by Jalees Rehman

Hearing about the HannoverGEN project made me feel envious and excited. Envious, because I wish my high school had offered the kind of hands-on molecular biology training provided to high school students in Hannover, the capital of the German state of Niedersachsen. Excited, because it reminded me of the joy I felt when I first isolated DNA and ran gels after restriction enzyme digests during my first year of university in Munich. I knew that many of the students at the HannoverGEN high schools would be thrilled by their laboratory experience and pursue careers as biologists or biochemists.

What did HannoverGEN entail? It was an optional pilot program initiated and funded by the state government of Niedersachsen at four high schools. Students enrolled in the HannoverGEN classes would learn to use molecular biology tools that are typically reserved for college-level or graduate school courses to study plant genetics. Some of the basic experiments involved isolating DNA from cabbage or how bacteria transfer genes to plants, more advanced experiments enabled the students to analyze whether or not the genome of a provided maize sample was genetically modified. Each experimental unit was accompanied by relevant theoretical instruction on the molecular mechanisms of gene expression and biotechnology as well as ethical discussions regarding the benefits and risks of generating genetically modified organisms (“GMOs”). You can only check out the details of the HannoverGEN program in the Wayback Machine Internet archive because the award-winning educational program and the associated website were shut down in 2013 at the behest of German anti-GMO activist groups, environmental activists, Greenpeace, the Niedersachsen Green Party and the German organic food industry.

Why did these activists and organic food industry lobbyists oppose a government-funded educational program which improved the molecular biology knowledge and expertise of high school students? A press release entitled “Keine Akzeptanzbeschaffung für Agro-Gentechnik an Schulen!” (“No Acceptance for Agricultural Gene Technology at Schools“) in 2012 by an alliance representing farmers growing natural or organic crops accompanied by the publication of a study with the same title (PDF), funded by this group as well as its anti-GMO partners, gives us some clues. They feared that the high school students might become too accepting of using biotechnology in agriculture and that the curriculum did not sufficiently highlight all the potential dangers of GMOs. By allowing the ethical discussions that were part of the HannoverGEN curriculum to not only discuss the risks but also mention the benefits of genetically modifying crops, students might walk away with the idea that GMOs may be a good thing. Taxpayer money should not be used to foster special interests such as those of the agricultural industry that may want to use GMOs, according to this group.

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by Misha Lepetic

“People for them were just sand, the fertilizer of history.”
~ Chernobyl interviewee VM Ivanov

For a few years, if you were on Twitter and you used the word “inconceivable” in a tweet, you would almost immediately receive an odd, unsolicited response. Hailing from the account of someone named @iaminigomontoya, it would announce “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Whether you were just musing to the world in general, or engaging in the vague dissatisfaction of what passes for conversation on Twitter, this Inigo Montoya fellow would be summoned, like some digital djinn, merely by invoking this one word.

Now, those of us who possessed the correct slice of pop culture knowledge immediately recognized Inigo Montoya as one of the characters of the film “The Princess Bride”. Splendidly played by Mandy Patinkin, Montoya was a swashbuckling Spaniard, an expert swordsman and a drunk. Allied to the criminal mastermind Vizzini, played by Wallace Shawn, Montoya had to listen to Vizzini mumble “inconceivable” every time events in the film turned against him. Montoya was eventually exasperated enough to respond with the above phrase. Like many other quotes from the 1987 film, it is a bit of a staple, and has since been promoted to the hallowed status of meme for the Internet age.

Of course, it's fairly obvious that no human being could be so vigilant (let alone interested) in monitoring Twitter for every instance of “inconceivable” as it arises. What we have here is a bot: a few lines of code that sifts through some subset of Twitter messages, on the lookout for some pattern or other. Once the word is picked up, @iaminigomontoya does its thing. Now, and through absolutely no fault of their own, there will always be a substantial number of people not in on the joke. These unfortunates, assuming that they have just been trolled by some unreasonable fellow human being, will engage further, such as the guy who responded “Do you always begin conversations this way?”

