"Matekoane ke bophelo" Cannibis is Life: Marginality and survival, a historical analysis of illicit cannabis production by the communities of Mokhtlong District of Lesotho

<p> </p><p> This study examines the evolving historical, geopolitical and economic context of illicit cannabis cultivation by the marginalised highlands communities of Mokhotlong district of Lesotho. Mokhtlong is one of the most impoverished districts of Lesotho with a population that has historically operated on the margins of the state and SouthAfrica as either providers of cheap sheep products to the rest of Lesotho or as suppliers of cheap labour to the mines in SouthAfrica. It considers the implications of the supply of cannabis to mainly the Gauteng metropolitan area in South Africa to the Mokhotlong district’s inhabitants’ state of marginalisation. Historically, cannabis production in the highlands resulted in a reproduction of the asymmetrical relations between and inside the metropolitan and mountain areas of both countries. Coalitions of actors merged from these new relations that the cultivation produced, and as such, this article should be analysed as an assemblage in which three distinct scales of territorialities were clashing or cooperating with each other. The article argues that the irregular migrants from Lesotho to South Africa took advantage of the fluctuations of their legal status as they moved between South Africa and Lesotho and the fluidity of the movement across the mountainous border to the migrants and smugglers to traffic cannabis across Lesotho into South Africa. In essence, the article makes the bold claim that cannabis production was one of the key ways in which the borderland communities of Mokhtlong dealt with their economic and social marginalisation.</p>

"Matekoane ke bophelo" Cannibis is Life: Marginality and survival, a historical analysis of illicit cannabis production by the communities of Mokhtlong District of Lesotho

<p> </p><p> This study examines the evolving historical, geopolitical and economic context of illicit cannabis cultivation by the marginalised highlands communities of Mokhotlong district of Lesotho. Mokhtlong is one of the most impoverished districts of Lesotho with a population that has historically operated on the margins of the state and SouthAfrica as either providers of cheap sheep products to the rest of Lesotho or as suppliers of cheap labour to the mines in SouthAfrica. It considers the implications of the supply of cannabis to mainly the Gauteng metropolitan area in South Africa to the Mokhotlong district’s inhabitants’ state of marginalisation. Historically, cannabis production in the highlands resulted in a reproduction of the asymmetrical relations between and inside the metropolitan and mountain areas of both countries. Coalitions of actors merged from these new relations that the cultivation produced, and as such, this article should be analysed as an assemblage in which three distinct scales of territorialities were clashing or cooperating with each other. The article argues that the irregular migrants from Lesotho to South Africa took advantage of the fluctuations of their legal status as they moved between South Africa and Lesotho and the fluidity of the movement across the mountainous border to the migrants and smugglers to traffic cannabis across Lesotho into South Africa. In essence, the article makes the bold claim that cannabis production was one of the key ways in which the borderland communities of Mokhtlong dealt with their economic and social marginalisation.</p>

Introduction

The introduction begins with the bold claim that in some parts of the New Testament, God is a being who has a body and who can be seen. It briefly outlines why many Westerners today believe that God is invisible and incorporeal and discusses the role that Platonism in particular has had in forming that view. It also provides a brief overview of key scholars who discuss God’s body in the Hebrew Bible and highlights the importance of Jewish portrayals of God’s body for this project. The introduction then discusses the various ways in which embodiment can be conceived, both in recent theory and in ancient discourse, and it provides an overview of the book’s contents.

Künstliche Künstler

For a long time, the natural sciences owed their success to the strategy of reducing phenomena to a few effective causes. Today, an additional approach is emerging: thinking in terms of complex systems. It explains a kind of illusory world that is beginning to establish itself between reality and humans, e.g., passionate gamers: the world of simulation. The most explosive example is so-called artificial intelligence. It claims to be able to emulate human characteristics. This bold claim confronts us with old and new questions: Can machines really learn? Are they even intelligent? Can a robot be more than wires, transistors and programs? And last but not least: Who are we – the humans?

Virtue, Objectivity, and the Character of the Education Researcher

In his 1993 book, Hare asks “What Makes a Good Teacher?” In this paper we ask, “What makes a good education researcher?” We begin our discussion with Richard Rudner's classic 1953 essay, The Scientist Qua Scientist Makes Value Judgments, which confronted science with the internal subjectivity it had long ignored. Rudner's bold claim that scientists do make value judgments as scientists called attention to the very foundations of scientific conduct. In an era of institutional research ethics, like the Tri-Council’s ethics policy, Rudner's call for an approach to these value judgments is even more relevant. The contemporary education researcher primarily engages with ethics procedurally, which provides a certain level of consistency and objectivity. This approach has its roots in principle-based theories of ethics that have long been dominant in Western universities. We argue that calls, like Rudner's, for an objective science of ethics, are at the root of this dominant institutional approach. This paper critiques the suitability of such principle-based ethics for solving Rudner's concerns, and posits that educational research ethics is better understood as a matter of character and virtue. We argue that, much like the ethical teacher, the ethical education researcher is a certain kind of person.

