Category Archives: Rationalism

Charlie Hewitt,Lennox Head.

Touting economic benefits as the justification for a 14-storey-high ski jump on the dunes at Lennox Head is nonsensical and offensive. Spend $10m on a small handful of elite athletes in an obscure sport who might occasionally buy food and accommodation for a few months of the year.

In return our community suffers a huge permanent eyesore that despoils natural assets that attract thousands of paying tourists all year; intensifies development in the catchment of a fragile coastal lake; and is severely exposed to coastal erosion hazard, corrosive salt air, highly brackish groundwater, and persistent strong coastal winds.

Furthermore, it is contemptuous to spout economic platitudes without presenting figures. On that note, it might be easier to spend the $10m on raising the Lismore flood levee or local employment training no need to massage those numbers to demonstrate economic benefit.

This ski jump was fully approved and funded in Queensland in 2011. If the numbers are so rosy, why did Campbell Newman, that proud bastion of economic rationalism, scrap it immediately on coming to power?

NSW Sport is trying to foist Queenslands rejects on our community. Despite owning this wonderful facility on a prime piece of coastal land for years, NSW Sport are so inept that they still record unacceptable losses there. So they lunged at this abandoned project in a desperate and unimaginative attempt to justify their continued management of the site.

Yes, so inept they recently had to back-pedal desperately when photomontages of this monstrosity were met with dismay and derision. Of course the images were checked and approved for release, but NSW Sport lied about misinformation being spread and doctored the images for re-release it now looks monstrous from far away and they look deceitful close up.

Finally, expect but dont fall for a blackmail attempt from NSW Sport like If you block this, well just sell the land to developers. There are countless ways this prime piece of coastal land could be used, with positive economic and social returns, in the hands of competent creative managers.

Maintain the rage, Lennox.

See the original post:

14-storey Lennox ski jump a blight - Echonetdaily

Russia must withdraw its support for the murderous regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. That was the tough but easy position to take for Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland.

She was climbing aboard the loud and vociferous public opinion bandwagon following the chemical weapons attack by Damascus. More important, with high-stakes economic issues on the table with Washington, she was taking advantage of another opportunity for Ottawa to be onside with the Donald Trump administration.

Many desire regime change in Syria, but what kind of regime to change it to is of course the hellish question. Its a question no one, including Barack Obama or Justin Trudeau, has wanted to answer given a brutal array of possibilities that include an ISIS-beholden government. Another consideration is precedent. Western-enforced regime change didnt exactly work wonders in Libya or Iraq.

Rules of war are strange. Whats worse? Being killed by poison gas or blown to pieces by bombs and cruise missiles? But Mr. al-Assad crossed the line, dramatically heightening stakes with Russia and the United States in the process. In moving to a position that Mr. al-Assad must go, the Trump administration will look inexcusably feeble if it doesnt follow up. It would be aping the Obama administration, whose biggest failing on foreign policy was breaking its pledge to move against Mr. al-Assad if he used chemical weapons.

As for Russian President Vladimir Putin, now that hes ensconced in Damascus, is he one to retreat? The record hardly suggests it. He has many strategic interests in Syria: A naval installation, an air force base, potential energy resources, a base for combatting terrorism. As well, his presence in Syria makes him a more important player in the Middle East.

More significant is that his fortunes are staked on making Russia proud and strong again and it is through his muscle-flexing in foreign affairs that he has given the impression to his people that he is doing it. He cant quit Syria. He cant quit Ukraine. He has to continue to punch above his weight. It deflects from the penury at home where deflated oil prices flatten economic hopes.

Its about the pride of his pride. One thing that struck me about Russians in three years spent there in Soviet times was not only the degree to which they were subjugated but, antithetically, their intrinsic sense of pride. It was attributable to size, the massive land, the reach of empire, the military might, the defeat at such horrendous cost of Hitlers Germany. If they were downtrodden they still held to be being part of something strong, powerful.

Id come to Moscow following a few years in Washington, where making the people feel proud was what Ronald Reagan did after the perceived downsizing of America under Jimmy Carter. Following the reticent rationalism of Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump now uses what distortions he can find to cast himself as the author of a return to greatness for his country. In the Trump foreign policy shop, traditionalists and cold-warrior types such as H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser, are gaining the upper hand. It is welcome news given the helter-skelter approach of a president who operates with an alarming knowledge deficit.

In any new big power clash, Ms. Freeland, whose animosity toward Mr. Putin knows few bounds, would like to see Canada play more than a role of bystander. Pierre Trudeau was a contrarian who sought to have a disproportionate influence in the Cold War. But Justin Trudeau does not possess his fathers prickly outsider streak and is too much the new kid on the block to start throwing his weight around.

There is also a wild card in the deck that makes policy planning by Ottawa or anyone highly hazardous. The controversy over Russian interference in the U.S. election with the possible collusion of Trump associates could turn out to be inconsequential. It could also turn out to be momentous.

The one constant in the mix is Mr. Putin and his old-school Soviet-like expansionist designs. All that talk of a Trump rapprochement with him is now improbable.

Follow us on Twitter: @GlobeDebate

See the rest here:

Why a tough-talking Trump won't faze Putin - The Globe and Mail

BBC Broadcasting House in central London. The BBC and others have swallowed whole a narrative of secularism, writes the Revd Canon Bruce Saunders. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

Thank you for your editorial (Religious literacy helps us to understand our secular selves, 8 April). The secularisation narrative that humanity is no longer ignorant, fearful and living in an enchanted world, but has now come of age, is rational, scientific and does not need religious faith seems to have been swallowed whole by those, like the BBC and many political and cultural policymakers, who claim to reflect opinion while actually forming and propagating it. This secularisation story is simplistic, unfounded on the evidence of the vitality of contemporary world religious faith, and fails to take account of the way religious faith has itself evolved, frequently welcoming theinsights of rationalism and science.

Your article warns against assuming that the values of the liberal, secularist west are self-evident. We do not need to look too far back in history to see how quickly a liberal consensus, assumed to be self-evident, can be subverted by a political rhetoric that appeals to human greed, fear or grievance. With nations today building walls and closing borders, pragmatism easily replaces the values of generosity and community if we lose the religious literacy that reminds us of the sources that nourish and sustain our values. The Revd Canon Bruce Saunders Bristol

Your editorial on religious broadcasting displays the Guardians traditionally uncritical approach to religion. There is a variety of reasons why the BBC should pay attention to religion. One is that religion underlies much of politics today, from Islamic State through cows in India and murdered secularists in Bangladesh to President Trumps disastrous ban on aid for any organisation even mentioning abortion to women in distress, and his backing for an extreme religious line in recent UN conferences on women and on development, to the dismay of most European governments. When religion presents itself as just apparent facts it can be dangerous, and that calls not just for religious literacy, but analysis and critique of religious positions. This is entirely different from the BBCs duty toreflect the nation to itself.

As long as there is an adequate audience for Songs of Praise or the radio morning service they should continue. But by the same argument the BBC should reflect the non-religious philosophy of the flourishing humanist movement in Britain today yet you made no mention of its refusal to allow humanists to explain their approach to life or even to present Thought for the Day. David Pollock London

Although I agree with the headline, Idont think Simon Jenkins article (The best way to tackle BBC bias is to make it plain to see, 6 April) sheds much light on the debate. The idea that the BBC is palpably left of centre is belied by the almost zero coverage given to the anti-austerity position during the five years of the coalition government, for example. It may well be left-liberal socially, but it is far from the left economically.

And while the Reality Check page during the referendum debate was admirable in intention, there was still a failure within it and across BBC programming to provide citizens with aconsistent and informative map of the different positions and the possible outcomes. What is more, the habitual adversarial exchanges that Jenkins extols rarely meet the standards of rigorous Socratic debate; frequently terms are not defined, ideologies are not named, arguments are not developed, conclusions are not crystallised. I suggest that the way forward for our public broadcaster, if it wants to be impartial, is to support good policymaking and informed voting through mapping all of the positions and arguments, clarifying how prevalent each one is, and illuminating the underlying assumptions, values and ideologies of each of its proponents. Nick Nuttgens Sheffield

John Shield (Letters, 8 April) seems to think that impartiality and fairness mean sitting on the fence, which is rather in conflict with the BBCs own mission statement to provide programmes and services that inform and educate.

We have been here before. For years in any global warming news item the BBC would give equal platform to climate change deniers, despite the overwhelming evidence and scientific opinion to the contrary. It has had a material impact on addressing the causes of climate change. Similarly, in the EU referendum the BBC chose to simply give equal platform to both sides as they presented their false claims to voters. Pete Foster Devizes, Wiltshire

I totally disagree with Simon Jenkins re bias at the BBC. Bias towards what? Towards being genuine and caring, for down-to-earth decency, for kindness, for being on the side of the decent middle-of-the-road viewer?

