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LA LEGGERA INSICUREZZA DELL'ESSERE.
Con vanità si intende la caratteristica dell'essere vano o dell'avere una assurda quantità di orgoglio per il proprio aspetto fisico. Essere eccessivamente vanitosi significa trascorrere lunghe ore davanti alla toeletta a truccarsi o depilarsi i peli del naso; in effetti, se cerchi di avere sempre un aspetto impeccabile e ti rifiuti di fare qualsiasi lavoro che possa sporcarti i vestiti o rovinarti i capelli, qualcuno potrebbe accusarti di esserlo.
CANON EOS 600D con ob. SIGMA 70-300 f./4-5,6 DG
The woman in the foreground I had seen twice , both times dressed in the most confronting manner . On both occasions she approached from behind me , so I haven't seen her face just her rear .. I was taking a few street shots then all of a sudden she walks past and she's gone ..
Surfers Paradise
Gold Coast . Qld.
Fonte dell'immagine: La Chiesa di Dio Onnipotente
Condizioni d'Uso: it.godfootsteps.org/disclaimer.html
I
Se è una questione di come cerchi Dio o come tratti Dio, è il tuo atteggiamento che importa di più. Dio non Si può trascurare o scordare in fondo alla mente. Piuttosto, Dio è vivo e sempre presente, devi tenerlo a mente. Lui non sta su nel terzo cielo, con nulla da fare. È sempre lì che guarda, e vede ciò che ognuno fa, Lui vede di tutti il cuore, ogni parola, ogni azione e come fan la loro parte e trattan Dio. Che tu scelga o no di dare te stesso a Dio, i tuoi pensieri e azioni Gli sono noti. Dio è giusto verso tutti. La conquista e salvezza dell'uomo sono qualcosa che importa per Lui. Prende tutti seriamente, non come animali con cui divertirsi.
II
L'amore di Dio non è del tipo che vizia. La Sua pietà non è indulgente, lo vedrai. Lui apprezza e rispetta ogni vita. La Sua pietà e tolleranza portano speranza e sono ciò di cui l'uomo ha bisogno per vivere. Dio è vivo, Dio esiste davvero. Il Suo comportamento verso l'uomo è di principio. È flessibile se l'uomo cambia. Il Suo cuore muta a seconda del tempo, delle circostanze e atteggiamento di ognuno. Dio è giusto verso tutti. La conquista e salvezza dell'uomo son qualcosa che importa per Lui. Prende tutti seriamente, non come animali con cui divertirsi.
III
Ascolta, non essere il bimbo che Dio stringe teneramente. Se credi Lui straveda per te, come non potesse abbandonarti, e il Suo atteggiamento verso te non cambierà, allora dovresti smetter di sognare e subito. Ti dovrebbe esser più che chiaro che l'essenza di Dio non cambierà. Ma la Sua indole viene fuori in tempi diversi e diversi contesti. Piuttosto, Dio è vivo e sempre presente, devi tenerlo a mente. Attraverso i tuoi comportamenti e atteggiamenti verso Dio, la Sua opinione e atteggiamento con te si adatta sempre. Dio è giusto verso tutti. La conquista e salvezza dell'uomo sono qualcosa che importa per Lui. Prende tutti seriamente, non come animali con cui divertirsi.
da "La Parola appare nella carne"
two weeks ago I was confronted with my data in a hard way. My large storage device “Drobo” refused to operate after I upgraded it with another 2TB drive. The drive became unresponsive and after a while it did came back giving me the opportunity to retrieve some data…since this was my largest storage device I had to make sacrifices to the data I could retrieve, so I had to delete all my movies, series and software I had collected over the years. Luckily I did manage to backup my photography work.
That same week my laptop died and it has been sent back to Apple for repairs.
Fortunatly I do hold regular backup sessions, but it’s still a hassle and I’m once again aware that all data is fleeting, and no storage medium is safe from harm. Photo’s can burn, disk drives will fail…it’s time holographic data crystals are made…at least they seem stable enough….
