A Rapper Salutes the Slave Trade

This is an early look at Social Psychology, which is the last chapter in the book. This area deals with social interactions, causes of social behavior, and how social conditions impact the individual. This is an article from an interview with Soulja Boy I just simply could NOT pass up. Perhaps Hip-Hop is truly DEAD. It began as a way to express social commentary for people in the inner-city...and now this is what we have come to. Read and Respond.

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Our music critic calls Soulja Boy on the carpet.

One of the biggest songs in the country last year was an inane, sex-chant-infused Southern rap called "Crank That (Soulja Boy)," by young Soulja Boy Tell Em, from tiny Batesville, Mississippi, population 7,113. Soulja Boy Tell Em turned 18 this summer and is looking forward to voting for the first time. His monster hit song included repeated assertions of a cartoonishly absurd sex act: supermanning, or as he elaborated repeatedly in the song, "Superman that ho," which means to come on a woman's back and then put a sheet over her so it sticks to her back and she looks like she’s wearing a cape. Ridiculous stuff. He also chants repeatedly, "Supersoak that ho,” the meaning of which needs no explanation, given the neighborhood we're already in.

These are ludicrous suggestions that play into the Cro-Magnon conception of men using sex and sperm to attack and slay women. It's such a mean-spirited vision of sex that every time I heard the record I thought, I bet that before this came out, he was a virgin.

I asked him, “What historical figure do you most hate?” He said, "Shout out to the slave masters! Without them we'd still be in Africa.”

Last week in Atlanta, I got to interview Soulja Boy Tell Em. I found out just how young he really is. He was one of about ten rappers I interviewed in one day for my BET show, The Black Carpet. I decided it'd be fun to give all the rappers part of the Proust questionnaire. I thought it'd be a way to get beyond image and into who they really are. Most of the guys gave good, thoughtful, intelligent, sensitive answers. I asked Juelz Santana, “How would you like to die?” He said, "Loved."

Then came Soulja Boy Tell Em. I asked him, “What historical figure do you most hate?” He was stumped. I said, "Others have said Hitler, bin Laden, the slave masters..." He said, "Oh wait! Hold up! Shout out to the slave masters! Without them we'd still be in Africa."

My jaw, at this point, was on the ground."We wouldn't be here," he continued, having no idea how far in it he'd stepped, "to get this ice and tattoos."

Wow. Never mind that diamonds come from Africa. Never mind that there were many generations of pain in between leaving Africa and getting diamonds. Never mind that the long-term cataclysmic effects of subtracting about tens of millions of young, strong people from Africa over the course of a couple of centuries is a large part of the reason why Africa now appears so distasteful to you. Never mind all that, Soulja Boy. You put country first.

The Style Imperative

Style is more character than clothes, more attitude than affluence. It's you making visible your inner self. So forget what you learned about appearance not counting; you can no longer afford to be without style.

"Do designers dictate hemlines?" the late style doyenne Diana Vreeland was once asked. "Only if you take dictation," she replied.

With that remark she exposed a rift the fashion world seldom flaunts. There is a vast gap between fashion and style. Fashion is about clothes and their relationship to the moment. Style is about you and your relationship to yourself. Fashion is in the clothes. Style is in the wearer. The distinction could not be more revealing.

Despite the proliferation of fashion, style has been out of style for decades. As the economy expanded, America embarked on a collective shopping spree. In place of style we have honored Merchandise. Clothes. Style, on the other hand, doesn't demand a credit card. It prospers on courage and creativity.

Style goes way beyond fashion; it is an individually distinctive way of putting ourselves together. It is a unique blend of spirit and substance—personal identity imposed on, and created through, the world of things. It is a way of capturing something vibrant, making a statement about ourselves in clothes. It is what people really want when they aspire to be fashionable (if they aren't just adorning themselves in status symbols).

In some quarters, it's fashionable, as it were, to trivialize style. It's true that style doesn't have life-or-death impact, but it isn't devoid of substance, either. "Clothes are separated from all other objects by being inseparable from the self," Anne Hollander writes in her classic Seeing Through Clothes. "They give a visual aspect to consciousness itself." Through clothes, we reinvent ourselves every time we get dressed. Our wardrobe is our visual vocabulary. Style is our distinctive pattern of speech, our individual poetry.