So here we have an interesting example of contemporary digital life. In the (fairly) transparent world of Twitter, we can witness people talking to software in the belief that it is in fact other people, while the more informed among us already understand that this is not the case. Ironically, it is only thanks to the lumpy and arbitrary distribution of pop culture knowledge that we may at all have a chance to tell the difference, at least without finding ourselves involuntarily engaged in a somewhat embarassing mini-Turing Test. But these days, we pick up our street smarts where we can.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

It is little surprise that geometry goes back thousands of years. Right up there with being able to communicate with your fellow tribe members and count how many fish you have caught, you need to be able to measure off farm fields and build proper foundations for your home. It is an invaluable skill to be able to accurately work with lengths, angles and the like. When Euclid came on the scene 2200+ years ago geometry was already a well developed, sophisticated, and central part of the sciences.

Euclid wrote the book on geometry. Euclid's Elements was the textbook in geometry for over 2000 years. The Elements only covered Euclidean geometry. That is, the geometry of good ol' flat space in two and three dimensions. The sort of space where straight lines never meet. And that was plenty good for a millennia or two of surveying land, building bridges, mapping the London Underground, and whatnot.

The London Underground [1].

As we saw here at 3QD, it took until the 19th century for people to finally open their mind to the fact that you can and should do geometry in non-flat space. If you're going to circumnavigate the Earth, then it matters quite a bit that it is a sphere. You can calculate distances, angles, and areas on a sphere, but Euclid isn't going to give you the right answer. If you want your calculations to be accurate you'd better use spherical geometry.

Nowadays we live in the age of Global Positioning Systems and interplanetary spacecraft. If you want to your phone's GPS to be accurate to within a few meters or land a spacecraft on an asteroid which is 2.5 miles across and whizzing through space at 34,000 miles per hour, then Einstein tells us we better take into account the bends and curves of spacetime. That is, we can and should do our calculations using Riemannian geometry.

It doesn't take much, then, to convince the most hard-nosed skeptic that even “exotic” geometries are pretty darn useful.

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by Madhu Kaza

* Located in the Dorsoduro section of Venice, the Gallerie dell'Accademia hold a collection of pre-19^th century Venetian art.

[detail of “Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo,” Gentile Bellini. c. 1500]

Introduction:

What if I walked through the doors of Europe (I am an immigrant, but not there; the doors swing open easily) casting aside much of my education, the narrow ways in which I’d been schooled to think about culture, history and art? What if I wandered through France and Italy not in a posture of submission and not as a student of Western Civilization? I know Europe well, even if I’ve hardly been there. I know how greedy (how desperate) it is for affirmation of its superiority to all other places. There is so much that is particular and beautiful there, no different from any place else with its own particular beauty.

What if I walked through the galleries of the Accademia letting my attention land where it wanted? This summer when I saw the painting, “Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo,” I wondered what the canals were like in the 15^th century; today no one swims or bathes in the water. But I didn’t spend much time reading about Gentile Bellini and the symbolism of the “miracle” he depicted. Instead this image made me think of the bodies of migrants and refugees that were in the waters off the Italian coasts. I’ve long been trained to look for beauty and to prostrate myself in the pursuit of knowledge. But I noticed when I had left the galleries that all the photos I had taken were of details, and that when I had looked at the paintings I had looked through them, reaching for something else: a correspondence.

*

[detail of “The Marriage of St. Monica,” Antonio Vivarini. c. 1441]

Why anyone might love Lila, the brilliant friend in Elena Ferrante’s novel, My Brilliant Friend, is because she is a brutal girl with a voracious intellect– no saint. She won’t be loved by a man.

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by Brooks Riley

Try to see it this way: You’re up in the attic of your own body, there where the thoughts are stored. The vaulted ceiling of your cranium slopes gently down to the two windows through which you view the world and let the sun shine in. Left and right, two speakers pump in sounds from somewhere else. And down below those two front windows, is the front door where you let the cat out, through that orifice which allows a few of those thoughts to wander out into the ether as articulation. There are no bars on your windows, and no locks on the door, but make no mistake, you are in solitary confinement. You’ll never get out of there. And no one will join you up there in that attic, ever.

