As an introverted, passive observer of society, I pay a lot of attention to the mechanisms of peer pressure to conform. It’s a good thing for the most part – social pressure keeps society in proper working order by subtly, or not so subtly, forcing individuals to behave in ways that are for the good of everyone by imposing sanctions onto those who fail to act favourably. But, there are many instances where social pressure is put on people to conform in ways that are actually quite useless, outdated or even harmful, because that’s just the way it has always been done.

For example, my older sister is a lawyer and we live in the Caribbean. The social convention of the legal profession here dictates that she wears black or a similarly dark colour of jacketed suit to work in day-time temperatures upwards of 30 degrees Celsius. Any rationally thinking person independent of the social pressure would come to the realization that this is actually the height of nonsense – such a mode of dress in this environment might actually impede optimal performance of lawyers on the job. My sister, however, can’t just decide to wear a sundress to court one day – she has to conform or face the social consequence of not being able to hold a job.

Another example of social pressure to act in ways that do more harm than good, and one that prompted me to write this post, is that of the immense pressure to believe in things I honestly don’t believe in. The other day a guy friend of mine I’d met in one of my classes at university last semester – a rather handsome fellow too I might add – told me that he approached me because he found me attractive but after getting to know me he realized that he couldn’t date me because I’m not Christian. This isn’t the first time something like this had happened – I was once in love with a guy when I was 18 who, though he isn’t a stringent adherent to his religion, chose to cut romantic ties with me for being “anti-religion”, after I once expressed that I passionately thought religion was harmful.  Another close friend of mine also tells me that I’m undateable because I’m non-religious. It has become a common theme as an agnostic living in a religious black society (blacks are statistically more religious than whites) that exercising an independence of thought on the topic of religion is almost tantamount to social suicide.

There is a self-perpetuating mechanism built into most religious belief that seeks to pressure non-believers into believing, or at least professing to believe, by painting non-belief as inherently “bad” and grounds for eternal torture. Any rational person who really thinks about it, though, would realize that holding a non-conforming opinion on the topic of religion is no different from holding a non-conforming opinion on the issue of the usefulness of Facebook.  A non-conforming belief or opinion does nothing to harm anyone -  in fact, a society where people are free to think critically, independently and outside of the box only adds to its value. This social pressure to have everyone conform to believing similarly, to my mind, is another instance where it’s done just because everyone has always been told to do it where religion is concerned. Not only is this not healthy for the religion itself as it probably succeeds in pressuring people who don’t really believe to say they do to keep up appearances (or in the case of centuries gone by – to avoid getting executed for heresy), but it also isn’t healthy for the progression toward intellectual truth when criticism or a mere dissenting idea is socially frowned upon and discouraged (…ask Galileo).

Unlike my sister who doesn’t think having the freedom to wear a sundress to work is worth being jobless, I do happen to think that exercising my right to freedom of thought  is worth being perpetually single, and I continue to be skeptical of any romantic prospect, institution, religion, government or worldview that doesn’t respect that right for all.

In the words of Jay-Z … on to the next one:

*hops off soapbox and goes on merry way*

I find it easy to relate to guys on a platonic level – easier than relating to other women to be perfectly honest – but when it comes to relating to men on a more than platonic level I haven’t much of a clue. It’s one of the areas of human interaction that I have the most difficulty figuring out because there are not many set social rules and etiquette that parents spend a lot of time teaching you about (well, at least not my parents), it’s mostly about nuances and subjective meanings that you have to figure out on your own for the specific period of time that you happen to be a teenager or beginner adult.

While I’m admittedly a beginner adult who is damn near clueless about most of it, there are some things I’ve figured out that I like, and things I realized I don’t like about what some men do. Here is a list of a few of them:

Don’t shout at us. Please. – Ok, yea this might seem obvious to some but there have been a few times where I’ve had a guy shout something at me from across the street about something or the other, and I wonder if he expects me to shout back at him and carry on a conversation in this way. I blame it on the exhibitionist nature of communication on sites like Facebook (I blame everything on Facebook. When nuclear Armageddon occurs I will be blaming that on Facebook too). For some people it has become normal to let the whole world in on your supposedly one-on-one conversations, and it has carried over into the “real world”. This is not cool. For me, if I don’t know you and you are too lazy to make the effort to cross the street and say something to me politely to my face then I’m too lazy to respond to you.

