It's not possible to search for God using the methods of a detective... There is no way. You can only wait till God's axe severs your roots: then you will understand that you are here only through a miracle, and you will remain fixed forever in wonderment and equilibrium.
PROVE WE WEREN’T CONQUERED BY A FOREIGN POWER, WOMAN! SHOW YOUR WORK: Milan Kundera on national memory
Central European literature discussion
hlo has writers Magdalena Grzebałkowska, Katarína Kucbelová, and Edina Szvoren in conversation with Sarolta Deczki "about Central Europe, realism, and their own work", in Central European Writers in Conversation.
Nowa Huta: The city that went from communism to capitalism BBC
Toyota Beats GM in U.S. Sales; GM Had Led Every Year Since 1931.
Agencies and public sector union in talks about employers providing RATs in some cases
More on the Morbidity Risk of Omicron: “Like a Chess Grandmaster Playing Against Schoolboys”
A lot of the misunderstanding of Omicron is actively cultivates
A lot of the misunderstanding of Omicron is actively cultivates
Toni Morrison’s Ten Steps Towards Fascism
In a convocation address delivered at Howard University in March 1995, Toni Morrison noted that before fascist movements arrive at a “final solution” (the euphemism used by Nazi leaders to refer to the mass murder of Jews), there are preceding steps that they use to advance their agenda. From an excerpt of that speech published in The Journal of Negro Education:
Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.
Morrison then continued, listing the pathway to fascism in ten steps:
- Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.
- Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
- Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power and because it works.
- Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
- Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.
- Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
- Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
- Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy — especially its males and absolutely its children.
- Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions, a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press, a little pseudo-success, the illusion of power and influence, a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
- Maintain, at all costs, silence.
As I have said before, you can see many of these steps playing out right now in America, orchestrated by a revitalized and emboldened right-wing movement that has captured the Republican Party. Jason Stanley, a scholar of fascism, recently wrote of Morrison’s speech:
Morrison’s interest was not in fascist demagogues or fascist regimes. It was rather in “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems”. The procedures she described were methods to normalize such solutions, to “construct an internal enemy”, isolate, demonize and criminalize it and sympathizers to its ideology and their allies, and, using the media, provide the illusion of power and influence to one’s supporters.
Morrison saw, in the history of US racism, fascist practices — ones that could enable a fascist social and political movement in the United States.
Writing in the era of the “super-predator” myth (a Newsweek headline the next year read, “Superpredators: Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?”), Morrison unflinchingly read fascism into the practices of US racism. Twenty-five years later, those “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems” are closer than ever to winning a multi-decade national fight.
See also Umberto Eco’s 14 Features of Eternal Fascism and Fighting Authoritarianism: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century. (via jason stanley)
Eichstaedt JC, Schwartz HA, Kern ML, et al. Psychological language on Twitter predicts county-level heart disease mortality. Psychol Sci. 2015;26(2):159-169. doi:10.1177/0956797614557867. “Hostility and chronic stress are known risk factors for heart disease, but they are costly to assess on a large scale. We used language expressed on Twitter to characterize community-level psychological correlates of age-adjusted mortality from atherosclerotic heart disease (AHD). Language patterns reflecting negative social relationships, disengagement, and negative emotions—especially anger—emerged as risk factors; positive emotions and psychological engagement emerged as protective factors. Most correlations remained significant after controlling for income and education.
A cross-sectional regression model based only on Twitter language predicted AHD mortality significantly better than did a model that combined 10 common demographic, socioeconomic, and health risk factors, including smoking, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. Capturing community psychological characteristics through social media is feasible, and these characteristics are strong markers of cardiovascular mortality at the community level…”
The year in crime-writing panel
In The Los Angeles Times Paula L. Woods leads a panel where America's top mystery book critics break down the year in crime.
The contributing critics are: Steph Cha, Oline Cogdill, Maureen Corrigan, Molly Odintz, and Sarah Weinman.
FBI REFUSES TO EXPLAIN FBI ROLE IN JANUARY 6