Join 📚Jof’S Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
We shouldn’t presume that ‘fake news’ is only a problem when obvious lies are driving news stories. The opposite might in fact be the case. News stories that appear honestly reported but which omit important contextual information can be just as damaging if not more so than clear smear jobs, because there’s less inclination to expose falsehoods that are not perceived as being deceptions. __‘The most mischievous errors on record,’ the 19th-century romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote, are ‘half-truths taken as the whole.’__
The Unknowers
Linsey McGoey
While rejecting English education and British rule, nationalist commentators seldom failed to express some satisfaction over the fact that British rule and its education system had provided a means for Indians to come in touch with a materially advanced culture. The assumption underlying this satisfaction was that the material advancement of Europe, as represented by the English in India, was based on Europe’s scientific knowledge. This assumption seems to have remained untainted by the realization which was widely shared that England was responsible for plundering India’s wealth.
Political Agenda of Education
Krishna Kumar
Much of what free trade has brought about is what gets called “the race to the bottom,” the quest for the cheapest possible wages or agricultural production, with consequent losses on countless fronts. The argument is always that such moves make industry more profitable, but it would be more accurate to say that free trade concentrates profit away from workers and communities, for whom it is therefore far less profitable (and here the very term profit cries out for redefinition, for the stock market defines as profitable every kind of destruction and lacks terms for valuing cultures, diversities, or long-term wellbeing, let alone happiness, beauty, freedom, or justice).
Hope in the Dark
Rebecca Solnit
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