The Invisible Counterpoint

Original Article:  Don’t blame Brits for the Brexit: The EU strayed from its roots in post-war unity to become a neoliberal technocracy WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2016 4:23 PM  E.L. Deflagrante   kumicho  "we do not get that the member nations are not US states, but nations with thousands of years of history" I always wonder when people talk about the importance of the length of time a country has been a country, if they're thinking that somehow a race's history gets passed on through the genes. It's like as if some serum was injected into each young child, so they're inextricably infected with the millions of voices of their ancestral heritage. Within each one is actually a Jungian legion! I'm sorry, but weren't they rather just playing with their X-boxes and listening to their Taylor Swift? How exactly was the Magna Carta, Shakespeare, Chesterton and Churchill lurking somehow, even within that? Maybe it's rather that if you've been well...

Original Article:  Smart country, foolish choice: The U.K.’s Brextremely stupid move SUNDAY, JUNE 26, 2016 3:02 PM  If this cosmopolitan world somehow manages to keep going, we're going to see some of these Anglophiles genuinely pressed on exactly how much, truly, they're disappointed when a cosmopolitan world collapses... how disappointed they are, truly, when suddenly everyone in their own country wants to know more of their Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Wordsworth origins, rather than what the rest of the world "bursted" (good literature bursts?) with their ostensibly equally worthy literature.  For if it somehow keeps going, Literature departments will likely be pressed on this habit of sticking to, of permitting, study according to country. Why communicate to students that it's okay to devote oneself to more or less uninterrupted involvement in your own country, when the world you're in is an interconnected reality? Why communicate that people shar...

Original Article:  No, Syrian refugees didn’t rape a child in Idaho: Right-wing urban legend shows how ugly anti-refugee movement has become WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22, 2016 7:52 PM  susan sunflower   Emporium  Good point about the similarity between this case and the scapegoating of Jews as child-abductors. Referring specifically to Jews, this was a minority actually leaps ahead in terms of childrearing, true child care, than the rest of Germans -- they were the most progressive group in the country.

Original Article:  The Internet’s bigot crisis: There’s a new push to curtail online bigotry, but the toxic sludge of hate is too enormous to erase