Unpalatable Truth Research Articles

Museums and the Citizenship of Hate

This article asks if and how national museums today, which have in recent decades adopted a remit for social rights activism, have an obligation to engage with a broad spectrum of political participation and expression, including contemporary forms of far-right extremism and white grievance politics. How can museums engage with and respond meaningfully to the upsurge in acts of violence perpetrated in the name of structural, collective, and personal ideologies based on hate, xenophobia, and racism? Responding to these questions requires museums to move beyond acts of symbolic national commemoration and grapple with the human expressions and experiences of hate. Drawing on current museum scholarship and practice that is increasingly open to embracing research into studies of emotion and affect, as well as activism and its shifting narratives, the article concludes that the task of curatorial activism should be focused on effecting processes of structural—internal, institutional—change. Furthermore, this process can lead to the understanding that our forms of being human are not just related to our interpersonal interactions in the private sphere but also influence all aspects of civic and institutional life—including the ones that raise difficult questions or unpalatable truths about who we are, individually, and as citizens of the worlds to which we contribute.

Market Harms and Market Benefits

Market Harms and Market Benefits

Unpalatable truths: Commitment to eating meat is associated with strategic ignorance of food-animal minds

Animal minds are of central importance to debates about their rights and welfare. Remaining ignorant of evidence that animals have minds is therefore likely to facilitate their mistreatment. Studying samples of adults and students from the UK and US we found that, consistent with motivational perspectives on meat consumption, those who were more (vs. less) committed to eating meat were more motivated to avoid exposure to information about food-animals’ sentience (Studies 1), showed less interest in exposure to articles about intelligent food animals (Studies 2a and 2b), and were quicker to terminate exposure to internet pop-ups containing information about food-animals’ minds (Studies 3a and 3b). At the same time, those who were more (vs. less) committed to eating meat approached information about companion-animals’ minds (Studies 2a-3b) and unintelligent food animals (Studies 2a and 2b) in largely the same ways. The findings demonstrate that, within the UK and US, the desire to eat meat is associated with strategies to avoid information that is likely to challenge meat consumption.

Index insurance and climate risk management: Addressing social equity

AbstractFair distribution of benefits from index insurance matters. Lack of attention to social equity can reinforce inequalities and undermine the potential index insurance holds as a tool for climate risk management that is also pro‐poor. The aims of this article are to: (a) examine social equity concerns raised by index insurance in the context of climate risk management, (b) consider how greater attention can be paid to social equity in index insurance initiatives, and (c) reflect on the policy challenges raised by taking social equity into account as a mechanism for climate risk reduction. The article draws on learning from the CGIAR's Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and presents the cases of the Index Based Livelihoods Insurance (IBLI) and Agriculture and Climate Risk Enterprise Ltd. (ACRE) in East Africa. It proposes a framework for unpacking social equity related to equitable access, procedures, representation and distribution within index insurance schemes. The framework facilitates identification of opportunities for building outcomes that are more equitable, with greater potential for inclusion and fairer distribution of benefits related to index insurance. The article argues that systematically addressing social equity raises hard policy choices for index insurance initiatives without straightforward solutions. Attention to how benefits and burdens of index insurance are distributed, suggests the unpalatable truth for development policy that the poorest members of rural society can be excluded. Nevertheless, a focus on social equity—facilitated by the framework—opens up opportunities to ensure index insurance is linked to more socially just climate risk management. At the very least, it may prevent index insurance from generating greater inequality. Taking social equity into account, thus, shifts the focus from agricultural systems in transition per se to systems with potential to incorporate societal transformation through distributive justice.

Unpalatable Truths: Food and Drink as Medicine in Colonial British India.

