BERTRAND RUSSELL ON DICTATORS
George Orwell:
Mr. Russell points out that the huge system of organized lying upon which the dictators depend keeps their followers out of contact with reality and therefore tends to put them at a disadvantage as against those who know the facts. This is true so far as it goes, but it does not prove that the slave-society at which the dictators are aiming will be unstable. It is quite easy to imagine a state in which the ruling caste deceive their followers without deceiving themselves. Dare anyone be sure that something of the kind is not coming into existence already? One has only to think of the sinister possibilities of the radio, State-controlled education and so forth, to realize that “the truth is great and will prevail” is a prayer rather than an axiom.
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NAZIS AND SOCIALISTS (AND THE KKK)
Mildred Harnack:
The official name of the Nazi Party is the Nationalsozialisticishe Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), Mildred explains, or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, “although it has nothing to do with socialism and the name itself is a lie. It thinks itself highly moral and like the Ku Klux Klan makes a campaign of hatred against the Jews.”
Quoted by Rebecca Donner in All the Frequent Troubles of our Days, p. 17
Read moreMY EXPERIENCE IS WHAT I ATTEND TO
William James:
Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind — without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground — intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.
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THE BURDEN OF WRITING
George Orwell:
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.
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FOSS AND PLAIN TEXT
It’s not unusual for someone writing a blog like this to describe the process they use to write text and get it up on the web. I’m going to do that someday, but I’d like to start with a note about my general approach to technology and computer use. I’m thinking this is the first of an occasional and irregular series of posts about how I use computers and software. I purchased my first PC way back in the early 1980s when I was in graduate school. It was a DEC Rainbow. The only reason I could afford it and knew about it is that I had a one-year teaching gig at a small college that had just installed a DEC mainframe. The terms of the contract included a provision for faculty and staff to purchase DEC PCs at a substantial discount. This, of course, was long before the days of MS Windows and MacOS. One defining characteristic of the Rainbow is that it could run both MS-Dos and CP/M. I confess that I don’t remember now just why one would want the ability to switch between those two; as I recall, I spent virtually all of my time in MS-Dos.
Read moreWHAT TO READ IN RETIREMENT
When I retired from the big full-time academic work over three years ago, I donated several boxes of books to my university library. I had some ideas of what I wanted to be reading in retirement, and thought that I wouldn’t be needing any of the books that I gave away. However, my interests changed, and I’ve already re-purchased at least a dozen of those books that I gave away. (At least I’ve found used copies of most of them.) At the same time, I still have more unread books on my bookshelves than I’ll be able to read in what remains of my life. As I anticipated retirement, I assumed that I would enjoy many hours of reading. And I have, but I’ve also suffered through more time than I would like to admit trying to decide just what I want to read next. Each morning as I pass the bookshelves I notice books that I would really like to read (and others that I would really like to re-read). I need some sort of structure.
Read moreCOGNITION AND LOCOMOTION
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber:
Cognition is first and foremost a means for organisms that can move around to react appropriately to risks and opportunities presented by their environment. Cognition didn’t evolve in plants, which stay put, but in animals that are capable of locomotion. Cognition without locomotion would be wasteful. Locomotion without cognition would be fatal.
The Enigma of Reason, p. 56.
TOTALITARIANISM, PERFECTION, AND OPPRESSION
Milan Kundera:
Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise — the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. … If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets ever smaller and poorer.
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ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED
There are many examples of cruel injustices, often inflicted by people intent on personal gain, at the expense of others’ pain. In so many instances, the ones inflicting pain go out of their way to “other” those who suffer as a result, stigmatizing them as somehow deserving of their pain.
Yesterday evening we saw the film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. It’s a really powerful documentary that weaves together the life and career of the photographer Nan Goldin, the profound inhumanity in the response to HIV/AIDS and those who suffered and died from it, and opioid crisis prompted by the self-serving work of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family to flood the medical market with Oxycontin. Goldin, an award winning photographer whose work is displayed in many prominent museums around the world, focused much of her work on the LGBT subculture, primarily in New York City. She is also a founder of the advocacy group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.) which was instrumental in pushing museums and other cultural institutions to stop taking money from the Sackler family and also to remove the family’s name from exhibition halls.
Read moreWHY WRITE AND WHY BLOG?
Why am I writing? And, if I’m writing, why post my writings on the web? These are questions I’ve pondered over the last year or so as I resisted the urge to try yet again to write a blog. I’ve realized in the last month that even if (especially if) I continue to write here, I’ll continue to struggle with them. So consider this the first (actually, it’s the second) of many more posts addressing this question.
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