first time, I was really able to let my guard down, Rivera said, noting that in other white-dominated spaces he often felt the need to be constantly proving himself to others. But when a scheduling conflict meant that he could no longer attend meetings, he realized there werent many alternatives for him, especially when it came to digital resources. And thats why he created Liberate, a meditation app that features dharma talks and guided meditations by teachers of color for people of color.

Rivera was stunned when a basic beta version of the app that he had first shared with 20 friends was downloaded 150 times in the first week. Now available for free on iOS and Android, the app has been downloaded thousands of times since its February 2019 launch.

Since all of Liberates teachers are people of color, users can scroll through dharma talks and guided meditations that are designed with their needs in mind, said Rivera. It says, The experiences I am going through as a person of colorits not just me going through them. The app is a combination of exclusive content and talks selected from other platforms such as Dharma Seed, an online resource for Vipassana teachings.

Liberate stands out for its guided meditations on topics that include microaggressions, ancestors, and toxic masculinity. Black women, Rivera said, kept telling him that processing microaggressions targeting their appearance and mannerisms represented a major part of their day-to-day lives. The constant barrage of comments has them questioning, Should I even be in this space? Am I worthy of being in this space? The meditations, Rivera hopes, help practitioners realize that they do indeed belong.

Rivera is proud to be part of an ongoing movement within Western Buddhism that works to make its communities more diverse and welcoming, and he is also proud of his role in instantly connecting users to teachings that can heal racial trauma.

It was a calling, he said, to be of service not only to my own practice but also to the practice of others.

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Liberate: Why Julio Rivera Created a Meditation App for People of Color - Tricycle

Displaced Rohingya refugees from Rakhine state in Myanmar walk near Ukhia, at the border between Bangladesh and Myanmar, as they flee violence in September 2017. (K.M. Adas/Getty Images)

Phil Gurski, When Religion Kills: How Extremists Justify Violence Through Faith (Boulder, CO, Lynne Reiner Publishers, 2020), pp. 181.

Some books with somewhat dramatic titles do not live up to the hype. This one does. It is a systematic examination of the way extremists have embraced their religions to perpetrate violence on an often grand scale.

The author, Phil Gurski, is a former senior analyst with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. He now runs a risk consulting firm. He brings to his task a vast amount of practical experience in the struggle against terrorist threats in Canada and abroad. But he makes clear that he makes no claim to being a theologian or a scholar. Rather, he goes about his business assessing factual material and analyzing it in the best traditions of intelligence assessments. The result is a fascinating treatment of a difficult, and often delicate, subject.

In six meaty chapters, Gurski examines six major world religions in alphabetical order: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism.

At first sight, a look at Buddhism in this context may seem counterintuitive. Most westerners view Buddhism as a religion dedicated to peace, tolerance, compassion and non-violence. The best known of all Buddhists is the Dalai Lama, a man revered for his advocacy of reason and compassion in human affairs. And yet Buddhists have been responsible for horrendous acts of violence. In the dying days of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009, Buddhist security forces massacred thousands of Hindu Tamil civilians. In the years since then, there have been numerous attacks on Muslims and Christians, some fomented by politicians and some by Buddhist monks. Sri Lanka remains a cauldron of Buddhist extremism. So, too, is Myanmar (the former Burma). As Gurski puts it: Beginning in 2016 a humanitarian catastrophe of biblical proportions occurred when hundreds of thousands (perhaps more than a million) Rohingya Muslims were forced to flee the northwestern state of Rakhine following the Burmese armys systematic campaign of rape and murder in an attempt at ethnic cleansing. Most of them now live in miserable refugee camps in Bangladesh. Much of this anti-Muslim activity can be attributed to the writings and sermons of a Buddhist monk by the name of Ashin U Wirathu, known as the Buddhist bin Laden. He routinely puts out messages on Facebook inciting hatred against Muslims. Buddhists in Thailand also display similar tendencies. Gurski concludes this chapter with the following thought: Many in these countries oppose the acts committed by the extremist minority in the name of its faith, but the dominance of so many Buddhist monks and religious leaders in terrorism leaves little alternative but to conclude that they truly believe their faith sanctions this kind of violence.

Christianity is also a religion whose founder preached love, peace and tolerance. But over the centuries, Christians have not shied away from the use of violence, from the crusades to the Inquisition to the European wars of religion. In more recent times a host of violent far-right individuals and movements have identified themselves with Christianity. Their targets have been varied and numerous, including Jews, Muslims, mixed-race couples, abortion providers, left-wing politicians and advocates of multiculturalism. More often than not, they justify their acts of terrorism as being in defence of traditional Christian values and of Christian civilization, which they portray as being under attack by non-Christians. A particularly notable example of this was the young Norwegian Anders Brevik, whose attacks resulted in the death of 76 people and the wounding of 300 more. In his manifesto, Brevik spoke out in favour of a sustainable and traditional version of Christendom, which alone could fend off an invasion by Muslims and Arabs. Much the same language was used by Brenton Tarrant, an Australian who killed 50 people and wounded 50 more in an attack on two mosques in New Zealand. But beyond individuals of this kind, there are a host of organizations in the United States and elsewhere who use Christianity to propagate hatred and violence against non-Christians.

Hindu nationalism is certainly not a new phenomenon, but one which has come to prominence in the past 25 years or so. The political manifestation of the movement is the Bhartiya Janata Party, which won national elections in 2014 and 2019 under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The main objective of the BJP is to turn India into a Hindu nation, as opposed to the secular nation envisaged by the countrys founders and embodied in the constitution. Since coming to office, the BJP has adopted policies and laws that discriminate against Muslims, who represent a minority of some 200 million Indians. And the government has turned a blind eye to thousands of acts of violence committed by Hindu nationalists against Muslims and Christians. Hindu extremism is the only one to enjoy the tacit support of a national government, albeit that Buddhist extremists are often in cahoots with the governments of Sri Lanka and Myanmar,

The phenomenon of Islamist extremism has been amply covered by the media in recent years and does not need elaboration here. From the al-Qaida attacks on Washington and New York in 2001 to the depredations of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2014 to 2018, the story is one of repeated horrors. And the killing of leaders such as Osama Bin Laden and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi seems to have done nothing to quell the fervour of their followers. Islamist terrorism is something that will persist for a long time, but as Gurski points out, the vast majority of Islamist attacks took place in five countries in 2017: Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, the Philippines and Iraq. Westerners need to continue to rely on the security and intelligence services of their governments to preserve them from Islamist threats, but they are not the main targets of those threats. The unfortunate byproduct of Islamist extremism is that too many westerners come to suffer from Islamophobia, blaming 1.5 billion Muslims for the sins of a few thousand.

Gurski begins his chapter on Jewish extremism with a quote from Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion. It runs as follows: The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal malevolent bully. Dawkins language may be a bit colourful, but there is little doubt that if the God of the Old Testament were still around today, he would find himself in front of a court in The Hague on charges of ethnic cleansing and genocide. In short, violence is no stranger to the Jewish tradition. Now it is true that Jews have been the victim far more than the perpetrators of violence, from the Crusades to the Inquisition, from the Pogroms of the 19th century to the Holocaust of Nazi Germany. That does not mean, however, that Jewish extremists have not been responsible for horrendous acts of terrorism. In the run-up to the creation of Israel, organizations such as the Irgun and the Lehi mounted terrorist attacks on British and Palestinian targets. In more recent times, Jewish extremists have manifested themselves in the Occupied West Bank, where Jewish settlers routinely attack Palestinian civilians, mosques, churches and Dovish Israeli groups, in the name of their interpretation of Judaism.

