What if the problem is simply liberals and conservatives just don't like each other? Fort Worth Star Telegram It's not about tax rates, government regulation or even abortion rights. No, this is elemental. This is about the city versus the country, higher education versus a mistrust thereof, Christian fundamentalism versus secular humanism. And it is about ... and more »

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What if the problem is simply liberals and conservatives just don't like each other? - Fort Worth Star Telegram

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

By Yuval Noah Harari

Harper. 449 pp. $35

---

Many people fear that the path of artificial intelligence will eventually lead to a standoff between humans and machines, with humans as the underdogs. Confrontation looms in the forecasts of futurists and in the narratives of science fiction movies such as "The Matrix," "The Terminator" and "Westworld." But there's another way our demise could go down. We could begin wondering what makes people so special, anyway, and willingly give up the title of supreme species - or even the preservation of humanity altogether. This is the path explored by historian Yuval Noah Harari in his new book, "Homo Deus." There's no need for a Terminator to come after us when, instead of fighting the network in the sky, we assimilate into it.

At stake is the religion of humanism. Whereas theists worship gods, humanists worship humans. Harari, whose previous book, "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind," foreshadows this one, defines religion as any system of thought that sees certain values as having legitimacy independent of people. "Thou shalt not kill" derives its force from God, not from the mortal Moses. Similarly, humanists believe in "human rights" as things earned automatically from the universe, whatever anyone else says. The right not to be tortured or enslaved exists outside human convention. (Philosophers call this bit of magical thinking moral realism.)

We may take for granted the right not to be tortured or enslaved - or various other humanist doctrines, such as the idea that we're all inherently valuable individuals with the free will to express our authentic selves - but we have not always done so. People were seen as property even well after that bit about "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was inked to parchment. As Harari argues, we've lived with alternatives to humanism, and we can again. And ironically, he writes, "the rise of humanism also contains the seeds of its downfall."

That's kind of a fudge, one of a few in the book. It's not the humanist revolution per se that planted those poison seeds. It's more the (somewhat symbiotic) scientific revolution. You don't need universal rights to study electricity and invent computers. Or to apply our inventions toward the evergreen pursuits of health, happiness and control over nature (or as Harari calls them, "immortality, bliss and divinity"). Nevertheless, scientific and technological progress might eventually undermine the humanist ethos.

On the scientific front, research is pushing back on the idea of free will (as philosophers have for ages). The more we can explain human behavior with neuroscience and psychology, the less room there is for some magical human soul.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is rendering us useless, taking the jobs of taxi drivers, factory workers, stock traders, lawyers, teachers, doctors and "Jeopardy!" contestants. And, Harari argues, liberal humanism rose on the back of human usefulness. It advanced not on moral grounds but on economic and military grounds. Countries such as France offered dignity to all in exchange for service to the nation. "Is it a coincidence," Harari asks, "that universal rights were proclaimed at the precise historical juncture when universal conscription was decreed?" But with robots making and killing things better than we can, who needs people? Intelligence will matter more than consciousness. "What's so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences" in virtual reality?

Even if the human species does continue to serve the system meaningfully, we might not matter as individuals. Harari suggests that algorithms might get to know us better than we know ourselves. As they collect data on our Web searches, exercise routines and much more, they'll be able to tell us whom we should date and how we should vote. We may happily take their advice, literally ceding democracy to databases. Once our authentic, enigmatic, indivisible selves are exposed as mere predictable computations - not just by philosophers and scientists but by our every interaction with the world - the fiction of free will might finally unravel. (Personally, I'm not sure our brains will allow this.) We'll enlist as mere specialized processors in the global cyborganic network.

Harari presents three possible futures. In one, humans are expendable. In a second, the elite upgrade themselves, becoming essentially another species that sees everyone else as expendable. In a third, we join the hive mind, worshipping data over individuals (or God). "Connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning," he writes. In any case, he says convincingly, "the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Islamic State or the Bible Belt, but Silicon Valley."

I enjoyed reading about these topics not from another futurist but from a historian, contextualizing our current ways of thinking amid humanity's long march - especially a historian with Harari's ability to capsulize big ideas memorably and mingle them with a light, dry humor.

In "Homo Deus," Harari offers not just history lessons but a meta-history lesson. In school, history was my least favorite subject. I preferred science, which offered abstract laws useful for predicting new outcomes. History seemed a melange of happenstance and contingency retroactively cobbled into stories. If history's arcs were more Newtonian, we'd be better at predicting elections.

Harari points to an opposing goal of his field. He writes that "studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past," showing that "our present situation is neither natural nor eternal." In other words, it emphasizes happenstance. That's a useful tactic for the oppressed fighting the status quo. It's also a useful exercise for those who see the technological singularity as a given. We have options.

It's possible we'll choose to avoid our loss of values. On the other hand, it's possible we'll choose to accelerate it. Harari, a vegan who disputes humanity's reserved seat atop the great chain of being, briefly ponders this option: "Maybe the collapse of humanism will also be beneficial." Indeed, don't we owe a chance to animals and androids, too?

---

Hutson is a science and technology writer and the author of "The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking."

The rest is here:

Book World: In a robot showdown, humanity may happily surrender - Prince George Citizen

By John Darling For the Tidings

Is the world gradually moving into a post-religious phase? Are millennials dropping religion in large numbers? Are evangelicals a driver in our politically divided society?

Phil Zuckerman, a professor in secularism at Claremont Graduate University and author of Society Without God, says "yes" to all these questions and will explain why at a talk starting at 7 p.m. Monday, March 13, at Rogue Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 87 Fourth St., Ashland.

Secularism means doubting and deconstructing religion in any political claims, he says. Philosophically, it means debunking religious claims. Its a large umbrella that includes agnosticism and atheism and other isms, but the most important one is humanism. Whatever problem is out there, whether in global warming, poverty, illness, you are taking a rational stand for all sentient beings and not relying on saviors, gurus or magical beings.

Zuckerman, who created the degree-granting program of secularism atPitzer College, one of The Claremont Colleges in Southern California, says secularism means being non-religious on a personal level and on the political level means absolute separation of church and state.

There are no gods or gurus or magical beings who are going to help us. Its humans and humanism that are going to make this a better place in the here and now.

In a phone interview, Zuckerman said, Secularism as a moral vision is more suitable in the goal of treating people with humanness and guarding our planet against destruction.

The lecture of Zuckerman, 47, is called, "Secular vs Religious Morality in the Age of Trump." He pulls no punches in describing new president Donald Trump and his effect on our societys morality, as well as the impact of self-described evangelicals, 81 percent of whom voted for him.

Not only are we living in an era of alternate facts, under Trump, but alternate facts means lies and alternate morality, he notes. Immoral policies are being carried out under the guise of morality and were now in an era of true moral depravity.

He says white evangelicals are the base Trumps support and need to be singled out for heavy responsibility in the moral depravity of today. Theyve created pain and suffering all over this planet.

The religious right, he says, is the main reason younger people are turned off to religion, even disgusted by it. Its the opposition to gays, womens rights, other ethnic groups and if the younger people have a spiritual experience on their own, they embrace it and might say they believe in a higher power, but theyre not interested in taking it to a religious organization. They feel the awe but they wont put labels on it.

There are other causes to the long decline of Christianity. America has become a much more multi-cultural society and people are starting to get to know and like people of other religious traditions, he says.

When you have a monopoly on religion and its the only show in town, as it was in the past, it takes on an aura of reality and truthfulness, but now thats harder to maintain. People have a lot more education about the history of religion. The internet is another big factor and its correlated with losing faith. More women are working outside the home. Women are socializers and have always maintained engagement with religion and that has declined.

The Pew Research Center reports that three years ago, of the so-called Silent Generation, born 1928-45, 85 percent say they were Christian, tapering down with 78 percent of boomers, 70 percent of Generation X and 56 percent of younger millennials. Between 2007 and 2014, the Christian share of the population dropped from 78.4 to 70.6 percent, while unaffiliated climbed from 16.1 to 22.8 percent.

Zuckerman says a degree in secular studies is a good gateway to public policy, law, education, history, teaching or politics although, at this time, if you want to run for office in a red state with that on your resume, you are probably doomed, because they expect you to be a god-believer. But that stigma is going to fade as more and more of us come out. The degree was not created to get people jobs, but to enhance our world.

Noted thinkers in the secular tradition and the books he assigns in classes include Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, David Hume, Emma Goldman and Epicurus.

In his Society Without God, Zuckerman points out Denmark and Sweden are the least religious countries in the world, maybe in the history of the world, but have the lowest violent crime rate and the least corruption in the world. He has commented that religion is often conflated with patriotism, and that secular people tend to vote for progressive causes.

He is the author of several other books, including Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion and Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions.

His talk is free and open to the public.

John Darling is an Ashland freelance writer. Reach him at jdarling@jeffnet.org.

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Noted secularist Zuckerman to speak here Monday - Ashland Daily Tidings

Miami Herald (blog)

'Can we all get along?' Apparently not Miami Herald (blog) So this driver is stopped at an intersection. A pedestrian is dawdling in the crosswalk. Driver leans out the window and yells, Get out of the street, you damned liberal! It's been years since I read that in a magazine. I can't remember if it was a ...

Excerpt from:

'Can we all get along?' Apparently not - Miami Herald (blog)

By Matthew Hutson By Matthew Hutson March 9 at 12:33 PM

Matthew Hutsonis a science and technology writer and the author of The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking.

Many people fear that the path of artificial intelligence will eventually lead to a standoff between humans and machines, with humans as the underdogs. Confrontation looms in the forecasts of futurists and in the narratives of science fiction movies such as The Matrix, The Terminator and Westworld. But theres another way our demise could go down. We could begin wondering what makes people so special, anyway, and willingly give up the title of supreme species or even the preservation of humanity altogether. This is the path explored by historian Yuval Noah Harari in his new book, Homo Deus. Theres no need for a Terminator to come after us when, instead of fighting the network in the sky, we assimilate into it.

At stake is the religion of humanism. Whereas theists worship gods, humanists worship humans. Harari, whose previous book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, foreshadows this one, defines religion as any system of thought that sees certain values as having legitimacy independent of people. Thou shalt not kill derives its force from God, not from the mortal Moses. Similarly, humanists believe in human rights as things earned automatically from the universe, whatever anyone else says. The right not to be tortured or enslaved exists outside human convention. (Philosophers call this bit of magical thinking moral realism.)

[Will technology allow us to transcend the human condition?]

We may take for granted the right not to be tortured or enslaved or various other humanist doctrines, such as the idea that were all inherently valuable individuals with the free will to express our authentic selves but we have not always done so. People were seen as property even well after that bit about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was inked to parchment. As Harari argues, weve lived with alternatives to humanism, and we can again. And ironically, he writes, the rise of humanism also contains the seeds of its downfall.

Thats kind of a fudge, one of a few in the book. Its not the humanist revolution per se that planted those poison seeds. Its more the (somewhat symbiotic) scientific revolution. You dont need universal rights to study electricity and invent computers. Or to apply our inventions toward the evergreen pursuits of health, happiness and control over nature (or as Harari calls them, immortality, bliss and divinity). Nevertheless, scientific and technological progress might eventually undermine the humanist ethos.

On the scientific front, research is pushing back on the idea of free will (as philosophers have for ages). The more we can explain human behavior with neuroscience and psychology, the less room there is for some magical human soul.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is rendering us useless, taking the jobs of taxi drivers, factory workers, stock traders, lawyers, teachers, doctors and Jeopardy! contestants. And, Harari argues, liberal humanism rose on the back of human usefulness. It advanced not on moral grounds but on economic and military grounds. Countries such as France offered dignity to all in exchange for service to the nation. Is it a coincidence, Harari asks, that universal rights were proclaimed at the precise historical juncture when universal conscription was decreed? But with robots making and killing things better than we can, who needs people? Intelligence will matter more than consciousness. Whats so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences in virtual reality?