I have always felt comfortable and safe with the BBCs journalism, interviewers and commentaries. In this era of uncertainty, even fear, and clashes of opinion which reflect something almost sinister in the background, it is reassuring to hear the voice of the BBC and feel a comfort. No strident fascism, no hard right either. The BBC just gets it right. Margaret Reading Swadlincote, Derbyshire

Join the debate email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

Read more Guardian letters click here to visit gu.com/letters

Here is the original post:

The BBC's duty to followers of all faiths and none - The Guardian

The vocabulary lists for Arabic lessons reflected both the countrys shifting politics and its enduring difficulties.CreditIllustration by Luci Gutirrez

When you move to another country as an adult, the language flows around you like a river. Perhaps a child can immediately abandon himself to the current, but most older people will begin by picking out the words and phrases that seem to matter most, which is what I did after my family moved to Cairo, in October of 2011. It was the first fall after the Arab Spring; Hosni Mubarak, the former President, had been forced to resign the previous February. Every weekday, my wife, Leslie, and I met with a tutor for two hours at a language school called Kalimat, where we studied Egyptian Arabic. At the end of each session, we made a vocabulary list. In early December, following the first round of the nations parliamentary elections, which had been dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, my language notebook read:

mosque

to prostrate oneself

salah (prayer)

imam

sheikh

beard

carpet

forbidden

On many days, I went to Tahrir Square, to report on the ongoing revolution. If I heard unfamiliar words or phrases, I brought them back to class. In January, after some protesters had become suspicious of my intentions as a journalist, the notebook had a new string of words:

agent

embassy

spy

Israel

Israeli

Jew

The following month, I learned tear gas, slaughter, and Can you speak more slowly? Conspiracy theory appeared in my notebook on the same day as fried potatoes. Sometimes I wondered about the strangeness of Tahrir-speak, and what my Arabic would have been like if I had arrived ten years earlier. But it would have been different at any time, in any place: you can never step into the same language twice. Even eternal phrases took on a new texture in the light of the revolution. After I could understand some of the radio talk shows that cabbies played, I realized that callers and hosts exchanged Islamic greetings for a full half minute before settling down to heated arguments about the new regime. Our textbook was entitled DardashaChatterand it outlined set conversations that I soon carried out with neighbors, using phrases that would never be touched by Tahrir:

Peace be upon you.

May peace, mercy, and the blessings of God be upon you.

How are you?

May God grant you peace! Are you well?

Praise be to God.

Go with peace.

Go with peace.

One of our teachers, Rifaat Amin, prepared a five-page handout entitled Arabic Expressions of Social Etiquette. This supplemented Dardasha, which also featured some lessons about social traditions, including the evil eye, the belief that envy can cause misfortune. In Dardasha, icons of little bombs with burning fuses had been printed next to the kind of phrase that, even during a revolution, qualified as explosive: Your son is really smart, Madame Fathiya. Fortunately, this compliment-bomb was promptly disarmed: This is what God has willed, Madame Fathiya, your son is really smart.

I often heard that phrasemashaallah, this is what God has willedwhen I was out with my twin daughters. Occasionally an elderly person smiled at the toddlers and said, Wehish, wehishBeastly, beastly!which confused me until somebody explained that a reverse compliment is another way of deflecting the evil eye. Rifaats handout taught us what to say when somebody returns from a trip, or recovers from illness, or mentions a dead person (allah yirhamuh, may God rest his soul). Beggars can be deftly rebuffed with a piece of deferred responsibility: allah yisahellik, may God make things easier for you. Theres even a dedicated phrase for anybody who has just received a haircut: naiman. The neighborhood barber said this every time he finished cutting my hair, but I didnt understand until Rifaats tutorial. The first time I responded correctly, the barber smiled, and then for five years we followed the script:

Naiman. With blessings.

Allah yinam alik. May God bless you.

Rifaat was in his fifties, a thin, intense man with eyes that flashed whenever he became animated. He had thick white hair and the dark skin of a Saidi, an Upper Egyptian. Rifaats father had been a contractor who grew up in a southern village known as Abydos, whose region had likely been the homeland of the kings of the First Dynasty, five millennia ago. Rifaat was proud of this heritage, and, like many southerners whose families had risen in social class during the mid-century, he was a staunch NasseriteGamal Abdel Nasser, who had led the revolution of 1952, was another Saidi. Every evening, at ten oclock, Rifaat watched the Rotana channels rebroadcast of a concert from the nineteen-fifties or sixties by the singer Umm Kulthum. Once, Rifaat prepared a class worksheet that included the sentence There is not a real Egyptian who does not love Umm Kulthum.

But Rifaat had other qualities that seemed out of place in Egypt. He was Muslim, but he drank alcohol, avoided mosques, and didnt fast during Ramadan. He said that the hajj was a waste of money that would be better spent on the poor. Since his teen-age years, he had followed a mostly vegetarian diet, a rarity among Egyptians. Rifaats siblings told me that their father had often shouted at him when Rifaat refused beef and lamb, but he held firm. Even as an adult, one of the few meat dishes that he ate was chicken prepared by his older sister, Wardiya, who had a special way of removing the skin.

Wardiya sometimes delivered meals to Rifaats apartment, because he was a man without a woman. A decade earlier, he had had lymphoma, and she had cooked for him weekly. At one point, briefly, he had been engaged to a foreign woman, but he seemed happy that it hadnt worked out. He lived alone, which is also unusual in Egypt, and Wardiya told me that she disagreed with Rifaat about two things in particular: religion and his belief that men and women are equal. But he had persuaded her to give the best possible education to her daughtersin his words, this was a weapon. If her husband lets her down, then shell have a weapon in hand, Wardiya explained. She can rely on herself.

Rifaat was natural in the presence of women, which was one reason Leslie and I had classes with him. Cairo is notorious for sexual harassment, but the male response to women also runs to the opposite extreme. If Leslie and I were together in our neighborhood, polite men often addressed all conversation to me, carefully avoiding eye contact with my wife. But there wasnt any such bias with Rifaat, who had taught many foreigners; in the late nineteen-eighties he had even served as a private tutor to the actress Emma Thompson, who was filming a movie in Cairo. For our classes, Rifaat prepared lessons that often reflected his social criticisms, to the degree that boorish men could be denied names:

Huda: What are you tired about? You dont do a single thing at home.

Her Husband: What do you mean?

Huda: I mean that you should help me a little with the housework.

Her Husband: Look, your work isnt necessary, and you spend half your salary on transportation and the other half on makeup.

Several times, Rifaat mentioned that Umm Kulthum, who had married late in life and never had children, had probably been a lesbian. He admired such iconoclasts, and he deeply valued personal freedom, but he also idolized Nasser, who had thrown dissidents and intellectuals into prison. Rifaat supported the Tahrir movement, and he believed that Egypt needed serious social change, but he drilled us on the Arabic Expressions of Social Etiquette. Over time, I came to see the complexities of his character as quintessentially Egyptian. The country has a dominant religion, a powerful nationalism, and family structures that tend to be close to the point of claustrophobia. But theres also a counter-strain of individualism, and many people are simply natural-born characters. Rifaats quirks and inconsistencies seemed so innate that his siblings had wisely chosen to embrace them.

He took great pleasure in Egyptian Arabic, which shares the national tendency to combine opposites: tradition and novelty, order and chaos. Before moving to Egypt, Leslie and I had enrolled in the Middlebury College summer program, where we spent two months studying fusha, the classical Arabic that is used as a literary and formal language across the Arab world. In Cairo we switched to Egyptian colloquial, which has a weak literary tradition but a vibrant character. Whereas scholars of fusha have always taken pride in its purity, Egyptian Arabic is muddied by many tributaries. Some words come from Coptic, the language that descended from Pharaonic Egyptian, and there are many imports from Greek, Persian, Turkish, French, and English. Rifaat loved neologisms like yeshayar, which took the share from Facebook and conjugated it as an Arabic verb. But he could also apply lessons from the classical language to what I heard on Tahrir. He told us that the word for tank, debeba, derives from an Arabic root that means to step heavily. The terms for west and strange share another root. Its not because Westerners are weird, Rifaat said, and gave his own theory. Its because thats where the sun sets, and its a mystery where it goes.

The language is wonderful for Wanderwort. Arabic imported shah from the Persians, and then the phrase al-shah matthe king diedwas introduced to English as checkmate. One morning in class, Rifaat taught the word for mud brick. In ancient hieroglyphs it was djebet, which became tobe in Coptic, and then the Arabs, adding a definite article, made it al-tuba, which was brought to Spain as adobar, and then to the American Southwest, where this heavy thing, having been lugged across four millennia and seven thousand miles, finally landed as adobe.

Surprisingly few Coptic words survive in Egyptian, a fact that reflects how quickly the natives adopted Arabic, despite a reputation for resisting outside cultures. Egyptians began to convert to Christianity not long after the time of Christ, but most people never learned the languages of their successive foreign rulers: the Ptolemies, the Romans, the Byzantines. In 640 C.E., the first Arab army arrived in Egypt, which was a province of the Byzantine Empire. The Arabs had only four thousand soldiers, but within two years they had conquered the country. By 700, Egyptian state archives were using Arabic. After another hundred and fifty years, Coptic had essentially vanished as a daily language in Lower Egypt. By the tenth century, a bishop named Severus complained that even Egyptian Christians could communicate only in Arabic.

Across North Africa, language, rather than religion or military force, created the most powerful bond of the new empire. Natives recognized the benefits of speaking the tongue of the Arabs, who rarely learned other languages, and who were more tolerant than previous overlords. For the people in the provinces in the Near East, the Byzantine emperor was somebody who did taxation and persecuted heretics, Kees Versteegh, a Dutch Arabist and the author of The Arabic Language, told me recently. There was no love lost between them and Byzantium. He continued, And the Arabs had the advantage of not caring about the exact faith the Christians had. They didnt care whether they were Nestorians or Arians or what have youas long as they paid their taxes, they were left in peace.