This article considers the significance of eating and drinking within a series of diaries and journals produced in British colonial India during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The discussion of food and drink in this context was not simply a means to add color or compelling detail to these accounts, but was instead a vital ingredient of the authors’ understanding of health and medical treatment. These texts suggest a broader colonial medical understanding of the importance of regulating diet to maintain physical health. Concern with food, and the lack thereof, was understandably a key element in diaries, and in the eyewitness accounts kept by British soldiers, doctors, and civilians during the rebellion. At a narrative level, mention of food also functioned as a trope serving to increase dramatic tension and to capture an imagery of fortitude. In references to drink, by contrast, these sources reveal a conflict between professional and lay opinions regarding the use of alcohol as part of medical treatment. The accounts show the persistent use of alcohol both for medicinal and restorative purposes, despite growing social and medical anxieties over its ill-effects on the body. Close examination of these references to food and drink reflect the quotidian habits, social composition, and the extent of professional and lay knowledge of health and medicine in colonial British India.

Place-based Inequality in “Energetic” Pain: The Price of Residence in Rural America

Despite the tendency for some to view rural life or living close to nature with nostalgia, the unpalatable truth is that rural America is beset with many problems, including lower incomes, higher poverty rates, limited access to well-paying jobs, higher morbidity and mortality rates, inadequate access to health care, and lower educational attainment. In this study, we question whether this palpable rural disadvantage extends to residential energy costs, a subject with serious implications for the well-being of households. Analyses of data spanning two decades show that rural households consistently spend more on residential energy than urban households, although they generally use less. This finding, which indicates the existence of energy cost inequality between rural and urban places, represents a kind of rural tax. Any sustained spikes in costs, which has happened in the past and would likely happen in the future, could portend significant access risks to rural households.

Xavier Herbert: Forgotten or Repressed?

Xavier Herbert is one of Australia’s outstanding novelists and one of the more controversial. In his time, he was also an outspoken public figure. Yet many young Australians today have not heard of the man or his novels. His key works Capricornia (1938) and Poor Fellow My Country (1975) won major awards and were judged as highly significant on publication, yet there has been relatively little analysis of their impact. Although providing much material for Baz Luhrmann’s blockbuster film Australia (2008), his works are rarely recommended as texts in school curricula or in universities. Gough Whitlam took a particular interest in the final draft of Poor Fellow My Country, describing it as a work of ‘national significance’ and ensuring the manuscript was sponsored to final publication. In 1976 Randolph Stow described it as ‘THE Australian classic’. Yet, a search of the Australian Literature database will show that it is one of the most under-read and least taught works in the Australian literary canon. In our view, an examination of his legacy is long overdue. This collection brings together new scholarship that explores the possible reasons for Herbert’s eclipse within public recognition, from his exposure of unpalatable truths such as interracial intimacy, to his relationship with fame. This reevaluation gives new readings of the works of this important if not troublesome public intellectual and author.

فقیراخان فقریؔ کی نظم گوئی "نیم سوز "کے تناظر میں

The poetry of Dr. Faqira Khan Faqri is capable of keen importance in the present scenario of Urdu poetry in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The reflection of contemporary problems could be easily observed in the subject matter of his poetry. He narrates unpalatable truths in his poetry, but, sometimes, does ignore the aesthetical demands of art. He has a realistic approach to the problems of life. That is the reason why he narrates contemporary problems, say, insecurity and sudden death in the present age as well as the eternal problems of human life, say, death, sorrows, deprivations, misfortunes etc. In this research paper, the book written by Faqri named “Neem soz” has been critically discussed from the above-mentioned dimensions.

The Cold Truth: Art as Fulcrum for Recovery in Participants and for Civic Change

This article describes art curating with sexually exploited young people. It reviews The Cold Truth: an exhibition produced by CSE survivors at Radiant Gallery, Plymouth, UK, 2016. The article proposes that the quality of the art produced by young people can catalyse social and civic change through public engagement and service commissioner adoption; and a pathway to psychosocial recovery for participants. It examines the transformative power of the art object created during the intervention. The article draws on Frogett et al’s “Aesthetic Third” to propose artwork as a fulcrum between silenced children, and communities which avoid unpalatable truths. It proposes that artworks eliciting empathetic responses are more powerful than those stimulating sympathetic responses. It offers Matarasso’s indicators of great art as language to consider the quality of art created by children, and to advocate that service leaders and commissioners use quality art processes to design and deliver effective services.

