Nautilus Magazine: Nietzsche Is Not the Proto-postmodern Relativist Some Have Mistaken Him For

As if being charged for one world war wasn’t bad enough, Nietzsche was also blamed for the Second World War, with his talk of superior “Supermen” [Übermenschen] crushing the “decadent” and “weak” selectively appropriated by Hitler and the Nazis. This was despite the fact that Nietzsche loathed German nationalism and especially despised anti-Semites for their pathetic resentment. [...]

Nietzsche believed in truth, albeit of an unstable, contingent, perspectival, and disposable variety. He believed in constant experimentation and argument. His Übermensch forever goes beyond and above. This is why they had to struggle, because truth was difficult but ultimately necessary to obtain through free-thinking and reason. As he wrote in Daybreak (1881): “Every smallest step in the field of free thinking, and of the personally formed life, has ever been fought for at a cost of spiritual and physical tortures… change has required its innumerable martyrs… Nothing has been bought more dearly than that little bit of human reason and sense of freedom that is now the basis of our pride.” Far from being casual about truth, Nietzsche cared deeply about it. And any truth we held had to earn its keep. “Truth has had to be fought for every step of the way, almost everything else dear to our hearts, on which our love and our trust in life depend, had to be sacrificed to it,” he wrote later in 1888 in The Antichrist.

Nietzsche believed truths had to be earnt. He believed we had to cross swords in the struggle for truth, because it mattered so dearly, not because “anything goes.” We had to accept as true even that which we found intolerable and unacceptable, when the evidence proved it so. All points of view certainly are not valid. Walter Kaufmann, who began the mainstream rehabilitation of Nietzsche after the Second World War, concluded in the fourth edition of his classic Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1974): “Nietzsche’s valuation of suffering and cruelty was not the consequence of any gory irrationality, but a corollary of his high esteem of rationality. The powerful man is the rational man who subjects even his most cherished faith to the severe scrutiny of reason and is prepared to give up his beliefs if they cannot stand this stern test. He abandons what he loves most, if rationality requires it. He does not yield to his inclinations and impulses.”

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Al Jazeera: The Hamas problem

Furious after Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections, the US and Israel pushed for a regime change in Gaza, clearly a Hamas stronghold. The 2007 attempt to depose Hamas was led by Palestinian security chief at the time, Mohammed Dahlan. That plot was, in fact, financed by the UAE to the tune of $30 million that ultimately ended in disaster and consolidated Hamas' power, while expelling Dahlan and his co-conspirators from Gaza. [...]

However, regional players astutely observe that the main obstacles to Dahlan's coronation are the current PA president, Mahmoud Abbas, and his political movement, Fatah, as well as Hamas. While overcoming the objections by Abbas and Fatah would be relatively easier due to the massive leverage Israel, the United States and other regional actors have over them, the acquiescence of Hamas and other groups to the installation of Dahlan, they reasoned, would have to be achieved through economic, political, and military measures, including pressuring their current Qatari patron. [...]

Since Hamas is considered the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the threat of this movement was, fairly or not, extended to Hamas. For political and strategic reasons, Saudi Arabia offered support to Islamist groups, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, for decades. But ever since the Arab Spring phenomena, this marriage of convenience was abandoned in favour of a bitter rivalry that became enmity.

Furthermore, the Saudi regime has claimed twice to have been undermined by Hamas. The first occurred when Hamas did not accept the so-called Arab peace initiative for resolving Israel's colonisation of Palestinian land, initially promoted in 2002 by then Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. And secondly, the Saudis blamed Hamas for the failure of the 2007 Mecca reconciliation talks between Fatah and Hamas - brokered by the late King Abdullah, even though other players, particularly the US and Israel, played a crucial role in blocking it.

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Jacobin Magazine: June 17, 1953

It began in East Berlin and spread out across the German Democratic Republic. Over half a million workers went on strike, and around a million East Germans — close to 10 percent of the population — joined the protests.

These figures would have climbed even higher if the Red Army and domestic security forces had not, with lethal force, quickly intervened. The scale of the response prompted Bertolt Brecht’s famous barb: the Politburo would have to “dissolve the people and elect another.” [...]

But what was most surprising was how quickly workers radicalized. A routine strike in East Berlin grew into a nationwide rebellion. In some towns, inter-factory strike committees and embryonic soviets formed.

This all happened in one day, between when workers clocked in for their morning shifts and when martial law was imposed that afternoon. [...]

