Edwin Rutsch • Nov 7, 2022 Best Empathy Training: Cohort 13.F: Module 1: Session 3 of 5 Cohort 13.F Landing Page: https://bit.ly/Cohort13F Training Website: https://BestEmpathyTraining.com Center for Building a Culture of Empathy http://CultureOfEmpathy.comhttp://EmpathyCircle.comhttp://EmpathyTent.comhttp://BestEmpathyTraining.com Empathy Circle Facilitator Training. Learn to facilitate an Empathy Circle. There is limited space in each cohort, and all participants must check with trainers to be accepted into the training. The basics of facilitating an Empathy Circle are fairly easy, however, it is a life long learning to deepen the skills and build a more empathic way of being and culture. Empathy Circle http://www.empathycircle.com/ 1. What is an Empathy Circle? http://bit.ly/EC-WhatIs 2. Why Participate? http://bit.ly/EC-Benefits 3. How to Empathy Circle? http://bit.ly/EC-How 4. Empathy Circle Facilitator Training http://bit.ly/EC-Facilitate

November 14, 2022 Issue

They dominated far longer than they were dominated, and, a new book contends, shaped the United States in profound ways.

By David Treuer

November 7, 2022 (NewYorker.com)

A portrait of Thayendanegea, painted in London, in 1785, by Gilbert Stuart.Art work by Gilbert Charles Stuart / British Museum

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I remember when I first encountered what must be the best-selling book of Native American history ever published, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” by Dee Brown. I was twenty years old, and had made my way from the Leech Lake Reservation, in northern Minnesota, where I grew up, to Princeton, in a part of New Jersey that seemed to have no Indians at all. Since “Bury My Heart” appeared, in 1970, it has been translated into seventeen languages, and sold millions of copies. In the opening pages, Brown wrote, “The greatest concentration of recorded experience and observation came out of the thirty-year span between 1860 and 1890—the period covered by this book. It was an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it. During that time the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed.”

I read this on the hundredth anniversary of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, in South Dakota. It was the last major armed conflict between an Indian tribe and the U.S. government, and more than two hundred and fifty Lakota men, women, and children were murdered there. Far from my Ojibwe homeland—marooned, I sometimes felt, on the distant shore of a self-satisfied republic—I readily accepted the version of history promoted by Brown’s book: that Native American history was a litany of abuses (disease, slavery, warfare, dispossession, forced removal, the near-extermination of the American bison, land grabs, forced assimilation) that had erased our way of life. And yet my culture and civilization didn’t feel gone. When I looked westward and back in time, I couldn’t help think that Brown’s historical record was incomplete—that the announcement of our collective death was rather premature.

Pekka Hämäläinen’s “Indigenous Continent” (Liveright) boldly sets out a counternarrative. In its opening pages, Hämäläinen—a Helsinki-born scholar at Oxford who specializes in early and Indigenous American history—maintains that the America we know was, in its borders, shape, and culture, far from inevitable. Even after the so-called colonial era, tribal nations often played a determining role in American history. In his view, we should speak not of “colonial America” but of “an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial,” and recognize that the central reality of the period was ongoing Indigenous resistance. By 1776, he notes, European powers had claimed most of the continent, but Indigenous people continued to control it. Instead of a foreordained story of decline and victimization, Hämäläinen wants us to see a parade of contingencies, with Native nations regularly giving as good as they got, or even better. The result, he promises, will be a North American history recentered on Native people and their own “overwhelming and persisting” power. Like treaties, though, scholarly promises have often been broken. Is Hämäläinen true to his word?

Throughout the roughly chronological work, Hämäläinen stresses movement. Tribal travellers crossed the Bering land bridge during the last Ice Age, and then, around 11,000 B.C.E., traversed an ice-free corridor along the flank of the Rocky Mountains, following game and evolving, culturally, as they went. Hämäläinen notes that other migration waves may have moved, in skin boats, through a maritime route, a seafood-rich “kelp highway,” that traced the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Patagonia. However settlement occurred, it happened quickly.

Hämäläinen spends the opening pages of the book detailing the rise and fall of early empires, in the Southwest and the Midwest in particular. “A distinctive pattern of simultaneous centralization and decentralization,” he says, characterized Indigenous history in the early second millennium C.E. Regional centers of power emerged; subordinate groups would rebel or break off and sometimes create their own centers of power. Some of these societies were highly stratified and hierarchical, with élites and, in certain cases, a kinglike single ruler. Such societies led to the development of Mogollon, Hohokam, and Ancestral Puebloan cultures in the Southwest. An ecological warm period, combined with new food technologies (the breeding and cultivation of corn, beans, and squash), helped give rise to the city of Cahokia, where the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers joined—the site of present-day St. Louis. Cahokia grew in population and size and had hundreds of ceremonial structures in the form of earthen mounds and plazas. At its peak, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, about forty thousand people lived in the vicinity. (It took seven centuries before North America saw a more populous city: Philadelphia, in 1790.)

But political culture was affected by climate. As temperatures dropped during the Little Ice Age, in the fourteenth century, Hämäläinen writes, “everything had to be smaller.” Cahokia’s society fractured into more mobile, less hierarchical groups, with hunting replacing farming as the dominant mode of living, and something similar happened in other dense Mississippian settlements. “Across the eastern half of the continent, people seem to have rejected the domineering priestly class for more collective and egalitarian social arrangements,” he concludes.

