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The Kelley Group Announces Speaking and Coaching Partnership Program - PRNewswire

A worker sprays disinfectant at Thailand's Government House after it was reported on December 25, 2020 that six officials at the seat of government had initially tested positive for Covid-19. Photo: AFP Forum via Bangkok Post

BANGKOK Thailands 68-year-old king and his loyal prime minister survived a dangerous 2020, relentlessly exposed to youth-led street protests demanding democracy and limits to the monarchs wealth and power.

Maha or Great King Vajiralongkorn and Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha now face a harsh January, with a Covid-19 resurgence and promised new rounds of street protests, but are nonetheless expected to emerge secure.

Prayut does not seem to be in danger. The royal-military alliance seems to be unassailable, said Michael Nelson of the Asian Governance Foundation, which focuses on law, academia and other sectors.

The protesters, though big on Facebook, also have little backing in the population. And now, the government is getting tough with them, Nelson said in an interview.

Prime Minister Prayut seized power in a bloodless 2014 coup when he was a general and army commander-in-chief and was elected to the head of a coalition government in 2019 in polls critics claim were rigged in his favor.

Today, Prayut is dependent on royalists, industrialists, the military and an urban-based upper and middle class.

The king and prime minister, however, are challenged by tens of thousands of protesters who swarmed Bangkoks streets during the past six months.

Their three demands remain: topple Prayuts government, replace Thailands 20th constitution with a new charter, and reform the monarchy, the latter a hitherto unheard of rally cry.

Prayuts administration was widely hailed for quickly containing Covid-19s first outbreak in the kingdom, though at a severe economic price.

The death toll was limited to 60 people in this Southeast Asian nation of 70 million, but has climbed in recent weeks to at least 67 dead amid the worst outbreak yet in the country.

The Thai economy reportedly contracted 7.7% in 2020. Its devastated massive tourism industry, representing around 20% of gross domestic product (GDP), is not expected to revive any time soon.

Some expect anger to swell against Prayut in 2021 as Thais suffer from a second round of containment measures in an already ravaged economy.

Another way to say it is the students may not have won much, but the government continues its string of losses, David Streckfuss, author of Truth on Trial in Thailand, said in an interview.

Thailand is in a legitimacy crisis, an identity crisis, of unprecedented proportions and faces a new generation that is smart, flexible and quick, and that proposes a very new, modern view of Thai society that celebrates difference, whether in political thought, gender diversity, ethnicity, etcetera, Streckfuss said.

Most of the demonstrations, led by university students and schoolchildren, have been festive with live music, speeches, political souvenirs and curbside food carts churning out cheap food.

But at some confrontations, security forces blasted them with truck-mounted, chemically-irritating water. Protesters occasionally smashed police barricades. A handful were shot in unclear circumstances at one chaotic protest.

The latest boisterous street confrontations included flamboyant, fleshy, fashion-disaster students prancing in public, mimicking the expensive clothing and snobby entitlement of royalists and other elites.

Dozens of protesters now face up to 15 years in jail for their camp gestures, costumes, and especially their often caustic accusations which royalists perceived as insults against the monarchy.

The Criminal Codes Article 112 lese majeste law severely punishes anyone who defames, insults or threatens the king, queen, heir-apparent or regent.

The constitution also states: The King shall be enthroned in a position of revered worship and shall not be violated. No person shall expose the King to any sort of accusation or action.

Arrests, charges and threats of imprisonment may have dampened some dissent, but may also galvanize others to rebel.

But their rebellious movement is suffering from internal splits. A previously hailed Youth Forum group recently signaled its support of communism, and published a logo similar to a hammer and sickle sparking complaints by other protesters.

Protesters volunteer guards, meanwhile, began fighting among themselves in the streets and aggressively grappled with police and their barricades defying demonstrators claims to be peaceful.

King Maha Vajiralongkorn, one of the worlds wealthiest monarchs, is expected to maintain his position of strength during 2021 while trying to adapt to an increasingly international and in spots glaring public spotlight.

Protesters want to unlink the palaces recent control over two army infantry regiments, and stop paying taxes which protesters have carped are used to pay for some of the monarchys ceremonies and activities.

They want the constitutional monarchy to revert to a more limited structure and role similar to the earliest years under Great King Vajiralongkorns late father, the widely revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died in 2016.

