Al Jazeera English According to American linguist and political activist, Noam Chomsky, media operate through 5 filters: ownership, advertising, the media elite, flak and the common enemy. Follow #MediaTheorised, an online project by Al Jazeera English’s media analysis show The Listening Post Facebook: /AJListeningPost Twitter: @AJListeningPost Narrated by Amy Goodman, Executive Producer of Democracy Now! Designed and animated by Pierangelo Pirak
Robert Louis Stevenson on consequences
“Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences”
–Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850 – December 3, 1894) was a Scottish novelist and travel writer, most noted for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and A Child’s Garden of Verses. Wikipedia
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Bio: Mansur Al-Hallaj
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Mansur al-Hallaj | |
|---|---|
| The execution of Mansur Al-Hallaj (manuscript illustration from Mughal India, circa 1600)[1] | |
| Personal | |
| Born | 858 CE Fars |
| Died | 26 March 922 CE[4] Baghdad, Abbasid Caliphate |
| Religion | Islam |
| Ethnicity | Persian |
| Era | Abbasid |
| Creed | Islam, Sunni[2][3] |
| Muslim leader | |
| Influenced by[show] | |
| Influenced[show] |
| hidePart of a series on Islam Sufism |
|---|
| Ideas[show] |
| Practices[show] |
| Sufi orders[show] |
| List of sufis[show] |
| Topics in Sufism[show] |
| Islam portal |
| vte |
Mansur al-Hallaj (Arabic: ابو المغيث الحسين بن منصور الحلاج Abū ‘l-Muġīth Al-Ḥusayn bin Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj; Persian: منصور حلاج Mansūr-e Hallāj) (c. 858 – 26 March 922) (Hijri c. 244 AH – 309 AH) was a Persian mystic, poet and teacher of Sufism.[5][6][7] He is best known for his saying: “I am the Truth” (Ana ‘l-Ḥaqq), which many saw as a claim to divinity, while others interpreted it as an instance of annihilation of the ego which allows God to speak through the individual. Al-Hallaj gained a wide following as a preacher before he became implicated in power struggles of the Abbasid court and was executed after a long period of confinement on religious and political charges. Although most of his Sufi contemporaries disapproved of his actions, Hallaj later became a major figure in the Sufi tradition.
Early years
Al-Hallaj was born around 858 in Fars province of Persia to a cotton-carder (Hallaj means “cotton-carder” in Arabic) in an Arabized town called al-Bayḍā’.[8] His grandfather was a Zoroastrian.[7] His father moved to a town in Wasit famous for its school of Quran reciters.[8] Al-Hallaj memorized the Qur’an before he was 12 years old and would often retreat from worldly pursuits to join other mystics in study at the school of Sahl al-Tustari.[8] During this period Al-Hallaj lost his ability to speak Persian and later wrote exclusively in Arabic.[7][8]
When he was twenty, al-Hallaj moved to Basra, where he married and received his Sufi habit from ‘Amr Makkī, although his lifelong and monogamous marriage later provoked jealousy and opposition from the latter.[8] Through his brother-in-law, al-Hallaj found himself in contact with a clan which supported the Zaydi Zanj rebellion, which had elements of Shi’i school of thought.[8] He retained from this period some apparently Shi’i expressions, but he remained faithful to Sunnism.[2][3][8]
He later went to Baghdad to consult the famous Sufi teacher Junayd Baghdadi, but he was tired of the conflict that existed between his father-in-law and ‘Amr Makkī and he set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca, against the advice of Junayd Baghdadi, as soon as the Zanj rebellion was crushed.[8]
The Grinch Who Stole The Prosperos
By Mike Zonta, H.W., M. (with apologies to Dr. Seuss)
Every Who down in Whoville liked The Prosperos a lot.
But the Grinch who lived north of Whoville did not.
The Grinch thought the Truth, to him, was uncouth.
So he plotted and planned and structured a ruse.
He’d sponsor a dean of the school,
then vamoose.
No one would know.