In Leipzig, for instance, protesters occupied the broadcasting system, the newspaper publisher, and the regime-run union and youth organizations’ headquarters. They celebrated success at lunchtime; demonstrators danced to tunes from the piano they set up in the market square.

The strike, its spread, and its culmination in a rally seemed winged by a sense of purpose. Wide layers of the population felt that “something should be done” and formed a consensus, often with surprising strength, about the course of action.

But after this point, the sense of common purpose lessened. Strategic and tactical questions grew complex: Which building to occupy? Where does power lie? [...]

With the partial exception of small strike waves in 1956, 1960–61 and 1970–72, barely any significant struggles spilled beyond individual workplaces between 1953 and 1989.

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Quartz: Sweden’s gender-neutral preschools produce kids who are more likely to succeed

Inside a handful of public kindergartens in Sweden, toys are never divided into traditional gender camps. Dolls and baby strollers mingle freely with cars and wooden blocks. In posters, dump trucks haul around beaded jewelry, a bionic robot wears a tutu, and it’s not a female or male Barbie who does the dishes—that’s left to a skeleton.

These are Sweden’s gender-neutral kindergartens, administered by Lotta Rajalin, who shared photos of the toyscapes and posters described above in a recent Tedx Talk. She also explained that at her schools, children can dabble in all kinds of activities, and are encouraged to explore their full range of emotions. Girls are not expected to suppress anger, and boys are not pressured to swallow their tears. All students are welcome to be as messy or tidy, rowdy, or passive as suits them. [...]

Such efforts are probably paying off. In a small study published in Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden report that children who attended one gender-neutral preschool were more likely to play with unfamiliar children of the opposite gender, and less likely to be influenced by culturally enforced gender stereotypes, compared to children enrolled at other pre-schools. Tests showed that the kids from the gender-neutral school were as likely as other children to group people by gender, but didn’t attach traditional associations to the concepts of “male” or “female” children to the same degree. During a matching task, for instance, they were less likely to make choices in line with cultural norms when shown images of boys or girls and jeans or dresses. [...]

Plenty of research has explored the ways gender assumptions in the classroom are equally harmful to boys and girls. In the study, for instance, the authors point out that just as boys, not girls, are usually encouraged to play with blocks, which develops spatial skills, girls are expected to comply with an adult’s direction, a trait that’s connected to better academic performance. Psychologists have also determined that when a teacher or student believes most boys can’t sit still long enough to read, or might not have the self-discipline required to thrive in a structured setting, it appears to negatively impact boys’ grades.

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CityLab: City vs. State: The Story So Far

The “Fight For 15” movement is really about cities. By November 2016, Riverstone-Newell writes that nearly forty cities and counties had agreed to local increases in the minimum wage ranging from $8.50 to $15.75 an hour in states such as Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, Maryland, Washington, and Maine (plus Washington, D.C.). Right now, 29 states set a higher minimum wage than the federal government and Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and Washington passed statewide raises in 2016. [...]

The fight over sanctuary cities has pitted federal, state, and city officials against each other and is about to come to a head this year as federal funding is in jeopardy. The most prominent example of preemption might be Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott has already blocked $1.8 million in grant funding to Travis County over its sanctuary policy and signed a “super preemption” law last month aimed at punishing local officials who do not cooperate with immigration authorities. It is set to go into effect in September. A Florida bill would impose a $5,000 per day fine on sanctuary cities (and Miami-Dade County has already voted to end its status as a sanctuary city) and North Carolina has a bill pending to strip cities of a variety of revenue sources if they operate as a sanctuary city. Other states that enacted restrictions this year include Mississippi, Georgia, and Indiana. [...]

Cities are up against more than Trump. The GOP controls 33 governorships and both chambers in 32 state legislatures. State preemption laws seek to strip cities of their abilities not just to oppose the White House agenda but to forge policies that reflect the desires, beliefs and concerns of their own residents. State legislatures in the U.S. have long had an anti-urban bias—in 2013, a study I wrote about in CityLab found that bills sponsored by legislators from small or medium-sized cities were overall twice as likely to pass as those that originated in big cities like Chicago or New York.

Another hurdle for cities is the constitutional challenge that they are legally considered “creatures of the state.” Republicans narrowly advocate for states’ rights in the face of federal power, arguing that cities don’t have the right to challenge the state. But this misremembers the origin of rights—they belong to people. Here’s how an Ohio Republican state senator summed up his opposition to Cleveland’s minimum wage hike: “[W]hen we talk about local control, we mean state control.”