They also want to delete the constitutions amended Crown Property Act of 2017, which gave the king direct control of royal assets worth billions of dollars. Royalists say many of those assets originally belonged to Thailands earlier kings and were subsequently inherited.

Bangkoks fast-moving and treacherous politics have hit the American Embassy and US Congress.

The embassy strenuously rejected royalists recent claims that current and recent American ambassadors secretly manipulated Thai dissidents, stoked pro-democracy protests, and supported subversive online campaigns.

US Senator Tammy Duckworth [D-Illinois] and eight other Democratic party senators said in a joint resolution on December 3, violence and repression by the countrys monarchy and government, were used against protesters.

Thai officials have sharply countered that assessment. Some [US] senators received inaccurate information about the protests, said Thailands government spokesman Anucha Burapachaisri.

Their concerns are not shared by the rest of the US Congress. The protesters have also been breaking the law with the intention to abolish the royal institution, Anucha said.

The US has supported Thailands dictators, elected prime ministers, and monarchy ever since World War II, a period that saw 13 military coups. During 2020, relations deepened under President Trump, who embraced Prayut in the Oval Office in 2017.

If President-elect Bidens administration emphasizes Thailands lack of human rights, Bangkoks ruling politicians might squirm while street protesters rejoice.

Thailands army, navy and air force however expect US weapons sales, training, and public statements boosting the Thai military will continue under Biden.

Much of Washingtons focus on Bangkok concerns a perceived rivalry between the US and China for Thai influence. Street protesters and even opposition politicians have taken recently taken critical aim at Chinas authoritarian ways and means.

Richard S Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based American foreign correspondent reporting from Asia since 1978 and author of a new nonfiction book, Rituals. Killers. Wars. & Sex. Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka & New York.

Read the rest here:
Plague and protest put Thailand on edge of panic - Asia Times

Despite a lot of talk about next-generation vehicles (NxGV), Automated and Autonomous Connected Vehicle (AACV), Energy Efficient Vehicle (EEV), and many more alphabet soup of acronyms in WapCar's 2020 National Automotive Policy, many manufacturers have stopped pouring more money into Malaysia, and Indonesia is the country that every manufacturer wants to date now, because of President Jokowi's commitment to promote electric vehicles, something which every car manufacturer is trying to catch up on.

Hyundai has confirmed that it will be investing RM4.02 billion (USD1.55 billion) in Indonesia until 2030. The investment includes a 150,000 cars per year plant (can be scaled up to 250,000 cars) in Bekasi, east of Jakarta. Production will begin later this year.

With Indonesia now becoming Hyundai's production hub for Southeast Asia, it only makes sense for Hyundai to move its regional office and training centre to Jakarta.

Apart from Hyundai, Toyota too will be investing RM8.04 billion (USD2 billion) in Indonesia between now until 2023 to build hybrid and electric vehicles there.

"Because the Indonesian government already has an electric vehicle development map, Toyota considers Indonesia as a prime EV investment destination," said Toyota president Akio Toyoda in June 2019 in a joint-announcement with the Indonesian government.

See the article here:
Hyundai Is Closing Its Asia Pacific Headquarters In Malaysia And Moving To Indonesia - SAYS

The full name of The Birth of Tragedy is The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (German: Die Geburt der Tragdie aus dem Geiste der Musik). It was reissued in 1886 as The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism (German: Die Geburt der Tragdie, Oder: Griechentum und Pessimismus).

The full text can be found here

Note the music mention in the title. I will be discussing on the music later. After all, Hypergryph also uses music heavily in their story telling.

The Birth of Tragedy examines the origins and development of poetry, specifically Greek tragedy. Nietzsche argues that Greek tragedy arose out of the fusion of what he termed Apollonian and Dionysian elementsthe former representing measure, restraint, and harmony and the latter unbridled passionand that Socratic rationalism and optimism spelled the death of Greek tragedy. The final part of the book is a rhapsody on the rebirth of tragedy from the spirit of Richard Wagners music.

Despite the clash of the Apollonian and Dionysian, neither side ever prevails due to each containing the other in an eternal, natural check or balance. Nietzsche argues that the tragedy of Ancient Greece was the highest form of art due to its mixture of both Apollonian and Dionysian elements into one seamless whole, allowing the spectator to experience the full spectrum of the human condition. The Dionysian element was to be found in the music of the chorus, while the Apollonian element was found in the dialogue which gave a concrete symbolism that balanced the Dionysian revelry. Basically, the Apollonian spirit was able to give form to the abstract Dionysian.