Soldiers, Scouts and Spies: A Military History of the New Zealand Wars 1845–1864

Military historian Cliff Simons says one of the inspirations for Soldiers, Scouts and Spies was “hearing a well-known Pākehā host on national radio vehemently declare that ‘Māori never lost a battle’” during the New Zealand Wars (21). At its launch, fellow military historian Richard Taylor described the new book as a “watershed publication” that marked a new era in research on the New Zealand Wars, supplanting the allegedly flawed work of James Belich.[i] It is a bold claim to make for a history of the role of military intelligence in some (but not all) of the conflicts fought between 1845 and 1864, especially given the omission of all of the wars fought after that date through until 1872. Simons himself makes some further claims for the work, suggesting that his own background as an officer in the New Zealand Army gives him special insights into the wars not available to other historians and writers from a non-military background. [i] Launch speech for Soldiers, Scouts & Spies, by Lieutenant Colonel Richard Taylor, 15 October 2019, https://www.masseypress.ac.nz/news/2019/october/launch-speech-for-soldiers-scouts-and-spies/

Climacus’ Miracle: Another Look at “the Wonder” in Philosophical Fragments through a Spinozist Lens

In Chapter 2 of the Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus poetises about a “king who loved a maiden.” Climacus concludes this venture with a bold claim: what he has just described is “so different from any human poem” that it should not be regarded as a poem at all, but as “the wonder” [Vidunderet] which leads one to exclaim in adoration that “[t]his thought did not arise in my own heart!” In the subsequent chapter of Philosophical Fragments, Climacus proceeds to offer a number of arguments against demonstrations of God’s existence, leading many scholars to conclude that he represents an unequivocally anti-rationalist perspective. Against such interpretations, this paper will seek to highlight how Climacus’ claims track those of the seventeenth century Dutch lens-grinder and rationalist philosopher, Baruch Spinoza. From this, it will be argued that “the wonder” in Climacus’ thought takes the form of an indirect, ethico-existentialist argument for the truth of Christianity’s incarnate God.

Epilogue

In the Introduction I made the bold claim that Wittgenstein transforms Frege’s and Russell’s logical and methodological ideas in a way that ‘can be justifiably described as a second revolution in philosophical methodology and the philosophy of logic, following Frege’s and Russell’s first revolution’. This claim was meant in a specific sense relating to the use of logical methods in philosophy, a discipline where we are often dealing with complex and messy concepts and phenomena, and having to clarify highly complicated and fluid uses of natural language. The situation is not quite the same in metamathematics, for example, and my claim was not intended to concern the employment of logical methods there, i.e. that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of logic would constitute a revolution in this area too. For, while his later philosophy of logic has no difficulty explaining the possibility of the employment of calculi to clarify other calculi, in metamathematics there is perhaps no similarly pressing need for idealization as in philosophy, when we clarify complex concepts originating in ordinary language, since the targets of clarification in metamathematics are systems governed by strict rules themselves. Thus, this area of the employment of logical methods seems not as significantly affected. But I hope that my claim concerning the use of logical methods in philosophy can now be recognized as justified, or at least worth considering seriously, on the basis of what I have said about 1) the later Wittgenstein’s account of the status of logical clarificatory models, and how this explains the possibility of simple and exact logical descriptions, thus safeguarding the rigour of logic, 2) how his account of the function of logical models makes possible the recognition of the relevance of natural history for logic without compromising the non-empirical character of the discipline of logic, and 3) in the light of Wittgenstein’s introduction of new non-calculus-based logical methods for the purpose of philosophical clarification, such as his methods of grammatical rules, the method of language-games, and quasi-ethnology....

A HERMENEUTIC OF VULNERABILITY. EDOM IN MALACHI 1:2–5

The current interpretation of Edom in Mal 1: 2-5 does not allow for any redemption of Edom. This article looks into the possibility of reading these verses differently so as to allow for the rehabilitation of Edom. At issue here is to whom the deity is referring to in Mal 1:4: the Edomites or the audience of Malachi’s prophecy, the priests? In nearly all the translations and commentaries it seems to be the Edomites, but Gerda Hoekveld-Meijer (1996) made the bold claim that the text refers to the priests, or the Levites, turning Edom into a blessing. Something similar happened with the figure of Cain in Genesis 4. In order to answer the question of the validity of this interpretation of Edom, this essay will look at what happened to Cain in Gen 4 and Edom in Obadiah (in which the anti-Edomite sentiments are the clearest) before it takes up the case of Edom in Malachi.

Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War.

By now many of you have heard about, considered reading (if not deterred by its 762-page girth), and even dipped into Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth. This tome well deserves the attention that it has received for addressing a burning issue today: economic stagnation and its origins. Taking the long view with both summary statistics of trends in growth between 1870 and the present, but also with an amazing variety of graphs and charts detailing patterns of growth in a wide variety of industries, Gordon chronicles the impact of the second and third industrializations. His oft-repeated argument is simple, that growth was revolutionary in the history of humanity in the century after 1870, resulting from the effects of the second industrialization (launched by electricity and the internal combustion engine especially), and raising living standards in profound but unrepeatable ways. Though he finds the 1920s to 1970 to be most dramatic in growth rates (especially resulting from technology and innovation measured by total factor productivity [TFP]—accounting for growth outside resource inputs), after 1970 that productivity was barely a third of the previous century despite the digitalization of the third industrialization, which contributes only 7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). This lag is especially evident since 2004 with no reasonable prospects for reversal, and the decline in the rate of growth has been accompanied by increasing income inequality with demographic lags and other “headwinds” further threatening growth. The argument is predominately based on technological change, though Gordon recognizes the role of government and even unions (in raising wages) and less often business innovation in advancing growth. Much of the book's reception has been shaped by economists and economic historians addressing this bold claim, and it has been compared with Thomas Piketty's even more ambitious work on the trend toward inequality.