as the mainsail shifts
and the boat drifts on to the shoreline.
and the sun will respect
every face on the deck,
the hour that the ship comes in.
then the sands will roll
out a carpet of gold
for your weary toes to be a-touchin'.
and the ship's wise men
will remind you once again
that the whole wide world is watchin'.
- dylan, of course.
every wednesday in CAB 243 at 5pm, the global education project has "welcome to the reel world", a series of documentaries focussing on "the untold stories". i unfortunately have french at that point, but recommend the rest of you go. the schedule:
sept27 - all about darfur
oct4 - breaking the silence (on the new afghanistan)
oct11 - the fence (west bank/israel)
oct18 - the world stopped watching (nicaragua)
oct25 - thirst (corporations/governments/environmental impacts of water access, shortages, etc)
nov1 - shake hands with the devil (rwanda, romeo dallaire, etc)
nov8 - life & debt (jamaica, global debt structures..)
nov15 - no more tears, sister (sri lanka)
nov22 - inside burma, land of fear
nov29 - bhopal: the search for justice
the season has shifted, it is now a cold cold world. is at near-freezing for most of the day.
and university - i postponed drama327, so now am left with phil357 (phil of religion), phil291 (existentialism), fren111 (french.), econ101 (micro), and engl217 (signs and texts, a crazy course on literary and critical theory). am also sitting in on relig202 (intro to the old testament). along with the jobhunt, this weekend is for organizing life, because i'm just realizing how many other obligations are on my shoulders.
how are you-all preparing for ramadan?
an interview by maryam namazie was recently sent out on the redmonton list. i didn't read the whole thing, but because it coincided with the pope's recent blathering it bothered me - it essentially starts out as an attack on "cultural relativists" (or at least the 'cultural relativist' strand of multiculturalism) and then makes grand universalist claims for secular humanism which show it fundamentally in the same position vis-a-vis pluralism as any other ideology. at this point the 'relativists' she's attacking would bring in their standard (and, as rene guenon pointed out almost a century ago in his critique of evolution, self-defeating) argument, saying she's played right into their hands. her examples, though, were what made me read further, as they were focussed on 'political islam'/'islamism' (meaningless terms, of course) and especially on iran. what i realized later was that her (standard) separation of discriminations based on race and gender from those based on beliefs (ie. the human being is what is sacrosanct, not the beliefs s-he may happen to hold) is tied through-and-through to a broader physicalism, and that is what gets me - that though her argument may seem cohesive, even sophisticated (elitism is always sophisticated), there's this ugly backdrop lurking beneath, and its silent implications are ghastly.