Because of this dynamic, Arabic spread much faster than Islam, and the language played a crucial role in Western scholarship. During the early ninth century, the Mutazila school of Islamic theology promoted a rationalist exploration of faith and other subjects, and Arabs searched out the works of the ancient Greeks. These were hard to find in the West, because the Romans, who read Greek easily, had never translated most books into Latin. After the Roman Empire collapsed, the ability to speak Greek disappeared rapidly in Western Europe, and knowledge of the classics was essentially lost for centuries.

Even in Byzantium such works werent highly valued. The Arabs reported that they found Greek books in poor conditionin their view, the Byzantines didnt respect their own heritage. The Muslims had the classics translated into Arabic editions, which became accessible in Western Europe in the late eleventh century, after Christians began to reconquer the Iberian Peninsula. Soon Arabic became the language through which Westerners rediscovered Greek works on medicine, science, and philosophy. At the University of Paris, medical scholars called themselves arabizantes, and some of our modern terms were originally filtered through the language. Retina and cornea come from Latin translations of shabakiyya and qarniyya, Arabic words that were themselves translated from Greek texts.

When complex ideas pass through so many lenses of language, distortions are inevitable. Eventually, Western scholars rediscovered the original classics in Byzantium, learned Greek, and claimed that many translations were flawed. By then, the rationalism of the Mutazila school had been superseded by more dogmatic interpretations of Islam. And Renaissance scholars came to view the Arabs as the defilers of classical texts, not their preservers. The motivation for learning Arabic also changednow Westerners did so primarily to argue with Muslims, and to try to convert them to Christianity.

On many mornings, Leslie and I were the only students at Kalimat. After the Arab Spring, there was a flurry of foreign interest in Arabic, and the school was busy for our first year. But then the Egyptian political climate worsened, and foreign-exchange programs were cancelled. By the spring of 2013, Rifaat was often upset. He had founded Kalimat with one of his siblings, and he loathed the Muslim Brotherhood, whose candidate, Mohamed Morsi, had won the first democratic Presidential election in Egyptian history. As a Nasserite, Rifaat blamed the rise of Islamism on Anwar Sadat, the President who had succeeded Nasser.

Under Nasser, very few women wore the hijab, Rifaat often told us. He was endlessly nostalgic about the cosmopolitanism of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and he approved of Nassers harsh repression of Islamists. Under Nasser, the government had executed Sayyid Qutb, a Brotherhood member and theorist of jihad, whose death inspired generations of radicals. After Sadat came to power, in 1970, he tried the opposite approach, seeking to accommodate the Brotherhood and other Islamists. According to Rifaat, this had only encouraged Egyptians to become more narrowly religious. During the spring of 2013, when President Morsi was clashing with many of the countrys institutions, Rifaat often arrived at class with lists of bitter phrases for us to translate:

Im not in a good mood.

He put me in a bad mood.

Show me the new bag which you bought yesterday.

Are you really stupid or just acting stupid?

Rifaat preferred to create materials for class, but I had insisted that we finish Dardasha first. Ive always liked language booksone of the joys of studying as an adult is that you can appreciate their subtext. In the mid-nineties, when Chinas economic reforms were starting to take hold, I had worked in Sichuan province, where I studied a government-produced book called Speaking Chinese About China. In the text, a basic sentence that appeared in Chapter 3 (He works very hard at his job) became more complex in Chapter 4 (Everyone is working very hard; as a result, the output has been doubled) and then reached new heights of sophistication in Chapter 5 (We have realized that only by developing production can we raise the peoples living standard). This was one of my most useful Chinese lessons: its possible to speak with increasing complexity while repeating the same simple ideas over and over. Grammar functions as a kind of spice, similar to the way that Sichuanese cuisine uses strong flavors to create satisfying meals that actually contain little meat.

Fifteen years later, I entered the world of Dardasha, which had been written by Mustafa Mughazy, an Egyptian linguist at Western Michigan University. After the Chinese, textbook Egyptians seemed remarkably uninspired by development. There were no production quotas, no economic plans, no infrastructure projects. The word factory did not appear in the book. People said things like Ya hag, Im an engineer and after five years of university, Im working as a waiter in a restaurant. The Chinese book had been cagey toward its foreign readers, expressing nothing negative about China, but the Egyptian text wasnt shy about bad behavior. It even included a sample dialogue of a bizarrely tenacious wrong-number conversation. From my perspective, phone etiquette was one of the eternal mysteries of Egyptian civilizationLeslie and I fielded countless calls from people asking for strangers, or demanding weird things, or saying nothing at all.

Mostly, Dardasha was full of families, talking and laughing, bickering and joking, being generous and being ridiculous. Husbands could act worse than children:

Ali: Whats for lunch today?

Fatma: Stuffed chicken, just the way you like it.

Ali: I dont want chicken. Every day, we have chicken.

Fatma: Fine, what do you want, Ali?

Ali: I dont know. But I dont want chicken.

Fatma: Tomorrow, God willing, Ill make whatever you like.

The book also wasnt shy about the challenges of Cairo life. It introduced the conditional tense with open-ended sample sentences:

If only I knew who was calling the telephone every day...

If only I could see the child who rings the doorbell and runs...

If only I knew which of the neighbors listens to loud music all night long...

One exercise was entitled You Are Irritable: Work in pairs and ask your partner the following questions to find out whether he/she has an irritable personality or not:

You have an appointment with a friend at five oclock. At six oclock your friend is still not there. Do you get angry and leave?

You are on the Internet and each time the telephone rings and the same man calls with a wrong number. Do you get angry on the telephone?

For Rifaat, the answer was always: Yes. He was the most asabi person I knew, although its hard to translate a word thats so specific to the Egyptian experience. The English irritable lacks contextit seems unfair to describe somebody as asabi without also conveying everything in Egypt that might make a person asabi. Perhaps its best to say that this word describes the type of man who teaches Arabic by asking his students to translate the following: It seems no one in this country knows how to celebrate without a microphone and five loudspeakers.

For Rifaat, preparing class materials was cathartic. He arrived each morning bursting with enthusiasm for a new lesson about poverty, or rape, or children who have been recruited into criminal rings. He wrote devastating little character sketches that began with sentences like Fareed is a very lazy worker who does not keep his appointments; he is always late. Once, we studied a puff-piece interview of Suzanne Mubarak, the Presidents wife, from before the revolution. She was asked what she ate for lunch (In fact, I dont have lunch, but if I do I just eat a small plate of fruit) and for dinner (I usually dont have dinner at all, but if it happens, its just a cup of fruit juice). By the time we finished this inane conversation, Rifaats eyes were flashing: These people stole millions of dollars, but all she eats is fruit!

One morning in May, 2013, we studied suicide. By then, protests against Morsi had crystallized into a movement that called itself Tamarrod, or rebellion. The following month, Tamarrod organized a massive protest that resulted in a military coup led by Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the Minister of Defense. In class, we compiled a sunny vocab listpoison, gunfire, frustration, depression, repressionand Rifaat explained that suicide had never been common in Egypt, but now it seemed to happen more than it did in the days of Nasser. He claimed that it is physically impossible to commit suicide after listening to Umm Kulthum. In any case, Rifaat would never do it. Because death is coming anyway, he said, smiling. Its coming soon enough.

He disapproved of the cowardice of carbon monoxide. If he absolutely had to kill himself, he would do it like Cleopatra, with the bite of a kubrathis word, he noted, sounds the same in Arabic and English, with a shared Latin root. He ended class by handing us a new series of sketches, entitled Victims of the System:

When Ibrahim was a 16-year-old high school student doing well in school he enjoyed the full confidence of his family and the freedom to come and go as he pleased. His friendship with a teacher only increased his familys confidence in him. And Ibrahim was so proud of his friendship that when his teacher asked him to help to rob the flat of a girl who had refused to marry him, he did not hesitate....

There has never been a great variety of materials for teaching Egyptian Arabic, whose status is best conveyed by its name: ammiyya, a word that means common. In contrast, the traditional written form of Arabic is called al-lugha al-arabiyya al-fusha, the eloquent Arabic language, or, for short, al-fusha: the eloquent. Western academics call it modern standard Arabic, although the language retains strong links to the time of Muhammed. Back then, Arabic lacked a strong written literary tradition, and, in the eyes of believers, the Prophets illiteracy is evidence of the divine nature of the Quran. Even a skeptic like Rifaat told us that the Quran is so beautiful that it could only have come from God.

After Islam began to spread, scholars established rules for the written language. Such a project isnt uncommon for a new empire. In China, the Han dynasty, which was founded in 206 B.C.E., codified and standardized the Confucian, or Ruist, classics, a process that helped set the terms for the writing system. By taking these centuries-old texts as their model of proper Chinese writing, the Han prescribed an idealized languageclassical Chinesethat was probably never spoken in day-to-day life.

Early scholars of Islam had a similar instinct to draw on the past, but they lacked an equivalent wealth of historical material. So the Arabs went to the desert instead. They sought out Bedouins, who were believed to speak a purer form of Arabic than people in cities, where language had been corrupted by contact with outsiders. Grammarians employed Bedouins as referees in language disputes, and the lite sent their sons to live with nomads so that they would learn to speak correctly. During the tenth century, a lexicographer named al-Azhari was so blessedal-hamdulillah!that he was kidnapped by a Bedouin tribe. This experience allowed him to produce a dictionary, The Reparation of Speech, whose introduction, in a kind of grammatical Stockholm syndrome, effusively praises the kidnappers: They speak according to their desert nature and their ingrained instincts. In their speech you hardly ever hear a linguistic error or a terrible mistake.

