Healing Hurts, Trauma and Awareness of Time, 'On Bullshit,' Indonesian Teenagers Headbang in Hijabs - Dinner Table Digest № 57
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
I’ve been reading more articles lately, so I’m finding more worth sharing with my readers. This edition features a Globe and Mail op-ed about Canada’s approach to housing, a PsyPost article on the effects of trauma on the awareness of time and the ability to plan for the future, and a short reflection on the life of philosopher Harry Frankfurt, whose paper ‘On Bullshit’ has had a deep effect on many philosophers of language, myself included. There are two YouTube links in today’s Digest, one to a song by the artist BLÜ EYES about the pain of the healing process, and another featuring the hijab-wearing Indonesian teenage band Voice of Baceprot, who’s brand of progressive Islamic metal is being noticed the world over.
Sections:
Canada’s Approach to Housing is Bad for the Economy / BLÜ EYES / Trauma, Awareness of Time and Planning for the Future / ‘On Bullshit’ / Indonesian Islamic Metal: Voice of Baceprot
Canada’s Approach to Housing is Bad for the Economy - John Rapley - The Globe and Mail
Did you know that in Germany, far more people rent their housing than own - or should I say, make payments to the bank for the right to live in a particular home.
Home ownership itself can slow the economy. Efficiency depends on matching skills to jobs, which requires factor mobility. If you lose your job or if you just have better opportunities elsewhere in the country, it’s much easier to pack up and leave if all you need to do is end a tenancy. Homeowners, for obvious reasons, tend to hang on and make do with jobs where their skills may not be most useful. And as property values rise, all workers become less mobile, owing to the sheer cost of moving. Germany, another country with comparatively good labour productivity, enjoys the edge it does largely because it remains to a large extent a society of renters.
Real estate evangelists will quickly ask: If renting is so great, why are so many Canadians so keen to get on the property ladder? The answer may be that Canadian laws tend to favour owners over tenants. In Germany, where tenants enjoy far more rights, investing in rental properties tends to get taken on only by those looking for a stable income stream. Preserving rather than growing wealth, it produces a model in which renting remains an attractive, even lifelong option.
BLÜ EYES - healing hurts
This song just is my life. I’m glad that BLÜ EYES wrote it.
I expected / For a few weeks / I might not feel quite like myself / I expected / Someone to tell me / Some explanation for what I felt / But now it’s been more than a year / and I still don’t have any clear cut answers / And askin just feels like slippin backwards
Yeah healing fucking hurts sometimes / I wish I would’ve known / I probably should’ve closed my eyes / Waited till it was all over / Yeah it gets better till it just gets worse / A full time job isn’t this much work / I’ll know that I’ll survive but / healing fucking hurts sometimes
Trauma-induced temporal disintegration plays a role in shaping how people anticipate the future - Eric W. Dolan - PsyPost
When I was in the ICU, on either side of my surgeries, my sense of time broke down on me. I had no idea how many days I'd been in the hospital, let alone in the ICU. Moreover, many of the nightmare episodes I experienced in the ICU seemed, in some cases to drag on forever - indeed, that was part of what made them nightmares.
When I think enjoy my fears today, I don't really feel like I fear death anymore. I'm okay with dying. But being in the painful, drugged-up, nightmarish hell that was the ICU? I could do with never experiencing that again. Ever.
During and immediately after a traumatic event, individuals may perceive time as slowing down or stopping, focusing only on the present moment with little awareness of the past and future. This distortion of time, called temporal disintegration, can isolate people in a stressful moment and disrupt the linear flow of time that weaves our life story together, affecting personal identity.
Temporal disintegration has been linked to long-term psychological adjustment following exposure to disasters. It can make individuals fixated on past negative events, leading to diminished well-being and increased distress over time. However, there is a lack of information about how trauma-related distortions in perceived time may be associated with our perceptions of the future, creating a gap in understanding the lasting impacts of temporal disintegration.
Philosopher Harry Frankfurt Passes Away at 94 - New York Times
Frankfurt's paper “On Bullshit” may have been a personal throwaway - his primary work on volition is also very interesting - but it revolutionized debates in the philosophy of language. My own interest in the philosophy of language, which centres around how politicians/propagandists - particularly fascists and Christian Nationalists - use words to persuade and overcome the everyday person's rational defenses and gain followers, finds much of its genesis in "On Bullshit."
Oh, and in a display of my strange sense if humour, On Bullshit has, for years, been one of my preferred bathroom readers. I figured it appropriate, eh?
Professor Frankfurt’s major contribution to philosophy was a series of thematically interrelated papers, written from the 1960s through the 2000s, in which he situated the will — people’s motivating wants and desires — at the center of a unified vision of freedom, moral responsibility, personal identity and the sources of life’s meaning. For Professor Frankfurt, volition, more than reason or morality, was the defining aspect of the human condition.
Despite the ambition and inventiveness of this project — the philosopher Michael Bratman praised it as “powerful and exciting philosophy” of great “depth and fecundity” — Professor Frankfurt became best known for a single, irreverent paper largely unrelated to his life’s main work.
The paper, written in the mid-1980s under the same title as his eventual book, discussed what to his mind was a pervasive but underanalyzed feature of our culture: a form of dishonesty akin to lying but even less considerate of reality. Whereas the liar is at least mindful of the truth (if only to avoid it), the “bullshitter,” Professor Frankfurt wrote, is distinguished by his complete indifference to how things are.
Whether its purveyor is an advertiser, a political spin doctor or a cocktail-party blowhard, he argued, this form of dishonesty is rooted in a desire to make an impression on the listener, with no real interest in the underlying facts. “By virtue of this,” Professor Frankfurt concluded, “bullshit is the greater enemy of truth than lies are.”
Indonesian Muslim Metalheads: Voice of Baceprot - The Guardian
I have been a fan of these young women for a few years now. Still teenagers, Voice of Baceprot’s no-holds-barred approach to thrash metal isn’t afraid to call out oppression against women in Muslim societies while proudly sporting hijab as they play.
When the members of all-female Indonesian metal trio Voice of Baceprot finished middle school in their teens, they were at a crossroads. Their parents wanted them to fall in line: the pressure was on to enter an arranged marriage and live traditional lives. “It was really hard to just say no to our parents when they told us to get married,” the band’s singer/guitarist Marsya (full name Firda Marsya Kurnia) remembers today. “But we are happy because of music. It lets us be the real versions of ourselves. Heavy metal gave us the courage to say: ‘No! I will play metal until I can’t any more!’”
Almost a decade later, that’s become the greatest decision of their lives: Voice of Baceprot (pronounced “bah-che-prot”) are one of metal’s biggest buzz bands. Although their debut album Retas doesn’t drop until July, they’ve already accrued viral fame, performances on national TV and slots at major metal festivals since forming as schoolgirls in 2014. Singles like God Allow Me (Please) to Play Music indulge 90s alt-metal nostalgia with their sturdy riffing and obviously Rage Against the Machine-inspired funk bass; Marsya’s lyrics about feminism, sexual assault and climate change give the songs an acute social conscience. Their success has won their parents over, and RATM guitarist Tom Morello is an outspoken fan, as he once told the band on a Zoom call. “He was great!” Marsya beams. “He was very, very humble and we talked like we were friends.”
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