Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "violence"
Violence the Norm? Fiction Provides Powerful Images That Stick
Fiction can provide powerful images that change minds; imprinting can result in a lifetime of believing violence is normal. I’m seriously worried about the current obsession with violence and dystopia.
Since I’m so critical, I thought I’d better get educated. My granddaughters watch and read it. They were eager to show me the “Hunger Games” movie, so I sat through the jiggling camera that is supposed to dilute the violence of the games. I was still horrified by the dystopian premise and teen blood-letting, even though the idea is to criticize current TV games.
How about some hope for Christmas? I’m shamelessly providing my award winning book The Webs of Varok to consider for your Holiday giving. It’s not just crass commercialism. Why not a fun story that includes some positive suggestions for securing a stable future? Take a look at a few excerpts below:
“...there are rumors of an Earth launch—more humans coming to Varok.”
“Rumors? Orram and Conn can continue blathering to Earth about water conservation. That doesn’t mean anything to us. But if humans do manage to get here, we must be ready to snuff them out before Conn can raise a fin.”
“Snuff them out? How?” Gitahl’s patches strained to find Mahntik’s true mind. “Let me be clear. Surely you wouldn’t use the diseases you’ve engineered on humans.”
“Why not? I’d use them to keep ahlork in line—even varoks.”
The ahlork Nidok appears on the cover of the Webs. He is one of our heroes, of sorts.
Conn the elll notes to human Tandra that female ahlork have bright blue scales.
“Better not call them birds,” Orram said. “Varok’s small avioids don’t have such a distinguished ancestry as Earth’s.”
“No dinosaurs?”
“Not enough heat or light out here. And ahlork are built differently than birds, like tanks with external hard parts.”
“Insectoids then.”
Orram’s sense of fun surfaced. “No, no, Tandra. Bad biologist.”
He waved an invitation, and with a clatter of broad, plated wings, the ahlork came toward us, swooping low over two elder varoks sitting nearby. One varok grimaced and ducked ever so lightly in revulsion. The ahlork noticed, circled, and made another pass at him.
I felt a surge of mirth. Orram warned me to stifle it, but the ahlork had already seen my wavering smile. He flapped toward me and landed on my head, then peered down into my tear-filled eyes. I burst into laughter despite the dig of his talons.
“You are nothing more than an elll, with all that shaking and grimacing, First-Human-Being-On-Varok,” the ahlork said...
The blue-plated ahlork standing on the floor spoke in a voice broken with foam. “Surely Earth be beautiful. Not this heap of ruins. Why do you come to Varok?”
One more excerpt. The Webs of Varok is a model of what it takes for humans to do long-term survival, based on the nonfiction text Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources by Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill.
The issues are challenging, good for Book Club discussion. Here’s one we can all agree on:
“I thought manufacturers are required to take responsibility for their products throughout their entire lifetime, including final disposal or recycling. So much of this cloth must be disposed of, every cycle. How do they pay the cost, with such low prices?”
“I have often wondered,” Orserah said.
“It’s as though the weavers wanted the cloth to wear out quickly—so we would buy more.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. “You have just defined planned obsolescence, an old trick on Earth—one of the favorites when business ethics turned sour in the interest of profits.”
Check out http://archivesofvarok.com for more excerpts and information about the series.
Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite ResourcesRob Dietz
]
Since I’m so critical, I thought I’d better get educated. My granddaughters watch and read it. They were eager to show me the “Hunger Games” movie, so I sat through the jiggling camera that is supposed to dilute the violence of the games. I was still horrified by the dystopian premise and teen blood-letting, even though the idea is to criticize current TV games.
How about some hope for Christmas? I’m shamelessly providing my award winning book The Webs of Varok to consider for your Holiday giving. It’s not just crass commercialism. Why not a fun story that includes some positive suggestions for securing a stable future? Take a look at a few excerpts below:
“...there are rumors of an Earth launch—more humans coming to Varok.”
“Rumors? Orram and Conn can continue blathering to Earth about water conservation. That doesn’t mean anything to us. But if humans do manage to get here, we must be ready to snuff them out before Conn can raise a fin.”
“Snuff them out? How?” Gitahl’s patches strained to find Mahntik’s true mind. “Let me be clear. Surely you wouldn’t use the diseases you’ve engineered on humans.”
“Why not? I’d use them to keep ahlork in line—even varoks.”
The ahlork Nidok appears on the cover of the Webs. He is one of our heroes, of sorts.
Conn the elll notes to human Tandra that female ahlork have bright blue scales.
“Better not call them birds,” Orram said. “Varok’s small avioids don’t have such a distinguished ancestry as Earth’s.”
“No dinosaurs?”
“Not enough heat or light out here. And ahlork are built differently than birds, like tanks with external hard parts.”
“Insectoids then.”
Orram’s sense of fun surfaced. “No, no, Tandra. Bad biologist.”