Hämäläinen’s broader point is that, long before the Europeans arrived, the peoples of the New World didn’t inhabit the stasis of an ethnographer’s account; they experienced a tumultuous process of continual change, which is to say, they were social and political actors. By the sixteenth century, around five million Native people had inhabited or made use of almost every part of North America. The usual story depicts them as dwelling in harmony with one another and the natural world in some cultural and ecological Eden that was then torn apart by Europeans. In fact, as Hämäläinen shows, they manipulated nature—rerouting water to create gardens in the desert, domesticating cultivars through seed selection—and they projected power, sometimes in violent ways, subordinating or being subordinated to their neighbors. They didn’t live in harmony; they lived in history.

Just as the initial settlement of the New World was marked by movement, so, too, were Indigenous forms of domination. It’s a thesis that Hämäläinen elaborated in an influential previous book, “The Comanche Empire” (2008): where European empires tended to be sedentary, marking power through permanent structures, dominant Native ones were “kinetic empires,” with everything—markets, missions, political assemblies—kept fluid and in motion. From the perspective of their neighbors, who were subject to their opportunistic, long-distance raids, the Comanches were, he noted, “everywhere and nowhere.”

The same kinetic strategy often characterized the Native response to European invasion and settlement—the early Spanish attempts to colonize Florida and the American Southwest, the English efforts to gain a foothold on the East Coast, followed by the French in the north and mid-continent, and the Dutch efforts around New York and the Hudson Valley. Hämäläinen wants us to see these colonial forays from a Native perspective, and to focus on how tribal nations retained their ascendancy.

When Hernando de Soto explored Florida and regions to the north, Hämäläinen recounts, he ventured into the territory of the Cofitachequi Nation, where he met its leader, known as the Lady of Cofitachequi, who was brought to the meeting on a litter. Perhaps sensing a chance to trade, she gave de Soto a pearl necklace; in response, he took her captive. The expedition moved on, in pursuit of even greater wealth. All this could sound like a story of colonial triumph, but Hämäläinen argues that we have it backward: “Soto and other conquistadors believed they were conquering new lands for the Spanish Empire, but in reality, Indians were carefully steering the Europeans’ course, sending them away with fantastical stories of treasures farther ahead.” And that’s a pattern that he regularly lays out: often, when European conquerors thought that they were subjugating tribal nations, the Europeans were actually being manipulated and controlled by them.

And what looked like bold military successes frequently involved a misunderstanding of Indigenous political structures. In the American Southwest, conquistadors such as Juan de Oñate and Vicente de Zaldívar thought they were controlling the so-called Pueblo Empire by decapitating it, as had been done among the Incas and the Maya. Yet the Pueblo communities in the Southwest were a loosely allied network of autonomous towns, rather than a centrally organized kingdom. Massacres at places like Acoma—where, in 1599, the Spanish killed around eight hundred Pueblo in retaliation for the deaths of a dozen Spanish soldiers—didn’t change the balance of power; they merely taught Indigenous people that the Spaniards were to be resisted. By the end of the sixteenth century, after nearly a hundred years of attempted conquests, Spain had failed to establish any serious settlements in North America.

Hämäläinen shows how the persistent power of Indigenous people similarly caused the early collapse of Jamestown. During the “starving time” of 1609-10, the English colonists—unable to hunt and unwilling to farm—ate dogs, cats, rats, horses, and, occasionally, one another. They failed to take the measure of the Powhatans, who had already subjugated a number of rival tribal nations. Now it was the ravaged colonists, Hämäläinen tells us, who were incorporated into Powhatan power structures. Of course, that wasn’t the end of the story. In 1611, three English ships, bearing hundreds of soldiers, showed up; as Jamestown was reoccupied, the English burned Powhatan cornfields and slaughtered entire Native settlements. It sounds like a familiar story of colonial cruelty, and yet Hämäläinen offers a different emphasis: such massacres, he says, were the actions of terrified, isolated, weak, and ultimately unstable communities. In Hämäläinen’s view, the colonial violence “exposed a deep-rooted European anxiety over enduring Indigenous power: the attacks were so vicious because the colonists feared the Indians who refused to submit to their rule.” He notes that into the mid-seventeenth century—a century and a half after Columbus—the coastal settlements established by the English, French, and Dutch colonists remained fragile and hemmed in; most of the continent was effectively off limits to them. The struggle was for survival more than for territorial expansion.

Only in the late seventeenth century did the French and the English begin to push into the heartland, engaging complex configurations of Indigenous power in contending for control of the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley. Yet even then colonial gains were precarious and provisional. By the mid-eighteenth century, Indian rebellions had rolled back European incursions; the Spanish, the French, and the English clung mainly to the coasts and rivers. The vast interior of the continent was largely unknown to them, and the tidy lines of the thirteen colonies were more aspirational than actual.

As the Europeans sought to entrench an imperial presence on the continent, many tribes conglomerated into lasting yet plastic empires of their own. The Iroquois Confederacy (made up of the Cayuga, the Seneca, the Mohawk, the Onondaga, the Oneida, and the Tuscarora) was the most significant power in the Northeast; the Three Fires Confederacy (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) was largely in control of the western Great Lakes; and, later, the Comanche on the southern Plains and the Lakota (along with the Nakota and the Dakota, who spoke distinct dialects of the same language) had military control of larger sections of the continent than any single European power did. Hämäläinen encourages us to see this time not as a period of colonial conquest but as a clash of empires, some European and some Indigenous.

Indigenous foreign policy among the Iroquois and the Three Fires confederacies had evolved into a kind of kinetic détente. My ancestors kept the French and the British off balance by making and breaking alliances as necessary, preventing both from getting the upper hand and keeping both dependent on Native nations. One of the side effects of this policy was the Seven Years’ War, which can plausibly be regarded as the first world war. The conflict began in what’s now Ohio, where an Odawa-French war chief named Charles Langlade led a coalition of Odawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe soldiers against a British fort near Pickawillany. They killed thirteen Miami soldiers and took the British hostage. The attackers executed an English blacksmith, who had been wounded in the attack, and then boiled and ate his heart in front of the horrified garrison. Vignettes such as these make the point that tribal nations, including my own, were shoving Europeans around (and eating their hearts) for quite a long time, and help dislodge the idea that tribes were either passively doomed or ineffectually violent.