Nietzsche emphasizes that in real tragic art, the elements of Dionysus and Apollo were inextricably entwined. As words could never hope to delve into the depths of the Dionysian essence, music was the life of the tragic art form. Music exists in the realm beyond language, and so allows us to rise beyond consciousness and experience our connection to the Primordial Unity. Music is superior to all other arts in that it does not represent a phenomenon, but rather the "world will" itself.

In contrast to the typical Enlightenment view of ancient Greek culture as noble, simple, elegant and grandiose, Nietzsche believed the Greeks were grappling with pessimism. The universe in which we live is the product of great interacting forces; but we neither observe nor know these as such. What we put together as our conceptions of the world, Nietzsche thought, never actually addresses the underlying realities.

He argues that we are still living in the Alexandrian age of culture, which is now on its last legs. Science cannot explain the mysteries of the universe, he writes, and thanks to the work of Kant and Schopenhauer, we must now recognize this fact. The time is ripe for a rebirth of tragedy that will sweep away the dusty remains of Socratic culture. Nietzsche sees German music, Wagner in particular, as the beginning of this transformation. While German culture is decrepit, the German character is going strong, for it has an inkling of the primordial vitality flowing in its veins. Nietzsche has great hope for the coming age and has written this book to prepare us for it.

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Arknights Lore: The Birth of Tragedy and Requiem - GamePress

The urge to do too many things at once is nothing new: as long ago as 1887, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was bemoaning the way one thinks with a watch in ones hand, even as one eats ones midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market. But for a variety of reasons overwork, digital distraction, plus the boundary-blurring consequences of the pandemic its probably never been worse. At new year, it often takes an additional form: the desire to implement a total life makeover, sorting out your work backlog and your relationship issues, your health and your home repairs all at once. The urge should be resisted, though. The single most effective ingredient for a happier and more meaningful 2021 is the exact opposite: to improve your capacity for doing only one thing at a time.

One main reason this is harder than it looks is that doing several things at once is usually a way of assuaging anxiety. When youre drowning in to-dos, its calming to feel that youre addressing lots of them simultaneously. And when you think your lifes a mess you should be exercising more, sorting out your finances, improving your relationship with your kids, and on and on its similarly reassuring to feel youre tackling all those critical issues, not just one.

But the feeling is deceptive. For a start, plenty of research testifies to the costs of task-switching: when you flit between activities, you waste time and energy regaining a state of focus again and again. Worse, each activity becomes a way of avoiding every other activity. So when a task feels difficult or scary as tasks that matter often do you can just bounce off to another one instead. The result isnt merely that you make a smaller amount of progress on a larger number of fronts; its that you make less progress overall.

Nobody likes being told that they should shelve (say) their fitness goals for a few months while they work on their marriage, or resign themselves to an overfilled inbox while they complete an important piece of writing; when everythings urgent, postponement feels like a luxury you cant afford. But thats the anxiety talking. The fact is that you cant afford not to postpone almost everything, at any given moment, if you want to make progress on anything. So a big part of the skill of doing one thing at a time is learning to handle the discomfort associated with knowing what youre not getting done.

Success is built sequentially. Its one thing at a time, the management experts Gary Keller and Jay Papasan point out in their book The One Thing, which does little but hammer home this simple yet somehow endlessly elusive truth. There are limits, of course: you cant put your job on hold while you work on your poetry collection, or press pause on parenting while you work on getting fit. But you can constantly seek to move your life in the direction of having as few projects as possible on your plate at any one time.

And this is more than an admonition against, say, checking your email while watching a presentation on Zoom. (Although you shouldnt do that and indeed you cant, since whats really happening is that your attention is alternating, rapidly and exhaustingly, between the two.) One thing at a time is a whole philosophy of life, one that treats your goals as important enough to be worth bringing into being, while not pretending your reserves of time or energy are infinite. It represents a commitment to actually achieving a few of your ambitions, rather than wallowing in comforting fantasies of one day achieving them all.

Use a personal kanban Divide a whiteboard into three columns ready to do, doing, and done then write your tasks on sticky notes, and move them across the columns as you make your way through them. (Or use one of many kanban-inspired apps, such as Trello.) By limiting the number of notes you allow in the doing column to just one or two, youll ensure you bring tasks to completion, rather than starting too many at once.

