Hedonistic Inspiration for Your Weekend and Beyond

Just a thought to put things into perspective...

“At the end of the day, it all comes down to you. No matter what your position in life, there are moments of joy and happiness to be had. You can go out and create them, or you can sit and wallow in a state of self-perpetuated misery. If you have a dream you should commit to it. If you find a vocation you love and you want to be the very best, good luck to you. But wherever your journey leads you, remember that life is not an assignment. It is not a contest. It is an experience and] an adventure that can be filled with beauty, bliss and above all, pleasure.”

”

— Michael Flocker: The Hedonist Handbook

Have fun.

Gamal

Breathing is Fundamental (Why Cops Love the Chokehold)

By Gamal Hennessy

“Protect Your Neck”

— Wu Tang Clan

As passive outrage online shifts from Eric Garner to Charlie Hedbo and Boko Haram, a disturbing tradition continues to thrive among the NYPD. According to a recent story in the New York Times, chokeholds are still a preferred tactic among police officers despite their illegal status.

Despite Scrutiny, Chokeholds Persist in New York City

It’s not difficult to see why this type of deadly force is preferred by law enforcement:

• Chokes serve the short and long term goals of the officer using the technique (See Who Watches the Watchers?)
• Chokes are an effective means of achieving those goals. It is difficult to physically or verbally challenge someone when you have no blood and/or air going to your brain.
• The likelihood of meaningful punishment for officers who use the chokehold is low. See Eric Garner and Anthony Baez before him.

The technique isn’t designed to kill, but it can lead to death, especially in the middle of a violent uncontrolled confrontation. But in the collective mind of the police the potential for a suspect’s death is not a justification to abandon the technique, because the antagonistic relationship fostered between elements of the police and elements of the community creates an environment where lethal compliance is easy to rationalize. When the police feel justified in turning their back on the mayor and are willing to manipulate arrest rates to make a political point, the subculture of policing threatens the health of the city. Chokeholds are only a symptom of the disease. (See Police Departments and Power Games)

Chokeholds may be illegal, but laws on their own are not the key to improving society. (See Laws Don’t Improve Society, We Do). Improvements in police/ citizen relations will come on an individual level, encounter by encounter, block by block. Until then, the Moscow Rules and a bit of luck might be our only protection for surviving a police encounter. (See Women, Minorities and the Moscow Rules)

Have fun.

Gamal

Laws Don't Improve Society. We Do.

According to Foreign Policy Magazine, the rape culture of India isn't being reduced by public calls for castration, mob violence and harsher anti-rape laws. The problem might be getting worse. 

India Doesn't Understand It's Rape Problem

“The obsession with punishment “deflects attention from the accountability shared by the state” — its failure to address social norms that lead to sex crimes against women. These norms often emerge from legal and educational institutions that place little to no premium on gender equality. India’s preoccupation with capital punishment gives “individuals a way to distance themselves from potentially sexist beliefs they may themselves hold.”
”

— Kavita Krishnan, Secretary of the advocacy group All India Progressive Women’s Association

The problem isn't limited to India or our present issues with police brutality in America, pseudo religious extremism in Europe or mass murder in Nigeria. Governments can pass laws and crackdown on segments of the population, but our problems will continue until we change our individual perspectives and attitudes.

“The Holocaust was legal. Slavery was legal. Segregation was legal. If you use the state as a metric for ethics, you’ll end up disappointed.”

— Lex Loper

Consider the ongoing experience America is having with the LGBT community. Prior to the Stonewall Riots, homosexuality was a lifestyle shunned, attacked and rejected by mainstream society. They were blamed for HIV and accused of undermining the fabric of American society. In 2014, challenges still exist, but gay marriage is legal in a majority of states, same sex relationships in entertainment and advertising is on the rise and the mainstream has watered down gay culture in order to absorb it. 

