David Powelstock

Sandy Klein sent: Why Guantánamo was a success ( March 2009): The Guantánamo Bay detention centre has been widely denounced as a legal and moral failure. Yet for those who created it, its legacy is a triumph. MG Zimeta
... The strategic victories it won for the Bush administration during the eight years of its existence will last much longer than the camp itself. [ ... ]  But the greatest strategic victory won is in the field of ethics. In his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), the philosopher Richard Rorty argued that the point of ethical discussion is to sensitise us to the suffering of others, and he uses Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert to show us that complicity with a cruelty teaches us how to be cruel[ ... ] 

JM: Right now I feel a total foreigner to the American language, thought, ironies. As if I only knew how to mimic the signs and sounds of the English. Perhaps my perplexity has been enhanced because this item coincided with an American school's annual financial report with statistics and histograms. There were two of these in which "students of color" were represented ( are they synesthetes? painters?), against an anonymous other category in the "Student Demographics". A second graph detailed their procedence: native american, middle eastern, black/african american, multiracial, asian american, latino/hispanic forming the 29% part of the  total of enrolled students. The remaining 71% students are what? Color challenged? 
The MG Zimeta article, the snippets we got, intends to illustrate what? Cruelty challenged peoples? Rorty's philosophy against Humbert Humbert's? What's the point in all of this? Games, world golf, fun?