Source: cjchivers
He left in the early fall of 2010 for a reporting trip to Afghanistan. There he stepped on a landmine and lost his legs. Fourteen months on, he came back to his wife and two children in South Africa, after a long hospitalization and period of rehabilitation in the United States.
That’s his…
Source: thenewinquiry
“How can you watch people die in the streets?”
“You don’t look, you close your eyes.”Nicholas Kristof, Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times journalist, is often hailed as a defender of the downtrodden, courageously reporting those man-made events that “shock the conscience.” As he traipses the globe to report on its most grisly moments, Kristof is followed, physically and digitally, by a significant swathe of educated, upper-middle-class America: 200,000 people like his Facebook page, a million track him on Twitter, and that’s not to mention his column in the Times. He even periodically holds a contest to allow young journalists to follow him in the field. Hence, whether decrying sex work in Cambodia (Kristof once bought a young girl out of sexual slavery) or relaying images of hacked-apart bodies in Congo, Kristof’s witnessing reaches a significant number of people. His words diffuse through book clubs, church groups, and even think tanks and governments to shape grassroots activism and policy alike. On the issue of civilian deaths in Darfur, for which he won his second Pulitzer, both critics and supporters cite Kristof’s importance in shaping both the Save Darfur movement and the U.S. President’s opinion.
Kristof’s ability to frame and deliver the world’s horrors to millions—in a way that keeps those millions coming back for more—seemingly should make him worthy of the hero worship that has attended his rise. Indeed, what is worse than a privileged bourgeois population that knows nothing of the way the other half (or rather the other 99 percent) lives? And yet the devil as always remains in the details—or in Kristof’s case, the lack of details. For, when exploring why Kristof has become a high priest of liberal opinion in America (arrogating the right to speak on almost any sociopolitical phenomenon, provided it involves an easily identifiable victim), we crash into what can be called Kristof’s anti-politics: the way his method and style directly dehumanize his subjects, expelling them from the realm of the analytical by refusing to connect them to systems and structures that animate their challenges. Kristof’s distancing double move provides us with precisely what is worse than a bourgeois not knowing about the world’s horrors: knowing about them only enough to simultaneously acknowledge and dismiss them, to denude them of political and moral demand, to turn them into consumable and easily digestible spectacles. We are encouraged to look only so we can then close our eyes.
Source: redlightpoliticsThere is one more thing I have hardly seen addressed in media about Anders Behring Breivik and it’s the fact that practically his entire online history, his extremist right wing, Islamophobic, anti immigrant, anti multiculturalism rhetoric, in spite of being borne out of a sense of Norwegian…
“Critical thinking is that mode of thinking – about any subject, content, or problem – in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully taking charge of the structures inherent in thinking and imposing intellectual standards upon them.”
It further states that “critical thinking is self-guided, self-disciplined thinking which attempts to reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded way.
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