Category Archives: New Utopia

President Star Parker of the Center for Urban Renewal Education has accused President Biden of not promoting an abolitionist education network after the radical group was linked to the new semester coronavirus handbook. Parker told the American Newsroom Thursday that educators under the administration are trying to turn our country into a Marxist utopia.

Star Parker: Well, the crumbs are all over your face. Your hands are still in the jar, but you havent eaten the cookies. Of course, they would deny that they are trying to transform our country into a Marxist utopia. I think its time for conservatives to admit that the collectivist government that controls the funded national education system is no longer functioning.

The CRT Group, promoted by BIDEN ADMIN, is associated with the best education officials

As we are divided in half, its time for money to chase children to the school their parents want. In other words, our society is unleashed, and civil society is unleashed because of the collapse of our common culture. We are no longer one unit. We are worldly and sacred. The sacred believe in personal responsibility. The world believes in groupism. So this is not the place where we pretend we can push all our children into one environment and teach them all kinds of values that are consistent with each other.

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Bidens Ministry of Education will deny trying to turn the United States into a Marxist utopia: Star Parker

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Biden's Ministry of Education will deny "trying to turn the United States into a Marxist utopia": Star Parker - Texasnewstoday.com

Princess Zelda finally got to star in her own game in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD (Switch)By: Nintendo

MUCH like reusing last year's half-charred birthday candles, Nintendo is celebrating Zelda's 35th year with the same game they used to mark the adventure series' 25th anniversary back in 2011.

The last of the old-school Zeldas, 2011's Skyward Sword released in the Wii's twilight, making much of the console's waggling long after the motion control novelty had worn off. Yet despite wilting in the shadow of its successor, the mighty Breath of the Wild, Skyward Sword has plenty to love especially in this bells and whistles do-over for the Switch.

After a quarter century focusing on an elfin boy named Link, Skyward Sword's water-coloured fairytale was the first game to focus on the series' titular Princess Zelda. Set in the floating utopia of Skyloft, when our abduction-prone princess is kidnapped, young Link travels to the terra firma land of Hyrule, haunted sword in hand, to rescue her.

The game still looks good in this portable conversion, running in HD at a flawless 60fps

A treasure trove of side quests, Skyward Sword's environment gradually revealed new secrets as you acquired the toys to explore it. Its motion controls put literal new twists on an old fairy tale. Many enemies became puzzles in themselves, requiring specific directional strikes to vanquish, while your weapon could be powered up by holding the controller aloft, a la He-Man.

Using the doodles of Paul Cezanne as inspiration, its impressionist visuals disguised the Wii's limitations a canny artistic choice that means the game still looks good in this portable 'Loft conversion, running in HD at a flawless 60fps.

Other quality of life improvements include a fully controllable camera oddly absent in the original which makes exploration much more enjoyable. With auto-saves, there's no more trudging to back up your progress, while the whole shebang runs at a faster clip thanks to skippable cut-scenes and your talking sword, Fi, doing a lot less talking.

Of course, the biggest change is to the controls. Given the original was custom-made for the Wii's bespoke Motionplus controller, playing on-the-go now relegates all its motion nonsense to traditional button presses. It's a clumsy compromise, and purists after the Wii experience will find it much more intuitive to play on the telly, where the console's Joy Cons even manage to outdo the original in the accuracy stakes.

Unfortunately, Nintendo have locked Skyward Sword HD's most useful tweak behind a plastic paywall. By tapping Zelda Amiibos to the Switch, players can zip between the game's overworld and surface at will a time-saving feature not available in the original.

It's peak Nintendo to charge 50 for an updated 10-year-old game then hide its biggest improvement behind a 25 toy.

Dodgy business practices aside, Skyward Sword's charms have lost none of their lustre. After the game-changing open-world bounty of Breath of The Wild, there's a whiff of the relic to Nintendo's latest but as a nostalgic stop-gap until its sequel lands, you could do a lot worse than the Wii's final hurrah.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

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Games: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD still offers plenty to love in new HD do-over for the Switch - The Irish News

To be sure, Partition itself was the product of a utopic plan enacting Enlightenment notions about the rational ordering of society. It promised to produce order out of a religiously and linguistically mixed society. It promised a homeland to those out-of-place in nationalist India.

Many who moved did so out of faith in this project, out of conviction, at times against the wishes of their families (most famously, Jinnahs only daughter did not move). Indeed, the deliberate sacrifice of home and bonds was the price that made the result participation in the creation of a new nation-state all the more sacred. (See oral histories in Anam Zakaria, Footprints of Partition. On Pakistan as a utopian ideal, see also Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition.)

The poet credited with launching the Pakistan movement, Muhammad Iqbal, was shaped by education in Germany and Britain. Among his closest friends in Lahore from 1932 was Muhammad Asad, the Austro-Hungarian Jew who opposed Zionism but supported the creation of a Muslim state in South Asia. He had been an advisor to Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud in the 1920s one of that world of European spies in Arabia I described in my first book.

Like them, he collapsed the tasks of reinventing the Middle East and himself. He would go on to shape Pakistans constitution and head the Middle East Division of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. My point in invoking Asad is to highlight the cosmopolitan intellectual context in which the idea of Pakistan took shape, however much it was also about the local mission of saving Muslims from domination by non-Muslims.

Enlightenment and romantic notions are dialectically related in this intellectual history. I am merely skimming the surface here, focusing on the chain of influences and sociological bonds to offer a sense of the global production and payoff of these ideas over time, up to our present, as we shall see.

In promising a national homeland for South Asias Muslims, Iqbals Pakistan also tried to move beyond nationalism. It was utopic in that ambition, too. Like Tagore, Iqbal denounced the European modernity exposed on the Western Front, the way competitive nationalism produced militarism, imperialism, and indifference to religion. His call for Pakistan was intended as a critique of nationalism and an important first step towards a post-nationalistic postwar world.

Muslim political autonomy would foster in one place a less divided and exploitative society on the basis of an Islamic moral system that would serve Muslims and non-Muslims alike. His notions of the unity of Islam were authentically his but also shaped by romantic orientalist notions he absorbed in Europe. (Barbara Metcalf, Husain Ahmad Madani: The Jihad for Islam and Indias Freedom.)

Indeed, although we take Partition as synonymous with the mass migration it entailed, mass migration was not part of the plan, even as late as the early 1940s. The idea was rather to create autonomous Muslim-majority areas in which Hindus and Sikhs would remain, while Muslims would remain in areas in which they were minorities.

Then came the idea of splitting Muslim-majority provinces. The idea of mass eviction and migration only came in March 1947 when riots in Rawalpindi enforced the notion that minorities did not belong in the lands that had now been designated Muslim or non-Muslim (Pandey). In the 1930s, Iqbal was thinking outside the box of nationalism, whatever the ironic appropriation of his goal for nationalistic purposes.

The India that was to result from the creation of Pakistan was also imagined through the lens of modern rationality. Even Indians who regret Partition speak approvingly of a purer nation formed through the sacrifice of dismemberment.

The journalist Alpana Kishore argues that without Partition, India would have gone on wrestling with an unresolved demand for a Muslim nation-state. It would have been haunted by the spectre of partition and the very different vision of national development embraced by Pakistans founders. (Zakaria).

This recalls BR Ambedkars views on Pakistan. He too was an anti-colonial thinker who was simultaneously critical of the nation-state. Yet, he saw Partition as unavoidable once the demand had been raised (and given his own notions of Muslim difference). To refuse it would simply endanger the new republic with the constant threat of civil war. (Ambedkar, Thoughts on Pakistan, 1941; Pakistan, or Partition of India, 1944; Aishwary Kumar, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy.) Arguably, in the end, Partition has haunted India anyway.

But besides these rationalist-idealist visions of a postcolonial Pakistan and India, other utopic visions were also available, for a time. Some saw an equally post-nationalist utopic prospect in the challenge of unifying a subcontinent that, they acknowledged, was divided. The poet Mohammad Ali Jauhar emerged as a leader of the Khilafat movement.

As president of the Congress party in 1923, he said:

I had long been convinced that here in this country of hundreds of millions of human beings, intensely attached to religion, and yet infinitely split up into communities, sects and denominations, providence had created for us the mission of solving a unique problem and working out a new synthesis, which was nothing low than a federation of faiths For more than twenty years I have dreamed the dream of a federation, grander, nobler and infinitely more spiritual than the United States of America, and today when many a political Cassandra prophesies a return to the bad old days of Hindu-Muslim dissensions I still dream that old dream of United Faiths of India.

Like Mohani and Bismil, he became disillusioned with Congress and Gandhis leadership in the early 1920s. He attended the First Round Table Conference in London in 1930-31 (Gandhi attended the one later in 1931, visiting the Thompsons while there). He died in England and was buried in Jerusalem, at his own request. Would he have remained in India or moved to Pakistan in 1947? Or later? Or would his survival have made his utopic dream a more viable possibility?

Others perceived a different utopia: the idea of an India that possessed an inherent unity even in its diversity, that was a single nation, which Partition violated. Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani, leader of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, the senior party of Indian ulema, saw imperialism as the disrupter of religiously plural societies that had their own integrity. Iqbal argued that it severed ethnically distinct Muslims who might otherwise have been united around their shared religion. (Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony; Metcalf.)