In time, the reasons for the clash of Indigenous and European empires began to change: the contest wasn’t simply for resources and the ability to transport them but for land itself. As the colonies expanded, accordingly, the elimination of tribal nations became a goal. By the time of the American Revolution, the French had been almost entirely expelled from what is now the United States, and the British pushed into what is now Canada; the Spanish, meanwhile, had divested themselves of most of their holdings north of the Rio Grande through war, treaties, and trade. Yet many tribal nations remained, too strong to ignore or subdue. Thayendanegea, an Iroquois leader, warned President Washington’s Secretary of War, “You consider yourselves as independent people; we, as the original inhabitants of this country, and sovereigns of the soil, look upon ourselves as equally independent, and free as any other nation or nations.”

Meanwhile, the new American nation found itself crushed under war debt; individual former colonies had different needs and pursued different foreign policies. The government couldn’t sustain multiple wars against multiple Indigenous groups. Instead, it deployed treaties and settlements as a means of subjugation. In the Ohio Country, Congress sold millions of acres of land it didn’t own to coastal speculators, who in turn enticed settlers with large tracts for little money. “The strategy was obvious: once the land was sold, colonists would eradicate Native Americans on their own,” Hämäläinen writes.

All in all, between 1783 and 1803, fighting with tribes drained the U.S. Treasury and absorbed roughly eighty per cent of all federal spending. As a result, the government was forced to expand its authority over regional entities; new powers granted by the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, in 1790, elbowed aside individual states when it came to the making of treaties and to the control of trade with tribal nations. It was in reaction to Native power and resistance that the augmented role of the federal government—the “United” part of the United States—arose.

More at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/14/do-we-have-the-history-of-native-americans-backward-indigenous-continent

David Treuer is the author of, most recently, “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee.” He is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

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(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America

by Pekka Hämäläinen

There is an old, deeply rooted story about America that goes like this: Columbus “discovers” a strange continent and brings back tales of untold riches. The European empires rush over, eager to stake out as much of this astonishing “New World” as possible. Though Indigenous peoples fight back, they cannot stop the onslaught. White imperialists are destined to rule the continent, and history is an irreversible march toward Indigenous destruction.

Yet as with other long-accepted origin stories, this one, too, turns out to be based in myth and distortion. In Indigenous Continent, acclaimed historian Pekka Hämäläinen presents a sweeping counternarrative that shatters the most basic assumptions about American history. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the Revolution, and other well-trodden episodes on the conventional timeline, he depicts a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals. From the Iroquois in the Northeast to the Comanches on the Plains, and from the Pueblos in the Southwest to the Cherokees in the Southeast, Native nations frequently decimated white newcomers in battle. Even as the white population exploded and colonists’ land greed grew more extravagant, Indigenous peoples flourished due to sophisticated diplomacy and leadership structures.

By 1776, various colonial powers claimed nearly all of the continent, but Indigenous peoples still controlled it—as Hämäläinen points out, the maps in modern textbooks that paint much of North America in neat, color-coded blocks confuse outlandish imperial boasts for actual holdings. In fact, Native power peaked in the late nineteenth century, with the Lakota victory in 1876 at Little Big Horn, which was not an American blunder, but an all-too-expected outcome.

Hämäläinen ultimately contends that the very notion of “colonial America” is misleading, and that we should speak instead of an “Indigenous America” that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial. The evidence of Indigenous defiance is apparent today in the hundreds of Native nations that still dot the United States and Canada. Necessary reading for anyone who cares about America’s past, present, and future, Indigenous Continent restores Native peoples to their rightful place at the very fulcrum of American history.

(Goodreads.com)

“Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.”

–ANNE SEXTON

Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974) was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Wikipedia

This Way Up: Remembering Who We Are 

by Wendy Mandy (Author)  Format: Kindle Edition

“A wonderful leader and healer, Wendy has so much to say about ceremony, family, relationships and plant medicine.”
Russell Brand

“Wendy Mandy has saved my life by reminding me who I am. A millennium’s worth of wisdom in one human, Wendy Mandy has done the work. We should all listen keenly so we can do our own.”
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“The needles are one thing, the pinpoint accuracy of Wendy’s insight is another. Wendy has a brilliant ability to understand people.”
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“Wendy has profoundly changed my life. I’ve been begging her to write a book to share her knowledge. She is one of the most important teachers of our time.”
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“Wendy is an exceptional person. She offers a healing of the brain and the heart. I leave her rooms feeling an extraordinary calm and centeredness. She has connected me to a powerful world of ancestral knowledge.”
James Fox, Writer

“I wind myself up all day, and [with] Wendy it’s the opposite; it’s about releasing. She’s a shaman, so she can guide you but you have to find out for yourself.”
Goldie, Artist and DJ

“This book is wise and more needed than ever”
Fearne Cotton, Author

(Amazon.com)

Kevin Fallon

Mon, November 7, 2022 at 12:29 AM · Yahoo.com

The first time the word “homosexual” appeared in the Bible was in 1946. That year, a committee gathered to translate an updated English version of the book from the Greek. Religious scholars, priests, theologists, linguists, anthropologists, and activists have done decades of research and investigation into the instances where the word appears in the book. Their conclusion is that it was a mistranslation.

In other words, the Biblical assertion that homosexuality is a sin—the catalyst for an entire shift in culture, with political repercussions, religious implications, consequences for LGBT rights and acceptance, and, frankly, deadly results—was, they allege, a mistake.