Batch your tasks Reduce the psychological costs of task-switching by grouping to-dos by type wherever possible. In one unbroken hour spent processing your email, youll get through far more messages than if that same hour were scattered in smaller chunks through the day.

Cultivate deliberate imbalance Instead of a life makeover, pick one area to focus on each month or each quarter, and consciously postpone the rest. Youre better off abandoning all hope of (say) decluttering your house while you get started on an exercise routine than trying to do both at once. Then relax about the clutter, safe in the knowledge that itll get its turn in the spotlight later on.

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Want to improve focus and productivity? Do one thing at a time - The Guardian

The grossly apocryphal reportage on the death of actor Anil P Nedumangad once again revealed the deep chasm that exists between cinema and other art forms and the undue hegemony it maintains over them. A few roles that Anil portrayed impressively in films were enough to bracket him as a promising actor, which in cinema lingo is an artful term for an upstart talent. What followed his untimely death in the glimmering green waters of Malankara Dam on Christmas Day was a deluge of reportage that not just lifted him out of the wavy, vile waters of the mundane world, but placed him up above the cycloramic sky, among the diminutive stars who suddenly lost their shimmering lights.

In fact, no one can be blamed for such excesses given that news media and cinema knew little about the trained actor, his potentials, and the person whom his friends and colleagues recall as a naive and hyperactive man with a notoriously acerbic tongue and a moonlit heart.

Anil is incomplete without his greed for acting, love for friends, and devotion to the works of Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky. Far from being a novice, he was a veteran actor who made an indelible imprint in modern theatre. I had an opportunity to co-organize and watch his stunning performance in a play adaptation of Willian Goldings Lord of the Flies, if not mistaken, in 1996. Anil was second to none as a source of intense energy on the stage.

He played major roles in almost all plays directed by his bosom friend, guide, and classmate Jyothish M G besides appearing in dramas directed by Surjith and Deepan Sivaraman. He also acted with seasoned theatre actors like D Raghoothaman, Jose P Raphael, Gopalan, Rajan, and James Elia ..(the list is incomplete) Of course, cinema enthused Anil. He was not among those artists who declared stage as the only world from where they get the right kick. He joined the School of Drama and Fine Arts in Thrissur to chisel his acting talents and ready himself for the world of motion pictures.

But it was not fame and money that he was looking for. He got his kicks out of acting. His huge success as a trained theatre actor for over the past 25 years had made him an acting addict. The actor in him tormented him when he was out of action. The love and concern for those close to him is evident in a recent message he sent to a former school of drama student: In the time of corona you cant make plays, I know. You write a poem, instead. Im itching to pay you.

On another occasion, he sent a voice clip to Jyothish, the head of the acting department at K R Narayanan Film Institute: If I do something great in cinema, it could happen only in your film. My liver wont start giving trouble till then, Im sure.

But, mediums other than theatre got to see very little of his talent. There is no point in blaming those who know him only for his role in Ayyappanum Koshiyum when the refreshing talent vanished abruptly from the screen. However, it points at the intimidating level of authority that cinema as a medium has managed to establish over other art forms. For all his new admirers, he was the one whom they saw on screen. Nothing more, nothing less.

Media works in currency. What is most important for the news media is the immediate present. They connect only with it. The coverage is bound to be incomplete and is directly proportional to the fame, not merit. Look at the difference between the news coverages on the deaths of lyricist Anil Panachooran and poet Neelamperoor Madhusoodanan Nair. Celebration of the present and adoration of the larger-than-life-size image projected on screen outshine everything else, says film critic C S Venkiteswaran.

The challenge faced by obit writers in newsrooms is such that it wholly hinges on the immediately available information. A couple of unsolicited quotes from film stars and political leaders make the newsroom exercise relieving, if not gratifying. But to assess an actor only on the basis of his association with the silver screen is nauseating, if not loathsome. Given a chance, Anil would have repeated what Mark Twain had said about the reports on his death: The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, adding in a derisive tone, I dont see myself in those reports.

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Views expressed above are the author's own.

