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Rainbowgardener

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Rainbowgardener’s environmental shelf

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Bringing it to the Table by Wendell Berry

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg

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Rainbowgardener’s Bookshelves

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book-club‎ (61)
apocalyptic-utopian-dystopian‎ (51)
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hs-young-adult‎ (42)
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Rainbowgardener is Currently Reading

Rainbowgardener is currently reading

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

by Carol Anderson

bookshelves: currently-reading, anti-racist, history, social-problems-political, non-fiction

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Rainbowgardener said: " Wow! 7 or 8 stars out of five. This is one of those books that opens your eyes, makes you see things in a whole new way, understand our country better, maybe even life changing. Like The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, it explodes a whole bunch Wow! 7 or 8 stars out of five. This is one of those books that opens your eyes, makes you see things in a whole new way, understand our country better, maybe even life changing. Like The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, it explodes a whole bunch of myths.

Before I read New Jim Crow, I naively believed that Jim Crow laws and official segregation were part of the bad old days of the 40's and 50's. Then we had the Civil Rights movement and took care of it. Jim Crow was always a Southern thing. The South had de jure segregation and the North had only de facto segregation, which was somehow better. Every word of that is a lie. Jim Crow never went away, it just changed its name and superficial appearance.

Before I read (still reading) White Rage, I naively believed that slavery was a pre-Civil war phenomenon. Then we had the Civil War, led by Abraham Lincoln one of the greatest presidents, the Great Emancipator. The North won and slavery disappeared. Pretty much every word of that is also a lie. In fact, the South actually won the civil war. Obviously they did not win the military war. Lee surrendered at Appamatox. But in the aftermath, with a corrupt and racist president [Andrew Johnson] , a spineless Congress, a Supreme Court in thrall to the president and willing to twist the law to make it do what they wanted (sound familiar?) the South manipulated the situation to get everything they wanted, everything they would have gotten if they had won the military war, including the continuation of slavery.

Her thesis is that all the terrible things that white people do to black people, the lynchings and whippings and burnings and all the violence inflicted by the systems, the laws and courts and redlining, arise out of white rage. And white rage is always triggered by black advancement. Every time black people make progress towards equality, white people react with fury. The biggest step towards equality was the Civil War, Abolition, and Reconstruction. So of course the white power had to trample it.

All those leaders of the Confederacy should have been tried for treason, insurrection, attempting to over throw the government. Instead they were pardoned and regained their previous hold on power. . One governor of MS was a former Confederate general. A number held positions in state and US Congresses. Their lands and property were not forfeited. [Note: there were several waves of pardons, then in 1868 Johnson issued a blanket pardon.]

As MS, GA and other deep South states drafted new constitutions, they reimposed white supremacy as if Civil War and abolition never happened. LA: we hold this to be a government of white people perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race. Negroes cannot be considered citizens.

The confederate states enacted Black Code laws which were slavery under another name. All Black men and their families had to sign a yearlong labor contract with a plantation or mill owner. If they didn't, they could be auctioned off. The contract meant that they couldn't leave, had no control over how much or even if they were paid, had no recourse from whippings and other abuse.

The Radical Republican faction (not like today's R's) kept trying to pass laws protecting and siding the former slaves. Andrew Johnson vetoed them all, saying that these attempts to give African Americans some equality and protection were giving them special rights and favors . ...more "

Jun 27, 2025 06:56PM · see review

Rainbowgardener is currently reading

Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise

by Thich Nhat Hanh

bookshelves: non-fiction, spirituality, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in February 2022

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Feb 07, 2022 04:10PM

Rainbowgardener is currently reading

Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique

by Michael S. Gazzaniga

bookshelves: non-fiction, science, currently-reading

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Rainbowgardener said: " Just started this book, but already it is making me mad. (Note I am a retired psychologist.) His loudly and clearly stated thesis is that human beings are unique -- not just quantitatively but qualitatively different from anything that came before. H Just started this book, but already it is making me mad. (Note I am a retired psychologist.) His loudly and clearly stated thesis is that human beings are unique -- not just quantitatively but qualitatively different from anything that came before. He insists there is a bright sharp line between us and all the rest of the animal kingdom. We are not just unique, but special. That is a position usually taken by Creationists, but I don't know if that's where he is going with this.