Nel 2020 ricorrera' l'anniversario dei 100 anni, dalla nascita, del Maestro Federico Fellini. In sua memoria, ho postato questa foto, in cui l'autore del murale, ha miniato il ritratto del Maestro e del suo attore preferito, Marcello Mastroianni.
"Everyone needs community, Rose. Especially those who claim they do not."
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In only the second comic book he's written in over a decade, veteran writer Christopher Priest creatively deconstructs and humanizes the story of Deathstroke by confronting the mercenary's addiction to violence with his need for emotional intimacy. Known as the Terminator to all but Slade Wilson to the select few, Deathstroke turns out to be far more complex character than he's ever been written as before, thanks to an intentional focus on his failure to maintain healthy relationships with his family members and loved ones. Political subterfuge and old school badassery undercut this central theme, while a vibrant cast of supporting and guest characters provide a believable human context in which Deathstroke can inevitably wreak psychological and physical havoc. Add in the fact that the artwork is consistently excellent, and there's no question that Christopher Priest's Deathstroke is decidedly one of the best titles DC has put out in years.
The only reason I ever took a look at this run was because it was constantly being recommended on Reddit. And I'm so happy that I did - just behind Superman, Deathstroke is my favorite Rebirth title. As a comic book character, Deathstroke is so mythically badass. He has an eyepatch, Minnesota high school hockey hair, and one of the most aesthetically pleasing costumes ever created. But despite these characteristics, he's never been written as a particularly deep character; he barely got any solo attention before the Flashpoint, and in the early New 52, Deathstroke was nothing but a musclebound, Liefeld-esque bruiser. But with a writing veteran such as Priest at the reins, Deathstroke has finally received the nuanced characterization and solo attention that he's deserved since his creation. If you haven't read this yet, you NEED to!
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This shot features main and supporting characters in the run, along with several guest stars that only appeared in single issues (Clock King, Superman, Batman & Robin, The Creeper). For those who haven't read any Deathstroke yet, here are a few quick summaries of characters that might not be immediately recognizable. Fig formulas are at the very bottom!
Joseph Wilson: Deathstroke's younger son, depicted in the final version of the Ikon Suit, created by David Isherwood. Joseph is more popularly known as Jericho in traditional DC continuity.
Clock King: Appeared in DEATHSTROKE #0s and #1 as a one-off villain. And yes, he appeared in classic Silver Age garb. :)
Adeline Kane: Deathstroke's ex-wife. Hates Slade for ruining their marriage and for indirectly causing the death of Grant and the mutilation of Joseph. Doesn't like Rose.
Ja Zaki: Real name Matthew Bland - an African dictator/supervillain who is a straight-up parody of Marvel's Black Panther. Is a recurring ally/rival to Slade throughout the run.
Grant Wilson: Deathstroke's older son, deceased from the combined effects of the H.I.V.E. super-serum and the stress from his long-ago battle with the Teen Titans. Slade's guilt over Grant's death principally drives the events of the Lazarus Contract.
