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Rating: 4 out of 5
Author: David Deida
Year: 1997
Publisher: Sounds True
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 1591792576
Lately I have been reading the way of the superior man. Forget about Nietsche, here the reference, although never made explicit, is to the superior man in the I-Ching. “this is the situation, so the superior man does so and so”. The book is extreemly interesting, and brings on the series of books on male issues, that I have been reading in the last ten years. Starting with Robert Bly’s Iron John, to King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, and then Fire in the Belly and finally Biddulph’s book manhood. Is also nice for one time to have a book about man that does not refer to christianity but to taoism.
The book is structured in 51 small chapters. Each giving one concept, one idea. You can’t stop thinking that the author maybe wanted them to be 64, and then link each to one of the iching hexagrams. But then fell short of things to say. 
The core idea is that, while yes it is possible for man and woman to be very similar, and this helps in bringing peace to society, it also comes with a huge price. The lack of desire for each other. In Italy for example, there is a growing literature on sexual anorexia. Man (and woman) who between the age of 25 and 35 just decide that they don’t actually need sex in their life. And is more the problem tha it brings than the joy. But not only on this, the idea that old couples don’t have sex anymore, is quite common, and generally considered to be one of the causes why man might flip in society.
Well, the idea in this book, is that while is possible to depolarize each other, is also possible to polarize each other. To take different roles. In fact, the book claims and I would agree with it, those roles do come quite natural, once we take the extra step of relieving ourselves of the burden of the wishful thinking of how nice would life be, if men and women could have the same role, while keeping desire for each other.
Interesting the idea is that those roles not only come natural, but are seen as the natural frame in which to interpret his desire for control, her (only) apparently illogical actions. His role is then to guide, and her role is to test him.
After ending the book, I went back to it, and reorganised it through a mindmap, which is available from my maps page. If you are reading the book you might find interesting my reorganization of the chapters. But don’t think that you can get the essence of the book just from my mindmap. Way too many things are missing.
Is also very interesting the idea that the primary focus for a man (with a masculine core, i.e. 80% of man) is his work and his spiritual quest. Relationships come only after. And instead of seeing this as a problem, this is seem as conditio sine qua non for a good relationships. While for the woman (with a feminine core, 80% circa) relationships are the main focus. Yet, according to this book, women might ask their man to be more present in the relationship, but actually they want a man who is heavily focused on his passion. A man who stays at home, and needs mommy, not only is not sexual, but sickens them. How very true!
So looking back at my life, and at different relationships I had, I remember one in particular in which I was very focused on my meditation, and she would follow me. I was for this heavily criticized, but actually the relationship was going well, and the polarity was creating a huge desire for each other.
So, another book under the list:”things I should have known when I was 16, but I am happy eventually I found them out”.
Internet is really great. How you can take a topic, or an article and dig in it for as much time as you want is wonderful.
Yesterday I read the “Open the Archive” on how archives need to both be protected and be cosulted. And how Microsoft bought Corbis and now it is conserving the huge image archive by sinking it in 220 meters of limestone (out of time and out of reach), while Rick Prelinger is making his archive accessible for everybody at http://www.archive.org.
I already knew about archive.org as it is the house of the wayback machine, the archive that stores old internet pages. What I ignored was that it contained also open source movies, footage, music pieces and so on. A real gold mine. So here was I, passing the afternoon downloading old footage from the USA government. In particular Duck and Cover (parody) from 1951 who teached to kids how to behave in case of a nuclear attack. Each footage included a comment section, and sometimes the comments were more interesting than the footage itself. Some people took Duck and Cover as a propaganda tool trying (and probably suceeding) in keeping the population psycologically duck (submitted) and covered (blind). Others just ridicularised the idea that a simple newspaper could be of any cover help in case of a nuclear attack, while others still remind how survivors from Hiroshima showed signs of worse burns where the kimono was black as dark colors absorb more radiations. Quite interesting. I remember having seen the movie the first time in a French curse in 1987. Why they would show such a movie ina french course I don’t remember, but I always wanted to see it again. Personally I feel that the greates danger was not in Nuclear War, but in breeding a generation of paranoid person who feel that ‘war can come at any time’. And we have no responsability or possibility to act on it.
Along the same line came “Boys Beware“. Another paranoid movie on what could happen to you if a stanger gave you a lift. It equated Homosexuality with Child Molestation. And described the first as: “a sickness of the mind that can be transmitted”.