Solitude is not for the faint of heart. That said, we all experience solitude nearly all the time. Whether we enjoy it or not is another question. Even if we’re never alone for a minute, even if we talk our heads off, or spend hours interacting with others, we are trapped inside our heads. We’re alone up there, in solitary, imprisoned by the cranium and our singular perspective. (Social interaction kindly provides the illusion that we are not alone.)

Take a look around and it’s surprising how much space there is to store things. Somewhere near the back are shelves piled high with memories, experiences, thoughts, knowledge, dreams and music. Behind these shelves is the operating system. We don’t go there. It just hums along of its own accord, allowing us to function in blissful ignorance of its machinations.

Many phrenological illustrations portray the brain as a tightly packed oval of small cubicles, each with its own function—a corporate flagship, or musty old factory, with every cogwheel doing its part to keep the enterprise afloat. It’s very crowded in those pictures, claustrophobic.

Not my view at all. There’s infinite space up there, plenty of room to have an alchemist’s laboratory where thoughts are put together from different elements in the cellular database. I don’t know how you see your brain, but I see mine as a spacious atrium with good natural light from above (no eureka lightbulbs). In the center, there’s a long old refectory table where I work and play. At one end there’s music, at the other, painting. In the middle, where the light shines brightest, is where I craft my ideas and observations from the contents of the infinite number of drawers and cupboards that line the room. This is the point of departure for travels far and wide across the geography of the imagination.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

The history of the Japanese calendar stretches very far back into Japanese history- so far back, indeed, that we find ourselves in ancient China.

As was true of many facets of the ancient Chinese civilization–from its writing system to ceramics and medicine– the Chinese calendar was remarkably advanced and far superior to anything held by its neighbors of the time.

An ancient lunar-solar calendar, it had months based on the phases of the moon (each month began with the new moon), and the seasons were kept track of by observing the movement of the sun against 24 solar points, called “the twenty-four sekki” (24節気). Using these 24 sekki as a meteorological guide, important seasonal marking points– such as the solstices and equinoxes– could be accurately understood so that additional months could thereby be inserted when necessary.

It was high technology in the ancient world and the calendar was adopted throughout East Asia–from Japan and Korea to tropical Vietnam, the same calendar was utilized so that the time of “Frost Falling” or “Big Snow” was observed, whether the people in those lands had ever seen snow or not! In Japan, in particular, the calendar has infused the seasons with poetry and shared meaning. I don't know if it's because of the poetry inherent in the names themselves or the pageantry of images and festivals that are embedded in the calendar but it is a way of looking at the world that is deeply affecting.

Sure, anyone can step outside and appreciate the great splendor or nature; anyone with eyes to see and a heart to feel can be moved by “scattering flowers and fallen leaves” (飛花落葉) and yet…. as with all festivals, somehow the most moving aspect of aspect of things is in the shared details. I always loved the way we lived according to the calendar out in the country in Japan. It is something I miss terribly.

This was really brought to mind for me yesterday when a friend, Patrick Donnelly posted this video below on Facebook of a deer stepping up toward the altar of a Catholic church in France. Other friends said it was a church in Canada, which seems more likely maybe, but the video that he linked to was labelled, “France, the Church of St. Eustace.”

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by Maarten Boudry

Maarten Boudry

Science education is an uphill battle. More than 40% percent of the U.S. population, one of the most scientifically advanced countries on the planet, believes that the earth was created in six days by supernatural fiat a few millennia ago. Ghosts, gods, angels and devils continue to populate people’s fertile imagination. Belief in telepathy and assorted psychic powers is rampant, as is belief in all sorts of quack medicine and conspiracy theories. It is no wonder that some scientists and science educators are driven to desperation: why don’t people just get it? Why do they doggedly persist in the myths of old, or the fads of late, as if the scientific revolution has never taken place?