To some degree, this standardization of written Arabic worked at cross purposes with the spread of the spoken language. In provincial places like Egypt, natives learned Arabic in informal ways, and in the process they simplified the grammar. In response, scholars moved in the opposite direction, developing a beautifully logical but extremely difficult version of the language. Charles Ferguson, an influential linguist who taught at Stanford, argued that theres no evidence that the language of the Quran was ever anybodys mother tongue.

Over the centuries, fusha remained separate from daily speech, which kept it remarkably stablea river that stopped flowing. But, in the nineteenth century, when the pressures of colonialism and modernization intensified, some Egyptians felt that fusha was inadequate. There had always been some writing in colloquial Egyptian, and a number of intellectuals advocated for expanding this practice. But traditionalists feared further cultural damage. It will not be long before our ancestral language loses its form, God forbid, an editor at the newspaper Al-Ahram wrote, in 1882. How can we support a weak spoken language which will eliminate the sacred original language?

Such debates occurred in other parts of the world that also struggled with the transition to modernity. In China, political movements in the nineteen-tens and twenties helped end the practice of using classical Chinese, replacing it with the northern vernacular now known as Mandarin. But this change was easier for the Chinese, whose language was effectively limited to a single political entity. Most important, classical Chinese wasnt tied to a religion or a divine text.

During the late nineteenth century, the leaders of the Nahda, or Arabic Renaissance, decided to modernize fusha without radically changing its grammar or essential vocabulary. New terms were coined using traditional rootstelegram, for example, comes from lightning. (Isnt that cute? Rifaat said in class.) Qitar, the word for train, originally was used for caravan. Other neologisms were even more imaginative. Lead camel was an inspired choice for locomotive, as was sound of thunder for telephonethe ideal image for Egyptian phone etiquette. Sadly, these words failed to stick, and nowadays one is forced to answer wrong numbers on a loanword: tilifun.

In Algerian schools, the French had at one point tried to replace fusha with the national dialect. British authorities never attempted this in Egypt, but some Englishmen proposed that vernacular writing might improve literacy rates. Over time, Arabs came to associate any encouragement of vernacular writing with colonialism. By the nineteen-fifties, allegiance to fusha was critical to pan-Arabism, because the language created a bond across the Arab world. But Nasser, the greatest pan-Arab of all, also understood the power of Egyptian Arabic. He often began a speech in fusha, and then sprinkled in Egyptian, until, by the climax, he was declaiming entirely in the language of the people. Such speeches, though, had to be heard in order to be appreciated. In Egypt, statements by political figures are often translated into fusha before theyre printed in a newspaper. There are some exceptions, like the interview with Suzanne Mubarak, which used Egyptian to portray the Presidents wife as accessible and humble. (I just eat a small plate of fruit.)

Translation into fusha can clean up a politicians words. For example, in April, 2016, President Sisi discussed political reform with representatives of different sectors of society. Speaking Egyptian, he stumbled: The ideal shape that you are calling for, that idealism is in books, but we cannot take everything you think about with paper and pen and then ask the state for it, no, it wont happen... but we are on a pathway in which were succeeding each day more than the day before. In Al-Ahram, the quote appeared in fusha as: Idealism exists in books, but were walking the pathway of success, and we will succeed day by day. Any Egyptian would know that Sisi hadnt actually been using fusha. Few people can really maintain speaking modern standard Arabic all the way through, Mahmoud Abdalla, the director of Middlebury Colleges summer Arabic program, told me. He said that even linguists like himself, or well-trained imams who have memorized the Quran, will make occasional grammatical errors if called upon to speak the language spontaneously. This is why they slow down when they speak fusha, he said. Theyre afraid to make mistakes.

After the coup, Rifaat wanted to have faith in Sisi. In January of 2014, when it was rumored that Sisi would run for President, Rifaat had Leslie and me study a pop song entitled All of Us Love Sisi:

The world says you remind us of Mandela, and of the leader of the nation, Gamal [Abdel Nasser]... .

That spring, Sisi ran, and Rifaat voted for him. But the new Presidents anti-terrorism campaign included a crackdown on every sort of potential opposition, and tens of thousands of people were imprisoned. Sisi seemed to favor flashy megaprojects rather than coherent economic strategies, and by the spring of 2015, Rifaat was increasingly asabi. He was suffering from a slow-healing sore on his foot, and a couple of doctors had been unhelpful; in class, he often railed against the Egyptian medical system and the general decline of society. Sure, Nasser was a dictator, but at least it worked, he said. But if youre a dictator, and things still dont work, then whats the point?

One morning, a middle-aged woman who lived in the same building as the school stopped by, and we chatted for a while. She was dressed in expensive clothes, and she complained about the young people who protested against Sisi. They should give him a chance to fix things, she said. Rifaat nodded, but then the woman started to gripe about the poor, and how the government subsidized their food and electricity. Rifaats face darkened; his eyes bulged. He managed to keep silent until she left.

These are the people who ruined everything! he exploded. They grabbed everything under Sadat and Mubarak! We were never like that.

Leslie and I often teased Rifaat about his nostalgia, but that morning he seemed too upset. In recent months, his playful pessimism had deteriorated into something more demoralized. One of the tragedies of modern Egypt is its failure to create a large, vibrant middle class, which had been the heart of Nassers social vision. His government built community centers to encourage theatre and other arts, and the education system was expanded on a massive scale, with millions of Egyptians attending college for free. But the prospect of future prosperity turned out to be a mirage. Schools grew too quickly, without proper reforms or teacher training, and Nassers brand of socialism was an economic disaster. Egyptians could go to college, but they couldnt find jobsthats why engineers in Dardasha worked as waiters. Thats also one reason that, during the eighties and nineties, violent Islamist groups gained followers on Upper Egypts campuses, where rural students realized that their aspirations were hopeless.

For Rifaat, who saw himself as staunchly middle class, Egypt had become a lonely place. The education system had collapsed, and most citizens remained poor; for decades they had drifted toward religion. Meanwhile, the lite had turned away from the rest of society, moving to gated compounds and educating their children in international schools. Tahrir represented a brief convergence: most organizers were upper class, and millions of the poor had followed their lead. But it didnt lastafter the initial rush, these groups couldnt bridge the vast gulf that separated them.

In the fall of 2015, Leslie and I took time off from class. It was our fifth and final year in Egypt, and we were busy with research outside Cairo. A few times, I e-mailed or telephoned Rifaat, who said that he was looking forward to our return. But his foot had worsenedonce, when I called, in late November, he sounded close to tears.

That winter, we took a long vacation in Upper Egypt. Afterward, I texted Rifaat, hoping to schedule a class. He didnt respond, so I calledno answer. I telephoned one of his brothers who worked at Kalimat. There was a long silence after I greeted him.

Rifaat, he said at last, itwaffa.

The word hit me all the harder because Rifaat was the one who had taught me what it means.

Language reform wasnt an issue during the Arab Spring. Such debates were crucial to the Arabic Renaissance and to Pan-Arabism, but after that the question was effectively settled, at least in terms of policy. Egyptian textbooks are written in fusha, which remains the standard language for newspapers and most other publications. Still, writers and scholars occasionally point out problems, and, in 2003, Niloofar Haeri, a linguistic anthropologist at Johns Hopkins, published Sacred Language, Ordinary People. In the book, Haeri refuses to use the academic term modern standard Arabic, instead referring to fusha as classical Arabic.

Modernity, in my eyes, means that it should be somebodys mother tongue, Haeri told me. Thats part of how I would understand a modern languagethat its contemporaneous with its speakers. She noted that while places like German Switzerland also practice diglossia, the use of two languages, the difference is that both Swiss German and High German are living, spoken languages. The majority of Arab children are put in a position that I cannot think of an equivalent for any other group of children in the world, she said.

Haeris book points out the discomfort that many Egyptians feel with fusha. Their relationship to the language tends to be passivemost people understand it well, because they hear it frequently, but they struggle to speak it. And writing fusha requires a step that isnt necessary in most languages. You are translating yourself into a medium over which you have far less mastery, Haeri told me.

After Haeri published her findings, she was attacked by many Western scholars of the Middle East. She believed that her backgrounda Muslim woman from Iran, who was trained in linguistics rather than in regional studiesmay have made her more willing to tackle an issue that is politically sensitive in Middle Eastern studies. But there have always been Egyptians with a similar opinion. Leila Ahmed, a professor at the Harvard Divinity School who grew up in Cairo, described her childhood hatred of fusha in a memoir, A Border Passage. She remembers shouting at an Arabic teacher, I am not an Arab! I am Egyptian! And anyway we dont speak like this! Her book was attacked harshly by the critic Edward Said, who saw it as part of the Orientalist perception of Arabic. In an essay that was published posthumously, Said wrote, Reading Ahmeds pathetic tirade makes one feel sorry that she never bothered to learn her own language.

Ahmeds point, of course, is that fusha is not her language. It wasnt Saids, either. He grew up in Jerusalem and in Cairo, and, in the essay, he acknowledges that, despite having spoken Palestinian and Egyptian Arabic at home, he never became comfortable with fusha. He relates the experience of giving a lecture in Cairo, as a celebrated scholar, only to have a young relative express disappointment with Saids lack of eloquence. Said describes himself as still loitering on the fringes of the language.

