First posted September 12, 2018 I will open this comment with an anecdote. Some months ago, whilst exercising in the gym I visit, the senior trainer was talking politics with someone. He is a friendly individual and I normally do not converse whilst exercising. He happens to be an admirer of Narendra Modi. On this… Read More Oxford University’s South Asian Studies Programme’s comments on Venkat Dhulipala
“Cultural Marxism” is often invoked by some on the right to explain the rise of “woke” politics in universities, newsrooms, and corporations. According to this well-rehearsed line of criticism, the fixation on race and gender, the erosion of free speech, and the high-pitched frenzy of political correctness and cancellation, are nothing less than a communist… Read More Alexander Stern: What the Frankfurt School has to stay about bureaucratic progressivism
‘When it becomes ‘political’, justice breeds hatred and despair among those it singles out for attack. Those whom it favours, on the other hand, develop a profound contempt for the very value of justice, they know that it can be purchased by the powerful. As a device for strengthening one political group at the expense… Read More Avay Shukla: IT'S TIME TO BE OUTRAGED , MY LORDS
Appalling. That’s the only way to describe the manner in which the proceedings against Devangana Kalita, Natasha Narwal and Asif Iqbal Tanha have been conducted and are being conducted by the police and prosecution till now. In the process, the underbelly of our criminal justice system stands exposed in some respects, and it’s a pretty… Read More Five Questions on the Shameful Proceedings Against Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita, Asif Iqbal. By Madan B. Lokur, former judge of the Supreme Court
….. French theorists judged this approach naive. They challenged any presumption of stable significance in the literary object. Derrida pushed a radical skepticism that targeted the very idea of core meaning, original intention, or truth in or behind or before or under the work itself. The one-million-times-cited sentences on decentering in “Structure, Sign, and Play in… Read More Mark Bauerlein: TRUTH, READING, DECADENCE
Sometimes… silence makes a lie begin to take on the shimmer of truth… Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written a detailed essay about the conduct of young people on social media “who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion”, who she says are part of a generation “so terrified of having the wrong opinions that… Read More ‘It is obscene’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pens blistering essay against social media sanctimony
NB: Some weeks ago, the RSS’ student front the ABVP got a Kerala professor suspended for calling the RSS a proto-fascist organisation. Actually the progenitors of Hindutva were eager admirers of Nazism and Fascism. Here is the research article on Hindutva’s fascist connection from the 1930’s. Also relevant is Desraj Goyals seminal book on the RSS Some information for Israelis… Read More Bharat Bhushan: It suits the RSS to allow BJP to encourage defections from other parties
“What progress we are making! In the middle ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.” Late in May 1938, an 82-year old Sigmund Freud and his family were in Vienna eagerly awaiting the final details to be sorted before they could leave their country for good. There was no… Read More “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone” – Sigmund Freud, 1938
For the philosopher of “hyperobjects”- vast, unknowable things that are bigger than ourselves – the coronavirus is further proof that we live in a dark ecology. In 2013, a philosopher and ecologist named Timothy Morton proposed that humanity had entered a new phase. What had changed was our relationship to the nonhuman. For the first… Read More Book review: Timothy Morton’s Hyper-Pandemic
According to the IEA, just one country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), currently supplies more than 80% of the world’s cobalt, and another — China — 70% of its rare-earth elements. Similarly, lithium production is largely in two countries, Argentina and Chile, which jointly account for nearly 80% of world supply, while four… Read More MICHAEL KLARE: Lithium, Cobalt, and Rare Earths