As a new film asserts, it was “the misuse of a single word that changed the course of history.”

1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture is a new documentary directed by Sharon “Rocky” Roggio. Ahead of its premiere this week at the DOC NYC festival, it has, as one might expect, gone viral within the conservative and Christian communities.

A grassroots campaign to promote the film on social media has gotten its official TikTok account more than 185,000 followers. That makes sense. For most people—practicing Christians or otherwise—what the film is stating is shocking.

There are layers to it: the realization that the Bible has been translated many times over the centuries, and that human error may have been involved in the process. That may be obvious, but it’s eye-opening. Moreover, there’s coming to terms with the notion that human error could be responsible for the stoking of homophobia—a mindset of hatred, oppression, and religious nationalism that has defined the last 75 years of our existence.

Before anyone has even seen the film, there has been an organized effort to attack and debunk the film’s claims. Roggio and others involved in the making of the documentary have received threats. Campaigns have been waged to get even innocuous social media posts taken down. An entire book was published to refute the evidence—even though the film has yet to be screened.

“The opposition is quite vocal about our film, trying to debunk it because they’re afraid,” Roggio tells The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview ahead of 1946’s New York premiere. “We’re literally unmooring them and pulling the anchors out from underneath.”

Things the Bible Doesn’t Say (But You Thought It Did)

Those attacks are coming from all sides.

“We’ve been hit by the conservative audience,” Roggio says. “We’ve been hit by the atheist audience. We’ve been hit by LGBTQ people who have been hurt by the church and who have now left the church, because they feel that we are subscribing to religious supremacy by even playing along in this dialogue.”

1946 takes a journalistic, academic approach to substantiating these claims. Poring over thousands of historical documents, centuries of ancient texts, and Bible translations in many languages, the experts in the film conclude that two Greek words were mistranslated to mean homosexual. One more accurately means effeminate. The other connotes a person who was a sexual abuser and who had harmed someone.

As the film outlines, years after the translation, when the mistake was pointed out, the committee recognized and attempted to correct it. But, by the ’70s, the implications of those verses had become widespread. By the time the AIDS crisis arrived in the ’80s, that mindset was weaponized by the moral majority, particularly in the merging of politics and religion in the United States.

“A big point of our film has been biblical literalism,” Roggio says. “We do just think that it was a magical book that was just dropped down to us, but these are real people who have made these decisions that impact our real reality. People are going to feel unmoored by this idea that it’s man that has messed up, not God. As much as we are combating biblical literalism, we want our conservative audience to journey with us, in the sense that this is not an attack on God. This is not an attack on the Bible. This is a real issue of a mistranslation.”

Before 1946 premieres at DOC NYC on Nov. 12, we spoke with Roggio about the work she did (along with scholars and activists Kathy Baldock and Ed Oxford) to meticulously substantiate the film’s claims, the challenge of getting through to a Christian community that refuses even to hear the evidence, and how a documentary like this could change the world.

All the Things the Bible Wants to Execute You For

I grew up in the church, but I am still someone who found the idea of “homosexual” being a mistranslation in the Bible to be shocking. What has been people’s response to this?

We’re talking about the biggest book in the world. This impacts the three largest religions in the world. This impacts everyone. And we don’t discuss these things. That was what intrigued me as someone who grew up in the church, was a victim of bad theology, and was discriminated against because I’m a member of LGBTQ community. Realizing that the word homosexual wasn’t in the Bible until 1946, that was a click for me. I think that it’s gonna be a click for a lot of people.

Even the basic principle that the Bibles we read were translated by a human, and there may have been a mistake in that translation—that’s a mind-blowing realization for people.

One of the biggest concerns that we see in America today is Christian nationalism and people using the Bible who are saying that it is inerrant. They are biblical literalists. It has sovereignty over us. It can’t be changed. The word is the word. That is dangerous. It’s dangerous for so many people. We see it playing out in our reality today, and I call that religious supremacy, really. My idea in finessing these themes is to hopefully get the conservative audience to join with us and be honest about this. Words have power and words have meaning. The way that we use the Bible and use these old texts is very important. So what we try to do is contextualize.

What is the goal of that contextualization?

Our movie is more than just theology. It’s history. It’s society. It’s politics. It’s law. It’s oppression. It’s how, again, these words have meaning. We as a group of people have had to negotiate the text. A group of people over time have had to pick and choose which verses stand out, which verses we follow—which verses play out in our land and our law. To really be an honest reader of Christian scripture, we have to find a way where we’re not oppressing people, where we’ve contextualized the text—we understand where it comes from and how it impacted a group of people.

When you’re introducing this idea, which is seismic and likely upsetting to a lot of people, how do you explain it to them at the most basic level?

1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture is about the first time the word “homosexual” appeared in the Bible. We had a team of researchers who wanted to ask the question: Who made this decision, and why? What was discovered, through a series of letters written by the translation committee that put the word “homosexual” in there, is that it was a mistake. Then it was discovered how the word “homosexual” went viral in print in the ’70s. That impacted the ’80s and the moral majority, and how we see the merger of politics and religion, specifically in America. What we now see today is the dangers of Christian nationalism, and it’s only grown.

Can you talk more specifically about the mistranslation of the word “homosexual” and what happened there?

We’re talking about a word, a medical term that has a connotation of a group of people that have an orientation, as opposed to what the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts are referring to, which is an aggressor, somebody who was an abuser—somebody who has abused someone else, and there is a victim on the other side. It’s a very different connotation. So that was my drive for making the movie, because now I have tangible evidence, letters written from the committee [acknowledging this].