[Do we love robots because we hate ourselves?]

Even if the human species does continue to serve the system meaningfully, we might not matter as individuals. Harari suggests that algorithms might get to know us better than we know ourselves. As they collect data on our Web searches, exercise routines and much more, theyll be able to tell us whom we should date and how we should vote. We may happily take their advice, literally ceding democracy to databases. Once our authentic, enigmatic, indivisible selves are exposed as mere predictable computations not just by philosophers and scientists but by our every interaction with the world the fiction of free will might finally unravel. (Personally, Im not sure our brains will allow this.) Well enlist as mere specialized processors in the global cyborganic network.

Harari presents three possible futures. In one, humans are expendable. In a second, the elite upgrade themselves, becoming essentially another species that sees everyone else as expendable. In a third, we join the hive mind, worshiping data over individuals (or God). Connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning, he writes. In any case, he says convincingly, the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Islamic State or the Bible Belt, but Silicon Valley.

I enjoyed reading about these topics not from another futurist but from a historian, contextualizing our current ways of thinking amid humanitys long march especially a historian with Hararis ability to capsulize big ideas memorably and mingle them with a light, dry humor.

In Homo Deus, Harari offers not just history lessons but a meta-history lesson. In school, history was my least favorite subject. I preferred science, which offered abstract laws useful for predicting new outcomes. History seemed a melange of happenstance and contingency retroactively cobbled into stories. If historys arcs were more Newtonian, wed be better at predicting elections.

Harari points to an opposing goal of his field. He writes that studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past, showing that our present situation is neither natural nor eternal. In other words, it emphasizes happenstance. Thats a useful tactic for the oppressed fighting the status quo. Its also a useful exercise for those who see the technological singularity as a given. We have options.

Its possible well choose to avoid our loss of values. On the other hand, its possible well choose to accelerate it. Harari, a vegan who disputes humanitys reserved seat atop the great chain of being, briefly ponders this option: Maybe the collapse of humanism will also be beneficial. Indeed, dont we owe a chance to animals and androids, too?

Homo Deus

A Brief History of Tomorrow

By Yuval Noah Harari

Harper. 449 pp. $35

Read more:

In a robot showdown, humanity may happily surrender - Washington Post

PARISJean dOrmesson was born in Paris in 1925. A writer and philosopher, he received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor in 2014. I spoke to him recently in Paris about the upcoming elections in France and the rise of populism globally.

Do you see a real possibility that Marine Le Pen and the National Front can win the French elections?

The National Front is clearly making steady progress. I remember when the party of the extreme right in France at the time of [Jean-Louis] Tixier-Vignancour reached a maximum of 2 percent of the vote. Later Jean-Marie Le Pens party gained a maximum of 3 to 4 percent of the vote. But now there is a populist wave all across the world I am thinking for example of Brexit, of Trump, of the Dutch elections and today Le Pen is at 26-27 percent.

For several months Le Pen has been the only candidate to be certain of going into the second round; the others, I am not sure. As I said before Le Pen will have approximately 25-30 percent of the votes but I do not think that she can be elected. She will face the Socialist Party led by [Benot] Hamon and the extreme left led by [Jean-Luc] Mlenchon. If they were united they would represent 25 percent, more or less the same percentage as Le Pen.

Anyway, I think that in the end Le Pen will be defeated. In my opinion, [Francois] Fillon if he is still in the race despite the scandal that has engulfed him or Macron will win the elections in the end. I do believe that Le Pen will be elected in the elections of 2022, but even now all possibilities are open. If, unfortunately, there should be a horrible attack two days before the elections, it would be a catastrophe, and in that case Le Pen could win.

Lukas Schulze via Getty Images

Are the French anxious and worried?

France has changed. For many years it was a country organized into two parties: the conservatives and the socialists, the right and the left. Macron has said correctly that bipartisanship is finished and it has been replaced by quadri-partisanship: Le Pen at the extreme right and the extreme left of Mlenchon, and then the traditional left and the traditional right. But it is not only politics that have changed but also the French people, who were once happy and carefree. As Cocteau rightly said they have become like Italians in a bad mood. The democratic system has been threatened and people are tending towards extremes. The victory of the National Front would be an economic catastrophe the return to the Franc, the closing of borders in short a great chaos.

Brexit and the election of Trump seemed to be unforeseeable events. They are, however, things that have happened.

You cannot absolutely trust the polls today, and also for many years people did not dare to admit that they voted for the National Front. Today, this trend has changed, and people are less afraid to say that they vote for the National Front. This could increase the partys vote to 30 percent.

What kind of a country is France today?

Its a country in bad shape. The five years of the Hollande presidency have been disastrous. He has not kept his promises and he was not able to reduce unemployment and increase the standard of living. Today France may seem to be turning the page, but the danger of terrorism and the problem of migrants is strong. Security is one of the main priorities, and with Le Pen there will be no more migrants because the borders will be closed. A large number of Christians vote for the National Front and I do not understand how they can support a political party that wants to close doors. I have to say that Hollande was better on the topic of security than he was on the economic front.

Do you worry about the world of culture, how are things for French culture?

The French language is doing very badly; it is hard to fight against English. It is also true that books and newspapers are in difficulty. Some publishers are doing well, but there is a negative trend and bookstore sales have been reduced by between 5 to 15 percent. Current events have certainly invigorated peoples desire to read newspapers, and for the moment the freedom of the press is total in France.

And if the National Front wins?

It will not only be a disaster for the poor and for the rich, but it will also affect culture, and the freedom of the press will be threatened.

Do intellectuals still have a voice in France today?

I am not an intellectual, I consider myself a humble writer. The left wing intellectuals went further right than myself. All of France is moving to the right. The Communist Party and the Socialists no longer seem to exist in France. However, writers still have a privileged situation. A writer in France still has a voice in society, although the myth of the great writer, such as Victor Hugo or Franois Mauriac or Andr Gide, no longer exists. The people have violently rejected the political class, all politicians are unpopular and the press is not seen in a very good light. Writers do still enjoy a certain respect.

You are a French academician. What is the role of the Academy of France today?

It does not have very much to do with literature, it is more like a meeting place for interesting people. Neither [Jean-Paul] Sartre nor [Andr] Malraux nor [Albert] Camus were French academicians, but the Academy of France definitely has an undeniable prestige, especially abroad, because it represents a certain French esprit. The French esprit prevailing at the time of Voltaire and Descartes.

One thing remains at the Academy that has otherwise disappeared in France I am talking about conversation. Formerly there were literary salons, but they disappeared. In the last 60-70 years, they were replaced by literary cafes, but now even those have disappeared and conversation has gone with them.

Does France still have a leading cultural role in Europe today?

France follows the destiny of Europe. For centuries the dominance of Europe was total, but I would like to say that culture goes hand in hand with a flourishing economy and military power. Both Louis XIV and Napoleon understood this very well. Tomorrow, the most important philosophers will be Indian, Chinese and Brazilian. The advance of populism is due to the weakness of Europe.

What about the United States?

Who would ever have expected four months ago an America with [Donald] Trump as president? And that is the opposite of what the world thinks about America. In both America and Europe today, there is great hostility toward the system. The real victim of all this is democracy.

What kind of a world do we live in nowadays?

It is a difficult period. The world has always changed, but today it is changing with a faster pace. I am not among those who say that it was better before. In spite of the great success of science it is unequivocally important to save a clear concept of humankind, and to reconcile the triumph of science with humanism.

Do you think that there will be new wars?

There should be no more wars, because we have created Europe, but if populism triumphs, things will change. We absolutely must safeguard the idea of Europe. Europe has succeeded in two things: the single currency and the absence of war. Wars will certainly continue in Africa, in Asia, but we must ensure absolute vigilance against populism. Young people have a tendency to be extremist, but we must prevent them from voting for the National Front.

In conclusion, what is your opinion about your country?

It is definitely somewhat anxious and unhappy. The French language, as I said at the beginning, is becoming less important, and France is not the first country in a Europe that is no longer the center of the world. It is wrong, though, to be talking about decline all the time. What I believe is that Africa will have an increasingly important role. The future is Africa.

Read more:

The Victim Of Populism Is Democracy - Huffington Post

During his lightning solidarity visit to Israel, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo met with Chemi Peres, chairman of the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation, and told him that every Sunday in the Big Apple throughout the month of June will be called Shimon Peres Day, as a fitting tribute to the legacy of Israels ninth president.

The people of New York are proud to participate in something like that, said Cuomo.

Chemi Peres said that it was extremely moving to know that such an honor was being bestowed on his late father.

In the Shimon Peres Day Proclamation that Cuomo presented to Chemi Peres, it states: Whereas New York is home to more than 1.7 million Jews the largest Jewish community outside of Israel in the world and always had a special relationship with Israel, and president Peres served as a tremendous ally in promoting and strengthening the bond....

LAST WEEK, when he learned of the death of legendary photographer David Rubinger, Chemi Peres recalled that there were several Rubinger photographs in the Peres family album, and a quick search revealed a happy moment for Peress parents, Sonia and Shimon, and another showed Shimon Peres asleep in a deck chair by the pool of the King David Hotel.

Rubinger was famous for catching his subjects in unguarded moments, and even in his 90s never went anywhere without his Leica.

Still working till the end of his days, albeit no longer chasing news stories, Rubinger was involved in two important projects at the time of his death. He was working with the Government Press Office on its National Photo Collection, and he was also the mentor for a photo contest for photos of Jerusalem taken anywhere in the city at any time. As far as the GPO was concerned, We considered him family, said GPO director Nitzan Chen.

FRENCH-AMERICAN producer, director, screenwriter and actor Philippe Martinez, a former president of the famed Odeon Theater in Marseilles, which is one of the largest in Europe, was the guest of honor at the Peres Academic Center in Rehovot, at a wide-ranging discussion on the rights of women in Israel and around the world. He was greeted by the centers founder and CEO, Ofra Elul, its president, Prof. Ron Shapira, and its dean of behavioral sciences, Prof. Malka Margalit.

Martinez, who has an impressive list of film credits to his name, spoke about his latest film, of which he is a co-producer. Finding Soraya, directed by Najia Khaan, deals extensively and in a universal context with womens rights.

The event also included a womens panel, moderated by television personality Dana Weiss, in which Deputy Foreign Minister Likud MK Tzipi Hotovely, Yesh Atid MK Aliza Lavie, clinical psychologist Dr. Michal Einav, Buba Levi from Kol Hanashi, an advocacy group for single mothers, and mental health expert Osnat Vaturi participated.

Recalling conversations with Shimon Peres, Weiss said that Peres had often stated that the future of the Middle East depends on the freedom and education given to its women.

Hotovely emphasized the importance of education toward equality from the earliest possible age, and also noted that even now, when women are reaching the highest ranks in almost every field, there is still a wage gap instead of equal pay for equal work.

WHEN HE officiated at the wedding last week of Asael Shabo and Saray Cohen and recited the Shehehiyanu prayer, Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has granted us life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this time, it had far greater meaning for Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, chief rabbi of Tel Aviv and former chief rabbi of the State of Israel, than at most other weddings, with the possible exception of the one he attended earlier last month in which the bride was his granddaughter Yael.

The groom in the more recent wedding was the child survivor of a terrorist attack, in which his mother and three of his siblings were murdered. Lau is a child survivor of the Holocaust, with a large family of children and grandchildren who would not have been born had he not survived. Similarly, newlyweds Shabo and Cohen will build a home and a family in Israel.

Amid all the joy that accompanies a wedding, there were many tears, as people remembered what the Shabo family had endured. In June 2002, when a terrorist invaded the Shabo family home in Itamar, he murdered Rachel Shabo, 40, and three of her children. Asael, who had also been shot, played dead, which is how he was saved. He was nine years old.