Wintergreen: Slade’s oldest and (arguably) only real friend. I’ll save the details of his background for you to find out. :)
NOTABLE OMISSIONS:
Dr. Villain, David Isherwood, Power Girl, Roscoe, Raptor
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Fig formulas:
Deathstroke: greyed Luke Skywalker hair, Airen Cracken head, erased General Cryptor Ninjago armor, LBM Batman torso, Simpsons S2 Marge left arm, cut Scu-Batsuit utility belt
Rose Wilson: Storm hair, SW Rebels Sabine Wren head, Hobgoblin torso, dark azure arms, S4 Musketeer CMF legs
Joseph Wilson: Captain Marvel hair, White Tiger head, Cosmic Boy torso, Batgirl utility belt, First Order AT-DP pilot legs
William Randolph Wintergreen: Count Dooku hair, J. Jonah Jameson head, Superboy arms, S12 Gamer CMF hips, sand blue legs, walkie-talkie
Adeline Kane: Narcissa Malfoy hair, Padme Naberrie head, BvS Lois Lane base
Hosun: N52 Robin hair, Draco Malfoy head, reversed S14 Clumsy Guy cmf torso, S12 Gamer CMF arms, computer board
Red Lion: LBM Red Hood CMF head, Kraven collar, NK promo fig torso, Catman CMF utility belt, Wolverine claws
Superman (Rebirth): Superman base fig w/Senate Commando legs
Clock King: Clock round plate, reversed City Beachgoer torso, Ninjago Lloyd DX hips, dark azure arms and legs
Ravager (Grant Wilson): Damian Wayne hair, N52 Nightwing head, Ninjago Jay ZX armor, 2012 Hawkeye torso, dark blue arms w/red hands, Catman CMF utility belt BvS Superman legs w/red hips
The Creeper: LBM Joker hair, S16 Strongman head, LBM Red Hood CMF cape, S12 Lifeguard CMF torso, S3 Hula Dancer CMF legs
Batman (Rebirth): Buccaneer Batman cowl, N52 Batman torso, LBM Death Metal Batman CMF arms w/dark blue hands, Helicarrier Nick Fury legs, custom-cut Disney Maleficent CMF cape
Damian Wayne (Robin): Damian base figure with Shazam hair, S15 Grim Knight arms, green short legs
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Props to Multi_Sharp for requesting this shot a couple months back! He was the only one that did so, but it definitely gave me the push to greenlight this one. :)
Just getting back from vacation. Hope to catch up with everyone soon. Here is one shot from Amish country. There could very well be mutant Homer Simpson's in there. You never know, I didn't get a look inside.
Even the most mundane things confront you with the idiocy of the present .............................................
NON utilizzare questa foto senza il permesso dell'autore.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati.
DO NOT use this photo without permission from the photographer
All rights are reserved.
KOGA teLLs me it wasn't him at aLL...he couLdn't heLp himseLf, but he was not guiLty.Him over here rubbing on my leg as I take a picture of the crime scene.
Bloor and St. George Streets, Toronto
Minolta CLE
Ernst Leitz Summicron-C 40mm f/2.8
Fujifilm Neopan Acros 100 II, D76 1:1
Nikon Super Coolscan 8000ED scanner
Check out my Monochrome (B&W) and Street photography (B&W) albums.
► All my images are my own real photography, not fake AI fraudography.
► Toutes mes images sont ma propre vraie photographie, pas une fausse fraudographie basée sur l'IA.
■ Please don't use my images for any purpose, including on websites or blogs, without my explicit permission.
■ S.V.P ne pas utiliser cette photo sur un site web, blog ou tout autre média sans ma permission explicite.
© Tom Freda / All rights reserved - Tous droits réservés
Confronting a life long dislike and fear of the cold, I did a workshop in the #wimhoffmethod culminating in a two minute ice bath immersion. On entry I was the only one that swore up a storm but 24 hours later I am still buzzing with a happy, chilled vibe.
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Top life moment.
To confront a person with his Shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his Shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.
Words by Dr.C.Jung
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Confronto diretto a Napoli Centrale fra il Freccia Rossa 1000 n.14 ed il E626.428, in testa ad un treno storico.
A Southern Rockhopper Penguin (Eudyptes chrysocome chrysocome) confronts a Falkland Island Skua (Catharacta antarctica) near a penguin colony on the Falkland Islands.
Flickr Friday-Ont The Waterfront
Cliche Saturday
2013 A Year In Photos-179/365-7/13
We actually got some rain last night and there was a puddle big enough to float the rubber duckies on, so I thought I'd do that :) I love these rainstorms, they come so rarely!
Confrontation sous la tempête! ❄️
Ceux qui ont vu ma vidéo que j’ai publiée précédemment savent déjà à quel point cette confrontation était intense! Mais voici un autre angle de cette scène incroyable : une chouette lapone en plein vol, dans la tempête, qui semble foncer droit sur une proie… et pourtant, c’est une autre chouette qui l’attend au sol!
Un affrontement territorial juste devant moi, totalement imprévu. Je suis sorti ce jour-là sans attente, juste pour marcher et prospecter, et j’ai été témoin d’un spectacle que je vais me rappeler toute ma vie. Comme quoi, plus tu marches, plus tu te rapproches du succès!
