February 2012
27 posts
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“Initiates into the Mysteries were forbidden to speak of their initiation. As...”
– Luther Martin, Hellenistic Religions
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The brass neck of Julian Assange →
“Wikileaks was once an emancipatory project. I say this with feeling because there’s stuff of mine on the site the libel lawyers tried to ban. But it was corrupted by the infantile leftism of Assange and his creepy collaborators, who worked on the assumption that because Russia and Belarus were anti-western, it was legitimate to hand their secret services news they could use.”
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Greece is being destroyed by 'respectable'... →
“The EU’s terms do not begin to match the altruism the United States showed to the defeated Germans after 1945. America did not pauperise West Germans as many in France and indeed Washington wanted. America guaranteed their security, then gave them loans from the Marshall Plan that allowed the West German economic miracle to begin. Greece has invaded no one and committed no crimes against...
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“And, on the other hand, what a melancholy notion is that, which has to represent...”
– Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
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“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real...”
– Karl Marx (via unitedworkers)
The context helps clarify the fact that he did not think it was necessary or wise to stamp it out. Marx himself used opium as a painkiller. Religion hinders the development of class consciousness, but it is also something that has helped the proletariat emotionally and...
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“The poet is someone who is permanently involved with a language that is dying...”
– Jacques Derrida (via sarahburgoyne)
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“No, words are not made to designate things. They are there to situate us amongst...”
– Henri Meschonnic, The Rhythm Party Manifesto (via sonofapritch)
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E-books Can’t Burn →
“Only the sequence of the words must remain inviolate. We can change everything about a text but the words themselves and the order they appear in. The literary experience does not lie in any one moment of perception, or any physical contact with a material object (even less in the “possession” of handsome masterpieces lined up on our bookshelves), but in the movement of the mind through a...
“The old saying that a man finds what he looks for in a subject, is too true; or...”
– Flinders Petrie
America's homeless resort to tent cities →
Tent cities have sprung up in and around at least 55 American cities - they represent the bleak reality of America’s poverty crisis.
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“What [Wittgenstein] is trying to get us to see is that the act of looking...”
– Marie McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations, p138
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“One has to have a good memory if one is to keep a promise. One has to have a...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human 1.59
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“I find this abuse prevailing among my most accomplished adversaries. But once...”
– William James, The Meaning of Truth
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Psychologists fear US manual will widen mental... →
“Among the anxieties to be labelled mental disorders if DSM-5 is published in May by the American Psychiatric Association are shyness in children and uncertainty over gender.”
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“Abstract changes in moral concepts are always embodied in real, particular...”
– Alastair Macintyre, After Virtue
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“Here, I believe, Kierkegaard asserts —if it is Kierkegaard asserting—what is...”
– Alastair Macintyre, After Virtue
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“The early uses of ‘moral’ in English translate the Latin and move to...”
– Alastair Macintyre, After Virtue
The Bank as Parasite →
Banking systems exist to lend money into the economy. Not so today’s. British banks are so over-leveraged (i.e. insolvent) that they cannot fulfil their role as lenders. Instead of acting as a lending machine, the British banking system, bizarrely, is now a borrowing machine. Like giant vacuum cleaners, banks are hoovering up the nation’s public and private resources, while refusing to lend,...
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“Origin of man now proved. Metaphysics must flourish. He who understands baboon...”
– Charles Darwin, 1 July 1838, Notebooks (via leuca)
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Alan Lomax recordings to be streamed →
This is great! Lomax recorded so many fantastic blues musicians.
January 2012
71 posts
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Krugman on austerity in the UK →
The infuriating thing about this tragedy is that it was completely unnecessary. Half a century ago, any economist – or for that matter any undergraduate who had read Paul Samuelson’s textbook “Economics” – could have told you that austerity in the face of depression was a very bad idea.
But policy makers, pundits and, I’m sorry to say, many economists decided, largely for political reasons, to...
interruptions: How I think of New Atheists: →
philosophy-of-praxis:
ideasandopinions:
“atheism” … reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man. - Marx
“ if there is to be talk about philosophy, there should be less trifling with the label“atheism” (which…
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“I see Hegel, already in the Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807, wrestling with a...”
– Robert Brandom, interview
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“How then, are we to interpret the current mess? Does this crisis signal, for...”
– David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital
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“As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is...”
– Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942, p. 31-32, emphasis included).
If I understand correctly, a good way to become a hugely influential economist is to plagiarize Marx while you repudiate Marx.
(via crowdsourced)
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“Many of those who rejected Stalinism did so by reinvoking the principles of that...”
– Alastair Macintyre, Preface to After Virtue
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“On the dominant liberal view, government is to be neutral as between rival...”
– Alastair Macintyre, Prologue to After Virtue, 3rd ed.
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“But is there not also the inexpressible? Yet what can it mean to say that there...”
– Michael Dummett, Thought and Reality
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“If we misprepresent reality as we apprehend it as no more than a picture, then...”
– Michael Dummet, Thought and Reality
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“Here indeed lies the justest and most plausible objection against a considerable...”
– David Hume, Enquiry
“A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It...”
– Michel Foucault, “Practicing Criticism” (via golehyas)
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Philosophical Investigations #304
“But you will surely admit there is a difference between pain-behaviour accompanied by pain and pain-behaviour without any pain.”
—Admit it? What greater difference could there be?
“And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is nothing.”
—Not at all. It is not a something, but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that...
“This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely...”
– Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Tom Robbins (via clavicola)
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“What we call “descriptions” are instruments for particular uses....”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations #291
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“Which depends on which—the semantics on the metaphysics or the metaphysics...”
– Michael Dummett, Thought and Reality
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“As a side effect of climate change, new patterns of disease could trim the human...”
– John Gray, Straw Dogs