Word: humanism
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James Fallon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, is skeptical. "So I take a rutabaga and put it close to my head, and it somehow changes the food and improves the mood of the person who ate it?" he asks...
...life, Ben-Shahar uses three optimalist exercises, which he calls PRP. When he feels down - say, after giving a bad lecture - he grants himself permission (P) to be human. He reminds himself that not every lecture can be a Nobel winner; some will be less effective than others. Next is reconstruction (R). He parses the weak lecture, learning lessons for the future about what works and what doesn't. Finally, there's perspective (P), which involves acknowledging that in the grand scheme of life, one lecture really doesn't matter...
Proof of that may have come earlier this month when human-rights and opposition activist Yana Palyakova, was found hanged in her home in Salihorsk, in southern Belarus. Palyakova, 33, had committed suicide just days after being sentenced to two and a half years in detention and a $350 fine for slandering a police officer, whom she had accused of beating her while in police custody in November last year. The day before Palyakova's death, the state-run newspaper Sovietskaya Belorussiya, or Soviet Belarus, had published an article mocking her and her complaint. "The state drove her to suicide...
...European Union's March 20 decision to include Belarus in its "Eastern Partnership" initiative all the more surprising. The program foresees deeper political and economic ties between Brussels and six former Soviet states: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Closer ties, Europe hopes, will promote democracy and better human rights. (See pictures of the 2006 riots in Minsk...
Others disagree. "In effect, the E.U. has taken away its previous conditions of democracy and human rights," says Valery Karbalevich, a Belarusian political analyst. "They still talk about them, but they don't mean it." And Lukashenka seems less than committed to living up to the initiative's "shared values, including democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights." Just last week he said, "It's wrong [for the E.U.] to disturb us over minor points," and called the opposition "enemies of the Belarusian people...