Tuesday, May 27, 2008
When we make them fight, ese always wins
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Cultural history of Penis Panic
The aim of this article is to present a summarizing overview on ethnomedical aspects of koro (in Chinese called suo-yang), the panic anxiety state in which affected males believe that the penis is shrinking and/or retracting, and perhaps disappearing. While reduction of penile volume occurs physiologically due to vasoconstriction in cold temperature and intense anxiety, it is believed in certain cultures that genital shrinking leads to impotence and sterility, and eventually to death. Traditional Chinese medicine treats suo-yang, the reduction of the male principle yang, as a dangerous disturbance of the life-sustaining yin-yang equilibrium of the organism. Koro has therefore been held to be a Chinese "culture-bound" condition. However , the koro phenomenon is also known among diverse ethnic and religious groups in Asia and Africa, typically in cultures in which reproductive ability is a major determinant of a young person's worth. Koro epidemics of panic anxiety due to widespread fears of losing one's genitals, procreative ability, and even one's life, are triggered by rumors of genital disappearance supposedly caused in China by female fox spirits, in Singapore and Thailand by mass poisoning, and in Africa by sorcery, usually in the context of socioeconomic or political tension. Today, in contemporary Western societies, ideas of genital disappearance are not culturally endorsed. But historically, it should be remembered that in the late Middle Ages in Europe, a man could lose his membrum virile through magical attacks by witches. The conclusion is that the psychological disappearance of the penis is a universal syndrome that was described recently in Asia and Africa and already in Medieval Europe.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2008) — Investors get carried away with excitement and wishful ‘phantasies’ as the stock market soars, suppressing negative emotions which would otherwise warn them of the high risk of what they are doing, according to a new study led by UCL (University College London). Economic models fail to factor in the emotions and unconscious mental life that drive human behaviour in conditions where the future is uncertain says the study, which argues that banks and financial institutions should be as wary of ‘emotional inflation’ as they are fiscal inflation.
See also:
The paper, published in this month’s issue of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, explores how unconscious mental life should be integrated into economic decision-making models, where emotions and ‘phantasies’ – unconscious desires, drives and motives – are among the driving forces behind market bubbles and bursts.
Visiting Professor David Tuckett, UCL Psychoanalysis Unit, says: “Feelings and unconscious ‘phantasies’ are important; it is not simply a question of being rational when trading. The market is dominated by rational and intelligent professionals, but the most attractive investments involve guesses about an uncertain future and uncertainty creates feelings. When there are exciting new investments whose outcome is unsure, the most professional investors can get caught up in the ‘everybody else is doing it, so should I’ wave which leads first to underestimating, and then after panic and the burst of a bubble, to overestimating the risks of an investment.
“Market investors’ relationships to their assets and shares are akin to love-hate relationships with our partners. Just as in a relationship where the future is unexpected, as the market fluctuates you have to be prepared to suffer uncertainty and anxiety and go through good times and bad times with your shares. You can adopt one of two frames of mind. In one, the depressive, individuals can be aware of their love and hate and gradually learn to trust and bear anxiety. In the other, the paranoid schizoid, the anxiety is not tolerated and has to be detached, so the object of love is idealised while its potential for disappointment is ‘split’ off and made unconscious.
“What happens in a bubble is that investors detach themselves from anxiety and lose touch with being cautious. More or less rationalised wishful thinking then allows them to take on much more risk than they actually realise, something about which they feel ashamed and persecuted, but rarely genuinely guilty, when a bubble bursts. Again, like falling in idealised love, at first you notice only the best qualities of your beloved, but when everything becomes real you become deflated and it is the flaws and problems that persecute you and which you blame.
“Lack of understanding of the vital role of emotion in decision-making, and the typical practices of financial institutions, make it difficult to contain emotional inflation and excessive risk-taking, particularly if it is innovative. Those who join a new and growing venture are rewarded and those who stay out are punished. Institutions and individuals don’t want to miss out and regulators are wary of stifling innovation. If other investors are doing it, clients might say ‘why aren’t you doing it too, because they’re making more money than we are’.”