Speaking of Facebook (last one, I promise)… don’t ask to look a woman up on Facebook – Another pet peeve of mine is a guy who, in lieu of getting to know me the old fashioned way by getting my number and actually talking to me one-on-one, would like to be directed to a Facebook page where, without much effort at earning divulgence of this information, is readily able to browse what school I went to, my friends, pictures of me, etc. Noooo. I believe that relationships which take the most time and effort to establish and maintain are the most valuable and enduring. If you have a situation where getting to know someone is just a click away, then that person is just as valuable (read: dispensable) as all the other hundreds of people you look up in that way. If I’m such a person to you, I’d rather save you the effort of that click in the first place.

Beautiful vs Sexy – As far as I know, everyone likes to receive compliments, but some compliments are more likable than others. “I hope you don’t mind me saying but I think you look beautiful today”, 9.9 times out of 10, is more appreciated than “dammmn, the way that skirt is hugging your ass is hella sexy yo”. ‘Nuff said.

Be nice to women/girls you aren’t trying to have sex with - Seriously, there are few things more attractive than a grown man who is playfully swinging a giggling little girl by the arms, cheerfully helping an old lady with groceries or just giving up his seat on the bus to a woman without any expectation of anything in return beyond gratitude, because it’s the nice thing to do. I can’t emphasize this point enough. Why does chivalry have to die? Do people consider it corny in this day and age? Guys, it’s cheaper than trying to impress women at the club and ten times more effective.

Leave us alone – Like any other human being, sometimes a woman just wants to be allowed to go about her business without being bothered.  Maybe her pet just died and she’s in a sour mood – having various random men flirting and/or ordering her to suggesting she smile for their viewing pleasure is just going to piss her off.  Body language and non-verbal communication play a major role in being able to tell when this is the case. If you need help deciphering such things here are a few tips:

• If she is not making eye contact with you as she passes by – leave her alone
• If she is dressed as self-effacingly as possible in baggy jeans and T-shirt, chances are she isn’t trying to attract your attention – leave her alone
• If she’s walking at a brisk pace, she’s probably in a hurry – leave her alone
• If she looks at you, smiles and says “hi” – feel free to not leave her alone

Just thought I’d put this out into the universe and hopefully start a gender relations revolution… or not.

Introversion is given a bad rap in society. You will often hear the cliche uttered by some clueless extrovert “it’s always the quiet ones…” preceding some stereotype about an alleged propensity to “snap” or of being particularly uninhibited in the bedroom. It is usually assumed that an introvert is simply an extrovert who is repressed and has to eventually “let it out” at some point. Not true.

Extroverts are energized by social interaction. They are likely to feel the need to check their Facebook status whenever they are near an internet connection, go clubbing every weekend, be constantly making new friends or find it damn near impossible to be alone, without at least their cell phone, for any prolonged period of time. They prefer to be around people, or at least be connected with people in some way technologically, because that’s what stimulates them. Of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that if that’s what floats your boat.

An introvert, however, is someone who has a preference toward spending their time inside their own mind daydreaming, reading, exploring/experiencing nature alone, or mentally processing issues/ events etc. We feel mentally drained when there is a whole bunch of social dilly-dallying about because it takes time away from more interesting things like… pondering the meaning of life. If they’re like me they have to be practically dragged, kicking and screaming, to parties, they think telephones should be banned from the face of the earth and texting/internet chatting should take it’s place like the 21st century planet it purports to be, and they can only handle about 4 or 5 close friendships because the more of them there are the more often we’re socially obligated to go out and do stuff… with people…

Things to know about your introvert:

1. We’re not necessarily shy. Wanting to be alone with our thoughts is usually a choice, not a manifestation of a psychological handicap. Stop telling us to come out of our “shell” if we happen to like it. How about you just come in and visit with us in there.

