Loaded question

Abstract: We have entered the Anthropocene (Gibson et al 2015), an era of human-caused global systemic dysfunction where the same species that caused this dysfunction also has the responsibility to turn the tide and respond How to live lightly, equitably, meaningfully and empathically (ie towards the past and the future, towards different cultures, the non-human and more-than-human world) on Earth is the key question of our time Young people in particular might feel overwhelmed by such a heavy existential question as they have a full life ahead of them and may have serious doubts about having children of their own some day in the face of the declining state of our planet How can schools help young people to engage meaningfully in such a loaded question? Or, morally speaking , how can they choose not to help them with this question or, worse, make them powerless witnesses and accomplices to this planetary demise by ignoring this question altogether and sticking to " education-as-usual " ? This edited volume brings together authors who are looking for principles , foundations and processes that enable educators, in a broad sense, to connect young people with the key questions of our time This chapter is the afterword to the book with some critical observations

Abstract: In this chapter we shift the emphasis away from the relatively abstract discussion of competing theories of imperialism towards consideration of their value in explaining the position of the United States in world affairs in the present era. We begin with the paradox that, although the categories and insights developed by the theory of imperialism are the most appropriate for explaining America’s role in the modern world, it is not the case that America should necessarily be described as an imperialist power. Perhaps it would be more accurate to suggest that it does not matter a great deal whether the USA is called imperialist or not; the term is open to such a wide range of interpretations that the decison as to whether the US role in the world is best described as imperialist becomes redundant. It is a loaded question which can be resolved by manipulating the meaning of the term to produce the desired answer, a form of labelling invariably employed for polemical rather than analytical reasons. To avoid such labelling is not to beg the question; it is rather to avoid asking the wrong question.

Abstract: OCTOBER 131, Winter 2010, pp. 3–22. © 2010 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Maurice Blanchot said that political impatience makes criticism warlike. Driven by the urgency of human-inflicted disasters, we want to proceed straight to the goal of social transformation, and so, wrote Blanchot, the indirection of the poetic—and, we might add, the artistic—displeases us.1 It should not be surprising, then, that the pressing events of the past eight years—war, rendition, torture—have produced many examples of impatient criticism. Two years ago, for instance, October sent a questionnaire to a group of art-world intellectuals, soliciting opinions on artistic opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and while October’s attempt to open up a conversation about art and war was welcome, its survey suffered from the fallacy of the loaded question. It asked: “What, if anything, demotivates the current generation of academics and artists from assuming positions of public critique and opposition against the barbarous acts committed by the government of the United States against a foreign country?”2 And, after noting that today “antiwar opposition seems most visible on the Internet” and asking if the “electronic-technological public sphere” measures up to the public protests of the Vietnam era, another question inquired whether this condition implies a “fundamental transformat ion of the sense of a polit ical public subject ,”3 a transformation that, in the context of the journal’s comparison between the present and what it portrayed as an earlier golden age of protest, could only be viewed as a degeneration from activism to quietism. What emerged was a thinly disguised decline-and-fall jeremiad about opposition to war, in which current antiwar activity

Abstract: This essay considers the question: “What is religion and is it essentially violent?” Rather than answer the question directly, Martin suggests that it is a loaded question and reflects on what might motivate it. Through a comparison of the concepts of “religion” and “child abuse”–as analyzed in Ian Hacking’s work on social constructionism–Martin points to the social or political stakes of defining terms tied to normative discourses and which could be designed to pathologize certain behaviors.