Much Indian historical writing is in this vein and has found it difficult to escape the obligation to demonstrate that oneness. This is partly because, apart from the Ambedkar approach, it was difficult for Indians to read Partition as anything but loss. Pakistanis, however nostalgic, could at least pin hope on the strength of having created something new.

To some Pakistanis, India is a dreamlike homeland, an origin story more than a land from which they are exiled. (Zakaria). Still, many survivors of Partition on both sides recall untroubled pre-Partition times marked by inter-communal harmony.

At times for elites from cosmopolitan settings, nostalgia for the Raj is part of this mix. At times joint resistance to it. At times the Unionist Partys popularity under Sir Sikander Hyat Khan, a close associate of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, in the 1930s is recalled as proof of the existence of a culturally and politically unified Punjab betrayed by higher politicians (at other times its social conservatism and loyalty to the Raj recalled as liabilities), even though the pressure of maintaining that unity against the competing forces of the League, Congress and the British was probably what killed Sikander Hyat Khan in December 1946.

We have no way of gauging the accuracy of memories untroubled pre-Partition harmony, but as Anam Zakaria and other collectors of oral histories note, memory and how people choose to remember certain events is as important as historical facts themselves. (Zakaria). Indeed, some memories were shaped by dismay at the violent change Partition wrought. Even those who did not move witnessed the destruction of their communities and the arrival of new, tormented faces, a transformation that made some see the struggle as a waste.

At the same time that the Pakistani state whitewashes Sikh history in Punjab literally in the case of the frescoes at the entrance of the Dera Sahab complex in Lahore we hear of Pakistanis who miss Diwali and Eastern Punjabis who miss Eid. (Nadhra Khan, Lahore Revisited: The City and Its Nineteenth Century Guidebook, lecture.)

It is true that many communities have coexisted in India and that Partition included many acts of inter-communal kindness. But equally true is the fact that in the end, Congress agreed to Partition, and that, since 1947, the community has again and again been constituted through violence in India impossible facts for those committed to the notion of an eternally unified India betrayed only by Jinnah and the Muslim League. (As Pandey notes, violence did not accompany Partition; it was constitutive of it. See also Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony.)

But apart from nostalgia for a lost utopia, even after Partition, many imagined the possibility for a unique international friendship between the two nations, in which the border was in fact a bridge permitting connection and communication.

Deferrals or reversals of the decision to stay or move, indicated by late departure or ongoing maintenance of bi-national existence for business and family reasons, are perhaps most symptomatic of this outlook. They represent a willful and wishful belief in the prerogative to remain locally and privately rather than nationally embedded as long as it was practicable.

It was certainly not obvious that Partition would mean total severance of connection. And in fact, many crossed legally without much obstruction until the 1965 war. Border communities continued to engage in common celebrations of Baisakhi. Others crossed illegally between bordering villages, like Germans in the early years of the Cold War.

Zakarias collection of oral histories includes the poignant case of Muhammad Boota who repeatedly crossed from his adopted village in Pakistan into his old village in Indian Punjab to search for a Sikh girl he had loved. As in the great qissas (romantic epics like Waris Shahs), he never found her but remained devoted to her. (Zakaria; See also the story of Ghulam Ali in Zamindar, Long Partition.)

The border became more clearly demarcated and impassable after the wars of 1965 and 1971, but even then, through 1986 no line or wire demarcated the border near Kasur villages, and people crossed accidentally. (Zakaria.)

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there was the utopic belief that borders did not change anything, even when they became impassable, that an un-severable regional unity transcends the experience and fact of Partition.

Here it is crucial to remember that the Indian and Pakistani dream for nation-statehood was fulfilled in a moment in which the entire system of nation-states was in severe crisis, with displaced minorities emerging in West Asia and Europe. (Mufti notes that nationalism has historically been a great disrupter of social and cultural relations, setting forth an entire dynamic of inclusion and exclusion within the very social formation that it claims as uniquely its own and with which it declares itself identical. By rendering some part of that formation as minority, it renders that group potentially movable. Thus, it has historically been a force for violent displacement. Enlightenment in the Colony.) This context shaped calls to rise above both nationalism and borders.

Maulana Azad (who tried his hand at poetry too in his younger days) insisted even after Partition on the existence of a composite culture, shared among all and possessing secular and cosmopolitan dimensions. He was a nationalist, in the sense of believing in the reality of an Indian nation that could stand independently of British rule, but also grasped the dangers nationalism produced for minorities.

His solution was to refuse politics based on fear to refuse to fear for the fate of a Muslim minority in independent India and to refuse the very notion of a Muslim minority. This leap of faith marks the secularism of Azads public life, explains Aamir Mufti. He articulated this complex vision in a speech in October 1947 in Jama Masjid in Delhi, which persuaded many Muslims there to stay, just when nationalism was violently reorganising the region into new nation-states.

Those who articulated such visions at once perceived their vulnerability, their increasingly outdated utopian nature. They knew that refusing nationalisms disruption of pluralism was its own kind of madness, reminiscent of Bishan Singhs stubborn attachment to the no mans land of Saadat Hasan Mantos Toba Tek Singh.

But while Mantos story encapsulated that madness in a dark, Chekhovian manner, such madness found a different kind of sanction in the Urdu poetic tradition, where it seemed less the breakdown of reason than the typically hopeless (but no longer melancholic or politically passive) idealism of the poetic subject, the lover.

They were the farzaane (learned, wise men) who double as deewane (mad, inspired men) in Jagannath Azads ghazal titled, 15 August 1947: Na puchho jab bahar aayi to deewanon pe kya guzari/ Zara dekho ki is mausam mein farzaanon pe kya guzari (Dont ask what befell the mad (the lovers) when spring came/ Just look at what befell the wise in this season).

With the plural deewane, the sher [verse] embraces the world of Azads fellow poets, his friends, as the losers of this history. And indeed the friendship among poets was one critical way in which the border was rendered meaningless, at least for some, especially those who chose to see it as a temporary inconvenience on the way to a future goal that they knew would transcend all borders.

While Faiz continued his political and poetic pursuits in Pakistan, his friend Makhdoom Mohiuddin of Hyderabad pursued poetry, lyric-writing for the film industry, labour activism, Communist Party of India leadership, trades union activism and activities with the Progressive Writers Association and Indian Peoples Theatre Association and was a primary leader of the Telangana Rebellion from 1946-50, the rebellion of peasants against Telangana landlords and the Nizam of Hyderabad.

He also inaugurated the short-lived Paritala Republic. Jailed in 1951 like Faiz in Pakistan he wrote the poem, Qaid (Imprisonment). On his release, he fought elections and joined Parliament, participating in the national political process as a member of the Communist Party of India.

For these poet-activists, Partition was a tragic yet transient event in a long struggle for far more radical ends. It was inconclusive. And their agreement on that across the border, their continued solidarity, was a mutual affirmation.

When Makhdoom died in 1969, Faiz composed a poetic homage adapting his friends celebrated ghazal, Aap ki yaad aati rahi raat bhar. [Your memory came to me all the night long.] Both versions can be read on multiple levels, as all ghazals, but let me offer a suggestive reading of the maqta (last verse) in each.

Makhdooms ended, Koi deewaana galiyon mein phirta raha/ Koi awaaz aati rahi raat bhar. [Some madman (lover) wandered in the streets/ Some sound came all the night long], evoking the eternal beckoning of some ideal in the darkness, towards which the poet-as-agent-of-history fumbles, perhaps never reaching it.

It is at once near yet out of reach. Faizs version ended, Ek umeed se dil behelta raha/ Ek tamanna sataati rahi raat bhar. [The heart amused itself with a hope/ A wish tormented (me) all the night long], evoking the desire for communion with a friend who is now impossibly far, in classic Sufi fashion, but also perhaps a memory of their shared, incomplete pursuit: the soothingly idealistic hope for a more humane future that is simultaneously agitating, despite our knowledge that it is ideal and thus unachievable.

For those entangled in this border-transgressing literary and political community, Partition was not a stopping ground. It could not be allowed to become a stopping ground. As Faiz wrote, reflecting on 1947 in 1951, Chale chalo ki woh manzil abhi nahi aayi. [Let us keep going, for that destination has not yet come].

To be sure, the notion of a long, joint journey ahead, despite borders, was also a mechanism for coping with the actual trauma of Partition, which Faiz genuinely felt. He considered it too big to cope with in poetry apart from his attempt in that 1951 poem, Subah-e-Azadi (Freedoms Dawn) although in allusive ways he did in other works too, I believe. (Rakhshanda Jalil, Liking Progress. Faiz did not think he wrote about Partition beyond this 1951 poem.)

One might reasonably interpret this indifference to borders as a form of denial, as fantasy. Arguably works like Toba Tek Singh engaged in precisely such fantasy, as literary form, whatever Mantos commitments to social realism.

