Noble Illusions

Noble Illusions PDF Author: Stephen Dale
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
ISBN: 1552667456
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
One hundred years ago saw the declaration of a war that would forever change our understanding of war. With a staggering loss of life, World War One was, by all accounts, a brutal and devastating tragedy. And yet, on the eve of the hundredth anniversary, countries around the world are preparing to commemorate the Great War not with regret but with nationalist pride. Conservative forces, already well into a program to elevate the place of the military in society, are embracing the opportunity to replace today’s apparent cynicism with an unquestioning patriotism similar to that which existed a century ago. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are imploring their citizens — especially their youth — to revive the sense of duty embodied in the generation that served in the trenches. But is the ennobling nature of patriotism the real lesson that people today should extract from that now-vanished generation’s experience? Through a dialogue with a pop-culture artifact from a lost world — a boys’ annual called Young Canada — Noble Illusions examines the use of propaganda to glorify racist colonial wars and, in the wake of those, the Great War. A juxtaposition of earnest instruction on the cultivation of everyday virtues and brutal tales of war masquerading as moral lessons on valour and righteousness, Young Canada helped to persuade a generation of young Canadians to head eagerly to the trenches of World War One. Concerned that the rise of militarism is leading today’s youth in a similar direction, Stephen Dale offers this examination as an inoculation against the blind patriotism politicians are working so hard to instill.

Noble Illusions

Noble Illusions PDF Author: Stephen Dale
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
ISBN: 1552667456
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 136

Get Book Here

Book Description
One hundred years ago saw the declaration of a war that would forever change our understanding of war. With a staggering loss of life, World War One was, by all accounts, a brutal and devastating tragedy. And yet, on the eve of the hundredth anniversary, countries around the world are preparing to commemorate the Great War not with regret but with nationalist pride. Conservative forces, already well into a program to elevate the place of the military in society, are embracing the opportunity to replace today’s apparent cynicism with an unquestioning patriotism similar to that which existed a century ago. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are imploring their citizens — especially their youth — to revive the sense of duty embodied in the generation that served in the trenches. But is the ennobling nature of patriotism the real lesson that people today should extract from that now-vanished generation’s experience? Through a dialogue with a pop-culture artifact from a lost world — a boys’ annual called Young Canada — Noble Illusions examines the use of propaganda to glorify racist colonial wars and, in the wake of those, the Great War. A juxtaposition of earnest instruction on the cultivation of everyday virtues and brutal tales of war masquerading as moral lessons on valour and righteousness, Young Canada helped to persuade a generation of young Canadians to head eagerly to the trenches of World War One. Concerned that the rise of militarism is leading today’s youth in a similar direction, Stephen Dale offers this examination as an inoculation against the blind patriotism politicians are working so hard to instill.

Epidemic Illusions

Epidemic Illusions PDF Author: Eugene T Richardson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262045605
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
A physician-anthropologist explores how public health practices--from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment--help perpetuate global inequities. In Epidemic Illusions, Eugene Richardson, a physician and an anthropologist, contends that public health practices--from epidemiological modeling and outbreak containment to Big Data and causal inference--play an essential role in perpetuating a range of global inequities. Drawing on postcolonial theory, medical anthropology, and critical science studies, Richardson demonstrates the ways in which the flagship discipline of epidemiology has been shaped by the colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492. Deploying a range of rhetorical tools and drawing on his clinical work in a variety of epidemics, including Ebola in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, leishmania in the Sudan, HIV/TB in southern Africa, diphtheria in Bangladesh, and SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, Richardson concludes that the biggest epidemic we currently face is an epidemic of illusions—one that is propagated by the coloniality of knowledge production.

Dance to the Tune of Life

Dance to the Tune of Life PDF Author: Denis Noble
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107176247
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
This book formulates a relativistic theory of biology, challenging the common gene-centred view of organisms.