Sikh extremists are largely dedicated to one objective: the creation of an independent Sikh homeland called Khalistan in the Indian state of Punjab. In pursuit of this goal, a variety of Sikh movements perpetrated acts of violence in India. It is estimated that in the 1980s they were responsible for the deaths of 20,000 people, including 2,000 members of the Indian security forces. In 1985, members of an organization known as the Babbar Khalsa International were responsible for the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history, the bombing of an Air India flight that led to the deaths of 329 people. While Sikh extremist violence has declined somewhat in recent years, it has known something of an upsurge since the election of the BJP Hindu nationalist government in 2014. The still relatively new Indian government is seen as being involved in active discrimination against Sikhs, as well as Muslims and Christians.

Some of the movements discussed in this book may be seen as primarily nationalist, but they all wrap themselves in the cloak of religion. Gurski does a fine job of analyzing their motivations and their operations. He buttresses his arguments with hundreds of endnotes and a 23-page bibliography. This is a book well worth reading by anyone interested in the phenomenon of extremist violence.

Louis A. Delvoie is a retired Canadian diplomat who served abroad as an ambassador and high commissioner.

Continued here:
When Religion Kills lives up to the hype - The Kingston Whig-Standard

Peterson is neither sacrosanct nor untouchable. He would agree with that statement himself.

Whenever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fear and many run awayThe risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them. Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung and Aniela Jaff

On January 7th, an assistant professorand anti-fascistfrom the University of Calgary by the name of Ted McCoy tweeted his thoughts on the well-known Canadian psychologist, Jordan B. Peterson, in the form of a (McCoys words) joke. McCoy stated in his since-deleted tweet that: I heard it rumoured students will fail my class if they cite Jordan Peterson and Id like to clarify that this is absolutely correct. After much feedback, McCoy revisedhis view on Peterson by tweeting that he acknowledges his students right to hold a dissimilar political viewpoint than his own. Whether this is truly McCorys actual belief, however, remains unclear.

My issue is less with McCoy and people like him, who frequently criticize Peterson with little depth to their criticisms. (This is not to say, of course, that these people and their freedom-injuring attitude belong in academia.) However, any personal animosity that I have had towards Petersons critics is being increasingly redirected: towards Petersons followers and those of public intellectuals similar to Peterson. A portion of Petersons fanscertainly not all of themmake use of a method of argumentation by attacking disagreements with empty Petersonisms, which I define as thoughts, arguments, or ideas that Jordan Peterson has once articulated. Empty is the way that many deliver these sayings; they often amount to little more than grateful gestures towards Peterson, without fundamentally agreeing with the underlying ideas.

Nevertheless, Petersons views should be scrutinized and defended in a thought-out and considered manner. Unfortunately, the polarizing effects of Petersons work can be especially problematic for those seeking to engage with his ideas in a thorough way, given all of the knee-jerk assumptions about his body of work. However, engaging with his ideas superficially only serves to further polarize Peterson, as well as his followers (including those who are trying to engage with his ideas thoughtfully) by reinforcing stereotypes about Peterson and his followers. This further polarization alsodiminishes the significance of being an authentic Peterson follower.

In one of his lectures, Peterson mentions this idea of paying attention to what youre sayingresembling Rule 10 in his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: Be precise in your speech by describing a dichotomization of his mind between a judging part and a talking part. The former part was, as Peterson put it, watching the part that was talking and going: That isnt your idea; you dont really believe that; you dont know what you are talking about; and, that is not true. The same could be said when engaging with Petersons own ideas: Reconsidering your current alignment with Petersons views can be more beneficial than mindlessly reciting his work.

Now, Petersons latest book (12 Rules), as well as his Youtube lectures and debates, have proved helpful to many people. Without being redundant, the beneficial element of Petersons work has already been described in great detail at Merion West. Whether one supports Peterson or not, this part of his work is eminently significant and should not be seen as trivial or be discredited by those seeking to portray him as destructiveor immoral. To separate the wheat from the chaff an idiom often used by Peterson himselfis a crucial process when analyzing controversial thinkers like Peterson.

When we ignore this process, we risk becoming incapable of considering other points of viewlike how the 15-year-old teenager in the film The Rise of Jordan Peterson described it: After following him [Peterson] so much, he becomes like a legendary figure in your mind. One of the teenagers presumable friends (also 15 years of age) acknowledges that its understandable to hold such a view of Peterson in an environment where his ideas are less tolerated. The polarizing essence of Peterson, however, can result in one becoming trapped in a Peterson-vacuum.

To prevent that from happening, one ought to expose himself to refined criticisms of Petersons work. Many have triedor are tryingto produce such articles, videos, or books that contain constructive criticisms of Petersons ideas. Yet, a great many have failed to do so, resulting in numerous ad hominem attacks of Peterson himself, rather than engagements with his works. In November, 2019, four authors at Merion WestBen Burgis, Conrad Hamilton, Marion Trejo, and Matt McManusattemptedto comprehensively critique Petersons work, without dipping into thead hominem. This attempt is still ongoing; their upcoming book, Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson has yet to be published. Unfortunately, the annunciation of their book has mostly been met with backlash. However, both Petersons allies and adversaries may benefit from sophisticated criticisms of his work. Those attempting to criticize Peterson, however, should avoid exerting a fault-finding approach as a reply to the previous lack of effective critique on Peterson. If there is no smoking gun, its probably a signal that Petersons critics have to look somewhere else. Engaging in such a manner with any intellectual one disagrees with results in the tendency to act as an empty skeptic. (The empty skeptic is a concept I described in an earlier articleof mine at Merion West. This form of skepticism invokes thoughtlessly critiquing anothers thinking by using different fallacies in order to avoid actual confrontation with the opponents actual, fundamental ideas (e.g. Straw man fallacy or Red herring).)

Nevertheless, McManus and his colleagues have undertaken an ambitious task. They introduced the article by mentioning the many different approaches fellow left-leaning critics have taken when addressing Petersons mistakesand how these commentators have failed in discussing the complete Peterson-encyclopedia. I wont get into the different ways McManus and his colleagues have not (yet) met their promises; this can be read at length in the comment section. As Ive stated at the beginning, I am less interested in the critics themselves; however, for the sake of argument, it might be interesting to examine a bit their incentives to produce this bookbesides just their political disagreements with Peterson. One of the reasons stated by the authors was their, belief that it is necessary to argue against political opponents in as sustained a manner as possible. Not many will refute this justification. Both left-right or any other dichotomy prefers strong players on both sides of the game, irrespective of the type of game.

Furthermore, they proceed by reminding readers about Petersons relevance in todays intellectual climate: Peterson is the most significant anti-leftist critic in the Western world today, and answering his charges in a reasonable and popular manner is necessary if progressivism is to be convincing both practically and intellectually. These motives so far are not illogical by any means. In my opinion, we should give it time to see how the authors continue to analyze Petersons ideas. Jordan Peterson is not going away anytime soon.

Per contra, adopting the notion that Jordan Petersons frequent misinterpretations are unalterable and that we should just move onas someone suggested in the comment section of McManus article on a sample chapter of the bookis simply admitting that Peterson is unable to be criticized. Peterson is neither sacrosanct nor untouchable. He would agree with that statement himself. In his earlier book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Peterson describes different satanic traits, including arrogance:

It is not that easy to understand why the act of presuming omniscience is reasonably construed as precisely the opposite to the act of creative exploration (as the adversary is opposite to the hero). What knowing everything means, howeverat least in practiceis that the unknown no longer exists, and that further exploration hast therefore been rendered superfluous (even treacherous). This means that absolute identification with the known necessarily comes to replace all opportunity for identification with the process that comes to know [Petersons italics]. The presumption of absolute knowledge, which is the cardinal sin of the rational spirit, is, therefore, prima facie equivalent to rejection of the heroto the rejection of Christ, of the Word of God, of the (divine) process that mediates between order and chaos.