Fantasy is a departure from consensus reality, in the words of one literary scholar (Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature, quoted in Karline McLain, The Fantastic as Frontier: Realism, the Fantastic, and Transgression in Mid-Twentieth Century Urdu Fiction, Annual of Urdu Studies 16), and belief in the immateriality of the border was a departure from the consensus reality of Pakistani and Indian nation-statehood. More than fantasy, however, it was romance, as articulated clearly in Faiz and Makhdooms couplets above. The unattainable end utopia itself was a reworking of birha in its own way, as was the experience of Partition itself.

Poets aloofness from Partition helps explain why post-Partition Urdu poetry continued to invoke extra-national geography: the Leftist Pakistani poet Ibn-e-Insha (born in Jalandhar in 1927), composed Tu Kahan Chali Gayi Thi (Where Had You Gone) in the 1950s, gesturing with equal ease towards Karachi and Delhi.

Nazir Qaisers poetry is as ecumenical in its geography. Shiv Kumar Batalvi (often referred to as Punjabs Byron) drew on the ancient epic about Puran Bhagat of Sialkot for his epic verse play, Loona in 1965. Jagannath Azad came to India, but his poetry dwelled on memories of his homeland, his lost chaman (garden).

While in Pakistan on his first post-Partition visit in 1948, he wrote the celebrated couplet, Main apne ghar mein aaya hoon magar andaaz to dekho/ Ke apne aap ko manind-e-mehman leke aaya hoon [I have come into my own home, but look in what manner/ For I have brought myself like a guest].

It remained his home. Alienated as he was, he was still not a guest but guest-like. He was split into both host and guest, at once at home and not at home, desi and pardesi.

Pakistani poets also continued to reach for the non-Islamic but (idols) and puja (worship, implying idol worship) on which the ironic idiom of Urdu poetry depends, despite the vanishing, ghostlike presence of such things in their midst.

Indeed, in a sense, the entire Indo-Islamic poetic tradition presumes a world of Muslims coexisting with non-Muslims to dramatise the ironies of worldly and unworldly faith at its core. (Sikh identity markers similarly presume a mixed social context. Else why the need for distinguishing markers?) This literary transcendence of Partition mirrored socio-cultural continuities such as the celebrations of Indian festivals among Pakistanis near the border. (Riyaz Wani, interview with Anam Zakaria.)

As Zakaria notes, even those who left out of conviction felt a bond with the home they abandoned because of ongoing relationships and memories: There is no clear line for these people. It is difficult to decipher what they love more, where they belong more. This confusion is the only truth for them. (Zakaria.)

If the goal was a coherent national self, the result was a population of divided selves. The exile, the refugee, the orphaned, the converted, the abducted-and-reclaimed all these survivors were in different ways split in many cases violently split, even shredded selves.

Permit me a metaphor from physics: In quantum theory, the uncertain, non-deterministic, smeared nature of electrons helps explain the stability of atoms; similarly, the stability of South Asian identity depends on a kind of indeterminacy.

Punjabis in particular seem smeared through space. Nations are like the impossibly rigid atomic structures of classical mechanics. They cannot contain such uncertainty: Makhdoom and Faiz were both literally in captivity in independent India and Pakistan in 1951.

Gyanendra Pandey calls on historians to explore the meaning of Partition in terms of what it produced the social arrangements, forms of consciousness, subjectivities it created rather than focusing obsessively on causes, a focus betraying Indian historians commitments to particular utopic visions of India. (Pandey, Remembering Partition.)

Curiously, as Rakhshanda Jalil notes, Urdu poets focus more on the consequences of Partition than its causes. (Jalil.) To me, their preoccupation with effects reveals their sense of the epiphenomenal and possibly transient nature of Partition their preoccupation with other utopias, unfinished business that Partition traumatically disrupted. Pandey might find in poetry if not historical writing the earliest analysis of what Partition did to subjectivity and consciousness quite apart from the human destruction it unleashed.

Here again, we find intriguing intersections with shifting subjectivities in Europe. Enlightenment notions of a coherent, rational self had long since smothered notions of an internally split self among Europeans.

Early versions of Adam Smiths Theory of Moral Sentiments had described a divided or doubled self which became more metaphorical and less literal in later versions, once the notion of an individuated, internally coherent modern self took hold in the late 18th century. (See Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England.)

The turn of the twentieth century saw new testing of this concept, most conspicuously in metropolitan occultist circles who experimented with the relationship of self to other, albeit now locating the split internally, in the psychology and neurobiology of the individual, rather than in the operation of social claims on the individual.

Theosophists were part of this cultural world, most notably Annie Besant, whose journey from turn-of-the-century British socialism (she famously led the matchgirl strike in London in 1888) to a prominent leader in the Indian nationalist movement was inseparable from her explorations of spirituality and selfhood. (Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London.)

She too was mixed up in the world of poet-activists, joining the poet Sarojini Naidu in representing in London the case for Indian women to vote. (Naidu was a Bengali from Hyderabad who joined the national movement after the 1905 partition of Bengal and became the second woman to preside over Congress after Besant. She was governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh in 1947-49 when Urdu poets there deliberated staying or going.)

Now, the subject of Urdu poetry had long been understood as split. This was what Sufi longing for the union was about. Momins much-loved couplet is exemplary: Tum mere paas hote ho goya/ jab koi doosra nahin hota [You are with me thus/ as when no second person is there].

In true mystic union, the self becomes extinct. This idiom seems ready-made to address the post-Partition condition of a partial, parted, or divided self. Urdu as a poetic language figured critically in the articulation of this subjectivity. As Mufti shows in his beautiful analysis of Faizs poetry, Indianness has come to encompass the disavowal of Indianness (like the electron that both is and is not).

Mufti cites, paradigmatically, Faizs Marsia (Elegy) from a 1971 collection: Dur ja kar qarib ho jitney/ ham se kab qarib the itne/ Ab na aoge tum na jaoge/ vasl o hijran baham hue kitne. [The extent to which you are close now that you have gone far/ when were you ever so close to me/ Now you will neither come nor go/ how as one union and separation have become].

In this four-line poem, Mufti perceives a dialectic of self and other in which the subject and object of desire do not so much become one but simultaneously come near and become distant and are rendered uncertain. It recalls Zakarias story of a man in a Pakistani village who daily sees his old village across the border it is at once near and far. (Zakaria. A similar phenomenon transpires on the German border towns Edith Sheffer describes in Burned Bridge.)

This is the reality of modern Punjabi subjectivity: contradictory, tense, antagonistic. Faizs grasp of this dialectically produced self clearly resonated; his work has remained phenomenally popular across the region. As Mufti explains, he articulated an Indian experience of the self that took division seriously and yet transcended borders and communal and national divides, much as he tried to do in his own literary and political commitments.

After all, he worked within an idiom in which indefinite separation from the beloved was the only ground from which to contemplate union. He subversively renders the abandoned home as the beloved, rather than a heathen land virtuously abandoned inverting the religious interpretation of Partition as hijrat (in the sense of the Holy Prophets flight from Mecca to Medina).

Urdu could uniquely convey the reality of this split self, nurtured in Pakistan where it was cut off from its homelands in Delhi, the Deccan and Uttar Pradesh, where Urdus status simultaneously declined.

Poets worldly experience of exile and refuge gave hijr (separation, departure) a range of new, secular connotations, notes Mufti. (Mufti). Faizs agonistic embrace of that inheritance is a South Asian expression of modernity, at once reminding us of the worldly basis of religious experience itself what early Punjabi romances expressed as allegory, or, in the language of the Punjabi tappa (folk lyric): Milna taan rab nu hai, tera pyaar bahaana hai [It is with god that I seek to unite, your love is merely the pretext]. For long, poets have grasped the instrumental nature of the worldly experience for the sake of higher spiritual experience.

The persistence of that mystical idiom, and the love successive generations profess for it, reveals the continued intimacy of the secular, modern self with its religious inheritance. In this too, modern South Asian subjectivity senses its incompleteness, its exilic existence. (On this see also Mufti. This is not a uniquely South Asian quality, of course. See for instance, Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains.)

In short, we cannot think of post-Partition identity only in the terms of the normalised vocabulary of the new nation-states, presuming autonomous national selves based on the European template. Progressive Writers attached to such requirements of normality were the kind who, Mufti speculates, suddenly turned against Manto, whose work and affect fell beyond that pale. (Mufti. Manto was disowned by the Pakistani Marxist-leaning literary set. Charged with obscenity, he avoided his sentence of prison with hard labour on appeal.)

The possibility of transcending national identity within oneself is powerful. For EP Thompson (in Scotts luminous interpretation, again), poetrys role was to leaven politics with imagination, to suggest a middle ground betweendisenchantment with perfectionist illusions and complete apostasy. That ground is the demanding, yet a creative place of continuing aspiration. (Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History.)

The work of continuing aspiration is the work of Azads deewane. The split South Asian self is the middle ground poets gave us between disenchantment and apostasy. It is Becketts, I cant go on, Ill go on and Gramscis mantra-like, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

The New Left that Thompson helped form in England after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 attracted the Communist, atheist and anti-imperialist Pakistani Tariq Ali, the grandson of Sikandar Hayat Khan and an important interlocutor of Edward Said, another deep thinker about exile and anti-colonialism who met Faiz in Beirut.