The terrorist who infiltrated the settlement shot in all directions before firing at the Shabo family. He shot Rachel Shabo in the back; then he shot Avishai, five, Zvika, 13, and Neria, 16, as well as a neighbor, Yosef Twito, who came to help them. Asael and his 13-year-old sister, Avia, were wounded, Asael more so than Avia. He had three bullets in his leg as well as shrapnel. Doctors tried to save the leg, but couldnt and in the long run had no choice but to amputate.

Despite the loss of a leg, Asael became an athlete, a champion basketball player and swimmer and represented Israel in the Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro. Among those who recited one of the seven blessings under the bridal canopy was M, a border policeman who rescued Asael from the carnage, but whose name still remains classified.

At the time of the attack, Boaz Shabo, the father of the family, was not at home, nor were the two eldest children, Yariv, 17 and Atara, 15. The Shabos were among the founders of Itamar.

Seeking to rehabilitate what remained of his family, Boaz Shabo remarried six years after the tragedy. His new wife, Hila Susan, had five children of her own. Together, in 2009, they produced a set of triplets. The family lives in Kedumim.

Three years ago, Avia married her stepbrother David Susan. Very soon after the two families became one, a very close bond developed between Avia and David, and no one was surprised when they decided to get married.

Last year, while attending the Israeli Final Four basketball semifinal between Hapoel Jerusalem and Hapoel Eilat at the Jerusalem Arena, Asael publicly proposed to Saray and presented her with an engagement ring, to the cheers of the crowd. Although they had been going steady for some time, Saray had no idea that Asael was going to propose, and as she accepted, tears of joy washed her cheeks. At her wedding, she was all smiles.

THE GOVERNMENT is finally waking up to the appalling conditions under which the mentally ill are kept under lock and key, and the cruel treatment to which senior citizens are subjected in certain nursing homes. The government might still be oblivious or derelict in its duty, were it not for Israel Radios Keren Neubach and Israel Hayom health reporter Ran Reznick, who for months have been pursuing both issues and broadcasting ongoing revelations of the mistreatment of patients in facilities for the mentally ill as well as those in homes for senior citizens.

Patients in both are abused, put in solitary confinement not just for days, weeks or months, but for years, and if they misbehave they are denied visitations by their families. When they beg to be allowed to go to the toilet, their cries fall on deaf ears, and they have no option but to answer calls of nature in the beds to which they are strapped. Because they are locked away, the general public does not spare any thought for the inhuman conditions to which they are subjected or the fact that they are deprived of basic rights.

Still, its unlikely that either Neubach or Resnick will be nominated for the Israel Prize which they richly deserve.

DURING THE period leading up to International Womens Day and in the immediate aftermath, the volume of publicity given to women achievers in almost every field of endeavor makes one doubt that there ever was a glass ceiling, or alternately, makes one realize that the glass ceiling has been smashed to smithereens.

Emunah, the religious Zionist Womens Organization, chose as its Woman of the Year Frumit Cohen, a lawyer by training and in charge of human resources for the Prisons Service, which means that she is responsible for some 9,000 people. She will be officially recognized as woman of the year at an official ceremony on March 15.

She has worked with the Prisons Service for 22 years, during which time she has held a number of different positions. She also works for the benefit of prisoners to help them find their places in society once they are released from prison. Notwithstanding the complexities of her job, when anyone comes to her with a problem, she is unfailingly supportive.

Raised in Ramat Gan in a staunchly religious Zionist family, Cohen, 46, a mother of five and a grandmother of two, now lives in Nof Ayalon. She earned her law degree at Bar-Ilan University. The Emunah Woman of the Year is chosen by a public committee headed by Emunah chairwoman Liora Minka. As has happened every year for the past decade, the committee received numerous nominations that included extremely outstanding women in their respective fields, but Cohen proved to be the most outstanding.

FOR MUCH too long, Holocaust survivors in Israel have been cheated of their rights more often than not because they were not fully aware of their entitlements. Now, those who are left may have a chance to get what is due to them.

Holocaust survivors, social workers and representatives of organizations working on behalf of Holocaust survivors are invited to attend a conference taking place at Kfar Hamaccabiah in Ramat Gan on Tuesday, March 28, from 9:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. The conference is jointly sponsored by the Claims Conference, the Authority for the Rights of Holocaust Survivors, the Center for Holocaust Survivors Organizations in Israel and the Social Equality Ministry.

Speakers will include Colette Avital, who chairs the Center of Holocaust Organizations; Ofra Ross, the CEO of the Authority for the Rights of Holocaust Survivors, and Udi Mozes, legal adviser to the Israel branch of the Claims Conference.

HOLLYWOOD MOVIE star Richard Gere, who came to Israel for the premiere of Norman, the most recent film by acclaimed director Joseph Cedar, is also a political activist who may anger some right-wing politicians in Israel.

According to an interview that he gave to Yediot Aharonots Tzipi Shmilovitz, Gere intends to meet with various political figures, including the leadership of Breaking the Silence. The occupation has to end and Jerusalem should be the capital of two nations, Gere told his interviewer.

On his previous visits to Israel, he said, he had listened to opinions from all sides, but now the situation has become almost intolerable.

The occupation is destroying everyone from both sides, and a binational state will not solve anything. It will only lead Israel to apartheid. There must be two states for two peoples, with Jerusalem as the capital of both, he said.

SIMILAR THOUGHTS were expressed on Monday by Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint List in the Knesset. At a meeting at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem with members of the Foreign Press Association, Odeh also warned of the dangers of apartheid and the increase in settlements, unless the two-state solution is implemented.

After voicing his support for Palestinian aspirations for self-determination, Odeh was also asked his views about Hezbollah. Most people are against Hezbollah, he said. Do you think I could live under the fundamentalism of Hezbollah? Do you think my secular wife, who is a gynecologist, could live under Hezbollah? The soft-spoken and amazingly candid Odeh was very well received by his audience, and his popularity was enhanced by the fact that unlike most other guests of the FPA, both Israeli and Palestinian, his was not a hit-andrun affair. Crowded by journalists who wanted to ask him more questions after the official lecture and Q&A session had concluded, Odeh stayed behind and patiently satisfied the curiosity of all.

By the way, the fact that he identifies with the Palestinian struggle has no bearing on his views about Jewish rights to self-determination in the territory shared by Jews and Palestinians.

In his view, there is room for both to be sovereign nations.

CULTURE, HUMOR, gastronomy, nature tours and rabbis in residence are some of the attractions being marketed by hotels to lure domestic tourism. The idea of going away for the weekend simply to relax is fast becoming obsolete. The weekend often begins on a Thursday and runs through Friday and Saturday, with checkout on Saturday night soon after the conclusion of the Sabbath.

At the Yearim hotel located at Kibbutz Maaleh Hahamisha in the Judean Hills, theyve really gone overboard this weekend, meaning from March 9 to 11, inclusive.

Billed as a weekend of humor and laughter, it includes Rivka Michaeli, Roni Weiss, Rafi Shragai, Rubik Rosenthal, Dudi Ben Zeev and Tami Sirkis, with subject matter that includes cabaret, humor in movies, the complexities of modern Hebrew and standup culinary comedy. Taking into account the identities of the above, its going to be a real nostalgia kick.

ON THE subject of nostalgia, last week Zemereshet, a voluntary enterprise dedicated to the preservation of pre-state and early state Hebrew songs, last week paid tribute to Israel Prize laureate composer, pianist and lyricist Moshe Wilensky on the 20th anniversary of his passing. The tribute would have been more appropriate in January, but better late than never.

The auditorium at the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem was packed, mostly with senior citizens who were paying much more for a ticket than many senior citizens can afford, but they had the time of their lives singing Wilenskys marvelous tunes, many of which were composed by Natan Alterman.

Classically trained at the Fryderik Chopin University of Music, also known as the Warsaw Conservatory, the Warsaw-born Wilensky, who came to Tel Aviv in 1932, was shown in a film clip in which he said that when he arrived in the country, the people were very serious and expected him to compose serious music.

They were disappointed that he opted to compose lighthearted tunes. But he wanted his music to be sung not only by professionals but by people who simply came together to sing. Had he written symphonies, he said, they would have remained in a drawer and no one would ever have heard them.

Leading the community singing was Noga Eshed, who is not exactly a spring chicken herself, but who plays guitar and has a wonderfully flexible voice at times sounding almost like Shoshana Damari.

Film clips were also shown of Damari at the peak of her career beautiful to look at, impressive and charismatic in her dramatic caftan.

Coming up in the Zemereshet programs is a memorial sing-along for Netiva Ben-Yehuda on the sixth anniversary of her death. The event will take place at her graveside on March 24 at 11 a.m. at Klil in the Western Galilee, east of Nahariya and close to the Arab villages of Kafr Yasif and Yanuh-Jatt. The event will not take place if it rains.

Claude Buchbinder, producer of Ben-Yehudas late-night radio programs, Raya Admoni, the program editor in recent years, and Dalia Horesh, who was the editor of most of the programs, were all present at the Wilensky memorial tribute.

Ben-Yehuda was an author and broadcaster who appealed particularly to the generation of the Palmah, playing their songs and recalling their history. Despite the fact that she didnt have a radiophonic voice, was often forgetful and occasionally impatient, her fans adored her and protested so forcefully when the powers that be at the Israel Broadcasting Authority wanted to take her off the air that she stayed almost until the day she died.

One of her great claims to fame was co-authoring a book on Hebrew slang, which today would be barely relevant, as there have been so many changes and innovations in the language.

WARSAW WAS the birthplace or temporary home of some great Jewish figures in the arts. Also born in Warsaw was photojournalist Dawid Szymin, later called David Seymour, but known professionally as Chim. Considered one of the greatest photojournalists of all time, he was among the pioneers of the golden age of political photojournalism. He was also a co-founder, with Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, of Magnum, whose stable includes some of the worlds greatest prizewinning photographers.

This being the 70th anniversary year of the founding of Magnum, Beit Hatfutsot the Museum of the Jewish People is presenting a retrospective exhibition of the life and work of Chim, who took portraits of leaders, artists and intellectuals that appeared in the worlds major magazines. His depictions of the Spanish Civil War, Europe devastated by World War II, and the first years of the State of Israel helped form the collective memory of the 20th century. These iconic photographs reflect Chims technical expertise and visual intuition, but also the compassion, humanism and optimism that characterize his work.

A highlight of this exhibition will be Chims stunning photographs of the young State of Israel, including color works on display for the first time. Other features include personal items from Chims estate. Like many photojournalists who get too close the action, Chim was killed in 1956 while covering the Suez Crisis.

The exhibition, which opens on Tuesday, March 28, was developed in collaboration with Helen Sarid and Ben Shneiderman, Chims niece and nephew. The chief curator is Dr. Orit Shaham-Gover, the exhibition curator is Asaf Galay, and the exhibition director is Michal Houminer.

AND IN Jerusalem at Beit Avi Chai, there will be a memorial tribute to stunning prizewinning actress, film director and fashion model Ronit Elkabetz, who died in April last year after a failed struggle with cancer. The tribute will take place in the course of the Maghreb festival honoring Jews from North Africa and those of North African background.

The festival will be held from March 27 to 30.

Elkabetz, the eldest of four siblings, was born in Beersheba to parents from Essaouira in the western Moroccan region known as Marrakesh- Safi. She divided her time between Israel and France, where she also worked in films.

The tribute will be made with the participation of her brother Shlomi Elkabetz, who is a film director, actress and model Yael Abecassis and several other entertainment personalities of North African extraction.

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Grapevine: Shimon Peres Day in the Big Apple - Jerusalem Post Israel News

When it comes to presidents, the populous loves to retrospectively idolize. When it comes to presidents, the populous loves to retrospectively idolize.