No Who’d be the wiser.
And for many years,
he was a well-hidden miser.
But finally one day
the Grinch showed his face.
And the dean gave up power
and the Grinch fell to grace.
Instead of clinging to a power elusive.
The Grinch gave it up and became a reclusive.
But all the Whos in Whoville now knew
that the Grinch was a Who man who valued the True.
And the Whos in Whoville
governed themselves well.
And the dean and the Grinch
became Whos as well.
And Whoever reads this,
Whoever might be.
Knows that the Whos in Whoville
are finally free.
There is an antidote to demagoguery – it’s called political rewilding
This form of radical trust devolves power away from top-down government, often with some very unexpected results @GeorgeMonbiot
Wed 18 Dec 2019 (theguardian.com)
You can blame Jeremy Corbyn for Boris Johnson, and Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump. You can blame the Indian challengers for Narendra Modi, the Brazilian opposition for Jair Bolsonaro, and left and centre parties in Australia, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland and Turkey for similar electoral disasters. Or you could recognise that what we are witnessing is a global phenomenon.
Yes, there were individual failings in all these cases, though the failings were very different: polar opposites in the cases of Corbyn and Clinton. But when the same thing happens in many nations, it’s time to recognise the pattern, and see that heaping blame on particular people and parties fixes nothing.
In these nations, people you wouldn’t trust to post a letter for you have been elected to the highest office. There, as widely predicted, they behave like a gang of vandals given the keys to an art gallery, “improving” the great works in their care with spray cans, box cutters and lump hammers. In the midst of global emergencies, they rip down environmental protections and climate agreements, and trash the regulations that constrain capital and defend the poor. They wage war on the institutions that are supposed to restrain their powers while, in some cases, committing extravagant and deliberate outrages against the rule of law. They use impunity as a political weapon, revelling in their ability to survive daily scandals, any one of which would destroy a normal politician.
In 2014, Finland started a programme to counter fake news. The result is that Finns have been ranked the people most resistant to post-truth
Something has changed: not just in the UK and the US, but in many parts of the world. A new politics, funded by oligarchs, built on sophisticated cheating and provocative lies, using dark ads and conspiracy theories on social media, has perfected the art of persuading the poor to vote for the interests of the very rich. We must understand what we are facing, and the new strategies required to resist it.
If there is a formula for the new demagoguery, there must also be a formula for confronting and overturning it. I don’t yet have a complete answer, but I believe there are some strands we can draw together.
In Finland, on the day of our general election, Boris Johnson’s antithesis became prime minister: the 34-year-old Sanna Marin, who is strong, humble and collaborative. Finland’s politics, emerging from its peculiar history, cannot be replicated here. But there is one crucial lesson. In 2014, the country started a programme to counter fake news, teaching people how to recognise and confront it. The result is that Finns have been ranked, in a recent study of 35 nations, the people most resistant to post-truth politics.
Don’t expect Johnson’s government, or Trump’s, to inoculate people against their own lies. But this need not be a government initiative. This week, the US Democrats published a guide to confronting online disinformation. They will seek to hold Google, Facebook and Twitter to account. I would like to see progressive parties everywhere form a global coalition promoting digital literacy, and pressuring social media platforms to stop promoting falsehoods.
But this is the less important task. The much bigger change is this: to stop seeking to control people from the centre. At the moment, the political model for almost all parties is to drive change from the top down. They write a manifesto, that they hope to turn into government policy, which may then be subject to a narrow and feeble consultation, which then leads to legislation, which then leads to change. I believe the best antidote to demagoguery is the opposite process: radical trust. To the greatest extent possible, parties and governments should trust communities to identify their own needs and make their own decisions.
Over the past few years, our relationship with nature has begun to be transformed by a new approach: rewilding. Bizarre as this might sound, I believe this thinking could help inform a new model of politics. It is time for political rewilding.Advertisement
When you try to control nature from the top down, you find yourself in a constant battle with it. Conservation groups in this country often seek to treat complex living systems as if they were simple ones. Through intensive management – cutting, grazing and burning – they strive to beat nature into submission until it meets their idea of how it should behave. But ecologies, like all complex systems, are highly dynamic and adaptive, evolving (when allowed) in emergent and unpredictable ways.