Alis anti-imperialist critiques were as globally sweeping as Faizs poetry about Chile, Palestine, Namibia and the Rosenbergs. Talal Asad, son of Muhammad Asad, has emerged as a major thinker about religion and secularism. The chain of inheritance and restless, continuing aspiration is long.

Thompson came to India for the first time in 1976, after our poets alternative visions had long expired. He was warmly welcomed by Indira Gandhi and her government in acknowledgement of the friendship between their fathers. But it was the time of Indiras Emergency.

He was horrified by the governments repression of dissent and by the Communist Party of Indias support of it and noted the strange convergence of Western modernising theory with orthodox Moscow-directed socialist theory: Both imagined a modern urban intellectual elite with know-how imposing modernity and progress upon the nation.

Both prioritised top-down, capital-intensive technologically-driven developments depending on a disciplined workforce for national economic take-off. Through a vulgar (ie un-poetic) economic determinism, Marxism echoed utilitarian and positivist ideas. (Scott Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory: EP Thompson, the New Left, and Postwar British Politics; Hamiltons 2007 talk at the History Department of the University of Auckland.) Politics without poetry is lifeless, and poetry without politics tends to the self-indulgent.

It is the same in Pakistan: I was fortunate enough to meet Jazib Qureshi in 2016 (2021 note: he has sadly just passed away), through the genius of the Bay Areas Urdu Academy, and he commented on the absence of poets of real standing in todays Pakistan, no one to fill the shoes of Josh or Iqbal.

If modern Urdu poetry evolved as critique of empire and nation it is no surprise that as the Left has crumbled so has poetrys most powerfully transcendent function. Modis India is bent on suffocating the Left further.

Indias poets are returning their national awards in the face of the governments thuggish attacks on dissent of all kinds, rediscovering their role in history and outside exclusionist mainstream nationalism. (See David Barstow and Suhasini Raj, Indian Writers Spurn Awards as Violence Flares, New York Times.) As we continue to look to technology to save us, despite the unending disasters that pile up before our eyes, it is time perhaps to revisit and reinvent the possibility and promise of poetic action.

Poetry is a social and collective endeavour. The writer alone cannot make poetry or poetic action. In Urdu poetry, the reader identifies entirely with the first-person voice of the poet. The poets place in history becomes the readers too.

This possibility for such total identification, for a kind of subsumption in the poet, is astonishingly universal. I identify with the Hum (collective and first-person subject) of Faizs poetry, even though (on the face of it) I am a woman, a Hindu and an Indian Punjabi (where he was a man, a Muslim and a Pakistani Punjabi).

Urdu poetry is queer in this sense: a space of non-normative identity and politics. And yet, it could not attend to the plight of Heer. When Jagannath Azad was leaving Pakistan after a visit to return to India, Muhammad Tufail, editor of the Pakistani Progressive literary journal Nuqush, took sweets to him at the station, quipping, Tumhein to yun rukhsat karte hain jaise beti ko rukhsat kiya jaata hai [You were send away in the way one sends off a daughter]. (I thank Hamida Chopra for sharing this story.)

Instead of separation from a beloved of unspecified gender, he rendered Azads exile from his homeland in the more clearly gendered form of the daughter leaving her parents home to join her new family after marriage a rite common to Hindu, Sikh and Muslim weddings in the region.

Playing on the land-as-mother trope, the departure becomes forward-looking, a rite of passage to adulthood progress itself. It is more final than the beloveds separation, but also less rigid, in that a girl can and does go back to her old home at times, albeit to be indulged as a guest with few substantive entitlements. But Tufails line also reminds us that, however vaguely gendered the poetic terms in which Faiz and others wrote about it, Partitions violence was deeply gendered.

Amrita Pritams plea to Waris Shah and Mantos stories, like Khol Do (Open It) acknowledged that reality. So too has scholarly work on Partition by Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Veena Das and others. They diagnose the complicity of the two new states in appropriating the violence that was done to women within an ideology of community and nation.

Shiv Kumar Batalvi (born in 1936) may have been activated by such themes in his recuperation of womens agency and sexuality in Loona, his celebrated retelling of the ancient epic of Puran Bhagat in 1965. Stylistically, he was influenced by the qissas as well as European epic poetry. The legend goes that the Sialkot prince Puran Bhagat spurned the advances of his young stepmother, Loona, a sinfully lustful seductress, who wreaked violent revenge: his arms and legs were amputated and he wound up exiled from his home, becoming an ascetic who later forgave and blessed his punishers.

But Batalvi tells the story from Loonas point of view: the disgust of this lower-caste young girl from Chamba at being married to an old king against her wishes, her entirely reasonable desire to be with a man her own age, Purans rejection of her out of suspicion of the merely sexual rather than spiritual nature of her attraction, and her self-sacrificial revenge.

For, her destruction of Puran is her own too. She knows she will live in infamy for it, but hopes that her infamy might prevent society from producing forcing future Loonas to marry against their will. Having borne the blame for Purans death for centuries, Loona finally finds peace in Batalvis play. Known for his passionate expression of the agony of separated lovers, here Batalvi redeems worldly love and the rebellion of youth. (For more on Loona, see Sa Soza, Shiv Kumar Batalvi.)

Here the punishing violence of Partition is visited on a male body, with Purans dismemberment and exile. In blaming society rather than Loona for this tragic outcome, Batalvi at once exonerates the individual perpetrator of violence (whatever her gender) while validating all Punjabi womens need and desire for such revenge.

He renders the Punjabi subject of history as female. Notably, he published this earthily Punjabi work on the eve of the repartitioning of Indian Punjab on linguistic lines, when other Punjabi Hindus claimed Hindi rather than Punjabi as their mother tongue, a choice made possible by the longstanding elision of Hindi with Urdu.

Loona was the Patakha Guddi (Firecracker Kite) of her time (a song penned by the poet Irshad Kamil, a Muslim from Malerkotla in Indian Punjab and sung by Jyoti and Sultana Nooran (Punjabi Muslims from Jalandhar). (Composed by AR Rahman for Imitiaz Alis film Highway.) She is the poet of her own destiny. She lives her contradiction as a means of superseding loss, a way of living as if in exile even when at home, as Maulana Azad felt he did, given his particular background and education and relationship to Muslim and nationalist politics in his time. (On Azad, see Mufti. Certainly, it is also a luxury of class.)

Modern Urdu writing, having displaced the relationship of language and self to place as Mufti tells us, is a vehicle for exilic thinking, an awareness, wherever one happens to be, that modern history has been one of marginalisation and uprooting on a massive scale, that split selfhoods are typical, in South Asia, but also in Germany, the Balkans, Cyprus, Palestine/Israel, Ireland and elsewhere. (Mufti.)

What is the poets role in history? Of course, the question is romantic.

Byron was romantic, Thompson was romantic, Faiz was romantic, Punjabis are romantic, land is romantic. And romanticism has its dangers: the British were romantic, Nehru was romantic, Silicon Valley is a romance. Dams and drones are romantic.

The Hindu Right and the Islamic Right offer romances of their own. There is a marketplace of romance, but the romance of the Left has too long been out of stock. Bollywood cannot do it alone, and it too, after all, is bound up in the worship of profit, god and nation.

Part one of this essay: Priya Satia: Why poetry remains a primary resource in remembering and understanding the Partition.

More here:

How the Partition contributed to the queerness of Urdu poetry to make it non-normative - Scroll.in

The immersive narrative art installation called Nove Ita opens this weekend.

Denver loves its immersive art. Weve got not one, but two immersive Van Gogh experiences, Prismajics popular Shiki Dreams installation, whats soon to be the countrys biggest Meow Wolf installation yet, and countless other pop-up immersive art experiences.

While youre waiting for Meow Wolf to open, check out Novo Ita, a new augmented-reality art experience that combines immersive, narrative, psychedelic elements and is created entirely out of recycled and reclaimed materials.

Brought to Denver by the team behind Spookadelia, Meow Wolf Denver artist Douglas A. Schenck and a team of more than 35 artists, writers, performers and tech professionals, Nova Ita takes guests into a magical, botanical utopia where humans and nature live in harmony. Guests can engage with augmented reality spirit guides and wander from installation to installation, where theyll interact with botanic art, lights and sound to uncover a narrative and learn more about this strange world.

Nova Ita challenges visitors to take a world-centered view that recognizes the relationships that exist among all living systems & the many ways these systems are consistently moving toward harmony and balance, according to press materials. It is a movement towards a novo ita which roughly translates from Latin to new we or new us.

The experience runs through August 29 out of Spectras gallery on South Broadway. You can buy tickets now.

See the original post:

Spectra Art Space opens immersive art installation, Nova Ita, in Denver this summer - Denverite

In Mexico, we call the tasks that fall to us unexpectedly and must be attended urgently a "bomberazo" (a term similar to "bombshell" in English). For any work team, the first bombshells usually correspond to unforeseen events or information. However, this way of solving problems tends to take hold as a modus operandi among us. Too readily, we become accustomed to postponing essential things until they become urgent. Perhaps it is because goods are not plentiful, so we prefer to wait until the task in question proves to be truly necessary. Yes, maybe it all reduces to a resource economy.