It's OK, he's entitled to his opinion and to try to defend it. But he's not entitled to cheat to try to convince people. Example: he is talking about the relationship between brain size and intelligence. In general, bigger brain = bigger ideas, though he is aware that it is not a perfect correlation. But he argues that modern humans are a unique exception. Neanderthals had slightly bigger brains than us and even since we have been homo sapiens our brain size has declined a bit more. But "of course" homo sapiens are more intelligent than Neanderthals and contemporary humans are more intelligent than early versions of homo sapiens. This is clear, he says, just look at the complexity of the culture and social structures. That proves it.

Personally, I don't know if we are actually more intelligent than those Neanderthals who were busy inventing the control of fire and the use of tools. Yes, we are living in an incredibly technologically advanced society. That's because a long time ago, we invented ways to transmit knowledge down through the generations, so that we could keep building up the complexity of knowledge and technology. Does that make us more intelligent? How many of us actually understand how all this technology works? Talk to the average anti-vaxxer Trump cultist. They have no way to distinguish between fact and opinion and no way to evaluate different ideas. And are our little nuclear families really more complex social structures than existed in early tribal cultures? Read Tony Hillerman for examples of the complex and subtle web of clan relationships in Navajo culture. It seems quite possible to me ,that the 150 grams less of brain tissue contemporary humans have than earliest homo sapiens represents an actual decline in intelligence. We are losing IQ because we don't need it. We are coasting along on what was built before. We don't need to figure out how to get food, just go to the grocery. We don't need to know how to make anything, just buy it. We don't need to fight off wild animals because we have contained and destroyed them.
Any unused attribute tends to atrophy. One of those people on the street interviews asked people what they would do if they found out their child was a homo sapiens. Quite a few of them said something like they would disown them, kick them out. Very stupid on two levels. First to not know the difference between homo sapiens and homosexual. Second to disown your child for being homosexual.

That's just one example of his sophistry. Presumably he is not stupid, he just thinks his readers are. There is already another example. Still on the issue of brain size, he talks about "split brain" patients who have had their corpus callosum severed to help control epilepsy. The corpus callosum is the bundle of nerve fibers that connect right and left brain hemispheres. So he says see, the right hemisphere is turned off, the person functions just the same with half the brain size, so size has nothing to do with it. Wrong on so many levels.

Gazzaniga must be a very left brain thinker. He maligns and under estimates right brain: "The left hemisphere is the smart half of the brain. It speaks, thinks, and generates hypotheses. The right brain does not and is a poor symbolic cousin to the left." Can he recognize people's faces? Can he appreciate music, art, poetry? Can he understand connotations and emotional meanings of speech? Interpret body language? Understand things in a Gestalt big picture way? Control the left side of his body? All that and more is thanks to right brain. And because the c.c. is cut doesn't mean the right hemisphere died. It doesn't even mean all communication between the hemispheres is gone. Both the right and left cerebral cortex have lots of connections to the deep brain structures, thalamus, hypothalamus and many others. So the hemispheres are connected indirectly through the deep brain. And the disconnected right brain is not dead; it is just as active as before. And split brain patients are not cognitively just the same. I could spell all that out and add evidence. But probably no one but me will ever see this, so I won't.

All of this is in just the first 20 pages! And again, he really knows better. He is a neuropsychologist who studies split brain patients. So is he just so concerned about dumbing this down for the average reader and making it engaging to read that he doesn't worry if that makes it misleading? (Do those average readers really read books on neuropsychology, even dumbed down ones? And anyway remember we are smarter than Neanderthals, shouldn't have to dumb it down so much.). Or is he just so invested in proselytizing for his uniqueness thesis that he doesn't mind misleading people to convince them? ...more "

Mar 01, 2022 11:37AM · see review

Rainbowgardener’s Quotes

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

tags: books, humor, reading

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