dijous, 7 d’abril del 2016

HUMAN RIGHTS

First of all, I ought to say human rights are the rights you deserve and have just for being a human. They were created in 1945 by the United Nations, in New York, and there are on a whole 30 of them.
We can tell human rights are being violated in our nowadays society, as, for example, there are many people that are actually slaved, which violates the article 4, some that are not allowed to get into new countires to live, as the article 13 clarifies, and sadly, a lot more.

Looking at all the 30 articles in the list, I've seen one that standed out, the article 18, freedom of Thought: 

"Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance."

This may not be in the human rights list, isn't it? Because it should be obvious that everyone has the right to think and believe in what they want. But the reason why may be there, is because some people disrespects others just for thinking diferent. No one has the same thought on everything. What about religions? There are many kinds, and each person believes in something because of culture, education, or just because it's what they like.
To think different makes you unique, that's why everyone should respect this right, because if everyone thought the same, believed in the same, said the same... Who would be special? Who would stand out and make the difference needed? Who would be the one inventing new thinks, writting new original books, making new unique films, and all that sort of things? No one, because everyone would be exactly the same. Yes WOULD BE. Because our thinkings, opinions and actions make us who we are.

This human right is violated in places with dictatorships, a good example could be North Korea, where anyone in the country can't do or think anything out of the wants of the dictator. For example, there is no freedom of religion, as religions that are not authorisized can't be taken.


dilluns, 4 d’abril del 2016

JEALOUSY: LOVE'S DESTROYER

Jealousy is an emotion, and the word typically refers to the thoughts and feelings of insecurity, fear, concern, and anxiety over an anticipated loss or status of something of great personal value. This issues is a universal human experience. Moreover, psychologists have proposed several models and have identified factors that result in jealousy. The factors are:

1.            Sociobiological factors
2.            Cultural and historical factors
3.            Personality factors
4.            Relational factors
5.            Situational factors and strategic factors

A jealous behaviour, in man, is directed into avoiding sexual betrayal and a consequent waste of resources and effort in taking care of someone else’s offspring. This, in great part is made by the imagination Imagination is strongly affected by a person’s cultural milieu. Nevertheless, one author can have a definite positive effect on sexual function and sexual satisfaction.
Jealousy is normal and necessary in relationships. If you are in a monogamous relationship, jealousy serves as a way to let your partner know that you care about preserving your relationship. This confirms that your partner values tour commitment and would be upset to lose you. For this reason, we can say that jealousy is an expression of love is healthy. Furthermore, some couples may be ok with casually filtering outside of the relationship, while other couples may discover through their jealousy to another person. This item, can be an important emotion to pay attention to but can finish to the point of obsession. When it becomes an obsession, it can cause you to become possessive and paranoid. Nevertheless, some people use jealousy to support the fear that their relationship is in danger; this situation is caused by females.
We can say that jealousy is possibly the most destructive emotion in human brains. It causes much suffering. It also endure behaviour that ranges from vigilance to violence. They feel anxious, depressed, angry, humiliated, out of control and, sometimes suicidal
All human emotions exist to help us figure out who are in the world, and jealousy isn’t an exception. It’s a resource we call on when we feel at risk. When we are jealous, we are, in fact, in the grip of an identity crisis.
Jealousy gives rise to feelings of inferiority and resentment, activates pain related neural circuits in the brain, neuroimaging tudies show.
Evolutionary, jealousy exists because it is a good mate retention strategy; a partner’s jealousy can be seen as a sign of love. In one study, about 75%of people said they tried to make their partner jealous at one time or another. Moreover, this feeling is more often associated with arguments, breakups and aggressive behaviour and, we feel jealous we may question the level of commitment in our relationship.
One of the most important factors is how you express or respond to jealousy. These reactions say to the partner that they need more attention or show more affection.
Jealousy has been considered the guardian of love, but more often is love’s ruin. We usually blame our partner for paying attention to another people instead of ourselves, but the real issue may be what jealousy teaches us about ourselves.
An example of jealousy could be Elliott, Amanda’s boyfriend. She feels charmed and amused; at first she thought it may be just a love-struck, but it wasn’t. One day he gave her some flowers, and she realised it wasn’t to have a detail with her but kind of a camouflage. He needed to know where she was every moment, and if he didn’t hear what he liked, his voice cracked with race. This is how a romance starts feeling like a prison, and this is how you get to know when to break up.
Jealousy experts agree it is a survival mechanism. They say jealousy is “the most destructive of passions and the least studied”.
Richard Smith, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky says: “Jealousy is not the same as envy although they are often used interchangeably. Jealousy arises when a relationship is infringed on by a rival who threatens to take away something that is in a sense rightfully yours.” He also says that to have jealous you need not to have any sense of who that third party is like.
Jealousy is an extremely painful emotion. There are huge individual differences in the propensity for jealousy, and there is emerging evidence that elements of personality influence some of them.
No one can define jealousy perfectly. It may take much of its primary force from activating the attachment system of the brain, a genetically ingrained circuit that is the foundation of our social bonds and that prompts widespread distress when they are threatened.
According to University of Texas psychologist David Buss, jealousy is a necessary emotion, a potential deterrent to identify that arises in both men and women when a threat materialises to intimate relationships.

