Ruyi's World of Books & Stories

Here is a summary of Tinubu's 7-point agenda: 1) national industrial policy 2) infrastructure plan 3) tax credits and subsidies 4) credit-based economy 5) more electricity generation 6) government-backed home mortgage system 7) investment in agriculture I find this amusing in Tinubu's address: “We must realize that no populous nation has ever attained broadly- shared prosperity without first creating an industrial capacity that employs large numbers of people and manufactures a significant quantity of goods for domestic consumption or export” I find it amusing because it is a careful rewording of an axiom that is generally applied to education - specifically public education - in the developed parts of the world. We say that no nation has ever attained modernity, prosperity, development, etc, without laying a solid foundation in public education. The quality of your growth and development is proportional to the quality of your publi...

Religion in the Muslim north revolves around (1.) a sick, prurient obsession with the female body under the cover of religious morality, (2.) exhibitionist displays of the rituals of religiosity, and (3.) identity politics without a care for ethical virtues, truth, honesty, and kindness.  You can lie, cheat, murder, rape, steal and generally be a monster of moral perversion and you won‘t attract th e condemnation of self-appointed guardians of public religious morality as long as you observe the public rituals of religiosity and mouth off familiar, stereotyped religious idioms. And you can be the very apotheosis of justice, truth, probity, compassion, etc., but if you don’t “perform” religiosity through your sartorial choices and through your public utterances, you’re the devil himself. In other words, religion is more about form than content, more about appearance than substance, more about cold structures than essence, and more about public performance of group identity tha...