Chouette lapone
Québec, Canada
Suretta Lisker
INTJ, 63, Professional Extrovert, ASD, ADHD MentorAuthor has 14.9K answers and 28M answer views9y
Originally Answered: Do you agree with the statement that "what you see in other people is a reflection of yourself"? Why and why not?
I was brought up with that adage, but it was not correctly explained to me.
I was told that, "What you see wrong with others, is wrong about yourself." That's not entirely true, and it created a great deal of distress, because I wondered how bad I was since I saw other people as bad.
What the statement really means, is that there is a reason you see or feel things in others. For instance, if you see someone as unsafe, it means you know the difference between safety and danger. <-- that's the reflection.
If you see someone as insincere, it means the reflection is that you can sense insincerity because you are, in fact, sincere.
Had I understood this growing up, I would not have developed the paranoia I have now. I thought that the reason I didn't trust people was because I was untrustworthy, not because I knew the difference between the truth and a lie.
Research indicates a person’s own behavior is the primary driver of how they treat others
Diana Yates, University of Illinois News Bureau
August 9, 2023
What is selfish behavior? Selfishness is defined as the tendency to act in one's own interests without regard for the impact on others. New research shows that a person’s own behavior is the primary driver of how they treat others during brief, zero-sum-game competitions.
Generous people tend to reward generous behavior and selfish individuals often punish generosity and reward selfishness – even when it costs them personally. The study found that an individual’s own generous or selfish deeds carry more weight than the attitudes and behaviors of others.
The findings are reported in the journal Cognitive Science.
Previous research into this arena of human behavior suggested that social norms are the primary factor guiding a person’s decision-making in competitive scenarios, said Paul Bogdan, a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the research in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology with U. of I. psychology professors Florin Dolcos and Sanda Dolcos.
“The prevailing view before this study was that individuals form expectations based on what they view as typical. If everyone around me is selfish, then I’m going to learn to accept selfishness and behave accordingly,” Bogdan said. “But we show that your judgments of other people’s behavior really depend on how you behave yourself.”
To test the factors that guide expectations and drive behavior, the researchers conducted a series of experiments involving the Ultimatum Game, which captures how an individual responds to offers from another player proposing to split a pot of money with them. The game requires the proposer to suggest how much each person receives of a $10 pot. The receiver must decide whether to agree to that split or reject it. If the offer is rejected, neither participant receives any money. Rejection can be seen as a form of punishment, even though it costs both players, the researchers said.
Some people tend to be generous – or at least fair – when offering another person a portion of a $10 reward. Others try to take as much of the money as they can, offering lopsided splits that benefit themselves at the expense of their competitors.
When on the receiving end of an offer, generous people tend to accept only generous offers, while selfish people are happy with selfish offers – even though the other player’s selfishness hurts them financially, the researchers found. Having the players switch between receiving and proposing offers allowed the team to explore the relationship between a player’s selfish or generous behavior and their evaluation of other players’ offers.
Further experiments showed that generous and selfish individuals tend to trust others who behave as they themselves do, regardless of the economic outcome.
Sanda Dolcos, Florin Dolcos, Paul Bodgan
In a new study, psychology professors Sanda Dolcos, left, and Florin Dolcos and PhD candidate Paul Bogdan, right, tracked how a person’s own behavior guides their expectations of others’ generosity or selfishness. Photo by L. Brian Stauffer
“Participants will gain more money with a generous person. But a selfish person will prefer to play with someone who behaves as they do,” Bogdan said. “People really like others who are similar to themselves – to a shocking degree.”
The team also evaluated data from a previous cross-cultural study that found that individuals sometimes punish others for their selfishness or for their generosity in a collaborative game involving resource sharing. They found that, when deciding whether and how much to punish others, participants were guided primarily by their own behavior and less by the pressure to conform. People who behaved generously tended to punish selfishness and people who put their own welfare first were much more likely to punish generosity – even in situations where one approach was more common than the other.
Cultural norms toward self-interest or generosity do influence people, as other studies have found, Florin Dolcos said. “But we are not only observers. This study is showing that we filter information about the world through our own view.”
