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FBI and NYPD Officers Sent On Museum Field Trip
In an attempt to "refresh their sense of inquiry" FBI agents, and NYPD officers are being sent to a course at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Art of Perception hopes to improve an officers' ability to accurately describe what they see during an investigation by studying art. From the article: "Amy Herman, the course leader, said: 'We're getting them off the streets and out of the precincts, and it refreshes their sense of inquiry. They're thinking, "Oh, how am I doing my job," and it forces them to think about how they communicate, and how they see the world around them.' Ms Herman, an art historian, originally developed the course for medical students, but successfully pitched it as a training course to the New York Police Academy."
The New York Police Department calls the trip a "resounding success." Though several paintings and sculptures were shot multiple times during the trip, an internal NYPD investigation has confirmed that the pieces of art were apparently reaching for weapons when they were fired upon. "Yeah, sounds like a clean kill to me," said Officer Leo Sekonsky, in reference to an incident that left Vincent van Gogh's "Self-Portrait with Straw Hat" in tatters. "That Van Gogh was definitely reaching for a knife or some shit. Ain't no one gonna say different."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It sounds like an attempt at filling the gap left by the lack of meditation our society experiences. Nobody plays Go (or Chess; but Go is a superior game), nobody quietly contemplates, nobody does listening meditations or anything. The most basic are breath awareness exercises-- sit quietly, close your eyes, observe the sound of the air passing through your nose and into your lungs, how your chest and belly expand, how your body shifts... then focus as well on your heart beat, and then add the focus of your attention on your muscles adjusting to hold your posture against gravity, shifting your balance constantly. All of these things at once, just for a minute or two, or an hour if you wish; time is a personal decision.
We do none of this stuff, and then we sit around wondering why people are bad at observing things. People want answers to shit; we still want to understand what's happening around us. But we've trained ourselves to be intolerant of the task of observation. We want to look, see, and understand; but our minds are looking for an ANSWER, not simply looking. So we don't understand what we're seeing, and we can't form a viable answer of what's going on around us.
It's like when you put a can of soup to the right of a jar of mayonaise in the cabinet. Then you open the cabinet and somebody moved the mayo a foot to the left next to a bottle of oil, and you spend 10 minutes trying to find it. You NEED it to be there, because you don't know HOW to observe and understand.
Here we have an attempt to make people stop, relax, stare and contemplate the art, the sculptures. Talk about what they see. A hollow attempt to regain these abilities that we no longer have.
The sad part is this is all completely whacked out and ridiculous ... and that I'm right.
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It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
...that will refresh the sense of inquiry much, much better.
end up with thought-police?
The program will be canceled about 12 seconds after the first officer on the witness stand describes a rape victim as "Rubenesque".
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Why is it labeled your rights online?
I'd go even cheaper: Make them read the constitution they swore an oath to defend.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Looks like the NYPD is taking a page out of NASA's preparation for the moon landing. Where Apollo astronauts worked with geologists to better be able to describe what they saw while they were on (or flying above) the moon's surface. Instead of calling something a gray rock, they could give it a more scientific and accurate description.
Why is this filed under "Your Rights Online"?
Because it involves cops...?
My stupid web site
The game is thought to originated somewhere in the border country of India and Afghanistan around 600 A.D. It came to Europe via Arabic traders a few hundred years later.
Observation is a learned skill, and anything that makes police better observers is great in my book.
I train my fellow officers in some simple observation exercises. My favorite takes place during meal breaks.
When sitting down at a restaurant, I instruct them to maintain eye contact with me, but describe every article of clothing the person at the table next to us is wearing. By forcing them to use their peripheral vision to gather details, they slowly learn to better use their unfocused vision and not get easily distracted. It's also a lot of fun.
For the less-than-willing male officers, I tell them it means they can check out women without actually looking at them...
Would be teaching them to DRAW.
Which is also about learning to see.
you had me at #!
Reading the constitution isn't nearly enough to understand even the hundredth part of it, much less to understand why it matters that we defend it.
One simple example: we tell kids it takes a simple majority of Congress to pass a bill into law, then a 2/3rds majority to overrule the president's veto, and we give them the constitution to read. But technically, Congress can pass laws any way it wants for the initial passage--it can deem them passed, or require sixty votes to end a philibuster, or require a unanimous vote. Just reading the constitution without thought isn't enough, and even with thought isn't enough, unless you're actually studying it.
Another example: Miranda rights are NOT in the constitution. The Supreme Court made them up a few years ago as a way to protect constitutional rights and has been slowly taking them away since.
Another example: There is a debate over changing the language of the Fourteenth Amendment to not grant citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. The sentence they're thinking about changing is the one we insisted on writing in because of the civil war--it's what we fought the civil war over: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." To the casual reader, it just seems to make people born here citizens of the US--but in reality, it granted black northerners *federal* citizenship, as opposed to merely state citizenship, meaning the federal government now had a legal avenue to fight discriminatory state action.
It would take a year of a *good* school for most of us to begin to understand the constitution.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!