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Alpine configuration

Alpine is to email software what Emacs is to text-editing software. I love it.

First, create a collection list — I think you may skip this part if you’re using pop instead of imap:
S L A
Nickname: any nickname
Server: my.server.net:port/ssl/user=my_username
If you’re not using ssl, write tls instead. You may not need to write a port number.
In my case, the username is my email address.
Exit the setup:
C^X

Enter password

E
Configure your account:
S C
Fill out the following:
User Domain: the text behind @ in your email address
SMTP Server: my.server.net:port/imap/ssl/user=my_username
If you’re using pop, just remove imap/ from the text. Also read the comments above about the server address.
Inbox Path: {my.server.net/imap/ssl/user=my_username}inbox
Not sure if you need to fill that field out if you’re using pop.
Customized Headers (find this field with the WhereIs command (W)): From: Name <emailaddress>

Let alpine remember your password by typing this from your home folder:
touch .pine-passfile

Crazy Like Us

I just finished reading Ethan Watters book, Crazy Like Us – The Globalization of the American Psyche, which I bought after listening to him on fora.tv.

I wouldn’t recommend the book unless you have a special interest in mental health issues. His fora.tv talk, however, is worth listening to.

The book is well written and documented. Watters main point is that the West is exporting its conception and treatment methods of mental illnesses, disrespectfully of cultural differences. He analyses 4 different cases: anorexia in Hong Kong, PTSD in Sri Lanka, schizophrenia in Zanzibar, and depression in Japan.

Some issues were of particular interest.

– Living with a person who is mentally ill (p. 151-4): Watters explains how the schizophrenic Kimwana’s family was accepting her condition and allowed her “to drift back and forth from illness to relative health without much monitoring or comment”. A team of researchers found that mental patients with schizophrenia have higher relapse rates if their family were critical, hostile and emotionally overinvolved—self-sacrificing, extremely devoted, overprotecting, or intrusive.

– Locus of control (p. 162-5): another researcher distinguishes people with internal vs. external locus of control. The first category think “of themselves as captains of their own destiny” while the latter believe “that the course of their lives [is] largely influenced by factors outside of themselves”. She “found that relatives who [are] highly critical of the mentally ill family members were those with an internal locus of control”. I agree with this classification: my experience is that people who don’t understand what it means to be mentally ill think that staying sane is a sign of strength and blame the mentally ill for not trying hard enough. To my mind one definition of being mentally ill is that you’ve lost that very strength—the willpower to stay sane. Blaming the loss seldom solves anything, quite the contrary.

– Society’s acceptance of mental illness (p. 172-3): Watters points out the irony of the fact that at the same time as mental illness is increasingly recognised as a disease vs. a weakness of character, its stigma has grown: “the perception of dangerousness surrounding the mentally ill has steadily increased”.

– Brain chemistry (p. 177-8): trying to explain mental illness purely by brain chemistry is scarily dehumanising. Moreover, if brain chemistry is controlling the moods and feelings of the mentally ill, it also does so for the mentally sane. “When we fall in love, get jealous, feel the joy of playing with a child, or experience religious ecstasy we do not describe the experience to friends as a fortunate or unfortunate confluence of brain chemicals. Yet we continue to suggest that the narrative of brain chemistry will be useful in lessening he stigma associated with a mentally ill person. What could be more stigmatizing than to reduce a person’s perceptions and beliefs to the notion that they are “just chemistry”?. It is a narrative that often pushes the ill individual outside the group, allowing those who remain in the social circle to […] view the ill person as almost a different species.”

David Harvey: The Crises of Capitalism

David Harvey is giving a talk about his book The Enigma of Capital on fora.tv:

http://fora.tv/2010/04/26/David_Harvey_The_Crises_of_Capitalism

It is a compelling analysis of the financial crisis. According to Harvey, the underline problem is that our economic system requires 3 % compound growth, which, in turn, requires 1.5 trillion dollars per year worth of profitable investment opportunities. Part of Harvey’s thesis is that we’re at an inflexion point where this isn’t feasible anymore. The only way we can have that level of growth is by creating fictions that cannot last.

Harvey concludes by saying that we need a completely different form of economy that has control over the production and utilisation of the surplus.

Why we are destroying Nature

In Répliques 5 December 2009 (French radio programme), Philippe Raynaud, author of Trois Révolutions de la Liberté : Angleterre, Amérique, France, makes the following point :

The best way to reach a social compromise is to increase wealth. While, according to Machiavel, under the Roman Empire, this was done by conquering new land, in modern times, we are conquering Nature.

It raises the question whether it is possible to increase life quality while preserving Nature. It also suggests that reducing social tensions may be one key to stop the destruction of Nature.

The power of hope

On Living on Earth of 6 November 2009, Jeff Young had an interesting piece on the power of religious communities in inspiring people to fight environmental problems. What I found the most interesting was the analysis that one crucial point is missing from all the scientific talk: hope. The interviewee, Martin Palmer, used the comparison with fasting in order to stress the power of hope: as long as you promise a feast, you can get people to fast.

As far as I could hear, he didn’t concretely tell how that would transpose to climate change but I certainly agree that we usually hear either gloomy or careless point of views. I guess we, who try our best at preserving the environment, have some sort of hope (otherwise we would give up). Many of the people I talk to, however, seem to have lost hope. It might be unless to convince them of anything unless we restore that hope first.

Link to the podcast

Link to Living on Earth

There may be a prayer for climate change prevention. Major world religious leaders and conservation organizations recently gathered in Windsor, England for the Many Heavens, One Earth conference to advance the fight against climate change. Host Jeff Young speaks with Martin Palmer, Secretary General of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, about why these initiatives might have a greater impact on stewardship than scientific or political efforts. (12:00)

Teddy Goldsmith

“Terre à Terre” on 5 September had a rerun of an interview with Teddy Goldsmith, an Anglo-French activist who founded The Ecologist and whose co-edited The Case Against the Global Economy. He died on 21 August.

He had an apocaplyptic view of the consequences of climate change and his rejection of cities reminded me of Derrick Jensen’s thoughts in “Endgame”, basically that cities are unsustainable social structures.

I liked his independence of mind. I am, however, skeptical to his friendship with James Lovelock. I attended a conference with Lovelock two years ago and his support of nuclear power is disturbing, not to mention his arrogance when I expressed some criticism.

The part that caught my attention the most was Goldsmith’s criticism of modern science as opposed to the science of Plato and Arisotle. Modern scientists are specialising in specific fields and do not reflect about the consequences of their work. That was precisely one of my main areas of concern when I was working as a researcher. Unless you’re a genius the pressure to produce articles is too big that you can spend time on “unproductive” activities. In a way, researchers are a modern form of assembly-line-workers.