Those individuals whose behavior switched from generous to selfish over time were more likely to punish generosity and reward selfishness – but only after their own behavior changed, the team found.
This helps explain the phenomenon of social alignment, for better and for worse, Florin Dolcos said.
“You may have groups of selfish people who are more accepting of other selfish people, and in order to be part of that group, newcomers might display the same behavior,” he said.
Ultimately, the study finds that a person’s own generous or selfish nature drives their behavior in many arenas of life, Sanda Dolcos said.
“This is not just about decision-making,” she said. “It has practical relevance to many types of social interactions and social evaluations.”
The paper “Social expectations are primarily rooted in reciprocity: An investigation of fairness, cooperation and trustworthiness” is available online. DOI: 10.1111/cogs.13326
las.illinois.edu/news/2023-08-09/study-finds-people-expec...
Kristin Dombek’s The Selfishness of Others begins by introducing three characters. There’s Allison, one of the stars of the MTV reality show My Super Sweet 16. (For her birthday parade, she had an entire block of Atlanta shut down, right in front of a hospital: “They can just go around,” she said.) Next is Tucker Max, the celebrity whose books and blog posts about “getting wasted and sportfucking” made him a hero among pickup artists and men’s rights activists. And then there’s Anders Breivik, who in 2011 killed eight people with a car bomb in Oslo, Norway. After that he proceeded to a summer camp, where he shot and killed 69 more. He would later claim that the massacres were a publicity stunt to promote his 1,500-page manifesto deriding women and Muslims, and featuring pictures of him smiling in Knights Templar costumes.
If Breivik seems like an outlier—if the comparison with two relatively harmless figures strikes you as inappropriate—this is intentional. The millennial girl, the bad boyfriend and the murderer: these examples show the range of our obsession with narcissism, a condition we hear more and more about these days. As I write this, half the country is still reeling from the election of a self-absorbed millionaire (or billionaire, if you believe his boasts) whom numerous psychologists have publicly diagnosed as a narcissist, while an online petition calling for the Republican Party to #DiagnoseTrump has been signed by more than thirty-four thousand people.
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Dombek begins her own discussion on more personal ground, in the depths of what she calls the “narcisphere.” This is her name for the metastasizing cluster of blogs, vlogs, quizzes and support communities where self-described victims gather to vent and to discuss the behaviors of their personal “narcs.” One website, the Web of Narcissism, quotes Dracula and employs gothic castle imagery; its members, who call themselves “keyboard faeries,” trade recommendations for media about sociopaths and vampires, enacting narc victimhood as a kind of underground subculture. There are many gurus and experts to choose from in the narcisphere, but their advice converges on one remedy. If you find yourself in a relationship with a narcissist—and you’ll know because they withhold care and attention, or do not seem to love you with the exclusivity you deserve—then the only solution is to cut your losses and get out. The narcissist can’t love you, and trying to change them is hopeless.
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What’s tempting about this “narciscript,” as Dombek calls it, is that it reduces a complicated situation (e.g. the average relationship) to a heavily weighted binary: Do I continue to extend an imprudent empathy, or do I go cold, the way the other person already has, in the interest of self-preservation? Clearly the latter course is the more “reasonable” one, but the moment I take it—go cold, withdraw, run—is the moment I can no longer safely distinguish my own behavior from the narcissist’s. “The script confirms itself,” Dombek writes, “and the diagnosis and the treatment confound the evidence, until it gets harder and harder” to tell whether the word “narcissism” describes anything at all. This is why, although The Selfishness of Others seems to promise an investigation of whether the “narcissism epidemic” (as it’s been called) is real, the book’s main interest derives from Dombek’s posing of another question, which may shed new light on our urge to #DiagnoseTrump: What’s at stake for us in believing it’s real?
