I love hell I am hell

A group of Sikh intellectuals and eminent citizens held a press conference in Chandigarh on Tuesday.

At the press conference, Professor Gurdarshan Singh Dhillon, a renowned scholar of Sikh history said, “On one hand, 80 lakh people have been imprisoned in their own land, they are being subjected to the worst kind of oppression. On the other hand, people are dancing on the streets in celebration. What kind of people are these? Is this their faith? Is this their nationalism? It is shameful”.

Retired IAS officer Gurtej Singh said, “Hindutva forces are out to destroy the nation. Every institution is under attack.”

Leading a protest at the Panjab University campus, the Students’ Union President Kanupriya said, “The BJP’s entire politics is about Hindi-Hindu-Hindutva. This is why they have denied rights to the people of Kashmir”

Amandeep Singh of the Punjab Students Union (Lalkar) said, “Kashmir is the world’s most militarised zone. People’s rights have already been trampled upon. Now, whatever special protection they had has also been destroyed. This won’t stop with Kashmir, this may be repeated in Punjab and the Northeast”.

The world is increasingly at risk of “climate apartheid”, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers, a report from a UN human rights expert has said.

Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said the impacts of global heating are likely to undermine not only basic rights to life, water, food, and housing for hundreds of millions of people, but also democracy and the rule of law.

Alston is critical of the “patently inadequate” steps taken by the UN itself, countries, NGOs and businesses, saying they are “entirely disproportionate to the urgency and magnitude of the threat”. His report to the UN human rights council (HRC) concludes: “Human rights might not survive the coming upheaval.”

The report also condemns Donald Trump for “actively silencing” climate science, and criticises the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, for promising to open up the Amazon rainforest to mining. But Alston said there were also some positive developments, including legal cases against states and fossil fuel companies, the activism of Greta Thunberg and the worldwide school strikes, and Extinction Rebellion.

In May, Alston’s report on poverty in the UK compared Conservative party welfare policies to the creation of 19th-century workhouses. Ministers said his report gave a completely inaccurate picture, but Alston accused them of “total denial of a set of uncontested facts”.

Alston’s report on climate change and poverty will be formally presented to the HRC in Geneva on Friday. It said the greatest impact of the climate crisis would be on those living in poverty, with many losing access to adequate food and water.

“Climate change threatens to undo the last 50 years of progress in development, global health, and poverty reduction,” Alston said. Developing countries will bear an estimated 75% of the costs of the climate crisis, the report said, despite the poorest half of the world’s population causing just 10% of carbon dioxide emissions.

“Yet democracy and the rule of law, as well as a wide range of civil and political rights are every bit at risk,” Alston’s report said. “The risk of community discontent, of growing inequality, and of even greater levels of deprivation among some groups, will likely stimulate nationalist, xenophobic, racist and other responses. Maintaining a balanced approach to civil and political rights will be extremely complex.”

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on the one hand: we have to push back against narratives that substitute preconceived notions for research and facts, and must guard agaist our own biases which lead us to accept without serious investigation that one dominant culture was always the innovator and the “peripheral” cultures simply received those innovations

on the other hand: there’s so much agenda-driven bad scholarship in these non-dominant cultures as well, and some  scholars who push these counter-narratives make grandiose claims about how they were “better” than these dominant cultures with little evidence, to the extent there’s a kneejerk reaction against these counter-narratives as automatically suspect

I mean would I be thrilled if there’s a good basis for the assertion that “Koreans” (or more precisely, proto-Koreanic groups in Manchuria and the northern Korean peninsula) used iron up to four centuries ahead of China? Hell yeah! Do I automatically take these claims with a truckful of salt, especially when the person making that claim has a pretty explicit nationalistic agenda? Also yeah.