The world at large experienced the pandemic as a highly contagious and lethal virus that fell on humanity overnight; we had to rush to cope with the disaster, firehose in hand. Without prior warning, we learned to be at home 24 hours a day, wash our hands frequently, wear masks, distance ourselves from others, and do our activities remotely. (Unfortunately, many also had to learn to lose their loved ones, jobs, lifestyles).

However, the arrival of the pandemic was not truly new and unexpected; it had been anticipated many years, all over the world. As evidence of this that I found in my personal library, in 2009, Dr. Octavio Gmez Dants warned about the subject in an article published in a high-circulation, prestigious journal. That same year, another university science magazine titled one of its covers "The Foreseen Epidemic." Likewise, the title of a 2015 book demonstrates what I am saying: The Mexican Influenza and the Coming Pandemic. In it, six authors announced that a global health catastrophe such as the one we are experiencing was looming over us.

So why was nothing done to prevent this? In daydreams, we can go back a few years and imagine leaders meeting worldwide to resolve future pandemics: UN-type congresses where measures would be dictated to reduce the expected impact; economic agreements, legal briefs, information campaigns, hospital prevention protocols, virtual technology development.

From this imaginary congress, international organizations in the field of education, such as UNESCO, would call on school systems around the world to develop prevention content and practices and to leverage the unstoppable influx of electronic media to organize preventively, logistically and technologically, the deployment of emergency remote education (as Fernanda Ibez taught us to call it in an article published here). Then they would have had years to run training drills with students and teachers and develop teaching strategies, health prevention measures, instructions for the use of masks, and healthy distancing.

Why then was nothing done?

Vctor Briones, professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, explains it to us in two words: all this preparation "is expensive." Just hearing this, deep indignation grips us: How expensive could it be compared to the costs of sacrificing the world's population and (speaking of our field now) forcing the entire educational community to become experts in remote teaching from one moment to the next? The teacher Maya Niro rightly calls all this a shipwreck: "At that moment, I boarded a ship in the middle of a storm, where I was given a different rudder than the one I knew how to maneuver."

Con rabia e impotencia imagina uno a los gobiernos de todo el mundo pasando en silencio la estafeta a sus sucesores o ms que la estafeta, la pistola de una ruleta rusa que llevaba dentro un virus que pondra a toda la humanidad contra las cuerdas.

With rage and impotence, one imagines the governments of the whole world silently passing the baton to their successors or, worse than that, the Russian roulette wheel pistol that the virus carries to put all humanity against the ropes.

*

However, the anger wanes when Briones' response reveals its realism. Calm returns. We understand then that by saying "expensive," the analyst is talking about an incomprehensible "expensive," not only in money, time and effort, but also in risk: risk for the greatest economic and political interests, yes, but also emotional and mental risk for the world's population in the face of the news. The announcement that (who knows when) a catastrophe will occur may generate immense anguish for some, more than the event itself. At the end of it all, we can foresee a wave of intense disagreements, confrontations, and conflicts coming, possibly even social chaos. In those circumstances, preventing and preparing ourselves could be a disaster.

Perhaps, despite supposed human rationality, our coordinating such an event would be as tricky as getting the world's bees to organize in the face of the threat of climate change.

*

A new blow against the rudder: What if world leaders then decided to let the pandemic come and function a bit as a "drill" for other health crises that are expected to arrive soon? Just thinking about it, anger and horror return: a thousand conspiracy theories come to mind, distrust of the authorities (including the scientists) grows, and pseudoscientific proposals, rejection of the medical/hospital system and vaccines, and alternative treatments are talked about with great hope. Finally, against this background of indignation, resignation, and painful doubts, the image remains of a group of leaders waiting year after year for the appearance of patient zero to sound the world alarm and call on us all (right now!) to put out the fire.

If action had been taken in these two decades, if world leaders had decided to prevent and prepare people for a possible pandemic, if they had organized international meetings and emergency remote education drills, everyone in the world would have ended up asking the crucial question: why is a pandemic inevitable? Then we would have turned with distressing alarm to the corners of the planet that, for the moment, prefer to remain hidden. Thousands of industries shred the planetary ecosystems, disturbing, among other things, animal coexistence and boosting the proliferation and diversification of viruses.

Dr. Julio Frenk, former Secretary of Health of Mexico and current rector of the University of Miami, has not tired of repeating that the COVID-19 pandemic is a phenomenon that has its origin in human activity. In an interview in the magazine CONECTA of Tec de Monterrey, he emphatically summarizes: "Pandemics are not natural events; they are anthropogenic, reflecting inhumane practices."

Peter Daszak, president of Ecohealth Alliance, confirms, "There is no great mystery about the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic or any modern pandemic. Human activities that drive climate change and biodiversity loss also generate pandemic risks through their impact on our environment.

The problem is more or less this: There are more animals with contagious diseases. The more they reproduce and coexist, the more variants of viruses emerge, and the more likely it is that one of these will be highly contagious and lethal to humans. The same happens when an ecosystem is destroyed, and animals migrate and concentrate in habitats where healthy distancing is impossible and viral contagion increases. Historically, the issue boils down to the fact that while animal husbandry was performed in small jacals by a few people, the chances of a deadly disease emerging were slim. However, when we talk about a virus mutating and spreading among a huge herd of pigs on an industrial-meat-production farm staffed by hundreds of people (as occurs now in many parts of the world) or thousands of bats cornered in a cave in China for having lost their forests, then it is more likely that a homicidal viral mutation will emerge.

*

To the above, let us add a human population that lives in narrow spaces in an overcrowded locality, to which come all kinds of rodents, birds and primates seeking better living conditions. Let us say that these people also tend to eat meat, often wild animals, and they attend bullfights or cockfights. They frequent markets with live animals, hunt or traffic fauna, make fur coats, perform rituals, or practice traditional medicine with animals. Some have weak immune systems due to poor nutrition. They live in poor hygiene conditions, work in cleaning and sanitation, and do not have access to adequate health services. In addition, to top it all, many of them (rich and poor) travel through their country or cross borders into super-congested land and air transport hubs. When these things happen, the greater is the creation of lethal viruses and the shorter the time they spread throughout the world. These factors are what epidemiologists have been studying since the last century, and they have come to make significantly reliable forecasts.

On all of the above, Dr. Julio Frenk can assure that the COVID-19 pandemic is man-made. Indeed, we are not victims. When we refer to the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was created in a laboratory, we can believe that it is true because humans have turned nature into an immense laboratory where the creation of lethal viruses is already a tremendous probability.

Knowing all this, what can the school do with so much and so crude information? Indeed, the first thing we want is to leave the question asked and run away. Haven't we gone through enough? Because in the challenging and terrible present, the school seems to be thwarted; it has come undone. We have had to adapt to a model without physical coexistence. We encounter faces without bodies in virtual classrooms where the air is not shared; we listen to breathless voices and pour our presence through electronic cables, resenting everywhere the lack of resources. The three dimensions of space have been replaced by two, by one, by zero (many students have not been able to receive any classes and can only wait for the day to return to school).

The tension of the Zoom classes leads to socialization to which we are not accustomed. Teachers regret having to communicate with their students through a screen. Girls and boys have stopped touching and running together. That absence of touch, that lack of physical simultaneity, seems to have detracted from the tri-dimensionality of the world, causing a kind of desiccation of the environment and even a painful habit of isolation.

On the monitor, what we know as a "class" becomes a mosaic, a mural. It is almost impossible to establish complicities; the teacher's management is hindered. "Now the teachers (Paulette Delgado reminds us ) are distanced from their students, which can trigger anxiety from not knowing how they are and impotence from not being able to help them."

Technologies are still not advanced enough to allow that chaos of voices that brings the classroom to life when everyone speaks at the same time. There is no complete sensory perception; everything is limited to the visual and auditory senses. We only have a two-dimensional appreciation of others.

In short, the loss of the collective and private spaces that are part of school socialization prevails.

However, despite all this, we decide to be brave and stop to think a little. Is face-to-face socialization truly the only one possible? Is there another that we have somehow neglected? Suddenly, an answer comes to mind. It has to do with the school ritual.

First, let us recall the idea of the philosopher Emil Wittgenstein that our language contains complete mythology. It seems to me that this means, for example, that knowing "I am part of a school" (whether online or remote) enrolls me in a learning community where multiple social roles are played. The entire personality is engaged and exercised. In that mythological community, we are sometimes heroes, sometimes wise, sometimes villains, and we buzz from order to disorder, attracted by a common goal that gives meaning to our encounter

Today, when it is difficult to perceive reality and understand what we can do with it, the school still thrives in that role play, perhaps more mobilized than ever to give its very detailed response. Language and mythology are in a state of freedom and freshness that allows processing the harsh reality with incomparable spontaneity.

At the beginning of the pandemic, there was the possibility of not going back to school even virtually and having to abandon everything until further notice. All the community members cried out with the courage of heroes who wanted to continue, and they did whatever was necessary to achieve it. They discovered a new and powerful form of socialization: they confirmed as never before that they belong to that convulsed world, not as victims but as beings whom the planet needs and awaits something. They are active; they resist; they respond indignantly and compassionately like heroes of shared mythology who advance toward a joint and deep dialogue.

