Category: language

call for the general good

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“Today, Biden, just as Lear does at the end, seems to have made his peace with the necessity of accepting the sheer injustice of his condition and his predicament, while seeking comfort in the saner corners of his life. Now, with the knowledge that he has finally made the right call for the general good, we can look back in sympathy with his personal predicament. It is unjust; he did a good job. The injustice extends to the reality that, while Biden is old and frail, his opponent is, and sounds, old and nuts. To reflect on Trump’s speech to the Republican National Convention is to see true madness …

[…]

Biden, … deserves to be ennobled, not ejected.”

Adam Gopnik, New Yorker.

https://www.tumblr.com/birdbird/756583034680197120/mai-thu-perretthis-is-a-slap-right-in-the
https://www.tumblr.com/birdbird/756661978866614272

To succeed in life a man must be adaptable.

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Claudia Roth Pierpont’s The Florentine, in the New Yorker (2008), came back at the right time. Niccolò Machiavelli’s writings are central to the moral-ethical-effective discourses on power and how to rule.

““The Prince” offered the first major secular shock to the Christianized state in which we still live. Long before Darwin, Machiavelli showed us a credible world without Heaven or Hell, a world of “is” rather than “should be,” in which men were coolly viewed as related to beasts and earthly government was the only hope of bettering our natural plight.

[…]

Erasmus, whose “Education of a Christian Prince” was written two years after Machiavelli’s work—he presented his treatise first to Charles of Aragon and, after it failed to elicit the desired financial result, to Henry VIII—spun his pious counsel around the central thesis “What must be implanted deeply and before all else in the mind of the prince is the best possible understanding of Christ.” Machiavelli, on the other hand, proposed the best possible understanding of the methods of Cesare Borgia.

[…]

To succeed in life a man must be adaptable. This is a prime lesson of “The Prince,” and Machiavelli appears to have been determined to live by it. A republican during the republic, a royal servant when princes rule: “He who conforms his course of action to the quality of the times will fare well.”

[…]

But a corollary, if contradictory, lesson of “The Prince” is that, try as he might, “man cannot deviate from that to which nature inclines him.” In composing his Medici-commissioned history, Machiavelli agonized over how to present the Medici, and the result is anything but the work of a courtier. Recounting how the family’s desire to “wield exclusive power” had led it to crush all political opposition, leaving other parties with no alternative except plots and murderous conspiracies, he concluded bluntly that under the Medici regime “liberty was unknown in Florence.”

Untitled(early morn might as well)

we cannot develop our sense of self in isolation

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“‘Significant other’ calls up the invitation from a host who wishes to strip away presumption. But we insist it is a fertile concept. It was propagated in the post-war decades by the American psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan. In his early work, Sullivan found that schizophrenic patients managed their lives better when they could count on regular contact with the same people. He was convinced that we cannot develop our sense of self in isolation, and that from the earliest stages the approval and disapproval of others pushes the self in radical directions. He grew up as a lonely gay boy in upstate New York at the turn of the last century, the sole Irish Catholic in his school. Certain kinds of alienation, he believed, could be manically productive, but without a sympathetic significant other, life was liable to be ruinous.

There can be any number of significant others in a life. Some we know for a long time; others are meteoric: we may see them only once.”

Thomas Meaney, Introduction, Granta 168.

… claw its way into the day, selling fruit,
selling futures, futures north of food and fictions,
bottom-line the violent caption, no this is not

attraction, yes the fruit fields by the highway, yes
the berry heavy wind, …

Zoë Hitzig, cache 9, Granta 168
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AG2024_1160461a

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Shelley Duvall, 20 films (14. Rapunzel (1983) from Faerie Tale Theatre series).

Sustainability and shoe companies. Small is closer to green.

Experts say there’s no real upside for consumers to allow gen AI to be trained on their data and there are risks that are still being studied. CNBC

“Lamar is a master of rap, it can’t be denied, and his hard-won skill has earned him an undammable flood of free expression.” Vinson Cunningham in New Yorker.

AG2024_1160392a or reframe

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“George Lakoff, a professor in cognitive science and linguistics at University of California, Berkeley, makes the point in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant! that when trying to get your point across, refrain from using the other side’s language. Doing so will activate and strengthen their frames and undermine your own views. Instead, successfully arguing a point requires you to establish your own frames and use language that evokes images and ideas that fit the worldview you want.

[Frames are] extremely powerful because most of our actions are based on the unconscious and metaphorical frames we already have in place. That is, once a frame’s architecture is in place, the boundaries of that frame and the associations of that frame are all taken into account in our decision making.

Lakoff emphasized in his book that reframing is not about spinning and manipulating the other party, but rather learning to express what you believe in your own language, within your own frameworks.”

Vivian Giang, Fast Company, 2018. via Pocket.

our economic goal is for a ‘steady state’ economy (that is, an economy with a relatively stable, mildly fluctuating product of population and per capita consumption) that helps to maintain and repair the delicate balance of nature, and respects the laws of ecology and physics (in particular thermodynamics). An economy that delivers social justice for all classes, and ensures a liveable planet for future generations. In consequence, this must be a world in which women’s rights over their own bodies are paramount –for all the obvious reasons, but also so that human fertility can be managed. A world in which labour substitutes for carbon: a decarbonised economy will be a job-rich, labour-intensive economy. In it, we will do far more walking and cycling; we will not fly; we will give up meat and grow and consume local, seasonal, slow food. We will make and repair our own garments, rather than exploiting low-paid workers in far-off places. We will use both the sun’s energy and human energy efficiently.

Pettifor, Green New Deal

I will continue to make art and trade with a tailor.