Remember way back in season one of Game of Thrones (or book one of A Song of Ice and Fire) when we all thought Jaime Lannister was evil incarnate? In the very first episode, he commits passionate incest and then cavalierly kicks an inquisitive child (Brandon Stark) out of a window. The fall paralyzes the 7-year-old from the waist down.

(What a bastard! How could he! Well, hes going to be the villain in this story.)

But then we met his nephew/son Joffrey and flay-enthusiast Ramsey Bolton and suddenly Jaimes transgressions seemed, well, forgivable. Its not a perfect parallel, as Jaimes eponymous king-slaying was rather heroic and saved the people of Kings Landing from being burned alive by wildfire. Theres a poetic tragedy to the arc of ol one hand. But, Im veeringon a surface level, Jaime Lannister and George W. Bush are enjoying the same glossy rebirth; they are both direct beneficiaries of a comparative softening. We are gazing through a new lens. The calamity of Trump has made all other modern presidents (including the aforementioned disastrous one: GWB) seem more successful and presidential and coherent, and even, dare I say, eloquent.

After staying away from the spotlight for much of the Obama presidency, W is back with a book of portraits and stories about veterans. The book itself seems like a noble venture, and hes certainly not the worst painter in the world. But accompanying the book release has been a publicity tour which has seen the former president being treated by Jimmy Kimmel, Ellen Degeneres, and others as if hes just this sweet guy who did his best. While I see where this type of thinking comes from, as W. never struck me as a particularly evil man, just an impressionable, and incompetent oneif that was his best, it wasnt enough. His best cost a lot of people their lives.

George W. Bushs approval rating was 22% (the lowest number on record)before he left office for a reason. Following 9/11 he thrust us into two warsone of which was the terribly misguided result of stovepiping intelligence and was started without the approval of the U.N. security council and thus, was/is considered by many to be illegal. We lost nearly 7,000 troops in these wars, while over 200,000 civilianswere killed.

Moreover, lets not forget that he was against gay marriage, he banned federal funding for stem cell research, he gave tax cuts to the richest among us which bolstered income inequality, he pulled us out of the Kyoto Protocol which would have limited Greenhouse has emissions, he gutted the Clean Water Act, he scaled-back the Endangered Species Act, he ramped up the war on drugs, he, and more specifically his vice president, were war profiteers: Cheneys Halliburton made an estimated $39.5 billion in contracts during the Iraq War, he inherited a strong economy and steered us into the Great Recession and those are just some lowlights.

When it comes to presidents, the populous loves to retrospectively idolize. Prior faults become less pronouncedlogic and reason get washed away by a wave of misguided humanism. Bill Clinton enjoyedand enjoysa similar reception. There comes a point when, as a collective, we stop seeing the President and start seeing the person. We divorce the person from the office as it were and begin to treat them like run-of-the-mill, super celebrities. It didnt seem like that was going to happen for W. however. Over the last eight years, opinions of the former president were, by all accounts, stagnant and negative.

But after only a month and a half of Trump, Bush has been reinvented as some sort of folksy, yet comparatively intellectual and empathetic conservative. Just because things seem worse now, and our leader is a boorish buffoon, it doesntor rather, shouldnterase Bushs legacy of war, inequality, and environmental regression.

Originally published on The Overgrown.

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The Newfound Lionization Of George W. Bush Shows How Far We've Fallen - Huffington Post

Last year, 2016, marked twenty years since the Nigerian Humanist Movement (NHM) was founded. I was instrumental in this historic exercise and have played a prominent role in the growth and development of the movement. In this piece, I reflect on what led me to start the organisation and what the last twenty years have meant for me personally and for humanism in Nigeria.

Founding a non-religious non-theistic organisation is not something one would expect a child who was born in a rural community, who did most of his education in catholic seminaries (and even taught in one of them) to do. That was not just beyond anybodys imagination because nobody in my training or upbringing had prepared me to be a humanist organiser or an outspoken atheist. As a person who had trained to be a priest, the least thing people expected from me after leaving seminary was to continue to live my religious life quietly. But, apparently, I did not. Yes, I disappointed many who claimed that I moved from one extreme to another. Humanism is an extremist viewpoint, right? Well, that is history now. More importantly, that history has been filled with struggles because it required a lot of effort to make a Nigerian humanist movement happen.

Looking back today, I would say that the circumstances of my birth and upbringing actually prepared me for the task of working and organising to provide Nigerians an alternative to religion. I was born and brought up in a remote village in Southeastern Nigeria. That was shortly after the Nigerian civil war. My parents were born into a traditional religious setting but converted to Catholicism as they grew up. My father told me that embracing Catholicism was the easiest way of getting a formal education because schools were managed by Catholic missions. Though most people in my community professed a belief in Christianity at least publicly, they still held onto traditional religious notions and other superstitious beliefs such as ancestor-worship, the potency of charms, ritual sacrifice of human body parts and, of course, belief in witchcraft. Most people were privately traditional religionists but publicly Christian. In fact, people were trado-Christian believers. So while growing up there was a mix of traditional and Christian religious beliefs and practices. But formal education was helpful in getting me on the path of intellectual emancipation.

I started my primary education at a local state school that started as a Christian mission school but was taken over by the state in the 70s. Even as a state property, the school retained its catholic tradition. The school day started and ended with prayers and the catholic priest in the nearby church occasionally visited to preach to the pupils. While in primary school I became an altar boy and started assisting the priest at the local church. After my primary education, I went to study at a minor seminary and then studied philosophy at a major seminary and did a few months of theology. It was while studying philosophy that I learned about humanism for the first time. That was in our history of philosophy course program.

However, humanism was presented in a bad light as a spiritually corrupting outlook during the renaissance. But when I looked it up in the dictionary, I did not see anything debasing about humanism. In fact, I found humanism to be the most human of all human philosophies because upholding human dignity was central to this outlook. What I understood then was that humanism was just a philosophical perspective like other philosophical thoughts such as existentialism, idealism and empiricism. It was much later that I discovered humanism as a life stance for the non-religious, as an alternative to religion. I learned about one humanist organisation in the United States that was led by Prof Paul Kurtz. The organisation sent magazines to humanist groups and activists in Africa. The name of the organisation was Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (CODESH) which was later named Council for Secular Humanism.

After flipping through the pages of their magazine, Free Inquiry, I learned why the priest who taught us the history of philosophy opined that humanism had a corrupting influence. I noticed that humanist articles were critical of religion, and rightfully so. Articles in the magazine challenged religious privilege, questioned its orthodoxies and dogmas, and supported the separation of church/mosque and state, the rights of minorities and the human rights of non-theistic and non-religious folks.

I left the seminary in 1994 and for years I embarked on a journey of self-discovery. I tried to figure out what I wanted in life. I thought about starting a free-thought organisation that would provide a sense of community to non-religious people and provide a platform to combat superstition and promote critical thinking. Nigeria was and still is a religious country where superstitious beliefs are rampant. There was so much poverty, fear and despair. Religion played an important role in peoples lives. Apart from spreading irrational beliefs, the various religions provided education and health; and thus forming the basis for family and social support and solidarity.

Providing an alternative to religion would be a Herculean task because an effective alternative to religion must take into consideration the critical services that religion provides, particularly in a poverty-stricken region. But for me, these good deeds which religions accomplished paled in comparison to the harmful and destructive effects of their dogmas and superstitions and the havoc faith-based abuses wreaked in peoples lives.

So it was a gradual start for NHM. The early years were quite challenging because the resources were limited. Most members were non-financial. They were either students, unemployed or under-employed who were fascinated by non-religious ideas and viewpoints.

There were many issues such as caste discrimination, ritual killing, and witchcraft accusations that beckoned for humanist focus, perspective and attention. Nigerians needed an active critical voice that could awaken them, persuade them and prick their consciences. Simply put, Nigeria needed an alternative to religion.

However, such an organisation needed some funding program that could sustain it until it reached a critical mass of financial members capable of sustaining it. So the major challenge was how to get the resources to fund the movement and its activities. I continuously worried about where I could get resources to grow the organisation and guarantee some future for it. Meetings and events were limited to Ibadan and the nearby cities, communications with other contacts were mainly by post and the newsletter was published occasionally. With these events, NHM was able to register some presence in Ibadan, partner with other like-minded organisations and provide a much-needed humanist voice, and successfully organise international conferences. Some of those initial individual contacts have today grown to become chapters and affiliate groups. They are working and campaigning to promote humanist ideas and values in various capacities. The Internet has been helpful in connecting humanists and in facilitating humanist solidarity. So the humanist momentum is growing across the country and beyond. Though there are still daunting challenges, the prospects of a rational alternative to religion are bright and promising. Humanism is really set to become an effective alternative to religion in Nigeria and the Nigerian Humanist Movement is positioned to midwife this critical process. So, for me, founding the Nigerian Humanist Movement has really been a worthwhile undertaking. Yes it has been a labour of love.

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Making Humanism Happen in Nigeria: A labour of Love - Conatus News

MARCH 4, 2017

AS A FEMINIST, I am reluctant, at times, to admit to friends and academic colleagues that I appreciate H. P. Lovecrafts work. His misogyny and racism do not just haunt his tales; they are central to his mythos. Critical scholarship on the author has only recently started to grapple with the tension between the philosophical implications of his work and its inherent xenophobia. Lovecraft may enjoy a current vogue among predominantly masculinist philosophical methodologies, but he remains unpopular for those unwilling or unable to delve beyond his racist and misogynistic attitudes.

Edited by Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, The Age of Lovecraft is a collection of 11 essays and one interview that questions Lovecrafts recent reemergence as a cultural force. The collection argues for Lovecrafts place in modernism, and more provocatively demonstrates the many ways in which the contemporary moment belongs to Lovecraft. As James Kneale suggests in his contribution to the book, the age of Lovecraft is an age in which we are clearly still living. Kneales claim is not just that we now live in an age for which Lovecraft might be a figurehead, but that its been that way for some time.

Lovecraft is one of those authors that most people have heard of, but few seem to have read. Thats because his influence is everywhere. From contemporary comic book appearances and popular role-playing games to Swiss surrealist paintings and American heavy metal music, the legacy of Lovecrafts mythos has been revived, and since his quiet death in 1937, his legacy once impoverished and unrecognized has flourished. So when exactly is (or was) the age of Lovecraft? And if its now, then why?

Elevated from pulp author to canonical classic when the Library of America published his oeuvre in 2005, Lovecraft has since been revived in both literary criticism and philosophy. In the last decade or so, Lovecrafts tales, letters, and essays have reemerged with intensity, markedly in the influential philosopher Graham Harmans book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012). Lovecrafts work has repeatedly appeared in philosophical essays and books that follow in Harmans speculative realist tradition, where the tales often serve as literary examples par excellence. Harmans presence in The Age of Lovecraft looms across the diverse essays, reaffirming his command of Lovecraft studies despite the grievances that many authors air regarding his approach to the burgeoning field.

The reemergence of Lovecrafts work within this context is therefore no coincidence. The adoption of Lovecraft by speculative realists marks his work as a quintessential example of literature that denies the centrality of human life within a rapidly expanding cosmos, where humans feel their smallness and insignificance in the face of larger and more powerful cosmic forces. His fiction serves as a link between the modernist period and the contemporary one through this de-emphasis of the human and the inherent inability to fully comprehend the mysteries of the universe. In the Anthropocene a term generally accepted across disciplines to mark our current geological epoch it is perhaps clear why a writer with what S. T. Joshi has called Lovecrafts cosmic pessimism would serve as a contemporary philosophical model.

In their introduction to the volume, Sederholm and Weinstock write that it is against all odds that Lovecraft has become a 21st century star. The introduction thoroughly accounts for Lovecrafts widespread influence throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and it charts references to his mythos across global literary and popular cultures. But indeed, the odds were against his apparent prevailing influence he died impoverished, selling stories to pulp magazines just to feed himself, and he enjoyed no real popularity or fame during his lifetime. In the 21st century, as the editors explain, there are other elements working against his reemergence as a celebrated literary figure, including Lovecrafts well-documented racism and xenophobia, which can be found in his letters and stories. Sederholm and Weinstock believe that Lovecrafts racism cannot be separated from his fiction, that it must be taken a central tenet of his writing and his philosophy.