Collective Illusions

Collective Illusions PDF Author: Todd Rose
Publisher: Hachette Go
ISBN: 0306925702
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and social psychology research, an acclaimed author demonstrates how so much of our thinking is informed by false assumptions—making us dangerously mistrustful as a society and needlessly unhappy as individuals. The desire to fit in is one of the most powerful, least understood forces in society. Todd Rose believes that as human beings, we continually act against our own best interests because our brains misunderstand what others believe. A complicated set of illusions driven by conformity bias distorts how we see the world around us. From toilet paper shortages to kidneys that get thrown away rather than used for transplants; from racial segregation to the perceived “electability” of women in politics; from bottled water to “cancel culture,” we routinely copy others, lie about what we believe, cling to tribes, and silence people. The question is, Why do we keep believing the lies and hurting ourselves? Todd Rose proves that the answer is hard-wired in our DNA: our brains are more socially dependent than we realize or dare to accept. Most of us would rather be fully in sync with the social norms of our respective groups than be true to who we are. Using originally researched data, Collective Illusions shows us where we get things wrong and, just as important, how we can be authentic in forming opinions while valuing truth. Rose offers a counterintuitive yet empowering explanation for how we can bridge our inference gap, make decisions with a newfound clarity, and achieve fulfillment. **National Bestseller** **Wall Street Journal Bestseller** **Named Amazon's 2022 Best Book of the Year in Business, Leadership, and Science**

The Ultimate Book of Optical Illusions

The Ultimate Book of Optical Illusions PDF Author: Al Seckel
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781402734045
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Contains color and black-and-white illustrations of over three hundred optical illusions, each with brief, explanatory text.

Honest Illusions

Honest Illusions PDF Author: Nora Roberts
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780515110975
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
A magician's daughter has inherited her father's talents-and his penchant for jewel thievery. Then she meets an escape artist who captures her heart and has secrets that could shatter her illusions...

Illusions of Emancipation

Illusions of Emancipation PDF Author: Joseph P. Reidy
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469648377
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not merely a product of Lincoln's proclamation or of Confederate defeat in April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom fulfill every dream of the enslaved or their allies. The process unfolded unevenly. In this sweeping reappraisal of slavery's end during the Civil War era, Joseph P. Reidy employs the lenses of time, space, and individuals' sense of personal and social belonging to understand how participants and witnesses coped with drastic change, its erratic pace, and its unforeseeable consequences. Emancipation disrupted everyday habits, causing sensations of disorientation that sometimes intensified the experience of reality and sometimes muddled it. While these illusions of emancipation often mixed disappointment with hope, through periods of even intense frustration they sustained the promise that the struggle for freedom would result in victory.

Dissolving Illusions

Dissolving Illusions PDF Author: Suzanne Humphries
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781480216891
Category : Communicable diseases
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Starting in the mid-1800s, there was a steady drop in deaths from all infectious diseases, decreasing to relatively minor levels by the early 1900s. The history of that transformation involves famine, poverty, filth, lost cures, eugenicist doctrine, individual freedoms versus state might, protests and arrests over vaccine refusal, and much more. But the authors shows that vaccines, antibiotics, and other medical interventions are not responsible for the increase in lifespan and the decline in mortality from infectious diseases.

Folk Illusions

Folk Illusions PDF Author: K. Brandon Barker
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253041120
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Wiggling a pencil so that it looks like it is made of rubber, "stealing" your niece's nose, and listening for the sounds of the ocean in a conch shell– these are examples of folk illusions, youthful play forms that trade on perceptual oddities. In this groundbreaking study, K. Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice argue that these easily overlooked instances of children's folklore offer an important avenue for studying perception and cognition in the contexts of social and embodied development. Folk illusions are traditionalized verbal and/or physical actions that are performed with the intention of creating a phantasm for one or more participants. Using a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the ethnographic methods of folklore with the empirical data of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, Barker and Rice catalogue over eighty discrete folk illusions while exploring the complexities of embodied perception. Taken together as a genre of folklore, folk illusions show that people, starting from a young age, possess an awareness of the illusory tendencies of perceptual processes as well as an awareness that the distinctions between illusion and reality are always communally formed.

Ideals and Illusions

Ideals and Illusions PDF Author: Thomas McCarthy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262631457
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
These lucid and closely reasoned studies of the thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, J�rgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty provide a coherent analysis of major pathways in recent critical theory. They defend a position analogous to Kant's - that ideas of reason are both unavoidable presuppositions of thought that have to be carefully reconstructed and persistent sources of illusions that have to be repeatedly deconstructed.McCarthy examines the critique of impure reason from the complementary viewpoints of the attackers and defenders of Enlightenment rationality. He first analyzes the work of Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida to determine what these radical critics have contributed to our understanding of reason and where they have gone wrong. He explores Habermas's theory of communicative rationality, focusing on the attempt to go beyond hermeneutics, the incorporation of systems theory, the implications of discourse ethics for our understanding of political debate and collective decision making, and the relation of political theology to critical social theory.Thomas McCarthy is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and the editor of The MIT Press series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. The analysis and assessment of Habermas's recent work in Ideals and Illusions serves as a sequel to his earlier study The Critical Theory of J�rgen Habermas.