Fashion is the least of it. Style is, for starters, one part identity: self-awareness and self-knowledge. You can't have style until you have articulated a self. And style requires security—feeling at home in one's body, physically and mentally. Of course, like all knowledge, self-knowledge must be updated as you grow and evolve; style takes ongoing self-assessment.

Style is also one part personality: spirit, verve, attitude, wit, inventiveness. It demands the desire and confidence to express whatever mood one wishes. Such variability is not only necessary but a reflection of a person's unique complexity as a human being. People want to be themselves and to be seen as themselves. In order to work, style must reflect the real self, the character and personality of the individual; anything less appears to be a costume.

Lastly, style is one part fashion. It's possible to have lots of clothes and not an ounce of style. But it's also possible to have very few clothes and lots of style. Yes, fashion is the means through which we express style, but it takes less in the way of clothes to be stylish than you might imagine. That's why generations of women have coveted the little black dress, a garment so unassuming in line and perfect in proportion that it is the finest foil for excursions into self-expression.

It's tempting to think that style is a new invention, open to us only now because we particularly value self-expression, and an extraordinary range of possibilities for doing so is available to us. But Joan DeJean, a professor of French language and culture at the University of Pennsylvania, contends that style has its well-shod feet firmly planted in the seventeenth century; it was the deliberate creation of Louis XIV of France, the Sun King. He was, she says in The Essence of Style, history's greatest exemplar of it.

CLICK HERE to read page 2 of the article.

Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind

Found this online and thought you would find it interesting. Click the link.

http://www.livescience.com/health/top10_mysteriesofthemind-1.html

Born to Be a Rapist

I thought you all might find this interesting. Read and drop your thoughts...preferably something more thought provoking than "ewww that's gross" :)

VIENNA, Austria — Josef Fritzl, the Austrian builder who locked his daughter in a cellar and fathered seven children with her, sees himself as a born rapist, a victim of his own tyrannical mother.

According to the first leaked account of interviews with a forensic psychiatrist, which is due to appear in two Austrian newspapers today, Fritzl hatched his plan to incarcerate his daughter, Elisabeth, while he was in prison for rape.

“I have realized that I had a mean streak. For someone who was born to be a rapist, I have managed to contain myself for a relatively long period,” Fritzl is quoted as telling the psychiatrist in a 130-page report leaked to the tabloid newspapers Kronen Zeitung and Österreich.

Fritzl, 73, is awaiting trial for sexually abusing and incarcerating Elisabeth, 42, in a purpose-built dungeon beneath his house in the town of Amstetten. He fathered seven children by her, one of whom died shortly after birth and Fritzl burnt his body in an oven.

Three of the surviving children were allowed to live upstairs with him and wife, Rosemarie, 69, while their three siblings were condemned to a shadowy existence with their mother in the cellar. They never saw daylight until they were freed by police on April 26. It emerged that Fritzl had a previous criminal record for sexual offenses.

In 1967 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for brutally raping a 24-year-old woman at knifepoint in her home.

According to the report compiled by Dr. Adelheid Kastner, a prominent forensic psychiatrist who conducted in depth interviews with the builder, Fritzl found the “ideal solution” to his deranged fantasies after he was released from prison. It was then that he decided to lock up his daughter in the cellar so that he could “live out” his “evil side” while leading a seemingly normal life in the flat upstairs.

Fritzl told the psychiatrist that his relationship to women was shaped by his experience with his abusive mother, who allegedly beat him and isolated him from other children until he started school. He was an “alibi child,” Fritzl told the psychiatrist – his mother only had him to prove to her partner that she was not sterile.

Dr. Kastner came to the conclusion when she was dissecting the personality of Fritzl that the builder managed to distance himself from what he was doing by never looking his victim in the face when he raped her.

“He was not only incredibly able to lead a double life but also managed to maintain a triple life without any problems,” Dr. Kastner wrote, indicating that Fritzl played down the gravity of his crimes in his mind.

“Mr. Fritzl resembles a volcano; under the surface that appears almost banal there is an evil streak. He is torn apart by his desires that he cannot master,” Dr. Kastner wrote.

The report declared Fritzl clinically sane and fit for trial, but also diagnosed a “severe combined personality disorder and a sexual disorder”.

“It is to be expected that Mr. Fritzl would perpetrate deeds with severe consequences also in the future,” Dr. Kastner concluded.

On the basis of her report the prosecution has demanded from the court that Fritzl be tried and sentenced, then committed to an institution for the criminally insane, where he would receive psychiatric care and therapy including, if deemed necessary, medication.