What unifies the so-far ineffective different criticisms of Peterson is that they usually take the form of the Poisoning the Well Fallacy, which describes using irrelevant, negative information related to a certain figureor what a certain figure has saidto discredit him as an individual, or to discredit his ideas. Weve seen this happening with Peterson regarding his stance on transgender pronouns, woman wearing lipstick in the workplace, and, of course,enforced monogamy. These mischaracterizations are not only ineffective, but they also act counterproductively if one is actually interested in assessing the essence of Petersons ideas.

Much of what Peterson espouses is seemingly politically neutral. Let us, for instance, take his eminent advice: clean your room (or in the book: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world). Whether one is on the Left or the Right should not impact ones decision to take that advice. Yet, in the May, 2019 debatebetween Jordan Peterson and Slavoj iek entitled: Happiness: Marxism vs. Capitalism, iek made the remark that it could be the case Petersons aforementioned piece of advice could not be practiced because of the way society is deranged. That is, much of the reason why they [someones house/room] are in disorder, is that there is some crisis in our society. Notably, ieks point does not imply that societys status is a justification for your chaotic room; rather, the understanding is that your personal choices are not the only factors that determine if such a state exists. ieks critique does not detract from the effectiveness of Petersons adviceor the reality that it has benefited many people who have taken his advice to heart. And, then there is the further important point that many of Petersons followers began to learn about psychology through Peterson and then embarked on a further exploration of the discipline.

Some of the means by which Peterson teaches others to view the world are theoretical constructs (e.g. paradigmatic assumptions or statistical information). These are mostly taken from his experience as a successful clinical psychologist. Petersonin both his latest book and his online Youtube lecturespresents information about the field of psychology in a truly accessible manner. Those who immerse themselves in Petersons work do indeed consume part of the theoretical (and religious) knowledge linked to Petersons expertise. On top of that, our intuitive psychology makes us predisposed towards information associated with the understanding of ourselves and others (the latter being known as folk psychology or theory of mind). These innate modulesas the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker names them in his 1997 book How the Mind Worksare the underlying mechanisms that support the acquiring of knowledge. To clarify this function, Pinker makes a (relatively) dated comparison:

Learning involves more than recording experience; learning requires couching the records of experience so that they generalize in useful ways. A VCR is excellent at recording, but no one would look to this modern version of the black slate as a paradigm of intelligence.

This does not suggest that any psychologist who utters statistical knowledge related to the relation between IQ and job complexity, for example, is on the road to stardom. Most of Petersons listeners/followers presumably didnt initially come to follow a 2-hour long psychology 101 lecture. Titles like: How To Stop Procrastinating or What Women Dont Understand About Men are subjects that get you intrigued and before you know ityoure hooked on watching psychology lectures all day long. (I must mention that these videos and titles are often from third party channels, actively using clickbait titles without Petersons involvement.)

However, even with all of these upsides to Petersons work, there is still the need to view itin its totalitywith somesoberness. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell suggests that the only way to decipher Socialismand the reasons why people despised it was to step away from it. Similarly, we ought to play advocatus diaboli when dealing with similar attractive theorieslike Petersonismto save ourselves from groupthink or, worse, group polarization. Anyone familiar with the workings of academia knows that any group resisting criticism is sensitive to dogma. Evaluating your beliefs about a subject, of course, is hardly tantamount to rejecting that subject. If one ends up disagreeing with Peterson on a particular subjects, that does not mean he needs to adopt a complete distaste for everything the man has to say.

All these previously mentioned processescontemplating the strength of your belief in certain ideas or intellectuals, separating the usefulness from the less useful, and playing devils advocatecan be practically referred to as truisms when dealing with public intellectuals of a magnitude like Jordan Peterson. Making someone work on his personality is a complicated task in itself. Labeling it anything other than meaningfulor worthy of attentionhas shownto be ineffective. Yet, those who have benefitted from Petersons advice should be thankful for it in a manner that does not jeopardize their own moral and political attitudes.

Alessandro van den Berg is an economics teacher in the Netherlands.

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Dear Jordan Peterson Fans, Try to Actually Be More Like Him - Merion West

Ive read Petersons Twelves Rules for Life, and it has some points that I agree with. But I dont think he goes far enough.

A frequent criticism directed towards modern society is that it suffers from a lack of shared purpose, community, or, more broadly, order. Commentators such as Jordan Peterson, for instance, have gained considerable attention in recent years for discussing topics along these lines. In this interview, John Horvat II, the Catholic scholar and vice president of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, joins Merion West and Kambiz Tavana to discuss his bookReturn to Order, as well as to provide suggestions on how best to find structure and purpose in a fast-paced modern economy and culture.

Thank you for your time today, Mr. Horvat. Let me start with this questions first: How did you come to write the book, which is, as you know, a very peculiar book. Its not just a book that you read and put aside; its like a toolboxor like a resource you have to come back to over and over. So how did you come to write this book?

Well, it has a long history. It goes back to 1986, and it was a project that was proposed by an intellectual I knew, whose name was Professor Plinio Corra de Oliveira; he was a Brazilian. He studied a lot about economics and culture and the moral aspects of society, and he proposed this book for me and a commission of people: about five or six others. So I did these studies, and I conducted many studies for years until, finallyin 2008I spent four years writing the book. Together with the commission, I was bouncing around these ideas, and the result was Return to Order.

The title of the book is: Return to Order.Does this suggest thatfor some reason or anotherover some time, weve gotten away from the sort of order a society should have?

Exactly. The central premise [of the book] is that we are in a state of disorder: a disorder thats mainly as a result of what I call in the book, frenetic intemperance. That is to say that where were out of balance. We have a system that works; it produces things, but it produces it in a way that is intemperate and that doesnt have restraint. And, at times, it can go into crisis. So the idea is we need to return to a temperate order that will be more stable and more virtuous.

Could you be more specific when you say unstable, or unbalanced in current life? Do you have an example?

I would say, for example, an economy that is first of allvery muchaddicted to debt. That is one thing that is very disorderly. We put things off. We want to just have the pleasure for the moment and, then, the debt comes, and the system crashes sometimes, like it did in 2008. Also the speed of things. We have an economy that is extremely fast-paced. Everything is fast; everything has to be right now, regardless of the consequences. And I think that also is a factor of instability and breakdown in our economy and, especially, in our society. Economies can work fast, but people are human; and they are limited by how much they can absorb and how much they can take. So that would be another thing: the speed of society. And perhaps another example would be the volume of things; you know were dealing with huge amounts and huge movements of that could be moderated. We want everything, and we dont want any type of restraint.

When I started reading the book, Steven Pinkers bookThe Age of Enlightenment, a very good book, came to my mind. What are your thoughts? Pinker argues that we are progressing constantly, but you argue thatat some pointwe just got off the route of order, and we have to get back at it. I want to know your thoughts.

Right. The point thatlets say, the breaking point, which I mentionedis the Industrial Revolution. Im not against industry or progress. I think we need progress, and certainly it helps a society. However, the Industrial Revolution was a revolution that turned society upside down and reversed the role of the consumer and the producer. Yes, it produced a massive amount of goods and services, but it overturned social structures that are very necessary for our own stability. I think these days we can have a society with a lot of progress and a lot of goods and services, but it should be done in a moderate way. And it can be done in a moderate way. The Industrial Revolution simply didnt do it in that way, and, for that reason, I criticize it.