Link:
Theatre of the absurd - Economic Times

Editors note: The following, second in a three-part series, is adapted from an essay inNational Reviewand is republished here with permission. ProfessorAeschlimanis the author ofThe Restoration of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism(Discovery Institute Press). Find the full series here.

Oscar Wilde (18541900), a witty Dublin Protestant-atheist Irishman like GeorgeBernardShaw, but of a very different class, stamp, and implication, wrote that natural science, by revealing to us the absolute mechanism of all action, [frees] us from the self-imposed and trammeling burden of moral responsibility. Wildes resultant, post-Christian aesthetic immoralism shocked and mocked the earnestness of late Victorian Britain in witty prose and plays, including the satirical wit (and homosexual implication) ofThe Importance of Being Earnest(1895). Both Shaw and G. K. Chesterton had an intimation that Wildes witty persiflage actually disguised deep decadence, an argument made brilliantly several decades later by the American Jewish moralists Philip Rieff (The Impossible Culture: Wilde as a Modern Prophet, 198283, reprinted inThe Feeling Intellect, 1990) and Daniel Bell (The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 1976; Beyond Modernism, Beyond Self, 1977). From Wilde came the Bloomsbury aesthetes and, we may say, nearly the whole world of the modern arts.

Yet both Shaw and Chesterton were themselves noted wits (both sometimes even accused of being paradox-mongering buffoons), and in fact Shaw shared much of the iconoclasm of his countryman Wilde, becoming a self-described feminist, Nietzschean, Ibsenite, and Wagnerite. But for Chesterton one of Shaws great achievements was his deep, abiding hatred of aestheticism Shaw even insisted that the Puritan evangelist John Bunyan (The Pilgrims Progress) was a greater writer than Shakespeare, and frequently, unaccountably, made orthodox statements, such as There is a soul hidden in every dogma and Conscience is the most powerful of the instincts, and the love of God the most powerful of all passions. Along with T. S. EliotsMurder in the Cathedral(1935) and Robert BoltsA Man for All Seasons(1960), Shaws playSt. Joan(1924) is one of the wisest, wittiest, and most sympathetic dramatic depictions of Christian religious belief in the last hundred years.

Both Shaw and Chesterton believed that the root problem of modernity was Darwinism, the acceptance of which made it impossible to resist its moral corollary, social Darwinism, and therefore plutocracy, amoral capitalism, imperialism, racialism, and militarism. Shaw wrote in the preface toMan and Superman(1903): If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.

Though Shaw was a small-p protestant religious heretic (he argued that Joan of Arc was an early Protestant, like Hus and Wycliffe), Chesterton asserted that he was a true if eccentric Puritan moralist. Shaws critique of Darwinism was profound, especially in the long preface to his mammoth playBack to Methuselah(1921): The literary critic R. C. Churchill has called this preface the wittiest summary of the Darwinian controversy ever written (see especially the sections from Three Blind Mice onward). In his own 1944 postscript to the play, Shaw, while still insisting on the need to give up the Protestant creed (and all other Jewish and Christian creeds) of his youth in the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in Dublin, held that Darwins exclusion of mind and purpose from nature was wrong and destructive: Unless we can reclaim mind, will, and purpose as realities in some kind of non-Darwinian, creative evolution, we fall into the bottomless pit of an utterly discouraging pessimism.

Shaws predecessor Samuel Butler (18351902), and his Franco-American successor and admirer Jacques Barzun (19072012), have made similar arguments, arguments given renewed strength more recently by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel (see my Rationality vs. Darwinism,National Review, 2012). Shaws resistance to determinism, and his insistence on the irreducible reality of human consciousness and will in nature and history, elicited Chestertons profound respect and admiration. In his final, 1935 chapter on Shaw, written in the last year of Chestertons own life, he said of the older mans achievements in drama over the previous 40 years: He has improved philosophic discussions by making them more popular. But he has also improved popular amusements by making them more philosophic. He added that Shaw was one of the most genial and generous men in the world.

Yet Chestertons admiration and approval were shadowed by a sense that Shaw had great deficiencies and that his influence was ambiguous and in some cases malignant. Born 18 years earlier than Chesterton, Shaw outlived him by another 16, his life encompassing both world wars, unprecedented destruction, and the fundamental disproof of his early progressivism and cosmopolitanism. His early Fabian socialism led him to become an influential communist fellow traveler. The famously exuberant, energetic Shaw told his biographer Hesketh Pearson, a close friend of Malcolm Muggeridge, that, in the postWorld War II world, he wished when he went to bed that he would never wake again.