But he doesnt address the larger question: if even educated people struggle with fusha, what does that mean for everybody else? More than a quarter of Egyptians are illiterate, and the rate is significantly higher among women, who are less likely than men to be in environments where fusha is used. Comfort is another issue. People dont write, because there is linguistic insecurity, Madiha Doss, a scholar of Arabic linguistics at Cairo University, told me.

The difficulty of fusha may have contributed to the tradition of using foreign languages to educate Egyptian university students in technical subjects. This had been the practice under the monarchy, but it was continued under Nassers expansion of higher education. At public universities, math, medicine, and some hard sciences are taught in English. Centuries ago, Europeans needed Arabic to learn medicine, but nowadays even Egyptian medical students dont use Arabic texts. What happens is that you reserve Arabic for traditional knowledge, Doss said. And it becomes more conservative.

The situation also makes for difficult transitions. After a math student enters a public university, he begins using formulas with Latin and Greek letters, and reading them from left to right, the opposite direction of what was done in his public-high-school classes. Then, in his junior year, the curriculum changes to English. Hany El-Hosseiny, a math professor at the university, told me that each of these shifts disorients students, whom he believes should be taught entirely in Arabic. But this needs a lot of effort that was not made for the past hundred and fifty years, El-Hosseiny said. We have to translate a lot, and we have to write original works in Arabic.

Continue reading here:

Learning Arabic from Egypt's Revolution - The New Yorker

BOB MASON

Last updated11:39, April 9 2017

The Cosmic Shambles Network

Cosmic Shambles is visiting Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch this month.

Cosmic Shambles Live The Opera House, Wellington, April 8

In a world where science and facts seem to be increasingly regarded as nuisances to the powerful, a variety show that strives to educate and entertain is always welcome.

I had initially misread the promotional poster as Comic Shambles, but while there was plenty of mirth during this unusual blend of science experiments, stand-up comedy and musical interludes, there were plenty of serious and sobering findings for the appreciative audience too.

Cosmic Shambles is the brainchild of Robin Ince, a nerdy UK comedian who has appeared on a number of TV shows, using his wit to popularise science and rationalism. He was an able and genial compere, stitching together the diverse range of acts with gentle banter about popular perceptions of science. The science was itself a good balance of the frivolous (what do ghosts eat?), the genuinely frightening (we seem to be heading for some kind of antibiotic Armageddon as bacteria become ever more resistant) and the ability of science to make something fascinating out of the seemingly trivially mundane: why do Aussies and Kiwis walk on the left, while their counterparts in the northern hemisphere walk on the right?

SUPPLIED/Mihaela Bodlovic

Mathematician Matt Parker's quirky attempt to measure the number pi using pies was one of the highlights of Cosmic Shambles Live.

READ MORE: *Cosmic Shambles: Robin Ince aiming to change people's perception of science, one laugh at a time * Mixing comedy and science * Neil deGrasse Tyson, 'sexiest astrophysicist alive', to visit NZ * Human Universe's Brian Cox answers the big questions

This is the first time the show has ventured to these shores, and this was underlined with the inclusion of local comic talent such as James Nokise, whose trenchant gags offered both light relief and a mordant observation of the times. It was a suitable contrast to some of the more worrying revelations of the evening.

My youthful co-attendee pronounced the whole evening "amazing"; he was particularly impressed by mathematician Matt Parker's quirky attempt to measure the number pi using pies and a special pi-endulum. New Zealand scientist Michelle Dickinson, a.k.a. Nanogirl, added a local flavour with an exuberant and thought-provoking presentation.

Supplied

Robin Ince is the host of Cosmic Shambles Live.

Although the musical performances were high-quality Shihad's Jon Toogood produced a charming solo acoustic cameo they did feel a little unconnected to the rest of the show. Considering that the whole gig weighed in at over three hours, the late finish and occasional colourful language might have deterred some parents from bringing along their inquisitive young charges.

This was nonetheless a compelling evening of fun and fascination, which will provide plenty of family table talking points for some time to come.

-Stuff

See original here:

Concert Review: Cosmic Shambles Live - Stuff.co.nz

by K. Narayana

As per news reports, the RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, has invited university teachers from all over the country in order to hold a seminar on Parting with Colonial WaysImbibing Nationalism.

The RSS and its off-shoot organisations had never raised a finger against British colonialism and remained aloof from the freedom struggle. They had in fact actively collaborated with the British authorities to sabotage the struggle for freedom. None of their founders was a part of freedom struggle at any time. The people of this country wonder whether in the name of imbibing nationalism, the Sanghis want to force their brand of Hindutva nationalism down the throats of the countrys vast majority, who do not subscribe to their ideology, or in the name of parting with colonial ways make them to swallow the bitter pills of neo-colonialism.

Though it is intended to be an open seminar, the Sanghis would indulge in a lot of shadow-work, as they cannot tolerate criticism and dissent. The participants will be carefully selected and any potential trouble-makers will be carefully kept away. As it is characteristic of the RSS, only those that meekly comply with their instructions will be allowed to participate. In the name of patriotism and nationalism, the intention of the Sanghis is to propagate intolerance, suppression of freedom of expression, rationalism, and, above all, democratic and secular values. Their ultimate desire is to establish a Hindu Rashtra, which will be a lone Hindu nation on this planet. This is nothing but jumping up to grab the moon. As per the Arsha Dharma and Manu Shastra, only upper-caste Hindus qualify to be legitimate Hindus. Neither the Dalits, tribals and backward classes nor the minorities, who together form more than 90 per cent of the countrys population, can be accorded the status of Hindus, according to their philosophy. Imposing by force the will and culture of a tiny minority on the whole of the population can only lead to escalation of social tensions. Will Muslims of this country, who constitute 17 per cent of the population, or even the Sikh community, who constitute a majority in our armed forces, accept a Hindu Rashtra? Would North-Eastern States give consent to a Hindu Rashtra as most of their citizens are Christians?

What sort of nationalism do the Sanghis want to preach? Those that spew hatred on the minorities, Dalits and tribals cannot be patriots by any stretch of imagination. And killing the intellectuals, such as Govind Pansare, Narendra Dabolkar, Kalburgi, and silencing opposing views by threats and intimidation is now projected a nationalism! What an irony! Anyone who raises his voice against the Hindutva forces is branded as a Pakistani agent and asked to leave the country. At this rate, most of the citizens of this country would qualify to be anti-nationals and only those that spew hatred, violence against minorities and Dalits would be true patriots and nationalists!

What type of patriotism or nationalism does the RSS chief want the teachers to teach the youth of this country? The Hindu Mahasabha is constr-ucting temples to honour Nathuram Vinayak Godse who murdered Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of our Nation. And what does this drama of parting ways with colonialism mean? This government is on a no-holds-barred race to kill the public sector and hand over the countrys economy to the MNCs. Even the nations defence industries are now being handed over to American companies. In the name of digital economy, for every transaction, we have to pay a commission to foreign net-brokers. Is this parting of ways with colonialism or forcing a new colonialism on this countrys populace? Our country is increa-singly being tied down by international finance capital and our banks have lost their independent role in regulating the economy. As it is, world capitalism is being plunged into systemic crises and by losing our economic independence, we would become increasingly vulnerable to economic upheavals. Wealth is being drained out of our country and is landing up in the coffers of the MNCs and international banks. The BJP Government, contrary to their stated aims of curbing black money, are hand-in-glove with the super rich, who loot this country and stash their ill-gotten wealth abroad. How can anybody believe their credentials, when they want the teachers to teach about parting ways with colonialism, while the reality is quite the opposite of their stated intentions?

The Sangh Parivar has floated one nationalist organisation called the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch. That organisation has given a call to boycott foreign goods. But as soon as the BJP came to power for the first time at the Centre, it comfortably made Enron Accord. Why is Narendra Modi conspicuously silent on the Strategic Partnership Accord and Nuclear Power Accord made by Manmohan Singh? Perhaps he wants to prove to his American masters that he is more faithful than the previous government.

Our economic policies are neo-colonial and that leads to colonialism. Foreign direct investments in defence, financial sector, railways, retail trade, etc. are gateways for transnational corporations to enter and devastate our economy. We cannot forget how the British entered into our country through the East India Company with trade in tea and coffee. Wallmart of the USA and Metro of Germany and many super-malls are symbols of neo-colonialism. The countries of Latin America had gone through a similar process of neo-colonialism and now their economies are completely devastated and they are yet to recover from the ruins of their respective economies. The BJP may argue that colonialism will not be allowed in our country. In todays changed world, political and military control of any country by a foreign power comes with great cost, as witnessed in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries. But neo-colonialism enables the capitalist core, controlled by the MNCs, to rob any country at will, what with compliant regimes such as the Modi Government ever eager to do their bidding.

Hence the fight against foreign direct investments is a fight against neo-colonialism and in turn that is a fight against colonialism. The real fight against the FDI is nationalism and that is true patriotism. As far as patriotism goes, loving all the people of this country, irrespective of their race, caste or religion, is the only true patriotism. Respecting our diversity is the best guarantee of a united India.

Dr K. Narayana is theNational Secretary, CPI.

See more here:

Imbibing Nationalism or Neo-Colonialism? - Mainstream

Painting of Edmund Burke by the studio of Joshua Reynolds.

National Portrait Gallery/Wikimedia Commons

This article supplements Fascism, a Slate Academy. To learn more and to enroll, visit Slate.com/Fascism.