     1. SEXUAL JEALOUSY
Sexual jealousy may be triggered when a person’s significant other displays sexual interest in another person. Experts often believe that sexual jealousy is I a fact a biological imperative. They want the bet reproductive partners.
Sexual jealousy is the leading cause of spousal murder worldwide. It’s not really jealousy what we have to blame. Buss says “It’s the disillusion that a loved one has committed an infidelity when none has occurred”.
Buss sees jealousy as a necessary evil, it isn’t quite as inevitable as it’s been made to appear. In a study of nearly 1.000 people in various stages of commitment, he and a colleague in Spain find that the individual inclination to jealousy is strongly influenced by two of the so-called big five personality factors. It is passively associated to with neuroticism, or emotional instability, the liabilityto such unpleasant emotions as anger, anxiety and depression. The higher the level of instability, the more one is prone to jealousy.
Not all jealousy is activated by immediate threats of sexual infidelity. Neuroticism is not a very appealing attribute in a mate; it’s not a trait that’s necessary on full display when one enters into a relationship.

     2. ROMANTIC JEALOUSY
Psychologist Steven Stosny says “the formula to jealousy is an insecure person times an insecure relationship”. A person that is insecure it’s not just about sexually jealous but of any kind of friendship or even of a child; anything that takes attention off them.
French psychiatrist Marcianne Blevis says jealousy is not the guardian of love, but more typically its destroyer. Blevis says “we assume that jealousy is necessary evil, the collateral damage of love”. “All human emotions exist to help us figure out who we are in the world, and jealousy is no exception. It is a reassurance we call on when we feel at risk. When we are jealous, we are in fact in a grip of an identity crisis”
It’s a mistake to assume that jealousy always involves love, argues Aaron Bem-Ze’ev, a philosopher in Israel’s University of Haifa. “A man who despises his wife may nevertheless become jealous when someone else looks covetously at her. Here, the central feature is losing to a rival.”
People use jealousy as a signal to try to control their partners; they use it as a powerful tool to stand out. They substitute power for value. People try to calm their own emotions by controlling a partner. You’re dependent of your partner’s whims to feel OK, and that’s a set up for anger.

diumenge, 27 de març del 2016

CAR RADIO - TWENTY ONE PILOTS



The song starts describing the situation of the man, sitting in his car realising someone stole his car radio. He uses this as a metaphor, as he says the following words: "and now I just sit in silence".

At first, this just seems to be a simple quote said to express what he is actually doing, but analysing the sentence (what, later on, is explained on the song), he says it’s not about sitting in silence, but feeling quiet inside of you, starting to think and just being aware of what’s going on. 

He relates being in silence with facing his own problems, the ones he was trying to hide with the music filling his ears and thoughts, but; what about now, without music? Why do we hide ourselves behind of songs? Do we feel he lyrics inside of us as a way to feel better?

Facing problems is not an easy thing to do. That’s why I’ve chosen this song. Once, just going through YouTube I found it and I felt so identified with the lyrics, because when we are sad, nowadays, we just put our earphones on and press play to our favourite song or; depending on our mood, to a sad or happy song and start escaping our feelings.

In the middle of the song, there are some verses I would like to highlight: 

"(...) Please stop thinking
I liked it better when my car had sound
There are things we can do
But from the things that work there are only two
And from the two that we choose to do
Peace will win
And fear will lose
There’s faith and there’s sleep
We need to pick one please because
Faith is to be awake
And to be awake is for us to think
And for us to think is to be alive
And I will try with every rhyme
To come across like I am dying
To let you know you need to try to think"

In this few sentences what he tries to explain is that the last we have to loose is faith, as it is all we have to be alive and show we are able to think and express our emotions and thoughts. 