Like H. G. Wells, he was threatened with an utterly discouraging pessimism when his political hopes came to seem almost completely vain. Commenting on the significance of Aldous Huxleys satirical dystopiaBrave New World(1932), even before George Orwells1984, an English writer quoted by Chesterton in his 1935 chapter said, Progress is dead; andBrave New Worldis its epitaph. Beyond the world of fiction, in the world of actual human tragedy, works such as Elie WieselsNightand SolzhenitsynsGulag Archipelagomay be said to have proved the point unanswerably: Human progress may be possible, based on willed choices, but there is certainly no mystical, progressive, propulsive purpose immanent within history.

Chestertons argument about Shaw from the beginning was that he was in three ways an outsider, ways that gave him a unique perspective and insight but that also prevented his understanding what Chesterton thought of as a fundamental piety that had been characteristic of Western civilization and Western societies at their best: Shaw was a Protestant Anglo-Irishman who disdained his own country and left it permanently for London; he was emotionally, intellectually, and politically a fastidious Puritan moralist who could not, however, believe any longer in the Puritan God; and he was a Nietzschean-socialist futurist whose disgust with the human past and its traditions made him an ultimate outsider to any particular historical community or continuity.

Free from what Chesterton called the vile aesthetic philosophy of his also-cosmopolitan Irish countryman Wilde, a philosophy of ease, of acceptance, and luxurious illusion, Shaw read and was deeply affected by Nietzsche after having committed himself, in mind, action, and loyalty, to the Fabian-socialist cause, making lifelong friends and allies of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whom he was instrumental in getting buried with full honors in Westminster Abbey in 1947. But reconciling Nietzsche with socialism was a lifelong conundrum, and it should be no surprise that Shaw came to admire strong men beyond the bourgeois-democratic tradition and temper such as Mussolini, Stalin, and the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. Stalin has delivered the goods, the celebrity Shaw wrote in 1931, the year of his state-conducted tour of Russia with his friend Lady Astor. A photo of the two of them in a chauffeured car on Red Square in Moscow is on the cover of David Cautes indispensable bookThe Fellow Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment(1973), a brilliant documentation of the lamentable credulity of Western intellectuals in confronting Lenin, Stalin, and what the Webbs called the new civilization of the Soviet Union. Shaw died in his English country house in 1950 with a signed photograph of Stalin on his mantelpiece.

Chestertons brief study of 1909 and its even briefer 1935 sequel were thus profoundly apt in assessing Shaws greatness and his folly. He saw that Shaw was really no democrat, that his admirable public spirit had in it something cold, abstract, theoretical, and even Platonist in the sense of Plato as an elitist authoritarian; whereas Chesterton himself was truly a kind of democrat, actually liking the common man and assuming that human beings across time had come to certain conventions, traditions, and sentiments that usually had in them some important truth. (This idea profoundly influenced the Chestertonian William F. Buckley Jr.)

Tomorrow, Shaw, Scientism, and Darwinism.

Excerpt from:
Darwinism as the Root Problem of Modernity - Discovery Institute

Editors note: The following, third in a three-part series, is adapted from an essay inNational Reviewand is republished here with permission. ProfessorAeschlimanis the author ofThe Restoration of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism(Discovery Institute Press). Find the full serieshere.

Much of George Bernard Shaws greatness was properly destructive of illusions and self-interested shibboleths and bromides, what Kant called the radical evil the use of the language of ethics as a screen for self-interest or self-love. An outsider to Victorian England, Shaw saw how post-Christian Great Britain habitually used such screens, and he mocked them with hilarious and hygienic effect. Jacques Barzun claimed that Shaw was in the true dramatic tradition of Aristophanes and Molire, and Shaw himself said, My business as a classic writer of comedies is to chasten morals with ridicule. He was proud of reintroducing to English drama long rhetorical speeches in the manner of Molire. Barzun called him a 20th-century Voltaire.