Meanwhile, the progress of science continues unabated, with an ironic twist. Science does not just explain the way the universe is; it also explains why people continue to think the universe is different than it is. In other words, science is now trying to explain its own failure in persuading the population at large of its truth claims. Decades of research in cognitive psychology have revealed that our brains, alas, are just not wired up for science. Or at least not for the fruits of scientific research. To be sure, science is a product of human brains (where else would it come from?), but as scientists have made progress, they have come up with theories and views that are increasingly hard to swallow for those same brains. Take evolutionary theory, a crowning achievement of science. Our minds are prone to find purpose in nature (intuitive teleology), but evolution says there isn’t any: all is blind chance, mindless necessity and pitiless indifference. Our minds like to think of biological species as immutable categories separated by unbridgeable chasms (intuitive essentialism), but evolutionary theory just talks about imperceptibly shifting populations and changes in gene frequencies. Our minds can just about conceive of a thousand years, but scientists estimate that life on earth has been evolving since 3.8 thousand times thousand times thousand years ago. It’s hard to get your puny human brain around such things.

In Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not, philosopher Robert McCauley offers ample demonstrations of the truth of his book title. Many scientific theories run roughshod over our deepest intuitions. Lewis Wolpert even remarked that “I would almost contend that if something fits with common sense it almost certainly isn't science.” It is not so much that the universe is inimical to our deepest intuitions, it’s that it does not care a whit about them (it’s nothing personal, strictly business). And it gets worse as we go along. Newton’s principle of inertia was already hard to get your head around (uniform motion continuing indefinitely?), but think about the curvature of space-time in general relativity, or the bizarre phenomena of quantum mechanics, which baffle even the scientists who spend a lifetime thinking about them. Science does not have much going for it in the way of intuitive appeal.

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by Grace Boey

For some, hopping across countries means switching between being part of the racial majority and being part of the minority. A Chinese Singaporean living in America discusses what she's learned about her privilege from her experiences of racial alienation.

This past June, my home country Singapore hosted the 2015 SEA Games. This is the Southeast Asian version of the Olympics, involving eleven different countries and numerous ethnic groups. The games opened with a lavish parade attended by 50,000 people, including government ministers and foreign dignitaries from all over Southeast Asia. In line with Singapore’s usual standards, the live telecast of the opening ceremony was flawless. But what happened fifteen minutes before the show went live was a more unfortunate story. Bhavan Jaipragas, a journalist covering the event, made the following Facebook post about an interaction between the Singaporean emcee and a young Indian audience member:

“Racism by emcee at SEA Games pre-opening ceremony activity:
In an audience interaction segment before the start of the SEA Games opening ceremony at the National Stadium, emcee Sharon Au approached an Indian girl seated in the stands. The girl did not properly perform the act—saying aloud a line welcoming foreign contingents (others before her didn’t get it right too). Au, speaking into a mike and with the cameras trained on her, shockingly put on a strong Indian accent, and while shaking her head from right to left asked the girl: “What (Vat) happened? What happened?”. Earlier, she made fun of the girl’s name, Kavya, referencing “caviar”.”

What would possess an experienced entertainer to casually and distastefully appropriate another race’s accent in front of a stadium full of 50,000 people? Perhaps Iggy Azalea might understand. But to give others the benefit of some context: Au, the emcee, is ethnically Chinese. Like me, she’s a member of the majority ethnic group which makes up 75% of the Singaporean population. Ethnic Indians, on the other hand, comprise just 9% of our population. Because of their dominance, ethnic Chinese Singaporeans enjoy a ‘Chinese privilege’ that’s similar in some ways to the ‘white privilege’ enjoyed by Caucasian people in the western world. In addition to this, casual social interactions in Singapore tend to be much less ‘politically correct’ than in most parts of the western world, at least regarding race. It’s not uncommon for Indian accents to be mimicked, and for Chinese people to ‘joke’ about the darker colour of Indian skin. Chinese Singaporeans have even had their own Bollywood 'blackface' controversies. This, unfortunately, occurs even amongst more educated circles of the Chinese majority. Many of my Indian friends have begrudgingly come to accept this as part of their reality, even joking about it themselves. (My Indian friend on Facebook: Coffee girl audibly sniggered when I ordered a ‘Long Black’. So this is what sexual harassment feels like.)

