Category: language

We will join Malcolm

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AG2017_1100546a
Malcolm X, December 1964. On youtube with not-so-great-audio, 32 minutes 53 seconds.

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The Words of El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz on extremism.

Related : Butler on protest; on how the state and contemporary discourse identify non-violence, protest, boycott and resistance.

Plato and Behavioural economics

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Text by Nick Romeo

Behavioural economics […] celebrated for identifying and analysing many of the core biases in human cognition.

Plato not only identified various specific weaknesses in human cognition, he also offered powerful proposals for how to overcome these biases and improve our reasoning and behaviour.

Plato’s dialogues dramatise the habits and processes that lead humans to false conclusions. He depicts people believing what they want or what they are predisposed to believe (confirmation bias); asserting whatever comes most readily to mind (availability bias); reversing their opinions about identical propositions based on the language in which the propositions are presented (framing); refusing to relinquish current opinions simply because these happen to be the opinions they currently possess (a cognitive version of loss aversion); making false inferences based on the size and representativeness of a sample of a broader population (representativeness heuristic); and judging new information based on salient current information (a version of anchoring).

Much more on Aeon.

Forensic Architecture

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Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, which is made up of a team of architects, scholars, filmmakers, designers, lawyers and scientists who gather and present spatial analysis in legal and political forums.

We undertake advanced architectural and media research in order to provide evidence for international prosecution teams, political organisations, NGOs, and the United Nations in various processes worldwide. Additionally, we undertake historical and theoretical examinations of the history and present status of forensic practices in articulating notions of public truth.

2011 Seminar.
MACBA.

Why Criticism Matters

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Why Criticism Matters – Essay by Elif Batuman NYTimes, 2011.

Literature viewed in this way becomes a gigantic multifarious dream produced by a historical moment. The role of the critic is then less to exhaustively explain any single work than to identify, in a group of works, a reflection of some conditioned aspect of reality.

Batuman reads “Constructed Worlds” is adapted from her forthcoming first novel, “The Idiot.”

Also, How to Be a Stoic.