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Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America: Free LibraryThing advance reviewer book! Ehrenreich is an entertaining writer with a provocative and fairly persuasive thesis set forth in the book: positive thinking is an individualizing, disempowering concept that leads people to ignore real challenges, for example breast cancer—she starts out with a harrowing look at the culture of pink in the context of her own diagnosis. She’s not always on target—spot the logical problem in the following two consecutive sentences: “To my knowledge, no one knows how antidepressant use affects people’s responses to happiness surveys: do respondents report being happy because the drugs make them feel happy or do they report being unhappy because they know they are dependent on drugs to make them feel that way? Without our heavy use of antidepressants, Americans would likely rank far lower in the happiness rankings than we currently do.”
She does then make the useful point that failure to anticipate 9/11 was not a failure of imagination, as some have stated, given the information available about planned attacks. “[T]here was plenty of imagination at work—imagining an invulnerable nation and an ever-booming economy—there was simply no ability or inclination to imagine the worst.” The positive thinking worldview also slots really well into blaming the victims of misfortune for whining and bringing negative happenings on themselves—there’s an appalling quote from Rhonda Byrne (The Secret) that tsunamis affect only people “on the same frequency as the event.” Positive thinking, by contrast, is supposed to bring us material rewards, regardless of their consequences for other people. And part of the positive thinking advice is to avoid news or other engagement with the problems of the world, and instead treat belief as reality, making unpleasant facts like Iraqi intransigiency or global warming into things that can be wished away. So we end up with politicians and businesspeople who are ruthless without being realistic.
Ehrenreich ends with a ringing endorsement of the scientific method. Science, she posits, is sociable: it’s based on the communicability of premises and replicability of results by other people. The alternative is that you alone validate reality, and that’s a trap. “Why spend so much time working on the self when there is so much real work to be done?”
David M.P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America: Over the course of the twentieth century, the federal government oversaw a massive intervention into the housing market that was deliberately structured, from the beginning, on the assumption that whites should be suburban homeowners and blacks should not be. This allowed whites, collectively, to build huge amounts of government-backed wealth and at the same time to tell themselves that their successes were the result of the free market, which naturally required the exclusion of blacks because blacks were, by definition, bad for property values, like other kinds of blight. By denying blacks credit and opportunity to purchase homes at the highly subsidized federal rates, and diverting resources from the cities to the suburbs, government policies worsened, solidified, and naturalized the economic and social disparities they purported only to acknowledge neutrally. At the same time, public housing was resource-starved and strangled, like low-income housing more generally, as unwarranted government intervention into the free market. Is anyone reminded of “get the government’s hands off my Medicare”? If you believe in the existence of white privilege, his restating of how it (1) existed and (2) was made to seem like the natural result of economic laws gets repetitive, but sometimes repetition is necessary, given the collective desire to forget.
Michael C. Donaldson, Clearance and Copyright: Everything You Need to Know for Film and Television: Written for the layperson, this book offers explanations and step by step guides, including model forms, for a producer trying to get a film made. I thought it was clear and helpful, though I disagreed with some of the things Donaldson said about trademark—he doesn’t seem to be aware that federal dilution law doesn’t apply to depictions of trademarks in a film, unless you’re using the mark as a trademark for the film itself—and he also usually errs on the side of caution, which is understandable but sad. He’s a big proponent of claiming fair use for documentaries though, which is great.
She does then make the useful point that failure to anticipate 9/11 was not a failure of imagination, as some have stated, given the information available about planned attacks. “[T]here was plenty of imagination at work—imagining an invulnerable nation and an ever-booming economy—there was simply no ability or inclination to imagine the worst.” The positive thinking worldview also slots really well into blaming the victims of misfortune for whining and bringing negative happenings on themselves—there’s an appalling quote from Rhonda Byrne (The Secret) that tsunamis affect only people “on the same frequency as the event.” Positive thinking, by contrast, is supposed to bring us material rewards, regardless of their consequences for other people. And part of the positive thinking advice is to avoid news or other engagement with the problems of the world, and instead treat belief as reality, making unpleasant facts like Iraqi intransigiency or global warming into things that can be wished away. So we end up with politicians and businesspeople who are ruthless without being realistic.
Ehrenreich ends with a ringing endorsement of the scientific method. Science, she posits, is sociable: it’s based on the communicability of premises and replicability of results by other people. The alternative is that you alone validate reality, and that’s a trap. “Why spend so much time working on the self when there is so much real work to be done?”
David M.P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America: Over the course of the twentieth century, the federal government oversaw a massive intervention into the housing market that was deliberately structured, from the beginning, on the assumption that whites should be suburban homeowners and blacks should not be. This allowed whites, collectively, to build huge amounts of government-backed wealth and at the same time to tell themselves that their successes were the result of the free market, which naturally required the exclusion of blacks because blacks were, by definition, bad for property values, like other kinds of blight. By denying blacks credit and opportunity to purchase homes at the highly subsidized federal rates, and diverting resources from the cities to the suburbs, government policies worsened, solidified, and naturalized the economic and social disparities they purported only to acknowledge neutrally. At the same time, public housing was resource-starved and strangled, like low-income housing more generally, as unwarranted government intervention into the free market. Is anyone reminded of “get the government’s hands off my Medicare”? If you believe in the existence of white privilege, his restating of how it (1) existed and (2) was made to seem like the natural result of economic laws gets repetitive, but sometimes repetition is necessary, given the collective desire to forget.
Michael C. Donaldson, Clearance and Copyright: Everything You Need to Know for Film and Television: Written for the layperson, this book offers explanations and step by step guides, including model forms, for a producer trying to get a film made. I thought it was clear and helpful, though I disagreed with some of the things Donaldson said about trademark—he doesn’t seem to be aware that federal dilution law doesn’t apply to depictions of trademarks in a film, unless you’re using the mark as a trademark for the film itself—and he also usually errs on the side of caution, which is understandable but sad. He’s a big proponent of claiming fair use for documentaries though, which is great.
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To use the time-honored analogy among the crazymeds community (I'm a proud prescription-carrying member) does a diabetic report herself as being healthy because of the insulin, or does she think of herself as unhealthy because she needs the insulin to live?
The diabetics I've known think of themselves as healthy or unhealthy to the degree that they have complications of diabetes and that the diabetes is controlled.