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by Paul Braterman

It looks as if life on Earth just got older, and probably easier. Tiny scraps of carbon have been found inside 4.1 billion year old zircons, and examination shows that this carbon is most probably the result of biological activity. This beats the previous age record by 300 million years, and brings the known age of life on Earth that much closer to the age of Earth itself. The implication is that life can originate fairly quickly (on the geological timescale) when the conditions are right, increasing the probability that it will have originated many times at different places in our Universe.

The Solar System, it is now thought, formed when the shockwave from a nearby supernova explosion triggered a local increase in density in the interstellar gas cloud. This cloud was roughly three quarters hydrogen and one quarter helium, all left over from the Big Bang some 9 billion years earlier. It had already been seeded with heavier elements produced by red giant stars, to which was now added debris from the supernova, including both long-lived and short-lived radioactive elements. Once the cloud had achieved a high enough local density, it was bound to fall inwards under its own gravity, heating up as it did so. The central region of the cloud would eventually become hot enough and dense enough to allow the fusion of hydrogen to helium. A star was born.

The heavy elements (and in this context “heavy” means anything heavier than hydrogen and helium) in the dust cloud surrounding the nascent Sun gave rise to the rocky cores hidden within the outer giants Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus, of the outer reaches of the Solar System, and to the rocky inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and, of course, to Earth and everything upon it. We are stardust.

The asteroids are made out of material that was never able to come together to form a planet, because of the competing gravitational pull of Jupiter. Asteroids are continually bumping into each other, scattering fragments, and some of these fragments fall to earth as meteorites. The Hubble Telescope has given usimages of star and planet formation in progress. Such is our modern creation myth, magnificent in scale, and rooted in reality.

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By, Leanne Ogasawara

It is one of my life regrets that when in Delhi, I did not take the time to go down and see the Taj Mahal. This is not even the worst travel regret I have either. But it is the second worst. There was so much to see and do in Delhi back then. And I guess I tend toward a pathological dislike for the popular and fashionable. So, I missed seeing the building with my own eyes.

Filled with regret, I sat down at LA's Geffen Playhouse last week to watch Rajiv Joseph's Guards at the Taj.

The play opens as two friends are standing guard in front of the almost completed Taj Mahal. Childhood friends, they cannot keep to the strict rule of silence that their job demands. Surreptitiously, they talk of the stars and their dream of “moving up” to become guards in the emperor's harem… the ultimate job, they decide. Birds are singing. The beauty of their friendship and funny dialog, however, belies the extreme violence that follows in Act 2.

It is an old legend that after having the Taj built as a monument to his beloved dead wife, the emperor Jahan decreed that the architect and all the workers who had built the building would all have their hands cut off. When I was in India, I had actually heard that it was only the architect who was put to death. In any case, it is just a dark legend. Anyway, as the two friends stand guard happily dreaming of the emperor's harem, one tells the other about a rumor that is going around. The emperor, it seems, in his desire to ensure that nothing more beautiful than his glorious Taj ever be built again, will amputate all 20,000 workers' hands.

One friend says, “What a horrible job that would be to cut off the hands of 20,000 men.”

“Yeah” says the other, “that's 40,000 hands.”

In that moment, it then dawns on them that of course this is a job that will fall to themselves–as the lowliest grunts in the army.

And sure enough in Act 2, the stage is awash in blood and severed hands. (My friend Guita called it an early Halloween).

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by Yohan J. John

I've always had a problem with the word 'nature'. It seems to serve as a label for multiple, mutually inconsistent notions. This in itself is not a reason to dislike a word — we seem to have little problem with most words that have multiple meanings. (Surely “right” as in “right versus wrong”, is easy to separate from “right” as in “right versus left”? Surely it isn't semantic confusion that causes left-handed people and leftists to be accused of being wrong, and even unnatural?) What seems to make the concept of “naturalness” especially problematic is the way it is used to justify particular situations or courses of action.

So what are the multiple senses of the concept of nature? I think we can discern at least three, which can be best described in terms of dichotomies. We have:

1. Nature versus the Supernatural
2. Nature versus Nurture
3. Nature versus Culture

Let's examine them one by one, and then see what they imply for 'human nature'.

