http://online.wsj.com/articles/no-offens...1414783663

[...] We knew soon enough that it was true. The literary, media and political worlds rallied in defense of Mr. [Salman] Rushdie. He became a hero of free speech and a symbol—even if a slightly ambivalent postcolonial one—of Western liberal traditions. But he also went, very sensibly, behind a curtain of security that was to last many years.

And by degrees—when it seemed that not only Mr. Rushdie’s life but the lives of his publishers, editors and translators might be threatened—his base of support in the literary world thinned out. Sensitive intellectuals discovered that, in a multicultural world, respect for the Other meant understanding his traditions too, and these often were, well, sterner than ours. Freedom of speech was only one value to be set against…ahem, several other values. Fear, cowardice and rationalization spread outward.

Twenty-five years later, we can look back on a long series of similar events, including: the 2002 anti-Christian riots in Nigeria, in which more than 200 people were killed because a local tabloid had facetiously suggested that Miss World contestants would make suitable brides for Muhammad; the 2004 murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for his movie “Submission,” in which passages from the Quran were printed on women’s bodies; the riots in Denmark and throughout the Middle East in 2005 in response to the publication of cartoons of Muhammad by a Danish magazine; the murder threats against Dutch politician Geert Wilders for his 2008 film “Fitna,” which interleaved passages from the Quran with clips of jihadist violence.

These events were threats to free speech, however, not only in themselves but also because they intimidated people and private organizations and gave governments an excuse to restrict free media. Over time, they encouraged others who had no interest in Islam whatsoever—from wealthy individuals to “dissident” minorities to democratic politicians—to try their hand at silencing opponents. Almost no newspapers published the Muhammad cartoons, for instance, though the story of them dominated the international media for weeks. Yale University Press especially distinguished itself by publishing a major study of the controversy in 2009—without the actual drawings.

Governments began to treat those threatened for their opinions almost as harshly as those attacking them...

[...] Admittedly, it is difficult to draw a clear line between criticism of an Islamic belief and an attack on Muslims who believe it. If you denounce a belief as absurd, you are implicitly criticizing the believers as credulous fools. Christians have to endure explicit denunciations of their faith all the time from such writers as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. And so they should. If you can’t stand the heat, don’t listen to hellfire sermons from atheists.

Hearing criticisms of your own convictions and learning the beliefs of others are training for life in a multifaith society. Preventing open debate means that all believers, including atheists, remain in the prison of unconsidered opinion. The right to be offended, which is the other side of free speech, is therefore a genuine right. True belief and honest doubt are both impossible without it.

It isn’t just some Muslims who want the false comfort of censoring disagreeable opinions. Far from it. Gays, Christians, feminists, patriots, foreign despots, ethnic activists—or organizations claiming to speak for them—are among the many groups seeking relief from the criticism of others through the courts, the legislatures and the public square.

England’s libel laws—long a scandalous system for enabling the rich to suppress their scandals—now have imitations in Europe and the U.S. In May 2014, the European Court of Justice created “the right to be forgotten,” enabling those with ugly pasts—a fraudster, a failed politician, an anti-Muslim bigot perhaps—to delete their crimes, misdemeanors and embarrassments from Internet records so that search engines cannot find them.

Surely such things can’t happen in the land of the First Amendment? Not in quite the same way, perhaps, but a libel suit brought by the climatologist Michael Mann against the opinion writer Mark Steyn, National Review magazine (with which I am affiliated) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for their criticism of his temperature projections still poses a chilling threat to free speech and scientific debate. Even if the case is ultimately resolved in favor of Mr. Mann’s critics, they will have suffered a considerable loss in time and money. “The process is the punishment,” Mr. Steyn has said of such trials. It is also a deterrent to future critics.

