05 Ιουλίου 2016

Ένα ελληνικό αυγό για κάθε Κινέζο

Ο Παύλος Τσίμας θυμήθηκε την επίσκεψη του Παττακού στην Κίνα και τη δήλωσή του μετά, ότι αν κατφέρουμε κάθε Κινέζος να τρώει ημερησιως ένα ελληνικό αυγό, η Ελλάδα θα πλουτίσει.

Αν ο συλλογισμός πράγματι έχει κάτι από τη σκέψη του Παττακού, ο Τσίμας θυμάται λάθος.

17 Φεβρουαρίου 2016

Φακίδες μικρά οπίσθια και ελαττωματικές παρτίδες

Disability is defined by culture.  The tendency to categorise all people with different impairments as ‘disabled’ is a fairly recent phenomenon emanating from Western societies. Many traditional societies do not have an exact equivalent in their own language for the word ‘disabled’,  and they can seldom match the three-tier concepts in English of ‘impairment’, ‘handicap’ and ‘disability’ espoused  by  WHO  and  disability  theorists;  they  usually  do  however  have  words  for  specific impairments such as ‘deaf’,  ‘blind’, ‘lame’,  and so on. Furthermore what is counted as a ‘disability’ (ie. that which prevents someone from fulfilling the roles normally expected of them, especially as regards marriage), differs from one culture to another. Among the Tuareg in Mali,  for example, freckles and small buttocks are counted as a serious impediment to marriage and could therefore be considered a disability. In other words,  the way societies think about disabled people is determined by a variety of cultural variables,  including the nature of the impairment. It is therefore essential for planners of community disability programmes to know and understand how different impairments are viewed in the target community in order to plan effective interventions, especially since many disability programmes place changing attitudes among their main objectives.

...

The individual medical model of disability says that the disabled person must try to overcome their disability by some means or other in order to join in with the mainstream. This implies that the disabled  person  is  intrinsically  of  less  value  because  of  their  disability.  This  has  devastating implications for the disabled person’s ability to grow and develop. It is very insidious, and is present in just about every encounter between a disabled person and other people, especially professionals. In the former communist countries,  as an extreme but at least frank example, anybody working with disabled persons is called a ‘defectologist’. Disabled people are regarded as defective in the medical model.

...

In ‘Disability and Society: Emerging Issues and Insights’ Len Barton writes: ‘Being disabled involves experiencing discrimination, vulnerability and abusive assaults upon your self-identity and self-esteem.’ Is this always the case? Does the definition of disability hinge on the fact that it provokes negative reactions from others? Is it possible to have disability without social discrimination, or does it then cease to be disability?  Can we honestly say that a soldier who has lost a leg in war, who is regarded as a hero and who suffers no social discrimination, is not disabled, while a Tuareg man prevented from marrying by the fact that he has freckles or small buttocks is disabled?  It is precisely this problem of definition that creates the apparently insuperable difficulty of assessing the number of disabled people in the world.

(από το Disability and Culture)

29 Ιανουαρίου 2016

Η ισορροπία του Μπάρακ

Recently, a remnant of the Kastner case came before the Supreme Court of Israel. In his docudrama Mishpat Kastner [The Kastner Trial] (Tel-Aviv: Or ve'tzel, 1994), Motti Lerner made Kastner throw at Hanah Senesh's mother that her daughter broke down during the course of being interrogated and handed over her two comrades to the Hungarian police. There was no factual basis for this accusation. Moreover, Kastner never raised this allegation in court. Giora Senesh, Hannah's brother, petitioned the Supreme Court sitting as the High Court of Justice to order the Israeli Broadcast Authority to remove this scene from the play that it intended to screen on Israel's state television (H.C. 6124, 6143/94, Senesh v. The Israel Broadcast Authority, forthcoming). For the parachutists episode, see Maoz, "Historical Adjudication," 590, n. 93. The Court rejected the petition. President Barak, writing for the majority, stated: "The controversial paragraph does not reflect historical truth. It has no historical foundation whatsoever. It is not true." Nevertheless, stated Barak, "a democratic society which loves freedom does not make its protection of expression and art contingent on them reflecting the truth.... A democratic society does not protect a legend by harming freedom of expression and art. The legend must stem from the free exchange of opinions and views. It must not be a result of governmental restrictions on freedom of expression and art. Hannah Senesh's legend will exist and flourish thanks to the freedom of the truth, not following the silencing of the untruth." Barak quoted another president of the Supreme Court, Justice Moshe Landau, who stated: "The distortion of historical facts does not justify the disqualification, because its creators could argue that there is no single historical truth; rather each historian has his own truth. And, anyway, since when does untruth disqualify a movie or a play from being screened or performed in a state which guarantees freedom of expression to the citizen"; H.C. 807/78, Ein Gal v. The Board for Supervision of Films and Plays, 33(1) P.D. 274, 277. (Censorship on films exists in Israel under the Cinematograph Films Ordinance, 1927; R. H. Drayton, The Laws of Palestine [London: Waterlow and Sons, 1934], vol. 1, ch. 16, p. 135. See, generally, Daniel More, "Film and Theatre Censorship in Israel," Israel Yearbook on Human Rights 9 [1979]: 225.)

02 Ιανουαρίου 2016

Περί της προέλευσης του νεοφιλελευθερισμού

Εφημερίδα Μακεδονία 3-5-1981

Εφημερίδα Μακεδονία 5-5-1981