He waved an invitation, and with a clatter of broad, plated wings, the ahlork came toward us, swooping low over two elder varoks sitting nearby. One varok grimaced and ducked ever so lightly in revulsion. The ahlork noticed, circled, and made another pass at him.
I felt a surge of mirth. Orram warned me to stifle it, but the ahlork had already seen my wavering smile. He flapped toward me and landed on my head, then peered down into my tear-filled eyes. I burst into laughter despite the dig of his talons.
“You are nothing more than an elll, with all that shaking and grimacing, First-Human-Being-On-Varok,” the ahlork said...
The blue-plated ahlork standing on the floor spoke in a voice broken with foam. “Surely Earth be beautiful. Not this heap of ruins. Why do you come to Varok?”
One more excerpt. The Webs of Varok is a model of what it takes for humans to do long-term survival, based on the nonfiction text Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources by Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill.
The issues are challenging, good for Book Club discussion. Here’s one we can all agree on:
“I thought manufacturers are required to take responsibility for their products throughout their entire lifetime, including final disposal or recycling. So much of this cloth must be disposed of, every cycle. How do they pay the cost, with such low prices?”
“I have often wondered,” Orserah said.
“It’s as though the weavers wanted the cloth to wear out quickly—so we would buy more.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. “You have just defined planned obsolescence, an old trick on Earth—one of the favorites when business ethics turned sour in the interest of profits.”
Check out http://archivesofvarok.com for more excerpts and information about the series.
Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite ResourcesRob Dietz


Published on December 09, 2013 07:38
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Tags:
aliens, book-clubs, earth, ethics, excerpts, fiction, sustainability, the-webs-of-varok, violence
A Review of The Spirit Level
Social Anxiety Rooted in Inequality?
From Blog 18 by Donald Neeper at http://neeper.net/social-anxiety/
Richard G. WilkinsonA Review of The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Bloomsbury Press, 2009, updated 2010.
What's going on? There's a feeling that people sense an impending social failure but are unable to identify it. What's causing this stress? As documented in the recent scholarly book, The Spirit Level, we really are much more anxious than we used to be.
Wilkinson and Pickett (W&P) are professors who have studied economics and epidemiology. They quantitatively evaluate many symptoms of social dysfunction, comparing results for 23 developed countries and also comparing data for the 50 states of the U.S. In each case, they correlate the severity of a social problem (e.g. teen births or homicides or obesity) with income inequality. The correlations are independent of the average income or overall wealth of a country. In other words, the greater the disparity in income, the more dysfunction a society has in multiple characteristics, including infant mortality, social mobility, literacy, AIDS, homicide rate, degenerative diseases, teenage births, trust, and status of women.
The authors present extensive arguments to justify inequality as the common factor underlying the other characteristics. For example, public spending on health and education does not correlate with homicide rates, but income inequality does. In a postscript, the authors counter what appears to be politically motivated criticism of the book, including statistical arguments or missing factors such as ethnicity. W&P assert ethnicity is not a factor because the same correlations occur across societies of widely differing cultures. Data from Italy and Finland fall along the same line in the graphs.
Wilkinson and Pickett argue that our need to feel valued and capable implies we crave feedback regarding our worth, but social status causes distress because it carries messages of superiority and inferiority. Greater inequality amplifies the importance of social status.
Both the relatively rich and the relatively poor have relatively better health, less violence, and less anxiety in a country (or state) with less inequality. That is, despite our expectations otherwise, all classes are happier in a society with less inequality.
Obesity occupies a special chapter in Spirit Level. In the U.S., about half the population were overweight and 15 percent were obese in the late 1970s. Now two-thirds of adults are overweight and about thirty percent are obese as measured by body mass index, which normalizes the effect that a taller person normally weighs more.
Obesity in the U.S. is more than twelve times greater than that in Japan, which is the least unequal society of the 23 so-called rich countries. In Japan, the basic wages are more equal, with smaller differences between the highly paid and the lower salaries.
Wilkinson and Pickett explain that many people have a strong personal belief in equality and fairness, but these values have remained private, hidden, unshared, inactive because people think their fellows disagree. Instead, political differences reflect beliefs about how to solve the problems, while desire for a safer and more friendly society goes across political lines. Politics have been weakened by the loss of any concept of a better society, a vision of how to get from here to there.
The authors, however, clearly identify corporate power as the elephant in the living room—the biggest determinant of political action. In the U.S., the highest-paid people in corporations received almost 40 times as much as the highest-paid people in the non-profit sector, and 200 times more than the highest-paid generals or cabinet secretaries in the Federal Government. Does that illustrate where our social priorities lie, despite our underlying shared personal belief? B&P suggest that worker ownership of corporations would induce both better satisfaction and better production.