This translation committee also has not only recognized the error but continues to rectify it and make their translations reflect the connotation of abusive behavior. Whereas now we see malice in the conservative committees, who since the ’80s have done the opposite. They say it refers to consensual acts, so it’s been amplified as homophobia because of this mistranslation.

From my experience, I know there are many Christians who are unmoving in their beliefs, who operate from a point of blind faith. What is it like to arrive with all of this evidence, research, and proof—even just an ask to listen to what the movie is alleging—but be met with that stubborn certitude?

It’s like hitting a wall. You get two kinds of Christians. You get people like my dad. [Roggio’s father is a pastor who appears in the film and repeatedly challenges its claims.] They want us to think they love us so much, that they’re just trying to give us the truth. And my dad is very kind and he’s never hurtful. But there are other people that I’ll see, especially on social media, who turn their fear into anger and then hatred. They’re vicious. A lot of what I see on social media and TikTok is the epitome of the phrase “There’s no love like Christian hate.” They’re just so disgusting.

Is it ever productive? What is it like to encounter that, on a human level?

We have reached a couple of people who actually will listen and watch the movie. But there are so many people who are so close-minded. It’s heartbreaking that people aren’t even open to recognizing us as human. It’s just dehumanizing. With the church being comfortable othering people—it’s not us, it’s you—it’s easy for them to dehumanize the LGBTQ person. A key barrier is that even some of these theologians that will put out this harmful rhetoric, they don’t have relationships with LGBTQ people.

Do you think that makes a difference?

One reason why I wanted to put my dad in the movie and my story in the movie is because we are a prime example of that “hitting the wall.” Here’s an example of someone who I love very much, who is my biggest oppressor. There’s no getting through to him at all. And so the other thing is, you know, we’re not going to change everybody’s minds, and that’s OK. But at the end of the day, my dad needs to keep his beliefs where they belong, and stay out where my beliefs are.

I don’t impede his equal rights and he doesn’t need to impede mine. I’m doing this to provide equal protection for everyone under the law, because if we don’t get a handle on this now, with the Bible in this country, we’re all in trouble—no matter what you believe.

(Contributed by Janet Cornwell, H.W., m.)

Full Moon Total Solar Eclipse in Taurus/Scorpio

The Taurus lunar eclipse is a total eclipse, bringing brief moments of complete obscurity of the Moon. Whilst in ancient times eclipses were thought to be deeply ominous, we have a variety of interpretations open to us in modern times, partly thanks to the added focus of branches of psychological astrology. We could, for instance, interpret the eclipse as showing a respite from some of the regular concerns that grasp our attention — maybe Taurean-specific issues, such as worry about economic security. But relief may be on the way that improves a practical situation, or at least clears up some confusion about the matter.

Even so, we should not ignore that in this lunation, Mercury and Venus in Scorpio also oppose the Moon conjunct Uranus in Taurus. This feels quite weighty, with those planets alongside the Sun in intense Scorpio. The opposition adds a sense of “odd one out,” increasing an undertone of someone being singled out — or at least feeling that way.

Being different can be exciting, but at some basic level it can also mean that we fear exclusion. What if other people don’t get us or have an issue about whatever makes us unique? Yet the innovative sides of Uranus make it quirky and refreshing. Perhaps our task is to uphold value for what we don’t yet know intimately — whether towards others or for some aspect of our own nature.

In practical circumstances, the Moon–Uranus conjunction smacks of something coming out of the blue, and the surprise element is magnified because of the eclipse. There’s the bolt that we didn’t see coming! If Uranus is the planet of upheavals and innovations, though, what is it that merits a shakeup in our lives and the world? And where can we sense a glimpse of breakthrough? These facets are almost sure to become visible eventually — and the story to make more sense, even if we can’t quite take in every detail straight away.

With a Taurus Moon, comfort can be something we reach for automatically, perhaps through food, drink, sex, or affection. Yet there may be reasons why, under the total eclipse, this process cannot be fulfilled in quite the same way that we are used to. Since Venus is in opposition, it might be that a partner’s change of diet, for instance, affects the food choices we also make. Or that they are going through a process that makes physical contact tricky for a while. And even though it might be our habits that get a shakeup whilst alongside another — it’s the “for a while” part that is probably the significant factor to remember!

Mercury’s opposition to the Moon could mean that we really do have to put rational concerns above those that relate to our intuition and heart. We manage to let our head talk us in circles over a particular issue or we are persuaded by the engaging speech and arguments of another. Since Scorpio is occupied by Mercury, it could be that something quite crucial is at stake — and so we go with the popular argument, rather than rely on more personal instincts.

What mediates this set of oppositions is Saturn, squaring both ways from Aquarius, making this a fixed t-square (fixed signs Taurus, Scorpio, and Aquarius, all locked into this pair of 90° angles). Saturn is extra firm in that sign, underlining rules and regulations and outlining its boundaries — yet it’s fair and seeks to include the best interests for all. Maybe we can respect its age-old wisdom, alongside its keenness to include some facet of modernity. Basically, Saturn is trying to keep up with the times and harness the energy of new trends. Ultimately, we may be glad for how it has managed to do so, even if we must endure a wait or a sense of limitation for the time being.

This article is from the Mountain Astrologer by Diana McMahon Collis

The Prince of Disks

The man represented by the Prince of Disks is a quiet and meditative man, who works with unfailing determination towards the goals he sets himself. He is reliable and resourceful, unswerving and creative in his dedication.

He is more imaginative than the Knight of Disks, though he has the same quiet strength and gentleness. His quality of contemplation often yields fruit in surprising ways, generating a deep and broad-sweeping understanding about the inner workings of life.

If he is ill-dignified, the Prince of Disks can become stubborn and short-sighted – even bloody-minded in his attitudes. Faithful and loyal himself, he will not tolerate faithlessness in others. Neither will he accept lack of integrity, nor dishonesty.

