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link“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.”
Friedrich August Hayek (via commondense)
YES!
(via coeus)
via • linkThis is incredible.
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via • linkDinner in the desert lit by giraffes on fire, Salvador Dalí’s design for Giraffes on Horseback Salad, his proposed Marx Brothers film (1937)
Grading Evil On A Curve - Common Sense - Dan Carlin.
Is the treatment of women in some traditional societies “evil”? Dan looks at the issue of “honor killings” and tries to determine what the world community’s response should be. Also: Fareed Zakaria wakes up.
This is a stomach-churning episode of Common Sense. Makes you think a little bit of cultural imperialism would be a good thing.
link“Kenyan, Anti-Colonial.”
Ever since he stepped onto the national political stage, the American right has been trying to come up with a grand unified theory that explains Barack Obama and his worldview. Thanks to an article by Dinesh D’Souza in Forbes, that grand hypothesis just got a little more kooky. According to the newly designated president of King’s College, a man who’s never met a controversial-for-the-sake-of-being-controversial thesis he never liked, Obama, Jr. is, ideologically at least, the reincarnation of his father, a raging, anti-colonial, African socialist.
From the end of the article:
“But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father’s time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.”
I suppose it’s one thing for D’Souza to put forward such a goofy-ass idea, but it’s another for Newt Gingrich—a former Speaker of the House, an established and notable political figure of the post-Cold War United States—to endorse said goofy-ass idea.
After the premiere of his latest documentary, Gingrich held an interview session with some reporters. During the interview he said that D’Souza’s article was “brilliant,” and repeated the core theory, that Obama’s worldview is “Kenyan, anti-colonial,” over and over.
Which begs the question: Since when did being anti-colonial become a bad thing? America was founded on the basis of highly anti-colonial sentiments. It’s one of our more noble characteristics: Yes, we’ve gone abroad searching for foreign dragons to slay, but as a people, we’ve never had the spirit of a colonial power. One could argue that to not be anti-colonial is downright un-American. During the Republican presidential debates in 2012, the question ought to be raised: Who here is anti-colonial? If nobody raises his (or her) hand, then we have a serious problem.
The other point this D’Souza article raises is this: D’Souza’s argument, and his upcoming book about “the roots of Obama’s rage,” seems nothing more than a racist, otherizing critique of Obama, cloaked in pseudo-intellectualism and hack psychoanalysis. Because of his African background, because his epidermis is several shades darker than his forty-three predecessors, there must be something mysterious about his thinking; there must be more esoteric at work in Obama’s brain. There’s no way he can be just another politician.
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