2. We don’t dislike people. People are great. We’re a people too. Our best friends are people! So no, we’re not arrogant, stand-offish so-and-soes who will give you the evil eye if you say hi. We may ponder your life story down to the probable age you stopped wetting your bed, but most of us will be outwardly polite about it.

3. We’re generally deep people with deep thoughts about deep issues. You’re welcome to share in that, or hush and leave us to it. No chit-chatting about the freakin’ weather or whatever else you feel the need to say purely for the sake of saying something. Feel free to discuss things like what makes you happy, puzzling or amusing aspects of human nature, what you’re hoping to achieve in life or just in that moment.  Psychological/philosophical stuff like that scores you major cool points with us.

4. Personally I’ve found that the number of people present is inversely correlational to the amount of time I can tolerate interacting with them. A rough outline is as follows:

• 1 person (myself) – I can spend all day with her

• 2 people – Maybe most of the day if I really like you. (need bathroom breaks)

• 3-6 people – a few hours, but leave me alone tomorrow.

• 7-12 people – maybe 45 minutes of hanging out before I remember I have to, um … study… or something…

• 12+ people – (uh… there better be an actual point to it besides just enjoying each other’s riveting company … otherwise I think I have to wash my hair that day… )

5. No one is 100% one way or the other 100% of the time. On the extremely rare occasion your introvert wants to accompany you to a club or party, just oblige her without the dramatic inquiries into her health.

Now that you know your introvert you can now both work together toward a peaceful co-existence. You’re welcome.

Now, this gained internet fame on it’s own because Antoine has a certain charisma and way with words that many people, including myself, instantly fell in love with. Others were embarrassed by this interview because apparently, there is some credible danger of his flamboyantly gay persona becoming a “negative” representation of the entire black community of the United States. I mean, really? But I digress…

Now, a channel on youtube run by “The Gregory Brothers”, which is known for autotuning various news events and personalities into catchy little ditties, got a hold of that news clip, autotuned Antoine’s voice, added backing choir vocals and music, and masterfully created an addictive full length R&B/hip hop song worthy of radio airplay. So good is the song, that after numerous pleas from commenters to have the song available on itunes, they did, and the song as of writing this blog, reached number 3 on the itunes R&B chart. Listen to the hilarious song below.

While this has done well to highlight the phenomenal talent of the Gregory Brothers as music producers, it also underscores what has become a known fact about the modern day music industry. One doesn’t necessarily have to have a modicum of talent as a singer… to be a singer. You can literally just recite words into a microphone in the studio in a normal speaking voice and have it autotuned into music using some typical computer software. I can’t help but think that if some of today’s hottest acts, like Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Kesha, Rihanna and T-Pain (is T-Pain still hot?) who are guilty of repeatedly and blatantly using the device in their pop music, heard this they would be hanging their heads in shame at being exposed like this. But then again, like Antoine Dodson is probably doing right now, they are also counting their millions at the expense of those of us who buy into it.

Social commentary aside, it’s a kick-ass song and an awesome rags-to-riches tale for the Dodsons. Now crank up your speakers and let’s all blast “The Bed Intruder Song” for the rest of the summer!!

In recent weeks there has been a lot in the news about Facebook and an ensuing backlash against it’s unceremonious backpedal on it’s initial privacy policies.

Me, I don’t have a Facebook account. I haven’t had one for months now because it occurred to me a while back that the site is more annoying that it is useful for the following reasons.

• As an 18, 19 and 20 year old, I thought I had passed the age where throwing virtual sheep, gifting virtual drinks, fertilizing virtual farms and finding out which superhero I am, would be my idea of fun. And these are just a few of over a hundred similar apps and requests that inundated my newsfeed. Constantly.

• I am admittedly not exactly much of a social person, and the fact that there was this constant feed of information about several people I barely know beyond the fact that I may have possibly went to the same school as them at some point in my life, felt unnecessary to me. Likewise, they didn’t need to know the details of my life either.