We are now in a very turbulent time politically. Theres a lot of talk about how the economy is working for some but maybe not all. Some proponents of capitalism might argue that thats just how capitalism works, in that some are made better off than others. Whats your takesince you brought up the economyabout our current times and how the economy is playing out?

Well, I mean we definitely have an economy that produces a lot of goods and services, and a lot of it has helped an enormous amount of people. It has taken people, as well as entire nations out of poverty and want. But it is a very precarious situation because it is very much based on debt (and the issuing of debt). It is also an economy that is fast-paced and leaves a lot of people behindbecause theyre not able to keep up with that pace. So there are definitely problems with our modern economy. And then theres the fact that we dont have a lot of the social structures of family, faith, and community that normally keep a society in balance. Those structures would allow us to keep the same amount of prosperity but would keep it in a balance that would allow many more people to benefit from the goods that come from a prosperous economy.

Theres a chapter in your book thats very interesting; its called Foundation of an Organic Order. It got me thinking, and I bookmarked it so that I could talk to you about it. There was a time in the earlier days of the Internet, for example, that social media and the Internet allowed people to post thoughts and organically reach some sort of audience. Now, its almost impossible because you have to pay to increase your reach (through advertisements and such) or seek to game their algorithms.I always thought that when we talk about the foundations of organic order, with every change or with every new technology, that becomes subject to change. In this day and agewith new technologies coming and goinghow do you keep that kind of organic order that you discuss in the book?

Organic order is basically the order that is according to our nature. We are social beings, so we like to communicate with others. Thats part of an organic order. Were not machines. When were put into machine-like situations, it becomes very awkward for us, and we dont become comfortable in those situations. So thats how I would define an organic order: an organic order is a society where people live according to their nature. And with social relationships, natural leadership, ways of producing, ways of consuming that are familiar, you feel a certain familiarity with what youre dealing with. The modern economy does tend to destroy those things, you know. It creates an environment where youre just a number in the system; youre not really a person with all the nuances that are necessary. As you mentioned, new technologies tend to disrupt those organic rhythms, but they dont necessarily have to destroy them. And were seeing a lot of that destruction today. Were feeling the lack of that human element that is so important, that human touch that is so important to not only our own social life but also to economic life.

When I describe your book to friends, the first question almost everyone asks is: What does the book say about social media? So why dont you share what you think about that?

Social mediaI mean, Im on social media. Not so much for my own personal use; I use it incidentally for the book because you need to have some kind of presence. But I think it is a very shallow medium; it doesnt allow us to really think deeply, and that is much more important than the shallow contacts, where its just a like, some kind of notification. I think it makes for very limited contact. Social media is very limited; it cannot replace personal contact. A lot of people try to replace it, and social media tends to present a distorted reality where the person only presents that which is most favorable to that person, and a person can somehow show off what he or she is doing. So I dont think its an ideal medium, as the more organic ones are. The personal contact is what makes all the difference.

I follow you on Twitter, and I was suspicious as to if it was really you behind the account.

Well, actually, Twitter I use. Facebook I dont, but Twitter I do. On Twitter, the personality of the person does show through because your thinking can show through, and its interesting. The human personality is so strong and so important that even in very mechanical ways, it can show through. Hopefully, my personality shows through on Twitter.

I resisted Twitter for a long time, but eventually I joined because apparently you should have it these days. Also, if some people want to contact you, then thats how they do it. But it always amazes me when I see those with much more practical purposes in life having a social media presence. I think they have much better things to do than spend time on social media.

One of the other things that comes up when I talk about the book is that the book looks like a religious book, but its not a religious book; its a very practical book. How do you account for having a very practical book that looks like its a religious text, but its not a religious text?

Well, I mean, it is. What were talking about are rules that come from our human nature, the way we are. Its just an observation of reality and an observation of societynot only my own but those of people who have written some very brilliant books about these topics. What I wanted to do in the book was not to provide an encyclopedia of everything Ive read but to create a very succinct summary of these things so that you could see what is available out there. These things have been thought out, and its not just some kind of pipe dream that Ive come up with. These things have been done; societies have been organized like this. It does work, to a certain extent. So that was basically my idea.

Whats your take on the state of religion nowadays?

Obviously, there is a decline in religion; we live in a secular society that doesnt recognize religionor makes religion simply a very personal thing. We are social beings, but we are also religious beings; and, its very hard to suppress religion. It always comes up. Everyone has to answer those very basic life questions that a secular society cannot answer, and those questions are, Who am I; Why am I here; What is my purpose? These are questions that require answers, and everybody has to somehow find an answer for himself or herself. And I dont think you can ever really suppress religion, even in a secular society that doesnt recognize it and doesnt give it official citizenship in the national discourse. But I think America is a very, very religious nation, much more religious than you might realize.

One topic that also comes up when I have conversations with people about your book is how to reach and maintain order. I tend to talk with people who are not thinking in the same way as I am, so I can understand my beliefs and also understand their point of view. But the notion of having an orderly, practical lifepeople always say its easier said than doneand from what I understand, its not easy to keep order. But if you want tell people how to approach having order in life and how to maintain it, whats the best practical advice that you could give?

Thats a very difficult questionbecause in an organic society, a lot of these arent spelled out in a systematic and mechanical way. People are very different, and one formula for one person may not work for another person, though there are basic principles you can and must take into consideration. I think one of those principles is that there is an order in society; there is an order that exists in our very nature. And it is necessary to recognize that order as valid for all people, in all types of times. It doesnt change, and there is an order of things, which says you dont lie, you dont steal, and you cant really find a way out of those things. Those are part of our very nature that you cant change. I think the first step would be to recognize that there is a natural order in society, and to see, well, how can I apply that to my own life? And how can I live that? The circumstances around me may be different, may emphasize one aspect over another, but we all have to somehow deal with it.

I wanted to see what your view is on a point Ive been thinking about. Many companies transformed media, entertainment, and such into a very scientific-based method to grab your attention and stop whatever youre doing. And they do it very successfully; they make a lot of money, even from people do not have a lot of power of concentration. However, the things that matter most need deep conversation, and we do not have that. I would say, Why is there no science behind the other side: on how to have discussions in a very deep way?

Well, that is a very interesting question. Ive never really thought about it. You definitely have a pointbecause the other side, the side that likes the spontaneity and unrestraint, they have become experts at it. They study it; they do the science on it, and they know what our reactions will be. So, definitely, were at a disadvantage. Were not in the loop. I see things from the point of view of a Catholic, and thats what I wrote it from: from that point of view. And there are spiritual schools that deal with these topics, of how to live ones life and how to meditate, how to reflect upon God, the contemplation of the universe. It is something actually well-developed, and these things are ways in which people can find a certain kind of happiness, a type of happiness that is very much in contrast with the frenetic intemperance of our modern day world. Its not as if these things have never been studied. I just think they have been put aside, and the modern media has certainly taken advantage of its monopoly on peoples attention to turn people the opposite way.

The argument that I make usually when it comes to the media is that many people still have this incorrect perception that media companies are doing things by the book, or are fair, or balanced, or moral. So I argue that these are money-making machines, so they dont really care about whats fair or balanced. They just see what works to their interests, so, in that case, no one should look at them as sources of justice or impartiality or fairness or morality. Theres nothing there, so we have to change the view. Thats what I tell them about.

There was a series of podcasts by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and he made the series of Morality in the 21st Century. The main theme was why for example, Adam Smiths book on the economy,The Wealth of Nation, is great, but his book on morality,The Theory of Moral Sentiments,is less known. So what would be the best way to approach the relationship between economics and morality today?