Nor are conservatives free from sin on this issue. In recent years, their attacks on free expression in the U.S. have generally been prompted by a philistine discomfort with provocative art, from the “Sensation” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 to the more recent flap over “The Death of Klinghoffer” at New York’s Metropolitan Opera....

http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/rayfield_11_14.php

Stalin, Vol 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928; by Stephen Kotkin

Review by Donald Rayfield

EXCERPT: [...] Psychopaths of Stalin's order arise so rarely in history that forensic psychiatry has few insights to offer. There is now a general consensus about the death toll and the ghastly heritage of Stalinism. [...] Kotkin's book is so long because he sets Stalin against an extensive historical and social background [...] There are a few new facts and a little demolition of false assumptions. Kotkin's major surprise is his claim [...] that Lenin's famous testament, a sort of headmaster's report critically assessing the six candidates who might inherit the leadership, was probably not dictated by Lenin. It may instead have been fabricated by Lenin's wife, Krupskaya [...] But this forgery, if that was what it was, matters little. Krupskaya may merely have written what she had guessed the semi-paralysed Lenin was thinking; moreover, many party members wanted a rude and power-crazed leader who would stir things up. Such criticism did Stalin's chances of power no harm.

Kotkin's merit is that he grinds no axes and is polite to his predecessors. [...] He believes that great men shape events: had Stalin not existed, then history would have been very different; had Stalin died in the early 1920s (as he might have done when operated on for appendicitis, given that Russian chloroform killed many a distinguished patient), then the USSR might have prolonged and developed the relatively liberal New Economic Policy and avoided 'socialism in one country'. The evidence of Stalin's proactive micromanagement supports Kotkin's theory.

One might disagree, however, with Kotkin's assumption that Stalin's paranoid, vindictive nature was a product of, not a motive for, the pursuit of power and that it was slow to develop. Stalin's youthful sexual liaisons may have been normal ('Stalin had a penis, and he used it,' Kotkin remarks), but his impregnation of the thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Siberian orphan Lidia Pereprygina was, even by the standards of the most unbourgeois Bolshevik, the kind of behaviour to be condoned only in a male stoat.

Kotkin omits many of the acts of the young Stalin that mark him as a creature of exceptional turpitude among the thugs, bandits, fanatics and misguided adolescents of the Transcaucasian Social Democratic Party. For example, when General Griaznov was assassinated in Tbilisi in 1906 and a bystander, Joiashvili, was arrested, Stalin composed an incriminating pamphlet to ensure that Joiashvili and not the real assassin was hanged (Stalin admitted this with pride in the 1920s). Likewise, he tried to have fellow party members executed on false accusations of treachery. The best evidence for any semblance of humanity in the young Stalin is not in Kotkin's narrative but in the pictures.

The photograph of a dishevelled Stalin standing with his mother and his in-laws by the open coffin in which his first wife lies is the sole picture of Stalin showing anything like remorse, sorrow and embarrassment. Kotkin might also have cited some of the postcards Stalin sent back to Georgia from London, in which he appears as just a laddish adventurer out to have a good time, hoping not to shock his new bride.

Stalin's childhood injuries and illnesses are well catalogued by Kotkin, but he does not pursue them as a possible source of Stalin's sadism (as some have done, on the Dostoevskian principle that the primary desire of a man suffering from toothache is that everyone should share his agony)....

Gotta try this! Sounds great!

http://www.rachaelraymag.com/recipes/rac...n-and-rice

Simple actually. But I'd still rather drink it in my margarita.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4xTqXhHlqg

"In line with previous scientific knowledge on the relative rigidity of rightist ideological beliefs, the first three studies illustrate that induced emotions have a greater influence on leftists' positions than on rightists' positions, even though the experimental manipulations affected levels of emotion similarly for all participants. Even the third study, in which a negative emotion was induced, led to changes in policy support only among leftists, as was the case with empathy in the first two studies. Induced empathy toward both Palestinians (study 1) and asylum-seekers (study 2) led to increased support for conciliatory and humanitarian policies among leftists, whereas induced despair (study 3) decreased support for conciliatory policies only among leftists.

