psychology dector

Looking into the face of bigotry and misogyny Day three in a somber world.   Protesters fill the streets every evening now.   Mostly, the crowds chant and rage and cry in fear and trepidation, but in Portland, Oregon, the police are calling the situation “a riot,” which probably allows them to bring in more hardware of war to force citizens to accept the unacceptable.   The evening newscasters keep apologizing for the signs:   “Fuck Trump!” and “Trump’s Got a Little Dick.”   They warn parents to send their children into another room.   I don’t think the vulgar signs are the problem; it is the fear of “Trump = Hitler,” as another sign put it, that should worry us all and scare our children. Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada), as reported in Mother Jones , said that Trump is “a sexual predator who lost the popular vote.”   According to David Leonhardt of The New York Times, Clinton won the popular vote by a greater margin than Gore, Nixon and Kennedy in t...

“To philosophize is to learn how to die.” (Cicero) There are books we remember all our lives.   We remember where we first read them, the way they made us feel, the way the world seemed so fresh, so colorful, so new when we finished the last page.   We remember how we never wanted them to end. I had that experience reading Sarah Bakewell’s At The Existentialist Café:  Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails (Other Press, 2016).   I knew Bakewell was good— I reviewed her book on Montaigne a few years ago—but this is a masterwork of biography not just of a person, but people, places, a philosophy and a way of life.   In fact, early on, she calls Existentialism more a mood than a philosophy and traces its lineage back to Job and Ecclesiastes in the Bible, up through St. Augustine and Blaise Pascal, to Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus , Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.   The last seven names are the ...

Mosa--A Mojave Girl by Edward S. Curtis (1903) He gave everything to his art.   Over the course of his career, he compiled an amazing anthropological and photographic record of Native American cultures and people.   He did so as they, and the wild western United States and Canada they inhabited, disappeared into the dust of history.   I first encountered his work when I researched George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull for a recent book review. Princess Angeline by Edward S. Curtis (1899) Edward S. Curtis was born in Wisconsin in 1868 as America was starting its long climb back from the Civil War.   He dropped school at the end of sixth grade and built his first camera so he could apprentice with a number of artists in this emerging field.   His first American Indian photograph was of Princess Angeline, the daughter of Chief Sealth of Seattle.   The Pacific Northwest and Blackfoot country became his backdrop as he crisscrossed the territories photograp...