My analysis involves personal decisions that you have to makeand also decisions where youre definitely going to have to give up something, including benefits that you might receive by falling in line with the fast-paced world where everything is completely unrestrained. So those personal decisions are things that will really determine how you are going to put morality into effect. But there are some basic ones, like family. Family is such a natural institution that it adapts to time; it adapts to situations, and it allows a person to feel very fulfilled. At the same time, one feels the restraints of that relationship, as well as the benefits. Family is very important, and if you can live a family life inside our society, then youve gone a long way. And, of course, faith is an important part of that as well. Even a communitythe life of a community is very difficult these days because everybodys isolated in their own little house, and they dont get involved in communities. But communities are very important for our social relationships.

Have you noticed that your book, Return to Order, is very compatible with Jordan Petersons 12 Rules for Life?

[Laughs]. I dont know; Ive read Petersons Twelves Rules for Life, and it has some points that I agree with. But I dont think he goes far enough. There are some criticisms that I have of him because he is not a religious man, and hes very philosophical. He bases himself on a lot of philosophers that I would not agree with, including German philosophers of the 19th century. But the fact that he does talk about responsibility, the fact that he does talk about family relationships, and also the fact that we are always constantly looking for meaningwe only reach a certain degree of happiness when we find meaning. In that sense, I think I definitely agree with him.

Last question, whats the best current book youve read that gives you the best satisfaction as for the point of view of having an orderly life?

Thats a good question.I would go with the book of my mentor, the one who actually proposed this project to me, who is Professor Plinio Corra de Oliveira, and he wrote a book called Revolution and Counter-revolution. It is a perspective on history that put everything in order in my life, and said Well, this how history works. It gave a general outline of the different revolutions in society and how to do a counterrevolution. That book was very important in my life, and I do read it often. I go back to it often.

Thank you so much for your time.

Its a pleasure, anytime.

The rest is here:

John Horvat: Social Media, Jordan Peterson, and Returning to Order - Merion West

Canadian filmmakers, Patricia Marcoccia and Maziar Ghaderi, discuss their documentary, THE RISE OF JORDAN PETERSON, on Tom Needham's THE SOUNDS OF FILM this Thursday on WUSB. The show is also going to featuring the music of composer Thomas Newman, who is nominated for an Academy Award this year for Best Original Score.

THE RISE OF JORDAN PETERSON provides an intimate glimpse into the life and mind of Jordan Peterson, the academic and best-selling author who captured the world's attention with his criticisms of political correctness and his life-changing philosophy on discovering personal meaning.

Referred to by many as the most influential public intellectual in the western world, University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson skyrocketed to fame after he published a controversial viral video about political correctness in 2016. Within 2 years, he sold over 3 million copies of his self-help book, 12 Rules For Life, and became simultaneously branded by some as an academic rockstar selling out theatres around the world.

THE RISE OF JORDAN PETERSON intimately traces the transformative period of Peterson's life while visiting rare moments with his family, friends and foes who share their own versions of the Jordan Peterson story.

Patricia Marcoccia is a Toronto-based director, producer, editor and cinematographer nominated for best emerging filmmaker at the Golden Sheaf Awards. Maziar Ghaderi is a multimedia artist, director and producer that works with visual media and interactive technology.

In addition, THE SOUNDS OF FILM, will be featuring the film music of Thomas Newman, who is nominated for an Oscar for his score for 1917. The show will be featuring some his memorable music from movies like FINDING NEMO, SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, WALL-E and many others.

THE SOUNDS OF FILM is the nation's longest running film and music themed radio show. For the past 30 years, the program has delivered a popular mix of interviews and music to listeners all over Long Island, parts of Connecticut and streaming live worldwide on the internet. Past people interviewed for the show include Don McLean, Nile Rodgers, Jimmy Webb, William H. Macy, Cheech & Chong, Hal Hartley, Carter Burwell, Laurie Anderson and Billy Joel.

Read the original here:

Filmmakers Discuss THE RISE OF JORDAN PETERSON On Tom Needham's SOUNDS OF FILM - Broadway World

Joe Rogan performs at the Ice House Comedy Club in 2017 in Pasadena, California. (Michael Schwartz / WireImage)

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You cant even discuss the fact that certain races demonstrate low IQ, Joe Rogan lamented in 2018. On that show he was celebrating Sam Harriss support for Charles Murrays claims that people of color are dumber than whites.

In 2019, in response to a guests proposed hypothetical, Lets imagine that you actually believe that males and females are equal in intelligence, Rogan responded, LOL. Rogans position was obvious: Women, he believes, arent as smart as men.

Rogan has routinely attacked people of color, trans people, women, and queer people as part of his public life for decades. His attacks on trans people are particularly vicious. Almost weekly on his popular podcast, Rogan excoriates trans folks using language like, What are you? and She used to be a man, and attacking trans individuals for wanting to play in sports, transitioning as teens, and asking people to address them respectfully.

In 2018, he told frequent guest Gavin McInnes, founder of the violent white supremacist and misogynist gang known as the Proud Boys, that people often become gay or lesbian because of molestation at an early age. it seems to be a real factor.

And Rogan, who has reveled in using the N-word, said that going to a black neighborhood made him feel like he was visiting the Planet of the Apes. He likes to use the word faggot, has announced that queer women dont have the lower back muscles to give other women a proper fuck, and says campuses are being too aggressive in prosecuting sexual assaults. He also claims that feminism is sexist.

All of this is why I felt so hurt and angry when I saw my favorite candidate, Bernie Sanders, trumpet Rogans endorsement in a campaign commercial released on Twitter.

As a passionate lifelong socialist, Ive adored and supported Bernie since the 1980s, when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont. I was beyond thrilled to be able to vote for him and contribute money to his campaign in 2016. Ive been ecstatic to see a new flourishing generation of openly socialist candidates in the Democratic Party like AOC, and the growth of a movement of young socialist activists backing them.

But the question at the heart of the controversy around Sanders celebrating Rogans endorsement is what solidarity means.

As Shevek, the hero of Ursula K. Le Guins anarchist novel The Dispossessed puts it, solidarity begins in shared pain. Solidarity means taking on anothers pain and responding to it as though it were your own. Or, as the Industrial Workers of the World had it, An injury to one is an injury to all. Solidarity is at the heart of socialism, but Bernie Sanderss decision to embrace the backing of someone like Rogan is the opposite of sharing the pain of all. It is the opposite of the union makes us strong. In particular, his campaigns decision to double down on the Rogan ad and not even to acknowledge the pain of trans, African American, Latinx, gay, and female critics is a disturbing signal that for Sanders adherents, cisgender straight white men are the only people whose suffering seems to matter.

Sanderss Rogan ad is not a side issue. It cuts to the heart of the danger facing the American leftin fact, this entire countryat this terrifying political moment. Far-right populists the world over are mobilizing whiteness and maleness as though they were actually the true emblems of working-class identity.

Trump won the last election by explicitly referencing capitalist inequality and telling whites and straight cis men that they were its only victims. Fascists here and abroad say baldly that the solution to capitalist inequality is to attack brown people and sexual minorities.

Walking that path, however unknowingly, is the wrong movefor both practical reasons and moral ones. Besides his personal volleys of hate against these groups, Rogan has used his show to host white nationalists and fascists including McInnes, Alex Jones (whom Rogan calls a good friend), Milo Yiannopoulos, and Stefan Molyneux. He delights in defending misogynists and gay-bashers like Jordan Peterson and Stephen Crowder.