He is hard-working, trustworthy and inventive, often producing unusual yet practical solutions which resolve otherwise intractable problems. As a friend he is non-judgemental and supportive, though capable of shedding new perspectives on situations. He’s generally a good listener, though he has little patience with histrionics and manipulation.

His approach to life overall is one of industrious practicality. He believes that all things yield to a determined will and well-directed activity.

Though emotionally he at first gives the impression that he is solid and perhaps even a little unimaginative, when his feelings are roused, he can be deeply passionate and sensual.

He rarely comes up to indicate a change of mood in a person, though sometimes he will appear to indicate some-one learning to take responsibility in everyday life.

(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)

Laura Spinney

What can the behaviour of apes teach us about sex and gender? A great deal, according to a new book by primatologist Frans de Waal – and his findings are already stirring controversy

Sun 17 Apr 2022 09.00 EDT (theguardian.com)

Sex and gender have come to represent one of the hottest fronts in the modern culture wars. Now, on to this bloody battlefield, calmly dodging banned books, anti-transgender laws and political doublespeak, strolls the distinguished Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal, brandishing nearly half a century’s worth of field notebooks and followed, metaphorically speaking, by an astonishingly diverse collection of primates.

Given the world it enters, de Waal’s new book, Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender, would arguably have failed if it didn’t stimulate debate. It seems safe from death by indifference, however, since it is dividing opinion even before it is published.

“I found the book to be as wise as it was humane,” the American primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy told me, while US palaeontologist and writer Riley Black , a non-binary trans woman, is disappointed the author didn’t attempt a more radical overhaul of sex.

Princeton University primatologist Agustín Fuentes, meanwhile, is full of admiration for de Waal’s descriptions of ape behaviour, but feels the book falls short when it comes to humans. Given the author’s public visibility and his masterful storytelling skills, Fuentes told me, this was his opportunity to present a thorough and thoughtful discussion of the latest research. “Unfortunately,” he said, “that’s not this book.”

What this book is is an attempt to put the biology – the sex – back into gender. For too long, de Waal thinks, gender was regarded as a purely social construct and talk of inborn sex differences was taboo. “The fact that we have genders is related to the fact that we have sexes and sexual reproduction,” he told me, ahead of a tour to promote Different. “That’s an undeniable fact, in my opinion, even though the gender concept is obviously more flexible than the two sexes that we have.”

Sex (male/female) is approximately binary, he argues, while gender (masculine/feminine) is a spectrum. The fact that the latter grew out of the former should not stop us questioning the cultural components of gender, some of which are based on a misunderstanding of biology, nor rejecting gender-based discrimination. Different doesn’t mean better or worse.

He makes this case by reference to the non-human primates he has observed for decades, but the book is also a plea to us to look beyond chimpanzees when searching for parallels in our nearest primate relatives. We are just as close to bonobos, the “Kama Sutra apes” for whom sex is as banal as a handshake, though much more fun.

It was only by accident, de Waal reminds us, that explorers stumbled on chimps first and they became our go-to model of primate behaviour (some Victorian prudishness helped). Since chimps are generally more aggressive than bonobos, this skewed emphasis gave rise to an unjustifiably bleak view of human nature, he feels, which has only begun to lighten up in the last few decades. In his unfashionable optimism about humanity, he compares himself to a frog he once spotted in an Australian lavatory bowl. Like the frog, he has clung on through periodic deluges of cynicism and despair.

Among his accumulated titles, de Waal is professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and from the first pages of Different you know you’re in the presence of someone who feels beyond the slings and arrows of the culture wars. “You wouldn’t write a book like that if you were 40 and trying to get tenure,” remarks Meredith Small, an anthropologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and an admirer.

The typical primate society is at heart a female kinship network run by older matriarchs

He’s well-known enough to feel comfortable sharing personal reflections on growing up as one of six brothers and describing himself as a feminist who nevertheless refuses to denigrate his own gender. He’s also critical of what he sees as the contradictions of modern feminism, in particular, the idea that gender is socially constructed until it comes to gender identity and sexual orientation, which are innate and immutable.

Primatology is a relatively young field that was founded by men but came to be dominated by women, which means it is acutely aware that who is looking is as important as what they see. This cisgender, straight, 73-year-old white man is no exception. He describes how the field broadened its horizons thanks to the feminisation that has happened over his career. “When the women came, we got more interested in female-female and mother-offspring relationships,” he told me. “Female choice became an important issue.”

His entrancing descriptions of apes illustrate this. There’s Princess Mimi, the “bonobo with staff” who grew up pampered in a human home and was mystified by the retinue of males with obvious erections she acquired on meeting her own kind; the gender-nonconforming chimp Donna and the gay capuchin monkey Lonnie, both of whom were fully integrated into their respective colonies; Mama, the wise kingmaker among chimps; and the rhesus macaque love triangle of Orange, Dandy and Mr Spickles.

Through these characters de Waal brings to life the complexity of sex and social behaviour in other apes. He recounts, for example, how Nikkie, a young and possibly overpromoted alpha-male chimp, was chased up a tree by a bunch of disgruntled underlings who wouldn’t let him come down.

“After about a quarter of an hour, Mama slowly climbed into the tree. She touched Nikkie and kissed him. Then she climbed down while he followed close at heel. Now that Mama was bringing him with her, nobody resisted any more. Nikkie, obviously still nervous, made up with his adversaries. No other chimp in the group, male or female, could have brought about such a smooth closing.”

Mr Spickles was the alpha male of a large macaque troop; Orange was the alpha female. The males all looked up to Mr Spickles, the females to Orange. But Mr Spickles enjoyed his privileged status largely thanks to Orange, his staunchest political ally.

