The trick to more restful sleep, may indeed involve a few teaspoons of peanut butter an hour before bed time.
I felt the urge to repost an article written by Tariq Ali, well, a portion of a recent article I read of his off Counterpunch web site. The context involves the protesting of certain Islamic women in France, one of which was involved in an anti-capitalist group. She wore a head cover (religious reasons of course,) and there was much misplaced anger directed towards her and this particular group (NPA) for doing so. It was as if her right to be more active in protesting against some of the ravages inflicted by what we will simply call ‘capitalism,’ (as if this means what Adam Smith, or an enterprising farmer in early 20th century United States may have understood it!) was somehow fatally compromised by her religious traditions/belief…anyway….. one does think of some of the typically barbed hypocrisy connected to the past, including those who are now considered to have been part of an ‘enlightenment’ tradition…. (don’t get me wrong…I’m not pissing on Voltaire and the Gang, as if they (men of their time, and able to ‘transcend it) are to be fully slapped till their souls turn an acrid smoke spewing orange…..but as a corrective, as a… well here’s the damn excerpt!
Bye!
“How many Western citizens have any real idea of what the Enlightenment really was? French philosophers undoubtedly took humanity forward by recognizing no external authority of any kind, but there was a darker side. Voltaire: “Blacks are inferior to Europeans, but superior to apes.” Hume: “The black might develop certain attributes of human beings, the way the parrot manages to speak a few words.” There is much more in a similar vein from their colleagues. It is this aspect of the Enlightenment that appears to be more in tune with some of the Islamophobic ravings in sections of the global media.
Marx famously wrote of religion as the ‘opium of the people’, but the sentence that followed is forgotten. Religion was also ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature’ and this partially explains the rise of religiosity in every community since the collapse of Communism.”