1. The Way It Is: Nature versus the Supernatural

One of the earliest notions of 'nature' was as 'character' or 'essence'. The nature of a thing is its way, its tao. The word itself stems ultimately from the Latin word “natus“, which means “born”. Since the late 14th century it has connoted creation — all that has been born — and is therefore synonymous with the universe and everything in it. In other words, it's Mother Nature.

So nature is what science aims to understand. Oddly, it is also a word used to label that understanding itself. To uncover the nature of a thing or a process is to situate it in the web of causality. Understanding an object's nature involves finding out where it comes from, how it is made or formed, and the various properties it exhibits in different circumstances. Understand a natural process involves systematically diminishing its potential to surprise us: even quantum mechanical 'weirdness' obeys laws, albeit probabilistic ones.

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by Rafiq Kathwari

Nine days in October 1947 that mapped the future of Kashmir

October 23, Thursday

On my walk in the evening, I saw refugees arriving from Muzaffarabad, where it appears some trouble had started and tribesmen had infiltrated into Muzaffarabad. I found lorries arriving in large numbers with Hindu and Sikh refugees.

October 24, Friday

Today is arfa (the day before Eid-ul-Adha), as well as Dussehra (a Hindu festival that celebrates the victory of good over evil). Maharaja Hari Singh went in the morning to attend the puja (ritual worship of god in Hinduism).

The ‘Salamati Fauj’ (Peace Brigade) of the National Conference is parading the streets. News about fighting in Muzaffarabad continues. In the evening, just before the radio news, the lights went off. First, we thought that it was only some trouble in the powerhouse, or on some line in the city, but later, we learnt that the staff at the Mohara powerhouse had fled, closing up the station. Grave situation is arising, seemingly.

October 25, Saturday

Eid-ul-Adha

In the morning went to Eidgah for prayers–a record congregation. After the prayers, a minor scuffle with the National Conference people resulting from a hawker giving offensive slogans about Qaid-e-Azam. Police also arrived on the scene. No light. No radio news. Slept.

October 26, Sunday

I was awakened early by the telephone. The Maharajah, his family all other wazir’s and Rajput families have fled away during the night. Situation must be very grave. Went out to the boulevard. National Conference ‘Salamati Fuaj’ parading the streets: chaos and confusion everywhere. News about insurgents advancing: they have reached Sopore. Sheikh Abdullah has early in the morning flown to Delhi, presumably to sell musalmans of Kashmir and to hatch up an intrigue against Pakistan itself. God help us all. Reportedly, the maharaja called Sheikh Abdullah during the night to transfer power to him. The National Conference volunteers are harassing those who support Pakistan, and for whom conditions appear most apprehensive.

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By Maniza Naqvi

We're trying to get the biggest bang for their buck–or rather biggest buck for their bang. Or you can say we're helping them pass the buck? Yes-yes–true–I'm a bit of a smart alec– at Boarding School everyone thought I had the comic's gift. I would agree. Wouldn't you? Doesn't matter what you think as long as the money keeps rolling in.

But seriously, do you think that just before he slits my throat he'll think of this: How I compared his mother to fifteen goats? Is that what you're asking me? Come off it–my friend—- he's going to be angry yes—He's going to wonder why I didn't compare his beloved Ma to fifteen cows—cows fetch 20,000 rupees apiece. Livestock. So get your facts straight—its cows not goats. Each person in these parts who is killed by a drone attack is equivalent to the rupee price of 15 cows. Converted into dollars? At today's rates?—$194—that's about 38 chai lattes or thereabouts at your nearest café in Washington DC——You see if a civilian is killed we pay three hundred thousand rupees. If a cow is killed we pay 20,000 rupees. My wife's outfit yesterday—the one you liked so much—the one you want made for yourself—well that cost me 450,000 rupees—yes—four lakhs. So you see, at 300,000 rupees it's a bargain. And we keep the costs down. We have a budget, a set quota for 2000 civilian deaths. Anything —or rather any more bodies– over this allocated amount, we just categorize them as militants. That way we don't have to pay. You see? Nice huh? Just an accountant's little trick of the trade. But my God! What a headache to get the numbers right on this. Hours—days of negotiations man—We finally gave them a list—how much for what they target—destroy—working age man, woman, pregnant woman, elderly man or woman, child, girl child, boy child, fetus, baby, goat, chicken, cow—concrete house, mud house, number of rooms, vehicle, what kind of vehicle—farm tools—and so on and on. It's a long list. We perfected the system—this cash transfers system—after the big Earthquake. Gave out money for the dead.