This didn't happen because laws were changed to compel people to change their views. Views changed when anti-gay people understood some of their friends, family and colleagues were gay. Views changed when the two groups looked past the labels and started dealing with the people. Once the views were altered, the door to progress could open and then the laws changed. Of course, there are some people still fighting progress and other parts of the world are just as bad as they ever were. But change is happening among people first. Changing the law comes second.

If we want change, then we have to change. We can't just call for laws to be passed, demand people be fired, and wait for other people to change around us. Rape culture, racism and religious extremism are all macro level problems we can begin to reduce on an individual level. We won't be able to eradicate any of these problems, but changing individual attitudes can create a cultural shift and that kind of change can have more impact than passing a random law.

Have fun.

Gamal 

Treating Creativity Like a Disease

I often get the impression that society uses the government, the mainstream media, priests, and psychologists to enforce the concept of normality. They claim, without any real authority, the power to define what is normal. They use surveys, statistics and selective historical trends to create the illusion of a “typical” man or woman. They preach that normal is inherently good and that all of us should strive to fit our bodies, hearts and minds into the mold that they dictate. Everyone who is willing to forge a new path or question the conventional is discouraged, punished or rejected. This perspective is supported by an article suggesting the new DSMV IV (the manual used to diagnose mental illness) now classifies above average creativity as a mental disorder. (See Non Conformity and Free Thinking as Mental Illnesses).

“All of this is a symptom of our over-diagnosing and overmedicating culture. In the last 50 years, the DSM-IV has gone from 130 to 357 mental illnesses. A majority of these illnesses afflict children. Although the manual is an important diagnostic tool for the psychiatric industry, it has also been responsible for social changes. The rise in ADD, bipolar disorder, and depression in children has been largely because of the manual’s identifying certain behaviors as symptoms. A Washington Post article observed that, if Mozart were born today, he would be diagnosed with ADD and “medicated into barren normality.””

— The Mind Unleashed

he rationale for the sudden explosion in mental disorders isn’t hard to understand. It is easier to make money from people who have mental problems than people with independent personalities. Patients can be medicated, sent to therapy and studied for years without results. Free thinkers are not a profit center.

At the other end of the spectrum artists, dreamers and hedonists resist this process. We reject what is normal and forge paths that are often bizarre, disturbing and completely fascinating. They are often misunderstood or unappreciated but the power of their voice is undeniable. For better or worse, artists fight against the tide of normal in an attempt to forge new paths and create a new reality.

Society changes and grows because individuals reject the current order and forge their own direction. The mainstream often follows because they are fascinated, inspired and motivated to think and dream. I’m glad I’m too old to have someone crush my creativity to sell a few pills. The potential artists who come after me might not be so lucky.

“To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”

— E. E. Cummings

Have fun.

Gamal

Police Departments and Power Games

The NYPD may or may not be refusing to make arrests as a part of their spat with the mayor. According to the New York Post (whose credibility is always in question, arrests for petty crime have dropped more than ninety percent.

See NYPD Punishes City by Not Making Arrests

How do we interpret this response? Is it a collective temper tantrum from out of control, over privileged civil servants?

Not at all.

Is it a defensive tactic to protect the safety and welfare of officers afraid of being ambushed by a cop killer?

Not really.

It is a direct attack on the city's finances. It is a message from the NYPD to City Hall that hits the city where it hurts the most, in the budget.

Fines and tickets make up a big part of the city's income. If the mayor won't support the police by letting them kill minorities at will, then the police won't support the mayor with cash.

This fight isn't about laws, justice, freedom or even lives. It is about money and power. Everything else, including us, is collateral damage.

Your Dating App Isn’t the Problem in Your Love Life. You Are. (Love in the Time of Smartphones)

It is easy to lament the state of modern romance (See This Is How We Date Now). We can look at dating apps and claim romance is dead. We can point to the abundance of our digital connections as the reason behind our collective personal disconnection. We can point to the illusion of social media and blame it for the one sided portrayal of the relationships we manage to have. But these protests are short sighted because they ignore a basic reality of sexual expression.