The trial is expected to start early next year.

The Evolution of Man

I came across an interesting image and thought I would share it with you all. We talked about Evolution before in class. While technology has been a great resource to human beings, I wonder if it has made us "dumber." Sometimes I miss the days of blowing into my old dusty Nintendo games (Skate or Die was my favorite)...blowing so hard I accidentally spit in them. I remember when we couldn't even use calculators in math classes, yet nowadays it's expected. What do you think? How was the development of technology over the years impacted human beings? Negatively or positively?

Study Materials for Chapter 2 (Neuroanatomy/Brain and Nervous System)

You are not required to respond to this post. This is simply listing additional online resources as you prepare for your test. Should you have any questions feel free to ask me in class or just drop a comment and I'll respond.


INTERACTIVE BRAIN: These interactive sites allow you to click on different parts of the brain and see their function. Also, it helps in seeing how the several different parts operate together.

MSNBC Interactive
http://www.msnbc.com/modules/brain/

BBC Interactive Body (Brain & Nervous System)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/index_interactivebody.shtml

ONLINE MAPPING:

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/sagittal.html


SPLIT BRAIN ACTIVITIES: These are fun online activities in order to develop a better understanding of the Left & Right Hemispheres.

Color Test
http://www.fireworkspop.com/colortest.htm

Twino
http://www.tetris1d.org/zigah/twinoo/twinoo.php


SAMPLE MULTIPLE CHOICE: This is an online Quiz testing basic knowledge of Neuroscience (Ch.2). See how well you do, but remember you also need to be able to apply terms conceptually.

http://www.appsychology.com/HowPass/MC%20quizes/Neuroscience/neuroscience.htm


Excuse me while I revisit my youth....Pinky & The Brain!!


BRAIN RAP VIDEO!!!

Dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was an act of the utmost compassion

This is an article by Satoshi Kanazawa, published in The Scientific Fundamentalist.

Do you AGREE or DISAGREE with the argument presented?

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Just because an act happens to be atrocious does not mean that it is not simultaneously the most humane and compassionate thing to do under the circumstances. Sometimes the alternatives are much worse.

After the fall of Okinawa in June 1945, the Japanese government prepared for the ground invasion by the Allied forces and the final battle on the mainland. Back in August 1944, the government had issued a decree, officially classifying all Japanese citizens (what’s left of them, mostly women, children, and the elderly, as all young men had already been mobilized) as military combatants and armed them all with bamboo spears. Yes, bamboo spears. Here are some contemporary pictures of women and children being armed with bamboo spears and trained to fight the enemies with them.

The women and children were told to fight the invading American ground forces with their bamboo spears till death. They were told that to surrender and be captured by the enemy was the ultimate shame and that they should die fighting instead. The national slogan at the time, propagated by the government and spread to the whole nation, was “Ichioku Gyokusai” (“100 million on a suicidal mission in honor of the Emperor”). They were absolutely prepared to die fighting the American soldiers with their bamboo spears.

Imagine the D-Day invasion in Normandy where the Germans on Omaha Beach were armed only with bamboo spears. It’s not difficult to imagine what the outcome would have been. The opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan would have looked quite different.

By his decision to drop two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing only 200,000 people, Harry S. Truman avoided the annihilation of an entire nation and saved the lives of 100 million people. The Japanese Army had tanks, and the Japanese Navy had airplanes, so they were not impressed with the American tanks and airplanes. Repeated carpet bombings of Tokyo in March 1945 did not faze them. The only thing that would convince the Japanese people, and, more importantly, their military leadership, of the utter American technological superiority and the complete futility of resistance were the atomic bombs, which they did not have.

They would never have surrendered had we not dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That would have necessitated ground invasion of mainland Japan by the American forces, which would have led to many, many more Japanese to be killed, up to 100 million. You are equally dead whether you are killed by a bullet or an atomic bomb. 100 million people killed by bullets, one at a time, over weeks and months, is much, much worse, by any account, than 200,000 people killed in a flash of a second by atomic bombs.

All of this is common knowledge for anyone who is even remotely familiar with modern Japanese history.

Not that compassion for enemies at times of war is a good thing or that, even if it was, the Japanese necessarily deserved our compassion, given a large number of atrocities committed by their army. But if it’s compassion you want, you can’t do better than saving the lives of 100 million people.