denial
no, i'm really naked
Submitted by antarchi on November 5, 2010 - 16:56"Excuse us, sir", said one of them, "...excuse us for talking. You're the one who should have been talking, sir. You know things, sir. We don't."
And Freire's response...
"All right," I said, in response to the peasant's intervention. "Let's say I know and you don't. Still, I'd like to try a game with you that, to work right, will require our full effort and attention. I'm going to draw a line down the middle of this chalkboard, and I'm going to write down on this side the goals I score against you, and on this other side the ones you score against me. The game will consist in asking each other questions. If the person asked doesn't know the answer, the person who asked the question scores a goal. I'll start the game by asking you a question."
At this point, precisely because I had seized the group's "moment," the climate was more lively than when we had begun, before the silence.
First question:
"What is the Socratic maieutic?"
General guffawing. Score one for me.
"Now it's your turn to ask me a question," I said.
There was some whispering, and one of them tossed out the question:
"What's a contour curve?"
I couldn't answer. I marked down one to one.
"What importance does Hegel have in Marx's thought?"
Two to one.
"What's soil liming?"
Two to two.
"What's an intransitivie verb?"
Three to two.
"What's a contour curve got to do with erosion?"
Three to three.
"What's epistemology?"
Four to three.
"What's green fertilizer?"
Four to four.
And so on, until we got to ten to ten.
A rare emperor.
From Pedagogy of Hope
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war crimes: a strategic blunder
Submitted by antarchi on October 24, 2010 - 20:55In his introduction to Animal Farm... George Orwell writes that the British (the audience for which he was writing) should not be too complacent about his satire on the crimes of the totalitarian enemy. He said in free England unacceptable ideas could be suppressed voluntarily, without the use of force. He says the reasons are that the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. In the more modern period, generally, the media are either big corporations or parts of mega corporations or closely linked to the government. The other reason—maybe more significant—is just that if you have a good education, you would have instilled into you that there are certain things that it just wouldn’t do to say.
For example, you don’t say or even think that the invasion of Iraq is a criminal aggression of the kind for which people were hanged in Nuremberg, that what you say was a strategic blunder1 was precisely what the Communist party said in the 1980s. They were under coercion. In the West, it is not coercion, it is just voluntary submission to an intellectual culture which remains overwhelmingly within narrow limits that restrict analysis, reporting, and condemnation of government action. Take this morning’s (October 5) New York Times. There is an article by a good correspondent, Steven Lee Myers, who says that Iraq is having serious problems with sectarian conflict, with chaos, which are all the results of democracy. I don’t think so. I think it is the result of the American invasion. But you can’t say or think that.
defending ahmedinejad (apparently)
Submitted by antarchi on October 1, 2009 - 18:42Is Ahmedinejad anti-semitic, is he holocaust denying - and does it matter? Should we bother to defend him if we think that he is not?
I think we should. Partly because he deserves, as any human being does, to be considered innocent until he has been found guilty, but mostly because this story about Ahmedinejad is being used to sell another war. Whatever he is, he is not deserving of a war, nor are the people in his country who will suffer it.
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the 12 warmest years
Submitted by antarchi on June 23, 2009 - 00:57The 12 warmest years on record within the past 150 years have been during the past 13 years: 1998 was the warmest, followed by 2005, 2002, 2003, and 2004.
genocide inflation: kosovo
Submitted by antarchi on December 21, 2007 - 20:08[Genocide inflation] occurred before and during NATO’s 78-day bombing war on Yugoslavia and takeover of Kosovo. The pre-bombing propaganda barrage claiming Serb misbehavior was massive, and then during the war itself there was a stream of hysterical claims of indiscriminate killing, official U.S. claims of Bosnian Muslim deaths reaching 500,000, with a very profuse use of the word “genocide.” After the war, the claimed deaths quickly fell to 11,000, and one of the greatest forensic body searches in history produced only 4,000 bodies (with some 2,000 still reportedly missing).
genocide in one small town
Submitted by antarchi on December 21, 2007 - 20:05the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 has survived as a now institutionalized “genocide.” But it has done so in the face of intractable problems: the NATO-organized and compliant Yugoslav Tribunal identified it as such by finding that there could be genocide in one small town, where the genocidists had bussed to safety all the women and children of their target population, and where the claims of 8,000 executed have never been verified by forensic or credible witness evidence of anything like this scale of killing. It lives on by virtue of its political utility and aggressive challenges to its truthfulness as “revisionism” and “denial.”