The Role of the Poet in a Time of Violence: A New Historicist Reading of Paul Muldoon’s “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants”

The main aim of this paper is to examine how Paul Muldoon’s personal experience in a strife-torn Northern Ireland affects his selection of historical subjects and his fictional representation of them adopting the New Historicism theory. It begins with a brief background on the New Historicism theory and emphasises the notion that the new historicist theorists sought to reveal truths concealed by history and to re-read or re-inscribe the past as seen from a present perspective. Both history and society combine to give various meanings and multiple interpretations to literary texts, hence studying the socio-cultural backgrounds as well as the authorial intentions help re-inscribe the past, reconstruct the social, cultural and political issues, and refigure the individual identity. The paper concludes that there is no binary opposition between history and literature or context and text and that both are subjective representations of reality. Thick description is illustrated as one of the tools that help suggest a multiplicity of social and political implications and it is concluded that both literary and non-literary texts are fictions formulated by imagination and created according to the authorial intentionalism. The second part of the paper proves that Muldoon’s poetry is intentionally obscure to manipulate and baffle readers. The paper asserts that Muldoon’s poetic technique and fast-paced tone help in dedicating his willful obscurity. “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants” delineates the hunger strikes prevalent as a kind of protest in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, revealing an ugly, unpalatable truth. Muldoon inscribes history in the images of the body. The hero’s transformations coincide with the poet’s changing of the traditional sonnet into a more flexible narrative form. The irregular metrical patterns, repetitions and transformations in theme and subject emphasise the fragmented identity the poet wants to reveal. Muldoon’s interest in intertextuality as a poetic technique helps him confirm that official history can be fictionally re-structured and that the reader is responsible for interpreting the authorial intentionalism.

Encountering the Archive in Katja Petrowskaja’sVielleicht Esther

In Vielleicht Esther (2014), the literary debut by Ukrainian-born Katja Petrowskaja, the narrator attempts to trace her family history. She realizes that she can no longer rely on the memories of her relatives, but rather, as part of what Marianne Hirsch calls the “generation of postmemory,” is dependent on the material that remains. She encounters various archive spaces and resources, but these fail to provide easy access to her family’s past. This article argues that Vielleicht Esther is thus a pivotal example of an archival turn in memory culture, which signals not only the central position of the archive in retracing the past, but also the increasing critical scrutiny of the status and role of archive in this endeavour. Petrowskaja’s narrator comes to see how the archive is implicated in the control of history and memory, and that what remains is also an indicator of what is missing – specifically the European Jewish tradition that once defined her ancestors. Moreover, the archive confronts her not only with what remains (and what doesn’t), but also with questions about who remains (and why), that is, with questions about the circumstances of survival. On the one hand, her encounters with the archive allow her to address its gaps through narrative, but on the other, they confront her with unpalatable truths that force her to rethink her family narrative.

A Family Business: The Bartholomews of Edinburgh in the First World War

This article examines the lived experience of the Bartholomew family of Edinburgh during the course of the First World War. Families, as much as nations, empires and other communities, were important participants in the conflict that collapsed the boundaries between the various battlefronts and homefront like none before. The Bartholomews’ letters to one another were the chief means by which the shared experience of total war was mediated and constructed, as well as a vital source for ascertaining the role played by the family in their nation’s war effort. In them, we can see the way unpalatable truths were concealed beneath literary tropes, drawn from the language of glory and sacrifice, but also the way such sentiments were real and deeply felt to a generation not yet experienced in the cynicism and sarcasm that the war occasioned in the English language as much as the mind. These letters also represent a form of organically created propaganda that sustained the Bartholomews’ morale and commitment to the war effort, and also their collective identity as a family unit, despite the scattering of parents and siblings from Edinburgh, to Flanders, and northern Italy.

