Upside Down World

The media keep reporting that Israel and the US are trying to teach Hamas to play by the rules by not funding the new Palestinian government until they renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist. So the occupying power and its principal financial and military backer, who are collectively responsible for far more deaths of innocent civilians than Hamas, and are now, and have been for the last 35 years, in the process of colonizing the Palestinians’ land, need to withhold and provide incentives to teach the democratically elected party of the people they are violently oppressing to renounce violence and recognize their oppressors right to exist. And this is taken for granted as a perfectly reasonable position in the US media.

Moods and Beliefs

"Emerson may be said to be a philosopher of moods, and it is one wise with moods who observes that 'Our moods do not believe in each other.' Neither do our philosophies, or visions, which is why the ideal of a pluralism in philosophy, however well meant, is so often an empty hope, and neither do our nonphilosophical and our philosophical moods believe in each other."

Stanley Cavell, Emerson's Transcendental Etudes, p. 26