“A story can always end happily by stopping at a cheerful moment.” — Lanark — Alasdair Gray (via nruth)
Facebook prohibits the word ‘Palestinian’ -
The folks at Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet thought they’d create a Facebook page only to discover: Facebook blocks the term “Palestinian”! (H/t Jillian C Cork.)
Are Palestinians the only group so blocked from making pages? Well, not really… after a little fiddling around, I discovered that al-Qaida Refugee ResearchNet and Nazi Refugee ResearchNet are filtered too.
It does seem a bit odd, however, that a population of up to 12 million people, receiving more than a billion dollars in international aid, recognized by the UN, and enjoying a degree of formal diplomatic recognition from the United States — is placed in the same filtered category as Nazis and al-Qaida.
I’ve sent an email to Facebook customer service—we’ll see what they say.
Just to be sure, I tried myself to create a “Palestinian sports” page — not allowed.
“Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.” —
David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.”
(via booksinthekitchen)
We All Need Words on Making Words Count
“Writers are entitled to their political opinions, and there are good political novels out there, but the language of fiction is not the language of daily politics. Identity politics divides us. Fiction connects. One is interested in sweeping generalizations. The other, in nuances. One draws boundaries. The other recognizes no frontiers. Identity politics is made of solid bricks. Fiction is flowing water.” — Elif Şafak
“From my grandmother, I learned, amongst many other things, one very precious lesson. If you want to destroy something in this life, beat an acne, a blemish or the human soul, all you need to do is to surround it with thick walls. It will dry up inside. We all live in some kind of social and cultural circle. We’re born into a certain family, nation, class. But if we have no connection whatsoever with the worlds beyond the one we take for granted then we too run the risk of drying up inside. Our imagination might shrink, our hearts might dwindle and our humanness might wither. If we stay for too long inside our cultural cocoons, our friends, neighbors, colleagues, family - if all the people in our inner circle resemble us, it means we are surrounded with our mirror image.
One other thing women like my grandma do in Turkey is to cover mirrors with velvet or to hang them on the walls with their backs facing out. It’s an old Eastern tradition based on the knowledge that it’s not healthy for a human being to spend too much time staring at his own reflection.”
— Elif Şafak
(via coffeenotes)
Borges, The Universe And The Infinite Library -
Great reading.
Since the Library is the Universe, nothing exists outside of it. So, the readers and the narrator are part of it. Can we ever fully understand something when we are not able to examine it as a whole? Like a fish that wants to understand the totality of the oceans, the librarians try in vain to decipher the mysteries of their world, unaware that all they can acquire is a partial knowledge of reality.
They believe that because the library contains all books, a catalog that describes their contents must exist somewhere. But because the library is complete, there must be a catalog that describes this catalog and then one that describes that one and so on, in an infinite progression.
So, it’s impossible to find a single book that includes all other books, since its existence implies in the existence of another book that includes it.
Complete knowledge is impossible.
Seen doctor this morning. Turns out I’m allergic to grains. And by grains, I mean a lot of things.