A dialogue not only among them and with the rest of humanity, but with nature, to which we believed we had imposed our discourse and it has reacted. Nature, which made us intelligent and from which we have passed prepared. Today the kids are inwardly debating the enduring belief that we own every environment. They are beginning to understand themselves as biological beings, sensitive and immersed in a painful but empathetic existence and search for meaning. They are together, learning and trembling. Avoiding triumphalism, they maintain utopia, fulfilling what the writer Eduardo Galeano teaches that this is not something that is attained but something to guide us in our progress.

Today young people see each other, touch each other at least imaginatively, feeling that something common among them exists. They dream of feats in which they take risks, are endangered, and even die and are resurrected several times. All their inner mythology buzzes. In many ways, they sense that what happens externally also happens inside them, and they ultimately take the truth of their time into their hands because, as sad as it is, it is still their truth.

In school, the call to truth puts into conversation all our ideas, superstitions, and beliefs, aligns them, and attracts them to a place where they fit, including even the conspiratorial and pseudoscientific. Already in that place, which we call "dialogue," teachers can lead them little by little until they begin to glimpse a common truth.

Thus, the students have become aware that what we are experiencing now is almost certain to happen again. (The tycoon Bill Gates, with all the information he can access, has stated that a new pandemic can arrive between three and 20 years). Today, hurrying to impulse changes that reduce the risk of pandemics, among other things, students inform one another and discuss how to convince governments to invest resources in disease prevention, even not knowing if or when the diseases will arrive (finally, understanding that letting them come can be much more expensive than preventing them). They inquire and discuss how to strengthen global health systems and basic hygiene; how to create and promote forms of production that do not overcrowd spaces or hoard resources in the hands of a few. They seek to prevent the rise in family well-being from becoming synonymous with over-consumption of meat (as occurs throughout the world) and, simultaneously, reduce industrial livestock, which in addition to being cruel, requires massive deforestations (such as the recent ones in the Amazon), also causing a catastrophic emission of greenhouse gases.

2020 and 2021 are not lost years; they are saved years, saved by and for schools. More than ever, we are a community (global, as if that were not enough) searching for a balance between what we want and what we really can and should want, understanding as the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater explains that the destiny of others is our own.

In school, Truth is a call more than a conclusion; we are summoned to it by the school bell. But what will that truth look like? It is only out of curiosity that we ask ourselves this question because we know how difficult it will be to answer. Nevertheless, we want to imagine a little, together, the kind of truth we can conceive in this threatened but hopeful present we have described.

The first indication of an answer is found in the increasingly visible presence of the so-called "false sciences" or pseudosciences. It is a fact that, with the pandemic, this presence demonstrated its global dimensions, exploding in a kind of boom that many scientists are beginning to seriously fear. We have all seen astrological or conspiratorial theories sprout about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 treatments that science says not been studied with sufficient rigor or are flat-out fiction.

My opinion is that, however far-fetched they may be, these positions come to occupy a space that reason, and especially scientific thought, tend to abandon. I refer to that delicate terrain where objectivity and something we can call "spirituality" go hand in hand.

Many people of science claim that their certainties are the only reliable knowledge. They argue that having been proven, we should rely only on them if we want to make good decisions (this includes the non-exact sciences, such as psychology and pedagogy). How can we not listen to them if, with methodical idealism, they claim that there is an ultimate truth that is not only affordable but verifiable? The prestigious popularizer Brian Greene, for example, states that the so-called String Theory may soon solve the central enigma of the universe. Saying one can determine Truth indeed seems a conceited, know-it-all stance, but we must recognize that in a world where most of us feel like carriers of the truth, those who limit themselves to what they can see seem humble.

Of course, it is also true that as the writer, G. K. Chesterton, says with fine irony some of these scientists are "very proud of their humility." Many of them, and their supporters, occasionally overstep their bounds and claim that, apart from their own, there is no other true knowledge. Daniel C. Dennet, a famous rationalist philosopher, states that "nothing we want to address can be beyond the limits of science." God, spirituality, and such things must be addressed as cultural phenomena that can be explained with scientific studies on evolution and the brain (Dennet is known worldwide as one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism.)

It is the old philosophical problem one of the first between two tendencies: that of "forcing life, life as a whole, (to follow) the destiny of knowledge," as the philosopher Mara Zambrano points out, and that of accepting that something exists beyond reason we can access by other means: toward reason, toward the reasonable Erich Fromm explains to us: it is up to man to admit his limitations and to know that "we will never capture the secrets of man and the universe, but we can know them, nevertheless," in other ways.

It is surprising to learn that some of the most influential theories that deny that total truth can be achieved come from Science itself. Without needing to believe in "an afterlife," experts like Niels Bohr (whose atomic model we studied in high school) have shown that the most here is not as "true" as believed. Eugene Wigner, Nobel Laureate in Physics, flatly states that it is impossible to explain reality without referring to infinite cosmic consciousness.

This brings us face to face with the question of how the educational field should approach the issue of scientific truth and its not-always-humble opposition to the so-called "spiritual." To summarize, I believe that school truth, while retaining its scientific inclination, must return to forms of knowledge such as those that Fromm describes. (In one of his most famous books, he refers specifically to knowledge through Love). And suppose we, the supporters of science (starting in the school itself), do not reasonably approach the field where the explainable and the inexplicable are linked. In that case, we will allow all kinds of conflicting ideas to take over that territory. Yes, as long as rational knowledge continues to pretend that it has the last word without admitting its limits or honoring the place that corresponds to the spiritual with true humility; if reason refuses to reach out "beyond" itself, envisioning continuity between reason and mystery, then it will be leaving that corner vacant and encouraging opportunistic positions to occupy it, some of them perhaps only nave, wanting to safeguard the delicate link with superstitions.

In the debate between science and belief (we might better say "open litigation"), the school has remained on the sidelines, no doubt respecting the scientific criterion but presenting itself at the same time as neutral where the other side is concerned. However, let us trust that the classrooms will increasingly become the site of reconciliation, elevating the search for truth to other realities where, being well-grounded, we can flourish.

See the original post:

Opinion | The School Ritual: Utopia, Truth, and Spirituality in the Face of the Pandemic - Observatory of Educational Innovation

A new month means an exciting batch of new content is arriving on HBO Max! As has been the case for much of 2021 thus far, the big news for the streamer is the simultaneous release of a big theatrical property on the same day that it arrives in theaters. This month, there are actually three!

The highly anticipatedSpace Jam: A New Legacyarrives on HBO Max on July 16 and will see NBA great LeBron James following in Michael Jordans footsteps by playing basketball with a bunch of animated Looney Tunes characters. (Just go with it.) Elsewhere, two other new WB films also arrive this month, heist dramaNo Sudden Move and animated sequelTom and Jerry in New York.

Elsewhere, theGossip Girlrevival Reboot? Remake? How are we categorizing this thing? will also hit our screens in July, bringing back all the Upper East side scandal and drama we can handle though now with a premium cable sheen. IThough there appears to be a sad lack of headbands.)

And fans of The CW dramas can also rejoice, the full runs of the most recent seasons ofBatwomanand Culturess faveNancy Drew hit the streamer toward the end of the month.

FBOY Island, Max Original Season 1 PremiereRomeo Santos: King of Bachata, 2021 (HBO)Romeo Santos Utopia Live from MetLife Stadium, 2021 (HBO)