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Mental Floss: How the Rainbow Became Associated with Gay Rights

In 1976, Baker noticed a proliferation of American flags around San Francisco—a celebration of the country’s bicentennial. "I thought, a flag is different than any other form of art. It’s not a painting, it’s not just cloth, it is not a just logo—it functions in so many different ways," Baker told the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). "I thought that we needed that kind of symbol, that we needed as a people something that everyone instantly understands. … It was necessary to have the Rainbow Flag because up until that we had the pink triangle from the Nazis—it was the symbol that they would use [to denote gay people]."

His reason for choosing a rainbow was simple: "We needed something beautiful, something from us. The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things. Plus, it's a natural flag—it's from the sky!" [...]

Baker’s design became popular pretty quickly, but demand for the flag skyrocketed after Harvey Milk was assassinated five months later, on November 27, 1978. As more and more people wanted to show their support for Milk and the LGBT community, it became harder to keep the supply of custom-created eight-striped rainbow banners up; Baker switched to premade rainbow-colored fabric even though it lacked the hot pink stripe. (The dye also had a tendency to run on cotton, so they switched to nylon. "The nylon caught on for two reasons: first of all, it’s very durable, and second, it lights beautifully," Baker told MoMA. "Dupont puts out a great product just for flags, it’s called Oxford Weave and it lights rather like stained glass and in some of the photographs you’ll see the sunlight coming through and it makes a rainbow on the pavement. That’s something that I think really captured the public’s imagination.")

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Quartz: The philosophical strategy underlying Emmanuel Macron’s favorite phrase

One clear marker of Ricoeur’s influence is a phrase Macron often uses: “et en même temps” (“and at the same time”). In a recent interview with the Irish Times, Eileen Brennan, a philosophy lecturer at Dublin City University, observes that Macron is prone to repeating the phrase when “he announces plans to do two seemingly incompatible things such as liberalising the labour market and protecting those in the most insecure positions.” (Brennan credits French philosopher Olivier Abel for noting the connection.) [...]

Macron has a similarly practical approach, Stiver notes. “He’s careful about not being too unrealistic in making promises that he can’t deliver, and trying at the same time to be imaginative about the future and thinking about things that can be done,” he says, adding, “The problem is, in politics, you often have competing truths. You have to make a decision about which way to lean when you have different ethical impulses pulling in different directions.” [...]

And that’s the approach Macron seems to be taking with his centrist political views. He’s shown a willingness to ask others for advice on what to do, to work with both left- and right-wing cabinet ministers, and to reconcile seemingly contradictory ideas. Unlike populist leaders on the left and right today, Macron isn’t a fervent idealist. Instead, he’s happy to compromise.

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Al Jazeera: Forces loyal to Libya's Haftar 'burn 6,000 books'

Forces loyal to renegade Libyan general Khalifa Haftar have been accused of burning more than 6,000 books, including works on religion, politics, poetry and philosophy.

According to a video posted on Facebook by Al Manara, a Libyan media platform, more than 6,000 books - including reported biographies of the Prophet Muhammad - were destroyed by a police force in the eastern city of Benghazi on Saturday.

The video showed a police officer claiming that the seized literature was promoting the ideas of "Daesh" (the Arabic term for Islamic State of Iraq and Levant or ISIL), as he sat behind a desk covered with books, including classical Islamic works.

The officer said the books "promoted violence" and the "ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood", which has been banned by UAE and Egypt.

In January, more than 100 Libyan writers and intellectuals, including renowned Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho, condemned a seizure of books deemed "erotic" or anti-Islamic by authorities in eastern Libya.

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IFLScience: So Coconut Oil Is Actually Really, Really Bad For You

According to a key advisory notice published in the journal Circulation – one which looks at all kinds of fats and their links to cardiovascular disease – coconut oil is packed with saturated fats. In fact, 82 percent of coconut oil is comprised of saturated fats, far more than in regular butter (63), olive oil (14), peanut oil (17), and sunflower oil (10). [...]

“Because coconut oil increases [bad] cholesterol, a cause of cardiovascular disease, and has no known offsetting favorable effects, we advise against the use of coconut oil,” the AHA conclude. In essence, there is nothing to gain and everything to lose by using coconut oil in cooking.

If you already have high bad cholesterol levels, then coconut oil is potentially quite dangerous to consume or use in acts of culinary creations. Swapping it out for olive oil, according to the AHA, will reduce your cholesterol levels as much as cutting-edge, cholesterol-lowering drugs.

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