Yet Shaws positive criterion by which to measure and ridicule folly and vice was fatally ambiguous, eclectic, and inconstant, as Chesterton pointed out, more in sadness than in anger. Shaw could deplore scientism, what he called the anti-metaphysical temper of nineteenth century civilization (preface toSt. Joan), and thus excoriate the inhuman and subhuman implications of Darwinism, and he could sincerely invoke the conception of a Godhead immanent in all human beings. His critique of scientistic imperialism in promiscuous, cruel vivisection finds a resonant echo in our time in our better protocols for animal experimentation, as John P. Gluck in hisVoracious Science and Vulnerable Animals(2016) has movingly shown.

But often his clear, confident moral rectitude is just a muddle; as his character Barbara Undershaft, the Salvation Army Major Barbara of his 1905 play, says after her loss of faith, There must be some truth or other behind this frightful irony. Shaws close friend Beatrice Webb castigated the play as amazingly clever, grimly powerful, but ending ... in an intellectual and moral morass. The same could be said of a number of the plays absurd outcomes, without the later, post-Shaw intention of celebrating absurdity (Beckett, Sartre, Pinter, Albee; Tom Stoppard is a salutary exception Shaws true successor). Some of the plays are almost unbearably tedious, such as the vastBack to Methuselah, despite its brilliant prose preface. In a notable attack on Shaw, the actor and playwright John Osborne, who had acted in provincial productions of many of the plays, asserted in 1977 that Shaw is the most fraudulent, inept writer of Victorian melodramas ever to gull a timid critic or fool a dull public. It is not difficult to agree with him that the much-praisedCandida(1900) is an ineffably feeble piece and that it is hard to think of anything more silly.

Shaws biggest box-office success was the poignant, strangely piousSt. Joan(1923), written especially for the actress Sybil Thorndike (18821976), which made her career. Some of the plays still make powerful reading and seeing Pygmalion,Androcles and the Lion, andArms and the Manare marvelous comedies. His prefaces are often lucid and profound, his music criticism expert, eloquent, and memorable for example, his early championing of Beethoven is deeply moving. His literary criticism is sometimes classic and even lapidary, as in his famous 1912 introduction to Dickenss novelHard Times.

But Chesterton was right to think that trying to synthesize Nietzsche and socialism and ultimately communism was to produce fools gold and destructive illusions. Writing after his own painfully revealing year in Moscow in 193233, as a correspondent for theManchester Guardian, Malcolm Muggeridge, a favored relation of Shaws close friends the Webbs, who was raised on Shaw in his London socialist home, deplored Shaws fellow-traveling propaganda for Communist Russia, whose reality the acute Shaw failed to recognize in his 1931 guided tour or for the 20 years of his life that remained. Chestertons ambivalence about Shaw as man and writer remains a superbly judicious guide to the most influential English-language dramatist of the 20th century; and Chestertons own body of writing, in several genres, remains a golden thread by means of which the sanest and most salutary elements of the classical-Christian literary, ethical, and political tradition made their way into the apocalyptic 20th century, and make their way to us.

Link:
Shaw, Scientism, and Darwinism - Discovery Institute

Representational Image.

Five people have been booked in Uttar Pradeshs Raebareli district for allegedly torching the house of a Muslim family that converted to Hinduism in September.

Police superintendent Shlok Kumar said the preliminary probe suggests that Dev Prakash, the convert, and Mohammad Tahir, the main accused, also had a dispute over a piece of land. We are probing the case from all angles. Tahir and his brother have been detained and are being questioned, he said. Kumar added a first information report has been filed and the accused have been booked for mischief by fire or explosive substance and rioting.

Police said the family managed to escape even as the house was gutted and that security forces have been deployed in the area.

Also read |UP:Dalit family claims beaten up by village strongmen for using hand pump, leaves home

Mohammed Anwar converted to Hinduism last year along with his three children and renamed himself, Dev Prakash.

Police said Prakash is a single-parent as his first wife died and his three subsequent marriages did not work.

In his police complaint, Prakash alleged that former village head Tahir and his associates were upset over his conversion.

He added he saw Tahir and his brother, Rehan, setting the house on fire.

Read more from the original source:

5 booked for torching house of family that converted to Hinduism in UPs Raebareli - Hindustan Times

As we step into a new decade, Hinduism, and its interpretation and practice, will play an increasingly pivotal role. We have seen the manifestation of hard political Hindutva, wedded to the goal of a Hindu Rashtra. It stands discredited not for its evangelism, but for its lack of knowledge of the basics of Hinduism. Another label bandied about is soft Hindutva, but with no real clarity about what it means. Since India is a deeply religious country, such notions need to be investigated before they distort the role religion plays in politics and, indeed, in our lives.