And you have no idea what a headache it is—on the other side of this—–these—our people are such cheaters, such brigands such liars….they will inflate their quotas of dead you see—no willingness to stay within the prescribe quotos—no principles at all—no integrity—they'll tell us that so many children have been killed—or so many women—we have no way of verifying how many women were inside those damn mud huts and so we have to rely on their word. Their word!!!! Makes you want emancipation doesn't it? These bloody losers keep them locked up—-we can't even get an honest head count. And after a house is blown up how are we supposed to know how many were in there, right! No sense of setting down a principle based on science or math–just emotions! I tell you literacy my friend is important! Number one priority once we are in the clear.

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by Michael Lopresto

Many people from all walks of life have been liberated by the phrase “social construction.” Most notably, those with gender identities that don't conform to traditional ideas, and those with behaviours that don't conform to traditional norms and values. In the former case, it's said that gender roles are wholly the product of socialisation, culture and education, whilst the labelling of nonconforming behaviours as “mad” is actually nothing more than the will of those in power trying to control behaviour and punish those they see as a threat to the status quo.

Indeed there's a venerable tradition in philosophy of saying that everything's socially constructed; with Michel Foucault and Judith Butler in the continental tradition, and an anti-metaphysical thread from Kant to the logical positivists to Quine and Goodman in the analytic tradition. Those with an anti-metaphysical bent often thought that philosophers were in a special place to examine and think about the world with their distinctly conceptual resources. The thought was that Plato was wrong to think that nature has joints, and that we can divide the world up in any way we want. We might think about the world as containing tigers or trees, things that form a distinct natural category, but that's actually a fact about our psychology than about how the world is independent of us. The common sense “naïve realism” of Aristotle says that there are things in themselves, and that science uncovers their real essences, but actually this is just a way of conveniently packaging our ideas and experiences. And this anti-metaphysical, anti-essentialist framework was put to good political use as well. Logical positivists such as Carnap and Schlick criticised metaphysical concepts such as wholes-as-distinct-from-parts as being nothing but metaphysical extravagance that couldn't be rigorously explicated, and therefore the very concept that underpinned the Nazi idea that the Volk was some distinct entity from collections of individual German people was complete nonsense.

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by Carl Pierer

Who the noble prize achieveth,
Good friend of a friend to be;
Who a lovely wife attaineth,
Join us in his jubilee!
Yes—he too who but one being
On this earth can call his own!
He who ne'er was able, weeping
Stealeth from this league alone!

—Friedrich Schiller, “Ode to Joy”

*

In “The Pervert's Guide to Ideology”, Slavoj Žižek draws the viewer's attention to the hollow, empty shell of the famous musical adaption of the ode to joy in Beethoven's Ninth. Commonly perceived to be a celebration of universal brotherhood, it has been used by various, starkly opposed political movements. While in Nazi Germany it was played at great public event, it was perceived as an almost communist song in the USSR and has now become the unofficial anthem of the European Union. He continuous to suggest that whenever a text claims to be rejoicing in the universal fraternity of humanity, it should be questioned who is meant by this. Is it really all of humanity or is there someone excluded? What are the conditions to shape the all-embracing league?

The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has an affinity for the presence of philosophical abysses in contemporary society. His films, absurd and highly satirical, yet at the same time deeply serious, are tremendously haunting. With great naturalness, he lets the familiar collide with the outlandish, thereby creating absurd frameworks. Such a background allows him to explore problems of identity, care and closeness and all the while caricature present society in elaborate metaphors. To take an example, “Alps” may illustrate this idea.

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