(Oh, it appears that , although I'm worried this might not use AI to really get powerful visuals. Sigh.

Melvyn Bragg and guests Robert Hoyland, Robert Irwin, and Hugh Kennedy discuss the life and ideas of the 14th-century Arab philosopher of history Ibn Khaldun.

Ibn Khaldun was a North African statesman who retreated into the desert in 1375. He emerged having written one of the most important ever studies of the workings of history.

Khaldun was born in Tunis in 1332. He received a supremely good education, but at 16 lost many of his family to the Black Death. His adult life was similarly characterized by sharp turns of fortune. He built a career as a political operator in cities from Fez to Granada. But he often fared badly in court intrigues, was imprisoned and failed to prevent the murder of a fellow statesman.

In 1375, he withdrew into the Sahara to work out why the Muslim world had degenerated into division and decline. Four years later, he had completed not only a history of North African politics but also, in the book's long introduction, one of the great studies of history.

Drawing on both regional history and personal experience, he set out a bleak analysis of the rise and fall of dynasties. He argued that group solidarity was vital to success in power. Within five generations, though, this always decayed. Tired urban dynasties inevitably became vulnerable to overthrow by rural insurgents.

Later in life, Ibn Khaldun worked as a judge in Egypt, and in 1401 he met the terrifying Mongol conqueror Tamburlaine, whose triumphs, Ibn Khaldun felt, bore out his pessimistic theories.

Over the last three centuries, Ibn Khaldun has been rediscovered as a profoundly prescient political scientist, philosopher of history and forerunner of sociology -- one of the great thinkers of the Muslim world.

Robert Hoyland is Professor of Islamic History at the University of Oxford; Robert Irwin is Senior Research Associate of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London; Hugh Kennedy is Professor of Arabic in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

The moderately near future. Technology has fractured the nature of "humanity", leaving most humans redundant and the remainder integrated with technology in ways that leave their humanity sometimes doubtful. Especially problematic is the genetic resurrection of our Vampire cousins—��homo sapiens vampira——from the dustbin of history. And now, aliens have arrived in the outer solar system and the crew sent to investigate must be the sharpest of the bleeding edge, and thus consists of a handful of people that cannot reliably trust, communicate, or understand each other.

�� �� The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

�� �� Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:
�� �� ‘The horror! The horror!��

��In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid for with terrible suffering or death. Even in this last, extreme case we must still concede that whoever takes up the commanded role does so by choice. Certainly the price for refusing it is high, but that there is a price at all points to the fact that oppressors themselves acknowledge that even the weakest of their subjects must agree to be oppressed.�� (p. 11)

Because patriotism is the desire to contain all other finite games within itself—that is, to embrace all horizons within a single boundary—it is inherently evil.

❝[A] reader or watcher of “Othello�� who is also paying attention to the political drama that is playing out in America may be tempted to understand it allegorically. On this reading Othello, the black (or “Moorish��) soldier who defends Cyprus against the Ottomans, is America itself. Desdemona, his blameless wife, is democracy. And Iago, who persuades Othello that Desdemona is unfaithful, is Donald Trump. The play ends with Othello smothering his wife to death and, full of remorse when he recognises his mistake, killing himself. It could thus be interpreted as a warning to America not to destroy democracy by heeding Mr Trump’s lies.��

❝Martial and naive, Othello has characteristics that one might attribute to America. Unlike Othello, America knows the nature of its nemesis. It does not have Othello’s excuse for succumbing to the pestilence.��

He hesitated for a second, then said, “I need to tell Ari he was right.��
“It could be worse.��
Valek waited. “It could be Janco who was right.��
“Ah, yes. That would be worse.��

Adequate. Really, closer to two stars, but I'm feeling generous. But the trend isn't great, so maybe the first sequel will be my limit?

❝Grownups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying.��
�� John Irving

��  Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And—how many of us do know it? Not Lotze. Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. But the broad masses . . . what do they think? All these hundreds of thousands in this city, here. Do they imagine that they live in a sane world? Or do they guess, glimpse, the truth��?
��  But, he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it?
��  He thought, It is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn’t it. I ��Dz�’t know; I sense it, intuit it. But—they are purposely cruel . . . is that it? No. God, he thought. I can’t find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia.
��  Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor: the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel of life turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they—these madmen—respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur.
��  And, he thought, I know why. They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God’s power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off.

Baumeister is an extraordinary social psychologist, in part because in his search for truth he is unconcerned about political correctness. Sometimes evil falls out of a clear blue sky onto the head of an innocent victim, but most cases are much more complicated, and Baumeister is willing to violate the taboo against “blaming the victim�� in order to understand what really happened.

A natural bias towards empathy has resulted in an almost universal identification of evil from the victim’s perspective. This book produces many examples of events which if one sets out to be even-handed cease to appear intrinsically evil. Few if any perpetrators ever do an “evil�� deed without good reason �� from their viewpoint. Very, very few groups or individuals “name themselves in positive affirmation of evil �� Most of them regard themselves as good people who are trying to defend themselves and their group against the forces of evil��.