Dombek spent the first part of her life in Philadelphia, where she was homeschooled by her parents, affable-sounding Jesus freaks she has described as “long-haired, corduroy-bell-bottom-wearing, antiauthoritarian biblical literalists.” When she was nine her father became sick with a host of terminal illnesses and the family relocated to a farm in Indiana, where they lived with a lot of animals: according to one (maybe exaggerated) list there were “not only about twenty cats and a dog but a half-dozen roving demented geese and two ornery pebble-shit-spewing goats and a couple dozen hysterical hens and a tyrannical rooster named Sam.” After high school Dombek attended Calvin College, a Christian Reformed (Calvinist) school in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She struggled to fit in with her classmates, who had all grown up in suburban neighborhoods.
As a freshman, Dombek became politically active in the fight against abortion—a practice she firmly believed, along with her parents and many of her friends, was not only murder but “a first step toward state-run infanticide and euthanasia.” At church, she and her friends watched films of months-old fetuses writhing in pain as machines snapped them apart piece by piece. Dombek would describe the anguish of those images in “The Two Cultures of Life,” her first article for n+1. The essay, which questions the left-right polarization of the abortion issue, contains many of the hallmarks of Dombek’s later work, including her attempt to bypass either-or distinctions by staging an argument on the page, and her insistence on directing empathy toward those viewed as incapable of returning it: the fetus, the animal, the murderer.
The year after she participated in an anti-abortion march in Washington, Dombek picked up smoking, started wearing flannel shirts and declared herself a Marxist. But her belief in the importance of empathizing across ideological and (sometimes) ontological boundaries seems to have persisted, along with her certainty that, as she writes in “Two Cultures,” “if it looks like violence, it is.” Studying literature at NYU after college, she emphasized persuading secular people to be “more empathetic toward fundamentalists, even those who conduct or support great atrocities.”
Her dissertation, “Shopping for the End of the World,” drew on the ideas of the French philosopher and literary theorist René Girard, who was interested in the ways that violence emerged within social groups. We tend to believe that violence happens when people don’t understand or empathize with one another, but Girard argued, first in Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961) and later in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), that violence springs just as much from our similarities. We think we desire things and people for their particular qualities but, according to Girard, this is an illusion; all desire is in fact an anticipatory mirroring of the desires of those closest to us. When two people reach for the same thing at once, as they inevitably will, not only are they hurled into conflict over that thing; they are also each confronted with disturbing evidence that their deepest self is little more than a bundle of imitations. Desperate to destroy the bearer of such news, they lash out. And because violence, too, is mimetic, it spreads through the community in a destructive, destabilizing feedback loop.
According to Girard, archaic societies developed a stopgap solution to these epidemics of violence: ritual sacrifice. (All archaic societies, apparently: Girard, who based his theory of sacrifice on readings of ancient myth rather than direct anthropological research, had a tendency to overgeneralize.) The group would select a scapegoat, and the selection itself was a significant decision. Ideally, this being—whether human or some other animal—would be enough like the sacrificers themselves that destroying or exiling it would satisfy the sacrificer’s need to banish what they hated. At the same time, the scapegoat needed to seem, or be made to seem, inhuman enough that everyone could safely assume its suffering didn’t count. This is how Dombek’s interest in empathy led her to the narcissist—the being our society often claims is too inhuman to truly suffer.
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The first people labeled as narcissists, writes Dombek, were almost exclusively homosexuals and women—and for Freud, who popularized the label, almost all homosexuals and women were narcissists. Beautiful women, whom Freud compared to children and “certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us,” seemed to him particularly resistant to therapeutic practice. To his mind, the abnormal resistance of these women to transference—love, basically—appeared to be a form of regression. Normal, healthy people start their lives in a similar state of selfish inaccessibility, he reasoned, but eventually they develop the capacity for empathy and love. The narcissist, for Freud, was the person who maintained or returned to this self-sufficiency.
Dombek’s criticism of the Freudian interpretation of narcissism draws from another work by Girard. In “Narcissism: The Freudian Myth Demystified by Proust,” Girard compared famous passages from Proust about desire with Freud’s vaguely moralistic theorizing about his desirable patients. The similarities he found were remarkable. Both writers ascribed to their subjects an inhuman autonomy, compared them with children and animals (specifically birds: large birds of prey in Freud’s case, seagulls in Proust’s) and marveled at their indifference to those around them. The difference was that Proust didn’t present his descriptions as true. “There is no such thing as a ‘real,’ objective narcissism for Proust,” Girard writes. It’s just less painful, when someone doesn’t feel about us like we feel about them, to believe that they’re incapable of feeling. What looks to us like someone else’s arrogance, according to this line of thinking, is actually our own inverted neediness.