Writing in The Guardian, Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin, called Rogans show pretty good and said the podcasters fans are a group of people we cant afford to cede to Trump.

I wonder if he thinks we can afford to cede the votes of people of color, women, trans people, and queer folks to the seductions of staying at home rather than vote for someone not prepared to have our back. More importantly, I wonder if he thinks we can afford to jettison these groups claims to protection, solidarity, and mutual aid from the rest of the left.

If were going to say that socialism is compatible with racism, transphobia, and misogyny, then weve already ceded the most important battle of our times. Many incarnations of fascism and white nationalism already incorporate a perverse kind of socialism whose benefits are to be restricted to white and cis straight males. Hey, Richard Spencer already believes in universal health care for white peoplewhy not get him to join the campaign, too?

The reason why not is, as Le Guin also wrote, that the means are the end. I expected better from Sanders. I will be voting for someone else in the primary.

Originally posted here:

Bernie Broke My Heart When He Embraced Rogan's Endorsement - The Nation

As January comes to a close, here are three pieces from around the web that I particularly recommend. Enjoy!

Representative Darrell Issa in the basement of the Capitol with a painting of Ronald Reagan by artist Steve Penley. Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via Getty Images.

Have you ever heard of Steve Penley? I havent, but then I guess the fact that I dont know his colorfully dappled paintings of US presidents and American flags just means that I dont watch much Fox News.

Penleys art is more than just a regular feature and symbol of all that is patriotic on Fox. You have seen his patriotic paintings all over Fox & Friends, and actually Fox News channeleverywhere you go, we see your pictures hanging up in the halls, the shows cohost, Ainsley Earhardt, enthused to an audience a few years ago, during an appearance by the world-famous painter on the show.

Its all over my radio studio nowwe took em all! another one of the friends, Brian Kilmeade, added. Its brainwashing!

That level of media exposure surely makes Penley one of the countrys most high-profile painters, whether youve heard of him or not. In a funny way, the right-wing mediasphere has a lot more use for artists than its liberal cable-media rivals.

Wetzler wades through a lot of Fox News (so you dont have to) to find the Fox News Theory of Art, and its pretty much what you think it is: Only three kinds of art exist for Fox News: patriotic, stupid, and obscene.

Any way you slice it, its a mainly instrumental view of art: a given artwork gets the spotlight either because it is useful as propaganda for the Fox News worldview; because it serves as an illustration of how dumb and empty-headed liberal elites are; or because it outrages conservative sensibilities, and so can be used to rally the troops for the culture wars.

The favored patriotic aesthetic tends to channel Norman Rockwell by way of Andy Warhol, a late-Pop recycling of comfortingly clichd American symbols. (Like Penley, the late Thomas Kinkadealso took direct inspiration from Warhols Factory and described himself as Warhols heir apparent.) The best you could say of this work is that its probably more aware of how it operates than the art-loving public thatdoesnt watch Fox Newsgives it credit for.

Conservative aesthetics are stereotypically all about taking a stand against decadent experimental art and for real traditional art. Ive made a version of this point before (about neo-Jungian philosopher of the manosphere, Jordan Peterson), but by putting this art into the context of Fox News, Wetzler makes the point even more forcefully: it shows just how classically postmodern this conservative art is, if by that you mean art reduced to hollowed out signifiers, mutable performances, and stripped of any sense of a reality outside of media.

The Fox News view of culture may slam contemporary art as deliberately valuing offense over enlightenment, spectacle over skill, ugliness over beauty. But beneath a very thin Rockwellian veneer, all of this is equally true of the Through-the-Looking-Glass sensibility of Fox Newss rearguard. You cant understand superstar Fox News artist Jon McNaughtons One Nation Under Socialism, a painting of Obama burning the Constitution, outside of the value it puts on offenseaka trolling the libs.

And you cant understand Joe Everson, whose shtick is live-painting the Statue of Libertywhile singing the national anthem, outside of the appeal to spectacle.

Patriot artist, nationally acclaimed flag muralist, and frequent Fox visitor Scott LoBaidos 20-foot-tall image of a musclebound Donald Trump isabout as farfrom the profundities of real traditional art as Andres SerranosPiss Christ.

Whats it all mean? Probably that you should take Fox News art a hair more seriously than it is normally taken. Not in the sense of plumbing it for deep meaningits meaning seems mainly to be its appeal to Fox News audiences. But as simplistic and easily mocked as it is, its much more savvy and finely calibrated to be effective than it gets credit for.

The blur in action: Donald Trump speaking before a luncheon with US and African leaders at the Palace Hotel in New York. Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images.

Petrovich, by contrast, reads political meaning in a phenomenon that youve probably seen everywhere and not read much into: the increasing presence of the blur in mainstream political photojournalism. That we dont fall off our chairs when we see this tells us how far we have come, photographically, in a very short time, he writes. We are a long way from Pete Souzas languid, almost classical compositions on the Obama-era White House Flickr account, which in retrospect feel tinged with approaching horror.

Its an observant and nuanced essay, with the implication being that all the blurring is an almost an unconscious aesthetic symptom, registering a widespread, unnamable sense of looming dread. On the other hand, such blurry images are also slightly virtuosic and carry the blush of pure expression. Petrovich writes: I have been told that what I was seeing was just the increased prowess of the telephoto lens, or merely the resurgence of shallow depth of field.

I left the essay thinking it could be both. Photojournalism is in dire straights, images are cheap and everywhere, and it stands to reason that the dedicated professionals who remainwho are going to be focused in high-profile beats like political coverage and disaster reportingfeel pressured to register the individuality of their images with an arty shot. Wonky blurring is one way to do it. Whats interesting is that either wayas a symbol of an audiences general sense of unease, or as a symbol of the photographers intensified need to register their subjectivitywe arrive at the blur through a sense of a system in crisis, just by different routes.

Peter Schjeldahl at the 2011 New Yorker Festival. Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for The New Yorker.

Like a lot of people, Ive been thinking about New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl and what makes him an important figure, since his essay, The Art of Dying, was published last year. Earnests essay puts a commanding knowledge of his subjects writinghe edited Schjeldahls recent book,Hot, Cold, Heavy, Lightto try to explain Schjeldahls Olympian everyman style.

There really are few writers who have the effect Schjeldahl has: his writing is almost untouchably on-its-own. But hes also exceptionally engaging and reader-directed, and focused on connecting the circuits of artist biography and personal experience to make comprehensible a thought, an experience, a way of seeing.

Earnest describes his articles as detective stories about feelings, which gives a name to what I feel about them. He mentions Schjeldahls own account of his method: Looking at art is like, Here are the answers. What were the questions? he once told me. I think of it like espionage, walking the cat backwhy didthathappen, andthat?until eventually you come to a point of irreducible mystery.'

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How Fox News Weaponizes Art + Two Other Illuminating Pieces of Criticism From Around the Web - artnet News

PASADENA, CA - APRIL 17: Comedian Joe Rogan performs during his appearance at The Ice House Comedy ... [+] Club on April 17, 2019 in Pasadena, California. (Photo by Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images)

The news that comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders for president matters just as much as The New York Times endorsing both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar; Which is to say, not at all. But all the buzz surrounding Rogans nod to the Independent U.S. senator from Vermont has taken on a life of its own, far surpassing the Wha...? moment that followed The Times hotly debated double trouble pick.

This week, the Sanders campaign embraced the endorsement, which Rogan announced during a podcast withTimesopinion writer Bari Weiss, the self-described left-leaning centrist whos described by observers of her writing as a pro-choice conservative.

