Apologies for the side jaunt thru my own thoughts, but that word, 'necessarily' is the one that I'm chewing on a bit. I've restarted my martial arts, and the biggest problem I'm having is to reacquire the requisite 'softness' that I need. While I don't want to engage in Orientalism or start spouting Zen koans, I'd argue that softness and hardness have to be combined to create strength and there is a tendency in the West to assume that soft=weak. Even with something that would appear to be simply applying force, like weight lifting, flexibility (something I'm sorely lacking at the moment) and pacing are essential to producing the best result.
You can see that in the current administration, where the whole idea of soft power is considered an oxymoron, so much so that they have gone to eliminate any agency that might engage in it.
1 week ago
I might be misunderstanding, but I kind of feel that the strength and excellence of _all_ people should necessarily be grounded in their caring and empathy and the challenge is to extend that to men rather than giving women an 'out' for not exhibiting those traits.
While I understand that we have to think about neurodiversity and understand that people have different brain chemistries and such, I feel like I'm dealing with some people who put out a self diagnosis as an excuse for not being empathetic. I find this happening with a few Westerners that I interact with here in Japan, so I don't know if they are picking up signals here of a system that is being imperfectly adopted here, or if this represents something in the system.
I realize that this creates the classical double bind that women and minorities always have to deal with, but I don't think the solution is to have people in those categories behave without caring and empathy, but to make sure that caring and empathy be something that is more or less required of all people.
2 weeks ago
A few more thoughts, with pro bono's link, it certainly pushes it over to sexism, had it only been the reposted message by Wang, I might have hesitated, but reading his wikipedia page, he seems like a real jerk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Lebrecht
(don't know why my wikipedia always has each reference on a different line)
Mentioned in the wikipedia page, but worth a read on its own is Hurwitz's piece about him.
https://www.classicstoday.com/journalist-norman-lebrecht-dead-at-61/
Ouch!
2 weeks ago
Interesting pro bono. It looks like it was before the email tantrum and none of the pages I saw mentioned it. Makes it look even more egregious.
Apologies for the side jaunt thru my own thoughts, but that word, 'necessarily' is the one that I'm chewing on a bit. I've restarted my martial arts, and the biggest problem I'm having is to reacquire the requisite 'softness' that I need. While I don't want to engage in Orientalism or start spouting Zen koans, I'd argue that softness and hardness have to be combined to create strength and there is a tendency in the West to assume that soft=weak. Even with something that would appear to be simply applying force, like weight lifting, flexibility (something I'm sorely lacking at the moment) and pacing are essential to producing the best result.
You can see that in the current administration, where the whole idea of soft power is considered an oxymoron, so much so that they have gone to eliminate any agency that might engage in it.
I might be misunderstanding, but I kind of feel that the strength and excellence of _all_ people should necessarily be grounded in their caring and empathy and the challenge is to extend that to men rather than giving women an 'out' for not exhibiting those traits.
While I understand that we have to think about neurodiversity and understand that people have different brain chemistries and such, I feel like I'm dealing with some people who put out a self diagnosis as an excuse for not being empathetic. I find this happening with a few Westerners that I interact with here in Japan, so I don't know if they are picking up signals here of a system that is being imperfectly adopted here, or if this represents something in the system.
I realize that this creates the classical double bind that women and minorities always have to deal with, but I don't think the solution is to have people in those categories behave without caring and empathy, but to make sure that caring and empathy be something that is more or less required of all people.
A few more thoughts, with pro bono's link, it certainly pushes it over to sexism, had it only been the reposted message by Wang, I might have hesitated, but reading his wikipedia page, he seems like a real jerk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Lebrecht
(don't know why my wikipedia always has each reference on a different line)
Mentioned in the wikipedia page, but worth a read on its own is Hurwitz's piece about him.
https://www.classicstoday.com/journalist-norman-lebrecht-dead-at-61/
Ouch!
Interesting pro bono. It looks like it was before the email tantrum and none of the pages I saw mentioned it. Makes it look even more egregious.