Though the essays span a wide variety of subjects related to Lovecrafts work and influence, some essays may be loosely grouped together for their shared theoretical foundation in speculative realism and/or new materialism. The book begins with James Kneales Ghoulish Dialogues: H. P. Lovecrafts Weird Geographies, which begins from Harmans influence on the study of Lovecrafts style and form, but ultimately argues for a marriage between the examination of form and content in his work. Kneale emphasizes the presence of technologies throughout Lovecrafts tales (telescopes, telephones, radios) that together reveal the presence what he calls a weird geography a distance or gap between space and time that troubled Lovecraft, and that also serves to merge form and content in his tales.

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstocks Lovecrafts Things: Sinister Souvenirs from Other Worlds cites speculative realist and object-oriented philosophers from Harman to Ian Bogost, but draws primarily from Jane Bennetts work on enchantment in order to interrogate what readers find appealing and satisfying in weird and gothic fiction. His attention to the things in Lovecraft (and in other Gothic narratives) places Lovecrafts work in a tradition he calls dark enchantment that is characterized by a postmodern cynicism aroused by thing-power, a portal that is opened up to the other and to the outside.

Perhaps the most original of this group is the contribution from Isabella van Elferen titled Hyper-Cacophony: Lovecraft, Speculative Realism, and Sonic Materialism. Van Elferen looks at Lovecrafts work through the lens of critical musicology in order to point out the inconsistencies in Lovecrafts thinking and to challenge his prevailing place in speculative realist philosophy. What she provocatively calls alien timbres the sonic qualities of Lovecrafts literary scenes and creatures alludes to profound conditions of immateriality and is thus incommensurable in many ways with speculative realism. Her essay urges us to consider Lovecrafts greater universe, and it draws our attention away from the dominance of visual references in order to think about Lovecrafts hyper-cacophony.

Three essays in the collection offer feminist and queer readings of Lovecrafts writing and ethics. Carl H. Sederholms H. P. Lovecrafts Reluctant Sexuality: Abjection and the Monstrous Feminine in The Dunwich Horror argues that despite critics outstanding claims that sex has no place in Lovecraft, the authors sexual loathing, fear of women, and horror at the means of human reproduction is expressed throughout his stories and correspondence and is central to his figuring of the human body.

Lovecrafts fear of otherness is also explored in Jed Mayers Race, Species, and Others: H. P. Lovecraft and the Animal, one of the best essays in the collection, which examines the influences of evolutionary narratives that have elevated certain species over others, and grapples with the racist attitudes inherent in Lovecrafts own speciesism. Drawing from contemporary animal studies scholarship, Mayer explores the inherent conflict between Lovecrafts own fear of kinship with other ethnic groups and his obsession with imagining connections (genealogies, intimacies, histories) with nonhuman beings. Mayer broadens his inquiry by asking how questions of racism and speciesism inform the genre of weird fiction more broadly. He argues that without forgiving Lovecrafts racism, we can recognize the provocative notion in Lovecrafts work that however much we learn about the other, it remains alien. Mayer demonstrates that Lovecrafts racism is what paradoxically becomes the means by which his stories achieve intimate contact with the feared other.

Patricia MacCormacks contribution, Lovecrafts Cosmic Ethics, is perhaps one of the boldest essays of the collection; it serves as a powerful climax to the volume as a whole. Here, MacCormack, who has been one of the few women writing in Lovecraft studies, argues against critics who dismiss Lovecraft for racism and misogyny, proclaiming instead that he offers a way into feminist, ecosophical, queer, and mystical (albeit atheist) configurations of difference. Acknowledging that her reading may seem perverse (and it is, in more ways than one), MacCormack says that this writer of unimaginable horror [] can also be argued to offer a glimpse into unimaginable structures forged through connectivities. In a vein similar to Mayers essay, MacCormack writes that Lovecrafts total inclusion of the complete foreignness of the universe forces a reorienting of traditional criticisms of his work as simply racist and xenophobic. In the last pages of her essay, she shifts her discussion to sex, persuasively arguing that Lovecrafts work is more focused on desire than sex, perhaps even offering a queer refusal of satisfaction or completion; his works are characterized by moods of profound suspension within a perpetual state both within and beyond a frenzy of potential.

Other essays in the collection offer useful examinations of the influence of Lovecrafts work on other texts and genres. In Prehistories of Posthumanism: Cosmic Indifferentism, Alien Genesis, and Ecology from H. P. Lovecraft to Ridley Scott, Brian Johnson reads Ridley Scotts Alien (1979) alongside Lovecrafts At the Mountains of Madness (1936), interrogating how Lovecrafts cosmic indifferentism strongly influences Scotts prequel Prometheus (2012). Johnson effectively reveals a shift in the way Ridley Scotts thematic preoccupation with human origins can be understood as he moves away from the monstrous feminine of Alien toward a

planetary version of the Frankenstein myth in which the beneficent mother is always already absent, her generative power usurped in advance by the new Promethianism of paternal science that appropriates creation as its exclusive province.

Moving from the screen to the graphic novel, David Simmonss H. P. Lovecraft and Real Person Fiction: The Pulp Author as Subcultural Avatar considers real person fiction in graphic novels as a way to challenge and upend Lovecrafts changing cultural position. He makes the argument that we must see Lovecraft as a fictional persona and not a static biographical figure. His essay can be usefully read alongside Jessica Georges A Polychrome Study: Neil Gaimans A Study in Emerald and Lovecrafts Literary Afterlives, which reads Lovecraft as a destabilizing figure; George sees this as perhaps one reason why he is so prone to reworkings and reimaginings, particularly in Gaimans work. These contributions reopen what many would consider closed discussions regarding authorship and biography as they challenge readers to think of Lovecraft and his influence beyond the pages of his tales.

The Age of Lovecraft is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship focused on Lovecraft, and it contains several essays that are especially important within this field. These essays have certainly helped me think about my own relation to studying and even enjoying Lovecrafts work, given that I am someone invested in non-oppressive, queer, and feminist critiques of literature and culture. The contributions that answered the call of the editors introduction and their collective refusal to separate Lovecraft from the problem of racial difference were particularly effective in this regard. Their sentiment is underscored in a wonderful interview with China Miville at the books conclusion: Acknowledgement [of racism, misogyny, xenophobia] is absolutely not enough, Miville says. To properly and ethically read Lovecraft in the 21st century, to celebrate his view of the cosmos and to herald his philosophy as ahead of its time, or to claim that we may live in an Age of Lovecraft in the present day, one must also accept the difficult responsibilities associated with taking on his discriminatory attitudes as keys to informing his philosophy. What does it mean that out of prejudice, fear, and a hatred of otherness was born a literary tradition that has particular merit in the contemporary moment? This collection helps readers of Lovecraft work through the incorporation of his deeply problematic attitudes into the ways we think about his work and its place in literary criticism and theory. It advances efforts to do more than just acknowledge Lovecrafts problematic politics by actually showing the ways they are entangled with form, content, ethics, and his vast fictional universe.

Alison Sperling is finishing her PhD in literature and cultural theory at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee.

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Acknowledgment is Not Enough: Coming to Terms With Lovecraft's Horrors - lareviewofbooks

Post-truth, the Oxford Dictionarys word of the year in 2016, is defined as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. But as people discuss Brexit, Trump and other phenomena that seem boosted by a disregard for the facts, there is a steady discussion of this being a post-truth era. But saying were in a post-truth era assumes that we were formerly in a truth era, which is unfortunately not the case. In fact, we have always been in a pre-truth era, and this lies at the core of the shaky old foundation for our civilization.

Humans have for millennia, when confronted with questions they couldnt answer at the time, sought answers they could live with. Such answers were often the results of coincidence, such as when a natural tragedy occurred after some seemingly immoral act or when rain appeared to result from appeals to an invisible powerin such cases causation was determined when it was really no more than correlation. Alternatively, answers were the result of great creativity, such as the many varied origin myths of various faiths. Today, its surprising to see the continuation of some of these ancient and outdated ideas that are no longer consistent with what we know based on scientific research and critical thinking.

Science, of course, is just a systematic process for observing our world, contemplating questions that arise, considering possible answers to those questions, deriving tests to see whether or not such possibilities make sense, and if so, determining ways to replicate the tests, so everyone, regardless of their beliefs, can see what was learned. Science is the best method humanity has yet to derive for finding answers that can be verified and gives us the closest thing to truth that can exist in a world constantly susceptible to new information and learning.

Humanists base their understanding of reality on sound science, tempered by compassion for the world around us and a conviction that humans are basically equal and deserve to be treated as such. And through this approach, the essence of humanism is the search for truth in all things, not just in the traditional sciences but in ethics and everything related to how we live our lives. Humanism provides a new foundation for civilization. Through his extremism and his unwillingness to even pretend that hes paying attention to facts, Trump is unwittingly helping highlight the need to build on this foundation and usher in a real era of truth.

President Trump has been dismissive of the overwhelming consensus on climate change. He ignores the data surrounding immigration and continues to press on building a wall that immigration experts consummately believe will not be effective. Trump continues to advocate for a ban on individuals from seven countries, citing them as national security threats despite none of the countries having exported anyone that has committed an attack on American citizens. Phenomenally, Politifact has rated 70 percent of Donald Trumps statements as being some degree of factually incorrect, compared to Barack Obamas 25 percent incorrect rating. Seeing that evangelicals, who voted in droves for Donald Trump, found Hillary Clinton too untrustworthy, despite holding the same truth rating as Barack Obama, suggests a disconnect from reality. Many Americans apparently prefer to believe the most untrustworthy politician in a generation, while simultaneously doubting an individual who had a track record of accuracy.

The social problems our country faces arent appearing on the scene only now because Trump was electedsystemic oppression and xenophobia doesnt happen overnightas these beliefs have been a part of our culture for a very long time. There is a resistance in our culture to change and growth that frequently leaves us mired in bigotry and the mythology that supports it, instead of building consensuses. This is perhaps best evidenced by renowned bigot Pat Robertson, who recently said that the pro-equality platform of the Obama administration was the result of a desire on the part of some, and I think its satanic, it really is spiritual, to destroy America... We were heading that way. Obama was bringing it on. Another four or eight years of Obama-style government and we would have been consumed with a socialist mentality and the freedom that weve enjoyed would be blotted out so God gave us a reprieve.

So while Trump didnt invent the regressive ideas he promotes, he and his cohort are ushering in a new acceptability for backward thinking. The only silver lining to this is that Trump is dealing at such an extreme level that most Americans recognize the morally retrograde nature of his approach and are already seeking something to replace it.

Enter humanism as a new foundation for better thinking. While the country rests in its state of post-truth society, rejecting facts, data, and scientific conclusions, it cannot progress. But humanism can be our path toward an era of truth. Humanism accepts the scientific method as a cornerstone of its ideologythe idea that skepticism leads to a search for the truth in every facet of life. This is why humanism is the answer to the post-truth era. Adopting a reason-based approach to our society built not on dogma and blind adherence to messages from thousands of years ago, but on the embrace of doubt, the scientific method, and our constant endeavor to innovate, will advance our species far beyond religion.

We arent now living in a post-truth era, simply because we never yet lived in a truth era. But Trumps extremity of words and actions point us toward a better path forward in understanding the difference between fact and fiction. Recognizing the value of reason over dogma and embracing the positive tenants of humanism gives us our best hope of someday achieving an era of truth.