Adapted from The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition by Zeev Sternhell. Published by Yale University Press.

While the 18th century is commonly perceived as the quintessential age of rationalist modernity, it was also the cradle of a second and strikingly different movement. In fact, at the very moment when rationalist thought seemed to have reached its peak, a comprehensive revolt against the Enlightenments fundamental views erupted in European intellectual life. From the second half of the 18th century to the age of the Cold War and today, the confrontation between these two modernities has formed one of the most prominent and enduring features of our world.

The Enlightenment wished to liberate the individual from the constraints of history, from the yoke of traditional unproven beliefs. This was the motivation of Lockes Second Treatise of Government, Kants Reply to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?, and Rousseaus Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: three extraordinary pamphlets that proclaimed the liberation of man. It was against the liberation of the individual by reason that this new Anti-Enlightenment movement launched its attack, and its campaign was infinitely more sophisticated and subtle than that of the classical, undisguisedly authoritarian enemies of the Enlightenment. This anti-Enlightenment movement constituted not a counterrevolution but a different revolution. It revolted against rationalism, the autonomy of the individual, and all that unites people: their condition as rational beings with natural rights.

This second modernity was based on all that differentiates and divides peoplea political culture that denied reason either the capacity or the right to mold peoples lives, saw religion as an essential foundation of society, and did not hesitate to call on the state to regulate social relationships or to intervene in the economy. Importantly, it did this in the name of a certain liberalismadvocating for a pluralism of values. In making its objective the destruction of the Enlightenments atomistic view of society, this attack announced the birth of a nationalistic communitarianism, in which the individual is determined by his ethnic origins, history, language, and culture.

ZEEV STERNHELL

Anti-Intellectualism Is Just As Revolutionary As Liberalismand Much More Dangerous

ROBERT O. PAXTON

Fascism Doesnt Die. It Takes on New Forms.

TIMOTHY SNYDER

Are You Prepared for an American Reichstag Fire?

- MULTIPLE AUTHORS

How Does the History of Fascism Help Us Understand Whats Happening Today?

KEVIN PASSMORE

Its Difficult to Define Fascism. That Doesnt Mean We Cant Oppose It.

THOMAS DOHERTY

1930s Hollywoods Love Affair With Authoritarian Jerks

A liberalism opposed to the Enlightenment made sense up until to the second half of the 19th century. But when a new society emerged as a result of the rapid industrialization of the European continent and the rise of nationalism among the masses, anti-Enlightenment liberalismoften deceptively attractive because its dangerousness was not always obviousthreatened the very possibility of the survival of democracy.

It was at the end of the decade in 1789 when the Old Regime collapsed in France, and the split between these two branches of modernity became a historical reality. And when the thought of the Franco-Kantian and British Enlightenments was translated into concrete terms by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the British political theorist Edmund Burke put out his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

From the start of his political and intellectual activity, Burke defined the Enlightenment as the guiding spirit of a movement of intellectual conspiracy whose aim was the destruction of Christian civilization and the political order it had created. According to Burke, the essence of the Enlightenment was to accept the verdict of reason as the sole criterion of legitimacy for any human institution. Neither history, nor tradition, nor custom, nor experience could ever fill the role of reason. Burke added that a societys capacity to assure its members a decent life would not be acceptable for the men of the Enlightenment. They are not content with a decent life: they demand happiness, or, in other words, utopia.

Burke denied reason the right to question the existing order. He contended that the existing order is consecrated by experience, by collective wisdom, and has a raison dtre that may not be obvious to each individual at all times but is the product of the divine will present in history. A society only exists through its veneration for history and its respect for the established church and the elites. Replacing the elites with other people and destroying the power of the church may be compared to the conquest of a civilized country by barbarians. The defense of privileges is thus the defense of civilization itself. That is why force has to be used to assure the survival of what exists. In other words, all means were justified to crush the revolution in France.

A true pioneer of ideological warfare, Burke invented the concept of containment, if not the word itself. Though it became famous during the Cold War, Burke first tried the tactic on America. He had been concerned with containing the pretensions of the colonists who were breaking away from the mother country and translating their natural rights into limited political terms, because he had hoped to confine the danger to a distant land and prevent it from spreading to Europe. When this same revolution of the Enlightenment took place in France, however, a policy of containment was no longer appropriate. When it was at the very gates of England, at the heart of Western civilization, one could only respond with all-out war.

Thus, this great British parliamentarian was the founder of the school of thought known today as neoconservatism. Authentic liberal conservatives like Tocqueville in France and Lord Acton in England, or, closer to our time, Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott, and Raymond Aron, feared the corrupting effect of power. They were the heirs of Montesquieu and Locke, and their great objective was to protect liberty through a division of power and by developing the capacity of the individual to stand up to the authorities. Against this, the representatives of neoconservatism are fascinated by the power of the state. Unlike the classical liberals, they aim not at limiting its intervention in the economy or in society but, on the contrary, at molding society and government in their image.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the historical importance, both in his own time and in the long term, of Edmund Burke and his fellow Anti-Enlightenment revolutionaries. Indeed, the 20th century was only truly born when rejection of the Enlightenment suddenly became a mass phenomenon. It was in a world that was changing at a previously unthinkable pace, when new ways of life, techniques, and technologies appeared all at once, and economic development, the democratization of political life, and compulsory education became living realities that were only dreams for the previous generation, that Burkes legacy gained popular support. Democracy, political liberty, and universal suffrageall recently acquiredappeared to an important part of the urban masses to be a danger to the nation and to modern civilization.

For all these thinkers, rationalism was the source of the evil: it led to materialism, to utopias, to the supremely pernicious idea that man is able to change things.

The year 1936 would seem to be a somewhat unfortunate time to wage war against the Enlightenment. But this was precisely the moment when the German historian and Nazi sympathizer Friedrich Meinecke gave his definition of historism, which demolished the concept of a common human nature, of a universal reason that gives rise to a universal natural law, regarding this way of thinking as empty and abstract. The direct consequence of this concept was a more or less radical general relativism: Meinecke was convinced that German historism was the highest stage thus far reached in the understanding of human affairs.

There was also an attraction of the historist attack on the Enlightenment for the generation of the Cold War in the 1950s. It was at that time that the totalitarian school came into being and one of its chief representatives, Isaiah Berlin, following in the footsteps of Meinecke and in the face of a Europe dominated by a left-wing and often communistic intelligentsia, took up the case against the rationalist Enlightenment. Hypnotized by the Cold War, he launched his attack on Rousseau and then on the idea of positive liberty, and in the name of liberal pluralism wrote a fulsome panegyric to negative liberty.

In his series of essays in Against the Current, Berlin made clear that he considered the principles of the French Enlightenment to be fundamentally opposed to those of a good society. Moreover, his interpretation of the Enlightenment repeats the principal clichs handed down from one generation to the next from Burke onward. These clichs have made a strong reappearance in our time.

For all these thinkers, rationalism was the source of the evil: it led to materialism, to utopias, to the supremely pernicious idea that man is able to change things. It killed instinct and vital forces; it destroyed the almost carnal connection between the members of an ethnic community and made one live in an unreal world. The existing social order, though it may not be perfect, made it possible to live a decent, civilized life. The permanence of Western civilizationthe great Christian civilizationcould only be ensured if its reality was not touched in its essence.

These scorners of the Enlightenment, were not turned toward the past generally. Their nostalgia was for a highly selective historical landscape. Historians of ideas and cultural critics who considered themselves philosophers as well, they saw the nation as the supreme framework of social organization. The kind of solidarity provided by the nation seemed to them greater than that provided by any other form of social cohesion. It is no accident that Burke can be regarded as one of the originators of nationalism.

For Berlin, as for Meinecke, there seemed to be no relationship of cause and effect between the war against rationalism, universalism, and natural rights and the war against democracy and its fall in the 20th century. These people did not believe that blocking and neutralizing the revolutionary potential in society meant abandoning the new social classes created by industrialization to the free play of economic forces, which inevitably gives rise to poverty and hence to revolts and revolutions. And as they advanced into the 19th century, the role assigned by these thinkers to the state was to control democratic tendencies, viewed as a threat to the natural order of thingsas demagogic illusions.

The inevitable process of democratization, the progressive access of the male population to universal suffrage, did not reconcile these liberals opposed to the Enlightenment to the principles of democracy. Instead it caused them to accept the disagreeable and, as they saw it, dangerous realities of political democratic rule. Some became conscious of the role a state could play in intervening in the economy in order to curb and canalize democracy. Some resisted democracy until they died.

It was also no accident if, as a result of seeing themselves as the defenders of a minority point of view, all these nonconformists ended up creating a new kind of conformism in promoting concepts that very soon became commonplace.

The most common reproach that the Anti-Enlightenment thinkers continually made to the people of the Enlightenment was that of having never left their study or the realm of abstractions, and as a result, being ignorant of the realities of the world as it was. It was Burke, one of the best parliamentary orators of his age, who originated this idea, but in fact it was only a myth.

Beyond all that divided the founders of the United States from the men of the French Revolution, the heritage of Locke and the Glorious Revolution of 1689 from Rousseau and Voltaire, or James Madison and Alexander Hamilton from tienne Bonnot de Condillac, Condorcet, and Saint-Just, there were certain convictions that were common to both parties. They were all convinced that they were working in a specific context to change or create a given situation and at the same time enunciating principles of universal significance. They were working on behalf of their own time, they wanted to change a world that was theirs and only theirs, but at the same time they had an acute awareness that they were initiating actions that would affect posterity without any possibility of return.