Sanders acceptance of Rogans support,in the form of this video, didnt just generate a backlash. The reaction seen on Twitter was more like front-, side-, top-, bottom- and every other which way-lash. To call it a backlash would be akin to describing the movie Joker as an intimate drama about a desperate mother and her troubled son.

As Dani Di Placido explained in his own Forbes.com story, in the rush to condemn the podcast as problematic, many commentators are missing the point.

Rogan, the colorful, bombastic, actor-turned mixed martial arts commentator has become an influencer in American politics and well-known for his candid conversations with controversial figures. Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, Edward Snowden, Jordan Peterson and Roseanne Barr have sat in the same studio as Dr. Cornel West, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Macaulay Culkin and Robert Downey, Jr. Elon Musk famously smoked pot there, sending Tesla stocks plummeting 9%.

But Rogan also made racist remarksthere, about a primarily African-American neighborhood where he saw the film, Rise of the Planet of the Apes: We walked into Africa, he said on his podcast in 2013. His podcast is one of the most downloaded podcasts on iTunes, and he has nearly 6 million followers on Twitter.

Ten million users follow the Sanders campaign; another nine million follow his official Senate account. The endorsement video tweeted by his campaign was seen more than 5.5 million times, and retweeted 145K times.

That endorsement tweet was swiftly followed by outrage, hand-wringing and a statement by Briahna Joy Gray, national press secretary for the Sanders campaign. She did not name Rogan but made the point that the campaign is not going to reject support from people just because they dont always share the same beliefs as Sanders, the Washington Post reported.

Sharing a big tent requires including those who do not share every one of our beliefs, while always making clear that we will never compromise our values, wrote Gray. The truth is that by standing together in solidarity, we share the values of love and respect that will move us in the direction of a more humane, more equal world.

Among the angry responses to Grays statement was this tweet from the press secretary for rapid response at Human Rights Campaign, Charlotte Clymer, in which she declared: I am a human being and a trans person. I am not another belief.

Her boss, Human Rights Campaign president Alphonso David, followed-up by publicly calling for Sanders to renounce Rogan and his endorsement. David noted that Rogan has attacked transgender people, gay men, women, people of color and countless marginalized groups at every opportunity.

Given Rogans comments, it is disappointing that the Sanders campaign has accepted and promoted the endorsement, David said in the statement, which contrasted Rogans record with Sanders, applauding him for having run a campaign unabashedly supportive of the rights of LGBTQ people.

The Sanders campaign must reconsider this endorsement and the decision to publicize the views of someone who has consistently attacked and dehumanized marginalized people, David said.

Two examples of this would be Rogans podcast with Peterson in which the two men mocked respect of a trans persons pronouns as madness; more famously, Rogan misgendered the first MMA fighter to come out as transgender, Fallon Fox, in 2013. You're a f***ing man, Rogan said. That's a man, OK? Fox publicly asked for an apology; she never got one.

Moveon.org not only called for Sanders to reject the endorsement, but to also apologize for accepting it in the first place.

But like a big electoral bug zapper, Rogans endorsement didnt merely scare-off some voters; It drew some closer.

Socialist journalist, editor of Jacobin magazine and Guardian columnist Bhaskar Sunkara called Rogan the best endorsement Bernie Sanders could hope for his fans are a group of people we cant afford to cede to Trump.

And since transgender people are not a monolith, it should come as no surprise there are trans voters who welcome Rogans endorsement. Here are tweets from three trans people who refused to join the Sanders-bashing bandwagon:

@Fox_Barrett tweeted, Hey. Fellow trans folk. I REALLY don't give a sh*t if Joe Rogan is endorsing Sanders. Neither Biden nor Warren nor f***ing Buttigieg are going to meaningfully push something like Medicare for All through. Free healthcare is a queer issue. Please don't get distracted.

The thread by Princeton professor and author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, shared by transgender athlete and journalist Karleigh Webb, actually walks the line. The scholar, who in 2017 called President Trump a racist, sexist megalomaniac and received death threats for making those remarks in a commencement address, doesnt have a problem with the endorsement. Taylor does call out the campaign for failing to take the next step, and urges Sanders supporters to adjust their focus forward, not try to rewrite what happened this week.

I think its fine to accept the endorsement even as I disagree [with] highlighting him in an ad... Solidarity cant be built on a faulty unity that assumes some of our acceptance of the repugnant ideas that continue to keep us divided. And receiving Rogans endorsement [without] publicly challenging his backward politics is effectively to accept those ideas... Stop denying Rogans bad politics, instead challenge them.

The bottom line, of course, is: Will all this hurt Sanders at the Iowa caucuses one week from Monday? Its highly doubtful, but rival Joe Biden certainly is doing what he can toward that outcome:

At last count, in 2016, Iowa had about 7,400 residents who identified as trans, or 0.31% of the states population. And for Joe Rogan, like Dave Chappelle, every trans Iowan is a punchline whose sole purpose is to make people laugh. This is, after all, America in 2020, where punching down is tolerated, so long as we defeat the bigger bully.

Medicare for all will take care of trans people, and only Bernie Sanders...

Just you wait...

Youll see...

Hell protect trans rights, as soon as hes elected...

Hey, as soon as this election is over, trans rights are next...

By the way, that reminds me, did you hear what Joe Rogan said about trannies?

Here is the original post:

Joe Rogans Endorsement: The Stain On Bernie Sanders That Some Voters Think Makes Him More Attractive - Forbes

Michael Emerson Photo: John Lamparski/Getty Images

Its always fun to get to play something that is seemingly normal but has a horrible subtext, Michael Emerson says, delivering the observation with the clipped overpronunciation that gives many of his performances their signature mixture of humor and dread. Emerson is talking about his role on CBSs Evil, the bonkers and delightful show from Good Wife creators Michelle and Robert King, in which he plays a forensic psychologist named Leland Townsend, who may be the devil incarnate, an agent of the devil, or just a weird dorky tuba player from Iowa whos trying to make himself seem important.

Either way, Leland consistently plots to mess with Evils Scooby gang of heroes, including Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers), the psychologist slash mountain climber slash paranormal investigator whos skeptical of all things supernatural. In Thursdays season finale, he even convinces Kristens mother, Sheryl (Christine Lahti), to marry him. Watching Leland, you get the feeling that hed get along with the other sinister TV characters Emerson has played on shows like Lost. As he told Vulture in advance of the Evil finale, hes comfortable playing the types of roles that make people give him the stink eye on the street, though as he discovered in playing Leland, he sometimes does have his limits.

In the episode before the finale, Kristen confronted Leland and revealed that hes just a dork named Jake Perry who grew up in Des Moines and played the tuba in his high-school marching band. You were also in your high-school marching band, right? Yeah, I wonder if the Kings have done some delving into my Iowa background. I didnt go to high school in Des Moines, but I went to undergrad in Des Moines. I went to high school in a little town in Iowa, and I was in the marching band, and I did play embarrassing instruments.

Which instruments? I started on the cymbals and I graduated to the glockenspiel. Imagine! Youre a shrimpy little 14-year-old, all the girls in your class are a head taller than you, and youre carrying around an upright xylophone with horsehair tassels on it.

But you didnt tell the Kings about that? No! I dont know where it all came from. The next time I see them, I should ask them. It cant be an accident that they chose Iowa.

After making us think that Lelands just an ordinary guy, the episode ends with a scene where hes meeting with a goat-headed devil plotting his revenge. Like a lot of the supernatural stuff in Evil, it could be imaginary or it could be totally real. How did you take it? My idea was that it was something he does every day and it no longer has any special shock value or meaning to him. Thats his shrink and hes impatient with his shrink. Hes tired of being pushed and prodded and told to do things. Hes like a kid. Its like, Yeah, okay mom. Except, in this case, it appears to be Satan.

