Art?

I really believe that human beings can be taught to love what they do not love already and that the privileged moment exists for all of us, if we let it. Letting art is the paradox of active surrender. I have to work for art if I want art to work on me.

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/27/jeanette-winterson-art-objects/

Posting Goodreads Just have some thing to put here

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think Diamond gives a pretty even handed account of the way societies fail (and how a few succeed), and I don't think any world view he has skews his research. Although if you love the Montana wilderness and marvel at its beauty you almost inevitably come down on the side of environmentalists wanting to preserve that beauty. Is that a bias, or just a recognition of reality?

Anyway, a good book but maybe a bit too long. He tries to offer some cautious optimism at the end but for the most part it is an emotional beat down. The history of it all is very interesting, but usually it involves tales of how people are short sighted and just plain too arrogant to imagine things might go bad. And the modern tales of Rwanda with its Malthusian dilemma is horrible.

If you follow politics even only slightly you know big business and the republican party in particular, hate regulations and always feel individual rights (or more precisely, big corporation rights) have a higher value then environmental concerns. Yeah, yeah, I know, the Democratic party is not much better, but at least occasionally they sound less strident.

Anyway he says things like this...

“The challenge of deciding which of a society's deeply held core values are compatible with the society's survival and which ones instead have to be given up.” Pg 410

“the remaining solution to the tragedy of the commons is for the consumers to recognize their common interests and design, obey and enforce prudent harvesting quotas themselves”. Pg 429

I just don't see ANY nation, state or even a group of people of any size honestly looking at the way things are, and changing core values. It just ain't gonna happen. Maybe my pessimistic view skews my interpretation...but I doubt it.

The bad times may not come in my lifetime, but it seems they are going to come some time.

“So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish ”

View all my reviews

Neil deGrasse Tyson - addendum

So I read this book about Narcissism called The Life of I by Anne Manne. I found this one bit about some well known Physicist who are repeatedly used by Climate Deniers. She was trying to understand why these few science guys would ignore all the research....

"The culture among physicists, studies have found, requires a macho (or highly competitive and confrontational) style of self-assertion, even bravado, while disdaining and being contemptuous of the work of others"

It just reminded me of Neil deGrasse Tyson telling me how stupid I was. And I started thinking the quote kind of applied to NDT.  There is a bit of confrontation in his Cosmos presentation and from his philosophy comments he certainly is contemptuous of the work of others. So maybe it is just a Physicist thing.

I found this interesting blog post contra NDT and Tyson actually replies in the comments section

http://www.chicagonow.com/an-agnostic-in-wheaton/2014/06/dear-neil-degrasse-tyson-dont-be-stupid-about-philosophy/

You Are Not What You Think You Are

"There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true...Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain. The wonder is that aberrations of a gross sort are relatively rare, and that, for the most part, our memories are relatively solid and reliable."

"We, as human beings, are landed with memory systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections — but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information."


Just another thing to remind us that the world and ourselves are not what we think."Reality" is not what we remember. Or maybe it is only what we remember (perhaps erroneously) that becomes what is real.

Thank you Oliver Sachs, for breaking another bubble

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/04/oliver-sacks-on-memory-and-plagiarism/

Video I just want to remember

Post by Antar Maximus Wagoner.

Random thougts

Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians, and warriors, for that fusion is impelled by a more elemental force—the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere. Such a view might seem miles away from the libertarian defense of the free market, with its celebration of the atomistic and autonomous individual. But it is not.

When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.

http://coreyrobin.com/2014/06/30/why-go-after-women-and-workers-the-reactionary-mind-explains-it-all-for-you/

More on feeling old...and mental bomb shelters

 I have very few friends or acquaintances my own age or near it. Though I am usually ill at ease in the company of elderly people I have the greatest respect and admiration for two very old men who seem to remain eternally young and creative. I mean [the Catalan cellist and conductor] Pablo Casals and Pablo Picasso, both over ninety now. 

Such youthful nonagenarians put the young to shame. Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middleclass men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.

Henry Miller

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/page/5/

 I love that phrase "mental bomb shelters"