‘Phantastic objects and the financial market’s sense of reality: A psychoanalytic contribution to the understanding of stock market instability’ by David Tuckett (UCL) and Richard Taffler (University of Edinburgh) is published in the April issue of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
This research was supported by the Leverhulme Trust. The Leverhulme Trust is one of the largest all-subject providers of research funding in the UK, distributing funds of some £40 million every year. For the full list of award recipients and further information about all the schemes that the Leverhulme Trust offers please visit their website at http://www.leverhulme.ac.uk.
Just Say No
Department of Psychiatry, Athens General Hospital G. Gennimatas, Athens, Greece. ckalaitzi@yahoo.gr
The genital-shrinking syndrome is a transient state of acute anxiety characterized by the triad of a deep-seated fear of penile shrinkage, its disappearance into the abdomen, and apprehension regarding inevitable impotence or even death. It is also known by the Malayo-Indonesian term 'koro'. In the West, koro syndrome has been reported only in relation with various somatic, psychiatric and drug-induced disorders. The vast majority of non-psychiatric cases was related to neurological disorders or intoxication with cannabis or amphetamine. This is the first case of cannabis-induced koro-like syndrome ever reported in Greece. Copyright (c) 2006 S. Karger AG, BaselFor the children.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Zizek on Tibet
Tibet: dream and reality
By Slavoj Zizek
All the media reports impose an image which goes like this: the People’s Republic of China, which illegally occupied Tibet in 1950, engaged for decades in brutal and systematic destruction not only of the Tibetan religion, but of the identity of Tibetans as a free people. Recently the protests of the Tibetan people against Chinese occupation were again crushed with brutal police and military force. Since China is organising the 2008 Olympic games, it is the duty of all of us who love democracy and freedom to put pressure on China to return to the Tibetans what it stole from them. A country with such a dismal human rights record cannot be allowed to whitewash its image with the noble Olympic spectacle.
What are our governments going to do? Will they, as usual, cede to economic pragmatism, or will they gather the strength to put our highest ethical and political values above short-term economic interests? While the Chinese authorities did no doubt commit many acts of murderous terror and destruction in Tibet, some things disturb this simple “good guys versus bad guys” image. Here are nine points which anyone passing judgment on recent events in Tibet should bear in mind:
1. Tibet, an independent country until 1950, was not suddenly occupied by China. The history of its relations with China is long and complex, with China often acting as a protective overlord – the anti-Communist Kuomintang also insisted on Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. (The term “Dalai Lama” bears witness to this interaction: it combines the Mongolian dalai – ocean – and the Tibetan bla-ma.)
2. Before 1950 Tibet was no Shangri-la, but a country of harsh feudalism, poverty (life expectancy was barely 30), corruption and civil wars (the last, between two monastic factions, was in 1948 when the Red Army was already knocking at the door). Fearing social unrest and disintegration, the ruling elite prohibited any development of industry, so all metal had to be imported from India. This did not prevent the elite from sending their children to British schools in India and transferring financial assets to British banks there.
3. The Cultural Revolution which ravaged the Tibetan monasteries in the 1960s was not imported by the Chinese. Fewer than a hundred of the Red Guards came to Tibet with the revolution, and the young mobs burning the monasteries were almost exclusively Tibetan.
4. Since the early 1950s there has been systematic and substantial CIA involvement in stirring up anti-Chinese troubles in Tibet, so Chinese fears of external attempts to destabilise Tibet are not irrational (1).
5. As television images show, what is going on now in Tibetan regions is no longer a peaceful “spiritual” protest of monks as in Burma over the last year, but also gangs burning and killing ordinary Chinese immigrants and their stores. We should measure the Tibetan protests by the same standards as we measure other violent protests: if Tibetans can attack Chinese immigrants, why can’t the Palestinians do the same to the Israeli settlers on the West Bank?
6. The Chinese invested heavily in Tibetan economic development, as well as infrastructure, education and health services. Despite undeniable oppression, the average Tibetan has never enjoyed such a standard of living as today. Poverty is now worse in China’s own undeveloped western rural provinces than in Tibet.