Eventually, and inevitably, these attempts at control fail. Nature reserves managed this way tend to lose abundance and diversity, and require ever more extreme intervention to meet the irrational demands of their stewards. They also become vulnerable. In all systems, complexity tends to be resilient, while simplicity tends to be fragile. Keeping nature in a state of arrested development in which most of its natural processes and its keystone species (the animals that drive these processes) are missing makes it highly susceptible to climate breakdown and invasive species. But rewilding – allowing dynamic, spontaneous organisation to reassert itself – can result in a sudden flourishing, often in completely unexpected ways, with a great improvement in resilience.
The same applies to politics. Mainstream politics, controlled by party machines, has sought to reduce the phenomenal complexity of human society into a simple, linear model that can be controlled from the centre. The political and economic systems it creates are simultaneously highly unstable and lacking in dynamism; susceptible to collapse, as many northern towns can testify, while unable to regenerate themselves. They become vulnerable to the toxic, invasive forces of ethno-nationalism and supremacism.
But in some parts of the world, towns and cities have begun to rewild politics. Councils have catalysed mass participation, then – to the greatest extent possible – stepped back and allowed it to evolve. Classic examples include participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre in Brazil, the Decide Madrid system in Spain, and the Better Reykjavik programme in Iceland. Local people have reoccupied the political space that had been captured by party machines and top-down government. They have worked out together what their communities need and how to make it happen, refusing to let politicians frame the questions or determine the answers. The results have been extraordinary: a massive re-engagement in politics, particularly among marginalised groups, and dramatic improvements in local life. Participatory politics does not require the blessing of central government, just a confident and far-sighted local authority.
Is this a formula for a particular party to regain power? No. It’s much bigger than that. It’s a formula for taking back control, making our communities more resilient and the machinations of any government in Westminster less relevant. This radical devolution is the best defence against capture by any political force. Let’s change the nature of politics in this country. Let’s allow the fascinating, unpredictable dynamics of a functioning society to emerge. Let the wild rumpus begin.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Eleanor Roosevelt’s Little-Known Children’s Book About Christmas and Hope Amid Humanity’s Darkest Hour
By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)
As a lover of children’s books, especially vintage ones, I was delighted to find out that beginning in the 1930s, Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11, 1884–November 7, 1962) — beloved First Lady, dedicated humanitarian, writer of controversial love letters, timeless philosopher — penned a series of books aimed at young readers, discussing various social and political issues, from voting to international relations. In 1940, in the midst of a grim holiday season marred by the realities of WWII and the Nazi occupation of Europe, she composed Christmas: A Story (public library) — the tale of a little Dutch girl named Martha, who struggles to find meaning, love, and peace in a world of destruction and uncertainty after her father, Jon, is killed in the war.
The original edition, now long out of print, features illustrations by German graphic designer and artist Fritz Kredel, who was later commissioned to create a woodcut of the Presidential Seal for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.
The light in the window must be the dream which holds us all until we ultimately win back to the things for which Jon died and for which Marta and her mother were living.
In the introduction, Roosevelt articulates something all the more prescient in the wake of recent tragedies:
The times are so serious that even children should be made to understand that there are vital differences in people’s beliefs which lead to differences in behavior.
Though the Christ Child plays a central role in Christmas: A Story as a source of hope and solace for little Martha, the religious elements are more of an allegory for Roosevelt’s philosophical message: That we don’t need to seek permission to believe in goodness, even in the face of evil, and that, as Stanley Kubrick famously put it nearly three decades later, “however vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
Complement with Roosevelt on happiness, conformity, and integrity, our individual responsibility in social change, and the immense value of science.
RELATED READING:
How Eleanor Roosevelt Revolutionized Politics
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