While the two movies where quite instructive in thinking how much road have we travelled from that time, it also inspire to think what other lies or unnecessary paranoia are we believing and buying. From “Terrorists can strike at any time, and we have no responsability over it” to “don’t look at the sun or you will turn blind”, “don’t masturbate or you will turn blind also”, “don’t look at the sun while masturbating, or you will turn blind on both eyes”, “don’t eat raw eggs/meat/milk”, “Pedophiles are all child molesters”, “someone having sex with a teenager is a pedophile”, “man are all rapers”, female sex abusers do not exist”, and so on.
The mood was then raised by an old cartoon of Popey Making an advertisment for the Oldmobile (automobile, car):In My Merry Oldsmobile. The advertisment also includes an older song from 1905. I laughed out loud at the cartoon and clapped (although I was alone in the room!) at the end of it. I also liked the song so much that I had to look for the lyrics and had to resist the urge to phone all my female friends to sing to them:
Come away with me, Lucille
In my merry Oldsmobile
Down the road of life we’ll fly
Automobubbling, you and I
And don’t trust when they say that at the time people were so virtuous:
…They love to “spark” in the dark old park
As they go flying along
She says she knows why the motor goes
The “sparker” is awfully strong …
Then today, Sunday, I promised myself I would not spend too much time in front of the internet, so I went for a ride with my oldsmobile but then the raw milk had to be brought to the fridge so here I am. Just in time to discover the ‘OPEN LETTER TO KANSAS SCHOOL BOARD‘ which raises the important issue: in Intelligent Design should be taugh in school why not other creationist theories, in particular the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) theory. That teaches that the whole universe was created by the FSM with his noodly appendage.
I read the whole letter, the answers from the K.S. School Board, most of the mails, until the one from Chris who explains that ” Although not a believer in He Who’s Name Cannot be Pronounced Because it has No Bloody Vowels, I try not to piss him off, just in case. ” Made me laugh too hard to be able to continue. Most of the mails are from scientist who very creatively see how they always got it wrong and now they started believeing in the flying spaghetty monster.
The new religion is getting much pubblicity, being present in Wikipedia,
The Guardian, Uncyclopedia, BoingBoing, and a number of other blogs, and news around.
Great Quotes:
“We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.”
and
” I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.”
Some of you know that I left ProtoLife. I hope in the future to keep on colaborating with the P.A.C.E. project, but for now that’s it. I want to go back to Germany, and finish my Ph.D. .
Somehow this seem to have a higher priority. Beside is getting clearer for me each day that I am hardly a ‘company’ type of person. I’d rather make research inside the university, or nowhere at all. While I was in Venice I met with the local group of Go players. Sandro, one of those made a big impression on me, being a person of great knowledge, whose only excuse was: “I don’t look at television, I read.”.
I decided that it made sense to read more… that it made sense to read ‘cum grano salis‘. With intelligence, choosing carefully what to read,
When I came back to Rome I decided that it made sense to read more. More than this, that it made sense to read ‘cum grano salis‘. With intelligence, choosing carefully what to read, and not reading any bullshit the latest friend suggested me. I remember telling a friend, “you know, I decided to stop just following my nose, on what books to read…”
His answer was quite funny: “If you don’t follow your nose, what do you follow? Other people’s nose”. And then he added: “This is actually a serious question, you might for example, find some people that you really don’t like, ask their suggestion, and then took off the book they suggest you from your reading list”. As you will see by the end of this entry, this ended up being very near the mark.
So I started asking around what where the books (or document) they felt where more important to understand the world we are living in
So I started asking around what where the books (or document) they felt where more important to understand the world we are living in. As an example I often gave where the acts of the Second Vatican Council (in particular Dignitatis Humanae). Since I am not catholic (nor even Christian), by suggesting something that was not traditionally seen as a classical text, I was implicitly suggesting: the documents that are behind the world we are living in, the documents that most people refer too, but few really read.
I did not receive many lists, but here and there someone would suggest a book or two, that I would dutifully add to my note. I then started keeping track of this list in a separate page on my blog. Since I did not publicize the page no one would read it. The list is nowhere ended, and I feel its inadeguateness knowing all the wonderful books that should be there, but I preferred to keep it small, and add new books slowly.