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Post-Truth Trump And Why Humanism Is The Answer To Anti-Facts - Huffington Post

Doctors should be more like gardeners than mechanics, says physician, author and historian Victoria Sweet, M.D., Ph.D. An advocate of slow medicine, she believes patients well-being can become a casualty of todays emphasis on high-tech, high-pressure medical care.

Sweet will be the keynote speaker at the Eighth Annual Cindy Wool Memorial Seminar on Humanism in Medicine, March 29 at 7 p.m. at the Marriott University Park Hotel, 880 E. Second Street. Her talk, Gods Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine, is based on her experiences working as a doctor at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, and on her book of the same title.

The seminar is presented by the Maimonides Society of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona in conjunction with the University of Arizona College of Medicine. First held in 2010, the event honors Cindy Wool, the wife of Dr. Steven A. Wool, who died in November 2008 at age 54 as a result of complications from acute lymphocytic leukemia.

Sweet says her first 10 years as a doctor convinced her there was something really missing from todays medical practice. She moved to Laguna Honda Hospital formerly the nations last almshouse, and a descendent of the Htel Dieu (Gods hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages where she stayed for 20 years. There, she encountered a slower-paced, less high-tech approach to medicine. Set on 62 acres, Laguna Honda features gardens, an aviary, a greenhouse and a barnyard where patients can recuperate mentally and physically as they tend plants, interact with animals and watch chickens hatch, she says. According to Sweet, studies of slow medicine show improved outcomes and reduced stress for both patients and doctors.

It was Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century German Benedictine abbess, who first showed Sweet the concept at the heart of slow medicine. Hildegards book, Causae et Curae, written in Latin, emphasized the connection between the green health of plants and human health, each within a balanced system. Hildegards concept of medicine as a kind of gardening captivated Sweet, and the book became the subject of her Ph.D. thesis in medical history.

In Hildegards model, says Sweet, The body is more like a plant than a machine. The difference is that the body can heal itself. Fast and slow medicine are equally important, she says but not to the exclusion of each other. They both work together. You need to have both in your black bag. For example, she says, a patient may need an appendectomy immediately, but rather than discharging her as soon as possible, spending more time with her and giving her longer to heal may yield better results.

High-tech scans, techniques and interventions are wonderful, crucial, and often life-saving for patients in need of immediate care, says Sweet. At the same time, slow medicine a growing movement that takes into account the patients mental, physical, emotional and social well-being is an important factor, especially for patients with chronic or incurable diseases. But, says Sweet, care is constrained by increasing bureaucracy that demands doctors spend more time on computerized systems than with their patients. Doctors are so stressed. Its a system thats broken. Slow medicine is about removing whats in the way, and putting back whats missing.

Tickets to Sweets keynote lecture are $18 (free for medical students) and are available online at jfsa.org or by calling Karen Graham at 577-9393, ext. 118, by March 22. The lecture will be preceded at 5:30 p.m. by a VIP reception that includes dinner and tickets to the seminar for $100.

Sweet will also speak at noon on March 29 at the Arizona Health Sciences Center in the DuVal Auditorium at Banner-University Medical Center, where she will present Slow Medicine and the Efficiency of Inefficiency. Medical students, faculty and staff should RSVP by March 22 to rgrant@medadmin. arizona.edu.

Kaye Patchett is a freelance writer and editor in Tucson.

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Lecturer for Cindy Wool seminar supports 'slow medicine' - Jewish Post

The main challenge for higher education in 2017 is to discern how to educate citizens in a world in which the political philosophy of liberalism, the cornerstone of modern universities, is increasingly challenged by populist and nationalist movements.

Universities are a relatively recent invention in the 200,000 or so years in which humans, in forms we would recognize today, inhabit the planet. The oldest universities such as Bologna and Oxford date back ten centuries and along with other medieval universities were first established to transmit religious dogma and support a world order in which most people would endure a stagnant life of misery in hopes of eventual salvation in the afterlife. Those were indeed times in which societies were ruled by very small elites, nobles and religious leaders, whose legitimacy was predicated on claimed links to divinity or prophets. The Italian Renaissance, borne out of the extraordinary convergence of talent from multiple disciplines and areas of human creativity which the House of Medici sponsored in Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, would begin a process of examination of the powerful ideology of the Middle Ages which condemned most humans to a life of servitude to nobles and preachers. Products of the Italian Renaissance were the Renaissance and Humanism which would, over the following two centuries, lay the foundation for an extraordinarily powerful alternative set of ideas. The ideas that ordinary people had rights, and the capacity to improve themselves and their communities. These ideas are central to liberalism the political philosophy founded by John Locke which gave preeminence to the ideas of liberty and equality, and which is the foundation of the freedoms on which democratic societies are founded: freedom of speech, of press, of religion, free markets, civil rights, democracy, secular government, gender equality and international cooperation.

Three products of liberalism are democracy, public education and the modern university. All of them based on great hopes in human reason, assisted by science, to interpret and transform the world. All of them designed on the premise that the aspiration of salvation should be replaced by the aspiration to improve the world. At its core, the liberal project is cosmopolitan, a global project of humanity advancing together towards a world of greater freedom and justice. Each of these creations of the enlightenment is interdependent with the two others: democracy enables public education, and depends on high quality public education for all, modern universities support effective government and enlighten the public to hold governments accountable to people and to the facts, modern universities depend on good public education, and can in turn contribute to the improvement of education.

Globally, access to public education expanded significantly with the consolidation of nation states and the expansion of liberalism in the 1800s, and again after World War II as a result of the creation of a global architecture to promote the values of freedom and equality, liberal ideas, around the world, reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the United Nations system and other global institutions to advance such rights.

Under liberalism it was assumed that public education could serve democratic political and economic goals with limited trade offs between them. Additional goals such as advancing human rights and modernization were also seen as convergent with political and economic goals. For this reason, most governments advancing education as part of liberalism saw limited trade offs between the goals of education.

The challenges to liberalism from communism and fascism brought alternative goals for public education, challenging the notion that individuals could be free to choose which education to pursue, and emphasizing political and economic goals, as well as downplaying human rights and modernization goals.

The modern research university, chartered by Wilhelm Humboldt in Berlin in 1810, was a product of the liberal project designed to advance truth, through scientific research, the development of rational and critical thought, through education, and the enlightenment of the larger public, through extension. Most universities built since have embraced, to varying degrees, these three goals.

Since the fall of the Berlin wall, the main political challenge to these liberal views came from populism. Populism posits that ordinary people are exploited by elites and challenges the notion of representative democracy with direct participation by the masses. Since direct participation by large numbers in complex societies is impractical, too often populism results in autocratic rule by a leader, who claims to be communicating directly with the masses, unobstructed from intermediary institutions such as political parties, elected representatives to Congress, organizations of civil society, the judiciary or the Press. This notion of direct links between the autocrat and the people undermines the normal division of power and the checks and balances on which democratic government depends. Historically, some political scientists have argued that such autocratic rule of populist leaders can easily give rise to fascism.

Modern populists exploit the following ideas. The first that globalization, and liberal policies, do not benefit all, and that there are important groups of the population who are left behind, and without hope of seeing their conditions improve. They attribute this to elites that are not accountable to those groups, to a model of development that fails to envision a role for these groups which are left behind, and to a state that is captured by administrators and interest groups who advance their own interests at the expense of those of the people. Populists exploit also cultural divides among the population, deep differences in values and worldviews. In the recent presidential election in the United States, these divisions are between the political establishment, which since World War II followed the views of the Hamiltonians and Wilsonians with the older views of the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians. Hamiltonians embraced the cosmopolitan liberal project so that the United States would play a global leadership role in creating a global liberal order to contain the Soviet Union and advance US interests. Wilsonians also advanced a global liberal order in terms of values that would reduce global conflict and violence. They promoted human rights, democratic governance and the rule of law. Jeffersonians believe that minimizing the global role of the United States would reduce costs and risks to the country. Jacksonian populist nationalists, in contrast, believe that advancement in the conditions of American citizens would best pursued delinking from cosmopolitan enlightenment ideals and from the global liberal order.

Populism is therefore a serious challenge to the idea of a universal project to advance freedom, equality and human rights. It is a challenge to the project of globalization and perhaps also a challenge to the idea of representative democracy, with checks and balances that limit the freedoms of rulers. They are also a challenge to the institutions which were invented to advance the liberal project, public schools and the modern university.

What could the challenge from populism mean for public schools and universities?

It would be congruent with populist ideas to seek more power for local groups to define the goals of education, and less role for government and for inter-governmental institutions. Replacing global and national politics with local politics of course does not mean more consensus, as competing ideas exist in local communities as well about the goals of education. Local control may in fact mean more conflict, perhaps with less rules of arbitration. Given that the divisions between cosmopolitans and populists exist in local communities, how will these differences will be resolved? Will the rule of law and expertise continue to play a role? We should expect less trust in and recognition of the authority of governments, experts and elites, including scientists and academics. It is also predictable that we will see a renewed emphasis on identity politics and culture wars in education.

Universities, in so far as they exist to cultivate reason, advance truth and enlighten the public are at odds with the populist worldview. Science and expertise are a problem for populist autocracies that do not value reasoned deliberation or informed understanding of facts as essential to solving controversies.

There are some risks we can expect to emerge from a world of emboldened populism.

The first is a risk to the idea of human rights. If nationalism is the new organizing force, the notion of in group and outgroup is defined by citizenship, not by membership in humanity. Because one of the consequences of globalization has been migration, non citizens will be the first target for exclusion. If cultural wars define the politics of education we should expect to see battles over the rights of cultural and ethnic minorities and contention over who belongs in America or in other nations were populism is emboldened.

A second risk concerns global challenges. The prospects for collective action diminish as the world moves towards national populism, and the goals of education move away from preparing students to understand global interconnectedness and globalization.

A third risk is a breakdown of the institutions that were created to protect freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and basic freedoms, and a breakdown of public education itself. The risk to these institutions of democracy is the risk that populism might evolve into fascism.

The risk of disorder. Lack of trust in institutions, elites and governments, will make the challenge of resolving conflict greater.

Can the institutions created to advance a liberal world order, such as public education and universities, save it?

Since modern universities were created because of the global liberal project to advance freedom and equality, as that project is challenged by populism Universities should renew their civic mission, embracing a new focus on education for democratic citizenship, including global citizenship. This means advancing human rights education, educating about shared global challenges, educating for engaged citizenship, contribute to build the civic sphere, renew their attention to the development of the dispositions and values of their students, as much as their skills and knowledge, boldly provide opportunities to access higher education to students from the most marginalized groups in society, double down on the extension mission to educate the public, and undertake unprecedented efforts to partner with K-12 schools and help improve them.

While these goals are within the reach of what Universities could do, they are not, at present, embraced as priorities by most universities. Whether universities step up in saving the liberal order which gave them life will depend on whether higher education leaders and faculty understand the grave risk facing the project of the Enlightenment itself.

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Can Universities Save the Enlightenment from Populism? - Huffington Post

Donna J. Haraway Manifestly Haraway (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)

In 1983, the Socialist Review asked Donna Haraway to write a few pages about the tentative future of socialist feminism during the Reagan era. Two years later, she published A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, a difficult, rococo text that not only announced but luxuriated in the enmeshing between human and machine, the leakages between organic matter and artificial intelligence, the prosthetic extension of the subject and its diffusion into fractal assemblages. By the late 20th century, Haraway argued, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.

A creature of fact and fiction, Haraways cyborg describes the reality of accelerating technological mediation while also offering a political metaphor for social construction.From one perspective, writes Haraway, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of womens bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. Dialectically, however, the cyborg could also prefigure lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. From this position, the cyborg offered a postmodernist, non-naturalist, and anti-essentialist politics to socialist feminisma politics disinterested in reproduction, organicism, or myths of origin, and at home with irony, creolization, and, as Haraway would likely put it today, queerness. A cyborg body, Haraway writes, is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end. The bastard child of weaponized capitalism, the cyborg is also the potential agent of its collapse. Illegitimate offspring, Haraway reminds us, are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.

