Rachel’s Musings

In order to do more dragon taming, I am reading Windy Dryden’s book How to Accept Yourself, which is based on Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT). He argues against self-esteem and suggests instead to work toward Unconditional Self-Acceptance (USA).

Dryden presents eleven principles of USA and suggests to copy those. So, I thought I’d share them. He gives more details on each principle in the book.

1. As a human being you cannot legitimately be given a single rating, but parts of you can be rated, as can what happens to you.
2. As a human being your essence is that you are fallible and unique.
3. You are equal to other humans in terms of shared humanity, but unequal in many specific respects.
4. When you accept yourself unconditionally, you think logically and avoid overgeneralization errors.
5. Unconditional self-acceptance is closely linked with a flexible, preferential philosophy.
6. When you accept yourself unconditionally, your emotions are healthy and your behavior is constructive.
7. If you still want to rate yourself, judge yourself against conditions that do not change in your lifetime. Thus, think of yourself as worthwhile because you are human, alive, unique, and constantly changing.
8. Unconditional self-acceptance promotes constructive action, not resignation.
9. You can learn to accept yourself unconditionally (but never perfectly, nor for all time).
10. Internalizing unconditional self-acceptance is difficult and involves hard work.
11. Internalizing unconditional self-acceptance requires force and energy.

To learn more about REBT, please check out my section in healing tools.

It depends. It depends on what’s going on in the black box also known as voting machine. And the problem isn’t just with the touch-tone screens. There are also issues with the grand counters - those machines that add up all the votes from memory cards from all precincts. Or at least that’s what they’re supposed to do.

I have heard about problems with voting machines before. Computer scientists, especially, are leery about them. I didn’t realize how extensive the problem really is. The HBO documentary Hacking Democracy shows, there are good reasons to distrust those machines. They are black boxes: Nobody except the manufacturers can look at the code - unless a grandmother stumbles on the code on a non-secured FTP site. Fortunately for us, that grandmother, Bev Harris, didn’t close her eyes and click somewhere else. She downloaded everything and got computer scientists to look at the code. Aside from using unsecured FTP sites, which in itself is a major security no-no that everybody who handles any kind of sensitive data knows about, the security experts uncovered major amateurish security flaws. Harris proceeded to create Black Box Voting to shed more light on irregularities and security flaws, hoping to get some answers for all of us.

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An interesting commentary at AlterNet made me realize how destructive the influence of the Religious Right really is (hereafter I call them the Wrong - they might be on the right-side of the political spectrum but they are dead wrong in their positions). The topics where their influence plays a role are ever expanding in my awareness. Here are some of them:

• Evolution: This is the most obvious one. Their attempts to derail science and teaching nonsense range from creationism, via creation “science,” to intelligent design.
• Global climate change: Here they try to cast doubt on the fact that we humans are influencing the weather patterns for the worse and are the major culprits behind climate change.
• Marriage: Not only are they opposing gay marriage but by imposing their standards of the heterosexual marriage as the only healthy family, they are attacking family diversity.
• Child rearing: Through ignoring research, they were able to perpetuate the myth that marriage is necessary for healthy child development.

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Ken over at Open Parachute wrote a very good post about the climate changes we are facing. His summary does an excellent job of countering the arguments of climate change deniers.

Of course I had to add my 3 cents mentioning a couple of articles from the current issue of Skeptic Magazine.

There are a couple of interesting articles in the Skeptic magazine. One of them is arguing that

The claim that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the current warming of Earth climate is scientifically insupportable because climate models are unreliable.

IF I understand the article correctly (and that is a big if - I got somewhat lost), the author claims because climate models don’t predict well (your point 4), humans are not causing climate change. Obviously, this would confuse prediction with explanation: Even though we might not predict future climate well, as the other article points out, the models of historical climate change are pretty darn good but only if they take human generated pollution into account, which echoes what you wrote again in point 4.

I’d love to see other people’s interpretation of these articles, especially the first one. I am still hoping that I misunderstood something… Somehow, an article by a climate change denier in a skeptical magazine doesn’t seem too appealing…

There is also an interesting older episode of Point of Inquiry with Bill Nye in which he takes issue with climate change deniers.

As the mother of a teenage boy, I was eager to read the article Lost Boys in the June 2008 edition of the Monitor. I was rather disappointed. The article ignores that despite the supposed educational gap, men still earn more than women. The last sentence even implies that the opposite is the case. The reasons given for losing boys are based on anecdotal evidence and do not reflect any changes in schools. Teachers have long been predominantly female, for example, so this cannot explain this trend. One of the suggested solutions sounds like the good-old-boys network resurrected, which is contrary to Dr. Kleinfeld’s claim that “we can design schooling where both boys and girls do well.” Nothing in the article presents even a hint of such designs.

The most disturbing comments came in the last two paragraphs, though. Starting with “helping boys succeed helps girls,” I excitedly expected to finally find out how schools can be designed to serve both boys and girls. But this is far from what Dr. Kleinfeld and the author of the article had in mind. No, these programs for boys help women find better partners! What a sexist and singlist statement! As if the only thing women are interested in is finding a partner, and a male one to boot. How about helping both girls and boys succeed in education without assuming that girls just get an education so that they can marry well or that boys should be better educated to make better partners?

(This is a copy of the letter to the Editor I sent to the Monitor on Psychology.)

The Pew Forum on Religion breaks out religious affiliation by marital status. According to their detail table, the highest percentage of never marrieds are amongst atheists (37%), almost twice the rate as in the total population (19%). This might be at least in part due to the younger age of atheists (37% are between 18 and 29 years old compared to 20% in the total population). 30% of secular unaffiliated/atheist/agnostic are never marrieds; 45% are currently married. 29% of this group is above 50 years old, so not all these singles are young adults.

I think the high presence of singles, especially never married people, underscores the need to discuss alternatives to marriage, as well as singlism, amongst secular humanists.