When mating season came around, Orange would pair up with Dandy, a handsome male almost half Mr Spickles’s age. If Mr Spickles tried to chase Dandy away, Orange would simply seek her younger mate out again. But if Dandy was tempted to flaunt his youth and vigour in front of Mr Spickles, Orange would loyally take up position next to the ageing alpha. “Orange carefully balanced two preferences,” de Waal writes. “One concerned political leadership and the other sexual desire. She never confused the two.”

Both males and females strive – non-consciously – to maximise their evolutionary fitness, but because they differ biologically their methods for achieving this goal differ too. Protecting offspring from male infanticide is a common female preoccupation, de Waal says, which is why one rule holds across species: “The typical primate society is at heart a female kinship network run by older matriarchs.” Beyond that, however, there are as many models of relations between the sexes as there are species.

Males and females are both hierarchical, but these hierarchies are based on more than just physical prowess or fighting ability. Prestige, which is less visible, counts too. Hierarchies are always at least partly coercive, but prestige always has a component of altruism and community-mindedness to it, as Mama and Orange showed. In most primates, the alpha female ranks below the alpha male. He has strength but she has choice. (Bonobos, uniquely, have reversed this order: females invest everything in the sisterhood, which collectively dominates the group.)

We have no evidence that any species other than our own knows that sex leads to progeny

As a result, the female has been underrated, an argument the British zoologist Lucy Cooke also made recently, in her acclaimed book Bitch. But de Waal thinks we’ve gone wrong at a deeper level. He challenges the idea that non-humans are “natural” while humans are “cultural”, arguing that nature and nurture are inextricably entwined in both. Apes may have gender as well as sex – there are hints of cultural variation in the way the sexes behave in non-human primates, though he says it hasn’t been studied enough yet – but you can’t take the sex out of human gender.

In this domain as in so many others, de Waal says, we’re more similar to other primates than we think. (Years ago, he coined a term for those who warned against anthropomorphising other primates: “anthropodenialists”.) Yet humans do seem to be unique in one way. We are apparently the only ape that attaches labels to sexual or gender diversity and prejudices to the labels. In other primates, he says, “I don’t find the kind of intolerance we have in human societies”.

He expects blowback from two broad camps – the feminists whom he overtly criticises in the book and those conservatives who claim that men are men and women are women and never the twain shall meet, wrongly asserting that science supports their position. But he also has critics closer to home.

Black says he fails to ask the most fundamental question: what is biological sex? “Is it chromosomes or hormones or gametes, or some combination thereof, or is it a concept we need to go back and start over?” she asks. Until we’ve answered that question, she feels it’s unreasonable to assume that sex is essentially binary, even if de Waal does allow for some blurring and acknowledges non-binary and transgender people.

Fuentes wonders why he overlooks a large body of research on human sex and gender – work by the American neuroscientist Lise Eliot, for example, showing that male and female brains aren’t that different, or British psychologist Cordelia Fine’s probing of the complex feedback loops that exist between sex and gender.

To read these and other researchers, Fuentes says, is to understand that the non-human-natural/human-cultural division is a straw person argument. Moreover, in the introduction to Different, de Waal explains that he will not discuss areas of human behaviour for which there are no animal parallels, such as economic disparities, household labour and dress. “But you can’t discuss gender without these!” Fuentes says.

These controversies will undoubtedly dominate discussion of the book once it comes out, so now seems a good moment to flag up some of de Waal’s quieter but still thought-provoking observations, such as: “Most beauty in nature exists thanks to female taste.” Or: “We have no evidence that any species other than our own knows that sex leads to progeny.”

And whether or not you agree with him, Different is worth reading for its anecdotes alone. The description of two grizzled male chimps who were normally sworn enemies, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, forming a barrage between a newborn and a young alpha male with possibly infanticidal intent, is one of many that will be hard to forget.

• Different by Frans de Waal is published by Granta on 5 May (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)

And from Le Monde:

In his book, the Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal presents the results of half a century spent observing the habits of great apes. He believes that they are cultural and gendered beings.

By Hervé Morin Published on November 6, 2022 (lemonde.fr)

Lire en français

At 73, Frans de Waal has nothing left to prove in the world of primatology, and he is one of its most eminent members. In Différents (‘Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist’), a book written during the pandemic, he shares what he discovered through decades spent observing great apes in their natural environment and in captivity – particularly about our closest cousins, the chimpanzees and bonobos. He believes that “they hold up a mirror to us that allows us to approach gender from a new angle,” mixing biology and culture.

Your first book for the general public was published in 1982, on politics among chimpanzees. There was already the question of sex and power. Why did you take up the theme of gender this time?

The reason is that when I give lectures on animal intelligence and emotion and mention gender differences, people are curious. Not least because they hear in the media that gender is cultural and flexible and that we can raise our children neutrally if we want to. The general public is skeptical about this, and they want to know what biologists think.

People are convinced that boys and girls are different, but they are also not convinced by the very deterministic biological discourse that came out of the 1970s, where you could say that a behavior is “pre-wired” or that we are “slaves to our genes.” And I think they are right: This is a very simplistic way of looking at biology, and we scientists are partly to blame for this misconception.

‘The majority of alpha males protect the weaker ones, keeping the peace and cohesion of the group. They have a very constructive role.’

I don’t believe you can ever say that a behavior is purely biological or cultural. Humans are animals, in whom we always encounter interactions between the two dimensions. And I would say the same thing for other primates, particularly chimpanzees and bonobos who have a very long period of development, which includes a lot of learning and cultural influences.

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Contrary to popular belief, you write that among great apes, ‘males exercise less control than we might think.’ Didn’t the notion of the alpha male, which you popularized, feed this prejudice?