The most cogent example of the dual nature of their work was the fate of the most important piece of political philosophy ever produced in the United States. The Federalist, a simple collection of electoral pamphlets written during the campaign in New York State for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, had a clear and well-defined primary objective: to convince the population of this pivotal state that both liberty and property would be preserved and protected in a federal state with a strong central authority. Invoking the authority of Montesquieu and the Enlightenment, it also sought to show that liberty did not depend on the size of a country but on good institutions.

All while waging an excellent electoral campaign, The Federalists writers, Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay, were perfectly conscious of the universal significance of their writings and actions. The Constitution dealt with the concrete problems that the Americans of the end of the 18th century had to confront, and it was voted in because it corresponded to their needs and hopes, but it formulated general principles that the founders thought to be just and good and consequently valid for all men in all times and places. This opinion was never disproved in the course of the next two centuries.

It is true that this is an almost perfect example: men called at a critical juncture in the history of their community to provide solutions to concrete political problems in a country on the margins of civilization gave answers of universal value and produced a classic of political thought. And in fact, the same can be said about Burke. It is likely that if the revolution was merely a reaction to a crisis of regime, a palliative to deal with bread riots or financial bankruptcy, an accident en route or the product of some machination, Burke would not have risen to the level of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or The Federalist, and his pamphlet, simply intended to fill a breach through which he saw the flood pouring in, would not have become, for more than two centuries, the intellectual manifesto of revolutionary conservatism.

All these writers wrote with the immediate application of their ideas in mind, but at the same time posed fundamental questions about human nature and the role of man in society. They gave an idea of what they thought a good society should be. They all tried to transcend the immediate context in which they lived and felt that they were stating eternal principles and essential truths. All the thinkers of the Anti-Enlightenment reflected on the rise and fall of civilizations and did not hesitate to position themselves within a perspective of 25 centuries when they engaged in dialogue with Plato and the principles of Athenian democracy.

The contentious coexistence of the Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment movements is one of the great invariables of the two centuries between our world and that of the end of the 18th century. But this is a point that generally escapes the attention of historians and critics of culture: If the enlightened modernity was that of liberalism which led to democracy, the anti-enlightened modernitycoming down into the street at the turn of the 20th centurytook the form of an intellectual and political movement that was revolutionary, nationalistic, communitarian, and a sworn enemy of universal values. Whether it is a matter of reactionary modernism or the conservative revolution, one is always confronted with the same phenomenon: the content and function of this movement remained the same. Its pet aversions remain Kant, Rousseau, Voltaire, and the philosophes of the Enlightenmentthe founders of the principles on which the democracies of the 19th and 20th centuries were founded.

Adapted from The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition by Zeev Sternhell;translated by David Maisel.Reprintedby permission of Yale University Press.

Link:

Anti-Intellectualism Is Just As Revolutionary As Liberalismand Much More Dangerous - Slate Magazine

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar had attracted the ire of traditionalists when he wrote more than once that the cow is not a divine mother but only a useful animal. A substance is edible to the extent that it is beneficial to man. Attributing religious qualities to it gives it a godly status. Such a superstitious mindset destroys the nations intellect, he wrote in 1935.

Recent events have not been a good advertisement for the national intellect. The party that pays homage to Savarkar has never come to terms with his modernist rationalism. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Gujarat has amended a state law so that anybody found guilty of cow slaughter will be awarded a life sentence. The chief minister of Chhattisgarh has said that those who kill cows in his state will be hanged. Even acts of homicide or sexual assault do not usually result in the hanging of the guilty. Meanwhile, there is a massive crackdown on abattoirs by the new state government in Uttar Pradesh, ostensibly targeted at illegal establishments, but clearly trying to hurt the Muslim community that dominates the meat trade. Congress leaders such as Digvijaya Singh have said his party will back a nationwide beef bana useful reason to remember that the original laws against cow slaughter were introduced in many states when the Congress was the hegemonic force in Indian politics. This also opens up the possibility of competitive cow politics. And footloose vigilantes have taken it upon themselves to attack any person they believe is harming the sanctity of the cow, even by just throwing a stone at an animal. There have traditionally been two main arguments in favour of cow protection. First, the cow is the pivot of an agricultural economy. Second, it is central to Hindu religious beliefs. Neither of these two arguments can justify the harsh punishments that are rather casually being talked about. The economic argument does not survive an empirical test. First, as farming in India becomes increasingly mechanized, the demand for draught cattle in the fields is falling. Second, as milk-producing cows grow old and become unproductive, they become a financial burden on farmers. If farmers cannot sell them off to slaughterhouses, they either abandon the animals or starve them to death. Third, the rational response by farmers to the ban on cow slaughter has been to prefer buffaloes to cows, as is evident from both the official cattle census as well as price trends in cattle auctions across the country. The economics of an asset totally changes when its terminal value suddenly comes down to zero. Economists such as V.M. Dandekar and K.N. Raj showed many years ago that the factors determining cattle population are not slaughter bans or religious sentiments but the demand for livestock products such as milk and meat as well as the levels of technology used in agriculture. Indeed, the directive principle of state policy that says cow slaughter should be prohibited is itself derived from the economic argument. Article 48 of the Indian Constitution needs to be read in full: The State shall endeavour to organise agriculture and animal husbandry on modern and scientific lines and shall, in particular, take steps for preserving and improving the breeds, and prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle. The issue of religious sentiments is a more tricky one. There is ample proof in old religious texts that beef-eating was not uncommon in ancient India. However, that does not necessarily mean that the current generation of Hindus should not worship the cow. There is also the undeniable fact that cow slaughter was one of the flashpoints in medieval India under Muslim rule. The real issue right now is that the state has no right to send someone to jail for killing an animal. It is also important to remember that beef is one of the cheapest sources of protein. Some 80 million Indians eat either beef or buffalo meat, including 12.5 million Hindus, as shown in an article by Roshan Kishore and Ishan Anand in this newspaper in October 2015, based on their detailed analysis of sample data. This does not mean that devout Hindus who worship the cow should not voluntarily devote themselves to its protection by setting up gaushalas, or cow shelters, though there simply arent enough of these to cater to the growing number of abandoned cattle. The problem lies elsewhere. Bans on the killing of cows are in effect a burden on farmers who own cattle. Punishment for consumption of beef is an attack on the basic Constitutional right of every citizen to live the life she wants to. (http://www.livemint.com)

See original here:

Going overboard with cow protection - Kasmir Monitor

Troy Schumacher is a corps de ballet member with New York City Ballet, one of the mostprestigious dance companies in the country. And while a job as a full-time athlete might be enough for some people, Schumacher is also the artistic director and choreographer for his own chamber-sized troupe, BalletCollective. All of its members are Schumachers fellow dancers at NYCB.

For the companys latest performance at the New York University Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, Schumacher explored his observations of how human bodies respond to built space. He approached architects James Ramsey, founder of RAAD Studio, and Carlos Arnaiz, founder and principal of CAZA, to collaborate on a project that would turn design into dance. Last season, I was already sold on the idea of working with architects because I thought our processeswould be very similar, said Schumacher. Whether youre creating performance or buildings, youre thinking about somethingthat has a larger scope but shows details. Youre thinking on two scales.

(Courtesy Whitney Browne)

Schumacher and his team took care to thoroughly investigate how the two disciplines could come together for a final project. We discussed how our respective disciplines are organized, how we record our work, how we make changes to our work as we go, and how our respective practices overlap, said Arnaiz.

Its not unusual for architecture and dance to go hand in hand. Just last year, Steven Holl created set pieces for Jessica Lang Dance, while the Guggenheim Museum frequently holds performances in its iconic rotunda. But these dances coexist with built architectural elementsnot so for BalletCollective. Instead, Schumacher chose to feature the dancers in a stripped-down environment. The stage at the Skirball center was entirely bare, with curtains lifted to reveal the dancers waiting on the sides, and their costumes were casual rehearsal wear. Until they started moving, there was no indication of the evenings architectural component.

One of Schumachers strengths as a choreographer is his unusual way of using formations. He often asks one dancer to move against the group or pairs a tall woman with a short man. Trios and duets are widely spaced around the stage, playing out contrary to the traditional ballet structure of a principalcouple and a shifting background of corps dancers. In Until the Walls Cave In, Ballet Collective dancers moved through lines, boxes or huddles that washed across the stage. Ramseys work, in comparison, also carves out space where heretofore there was none. Jamess work is about restoring or facilitating life in a place where it wouldnt normally exist, said Schumacher. We were really driven by light, concrete spaces and the growth happening within them.

(Courtesy Whitney Browne)

For his part, Ramsey entered the collaboration unsure of what to expect. I had little to no idea about the creative process for dance, Ramsey said, and I was completely blown away by how naturally our processes were able to mesh. Our conversations had to do with the lifeand death of human spaces, renewal, and the idea of tension as a dramatic architectural design tool. Here, though, Schumacher might have picked something up from his collaborator. The start-stop energy of his choreography makes it nearly impossible to establish dramatic tension.

