aballah

November 27, 2012

An assumption of human free will is fundamental for any system of legal accountability. Unfortunately, the more the cognitive sciences develop, the more they suggest that our moral reasoning lies largely outside of our control—and can even be manipulated.

An example is transcranial magnetic stimulation. Experiments with TMS reveal that you canalter somebody’s moral reasoning using a powerful magnet. Unscrupulous military leaders could artificially distort their subordinates’ morality for the worse by attaching a TMS unit to their helmets. Yet if a soldier committed war crimes because somebody else had turned off his morals, it is hard to see how we could hold him responsible for his actions.

From “Who Will Be Accountable for Military Technology?” by Paul Robinson.

11:54am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZBXRbyY9n0qS

June 20, 2012

azspot:

“The American public is suffering from an education deficit. By this I mean it exhibits a growing inability to think critically, question authority, be reflective, weigh evidence, discriminate between reasoned arguments and opinions, listen across differences and engage the mutually informing relationship between private problems and broader public issues. This growing political and cultural illiteracy is not merely a problem of the individual, one that points to simple ignorance. It is a collective and social problem that goes to the heart of the increasing attack on democratic public spheres and supportive public institutions that promote analytical capacities, thoughtful exchange and a willingness to view knowledge as a resource for informed modes of individual and social agency. One of the major consequences of the current education deficit and the pervasive culture of illiteracy that sustains it is what I call the ideology of the big lie - which propagates the myth that the free-market system is the only mechanism to ensure human freedom and safeguard democracy.”

— Henry A. Giroux

9:47pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZBXRbyNod-aF

(Notes: 256)

Filed under: education critical thinking American public reason think reflect human freedom democracy social

January 17, 2012

From Israel’s ‘national suicide’ by Mark LeVine

Simply put, the threat of a Palestinian “demographic bomb”, as Prime Minister Netanyahu has called it, is little more than a contrivance to justify the further exclusion of Palestinians from full citizenship rights within Israel.

But accurate or not, the average Jewish Israeli is likely not spending much time parsing the logic or statistical foundations of the High Court’s decision - because they understand the deeper meaning of the argument underlying the decision’s title: to extend full human rights to Palestinians will lead inevitably to the “national” - that is, political - suicide of Israel as a Jewish state.

Why?

Because to recognise that Jews and Palestinians can become one in the most intimate way possible - through love, sex and children - is to open Israeli Jews to the possibility that there is nothing essential that separates them from Palestinians, that as human beings with deep roots in this land, Palestinians have the same human rights as Israeli (or diaspora) Jews.

9:32am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZBXRbyEw5oAj

(Notes: 13)

Filed under: Palestinian demographic bomb Netanyahu Israel Jewish state nation political suicide sex love children human rights human

November 2, 2011

inothernews:

Angolan asylum-seeker Mauro Manuel cried during a rally in The Hague Tuesday. The Dutch Parliament denied the asylum seeker’s request. He arrived in the Netherlands in 2003 after his mother, hoping for a better future for her son, put him on a plane; a Dutch family had taken him in. (Koen Van Weel/European Pressphoto Agency)

9:17am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZBXRbyBPXduB

(Notes: 109)

Filed under: human asylum Netherlands politics

November 1, 2011

centerforinvestigativereporting:

Since the collapse of communism in 1989, millions of people from the former Soviet bloc migrated abroad with the hope for a better future. These waves of migration breathed life into one of the oldest yet darkest criminal enterprises—the trafficking of human beings into sexual slavery.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of women from Eastern Europe have been sold into prostitution against their will. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, a Bulgarian who immigrated to the U.S. during that period, investigates this rarely documented journey of trafficking in the documentary The Price of Sex.

If you’re in San Francisco, you can buy tickets now to see this film at the San Francisco Film Society on November 5.

3:02pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZBXRbyBNRCcC

(Notes: 24)

Filed under: prostitution sex slavery trafficking human criminal capitalism inequality

February 28, 2011