People have this view that primates are always dominated by males. This is a misconception that came from an early study of baboons in a zoo, where the males were clearly violent and dominant. I don’t see primates that way at all. First of all, because in our two closest relatives, males are dominant among chimpanzees, while among bonobos, it’s the females. So it’s not that simple.

Link to full article online: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/science/article/2022/11/06/frans-de-waal-primates-are-also-born-with-a-gender-identity_6003120_10.html

(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)

Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

by Frans de Waal

New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal explores sex and gender in both humans and other animals.

Though many scholars now argue that gender differences are purely a product of socialization, primatologist Frans de Waal illustrates in Different the scientific, evolutionary basis for gender differences in humans, drawing on his decades of experience working with our closest ape relatives: chimpanzees and bonobos. De Waal illuminates their behavioral and biological differences, and compares and contrasts them with human behavior: male domination and territoriality in chimpanzees and the female-led pacific society of bonobos.

In his classic conversational style and a narrative rich in anecdotes and wry observations, de Waal tackles topics including gender identity, sexuality, gender-based violence, same-sex rivalry, homosexuality, friendship, and nurturance. He reveals how evolutionary biology can inform a more nuanced—and equitable—cultural understanding of gender. Ultimately, he argues, our two nearest primate relatives are equally close to us, and equally relevant. Considering all available evidence, we can learn much about ourselves and embrace our similarities as well as our differences.

(Goodreads.com)

Gallery|In Pictures

Thousands protest, calling for a general election amid the worsening cost-of-living crisis in the UK.

Published On 6 Nov 2022 (aljazeera.com)

Thousands of people joined a demonstration in London, calling for general elections amid the worsening cost-of-living crisis in the United Kingdom.

A coalition of trade unions and community organisations took part in the “Britain is Broken” protest, organised by The People’s Assembly, in central London on Saturday.

The group said protesters were demanding immediate general elections, action on low pay, and the repeal of “anti-union” employment laws.

Protester Adam Robinson said people would “keep shouting” until the government listened, and likened the movement to the 1990 poll tax riots, which he credited with causing then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s fall from power.

“I’m really starting to feel the pinch as I know a lot of people are,” the 51-year-old secondary teacher from Maidstone in Kent, who is among those who may go on strike early next year.

“The current government is an absolute shambles, it is not fit for purpose, it is damaging our country, and I think it’s important that we stand together to make our voices heard and to say that we’re not going to put up with this stuff any more.”

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(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)

J. W. Barlament

Oct 17, 2022 (jwbarlament.medium.com)

And a case study in applying abstract philosophy to the real world

“Things-in-the-world”, obviously, exist, but what about the tropes we ascribe to these things? Do they exist? And if so, what shape(s) do they take?

I’m pulling your leg, I swear, please stay. No philosophical word vomit here. But really, if so many of the most famous minds of the last few millennia have spoken or written on the subjects of ontology and metaphysics, and if students like me are forced to read no less than four books by Plato and another four by Aristotle over the course of a couple of years, we might as well actually know what these words mean, and surely more importantly, what they can tell us about the world.

The central problem of both ontology and metaphysics (if you’d just tilt your head the same way as me) is the Problem of Universals; “universals”, in this case, referring to not any concrete physical things, but instead referring to the attributes or properties of said things (the things-in-the-world of earlier; it sounds confusing at first but unfortunately the philosophers might be right that it’s actually the least confusing way to say it). Both disciplines deal with “things” and what things really do be in the world and all of that; the distinction between them lies in the branch of being they deal with. Simply put, ontology is the study of existence itself, and metaphysics is the study of the nature of existence. The central question of ontology, therefore, is: what exists? And the central question of metaphysics: what is the nature of that which exists?

Well, then, what exists, and how so? We know, we think, that things-in-the-world exist, at least on as deep a level as could ever be relevant to us humans. But what about those “universals”? Do things-in-the-world have properties that exist on their own as independent entities? Or, less headache-inducingly, should an object’s properties be considered to exist beyond said object itself?

It’s a simple enough question — not to say that ontology and metaphysics as a whole are simple fields or even that the reduction of them to this is fair or sane — and it doesn’t really require any lengthy explanations of obscure Classical philosophers to answer. To get at least an idea of what these fields (and all of their handsomely tenured faculty) are up to, we need really only look at one recent figure, the American philosopher D. C. Williams, and his Trope Theory.

The idea goes as such: a “trope” is a particular property; not an abstracted idea of a property, like the ideas of “skinniness” or “sturdiness” in general, but a particular property of a particular thing, like a skinny book or a sturdy table. The idea that there must be “universal” properties behind the appearance of specific properties — that, if something is red, then there must be a universal “red” that is being expressed in that particular instance — is a sort of linguistic illusion. Just because two things can both accurately be described as “red” does not really make them “red things”; their common description is only accurate because we’ve all collectively, and arbitrarily, decided to call some things red and other things not, and it doesn’t reflect any higher principle of “red” in some transcendental realm or perhaps invisibly omnipresent in our universe.

This view is called “nominalism”, but William’s isn’t your run-of-the-mill nominalism because it doesn’t just deny the universals’ existence, but crucially also asserts the tropes’ existence. It isn’t that qualities or properties aren’t real; it’s just that, while their specific instances (in Williams’ words, “particulars”) may be real, any overarching universal principles behind them may just be the linguistically reinforced whimsy of people with too much time on their hands.

And so we may say, at least according to that theory which seems least cooky to me, that properties are real, but only as singular unique properties of singular unique objects, or of abstract descriptive tools used to describe objects. And so we see, at least through the lens of one central problem through one thinker’s interpretation, the difference between ontology and metaphysics and their respective applications in how we view our world and ourselves.