Sandy Klein sent: Why
Guantánamo was a success ( March 2009): The Guantánamo Bay
detention centre has been widely denounced as a legal and moral failure. Yet for
those who created it, its legacy is a triumph. MG Zimeta
... The
strategic victories it won for the Bush administration during the eight years of
its existence will last much longer than the camp itself. [ ... ] But
the greatest strategic victory won is in the field of ethics. In his book
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), the philosopher Richard Rorty argued
that the point of ethical discussion is to sensitise us to the suffering of
others, and he uses Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert to show us that complicity with a
cruelty teaches us how to be cruel[ ... ]
JM: Right now I feel a total
foreigner to the American language, thought, ironies. As if I only knew how
to mimic the signs and sounds of the English. Perhaps my perplexity has
been enhanced because this item coincided with an American school's annual
financial report with statistics and histograms. There were two of these in
which "students of color" were represented ( are they synesthetes?
painters?), against an anonymous other category in the "Student Demographics". A
second graph detailed their procedence: native american, middle eastern,
black/african american, multiracial, asian american, latino/hispanic
forming the 29% part of the total of enrolled
students. The remaining 71% students are what? Color challenged?
The MG Zimeta article, the snippets we
got, intends to illustrate what? Cruelty challenged peoples? Rorty's
philosophy against Humbert Humbert's? What's the point in all of this?
Games, world golf, fun?