#robert wright

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

darkness and light

* * * *

 Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point. 

Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (via panatmansam)

[liskantope]

While I'm thinking of Election 2024... I keep hearing, from pretty much everyone in my circle of podcasters except I think for David Pakman, about this one Trump campaign ad which quoted Kamala Harris from 2019 saying she'd support gender-affirming surgery for undocumented immigrants and ending with the words, "Kamala Harris cares about they/them. Donald Trump cares about you." (I still haven't actually bothered to look up this ad.) And each and every one of these commentators refers to it in some permutation of the words "the most devastating ad in the campaign" as though this were objective fact; most recently I heard some record amount of money quoted as having been spent on it. My circle of podcasters includes some pretty liberal-leaning people (e.g. Robert Wright) and skews heavily anti-Trump, but all (except again for David Pakman) are very free-thinking dissenting, hard-to-peg-in-a-political-category types. And again, the fact that this commercial an extreme example of political success is this one fact they all seem to agree on.

I can't help questioning how they know how this ad was so outstandingly effective and how one would even go about objectively measuring that.

[magnoliasforyourmedic]

Eagles of Mercy

Upon landing in Normandy on D-Day, one of Easy Company’s medics connected with three other medics of the 101st Airborne Division and set up a makeshift aid station in the church of Angoville-au-Plain, a small village a mere 10 miles behind Utah Beach. Medic Edwin Pepping of Easy Company spent hours helping another medic by the name of Willard Moore transport severely wounded soldiers in a jeep to L’église Saint-Côme-et-Saint-Damien, the Church of Saint Côme and Saint Damien.

Back at the church, Medic Robert Wright began to treat the many wounded while Kenneth Moore, a stretcher bearer with not quite as much medical training, helped unload the men brought to them by jeep. They had lost a majority of their medical supplies on the jump and had to treat the men with anything and everything they could find, all while under heavy artillery fire.

They accepted any and all wounded into their care, regardless of nationality, under the stipulation that all rifles be left outside the church door. Men were laid on the pews with their heads facing the aisle, pews that remain in the church to this day. Those most seriously wounded, the ones they weren’t sure would make it, were placed behind the alter and given morphine.

Amidst one particularly intense shelling, a mortar fell through the roof of the church and landed in the center aisle. Miraculously, it didn’t explode, and Wright threw the shell out of a window. Pepping eventually moved on to reunite Easy Company, but Wright and Moore remained. They treated 80 seriously wounded American, French, and German soldiers as they worked 72 hours until the village was liberated on June 8, losing only two men.

The locals believe Wright and Moore landing near their village and choosing their church as an aid station to be no accident. Their church, as fate would have it, was named after two saints:

“L'église Saint-Côme-et-Saint-Damien, takes its name from 4th century martyrs: Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian. Saints Cosmas and Damian were physicians and possibly brothers who hailed from ancient Syria, then a province of the Roman Empire. They are widely regarded to be the patron saints of doctors, surgeons, and pharmacists. In fact, the saints were renowned for healing those who were ill or wounded as well as caring for all people regardless of their background, race, or faith.“

A stain glass window was installed in the church paying tribute to these two men and a memorial was constructed.

A documentary was created telling the story of the Eagles of Mercy featuring interviews with some of the veterans. Watch it for free at the link below:

[lisboaumretrato]

Robert Wright, Paleta de Cores de Lisboa, 2008 http://www.andthisisreality.com/2008/01/estudo-sobre-as-cores-de-lisboa.html

[pureanonofficial]

Best musical theater team?

Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II

Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart

George Gershwin & Ira Gershwin

Alan Jay Lerner & Frederick Loewe

John Kander & Fred Ebb

Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick

Robert Wright & George Forrest

Harvey Schmidt & Tom Jones

Charles Strouse & Lee Adams

Lynn Ahrens & Stephen Flaherty

Richard Maltby Jr. & David Shire

Michael Kunze & Sylvester Levay

Voting ended onDec 1, 2023

[superherobriefings]

The Avenger

pdsh.fandom.com/wiki/Avenger_(Magazine_Enterprises)

Creator(s): Dick Ayres, Gardner Fox, Powell

Alias(es): Robert Wright

1st Issue w/Uniform: The Avenger #1

Year/Month of Publication: 1955/02

[arbitrarygreay]

This is the video that made me go "okay I need to make this a spam, not just a single link" because HOT DAMN! THE SUPREMES DOING STRANGER IN PARADISE! WHAT!

(And yes, they were one of the other Ed Sullivan performances, September 25, 1966)

[maaarine]

Autism and the Two Kinds of Empathy | Robert Wright & Simon Baron-Cohen

"0:00 The (fuzzy) distinction between cognitive and emotional empathy

7:01 Simon’s work on autism and empathy

15:59 Should we really view autism as a spectrum?

26:17 Are powerful people bad at cognitive empathy?

40:19 Hitler, tribalism, and the societal dynamics of empathy

53:58 Can cognitive empathy save the world?

1:00:50 The “double-empathy” problem

1:04:52 How autistic kids play differently"