In the end, each has become an interest group, concerned only with itself. While each may talk about Black Power, Women Power, Worker’s Power, in the final analysis each is only talking about separation of powers, or “a piece of the action.” None is talking about real power, which involves the reconstruction of the entire society for the benefit of the great majority and for the advancement of humanity. (bell hooks, Feminist Theory)
The philosopher Hannah Arendt put it neatly in her postwar study of totalitarian life: “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” (Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible)
Yes!
Christi Carras of the Los Angeles Times reported today that the reality TV industry has collapsed. From April to June, reality TV production in the Los Angeles region fell by 57% compared to the same period in 2023; that’s a 50% drop over the five-year average, excluding the Covid-induced production shutdown. The immediate reasons for the dropping production are systemic to the business, Carras reports, but the change seems to represent Americans’ souring on the blurring of reality and entertainment that gave us the Trump era.
Why is it a thing to film a scene so in the dark that you can’t make anything out? Seems unnecessarily artistic to me.
Managed to get the Sunday chores done… pushed through the all over aches my bodyhas beenen experiencing for a week now… i am feeling a little better today but don’t know if that will last…
From this morning…
… we are doing a Despicable Me and Minions marathon…
Not causing harm requires staying awake. Part of being awake is slowing down enough to notice what we say and do. The more we witness our emotional chain reactions and understand how they work, the easier it is to refrain. It becomes a way of life to stay awake, slow down, and notice. (Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart)
One of the ironies of the culture of greed is that the people who profit the most from earnings they have not worked to attain are the most eager to insist that the poor and working classes can only value material resources attained through hard work. (bell hooks, All About Love)
we jump from an awareness of a distinction to the assumption of a division. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
… even the most exact sciences float above ‘axiomatic abysses’: unexamined assumptions. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
We need to recognise the limitations of intellectual analysis, and the way in which insight is achieved not just by the controlling intellect, fussily classifying and cataloguing the pieces of the jigsaw, but by a process of attunement, whereby we allow different levels of understanding and awareness to coalesce, until a picture of the whole begins to emerge. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
Human brains, however, are closely interconnected with, and embedded in, the distributed networks of culture from infancy … Humans are collective thinkers, who rarely solve problems without input from the distributed cognitive systems of culture. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
… really tired of this physical tiredness i have been experiencing this week… the humid hot weather doesn’t help…
Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
Spiritual life is first and foremost about commitment to a way of thinking and behaving that honors principles of inter-being and interconnectedness. (bell hooks, All About Love)
ultimate meaning will always lie beyond what reason can conceive or everyday language express. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
“The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and animation,” Emerson had written, “for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs.” (Maria Popova, Figuring)
In retrospect, it is evident that the emphasis on “man as enemy” deflected attention away from focus on improving relationships between women and men, ways for men and women to work together to unlearn sexism. (bell hooks, Feminist Theory)
In assessing the mechanistic view of the world, still to prevelant, McGilchrist has this to say:
A machine has clear boundaries; a natural system does not. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
‘What Zeno shows’, as philosopher George Melhuish puts it, ‘is that continuity cannot be composed of discrete elements even if there is an infinity of them.’ It has to be inhabited whole; it cannot be composed from without. Flow is an irreducible, not an emergent, element in the universe. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
Conceptualizing anything is a way of asking ‘what it can do for us’, says Bergson. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
Imagine how different our lives would be if all the individuals who claim to be Christians, or who claim to be religious, were setting an example for everyone by being loving. (bell hooks, All About Love)
Conservatives have their Eden before the fall—it usually involves strong fathers and demure women and nonexistent queer people—and liberals also have stories about when everything was uncorrupted, about matriarchal communities and Paleo diets and artisanal just about anything, from cheese to chairs. (Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names)
In a vintage frame of mind…