One Summer: America, 1927 BillBryson. New York: Doubleday, 2013.

One Summer: America, 1927 Bill Bryson. New York: Doubleday, 2013.One Summer chronicles in meticulous detail the events of summer 1927 in the United States. These were momentous times: the stock market was booming (two years before the Wall Street Crash), single-minded sculptor was about to carve four giant heads on Mount Rushmore; A1 Capone reigned supreme in Chicago; television was about to hit the market; and precocious aviator became the first man to cross the Atlantic in 33 hours, 30 minutes, 29.8 seconds.The aviator's name was Charles Lindbergh, and his exploits constitute the framework of this highly entertaining volume. The sheer magnitude of the achievement deserves consideration. Lindbergh had very few instruments to find his way, save for compass bearings and mathematical calculations designed to work out how far The Spirit of St. Louis (Lindbergh's plane) had deviated from its prescribed course. Although other pilots tried the hazardous route in 1927, Lindbergh was the only one to plot his course successfully. He returned to the United States to hero's welcome-an estimated 300,000 people waited for him in New York harbor, while millions more lined the streets to City Hall where Lindbergh gave speech. Such was the interest in everything to do with the aviator that when his mother went to Pennsylvania Station to catch train back to the Midwest, five hundred police officers lined the streets to hold back the crowds (176).Lindbergh's response to this adulation was unexpected; he remained sullen, seldom acknowledging the crowd's enthusiasm. Sometimes he had to be literally dragged out to face the public, as on occasion in Dayton, Ohio, when the townspeople threatened to destroy the house of the aviation pioneer Orville Wright, if Lindbergh did not appear. Nonetheless the media continued to represent Lindbergh as warmhearted hero of the American people. Even in time of prosperity, the country need to sustain the exceptionalist myth.Bill Bryson does not shy away from exposing the grimy realities behind these myths. Lindbergh might have been wonderful aviator, but he was pro-Nazi. In 1941 he delivered radio speech explaining why he thought war with Germany was wrong. He became member of America First, an organization opposed to involvement in World War Two. From then on his reputation nose-dived; Franklin Delano Roosevelt was convinced he was Nazi (479). Henry Ford, the inventor of the iconic Model T, was anti-Semitic, the only American favorably mentioned in Hitler's Mein Kampf (1927). In 1927 Ford became involved in lengthy libel suit as his newspaper The Dearborn Independent claimed that Los Angeles lawyer named Aaron Sapiro was member of a band of Jew bankers, lawyers, advertising agencies and produce buyers who had cheated American farmers (265). The suit cost Ford over nine million dollars and damaged his public persona in the process.Yet people at that time-especially in the media- did not really acknowledge such unpalatable truths. They were more preoccupied with maintaining myths or prosperity as way of convincing themselves that the United States had at last become global superpower. Forty-two percent of all that was provided in the world came from America. The country held onehalf of the world's gold resources and appeared to grow wealthier every year. …

