Gersande La Flèche wants to read Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
Sam Brower mentions this book and why Jon Krakauer wrote it in Prophet's Prey. The origin story is quite ironic.
🍵 Lots of nonfiction, literary fiction, poetry, classical literature, speculative fiction, magical realism, etc.
📖 Beaucoup de non-fiction, de fiction littéraire, de poésie, de classiques, de spéculatif, de réalisme magique, etc.
💬 they/them ; iel/lo 💌 Find me on Mastodon: silvan.cloud/@gersande
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Sam Brower mentions this book and why Jon Krakauer wrote it in Prophet's Prey. The origin story is quite ironic.
Content warning CW: Everything? Warren Jeffs and the FLDS is a brutal example of human cruelty
Easy read because it's clearly written, which is a relief because the subject matter can be really intense in a bad way. A page turner, too. I have a lot of thoughts about everything but it's quite jumbled.
What's wild to me about all of this is the era it was happening in. 2003-2004 was the era of Islamophobic panic across France and Canada and the USA, and then you have these intensely white supremacist bigots out in the desert enacting religious laws that are absolutely horrific and abusing children and men and women and doing a lot of human trafficking and slave labour of children but it's fine because it's (mostly) Christian. Right? UGH.
Arousal of the FEAR system eventually leads to excessive production of cortisol. Under optimal conditions, when an animal is afraid, the secretion of cortisol mobilizes glucose as an energy supply for the skeletal muscles in case the animal decides to flee. In this way, cortisol secretion is beneficial. However, excessive secretion can begin to damage the body if elevations are sustained for too long. Normally, when cortisol has circulated through the blood back up to the brain, the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) of the hypothalamus exerts an inhibitory effect that stops further release of cortisol. If, however, a person or animal is subjected to an excessive amount of stress — when they are chronically frightened or anxious — the PVN may not be able to stop the production of cortisol. (..). all visceral organs and many areas of the brain, as well as the immune system, can be adversely affected by a prolonged excess of cortisol.
— Archaeology of Mind by Jaak Panksepp, Lucy Biven (2%)
Basically how stress hijacks your bodymind. It sucks.
Even though work on kindred animals has been so crucial to the development of affective neuroscience, Jaak Panskepp started his work with an interest primarily in human emotions, especially their disturbances in clinical disorders. He soon realized that deep neuroscientific understanding could not be achieved without appropriate animal models. This position has changed somewhat with the emergence of modern brain imaging, but not much if one wants to really understand the evolved functional network of the brain. It is rather difficult to have intense emotions while lying still within brain scanners that make measurements that cannot tolerate movement. (..). The primary-process emotions are all connected to movements, and the evidence now indicates that raw emotional feelings arise from the same ancient brain networks that control our instinctual emotional life.
— Archaeology of Mind by Jaak Panksepp, Lucy Biven (2%)
I love the use of "kindred animals" — makes me think of Haraway's "companion species" and Zoe Todd's work on kinship with fishes.
Found out about Dr Panksepp through the work of Dr Grandin, discovered the 7 core emotion systems ...system, got excited, bought the book, here we are. I'm very excited about this not only because I'm fascinated by the similarities in cognitive processes and emotions of all mammals, but because it covers in a pretty rigorous way some stuff that gets talked about a lot of polyvagal theory that is often dealt with in a ... perhaps less rigorous way? (Depends on your framework and point of view, I guess.)
In any case, following this rabbit hole to see where it goes.
Content warning CW: Everything? Warren Jeffs and the FLDS is a brutal example of human cruelty
@pivic@bookwyrm.social I haven't because Canadian laws won't let me see it and also my ISP yelled at me for trying to torrent it lol
From this NYMag article on some of the best book out there on cults (written in 2018).
Whom do we touch when we touch a dog? How does this touch shape our multispecies world?
In 2006, about …
The categories for subjects are part of the problem. I have stressed kin making and family membership but rejected all the names ot human kin for these dogs, especially the name "children." I have stressed dogs as workers and commodities but rejected the analogies of wage labour, slavery, dependent ward, and nonliving property. I have insisted that dogs are made to be models and technologies, patients and reforms, consumers and breedwealth, but I am needy for ways to specify these matters in non-humanist terms which specific difference is at least as crucial as continuities and similarities across kinds.
— When Species Meet (Posthumanities) by Donna J. Haraway (Page 67)
Typing on phone, thus typos are self-inflicted. I still really love chapter 2, even if it still feels preliminary
The Companion Species Manifesto is about the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, …