Word: classics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...book is a belated follow-up to Orientalism, the classic 1978 work by Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, which described how Europeans have long stereotyped non-Westerners ("Orientals") in ways that emphasize their irrationality and childishness. Occidentalism tells the other side of the story: how influential non-Western thinkers, especially in Islamic countries such as Iran, Egypt and Pakistan, have portrayed Americans and Europeans as being money-minded, effeminate, sexually promiscuous and decadent-thus providing the intellectual justification for Islamic terrorism...
...could have come up with something like the pose seen in one of the most infamous images from Abu Ghraib--one in which a hooded prisoner stands on a box with electrical wires connected to his arms and genitals. The photo could have been a textbook illustration of a classic torture method known as crucifixion, says Darius Rejali, an associate professor of political science at Reed College and author of Torture and Modernity. This kind of standing torture was used by the Gestapo and by Stalin, he says, although the wires and the threat of electrocution if you fell were...
Psychologists who have studied torture and prisoner abuse say it is remarkably easy for people to lapse into sadistic behavior when they have complete power over other human beings, especially if they feel the behavior has been sanctioned by an authority figure. In a classic series of studies conducted at Yale in the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram showed that psychologically healthy volunteers did not hesitate to administer what they thought were electric shocks to another human being when instructed to do so by a researcher. Two-thirds followed instructions and kept raising the voltage--right up to levels marked DANGER...
...through an interpreter. "And those the government likes I didn't want to do. I waited to see if either the government changed or I was changed by them." Lucky for filmgoers, Beijing blinked first, and Tian is back with Springtime in a Small Town, a remake of a classic Chinese film, opening in the U.S. this week. The new tyranny in Tian's life, however, is the box office; China's young moviegoers, he says, prefer simpler fare...
...British don't understand their history because it happened overseas, and the same may be coming true for the U.S. also. The notion of liberation is an integral part of America's own image of its mission in Iraq, but the reality experienced by the Iraqis is a classic occupation. The sad fact is that colonialism and the occupation of foreign countries typically produce a disconnect between the self-image of the occupier, and the way he's seen by the natives. Life in the occupied country has little relation to occupying nation. And when resistance occurs - sometimes...