Are these insights about scapegoating and the “narcissistic illusion” (as Girard called it) helpful for understanding today’s “narcissism epidemic”? The claims that narcissism is becoming pathological on the level of the whole culture go back to at least the late Seventies, when Tom Wolfe’s “The Me Decade” (1976) made the cover of New York and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979) became a national best seller. Despite Lasch’s scattershot approach—sections of The Culture of Narcissism are devoted to confessional writing, radical feminism and the use of AstroTurf in sports stadiums—his account of “the new narcissist” remained firmly rooted in psychoanalytic theory: specifically, Dombek notes, that of the analyst Otto Kernberg, who modified Freud’s theory by positing that the narcissist’s performance of self-sufficiency was part of a compensatory attempt to fill a vacuum of self-esteem.
Just as Lasch’s book was published, however, scientists began laying the tracks for the more clinical conception of the condition that prevails today. In 1979, two social psychologists developed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), a diagnostic tool that reduced Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) (enshrined in the DSM as a mental illness the next year) to a set of eight traits. The NPI is a forced-choice questionnaire, which means it tests NPD by asking subjects to select from a pair of statements—for example, “Sometimes I tell good stories” or “Everybody likes to hear my stories”—which it then correlates with clinical traits. The resulting numerical score tells you next to nothing about the individual test-taker, not even whether that person is a narcissist (as the test’s creators readily admitted). But it makes it much easier to generalize across large sample sizes.
In The Narcissism Epidemic (2009), for instance, social psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell reported that because millennials scored 30 percent higher on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory than ever before, they were likely the most self-involved generation in history. But according to Dombek, the study the book was based on actually only revealed that a “slight majority of students in 2006 answered, on average, one or two more questions in the narcissistic direction than did those in 1986.” Another caveat is that the people surveyed in Twenge and Campbell’s study were not just American college students, but specifically freshman psychology students, participating for course credit—an extremely common form of institutional bias which leads Dombek to wonder how much of popularly reported psychology research “would actually be more accurately framed as an understanding of what young psychology students think about themselves.”
The problem is not just that studies using this paradigm mask an absence of real knowledge, although this is a problem. More importantly, by presenting narcissism as a diagnosis with a firm empirical basis, journalists quoting social psychologists often make it seem like a condition someone—or a whole group of someones—just has. For researchers, this sort of shorthand isn’t unusual—it’s more or less how most sciences operate. But such research isn’t usually being cited to support sweeping claims about entire generations, nor to explain the behavior of our bad boyfriends, murderers and politicians.
The fact that, with narcissism in particular, such labeling has become so common, speaks in favor of Dombek’s suggestion that the narcissist occupies a special place in our social imagination. For Twenge and Campbell, millennials play the role of arch-villains in a story about our culture’s refusal to grow up. More recently, many of us have focused our attention on a villain who looks very different from a millennial, though we call him the same name we call them. Which makes one wonder what, in this case, is the underlying sameness that we’re hoping to purge.
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It’s likely no coincidence that one of the terms commentators often used to describe the political divides of the 2016 presidential campaign—“echo chamber”—brings us back to the Narcissus myth. In the classic version told by Ovid, Echo is a girl who, cursed by Hera, can only speak by repeating what others say. In the forest she falls hopelessly in love with the beautiful Narcissus, but when she tries to embrace him he reacts fearfully, with angry words that she can only whisper back to him; then he abandons her in favor of his own reflection in a dark pool. In our modern rendition, the term “chamber” is supposed to suggest a technological component to the problem, but the basic story is the same. In it, the other side of whatever divide—political, ideological, demographic—is imagined as being trapped in the echo chamber of “fake news” and bias-confirming feeds, while “we” play the role of Echo. We want to communicate, but the only way our voices can carry across the divide is if we repeat exactly what the other side already believes.