To sum up, I would like to say most of the songs of "twenty one pilots" have some beautiful and thoughtful letter that can be analysed and compared to our nowadays society. We need more artists like them, not just people wanting to earn money singing songs just with rhythm and without any meaning, and getting famous for it.

dissabte, 26 de març del 2016

INDIA’S DAUGHTER: SINCE THE DELHI RAPE THINGS HAVE GOT WORSE

A documentary named Indian’s Daughter has been banned in India. The Indian government think that its content has to be banned because with this documentary people could think that all Indians have the same character and it isn’t like this. They are more worried about the international image of the country than of the women.
The documentary was made by a woman that was a rape survivor. This documentary has been criticised by the government and the women’s activists because of his content. The Indian government haven’t done much to save their women; even though they aren’t the only country that has that kind of problems.
That government wanted to ban this documentary because it could show that they didn’t do much for their women, the documentary showed the reality; they could put more security but they won’t. But instead of hiding the reality they would have to improve their security against woman.


I think the documentary should stay alive even though the Indian government didn’t want to, because people still know what is happening there. They would have to react and defend their people before all. At the end, if a news spreed it gets everywhere, even if they delete the documentary the most probable is that a lot of people will have seen it; and people have the right to know what's happening in other countries and what are they abusing of. 


VOCABULARY: gang, rape, widespread, restraint, rampant, blatant


dimecres, 9 de març del 2016

Family Travel Unplugged: More Options for Teenagers

The 21st century bane is seeing your children socializing virtually instead of enjoying vacation. According to parent’s frustrations, hotels and resorts had created a programme to promote real world interaction. These interactions consists in doing some activities in the mountain such as snowshoeing and other activities in the Anti-Gravity Centre; and in the resort such as going to the spa, a nightclub, etc.

Small group trekking adventures are a sure way to make children forget about their phones. Another adventures-group offers active teen trips to focus on culture.

I totally agree with the first statement in this news, because it’s totally true that social networks have children and teens addicted. The ways to entertain them that they have thought are really cool and imaginative, and I’m sure they’re going to work.

Actually I think it’s a bad idea to give a phone or a tablet to distract a little child, because the way they learn is not connecting with the world but with the network. It’s more usual in teens because they stop liking toys and all that stuff, so they talk to their friends with social networks, but this is not the way you spend vacation with family. Moments had to be enjoyed, and not seen through screens.
Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/travel/family-travel-internet-addiction.html?ref=todayspaper


Vocabulary: police (your children), snowshoeing, trekking. 

divendres, 4 de març del 2016

SLAVES?

This essay will be based in one simple, and so complicated at the same time, question I’ve read in our 2nd bat blog: Do you really want to be forever young?

Is this a simple thing to talk about? Because as a simple question nearly everyone would say: yes, of course! Who wouldn’t want it? But, what if I tell you that there is more than one way to understand this question? Yes, you can think of being immortal and never stop living. That could be cool, but what if you are the only one immortal person in the world? What about seeing your whole family dying, your friends; everyone around you? That doesn’t sound cool. Almost everyone would say no then, because, who wants to see their parents, sons, soulmates saying goodbye forever? No one.

Well, there’s another way to understand the question: being outside young forever. Yes, you will die, but until that day, you will look as if you were 20. Would anyone say no to that? Being pretty forever? Maybe not even looking as if you were 20, but pretty anyway. Who would say no really? Well, there’s the problem. Nearly everyone would like that, and the thing is that it is not a personal like or something punctual, it is something that big enterprises and all the people that lead the world had put in our minds.

They show us new cosmetics, make-up, clothes; artificial things to tell us how to look and how to do everything. The problem is that “being young forever” means to be imprisoned in a materialist world forever. Because in older ages, people didn’t need to look pretty all the time, maybe rich people did it but just because, as nowadays, they had the money to pay treatments and all that stuff, but it wasn’t really like it is now. Now, girls (it is more a girl than a man thing) have to look good anywhere they go and at any age.


Maybe the conclusion to all this is to escape the system and just do what you want, but… how do you know if it’s what you want and not what they want you to want? Everyone is a “victim” of the system, including myself; and if only a few people try to stand up to these injustices maybe a new world would start being created.