• The friendships I had with the people I did care about felt decidedly less intimate when I had to be learning about what’s going on in their life by way of a status update or photos directed at me and 500 of his/her other closest “friends” rather than a one on one conversation.

These were the main reasons I decided in January to commit Facebook suicide. But I was just one odd girl who isn’t exactly much for being a part of crowds anyway. So if others found it useful, more power to ‘em, I hadn’t thought about it much since.

However, with recent developments, and the consequent inadequate (in my opinion) rationalizations by  die-hard pro-facebookers, my curiosity is peaked as to what exactly is the appeal of Facebook today.

It use to be that Facebook was attractive, especially as compared to Myspace, because people’s profiles (which is mandated to include your real name) were locked to everyone you didn’t first OK. It also used to be that people liked Facebook because it was a great and easy way to share your life with all your friends under the aforementioned climate of security. Easier than emailing, instant messaging or calling.

Now, things have changed.

These profiles are being opened up to the world, and you now have to be constantly on guard that Facebook hasn’t randomly decided to open up your information as a default setting of it’s various unannounced changes to, say, your employer, for example. Pro-Facebookers argue that you just have to keep on top of the privacy settings for each piece of information you impart (which to my mind makes things a lot less easy). And now that the security premise has been ripped from under the users’ feet, they say you just have to be very vigilant and discriminating with anything you share on the internet anyway.

So my question is, if the site is now a place where one guards what you say like you’re talking to the open Internet rather than just your friends, and it is now more complicated and less secure than email, doesn’t this defeat the intended purpose of Facebook in the first place? Could it be that Facebook has now outlived it’s usefulness but because of the powerful influence of peer pressure and group-think, and because some people are now psychologically dependent, even addicted, that they can’t see it?

Have you ever heard of the “Wow Signal”? If you haven’t I thought I’d blog about it because it is to my mind, one the most fascinating scientific events since the dawn of the Space Age. The Wow Signal refers to the very first and only unexplained radio signal picked up from beyond the Earth which might suggest the presence of a far off extraterrestrial intelligent civilization with radio technology.

On August 15, 1977 (the night before Elvis Presley died) at Ohio State University, during the course of a SETI space observation experiment being conducted using the Big Ear radio telescope, a very powerful radio signal was detected from the direction just east of the star constellation Sagittarius, 200 light years away.  So powerful and compelling was this signal that Dr. Jerry Ehman, the volunteer who had been monitoring the data at the time of its occurrence, expressed his astonishment by circling the relevant data and scribbling an exclamation which would later become the signal’s infamous moniker -  “wow!”. Ohio State researchers wondered if this could have been man’s first encounter with ET.

The signal bore all the characteristics that the scientists expected it to have for it to be of extraterrestrial origin. The Big Ear telescope was affixed in such a way that it remained stationary while it scanned the sky by way of the Earth’s rotation. In detecting an extraterrestrial shout-out, it was expected that it would take the telescope exactly 72 seconds to move through the beam of such a signal. It so happened that the Wow Signal lasted exactly 72 seconds. What disappoints scientists, however, is that a second telescope  next to the one which detected the signal, when it scanned the same area of the sky some 3 minutes later, did not pick up the signal again. In fact, that signal has never been detected again.

It is precisely because of its one-time occurrence that scientists are reluctant to make any untestable guesses about where this signal came from, but they have been able to rule out or assign low probabilities to other speculative origins such as aircraft, space craft, planets, ground-based transmissions, etc. According to Dr. Ehman:

Thus, since all of the possibilities of a terrestrial origin have been either ruled out or seem improbable, and since the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin has not been able to be ruled out, I must conclude that an ETI (ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) might have sent the signal that we received as the Wow! source. Of course, being a scientist, I await the reception of additional signals like the Wow! source that are able to be received and analyzed by many observatories. Thus, I must state that the origin of the Wow! signal is still an open question for me. There is simply too little data to draw many conclusions. In other words, as I stated above, I choose not to “draw vast conclusions from ‘half-vast’ data”.

Spooky, isn’t it?

*****

1. Have answers. Thinking, self-aware animals tend to have big questions of existence like:

Where did we come from?