Studies 4 through 6 looked at real-world scenarios, and found that Jewish-Israeli leftists' policy support was more related to both empathy and anger than rightists', at times of both peace efforts (study 4) and war (study 5). The final study found the same pattern of results with regard to fear among a different population, demonstrating that the interactive effect of ideology and emotion on policy support is not limited to a given population nor to emotions typically associated with leftist ideology.

Ms. Pliskin and her colleagues believe that these results may apply to other cultures, including liberals and conservatives in the U.S. "We would expect to find similar results among rightists and leftists in other cultures, including conservatives and liberals in the U.S., because of the cross-cultural similarities in the superstructure of ideology and the needs associated with rightist versus leftist ideology--and because of how these factors relate to emotional processes and their outcomes." But Ms. Pliskin does caution that more research would need to be done to determine if there are cultural factors that may limit or increase observed left-right differences."====http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...110314.php

I would stipulate that the study is incomplete because it emphasized primarily empathic emotions. I think negative emotions play a bigger role among conservatives--emotions like anger, disgust, fear, and moral blame. The teapartiers fear big government. The gun nuts fear being a victim of a crime or government tyrrany. The nativists judge illegal immigrants as immoral and inferior. The anti-gay groups harbor disgust and hatred against people due to their sexual orientation. The nationalists fear other nations like China and Russia. Capitalists fear poverty and socialism. It's still emotions here, only not those of compassion and altruism.

The body does not perceive anything. The eyes do not see. The hands do not feel. The ears do not hear. They have to be constructed as perceiving inside the brain. The body has to be constructed as conscious by the brain. But by itself it is little more than an unconscious machine being affected by external stimuli. Think about your eye for a second. All it's doing is focusing light on your retina. But the retina doesn't "see" this light. It isn't like some magically conscious surface that visualizes the image inside of itself. It is little more than cells that are being electrically stimulated by light. Like the leaf of a tree or a solar panel. But electrical stimulation of retina cells isn't seeing. It's all happening in the dark at this point, a stream of impulses waiting to be visualized as a scene inside the brain. The same is true for the nerves in your hand. The hand is not a conscious "thing" that feels the things it touches. The hand is not even "there" as a passive receiver of stimulation until AFTER the brain locates it as an attached extension of an identified-with body. THEN and only then does the hand SEEM to be feeling the outside world like it had awareness of its sensations independently of the brain. The mind constructs the body as a sort of animistic machine that is a subjective and passive experient of the world, situated in a landscape sensorily accessible to it yet simultaneous to it. In reality, and to the brain, it is nothing but a construct translated out of the machine language of varying electrical impulses.

"When we look at the world around us, we do not, as a rule, see "changes in light flux over time." We see solid objects moving and standing still in a well-defined three-dimensional space (at least, that is what we see in the most focused, central area of our vision). Nothing would be visible, however, were it not for the "light flux" entering our eyes through the pupil and flowing over the photosensitive cells lining the back of our eyeballs. Experiments have shown that when the retinal cells receive a steady, unchanging light, when the stimulus is absolutely fixed and unvarying, the cells quickly "tire." They stop sending the information our brain needs to construct the visual world we see lying in front of our eyes.[20] Thus there has to be a "flux," a movement of light over the retinal cells; otherwise, we see nothing at all. (If the sources of light do not move, the eye's own movements will keep the light moving across the cells.) "All eyes are primarily detectors of motion," R. L. Gregory points out, and the motion they detect is of light moving on the retina.[21] Only by these changing patterns of illumination can the world outside our eyes communicate with the visual processes of the brain. From that communication emerges our visual world."===http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebook...nd=ucpress

"A 52-year-old Ferrari just smashed the record for the most expensive car ever sold at auction.

The 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO, with a somewhat dark past, was just sold by Bonhams for $34.65 million. That blew away the previous record, held by a Mercedes-Benz racer that sold last summer for $31.6 million including auction fees.

"The market right now is just so strong," said Marcel Massini, a leading Ferrari historian and adviser to collectors. "And this is one of the big prizes in the entire collecting world."==http://www.cnbc.com/id/101914056