7. In recent years the Chinese changed their strategy in Tibet: depoliticised religion is now tolerated, often even supported. The Chinese rely more on ethnic and economic colonisation, rapidly transforming Lhasa into a Chinese capitalist Wild West with karaoke bars and Disney-like “Buddhist theme parks” for western tourists. What the media image of brutal Chinese soldiers and policemen terrorising the Buddhist monks conceals is a far more effective American-style socioeconomic transformation. In a decade or two Tibetans will be reduced to the status of Native Americans in the United States.
It seems the Chinese Communists finally learned the lesson: what is the oppressive power of secret police, camps and Red Guards destroying ancient monuments, compared to the power of unbridled capitalism to undermine all traditional social relations? The Chinese are doing what the West has always done, as Brazil did in the Amazon or Russia in Siberia, and the US on its own western frontiers.
8. A main reason why so many in the West have taken part in the protests against China is ideological: Tibetan Buddhism, deftly spun by the Dalai Lama, is a major point of reference of the New Age hedonist spirituality which is becoming the predominant form of ideology today. Our fascination with Tibet makes it into a mythic place upon which we project our dreams. When people mourn the loss of the authentic Tibetan way of life, they don’t care about real Tibetans: they want Tibetans to be authentically spiritual on behalf of us so we can continue with our crazy consumerism.
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote: “If you are snagged in another’s dream, you are lost.” The protesters against China are right to counter the Beijing Olympics motto of “one world, one dream” with “one world, many dreams”. But they should be aware that they are imprisoning Tibetans in their own dream. It is not the only dream.
9. If there is an ominous dimension to what is going on now in China, it is elsewhere. Faced with today’s explosion of capitalism in China, analysts often ask when political democracy, as the “natural” political accompaniment of capitalism, will come.
Valley of tears
In a television interview a couple of years ago, the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf linked the growing distrust of democracy in post-Communist east European countries to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity leads through a valley of tears. After the breakdown of socialism, one cannot directly pass to the abundance of a successful market economy. The limited but real socialist welfare and security have to be dismantled, and these first steps are necessarily painful.
For Dahrendorf, this painful passage lasts longer than the average period between (democratic) elections, so that the temptation is great to postpone the difficult changes for the short-term electoral gains. Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, pointed out (2) that democracy can only catch on in economically developed countries: if developing countries are prematurely democratised, the result is a populism which ends in economic catastrophe and political despotism. No wonder the three formerly third world countries that are the most successful economically – Taiwan, South Korea, Chile – embraced full democracy only after a period of authoritarian rule.
There is a further paradox: what if the promised democratic second stage that follows the authoritarian valley of tears never comes? This is the most unsettling thing about China. There is the suspicion that its authoritarian capitalism is not merely a reminder of our past, the repetition of the process of capitalist accumulation which in Europe went on from the 16th to the 18th century, but a sign of the future. What if the “vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market” proves economically more efficient than our liberal capitalism? Might it signal that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer a condition and motor of economic development, but an obstacle?
Rebels in Khartoum
Sudan shooting after rebel raid
 There was heavy fighting in Khartoum's twin city, Omdurman |
Shooting has been heard in two separate parts of Sudan's capital, Khartoum, following a raid by Darfur rebels.
Details are sketchy - in one incident a lot of shooting was heard and roads closed after security forces pursued a small group of suspected rebels.
There was also at least one arrest near the US embassy.
Sudan's Islamist opposition leader Hassan al-Turabi has been arrested and accused of links to the rebels, who on Saturday came close to the capital.
Mr Turabi's wife told the BBC that the soldiers who arrested him connected him to the weekend attack on Omdurman, the capital's twin city, just over the River Nile.
Mr Turabi denies any links to the Rebel Justice and Equality Movement (Jem) rebels but its leader used to be close to him - as did Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir.
Sudan says it has proof that neighbouring Chad backed the rebels.
The weekend attack was the closest the rebels have come to Khartoum during five years of fighting.
 Hassan al-Turabi fell out with President Bashir in the 1990s |
The authorities had said the rebels had been repulsed.