Wilkinson and Pickett conclude that many of the growing social problems are maintained by income inequality, whereby the poor cope with their own poverty and also with the consequences of the poverty of their neighbors, while the rich pay to live separately in residential economic segregation. As the authors say, governments can spend either to prevent social problems or else to deal with the consequences. In the U.S. since 1980, public expenditure on prisons has risen six times as fast as public expenditure on education.
A missing argument.
One key observation seems missing from the excellent presentation of data and observations in The Spirit Level. Almost any enduring symptom (good or bad) of a complex system is maintained by a loop of positive feedback, as outlined in Blog 14 and Blog 16 at http://neeper.net. The search for ways to rectify income inequality must first locate the unchecked positive feedback loops that maintain and increase the inequalities. Often, those loops are what we label "growth." As argued in Blog 16, disallowing political action by corporations would be one powerful step toward equal justice because corporate governance is simply sophisticated bribery.
From Blog 18 by Donald Neeper at http://neeper.net/social-anxiety/

What's going on? There's a feeling that people sense an impending social failure but are unable to identify it. What's causing this stress? As documented in the recent scholarly book, The Spirit Level, we really are much more anxious than we used to be.
Wilkinson and Pickett (W&P) are professors who have studied economics and epidemiology. They quantitatively evaluate many symptoms of social dysfunction, comparing results for 23 developed countries and also comparing data for the 50 states of the U.S. In each case, they correlate the severity of a social problem (e.g. teen births or homicides or obesity) with income inequality. The correlations are independent of the average income or overall wealth of a country. In other words, the greater the disparity in income, the more dysfunction a society has in multiple characteristics, including infant mortality, social mobility, literacy, AIDS, homicide rate, degenerative diseases, teenage births, trust, and status of women.
The authors present extensive arguments to justify inequality as the common factor underlying the other characteristics. For example, public spending on health and education does not correlate with homicide rates, but income inequality does. In a postscript, the authors counter what appears to be politically motivated criticism of the book, including statistical arguments or missing factors such as ethnicity. W&P assert ethnicity is not a factor because the same correlations occur across societies of widely differing cultures. Data from Italy and Finland fall along the same line in the graphs.
Wilkinson and Pickett argue that our need to feel valued and capable implies we crave feedback regarding our worth, but social status causes distress because it carries messages of superiority and inferiority. Greater inequality amplifies the importance of social status.
Both the relatively rich and the relatively poor have relatively better health, less violence, and less anxiety in a country (or state) with less inequality. That is, despite our expectations otherwise, all classes are happier in a society with less inequality.
Obesity occupies a special chapter in Spirit Level. In the U.S., about half the population were overweight and 15 percent were obese in the late 1970s. Now two-thirds of adults are overweight and about thirty percent are obese as measured by body mass index, which normalizes the effect that a taller person normally weighs more.
Obesity in the U.S. is more than twelve times greater than that in Japan, which is the least unequal society of the 23 so-called rich countries. In Japan, the basic wages are more equal, with smaller differences between the highly paid and the lower salaries.
Wilkinson and Pickett explain that many people have a strong personal belief in equality and fairness, but these values have remained private, hidden, unshared, inactive because people think their fellows disagree. Instead, political differences reflect beliefs about how to solve the problems, while desire for a safer and more friendly society goes across political lines. Politics have been weakened by the loss of any concept of a better society, a vision of how to get from here to there.
The authors, however, clearly identify corporate power as the elephant in the living room—the biggest determinant of political action. In the U.S., the highest-paid people in corporations received almost 40 times as much as the highest-paid people in the non-profit sector, and 200 times more than the highest-paid generals or cabinet secretaries in the Federal Government. Does that illustrate where our social priorities lie, despite our underlying shared personal belief? B&P suggest that worker ownership of corporations would induce both better satisfaction and better production.
Wilkinson and Pickett conclude that many of the growing social problems are maintained by income inequality, whereby the poor cope with their own poverty and also with the consequences of the poverty of their neighbors, while the rich pay to live separately in residential economic segregation. As the authors say, governments can spend either to prevent social problems or else to deal with the consequences. In the U.S. since 1980, public expenditure on prisons has risen six times as fast as public expenditure on education.
A missing argument.
One key observation seems missing from the excellent presentation of data and observations in The Spirit Level. Almost any enduring symptom (good or bad) of a complex system is maintained by a loop of positive feedback, as outlined in Blog 14 and Blog 16 at http://neeper.net. The search for ways to rectify income inequality must first locate the unchecked positive feedback loops that maintain and increase the inequalities. Often, those loops are what we label "growth." As argued in Blog 16, disallowing political action by corporations would be one powerful step toward equal justice because corporate governance is simply sophisticated bribery.
Published on February 19, 2014 15:28
•
Tags:
dysfunction, economics, inequality, nonfiction, obesity, society, violence
Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction
Expanding on the ideas portrayed in The Archives of Varok books for securing the future.
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