Widely known and published as the Cyborg Manifesto, the essay, which opens Manifestly Haraway, is regarded as a theoretical cult classic and a lodestar of posthumanism (though Haraway has distanced herself from that term). Its prose is opaque and heteroglossic, thick with conceptual agglutinations and perverse couplings. One could fault Haraways text for being a bit too infatuated with its own excesses, over-invested in taboo fusions, breached binaries, and other then-trendy pomo tropes. In 2001, the critic Suhail Malik said as much and more, dismissing Haraways cyborg theory as a self-serving sexying-up of critical liberalism via a vague optimism in which all transgressions of boundaries are welcomed. But this casual trivialization ignores the political crisis in which the Cyborg Manifesto was forged, one which is reverberating today.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan, a B-list entertainer dismissed by Republican lites as a lightweight, and ridiculed by liberals as the Candidate from Disneyland, won the presidency with an eerily familiar campaign slogan: Lets Make America Great Again. Buoyed by nostalgic appeals to white populism and the racialized scapegoat of the Welfare Queen, Reagan set into motion the aggressive entrenchment of free-market absolutism, a project that political economist William Davies has termed combative neoliberalism. The immediate political context of the Cyborg Manifesto was one of rising unemployment, cuts to social services, a war on labor, the redistribution of wealth from the working and middle classes to the rich, and a bellicose missile defense system nicknamed Star Wars.

Facing an onslaught of reactionary forces, the U.S. left was also buckling from internal fractures, crumbling consensuses, and foreshortened horizons. Haraway recalls this sense of closure in a conversation with Cary Wolfe in Manifestly Haraway: You could no longer not know that the 60s were well and truly over, and the great hopefulness of our politics and our imaginations needed to come to terms with the serious troubles within our own movements, within our larger historical moment. While socialist, anti-imperialist, environmental, black, womens, and LGBT liberation movements struggled to find common ground, discourses of personal empowerment began to eclipse solidarity, and a generation of radicals was absorbed into an academy in which postmodernism became the de rigueur philosophy of an increasingly abstract, centerless, financialized world. The title of Andre Gorzs 1982 book, Farewell to the Working Class, fitted the mood, Sharon Smith, author of Women and Socialism, wrote in the Spring 1994 issue of International Socialism. Having divorced the source of oppression from class society, and raised the notion of autonomy to a principle, it was only a short step from the politics of movementism to the politics of identity.

Semantic confusion and ideological splinting was felt not only between movements but also within them. It has become difficult to name ones feminism by a single adjectiveor even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun, Haraway observes in the Cyborg Manifesto.

Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race and class cannot provide the basis for belief in essential unity. There is nothing about being female that naturally binds women. [] Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of womens dominations of each other.

In particular, Haraways cyborg feminism was motivated by the imperativestill pressing todayto address the [e]mbarrassed silence about race among white radical and socialist-feminists through universalizing myths of sororal unity. In demolishing the idea of woman as an undifferentiated block, the cyborg allowed for a pluralized concept of women with elastic and variable identities beyond being a source of alienated domestic labor or an object of sexual objectification. Rather than rooting politics in a hierarchy of oppressions, it articulated difference within solidarity. Instead of identification, vanguard parties, purity and mothering, it proposed synthetic, big-tent coalitions like Chela Sandovals notion of women of color, inhabited not by birthright but by elective affinity.

Though both are bound in the spiral dance, Id rather be a cyborg than a goddess, Haraway famously finished the manifesto, announcing a steely futurist alternative to the atavistic earth mother rhetoric of certain tendencies within 60s and 70s feminism. The cyborg was and remains a potent aesthetic and erotic cipher, conjuring horrors and fantasies of mechanic integration from carapaced bermenschenJacob Epsteins Rock Drill, Darth Vaderto the replicants of Blade Runner and the bionic concubines of Westworld. (Its hard to not see shades of Haraways cyborg Alice in Westworlds Dolores, herself modeled on Lewis Carrolls heroine.)

But the glamour of the cyborg as an image has somewhat overdetermined the manifestos reception, eclipsing its historical context, political stakes, and the larger scope of Haraways intellectual project that emerges through the other texts collected in Manifestly Haraway. For instance, those who know Haraway only through A Cyborg Manifesto and its memorable finale would be surprised to know that she has recently taken up a more-than-casual interest in primeval goddesses. In her published conversation with Wolfe, Haraway embraces Terra and Gaia as ecological metaphors (goddesses, she explains, are O.K. so long as theyre pre-Olympiad and non-matriarchal); and the book ends with The Chthulucene From Santa Cruz, a beautiful, apocalyptic text invoking snakey Gorgons called the chthonic ones.

In 2003s Companion Species Manifesto, Haraway transitioned from cyborgs to the more cuddly topic of canine companionship as a site of humannonhuman entanglement and relationality. I have come to see cyborgs as junior siblings in the much bigger, queer family of companion species, she wrote, abandoning the postmodern irony and cybernetic edge of A Cyborg Manifesto for a deeply earnest, affect-oriented discourse on the love and reciprocal possession between the author and her Australian shepherd. (Dog-impervious readers like myself might feel somewhat alienated by the purple language about pooper-scoopers and deep tongue doggy-kisses.) Persistent throughout Haraways writing, however, is an emphasis on the co-constitutive interpenetration of humans and their others (machines, animals, and the environment), an insistence that there is no becoming, there is only becoming-with. In her interview with Wolfe, Haraway corrects those who read this latter manifesto as something of a rebuke to her earlier, more famous one: There are folks who asked, Why did you drop your feminist, antiracist, and socialist critique in the Companion Species Manifesto? Well, its not dropped. Its at least as acute, but its produced very differently. She says, Theres a sense in which the Companion Species Manifesto grows more out of an act of love, and the Cyborg Manifesto grows more out of an act of rage.

Perhaps its this sense of anger that makes A Cyborg Manifesto the more urgent text, despite its vintage. It isnt difficult to read hieroglyphs of the present in Haraways panoramic description of the miniaturization of technology, the end of the white family wage, the assault on labor, the precarity and feminization of work, the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between work and play, the technological surrogacy and dispersion of the self (Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert). In the months since the election of Donald Trump, who amplified Reagans folky appeal to white America with a more resentful and ferocious rhetoric of cultural revenge against political correctness, arguments about identity politics, a contentious and somewhat obfuscatory term, have become plethoric. The best of such arguments, such as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylors No Time For Despair, have called for a heterogeneous and inclusive resistance movement without apologizing for the compromised political agenda of the neoliberal Democratic establishment. The worstsee Mark Lillas notorious New York Times op-ed, The End of Identity Liberalismhave insinuated that liberals should stop making such a big fuss over diversity issues like racism and transphobia in order to romance white working-class voters. As Naomi Klein has pointed out, nothing has done more to liberate our lites to build their corporate dystopia than the persistent and systemic pitting of working-class whites against blacks and immigrants, men against women. White supremacy and misogyny are and always have been our elites most potent defenses against a genuine left populist agenda and meaningful democracy. In the fight ahead, its ethically and politically imperative to resist playing a crude, zero-sum game between identity politics and economic populismas if social and economic oppressions werent, as Haraway might put it, deeply braided or, as we might say now following the mainstreaming of Kimberl Crenshaws insights, intersectional. From the perspective of cyborgs, Haraway writes, freed of the need to ground politics in our privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations, the innocence of the merely violated, the ground of those closer to nature, we can see powerful possibilities. Underneath the cyborgs armor, theres a radical, situated, socialist feminism for these reactionary times.

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Manifestly Haraway - Brooklyn Rail

New York Times

'Moonlight,' 'La La Land' and What an Epic Oscars Fail Really Says New York Times ... only to be part of a rug-yanking ceremony. After Sunday night, the presidential election, the Super Bowl and, to a different but related extent, the Grammys, I've officially come down with outcome-oriented post-traumatic stress disorder Ooptsd ... and more »

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'Moonlight,' 'La La Land' and What an Epic Oscars Fail Really Says - New York Times

The exhibition creates an immersive experience, capturing the chaotic, almost apocalyptic act of consuming. The viewer is invited to experience illusions of order in underlying confusion and pandemonium.

Black Friday(2016) shown here outside museum context for the first time, is a projected video featuring primarily empty malls in Doha (Qatar) and offers a moody, sinister take on shopping. Designed at seemingly impossible scale with incredible heights, the malls featured in the video appear as dizzying temples dedicated to artifice and capitalism, showing how scripted environment of the shopping mall is a form of default religious architecture in a culture of consumerism.

In her new series of works, EVERYTHING MUST GO, Sophia introduces a playful twist, juxtaposing emblems of consumerism with military jargon and captures the crux of the end of days where chaos and destruction are met by a violent military attempt to reinstate order. EVERYTHING MUST GO consists of a large series of stills taken from Black Fridays The Litany series an installation of numerous electronic devices displaying flickering, short and glitching loops of countless consumption references each printed with either a fake beauty product term or military idiom. When read together or even at random, the grouping of words result in absurd and obscene combinations.

Throughout her practice, Sophia has been finding ways to describe 21st century life in the Gulf through art, writing, and film-making. She has explored different complexities such as environmental damage, religious conservatism, and historical contradictions that the Gulf has encountered. Sophia is a young artist aware of the rapid changing times and capable of articulating the controversies that cause friction in contemporary Gulf cities.

Sophia Al Maria is an artist, writer and filmmaker. She studied comparative literature at the American University in Cairo, and aural and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. For the past few years, she has been carrying out research around the concept of Gulf Futurism. Her primary interests are around the isolation of individuals via technology and reactionary Islam, the corrosive elements of consumerism and industry, and the erasure of history and the blinding approach of a future no one is ready for. She explores these ideas with certain guidebooks and ideas including, but not limited to, Zizeks The Desert of the Unreal, As-Sufis Islamic Book of the Dead, as well as imagery from Islamic eschatology, post humanism and the global mythos of Science Fiction.

Her work has been exhibited in various institutional shows around the world, including Black Friday, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA (2016); Repetition, Villa Empain, Boghossian Foundation, Brussels, Belgium (2016); Imitation of Life at HOME, Manchester (2016); In Search of Lost Time, The Brunei Gallery, London (2016); 89plus: Filter Bubble, LUMA Westbau, Zurich, Switzerland (2015); 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, New Museum, New York, NY, USA (2015); Common Grounds, Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany (2015); Extinctions Marathon: Visions of the Future, Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (2014); Virgin with a memory, Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK (2014); Do It, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2013); The 9th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2012); For your Eyes Only, St. Paul Street Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (2012); Dowse Museum, Wellington, New Zealand (2012); Genre Specific Xperience, New Museum, New York, NY, USA (2011); Bendari & the Bunduqia, Waqif Art Centre, Doha, Qatar (2007) and We Few: A Comic Palindrome, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, Egypt (2005). Her writing has appeared in Harpers Magazine, Five Dials, Triple Canopy, and Bidoun. In 2007, she published her first autobiographical novel, The Girl Who Fell to Earth (Harper Collins Perennial).

Sophia recently guest edited an issue of the experimental art-writing journal The Happy Hypocrite, entitled Fresh Hell.

She currently lives and works in London, UK.

Writing via press release provided by the gallery

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Sophia Al Maria: EVERYTHING MUST GO at The Third Line - Arte Fuse

The 2016-2017 Elizabeth Allen Visiting Scholars in Art History Series presents Dr. Sherry Lindquist, an alumna of NIUs art history program and an associate professor of art history at Western Illinois University, speaking on The Body and the Book of Hours: Somaesthetics, Posthumanism and the Uncanny Valley.

The presentation will be given at 5 p.m. Thursday, March 2, in room 100 of the Visual Arts Building. The talk is free and open to the public.

