Far from being a secret Muslim who was indifferent to the death of an American diplomat, or a progressive peacenik who resents U.S. leadership, Obama was something much more destructive to the interests of Americans — he was a typical American hawk. He was different from George W. Bush only in preferring air power for aiding revolutionaries and rebels on the ground, rather than a ground invasion and think-tank conquerors like Ahmed Chalabi. The result of the policy of our foolish Christians is worse than the fever dreams of any Manchurian Mohammedan or American weakling: a continuation and intensification of the wars that are leading to the eradication of Christianity from the Middle East. ISIS is conquering territory and killing Christians with American materiel.The fact is that the opposition party in America can’t honestly investigate Obama’s foreign policy without doing fatal collateral damage to its own. And so Hillary Clinton can say in public that the intervention she championed in Libya is “smart power at its best,” even though that country is being terrorized by ISIS and other jihadists and is one source of the refugee crisis. The supposedly mean-spirited GOP that would do anything to attack Clinton has run into something it won’t do: challenge our recklessly hawkish foreign policy.
[gallery] From The Negro Motorist Green Book
I am reminded of a story I recently read on a website called Marketwatch. This story explained to me that reading fiction can improve empathy. It was a proven fact—the scientific method had determined that books could do this. This was relevant because Marketwatch was reporting on a new finding that only 47 percent of Americans had read a novel, play, or poem in 2012, down from 50 percent in 2008. The argument was simple: you can get a tangible benefit out of fiction—in this case, greater empathy. This benefit could make reading more competitive with other entertainment options. Reading could improve its market share.
I was struck by the fact that this article never tried to account for the utilitarian benefits of much more widespread forms of entertainment, like professional basketball or a Hollywood action movie. I’ve read a lot of articles like the Marketwatch one, and I’ve noted that none of them ever do this. Never is an NBA playoff game or a blockbuster movie expected to explain its reason for existing, its benefits to the consumer. They only ever try to make novel art account for its purpose. Maybe this is the divide we’re really speaking of when we invoke that binary, high and low. Perhaps we are talking about ways of filling our free time that need no justification, and those that do.
Britain’s got talent.
Americans have not, in fact, become more tolerant. Rather, they have shifted their dislike to new groups. For example, “Muslim clergymen who preach hatred against the United States” are now the least liked group included in the General Social Survey (GSS), followed by people who believe that “blacks are genetically inferior”. Most importantly, compared to those in their 40s, people in their 30s and 20s actually show lower tolerance towards these groups. According to the 2012 GSS, people in their 40s are the most tolerant of Muslim clergymen who preach anti-American hatred: 43% say a member of this group should not be allowed to give a public speech in their community. Among people in their 30s, the number who would prohibit this group from speaking climbs to 52%, and for those in their 20s it jumps to 60%. Young people are also less tolerant than the middle aged groups toward militarists, communists, and racists. This is not true for tolerance towards homosexuals or atheists, because younger people simply like these groups more. (Political tolerance is not a measure of liking someone, but the willingness to extend political freedoms to those one dislikes).
In one sense there were differences, and not just that I was younger and slenderer first time round. Food and service are both much better than when I first came here. Attitudes have also changed mostly for the better, although not always. There is this paradox that Britain has never been so rich and the amount of money and possessions most people have cannot be compared with what people had when I first arrived. And yet the country behaves as if it has never been so poor. The refrain you constantly hear is “we can’t afford it”. It feels like we are permanently in this age of austerity in which we not only can’t afford large things – housing for all that need it, cottage hospitals in every town – but also small things such as flower beds on roundabouts. All these things the country had when I first came here, and when we were all much poorer.
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Unsexy Halloween costumes, via Matt Novak and John Clifford on Twitter
[gallery] deckerlibrary:
Today is Ursula K. Le Guin’s 85th birthday!To celebrate, we are taking a look at Aaron Johnson and Michael Bixler’s artist book Direction of the Road (N7433.4 .L42 D57 2007 Cage) which takes it’s inspiration and title from Le Guin’s short story contained within it.
Direction of the Road by Le Guin is a tale of perception and perspective, told from the point of view of an oak tree which must adapt to its changing surroundings.
The artist book contains an example of an anamorphosis image. An anamorphosis image is seen by the naked eye in distorted perspective. The true image is only revealed when looking at the image with a device, often a cylindrical mirror, which in this case reveals a large tree with two birds flying overhead.
And be sure to check out Le Guin’s other books in our collection here!
So if selfhood implies individuality, or if our undeniable individuality justifies the sense of selfhood, then there is another mystery to be acknowledged: that this impulse to deny the reality, which is to say the value, of the human self should still persist and flourish among us. Where slavery and other forms of extreme exploitation of human labor have been general, moral convenience would account for much of it, no doubt. Where population groups are seen as enemies or even as burdens, certain nefarious traits are attributed to them as a whole that are taken to override the qualities of individual members. Again, moral convenience could account for this. Both cases illustrate the association of the denial of selfhood with the devaluation of the human person. This would seem too obvious to be said, if it were not true that the denial of selfhood, which is, we are told, authorized by the methods of neuroscience and by the intentionally generalized reports it offers of the profoundly intricate workings of the brain, persists and flourishes.There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of our selves is an understandable temptation. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader’s store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood. As with scientific hypotheses, even failure is meaningful, a test of the boundaries of credibility. So many voices, so many worlds, we can weary of them. If there were only one human query to be heard in the universe, and it was only the sort of thing we were always inclined to wonder about—“Where did all this come from?” or “Why could we never refrain from war?”—we would hear in it a beauty that would overwhelm us. So frail a sound, so brave, so deeply inflected by the burden of thought, that we would ask, “Whose voice is this?” We would feel a barely tolerable loneliness, hers and ours. And if there were another hearer, not one of us, how starkly that hearer would apprehend what we are and were.