The pejorative phrase soft Hindutva is an outcome of a curious if unintended collusion between the ultra-Hindu right and the ultra-liberal left. The supporters of political Hindutva believe that they have a monopoly over public display of religion (PDR). They are overt in their passionate and sometimes fanatical belief in the need to project, promote and impose their warped view of Hinduism. Thus, they view PDR by any other section of the political class, as an attempt to usurp their ordained public space through a weak imitation, soft as against their hard religious commitment.

The ultra-liberal left is dismissive about religion per se, and believes that any public show of personal religious fealty by politicians is a betrayal of secularism. For its votaries, political Hindutva can be countered not by a saner practice of religion, but by not practising religion at all, least of all publicly.

I wonder what Mahatma Gandhi would have thought of these unseemly definitional shenanigans. He was, as Nehru said, a Hindu to the innermost depth of his being. During his first jail term in South Africa (January 1908), he read Rajayoga, commentaries on the Gita. During his second incarceration (October-December 1908) he read the Bhagwad Gita almost every day.

During his third imprisonment (February-May 1909) he read the Veda-Shabda-Sangana, the Upanishads, the Manusmriti, Patanjalis Yoga Shastra, and re-read the Gita. One of the first books published by his International Press in Phoenix, Natal, was an abridged version of Tulsidass Ramcharitmanas, which, as he wrote in his autobiography, was the greatest book in all devotional literature.

He did not, therefore, see anything wrong in espousing the utopia of Ram Rajya. But and this is critically important he combined his staunch belief in Hinduism with the fullest respect for all religions.

Let us take another example. Madan Mohan Malviya (1861-1946) was four times the president of the Indian National Congress, a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, and like him a devout Hindu. When, as a member of the Congress, he founded the Akhil Bhartiya Hindu Mahasabha, for the welfare of Hindus and Hinduism, was he practising soft Hindutva or merely following his personal faith? He is credited for having begun the aarti puja at Har-ki-Pauri in Haridwar which continues to this day and the setting up of organisations for the protection of the cow, and for a cleaner Ganga.

He is also the iconic founder of the Banaras Hindu University, from where, as its vice-chancellor, he published a magazine called Sanatan Dharma to promote religious and dharmic interests. The national slogan Satyameva Jayate taken from the Mundaka Upanishad, was also his contribution. Did all of this make him a proud Hindu immersed in his faith, or just a practitioner of soft Hindutva, uncritically emulating Savarkar and the RSS?

Our assessments need to get away from such knee-jerk categorisations and aspire to a more reflective inquiry. The truth is that when Hinduism is reduced to cynical tokenism for short-term political dividends, it is soft Hindutva. When it is devalued to illiterate aggression for long-term political gain, it is political Hindutva. Both these extremes are a deliberate ploy to make genuine Hindus lose agency of the way they wish to practice their religion in conformity with republican values, democratic principles and constitutional secularism.

Swami Vivekananda, the towering symbol of Hindu renaissance, would have been impatient of such categorisations of soft or hard. His mission was to espouse an enlightened and inclusive form of Hinduism sans hatred, intolerance and violence. Once, when he was berated by conservative Hindu critics for staying with a Muslim lawyer in Mount Abu, he expostulated: Sir, what do you mean? I am a sanyasin. I am above all your social conventions I am not afraid of God because he sanctions it. I am not afraid of the scriptures, because they allow it. But I am afraid of you people and your society. You know nothing of God and the scriptures. I see Brahman everywhere manifested through even the meanest creature. For me there is nothing high or low. Shiva, Shiva!

Hinduism deserves a true renaissance based on its great wisdoms. But this will require its followers to study their religious legacy, and prevent its distortion by hard and soft Hindutva-vadis.

Lord Ram in the Ramayana says: Janani Janambhoomischa Swargadapi Gariyasi Mother and motherland are superior to heaven. Today, our motherland requires social harmony and stability to realise her destiny of becoming one of the great nations of the world. If Prime Minister Narendra Modis call, Sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas, is not to become just an expedient slogan, it must be based on Swami Vivekanandas vision and on Mahatma Gandhis inclusiveness.

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Warping a great faith: Both hard and soft Hindutva are expedient uses of religion for political ga - The Times of India Blog