Arnaizs contribution involved one specific drawing, resulting in The Answer, a duet for Anthony Huxley and Rachel Hutsell. Choreographers are always looking for new pathways, said Schumacher. Carlos emailed us a sketch on top of a photo of Allen Iverson. I was floored by the energy and idea behind it, and we just went with it. Arnaiz wrote about Iverson in his recent monograph, reflecting on how static geometric forms are brought to life by the creative process of architecture. As a result, The Answer plays off friendly competition.

Huxley is an elegant dancer who, while still able to have fun, is quite serious onstage. Hutsell, who is just beginning her professional career, might be expected to be timid, especially dancing with Huxley (he is several ranks higher than her at NYCB). Instead, shes remarkably grounded for a woman dancing in pointe shoes, which can complicate quick direction changes and off-balance steps. She eats up space with infectious energy. The dancers darting limbs seem to leave trails of lines and spirals across the stage, reminiscent of Arnaizs drawing.

Schumacher wasnt worried about disappointing audiences who might have expected structures or set pieces designed by Ramsey and Arnaiz. All the artists who contribute to BalletCollective are a source, he said. But invariably, the starting and ending point arent the same place. Asking for architectural input is about giving us a place to start.

Arnaiz and Ramsey were both surprised at what that starting place was able to yield. Ive worked with musicians, but never with dancers, said Arnaiz. It was fascinating to see how something transformed from concept to physical performance. Ramsey agreed: Troy brought a level of clarity and rationalism to the projects that was startling, and even led me to understand my own work more succinctly.

What Comes NextBalletCollective The NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts October 2728, 2016

Read more from the original source:

How James Ramsey of RAAD Studio, Carlos Arnaiz of CAZA, and BalletCollective turned design into dance - The Architect's Newspaper

The YouTube video shows girls convulsing in hospital beds, on the floors of their schools, losing control of their bodies, unable to walk or talk.

The young women have allegedly just been given shots of the HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. Instead of a lifesaving treatment, theyre left crippled, chemically lobotomized.

A voice over the disturbing footage screams: I am not a slave. You cannot force me to inject my kid with this poison. This is sick!

That voice belongs to Owen Shroyer, a reporter for Infowars, the right-wing, conspiracy theoryladen news site. Hes anchoring a classic Infowars health segment, featuring a passionate rant against mainstream medicine. In this case, the subject is a favorite on Infowars: vaccines and the damages they do to our youth.

When Shroyer appears onscreen again, his face is flushed and twisted in rage. You know what? Im sorry but F you! Okay? he says, squinting at the camera. F you if youre going to sit here and watch a video of young girls literally convulsing because of a vaccine that you say is safe and effective. F you! Youre disgusting.

If you know anything about the HPV vaccine or vaccine safety, its easy to dismiss this video as fringe lunacy. But Infowars is no longer a peripheral media player. The website now reaches more than 6 million unique US users each month. The YouTube channel has more than 2 million followers about as many as Vox.

I watched more than six hours of the show, and came away steeped in a dark view of the world. On Infowars, truth is provisional, science means nothing, and you cant trust anyone especially not your doctor, researchers, or experts of any kind. This is a parallel information universe, with deep suspicions of the establishment and government agencies and a deep appreciation for the populist president, Donald Trump.

As a medical reporter, Ive written a lot about shady peddlers of health misinformation; Infowars felt like familiar terrain. Exaggerated claims, cherry-picked studies reported out of context, and the promise of treatments and foods that will either kill or cure are more the rule than the exception in this corner of journalism.

But Infowars makes Dr. Oz and the Food Babe seem benevolent. The show goes so much further than simply misleading people about their personal health choices and a range of other subjects. Jones and Infowars are part of a political movement aimed at undermining and delegitimizing the institutions that are fundamental to democracy especially science. They also have connections that run all the way up to the White House.

Alex Jones is an ally and champion of President Trump, who told Jones in a 2015 interview, You have an amazing reputation. Trump may disparage institutions like the New York Times and the Washington Post on Twitter and Fox News, but he shares Infowars articles and videos.

It doesnt seem to bother the president that Jones has a long history of spreading conspiracy theories through his various media channels. Jones launched his first radio show in 1996, and the day after 9/11 he went on the air calling the tragedy an inside job.

A theme he returns to again and again is that the US government is actually controlled by an international faction called the New World Order. The globalists big banks, billionaires, mainstream media, pharmaceutical companies are actively conspiring against the interests of regular Americans.

Jones has said Oprah Winfrey is trying to reduce the African population by half, that Sesame Streets new autistic Muppet was designed to normalize an increasingly common disease thats caused by vaccines, and that the Atlantic and other lefty periodicals are hinting at an imminent decapitation of President Trump.

In this world, Andrew Wakefield, the discredited doctor who falsified data to suggest vaccines are linked to autism, is a pioneer and trailblazer who just wants to help keep people healthy. By contrast, Bill Gates is running a mass eugenics effort through his charitable work, and the HIV epidemic was actually created by the American government (which has incidentally been part of a Russian disinformation campaign about the US government).

Jones often talks about the pedophile rings that elites are helping to organize, and his suggestion that Hillary Clinton was running one out of a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC, was the reason a man walked into that shop with a gun last year threatening to kill people, in what has become known as Pizzagate.

Inciting violence is one problem with the show. Less obvious but equally worrying is that over the years, scientific experts and doctors have been popular targets, and empiricism and rationalism are under constant attack.

According to Infowars, vaccines are just one part of a serious attack on our health. Its also happening with fluoridation of the water supply, GMOs in our food, the chemicals in the environment, and the medications prescribed by doctors.

More recently, Infowars has aired segments about another health problem youve probably never heard of: a rarely discussed fungus epidemic [that] is spreading throughout America. Its a useful example of how the site spreads misinformation and denigrates science.

Instead of actual researchers, the fungus segments feature Infowars associate Dr. Edward Group. Group is not a doctor but a naturopath who also frequently alleges that researchers and mainstream medicine are colluding with government in a mass conspiracy to poison people. Hes said Food and Drug Administration officials raided his office because he was onto a promising cure for cancer. (I reached out to Group to interview him for this story. He declined the request.)

To establish this fungus epidemic, Group draws on science or the feeling of science. He talks about all the research hes done, and refers to citations from stacks of papers in front of him to support the idea that fungus and yeast overgrowth is causing everything from brain tumors and brain fog to skin conditions, itching, difficulty with vision, anxiety, fatigue, and the obesity epidemic.

It really is a problem most people are not familiar with, Group says on the show. The scientific community is deliberately hiding this fungus from view. As a matter a fact, most doctors and hospitals really do not take the time to check people for fungal infections.

Not to worry: Group and Jones have the solution.

They are peddling supplements called Myco-ZX to fight an epidemic theyve invented. Group claims the pills cleanse the body and boost the immune system to fight fungal overgrowth. These fungus fighters are one of numerous health products hawked on the show.

Watching these segments, I felt confused, disturbed. I understood why people might believe Jones and Group. Its hard to falsify many of the health claims they make. They also draw on real uncertainty and problems in science medical studies are often funded by the drug industry; the industry has done shady things to undermine the entire research enterprise.

The health care system has also failed many people. Doctors make mistakes and leave patients jaded and suspicious of their expertise. Medicine has come so far over the past century, but it often falls short of patients expectations. Its not difficult to see why the quick fixes and simple solutions Jones offers the game-changing pills to fight the fungus thats really causing all your health woes might resonate with millions of Americans.

Theres also the current political climate to consider. An environment in which people are distrustful of institutions can be fertile ground on which to promote conspiracy theories, said Brendan Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth College who researches misperceptions about politics and health care. With Infowars, Jones is tilling that soil.

Exaggerating scientific uncertainty to sow doubt and confusion is nothing new. We saw this during the tobacco wars. We see this in the ongoing debate about climate change (which scientists agree is not actually a debate). Fake news isnt novel either, nor is medical misinformation on the internet.

Whats different about Infowars is the concerted effort to undermine institutions and politicize topics that have mostly been neutral like immunizations for children.

Dr. Oz may have brought anti-vaccine campaigners on air or spread magical thinking about health, but he didnt wrap it up in identity politics. Jones and his associates do, making a rejection of the medical establishment and science part of what it means to be on the populist right.

If to be skeptical of vaccines means to be a good conservative, [theres a problem], said Alan Levinovitz, a professor of philosophy and religion who has been studying pseudoscience. This misinformation is dangerous when it gets tied up with political ideology.

It's concerning in part because of the right-wing media's growing influence over the GOP. Infowars frequently calls on Trump to enact policy based on conspiracy theories. Sign an executive order to take fluoride out of the water! Group said once. And while the administration doesn't seem to be entertaining that particular idea, it's conceivable that the show could have some influence over the shaping of vaccine or abortion policy with deadly effects.

Science as an institution has, for hundreds of years, been viewed as the best method for producing knowledge. Until recently, science has also been relatively sacred across administrations and across partisan lines, said Dietram Scheufele, a professor of science communication at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Once we start eroding [science], we get into dangerous territory, he added. Think about how important science is for national security, how important it is for business. The very laptops this stuff is being written on wouldnt be possible if not for the science thats under attack.

This war on science playing out in the right-wing media is poised to damage one of our most valuable institutions a key driver of the economy, a source of our military strength and leadership in medical and technological innovation. In the Infowars universe, though, science is the enemy part of the globalist elite movement thats poisoning people, keeping them down. Anyone who cares about evidence and science: Ignore this seething movement at your peril.

See the original post:

I watched Alex Jones give his viewers health advice. Here's what I ... - Vox