What happens after we die?

Why Michael Jackson of all people?

By filling gaps in knowledge with stuff, albeit random made-up stuff you don’t actually know, you will be fulfilling a powerful human intellectual need. “I don’t know” is for wusses, don’t ever say that or they’ll just move on to the next guy who can give them something, anything. When in doubt make shit up.

*****

2. Eventually you will get the inevitable  “How do you know all of this?” question. This is where you perform the mother of all name-drops and tell them you are chummy with The Big All-Powerful G In The Sky and watch as the particularly gullible among the population drop to their knees and kiss your feet – awesomeness by association. You now have people at your command. Get them to go take a bath or something.

*****

3. There will however be many who further question you with “Yea right, why should I believe you?” You must try to win these people over. Bribe and threaten with stories of heaven and hell like the Russian mafia. You might even want to use emotional blackmail such as “He loves you, why don’t you love him?”. Anything goes, just get it done.

*****

4. For those who are still skeptical, tell them that you happen to have inside knowledge that The Big G wants them to trust you and everything you say, no matter how fantastical, without you actually having to prove it. Push this “faith” angle as much as possible.

*****

5. Then you’ll have the really difficult smart-asses who ask “If all this is true, you should be able to prove it… right?”. The minute they start demanding proof for your obviously unprovable stories you must go on the offensive. It use to be that you could have such people legally tortured and executed for this – dead men tell no tales and such -  but your religion will probably not have such measures at your disposal today (sorry).You must pre-emptively explain to your subjects that these hell-bound doubters lack the faith that they are enlightened with and must be pitied/scorned/ not listened to. Appeal to the human psychological need to belong to an in-group and ostracize “those outsiders” as lost, corrupt and dumb.

*****

Now the previous 5 steps sufficed millenia ago when the general public were uneducated desert dwellers who were just discovering the concept of “the wheel”. This approach is no longer going to get you very far in the Information age when education, science and the internet necessitates critical thinking among the masses. That’s where number 6 comes in…

*****

6. Do not under any circumstances wait until a kid is a 21 year old Biology major in college to first broach your religion’s theories on Creation and such… it’s not going to work. Make sure your doctrine calls for the application of steps 1-5 on  children when they are susceptible to believing in things like jolly fat guys in red suits climbing down chimneys to give them presents on Christmas Eve. Getting them at that age ensures that your indoctrination stays with them  in spite of the contradicting knowledge they will acquire later on in life which they will simply rationalize away in the name of faith.

Congratulations, you now have yourself a religion!

]]> http://thebooreport.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/afternoon-silliness/feed/ 8 TheBoo descartes CORRECTION AL QAIDA BIN LADEN word-up-to-the-peace-of-westphalia-while-we-at-it-569-1253034386-11 tumblr_kvag759XZe1qa3i8uo1_500 kanye-swift-apology http://thebooreport.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/extraterrestrial-life-in-our-solar-system-very-possible/ http://thebooreport.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/extraterrestrial-life-in-our-solar-system-very-possible/#comments Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:49:41 +0000 The Boo http://thebooreport.wordpress.com/?p=638 ]]>

I’ve found exciting news that is somewhat related to the my favourite area of recreational reading and research – space exploration.  Scientists are stunned by a recent discovery of life under a sheet of Antarctic ice hundreds of feet thick where no sunlight ever shines. Additionally, not only is there simple life such as microbes, there are actually complex organisms such as shrimp-like creatures and jelly fish happily swimming around under there.

How is this related to space exploration you ask?

This is an extremely important development because it demonstrates the fact that life is capable of thriving under certain extreme environments found elsewhere in our solar system, and by extension, the universe. On reading this article it immediately cast my mind back to my knowledge of a certain moon orbiting Jupiter where some scientists believe is the most likely destination for currently thriving extra-terrestrial life, Europa. Europa is covered in a very thick layer of ice, under which, scientists have reason to believe, exists an ocean of the most vital ingredient for life in the universe – liquid water.

Can you imagine the possibilities here? Hurry up and shoot a lander out there darn it!