While I was keeping the list in the back burnere, and slowly going through some of those books, I found another list a much better one from which I am about to fatten my list. And the story of how I found it, and how it relates to my list is very funny, so let me tell it to you.
The list have it all, it’s the most complete list of texts I found that were really important to understand the world we are living in. Each of those book inspired millions of people.
A right winged newspaper: Human Events online, asked
a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th enturies.
They crossed the information between the various people and came to a list of 10 really dangerous books, and 21 ‘honorable mentions’. The list have it all, it’s the most complete list of texts I found that were really important to understand the world we are living in. Each of those book inspired millions of people. Just to understand where those people come from the book is important. Fundamental I would say. You have it all: Freud, Darwin, Gramsci, Marx, Engels, Mao, the Kinsey report (the Kinsey Report! That I wanted to read from so long). Dewey, that I have been told set the foundation for modern relativism thinking (so dear to our new pope). There is also Mein Kampf, which I am not sure if I’ll have the guts to read, but I probably should. And many others, Betty Friedan (don’t you want to understand Feminism? Read it, too), Keynes, Adorno… Is a wonderful list.
Interesting enough I was not the only one to see this as my next reading list. On the delicious page of the people who bookmarked the article the most common comment is “my next reading list”, ” A very interesting list of powerful books that have changed history.”, “some good reading”, “…some of these would make my required reading list…”, “…would make an excellent library booklist.” and so on.
Buy ‘The Kinsley report in the human male’, and help sustain the neocons battle.
One of the things that you should not fail to notice is that each book in the top ten most dangerous book is presented with a link. The link to Amazon. But is not just a normal link to Amazon. Amazon let you sign an agreement so that you can advertise some books from your website, and if people buy your book, they get a discount, and you get a percentage. So, yes you got it, each of those book is presented in that format. If you click on those links to go to Amazon, and you buy the book, the right winged journal will get a percentage. Will get a percentage out of you buying Mein Kampf, and The Communist Manifesto. “Buy ‘The Kinsley report in the human male’, and help sustain the neocons battle.”. Ah, the irony of all this.
no I don’t ask people I don’t like which books to read and cross them out. I ask them which books not to read, and add them to my reading list. Way more efficient!
So, to answer my friend, “no I don’t ask people I don’t like which books to read and cross them out. I ask them which books not to read, and add them to my reading list. Way more efficient!”
And if you read all this, and want to add something to my reading list, feel free to suggest:
“what books or document would you suggest to understand the world we are living in”. And tell us why, in what way was this book so unique that reading it is a must. Now the line is yours.
In the previous post I discussed how we can measure the relative importance of tags in a post, by calculating their weight, as
- weight of tag t= (number of people using t)/(total number of people)
I also said that:
Not only we could study a culture by studying the differences in the power law approximated by the tag clouds used by people of that culture. But we could even measure cultural eartquake by measuring the difference between the tag cloud being generated before a certain event, or after a certain event.
Independently Clay Shirky was coming at a similar conclusion, although he more focused on temporal changes that seem more signature of a particular subgroup of people all bookmarking a site at a certain time:
During a period of about 120 users’ additions of OIO, 20 or of them used the tag ‘ia’, putting it between #7 and #10 during that period. Now it is down to #17. This suggests that one or a few IA-oriented sites or mailing lists posted the link, and it got a flurry of attention from those taggers in a narrower window of time. This in turn suggests a conversationally tightly-knit IA community.
Through this tool we can see changes in the culture we are living in. We are used to feel those changes, but generally we never were able to measure them. Maybe now we might start to be able to do it.
But let’s go back to the tag weight. Terrell Russell took the ball, and in one evening of programming presented a tool to actually see how the weights change in time.
Nothing to say about the tool. It works perfectly well, and although it can be enhanced in many little ways, it already is very useful. Not bad for one evening.
More interesting, from my point of view, is how, through this tool we can see changes in the culture we are living in. We are used to feel those changes, but generally we never were able to measure them. Maybe now we might start to be able to do it.
No change
First of all I would like to show you the graph of a part of the culture where no changes are happening:
From the site: Nifty Corners. 1859 people having bookmarked it by now. The values soon converge to what we can expect to be their definite value (for the culture we are in).
Little Social-Quake
Continue reading Tagclouds and cultural changes
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