Jem leader Khalil Ibrahim says his group will launch more attacks on Khartoum.
"This is just the start of a process and the end is the termination of this regime," he told Reuters news agency by satellite phone.
He said he was speaking from Omdurman but this could not be independently verified.
Sudan's ambassador to the UN, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem, told the BBC that captured rebels had identified Chadian officers killed during the assault.
Sudan has severed diplomatic ties with Chad, which denies any involvement.
A senior official said searches were under way in Khartoum for individuals thought to be insiders who may have helped the insurgents.
State television said earlier that at least 100 people had been arrested.
Reward
Mr Turabi's wife, Wisal al-Madhi, told the BBC's Network Africa programme that her husband had been away from the capital over the weekend.
She said he was arrested first thing on Monday morning.
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"They had three cars full of soldiers and munitions and arms, and they took him to the prison in Khartoum North directly."
At least four other members of Mr Turabi's Popular Congress have also been arrested, party officials say.
Mr Turabi was Sudan's main Islamist ideologue in the 1990s before falling out with President Bashir. He has since been imprisoned several times.
Jem leader Khalil Ibrahim used to be one of his followers and retains an Islamist outlook.
Sudan has offered a reward of $125,000 (£64,000) for Mr Ibrahim's capture and information that leads to his arrest.
Chad said it regretted Sudan's "hasty decision" to break off diplomatic ties.
Jem has also denied being backed by Chad.
Oil targets
Senior Jem official Tahir el-Faki told the BBC that they had already exposed the government's weakness in the assault over the weekend.
He admitted that 45 rebels had been either killed or wounded in the heavy fighting.
 | JEM REBELS  Founded by Darfuri Muslims loyal to Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi Led by lawyer Khalil Ibrahim Muhammad Believed to have up to 3,000 fighters Now said to have fragmented into several disparate groups  |
But he said that as well as further attacks on Khartoum, they would also continue to target oil installations in South Kordofan province to cut off the government's main source of income.
On Saturday, Jem rebels said they had taken Omdurman and the Wadi Saidna air force base about 16km (10 miles) north of Khartoum, and entered the capital itself.
Omdurman residents said there had been more fighting on Sunday morning.
Experts say Chad and Sudan are fighting a proxy war using each other's rebels to achieve their military objectives.
Earlier this year, rebels reached Chad's capital N'Djamena, with Chad accusing Sudan of involvement.
The Jem is one of several rebel groups fighting the government and pro-government Janjaweed militia in the western Darfur region since 2003 over alleged discrimination by the authorities in favour of Arabs.
The rebels have been involved in raids on government forces in the area before.
article from BBC News: There is also an excellent post about this at the SSRC blog Making Sense of Darfur. Highlight:
Spokesmen for JEM have said that they are fighting for the CPA and its fair implementation, but most people who have followed JEM’s politics consider this no more than a tactic to win the support of Southerners who would otherwise distrust JEM’s Islamist origins, its fierce opposition to Southern separatism and the Chadian fingerprints on its operation. JEM’s manifesto speaks of democracy and human rights—justice and equality no less—but its putchist strategy is the antithesis of compromise, democratic politics and civil liberties. Both the Omdurman attack and the inevitable government response imperil Sudan’s shaky path to democratization and the South’s aim of exercising the right of self-determination. First Vice President Salva Kiir Mayardit saw these dangers when he spoke out against the attack.
The three towns of Khartoum, Omdurman and Khartoum North have enjoyed a remarkable social peace during the last quarter century of war. There has been everyday racism and discrimination but astonishingly little violence. That coexistence may now be in jeopardy. For many Khartoum natives and people of the riverain north—the awlad al balad—JEM’s attack was an assault on their hitherto peaceful and prosperous territory. It was a shock and a horror and many are rallying to the government. Opposition politicians from the north hope that their voices of moderation may help prevent pogroms against the Zaghawa and other suspected JEM supporters and keep alive the prospects of elections next year.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
For the Hamsters
http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/articles/tts/tts1932/itinerary1932p4.htm