Now, instead of pheromones and handshakes, we’ve got to find nuance and cues from video images on a Facetime call.
—Seth Godin, in ‘The digital swirl is real, it’s disconcerting and it’s loaded with possibility’
Tag: Society
Plight of us lovely huggers amongst the aloof…
We love Thanksgiving. We cook everything. But we’re still learning many things about the American culture. Back home everyone likes to hug and kiss on the cheek. It communicates that you care about someone. But here it is different. My friend tried to give me a Thanksgiving handshake at the gym today. But I went in for a Thanksgiving hug. And he only gave me a Thanksgiving half-hug. A few months ago I was called into Human Resources, and they said: ‘Mr. Mauricio, no more hugging at the office. It is making people uncomfortable.’
— Mr. Mauricio, in ‘Humans of New York’
P.S.: I’m a big time hugger. The British around me are definitely not. I’m available for hugs.
Envy and status in politics
People will oppose policies that benefit themselves and their community if they think it will lower their within-group status.
In other words, even when a policy might make someone materially better off (by, say, improving their housing conditions), they are likely to oppose it if the government doing so for everyone in their community would harm their relative status position.
—Gwyneth McClendon quoted in the Washington Post: ‘Envy and status in politics‘
Continue reading Envy and status in politics
Definition: Policing
Egon Bittner, a sociologist, once defined policing as responding to “something that ought not to be happening and about which someone had better do something now”
Smartphones – an invention I don’t like
I hate my mum’s phone and I wish she never had one. That is a invention that I don’t like.
A second grade student, Reported by BBC News
Me too, kid. It’s a sad comment on our generation, and our mass addiction.
🇮🇳🤐
The famously argumentative Indian is now being silenced and turned into a consenting Indian.
FT: Narendra Modi’s illiberal drift threatens Indian democracy
Beating wife & kids – my god given right!
Scripture and Russian tradition, the church said, regard “the reasonable and loving use of physical punishment as an essential part of the rights given to parents by God himself”.
Why Russia is about to decriminalise wife-beating, January 28, 2017 at 12:03PM
I know a vast proportion of population back in India would completely agree with the Russian duma on this, with religious and societal permission.
I remember an aunt who used to be regularly beaten by her husband, and her mom refused to interfere because it was ‘between her and her husband’. Her husband, and his family, burnt her to death a few years after since she didn’t get sufficient dowry.
The grand aunt was one of the strongest, most independent women I’d known till then. Her daughter’s murder broke her. Yet, she refused to accept that she should’ve intervened. She only regretted not choosing a better husband in the first place.
Not surprising then, that women led the Russian wife-beating law, or that women voted for Trump in large numbers, or that women are big supporters of some of the most women-oppressing societal norms in India.
Use my marker 