Assimilate: a critical history of industrial music

Introduction 1. A Fading Vision Lost in Time 2. The Pan-Revolutionary 3. The I-Word Part 1: Technology and the Preconditions of Industrial Music I. Italian Futurism 1. Industry 2. The Aesthetics of the Machine 3. Crash II. William S. Burroughs 1. Junkie 2. The Control Machines 3. Brainwashing and the Conflation of Authority 4. Mediatic Verses 5. The Cut-Up 6. Process as Composition 7. Media 8. Techno-Ambivalence III. Industrial Music and the Avant-Garde 1. Noise and Revisionism 2. The Revolutionary Class Part 2: Industrial Geography IV. Northern England 1. Progress in Hell 2. The Original Sound of Sheffield 3. Meatwhistle and ClockDVA 4. Throbbing Gristle 5. Manchester in the Shadow of War V. Berlin 1. An Island Out of This Planet 2. Strategies Against Architecture 3. German-ness 4. Ingenious Dilettantes 5. West Germany Beyond Berlin VI. San Francisco 1. Madness in Any Direction, at Any Hour 2. Monte Cazazza and Self-Propaganda 3. Z>'ev and Survival Research Laboratories 4. Factrix and Chrome VII. Mail Art, Tape Technology, and the Network 1. Fluxus and UFOs 2. A History of Tape Trading 3. Taping as a Political Act 4. The Eternal Network 5. A Virtual Scene Part 3: Industrial Music as Music VIII. The Tyranny of the Beat: Dance Music and Identity Crisis 1. Those Heady Days of Idealism Are Over 2. Irony 3. Technology and Rhythm 4. Futurist Pop 5. Pleasure 6. Industrial Identity IX. : England 1981-1985 1. The Mission is Terminated 2. London 3. Beyond London X. Body to Body: Belgian EBM 1981-1985 1. A Satellite State 2. Luc Van Acker 3. Front 4. Musical Order 5. Bodily Order XI. Industrial Music as a Theatre of Cruelty 1. Artaud-Damaged 2. Theatricalities of All Kinds XII. She's a Sleeping Beast: Skinny Puppy and the Feminine Gothic 1. From Pop to Puppy 2. Vancouver's Fertile Ground 3. Disrupting Maleness 4. The Feminine Gothic Part 4: People and Industrial Music XIII. Wild Planet: WaxTrax! Records and Global Dance Scenes 1. Industrial Music and the Mainstream 2. The Beginnings of WaxTrax! 3. Ministry 4. Mixing and Merging 5. The Business of Chaos 6. Clubbing and Participatory Culture 7. New Beat 8. The WaxTrax! Heyday XIV. Q: Why Do We Act Like Machines? A: We Do Not. 1. Pretty Hate Machine 2. Industrial Harmony 3. Language, the Self, and Gender 4. Get Me an Industrial Band 5. Resembling the Machine XV. Death 1. Death as Event 2. Death as Metaphor 3. Death as Fashion 4. New Life XVI. Wonder 1. Covenant and the Ubiquitous Sublime 2. Apoptygma Berzerk and the Spontaneous Sublime 3. VNV Nation and the Unthinkable Sublime 4. The Futurepop Backlash 5. Clubbed to Death 6. The Longevity of Industrial Bands 7. Industrial Music Is Dead? Part 5: Meaning and Revolution XVII. Back and Forth: Industrial Music and Fascism 1. Extremism as the Norm 2. Silent Politics 3. Loud Apolitics 4. The Effects of Fascism's Spectre 5. Fascist Assimilation 6. The Hidden Reverse XVIII. White Souls in Black Suits: Industrial Music and Race 1. Whiteness 2. The Inheritance of Blues, Jazz, and Dub 3. Exotica, Caricature, and the Techno-Oblivious 4. Technology and Racial Engagement 5. Black and White 6. Repetition and the English Ballad XIX. Is There Any Escape for Noise? 1. Unpalatable Truths 2. The First Two Options 3. Transgression as Law 4. The Future Happened Already 5. Pleasure, Flag Planting, and Revolution 6. The Third Mind

Third Party Intervention at the International Court of Justice: Challenges and Prospects

