Monthly Archives: March 2012

Dodai Stewart: Racist Hunger Games Fans Are Very Disappointed

http://jezebel.com/5896408/racist-hunger-games-fans-dont-care-how-much-money-the-movie-made?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

“These people are MAD that the girl that they cried over while reading the book was “some black girl” all along. So now they’re angry. Wasted tears, wasted emotions. It’s sad to think that had they known that she was black all along, there would have been [no] sorrow or sadness over her death.”

I haven’t read the book or seen the movie, but the screenshots of Facebook comments are scary.

LEANH NGUYEN, PH.D: "The Ethics of Trauma"

Link to my blog instead of directly to the article because it’s behind a paywall.
Well worth the $ 19.50 it costs.




“What you want to know, just ask me.” 

A beautifully honest paper on an excruciating theme:  



http://guilfordjournals.com/doi/pdf/10.1521/ijgp.2011.61.1.26 


Some quotes: 

During the Physicians for Human Rights evaluations of the Iraqis, some of the men laughed incredulously upon reading the questionnaires. One man looked at the items in a studious, puzzled way. Another said, “What is this?” One man pushed the questionnaire away in despair. “I can’t do this. I don’t understand
this.” Another man eventually refused to continue and said to me, “What you want to know, just ask me.”

Just ask me.

These reactions conveyed to me that the clinician-listener-witness was failing her traumatized subject in the task that the historian Dominick LaCapra (2001) has called “remaining in empathic unsettlement”: to stay unsettled in order to look at, not past or beyond, the subject. To stay in the not knowing and trying to know with the subject—such is the task that we may be failing when we unquestioningly engage in “empirical” standardized testing of traumatized people.

Ban Ki-moon: The Time Has Come.

From AllOut.org:

Earlier this month, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon delivered an incredibly powerful speech at the U.N. in Geneva. It’s not every day that a major world figure speaks out forcefully in defense of equality. But most people didn’t even hear about it.

Why? Because a handful of delegates stormed out of the meeting in protest and their story – that gay people should be denied human rights – dominated the day’s news.


But we are about to change that. Our friends at the U.N. just let us REMIX Ban-Ki Moon (complete with a dance beat chosen by the team at All Out). Will you take just 2 minutes to listen to this incredibly inspiring speech and share with your friends and family? When someone like Ban Ki-Moon speaks out, it makes a difference – but only if people hear what he has to say:

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study

Thanks again to @Sigrun for the link:

http://www.cdc.gov/ace/index.htm

Quote:

The ACE Study findings suggest that certain experiences are major risk factors for the leading causes of illness and death as well as poor quality of life in the United States. Progress in preventing and recovering from the nation’s worst health and social problems is likely to benefit from understanding that many of these problems arise as a consequence of adverse childhood experience

Terrorhood

Norsk sammendrag: 
Jeg legger ut dette på nytt fordi det ikke kommer opp i søk. 
Det er en lenke til en smertefullt ærlig gjennomgang av en helbredelsesprosess. 
Dessverre er det langt … og på engelsk.  

I posted this a year ago, and I’m reposting because it does not come up in site searches: 


I’m linking to something called “TERRORHOOD” that I mentioned in the comments to the “Abuse and use” post.

I actually printed out the whole thing some years ago – it was painful reading, but very helpful. Others might find different things there; it gave me new insights into being used as an object of addiction.


I don’t agree with everything here, and I wouldn’t recommend trying to read it straight through – I used to dip into it here and there, stop when it hit me where it hurt, and then work my way through that before I continued.


But the raw honesty it contains is rare and wonderful. Clinton Clark is one of my heroes

Research paper: A Meta-Analysis of Rape Myths

In Sigrun’s Norwegian blog …
http://stomm-blog.blogspot.com/2012/03/forskning-pa-voldtekt-og-offerklandring.html 
… I found the link to an interesting research paper called


Stop Blaming the Victim: A Meta-Analysis on Rape Myths



I’m adding a relevant excerpt that Sigrun quoted:

Therapists’ length of experience working with rape victims was found to be positively associated with RMA [rape-myths acceptance]. One possible explanation for this finding is that the therapists may become desensitized to the suffering of rape because of repetitive exposure or as a consequence of compassion fatigue, and this may lead to an increased acceptance of rape myths. Other possible explanations include Fox and Carey’s (1999) collusive resistance concept. This concept describes the process by which therapists join rape survivors to avoid confronting painful issues, thus, failing the therapeutic responsiveness. Using the same rationale, attempts to avoid painful issues related to the assault may also lead to justify the rape in certain extent. The implications of these findings are important. It seems that it is necessary to not only promote awareness of the ways in which RMA may be impacting the survival of rape victims (Moor, 2007) but also to examine how RMA may be affecting the therapists’ perception of the victims.

In here is a camel I find it impossible to swallow:

Other possible explanations include Fox and Carey’s (1999)collusive resistance concept. This concept describes the process by which therapists join rape survivors to avoid confronting painful issues, thus, failing the therapeutic responsiveness.

My experience, and the experience of many others, is that therapists refuse to listen when victims of harm try to tell their  stories. 
    And I see this in a context of psychotherapeutical harm-myths: The denial and mystification of harm done by adults to children. I will be writing more about this, for now I’m linking to I was a victim, and I’m proud, and here is a quote: 


As I see it, a child who has been used by adults can be compared to a child that has been run over by a car. A traffic victim. There is no shame attached to that, and maybe admiration of the guts and bravery that keeps traffic victims alive and can get them back on their feet.

I have decided to retake the V word. I was run over by adults. I was a victim of adult use. 

There are so many ways in which adults use children, and I’ll lump them all under one umbrella: adults use children as objects of addiction. Instead of drugs or alcohol, it’s about adults, often unconsciously, using the power they have over vulnerable, helpless kids in an attempt to make themselves feel better, stronger, more in control. And in doing so, they are invisibly ramming into children and running over them.  And here my analogy fails. No one has been run over by the same car or cars day after day, year in and year out, all their formative years. The whole idea is preposterous.

Yet children are used by adults in this way. They are mentally and physically run into and over and crushed and smashed, day after day, year in and year out. And very often, nobody sees this, nobody hears this, nobody speaks out against this.

Think about it: When mental health workers are blind to this reality that so many children live in, is  it not it natural that they perpetuate rape myths in therapy? And are blind to the reality of rape and how it harms us?

Blog: Camels With Hammers on religion

Written by Dan Finke

Dan Fincke has his PhD in philosophy from Fordham University and is an adjunct philosophy professor at five universities this semester (Fordham, Fairfield, Hofstra, William Paterson, and Hunter College). 



Contra de Botton: Religions Are NOT To Credit With Universalistic Humanistic Values


Starts like this:

Alain de Botton’s chapter on community in his book Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion is filled with half-baked thinking. After one-sidedly disparaging modern social life from numerous selective (and sometimes specious) angles, he goes on to model really effectively how not to try to learn from religion