Come! (aka Eat!), 20208 Mile, 2002 (HBO)All Dogs Go to Heaven 2, 1996 (HBO)All Dogs Go to Heaven, 1989 (HBO)Behind Enemy Lines, 1997 (HBO)Beneath the Planet of the Apes, 1970 (HBO)Bio-Dome, 1996 (HBO)Black Panthers, 1968Blackhat, 2015 (HBO)Brubaker, 1980 (HBO)Cantinflas (HBO)Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, 1972 (Extended Version) (HBO)Cousins, 1989 (HBO)Dark Water, 2005 (HBO)Darkness Falls, 2003 (HBO)Demolition Man, 1993Dirty Work, 1998 (HBO)Disturbia, 2007 (HBO)Doctor Who Holiday 2020 Special: Revolution of the Daleks, 2020Duplex, 2003 (HBO)Escape from the Planet of the Apes, 1971 (HBO)Eves Bayou, 1997Firestarter, 1984 (HBO)First, 2012For Colored Girls, 2010 (HBO)For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada, 2012 (HBO)Full Bloom, Max Original Season 2 FinaleGhost in the Machine, 1993 (HBO)The Good Lie, 2014 (HBO)Gun Crazy, 1950House on Haunted Hill, 1999Identity Thief, 2013 (Extended Version) (HBO)Ira & Abby, 2007 (HBO)Joe Versus the Volcano, 1990Judas and the Black Messiah, 2021 (HBO)Laws Of Attraction, 2004 (HBO)Lucky, 2017 (HBO)Maid in Manhattan, 2002Married to the Mob, 1988 (HBO)Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, 1997Mississippi Burning, 1988 (HBO)Monster-In-Law, 2005Mousehunt, 1997 (HBO)My Brother Luca (HBO)No Sudden MovePleasantville, 1998The Prince of Tides, 1991Project X, 1987 (HBO)The Punisher, 2017 (HBO)Punisher: War Zone, 2008 (HBO)Rambo, 2008 (Directors Cut) (HBO)Reds, 1981 (HBO)Reservoir Dogs, 1992 (HBO)The Return of the Living Dead, 1985 (HBO)Return of the Living Dead III, 1993 (Extended Version) (HBO)Rounders, 1998 (HBO)Saturday Night Fever, 1977 (Directors Cut) (HBO)Scream, 1996Scream 2, 1997Scream 3, 2000Semi-Tough, 1977 (HBO)The Sessions, 2012 (HBO)Set Up, 2012 (HBO)Snake Eyes, 1998 (HBO)Staying Alive, 1983 (HBO)Stuart Little, 1999The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 2003Tom and Jerry in New York, Max Original Series PremiereTrick R Treat, 2009 (HBO)Tyler Perrys Daddys Little Girls, 2007 (HBO)Tyler Perrys Diary of a Mad Black Woman, 2005 (HBO)Tyler Perrys I Can Do Bad All by Myself, 2009 (HBO)Tyler Perrys Madea Goes To Jail, 2009 (HBO)Tyler Perrys Madeas Big Happy Family, 2011 (HBO)Tyler Perrys Madeas Family Reunion, 2006 (HBO)Tyler Perrys Why Did I Get Married Too, 2010 (HBO)The Watcher, 2016 (HBO)The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, 2007 (HBO)Westworld (Movie), 1973White Chicks (Unrated & Uncut Version), 2004The White Stadium, 1928Wont Back Down, 2012 (HBO)Zero Days, 2016 (HBO)

Lo Que Siento por Ti (aka What I Feel for You) (HBO)

Let Him Go, 2020 (HBO)Nancy Drew, Season 2

Dr. STONE, Seasons 1 and 2 (Subtitled) (Crunchyroll Collection)Shiva Baby, 2021 (HBO)

The Dog House: UK, Max Original Season 2 PremiereGossip Girl, Max Original Series PremiereHuman Capital, 2020 (HBO)The Hunt, 2020 (HBO)Looney Tunes Cartoons, Max Original Season 2 Premiere

July 9

Frankie Quinones: Superhomies (HBO)

The White Lotus, Limited Series Premiere (HBO)

Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes, Documentary Series Premiere (HBO)

Tom & Jerry, 2021 (HBO)

Betty, Season 2 Finale (HBO)Space Jam: A New Legacy, Warner Bros. Film Premiere, 2021Un Disfraz Para Nicolas (aka A Costume for Nicolas) (HBO)

The Empty Man, 2020 (HBO)

100 Foot Wave, Documentary Series Premiere (HBO)

Through Our Eyes, Max Original Documentary Series Premiere

Corazon De Mezquite (aka Mezquites Heart) (HBO)

Freaky, 2020 (HBO)

Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes, Documentary Series Finale (HBO)

Batwoman, Season 2Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel (HBO)

Uno Para Todos (aka One for All) (HBO)

What are you planning to check out on HBO Max this month? Let us know in the comments.

Read more here:

Gossip Girl, Space Jam: A New Legacy, and more on HBO Max in July - Culturess

Conspiracy time: Maybe the light release week was because musicians knew of the heat wave before we did? Oh, its a holiday weekend? I sound unreasonable? Whatever, because we still got some bangers to prepare for a hot, sweaty and rockin July. Practice your synchronized swimming in the kiddie pool with The Go! Team playing in the background, or have a house kickback with Laura Mvulas 80s-infused style. Perhaps G Herbo is your grilling music of choice, and Snapped Ankles can accompany you when you may have had one too many burgers before you pass out in the aforementioned kiddie pool. We wont judge. Have a safe and happy long weekend from the Paste staff and find a new album to tide you over until next week!

London rockers Desperate Journalist demanded our attention with the April release of Fault, the lead single from their fourth full-length Maximum Sorrow! The follow-up to 2019s In Search of the Miraculous, the album lives up to that songs promise, with Jo Bevan (vocals), Rob Hardy (guitar), Simon Drowner (bass) and Caz Helbert (drum) consistently delivering moody, tightly-wound post-punk thats occasionally brightened by flashes of ethereally melodic dream-pop (e.g., Personality Girlfriend, Utopia, and the particularly light The Victim), like a flare turning night into day. Bevans vocals bring to mind the late Dolores ORiordan; meanwhile, her bandmates couch her contemplations of fear, uncertainty and conflict in shimmering waves of instrumentation. The overwhelming sense you get from Maximum Sorrow! is one of confidence and control, as if Desperate Journalist know the 70s gothic rock tradition theyre operating within both inside and out, and are uniquely equipped to carry it forward. Scott Russell

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The sixth album from English indie-pop collective The Go! Team, and their first since 2018s Semicircle, Get Up Sequences Part One is a characteristically vivid mosaic of samples and melody, certain to add some color and verve to your holiday weekend. The albums upbeat brightness belies the tribulations bandleader Ian Parton endured during its making: He began losing his hearing due to Menieres disease while recording, recalling in a statement, The trauma of losing my hearing gave the music a different dimension for me and it transformed the album into more of a life raft. Whatever the corresponding pain in your own life may be, Get Up Sequences Part One is a safe bet to whisk you away from it, if only for a little while. From the horns and steel drums of We Do it but Never Know Why and shuffling groove of A Bee Without Its Sting to Indigo Yajs singsongy, flute-backed raps on Cookie Scene and the battering ram toms of closer World Remember Me Now, The Go! Team have added another kaleidoscopic entry to their joyous, technicolor universe. Scott Russell

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The fourth album from Chicagos G Herbo, 25 sprawls at 19 tracks and nearly an hour of runtime, with buzzy collaborators including Polo G, 21 Savage, Gunna, Lil Tjay and The Kid LAROI chipping in verses. Herbie peppers his gritty prestige raps with just enough bounce and melody to make them go down easy, but its the heft of his subject matter that deserves close attention: A devoted advocate for destigmatizing mental health issues in his community, the Windy City emcee offers his perspective on the hard-knock life many can only imagine: Broad day, had guns blazin with the bravest, for real / Seen action like a movie but that shit was real / Then bein too courageous got my n*gga killed, he raps on Stand the Rain, letting the beat ride for a full minute as he speaks plainly to PTSD and the cycle of violence he remains trapped in: Im only 25 but I feel like Ive lived ten lifetimes. Rather than using street violence as a superficial stylistic trademark, G Herbo puts the implications of that life on full display, telling his truth in songs with downright operatic power. Scott Russell

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A few months after 2016s A Dreaming Room was released, Laura Mvula was dropped from her label. So, she did what anyone else would do: made a kickass pop album to show them what they were missing out on. Her righteous return on Pink Noise is a crisp homage to the 80s, with elements of Michael Jackson and Prince finding a fitting home within Mvulas impressive artistry that extends far past the music into the entire aesthetic (have you seen those press photos?). Mvula didnt get bitter, she got better, and its a refreshing comeback if weve ever seen one. Jade Gomez

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At times recalling the best of indie-pop stalwarts Animal Collective and Yeasayer, Snapped Ankles create a captivating and unique sound completely their own on Forest Of Your Problem. Taking inspiration from the forest, the band draws from that kind of mysticism to effortlessly hop across genres, moving from the acid basslines of Psythurhythm to the new wave influence of Undilated Lovers, leading to the ecstatic conclusion of Xylophobia. Through their explosive music and unique style of production, as well as their mysterious performative antics, Snapped Ankles in recent years have proven themselves to be one of the most intriguing acts coming out of London, and thats only bolstered by Forest Of Your Problem. Jason Friedman

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New Albums to Stream Today: The Go! Team, Laura Mvula, Snapped Ankles and more - Paste - Paste Magazine

Former Trump campaign communications strategist and expert DNA communicator Jason Miller has launched a new social media platform he hopes will be the long-awaited free-speech utopia to rival Big Tech's supposedly crushing grip on public discourse.

The app known as GETTR, not to be confused with Turkey-based groceries app Getir has actually been available on the Google and Apple app stores since mid-June, but had only been downloaded a thousand or so times on each until it was soft-launched yesterday (1 July).

The app's official launch day will be 4 July, which will undoubtedly lead to hugely positive coverage from any tech journalists who have to cover it, instead of being at home celebrating Independence Day with their families.

In a pre-launch interview on the US right-wing news network Newsmax, Miller claimed that GETTR was going to "blow away anything on social media right now."

"Here is a thing I think that has really stymied a lot of conservatives in our efforts previously: we haven't had a lot of good products," he said, seemingly oblivious to the fact that conservatives have had access to exactly the same products as liberals, libertarians, greens, communists and everybody else up until this point. They just never paid enough attention to the terms and conditions.