The Book of Hours and the Body:Somaesthetics, Posthumanism and the Uncanny Valley explores our corporeal connection to the past by considering what three recent theoretical approaches to the postmodern body may reveal about premodern terms of embodiment.

Lindquist received her M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from Northwestern University. The author of numerous publications, her book, Agency, Visuality and Society at the Chartreuse de Champmol, was published in 2008. She has also edited a number of volumes, including The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (Ashgate, 2012).

The Elizabeth Allen Visiting Scholars in Art History Series is hosted by the Art History Division and funded in part by the NIU School of Art and Design Visiting Artists and Scholars Program. For more information email avandijk@niu.edu.

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Talk utilizes postmodern approaches to explore images of the medieval body - NIU Today

A little over a week ago, Bill OReilly of The OReilly Factor on Fox News slammed the twisted reporting of the deportation of illegal immigrants who were convicted felons, showing how the media portrayed them as innocent maids, moms, and shopkeepers. He said that this exemplifies how the media coverage of President Trump is beyond biased; it is blatant dishonesty. Mr. OReilly, whose program is routinely the highest-rated show of the three major US 24-hour cable news television channels, concluded the item declaring, There is a radical element [the radical left] in this country that wants to destroy it. If this continues, there will be a breaking point.

As harsh as this threat sounds, judging by the relentless attempts of the Democrats to sabotage Trumps efforts to man key positions, the medias slew of warped and made up stories purporting to prove the presidents incompetence, through the army of on-the-ground agitators that Obamas Organizing for Action has dispatched in order to disrupt every town-hall meeting in the country and create the pretense that the nation is with the Democrats, it seems that there is indeed a war against the president on multiple fronts.

It is not a question of policy; it is a question of identity. Donald Trump recently deported 680 convicted criminals, and the media was up in arms over the deportation of innocent people, as they called them. Where was the media when Obama, to whom immigrants referred as Deporter-in-Chief, drove out 2.5 million people during his tenure, the majority of whom were without any criminal record? And where was the outcry when it became known that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, sold one fifth of US uranium to Russia, and that she and her husband, Bill Clinton, personally profited from the deal?

The media were silent because Obama and Clinton were the guardians of power for a small ruling elite that wants to dominate the US. A president who does not comply with their dictates does not serve their interests and there is no telling what they will do to remove him from office. For now, they are using a bogus, humanistic agenda such as caring for the immigrants and backing the Obamacare program to promote their goal of ousting Trump, but there is no reason to believe that they will stop there.

The Necessity of Diversity

Liberalism in itself is a noble idea. Following World War II, numerous countries in the West adopted the Liberal agenda as a vaccine against fascism and Nazism. However, a society cannot be vital and vibrant unless many different views vie against one another and in the process become polished and refined. When all the parties understand that diversity of views creates vitality, they strengthen their society and increase its ability to cope with changes.

Our own Jewish tradition encourages diversity and debate as a means to enhance social cohesion. Martin Buber wrote in Nation and World: It is not neutrality that we need, but rather cohesion, cohesion of mutual responsibility. We are not required to blur the boundaries among the factions, circles, and parties, but rather share a recognition of the common reality and to share the test of mutual responsibility. Likewise, the great Rav Kook wrote (Orot Hakodesh), Near the end of days, the quality of unity will surface in the nation This quality is immersed in pool of strife and discord, but its content is paved with love and wondrous unity.

For generations, Jewish leaders taught their disciples that conflict of views is a means for finding the ideal solution and strengthening social cohesion. The Talmud writes that A father and son who engage in Torah become each others enemies, yet they do not move from there until they return to loving one another (Kidushin 30b). The Zohar, too, writes (Aharei Mot), Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to also sit together. These are the friends as they sit together, and are not separated from each other. At first, they seem like people at war, wishing to kill one another. Then they return to being in brotherly love. And you, the friends who are here, as you were in fondness and love before, henceforth you will also not part And by your merit there will be peace in the world.

The Inevitable Evil Yet, the American society has denied the legitimacy of other parties, as Buber put it. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, said British Liberal MP Sir John Dalberg-Acton. Liberalism has been the sole legitimate agenda for decades now, but instead of using it to create a vibrant arena of views that invigorate one another, it has become a stifling mechanism by which anyone who contradicts what the media deems true is shamed and bullied. If business people such as Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank feel that they must apologize for stating their honest, very mildly conservative views for fear of losing business, this is no longer liberalism and certainly not pluralism. This is tyranny. Beneath a guise of free speech, America has become a fascist country, where only one view is permitted.

But if absolute power corrupts absolutely, then this is to be expected. The inclination of man's heart is evil from his youth (Gen 8:21) is not merely a verse from the Torah. It is who we all are. This is why rulers need the media to monitor them, and why the media needs to be kept genuinely free and pluralistic.

This is not the situation in America. Neoliberalism, which has destroyed Europe through immigration, and nearly destroyed the US by eliminating its middle class, has been the sole ruling agenda in the US for decades. It serves the interests of the small elite group of magnates who control the American economy, the media, and thereby the government, all the way up to the White House. They determine what is reported and what is not, who is defamed and who is glorified. By controlling the media, they have dominated public discourse, public opinion, and have avoided criticism. This is ingenious, but deadly to society.

Their best interest is not the best interest of the American people. They aspire for world domination. Through proxies such as Obama and Clinton, they removed Arab leaders such as Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Bashar Assad, destroyed their countries, and created an influx of migrants into Europe. It is not that these Middle Eastern tyrants are or ever were anything to admire, but if you look at Iraq, Libya, and Syria today, would it not have been better for their people if their tyrants had remained in place, rather than the ruin, death, hunger, and terrorism that is their daily reality today?

If the people driving the liberal agenda in Europe maintain control over their governments, it will not be long before Europe accepts Sharia law. As this sad story of a forced child marriage shows, this is already happening, but it will spread much faster if they succeed.

And what they have done to Europe, they will continue in America: This same group will allow unchecked influx of migrants into the US, who will drain the already overstretched welfare system, create an impossible conflict of cultures and faiths, which will result in extremism and subsequent bloodshed on both sides. And all this will be done in the name of liberal thinking, pluralism, humanism, and democracy.

On the Side of Correction It may appear as though I am in complete support of President Trump and against the Democratic Party. In truth, I have no personal affinity for any particular person or agenda. I do have great affinity for diversity above which people can connect since diversity keeps society cohesive, agile, and healthy, and keeps the country strong. At the moment, President Trump represents this view quite well, and the Democratic Party, with its undisputed monarch Barack Hussein Obama, absolutely does not.

I regard Trumps victory as a sign that the American society is still alive and kicking. It gives me hope that it will also be able to go through the necessary sobering up without bloodshed and without dragging the world into another war. If Clinton had been elected, there is no doubt that war would have erupted. Russia, America, and Europe were already making preparations on the ground. Now, at least there is a chance for peace and the correction of society.

But to correct society, all parties will need to learn from the Jewish traditionthat love covers all crimes (Prov 10:12). Rav Yehuda Ashlag, author of the Sulam (Ladder) commentary on The Book of Zohar, wrote in his essay, The Freedom: Just as peoples faces differ, so their views differ. Therefore, society is cautioned to preserve the freedom of expression of the individual. Each individual should maintain his integrity, and the contradiction and oppositeness between people should remain forever, to forever secure the progress of the free society. Liberals would do well to listen to their own coreligionist Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times who wrote, We progressives could take a brief break from attacking the other side and more broadly incorporate values that we supposedly cherishlike diversityin our own dominions.

At the moment, Trump cannot end the war with the media and the Democrats because he is not the one waging it. For things to calm down, the media and the Democratic Party must decide that the best interest of their country comes before that of their party, or even that of their financiers. If this war does not stop, then either the media will be severely restricted going forward and American democracy will be hampered, or the next leader Americas political right sends forward will likely be one who will truly galvanize the conservatives in America, and there will be a breaking point, as OReilly put it.

For Americas sake and for the sake of the world, I pray that this great nation wakes up and understands the value of diversity, the benefit of honing views through open debate, and the powerful cohesion attained when that debate yields solutions that contribute to the thriving of the whole of society.

Michael Laitman is a Professor of Ontology, a PhD in Philosophy and Kabbalah, an MSc in Medical Bio-Cybernetics, and was the prime disciple of Kabbalist, Rav Baruch Shalom Ashlag (the RABASH). He has written over 40 books, which have been translated into dozens of languages. Click Here to visit his author page.

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Humans in Dark Times New York Times We see this most fully today, as Cary Wolfe suggested, in the intellectual moves toward post-humanism and the bestowing of rights both to humans and to other animals. The key here is to identify and disrupt forms of ethical hierarchy, which allow ...

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Humans in Dark Times - New York Times

Far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders has stated that Islam and freedom are not compatible, slamming his country for importing those who follow the religion.

Dutch values are based on Christianity, on Judaism, on humanism. Islam and freedom are not compatible, the Freedom Party politician told USA Today.

You see it in almost every country where it dominates. There is a total lack of freedom, civil society, rule of law, middle class; journalists, gays, apostates they are all in trouble in those places. And we import it.

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He went on to accuse Dutch society of being afraid to stand up against Islamic ideology.

For a long time, our society has been afraid to say, No, this is our Dutch culture, we dont treat women like that, and anyone who did was labelled a racist or bigot or hate-monger, and they are not, Wilders said. They just believe we should be more proud of who we are.

Wilders, who has become known for his controversial rhetoric and hailing Donald Trump's victory in the US as a patriotic spring, is advocating for all mosques to be closed in the Netherlands. He also wants to ban the Koran and seal the nation's borders to asylum seekers and migrants from Islamic countries.

"On Islam, it is true that I am tough. Perhaps tougher than I should be if my only aim was to get votes," Wilders said. "But I really believe in what I say, that the Islamic ideology is this huge threat."

Wilders and his Freedom Party are expected to come in first in the national election on March 15, December polls showed. But despite expressing a desire to be the country's next prime minister, such chances are unlikely. Based on the Netherlands multiparty system, Wilders would have to form a governing coalition with other parties, most of which have ruled out that possibility.

Even so, Wilders said that even if he loses the election, the genie will not go back in the bottle again.

"People are fed up with the combination of mass immigration, Islamization and austerity measures that require us to cut pensions and support for healthcare and the elderly while giving (debt bailout) money to Greece and the eurozone, he said.

"People are not satisfied. They feel misrepresented," Wilders added. "The process of a patriotic spring wont be stopped.

Wilders' comments come just days after he targeted so-called Moroccan scum in his election campaign launch.

READ MORE: Far-right Wilders targets Moroccan scum in his election campaign launch in the Netherlands (VIDEO)

It's far from the first time that Wilders has targeted Moroccans. He was convicted of discrimination and inciting hatred by a Dutch court in December after calling for Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!" Moroccans in the country, as well as calling them scum.

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Wilders has also compared the Koran to Hitler's 'Mein Kampf.'

The politician has repeatedly come under fire in the Netherlands, a country known for its liberal approach to topics ranging from marijuana and prostitution to euthanasia.

The politician has vowed to continue his mission, but said he wouldn't wish his cautious lifestyle on his worst enemy.

"I cant even go on a spontaneous walk or to a restaurant without armored cars and police, but there is no alternative," Wilders said. "If I stop or moderate my voice, people who use or threaten violence against democracies would win. I will never let them win."

The upcoming general elections in the Netherlands are being watched closely by other countries across the European Union as a sign of the growing spread of populism throughout the bloc particularly following the UK's Brexit referendum, which saw the country vote to leave the EU.

German Vice Chancellor and Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel warned last month that the EU could fall apart if populist parties gain power in the upcoming Dutch or French elections.

However, Germany is not immune from the populist sentiment sweeping the continent. The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been gaining support following the refugee crisis, which saw more than 1 million asylum seekers enter the country in 2015.

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Freedom & Islam 'not compatible,' says far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders - RT