We have the impression that he had great powers and that he was maybe the evil genius behind everything. To find out that hes not even that high on some infernal pecking order, its delicious. Even when you agree to work with the devil, you still dont get any respect.

Your wife, Carrie Preston, has a great recurring role on The Good Wife and The Good Fight playing Elsbeth the scattered lawyer. Did you know the Kings well coming into Evil? I had met them, of course. They had inquired after me for guest spots here and there over the years that I, for one reason or another, wasnt available for partly because I was on a long-running series, Person of Interest, on CBS, which is their network. Evil was easy. They said, We have this script; wed like you to read it. I read it and I liked it and that was it. That was how hard it was to sign me up, because theyre the Kings.

You dont have to read but two or three pages of any script they write to know that it is superior writing, that the language of it is very smart. Nothing trite or predictable about it. Its strong. And the fact that it is shot in New York City, where I live, that was a big plus.

The Kings said they were excited about Evil because they could work with a lot of the theater and TV actors theyd already used on The Good Wife all over again. Whats it like to join that extended company? Its so great because they have the deepest casting pool on the planet here in New York City, so you get astonishingly good and nuanced players coming in to play supporting roles. You get John Glover and you get Darren Pettie and Jayne Houdyshell. Every time you turn around, theres some great stage actor that you revere and theyre there to do a part on the Kings show.

Did you have a favorite guest performer? Well, of course my best scenes are with Christine and with Katja. But for a guest player, I dont know if you remember Noah Robbins, who played the young man that I was luring into being an incel shooter. He was really good. He was really professional and well prepared. Hes quite young, but man, you havent heard the last of him.

In that story arc, Leland radicalizes Noahs character through the language of mens-rights movements, like hes an internet figure in the style of Jordan Peterson. Did you do much research into that world? No, I get enough information about that world from the daily news. To me, that was the most villainous and unforgivable thing that Leland did this season. It was awful. Its the only time I have ever gotten in touch with the Kings to say, Do we really need to go this far? Because if it plays as it is on the page, I will be a hated person on the streets of New York City to those people who blur the lines between actors and characters. We had a good conversation about that and there were some little changes of tone.

What kinds of changes? Just some language.

When you talked, why did they say they wanted to do that story line? They said, Were glad you called because weve been having this discussion in the writers room. Were relieved to have a chance to talk to you and get your perspective on it. It turned out to be a good conversation. If you tackle certain themes that are very topical, youre a little bit playing with fire. You can be misunderstood. You can get a firestorm of social media reaction if you appear to be glib or unfeeling and they are neither of those things.

You didnt want yourself to be hated on the streets of New York, but of course youve played several villains in the past, like Ben Linus on Lost. Do you worry about weird in-person interactions? In my acting career on TV, I have experienced people misunderstanding who I am. Right from the get-go, when I played that serial killer on The Practice, people would scream and run away from me. Because I was a little-known actor at that time, they couldnt just say, Oh, thats just Michael Emerson. To them, Michael Emerson didnt exist. Only the character existed and there he was walking the streets of New York City.

So yes, I do think about those things. The same on Lost. People would cross the street in Honolulu to tell me how much they hated me. Some people would tell me that I had ruined the show, as if I had written it. We liked it when it was like Survivor. We dont want all this meanness and danger!

I imagine if you agreed to play a character like Leland on Evil, then youve had to come to peace with that experience? I dont mind it, unless I was confused with some sinister or horrible point of view. I would be loath to play a character who was a racist agitator. I know Id just be an actor playing a role, but I guess I just draw the line somewhere. I dont want those words to come out of my mouth.

Working on the show, the Kings said they like to keep a balance between their two perspectives on what evil is. Where do you fall on that spectrum? Im not really a believer of supernatural beings or that an incarnate devil walks the earth. I think evil is like a potentiality in the human brain. A thing thats vulnerable to persuasion or misunderstanding or fear that can turn us away from empathy and toward aggression. We can lose track of our better natures and do perhaps unthinkable things.

Although, I do think about ghosts and aliens. I dont know if youve ever had this experience, but Ill be walking down a crowded street in midtown and someone will be walking toward me, and theyre looking right at me and there is a fixed deadness in their stare, and I have this intuition that this person is not human. Maybe its just the wild imaginings of a person who tells stories for a living, but I have had a couple of those experiences.

When I was a kid I used to get sleep paralysis, where you feel the weight on your chest in the middle of the night and you think that theres some demon in the room or something, which always terrified me even if I knew the explanation of it. I have had sleep paralysis a couple of times since weve been shooting Evil. Its like the mere discussion of it in the show has brought it into play in my own mind. Were all impressionable. If we are hearing those kinds of stories, or in the business of telling them, it may be rattling around in your head.

See the rest here:

Evils Michael Emerson Isnt a Bad Guy, Hes Just Good at Playing Them - Vulture

Entrepreneurs are trial and error people, says Krishna Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Green Pepper, a Kochi-based boutique strategic consulting firm. Less than 1% makes it big in the entrepreneurship game. Some quit, some thrive, some stay, some drag, says Krishna, who has published his first book, Between Genes and Memes Life Beyond Hunts, Harvests and Hashtags.

The book, which is philosophical in treatment, has been largely drawn from Krishnas experience as a consulting entrepreneur and his many interactions with CEOs, leaders, investors, and risk-takers. What I learnt from these people is that essentially, it is the life philosophy that holds them higher than their business acumen.

An avid blogger, Krishna says most of the material for the book has come from his blogs.

Edited excerpts from an interview

Why a book on philosophy?

Philosophy is all about wisdom derived through critical thinking, which drives our decisions, habits, and results. This book is a laboratory of such thought experiments and a DJ mix of philosophical perspectives from deep conversations and experiences with leaders.

Many would say philosophers over centuries were mostly financially unsuccessful and lived miserable lives. That perception makes it an unattractive thing. Philosophy is not for losers, it is for all.

So, the book is for anyone trying to maintain their space in this world?

We are shifting from teamwork to specialist jobs; full-time jobs to the gig economy; company branding to personal branding. Never before in history, as individuals, have we faced so much pressure.

We have now moved from thinking about mere survival to the richer meaning of existence. This book is for everyone who wishes to see life differently entrepreneurship, leadership, education, internet, meditation and more.

Did you follow any particular writing routine?

I write in the form of tweets whenever an idea strikes. Then it becomes a blog. Creating a book out of my blogs was a challenge. It took a lot of time to create a coherent flow.

Writing, to me, is unadulterated self-expression. The emotions are real. My writing routine generally involves a long walk and coming back with an idea to write. Even in the midst of chaos, I write. They are small islands of meditative moments I get during the day.

Who are your influences?

Modern science has changed the way we look at philosophy. We are equipped with better answers and solutions to the existential questions. Thinkers like Yuval Noah Harari, Steven Pinker, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Naval Ravikant, Jordan Peterson and James Clear have influenced me heavily.

Ive been reading philosophers like Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Immanuel Kant, Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche and many more. I find Alain de Bottons School of Life videos enriching.

Critical thinkers look at the world to offer better solutions. The proceeds of the book will be used to create free educational content on critical thinking.

What are you working on now?

The next book is coming in 2020. It will be another version of this book, but deeper. If you write 100 words a day, in 7 months, you have material for a 200-page book. The next 3 months are for refining and brutal editing. That is the formula.

Published by Recto and Verso, the book will be launched in Amazon, Flipkart, Storytel by February 10. An audiobook is also on the anvil.

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Krishna Kumars book takes a critical look at the world to offer solutions - The Hindu