The main selling point for Miller's new venture seems to be that GETTR will have fewer pesky rules to catch out well-meaning and under-represented right-wing voices, an aspiration it shares with Parler, Gab, Frank, Minds, and seemingly dozens of others. However, GETTR's terms are actually as restrictive as Twitter's, if not more so:

Click to enlarge

As YouTuber JustALazyGamer has pointed out, this effectively just makes it Twitter without the porn.

If Twitter is its main rival and the internet is lacking "good product," you would expect the new site to be radically different. But instead GETTR shares a great deal in common with the more established microblogging site, effectively cloning Twitter's UI and layout while missing out some of the features. This makes Miller's suggestion that conservative voices were just lacking a certain special product to really allow them to shine all the more odd.

GETTR users can also import all of their Twitter tweets and contacts. Early on, this fact led to some of the bigger accounts having more followers than there were registered users on the site, a bug which has since been fixed.

The platform has a number of other odd quirks when compared with its obvious main rival. To begin with, the maximum length of posts is 777 characters rather than 280. This seemingly completely arbitrary number is probably intended to allow posters overly verbose former presidents, perhaps to express themselves more fully than they might have been able to on Twitter.

Unfortunately, the number 777 also happens to be the symbol of the Afrikaner-Weerstandsbeweging or Afrikaner Resistance Movement, a South African white supremacist neo-Nazi organisation. This may be a simple coincidence, of course, but it does seem like a bit of a red flag that nobody noticed it.

Users can also post videos of up to three minutes in length, compared to 140 seconds on Twitter.

As yet, the former rambler-in-chief has not set up an account on the platform, which seems a little unkind given that it appears to have been set up mostly with him in mind. Donald Trump has made no secret that he has been looking for another place to deign with his bombastic presence since he was booted off of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, parts of Reddit, and most of social media following the Capitol Riots in January 2021.

"I will tell you that 'Real Donald Trump' is reserved for the 45th president, my favorite president, so if he does decide to join the platform then we'd love to have him," Miller said in another Newsmax interview on Thursday night (1 July), possibly more in hope than expectation.

Trump has struggled to find a suitable home for his online primal scream therapy, having started a blog in May, only to close it down weeks later due to an absence of traffic. His organisation is reputedly looking to either start or buy into a new social media home for the former president, preferably on terms that would make his involvement profitable, rather than just helpful to his public profile in the run-up to a possible tilt at the 2024 presidential election.

That said, there is no guarantee that Trump will even have the means or the personal liberty to conduct such a campaign following the tax charges levelled yesterday against the Trump Organisation and its CFO Allen Weisselberg by the Manhattan District Attorney.

Given that the allegations include suggestions that the Trump Organisation kept the details of its tax violations on a secret "internal spreadsheet," it might be better for the former president and everybody around him if he steers clear of technology altogether in future.

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A real go-GETTR: Former Trump aide tries to batter Twitter by ripping off its UI - The Register

OTTAWA, July 1 (Reuters) - Multiple cities scrapped Canada Day celebrations on Thursday after the discovery of hundreds of remains of children in unmarked graves at former indigenous schools sparked a reckoning with the country's colonial past.

Calls to scale back or cancel celebrations snowballed after, beginning in May, almost 1,000 unmarked graves were found at former residential schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan that were mainly run by the Catholic Church and funded by the government.

Traditionally the holiday is celebrated with backyard barbecues and fireworks much like July 4 in the United States. This year, however, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the day would be "a time for reflection." read more

A #CancelCanadaDay march in Canada's capital, Ottawa, turned into a sea of orange as thousands rallied wearing orange shirts to honor the victims and survivors of Canada's residential school system. They carried a large banner that read, "No pride in genocide."

The residential schools forcibly separated indigenous children from their families, in what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 called "cultural genocide."

Hundreds of people, likewise in orange shirts, also marched through downtown Toronto, Canada's financial capital, in support of the indigenous children. Indigenous performer Danielle Migwans performed a healing dance during the march.

Orange has come to symbolize the acknowledgment of the victims of the countrys residential school system.

Vigils and rallies were held across other parts of the country.

"Canada is having a reckoning with its history," said Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a University of Toronto sociology professor who studies race, crime and criminal justice.

"I don't think we can celebrate this country for what it is without recognizing this country for what it isn't: a utopia and a bastion of equality and freedom and equal opportunity for all members of society," he said.

Canada's reputation for tolerance was built on its efforts, starting in the 1970s, to create a multicultural society. But data shows inequalities abound both for indigenous communities and among visible minorities.

In his Canada Day message, Trudeau said the discoveries of the remains of hundreds of children at former residential schools "have rightfully pressed us to reflect on our country's historical failures," and the injustices that still exist for indigenous peoples and many others in Canada.

"This Canada Day, let's recommit to learning from and listening to each other so we can break down the barriers that divide us, rectify the injustices of our past, and build a more fair and equitable society for everyone."

STARK DISPARITIES

Indigenous people, who make up less than 5% of the population, face higher levels of poverty and violence and shorter life expectancies.

The unemployment rate for visible minorities, who make up more than 20% of the total population, was 11.4% in May compared with 7.0% for whites, according to Statistics Canada. In 2020, the unemployment rate for indigenous people in Ontario was 12.5%, compared with 9.5% for non-indigenous people.

Some 30% of visible minorities and indigenous peoples feel treated like outsiders in their own country, according to an Angus Reid Institute poll on diversity and racism published on June 21.

The discovery of the remains and a deadly attack on a Muslim family in June that killed three generations of members has led to soul-searching in Canada about the country's oft-touted reputation for tolerance. The suspect is accused of murder and domestic terrorism. read more

Hate crimes against Muslims rose 9% to 181 in 2019, according to the latest data by StatCan. About 36% of indigenous people and 42% of visible minorities said Canada is a racist country, according to the Angus Reid survey.

A number of Muslim women who wear hijabs have also been attacked in Alberta in recent weeks, while in Quebec a law banning public servants from wearing the hijab is facing legal challenges, and critics have called the measure a form of institutionalized racism.

New Democrat lawmaker Mumilaaq Qaqqaq, who is Inuk, said she felt unsafe in the House of Commons as an indigenous woman, and last month announced she would not run for re-election. read more

"I don't think there's any reason for celebration (on Canada Day)," Qaqqaq said.

Reporting by Steve Scherer, additional reporting by Julie Gordon; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Dan Grebler

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Canada Day muted as country reckons with treatment of indigenous, other minorities - Reuters

China's first Mars rover has captured its first sounds of the Red Planet and beamed back stunning views of a drive on the dusty world.

A new video released by China's state-run CCTV news channel today (June 27) shows the first sounds recorded by the Mars rover Zhurong as it drove off its Tianwen-1 lander and onto the Martian surface on May 22. It also includes stunning video of Zhurong driving on Mars captured by stitching together images from a small camera deployed the rover.

"In fact the sounds were made when the pinion of the Mars rover rotates on the rack, or say the clashing sounds between metals," Jia Yang, Tianwen-1 system deputy chief designer, said in the video according to a CCTV translation. "The purpose we [installed] the recording device is to capture the sounds of wind on Mars during its windy weathers. We really want to hear how the winds sound like on a planet other than the Earth."

Related: China's Tianwen-1 Mars mission in photos

China's Zhurong rover is the centerpiece of the country's Tianwen-1 mission, which delivered an orbiter and the rover to the Red Planet this year. The combined spacecraft launched in July 2020 and arrived in orbit around Mars in February. The Mars rover Zhurong landed on the plains of Utopia Planitia on May 14. It's using six science payloads to study the Red Planet, including its microphone.

"With the [video, image and audio] files we released this time, including those sounds recorded when our Mars rover left the lander, we are able to conduct in-depth analysis to the environment and condition of Mars, for example, the density of the atmosphere on the Mars," said Liu Jizhong, deputy commander of China's first Mars exploration program, in the CCTV interview.

A second video also released today shows a series of stunning views from the Tianwen-1 lander and the Zhurong rover itself as it drives on Mars. They capture views of the lander's parachute, the moment of parachute separation and views of the Martian surface from the lander as it approached the ground.

"When we were designing, we wanted to obtain some visual states of the rover, which could be used as a basis for further improvement of the project," said Rao Wei, deputy chief designer of the Tianwen-1 probe, according to CCTV. "Then we designed several parts, including the process of opening the parachute, releasing the canopy and descending."

Those systems appeared to work as planned, with the Tianwen-1 lander descending as designed and then pinpointing a safe landing spot.

"According to the telemetry, we can see that the landing point is only three kilometers away from our designed position," Rao said. "In general, the landing position is very accurate and the control system is very good."

The 530-lb. (240 kilogram) Zhurong rover is expected to last about 90 Martian days exploring the Red Planet with its high-resolution cameras, subsurface radar, multi-spectral camera and surface composition detector, a magnetic field detector and a weather monitor. The Tianwen-1 orbiter is designed to last a full Martian year, which is about 687 Earth days.

Email Tariq Malik attmalik@space.comor follow himon Twitter @tariqjmalik. Follow uson @Spacedotcom and Facebook and Instagram.

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Hear the 1st sounds from China's Mars rover Zhurong and watch it drive in new video - Space.com