It’s true many of us in the twenty first century can find a potential partner in the same way we can order pizza. Couples on dates do spend a disturbing amount of time staring at their phones instead of each other. Most online relationship narratives only show the happy moments. Life and love were so much better before social networks, smartphones and apps, right?

Society has created multiple methods to bring people together throughout history. Arranged marriages, matchmakers, church groups, social mixers and random encounters in bars and clubs pre-dated Tinder and Match. Did they produce better results?

People who did get together spent a lot of time apart. They might be separated physically because of work and travel, or they might be mentally separated staring at the TV all night. Were those romantic droughts preferable to smartphone staring?

The interpersonal problems we had were covered up in public with banal conversation and elaborate lies. Emotional release was satisfied by professional courtesans and concubines for the rich or amateur infidelity for the poor. Some people just suffered in silence, drowning their sorrow in liquor or lashing out at the people around them. Why is that life better than the one we have now.

Technology has changed the details of our romantic encounters, but it has not changed the fundamental process. It has made it easier for us to connect and disconnect, but has not altered the art of seduction. We now have the ability to find people to love, but most of us still don’t know how. Technology isn’t the problem. It’s the people who use it.

We have no collective skill in romance or love because most of us never get a seductive education. At a certain age, we’re pushed to be attractive, date, marry, procreate and repeat the process with the next generation with most people stumbling through every stage like a drunken monkey. It’s as if we were each given a gun and bullets and then told to protect ourselves without any instruction on the physical, mental, emotional and social impact of owning a deadly weapon. We are burdened with the expectation and responsibility to love with nothing more than the ignorant mantra of “it will work out if it’s meant to.”

It’s not as if the lessons of love don’t exist. Ovid’s Art of Love, the Kama Sutra, the Technique of the Love Affair and the Art of Seduction are only a small sample of the books devoted to romance. There are historical icons from Casanova and Ninon de l’Enclos and modern examples like Prince and Monica Bellucci today. But the education is hidden or rejected. The experts are either shunned or marginalized as unique or different from the rest of us. But romantic fulfillment isn’t a product of apathy, apps or astrology. It comes from intelligent effort, focused attention and constant communication.

I left the open dating world before apps went main stream, so I only have an observer’s perspective on the current state of affairs. I’ve been in love for five years now with a woman I idolize and adore. We share affection, communication and understanding I appreciate but never take for granted. I still try to attract and impress her because I’ve made the personal decision to continue and enhance our romantic relationship. In spite of the dire predictions, romance isn’t dead. It can’t be killed by society or technology. Romance is simply rare and it only lives and thrives with inspiration and effort.

Have fun.

Gamal

The Crossroads of Privilege

Each person in our society falls into multiple categories defined by class, race, ability, gender, orientation, education and others. As we move through different environments, our multiple forms of "membership" are perceived as positive or negative. This class gets attacked for X but has an easy time doing Y. This race is accepted here but not there. Navigating the different currents can be treacherous, especially when several factors come into play at once. 

A piece in the Huffington Post called Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person looks at the defensiveness certain people have when confronting the concept of white privilege. The author, who has the benefits of race but the challenges of gender and race, points out that white privilege (or male privilege or American privilege or cisgender privilege) isn't a magic wand anyone can use to erase all the other obstacles in their lives. It suggests most of us are dealing with a complex tapestry of issues which are only becoming more intricate as our subgroups grow.

““The concept of intersectionality recognizes that people can be privileged in some ways and definitely not privileged in others. There are many different types of privilege, not just skin-color privilege, that impact the way people can move through the world or are discriminated against. These are all things you are born into, not things you earned, that afford you opportunities that others may not have.””

— Gina Crosley-Corcoran: Author of the Feminist Breeder

I read the piece thinking about both my own complex relationship to the world around me as well as the multiple layers I want to build into my characters. I'm sharing it because if more of us saw each other beyond a singular two dimensional image we can turn our privilege into something positive.

Have fun.
G