Respect for the rights of third parties in international adjudication is necessary if the ideal of a warless world is to be realized. Hence, every affected party must be catered for in any international adjudicatory scheme. The term “intervention” in international procedure describes the mode through which a third State participates, for protection of its own interests, in an international proceeding already set in motion at the instance of two or more States . The Statute and the Rules of the International Court of Justice make provisions for third party intervention. The institution of third party intervention serves a paramount goal. It seeks to safeguard third party rights, thereby, making third parties a part of the process of pacific settlement of international disputes. Nevertheless, the unpalatable truth is that there is nothing satisfactory about the institution of third party intervention at the International Court of Justice. Scholastic analysis of the subject is void of any modicum of praise in it and it is instead rich in criticism and disapproval. On the other hand, the decisions of both the Permanent Court of International Justice and the International Court on the subject are also not a good guide, they lack uniformity and consistency. This leaves the law of intervention too uncertain. Although the Court’s decisions are not binding on third parties, a third party who is unable to intervene cannot seek refuge in the shelter provided by the non-binding character of the Court’s decisions to third parties. The protection is only illusory. At the end, third parties are left in the lurch. One of the principal organs of the United Nations does not adequately safeguard their rights.

Suspicion

Suspicion

The Difficulty of Reading Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish" Suspiciously

The difficulty of reading Allen Ginsberg’s poetry is a recurring theme in criticism of his work and that of other post-WWII “Beat Generation” writers. “Even when a concerted effort is made to illuminate [Beat] literature,” laments Nancy M. Grace, “doing so is difficult: the romance of the Beat life threatens to subsume the project” (812). Of course, the Beat life is romantic to the extent that it is romantically regaled. Continual romantic portrayals, such as that of Ginsberg in the recent movie Howl (2010), rekindle the Beat romance for new audiences with chicken-and-egg circularity. I explore this difficulty of reading Ginsberg that Grace and other critics identify by articulating it with respect to "Kaddish"—“Ginsberg’s most highly praised and his least typical poem” (Perloff 213)—as a difficulty of interpreting Ginsberg suspiciously. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s theories of interpretation—or “hermeneutics”—provide the theoretical foundation here. Ricoeur distinguishes between a romantic or “restorative” mode of interpretation, where meaning is reverently reconciled to a text assumed to be trustworthy, and a “suspicious” approach, where meaning is aggressively extrapolated from a text held as unreliable. In order to bring these theories to bear on "Kaddish" and its criticism, I draw on Rita Felski’s pioneering work in relating Ricoeur’s concept of “suspicious reading” to the field of literature. Is it possible to read "Kaddish" suspiciously? Or is there nothing left for suspicious readers to expose in texts such as "Kaddish" that are already self-exposing?

Generic and therapeutic substitution: a viewpoint on achieving best practice in Europe

Given the current financial climate there is an ever increasing need to substitute drug treatments to optimize expenditure. A closer examination of the beliefs surrounding when substitution is appropriate led a group of European healthcare experts to argue that in some cases these beliefs may be unfounded and that guidelines are needed for clinical practice.

The Homme Fatal and the Subversion of Suspicion in <i>Mr Brooks</i> and <i>The Killer Inside Me</i>

The Homme Fatal and the Subversion of Suspicion in <i>Mr Brooks</i> and <i>The Killer Inside Me</i>

Robots and reality: a reply to Robert Sparrow

We commonly identify something seriously defective in a human life that is lived in ignorance of important but unpalatable truths. At the same time, some degree of misapprehension of reality may be necessary for individual health and success. Morally speaking, it is unclear just how insistent we should be about seeking the truth. Robert Sparrow has considered such issues in discussing the manufacture and marketing of robot `pets', such as Sony's doglike `AIBO' toy and whatever more advanced devices may supersede it. Though it is not his only concern, Sparrow particularly criticizes such robot pets for their illusory appearance of being living things. He fears that some individuals will subconsciously buy into the illusion, and come to sentimentalize interactions that fail to constitute genuine relationships. In replying to Sparrow, I emphasize that this would be continuous with much of the minor sentimentality that we already indulge in from day to day. Although a disposition to seek the truth is morally virtuous, the virtue concerned must allow for at least some categories of exceptions. Despite Sparrow's concerns about robot pets (and robotics more generally), we should be lenient about familiar, relatively benign, kinds of self-indulgence in forming beliefs about reality. Sentimentality about robot pets seems to fall within these categories. Such limited self-indulgence can co-exist with ordinary honesty and commitment to truth.