 | Undoubtedly gambling, like other addictions, depends on a complicated mixture of brain chemistry, environment and socialisation. Howard Shaffer, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, notes that the rate of pathological gambling in America has remained relatively constant for the past 35 years, despite a huge expansion in the opportunities on offer. There was a spike in the late 1990s but levels have dropped since then. Dr Shaffer draws a parallel with a classic virus-infection curve: high at the beginning as those most susceptible fall ill, but gradually tailing off as people adapt. |
✖ Via The Economist: “The risk instinct. Why do people bet?” June 8th, 2010 |
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Aug 04 link notes
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 | Since the nuclear stalemate became apparent, the Governments of East and West have adopted the policy which Mr. Dulles calls ‘brinkmanship’. This is a policy adapted from a sport which, I am told, is practised by some youthful degenerates. This sport is called ‘Chicken!’. It is played by choosing a long straight road with a white line down the middle and starting two very fast cars towards each other from opposite ends. Each car is expected to keep the wheels of one side on the white line. As they approach each other, mutual destruction becomes more and more imminent. If one of them swerves from the white line before the other, the other, as he passes, shouts ‘Chicken!’, and the one who has swerved becomes an object of contempt. As played by irresponsible boys, this game is considered decadent and immoral, though only the lives of the players are risked. But when the game is played by eminent statesmen, who risk not only their own lives but those of many hundreds of millions of human beings, it is thought on both sides that the statesmen on one side are displaying a high degree of wisdom and courage, and only the statesmen on the other side are reprehensible. This, of course, is absurd. Both are to blame for playing such an incredibly dangerous game. The game may be played without misfortune a few times, but sooner or later it will come to be felt that loss of face is more dreadful than nuclear annihilation. The moment will come when neither side can face the derisive cry of ‘Chicken!’ from the other side. When that moment is come, the statesmen of both sides will plunge the world into destruction |
✖ Via Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare by Bertrand Russell, Simon & Schuster, 1959, p. 30 Get the full text on the Internet Archive. Learn more about the “chicken game” on Wikipedia. Watch the famous “chickie run” sequence from the movie Rebel Without a Cause on YouTube. |
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 | Milgram found that 62.5% of his subjects could be encouraged, browbeaten or intimidated into seeing the test through to its conclusion by delivering scores of shocks of increasing intensity to the maximum of 450 volts. In Game of Death, 81% of contestants went all the way by administering more than 20 shocks up to a maximum of 460 volts. Only 16 of the 80 subjects recruited for the fake game show refused the verbal prodding from the host — and pressure from the audience to keep dishing out the torture like a good sport — though most expressed misgivings or tried to pull out before being convinced otherwise. |
✖ Via Time: “Game of Death: France’s Shocking TV Experiment” by Bruce Crumley, March 17, 2010 Learn more about the “Milgram experiment” on Wikipedia. |
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Whatever fortunes our activity might have known, it was Potlatch alone that filled the void in the cultural ideas of an era — that gaping hole in the middle of the 1950’s. It is already certain that history will see it not as a witness to the fidelity of the modern spirit during the reign of reactionary parody, but as a document of the experimental research that would be the central concern of the future. But this future is now — it is the game of every one of our lives. The real success that may be attributed to Potlatch is in its serving to unite the situationist movement on a new and greater field of operations.
Potlatch took its name from the North American Indian word for a pre-commercial form of circulation of goods, founded on the reciprocity of sumptuous gifts. The non-salable goods which such a free bulletin could distribute were desires and unedited problems; and it was their profundity for others that constituted a gift in return. |
✖ Via DEBORD, Guy (1959). «The Role of Potlatch, Then and Now», Potlatch, no 30, July 15. Translated from the French by Reuben Keehan. About the site where this translation is hosted: «NOT BORED! is an autonomous, situationist-inspired, low-budget, irregularly published, photocopied journal.»
Potlatch, as a circulation ritual (studied by Marcel Mauss), can be used to offer a different understanding of communication process. See Bataille (1933), Debord (1954) et Baudrillard (1972). |
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