In general, national communities and nation states reclaim, or fabricate their 'past' in order to justify their present condition and aspirations. Typically, where the real past is either inadequately known, or contains realities unhelpful to nationalist identity, 'facts' about the past are fabricated to support the ideology and 'myths of origins' are created.

— The Bible and Colonialism, A Moral Critique

ما يصنعُ الأُمّة هو التاريخ، ما يبرّر عداء أُمة لأُخرى هو التاريخ، والمؤرخون هم من يُنتجون التاريخ

والشعراء*

It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.

*Truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.

وخُذِ الأنوارَ عنّي، رُبّما
أجِدُ الرَحْمةَ في جَوْفِ الليَالي

— إبراهيم ناجي

Bernard Boutet de Monvel

Male rats deprived of testosterone during their critical period [of brain development] never show male reproductive behavior (mounting, intromission), though they do show female reproductive behavior measured by frequency of lordosis (female presenting posture—raised rump, concave back). Females exposed to testosterone during the critical period are masculinized; their adult behavior js characteristically male. The androgenization of the developing brain appears to be irreversible and enduring.

Before the influx of testosterone during fetal development, the brain is bipotential—that is, capable of becoming characteristically male or female. This means that brain sex is not simply a matter of genetic sex, and indeed the two can be dissociated such that a genetic male can have a female brain, and a genetic female can have a male brain. So-called experiments of nature are one indicator of this sort of dissociation. Freemartins are cows (genetic females) with a male twin. They are invariably infertile, and in the pasture behave more like bulls than like cows. In the human case a pathological condition called androgen insensitivity results in a genetic male who is phenotypically female both in external genitalia and in sexual orientation.

مشكلة المثقفين

الفيديو يتحدث عن مثقفي روسيا قبل الثورة البلشفية، بس ينطبق بشكل مو قليل أبد على اللي نسميهم "المثقفين" العراقيين

بهذا السياق، من الممكن قراءة رواية "الجريمة والعقاب" على أنها "رحلة التوبة من إنسان مثقف إلى شخص محترم"

كان تحت وسادته إنجيل، هو بعينه الكتاب الذي قرأت له فيه سونيا في الماضي قصة انبعاث لعازر . . . ولكن هنا تبدأ قصةٌ أُخرى، قصة تجدّد إنسانٍ شيئًا بعد شيء، قصةُ انبعاثه رويدًا رويدًا، قصةُ انتقالِه من عالَمٍ إلى عالَمٍ آخر متدرجًا، قصةُ معرفته بواقعٍ جديد كان يجهله حتى ذلك الحين كل الجهل. هذا يصلح أنْ يكون موضوعَ قصةٍ جديدة، أمّا قصتنا التي نرويها الآن فهي تنتهي هنا.

— نهاية "الجريمة والعقاب" لـ فيودور دوستويفسكي