Although the echo chamber presents itself as a tragic picture, Dombek can help us recognize its flattering features. We, the ones who bemoan being stuck in our chamber, desire earnestly to reach out to the other side. They, the narcissistic ones, refuse to leave their chamber and meet us halfway. Scapegoating has always been an effective political tactic, and it is one Trump used ably, if offensively, during his campaign. But if Dombek and Girard are right that narcissism functions today largely as a scapegoating technique—a way of justifying coldness, maybe even violence, toward the one we label the narcissist—then it is Trump himself who emerges as the ultimate scapegoat, precisely because of his refusal to even pretend to care what his adversaries think.
Other presidents, after they win, at least make a show of reaching out; our narcissist-in-chief just keeps insulting us. Apparently he’s seeing other people, or maybe he really does just look into his reflection on TV all day. In any case, a better pretext for our own unapologetic anger and hatred could hardly be imagined. Which is a relief, in a way: all that empathizing can be exhausting.
The problem is only that, as Girard believed, scapegoating could never truly end violence or hatred, because, in misidentifying its source, it leads us to think we’re outside the dynamics responsible for it. “The moment you begin to find that the other lacks empathy—when you find him inhuman,” Dombek writes, “is a moment when you can’t feel empathy, either.” We say, this is how things are, fair or not. Either they burn, or we do.
Please share our frustration over the situation that confronted us last evening our last night in Wales.
We had travelled to north Wales from Ipswich for a couple of days in the hope of both seeing and photographing choughs a bird that had eluded us on previous trips.
On our way back to the self-catering cottage I spotted choughs in a field of horses.
The raucous calls suggested that juveniles might be present so we pulled up in a narrow lane but because if distance I had to use a heavy lens which in itself was bad enough for me. Just cannot manoeuvre it anymore.
However the birds were in a position that only allowed me to photograph into the sun as there was no other option.
We were treated to some great chough family action but most images were far too dark and unusable however we did manage to salvage a few shots.
However I seized the moment .
We hope you can also share the things that we saw and I tried to capture.
C’est la vie!!!!
Confronto tra i due treni, che differiscono non solo per il nome del tipo di servizio, ma anche per i rotabili utilizzati, e conseguentemente per il diverso profilo dei frontali.
This Carolina Anole (Anolis carolinensis) is confronting another Anole below. Found him near the Jimenoa River in Dominican Republic.
Née en 1994 à Donetsk en Ukraine, Sasha Zaitseva a grandi dans une famille russo-ukrainienne où elle a « ressenti le dualisme culturel comme norme ». Ce n’est qu’en 2014, lors de la guerre civile ukrainienne, qu’elle réalise porter deux héritages culturels séparés. Avec ses Kalina venok, des couronnes tressées de fleurs, elle pense le rôle des signes et objets culturels dans la formation de l’identité. La même année elle participe au Salon d’Automne International à Tel Aviv (Israel). Depuis elle expose en France et au Danemark (Musée de Greve, 2021). Elle est lauréate du prix UNESCO 2018 « Exprime toi : la culture, un agent de la paix ». Elle devient membre de l’atelier des artistes en exil en mai 2022.
Born in 1994 in Donetsk, Ukraine, Sasha Zaitseva grew up in a Russian-Ukrainian family where she “felt cultural dualism as the norm”. It was not until 2014, during the Ukrainian civil war, that she realized she was carrying two separate cultural heritages. With her Kalina venok, braided crowns of flowers, she thinks about the role of cultural signs and objects in the formation of identity. The same year she participated in the Salon d'Automne International in Tel Aviv (Israel). Since then she has exhibited in France and Denmark (Greve Museum, 2021). She is the winner of the 2018 UNESCO Prize “Speak Yourself: Culture, an Agent of Peace”. She became a member of the workshop of artists in exile in May 2022.
Flaxman’s ‘St Michael Overcoming Satan’, North Gallery Petworth House.
Leica MP with Super-Angulon 21mm (v2 @3.4), Kentmere 400 in Rodinal 1:25 for 7.5 mins.