Small Is Beautiful is divided into four parts: “The Modern World”, “Resources”, “The Third World”, and “Organization and Ownership”.
In the first chapter, “The Problem of Production”, Schumacher argues that the modern economy is unsustainable. Natural resources (like fossil fuels), are treated as expendable income, when in fact they should be treated as capital, since they are not renewable, and thus subject to eventual depletion. He further argues that nature’s resistance to pollution is limited as well.
Growing one’s own food and not being reliant on capitalist exchange are exactly the conditions peasants were in before being forced off the land and into the factories. Of course, not everyone’s got a family farm to return to (I don’t), but a revolutionary politics urging for land return and redistribution is exactly what resistance to capitalism initially looked like. Maybe it can again.
For Arendt, the case of Rahel is also exemplary of an entire age in that two forms of necessary courage collide in her situation. On the one hand there is the progressive courage to use one’s own intelligence, and so to define oneself as a creature of reason. But there is also the courage required to acknowledge that this attempt at self-creation is always contingent on historical and cultural conditions, from which no individual can fully escape.
Making pesto in a mortar and pestle… it’s a little work but the flavor is more intense…
About Habit :: Essays On Attention Paid
… there is, of course, the occasional afternoon or evening trip to the movie house, friends for dinner, the odd cultural event… these things splash into the lake of our habits, compressing, expanding, canceling, here and there and there… the ripples shape and mold the time and space and matter around us… it takes time for attenuation to settle things back into the placid calm of the habitual…
Importantly, Evans insists – along with Marx – that the only class that could actually affect any real revolution is the proletariat. When the petite bourgeoisie agitate for change, they always stop short of revolution because they have too much to lose. The proletariat, on the other hand, by definition has nothing to lose and everything to gain. However, since the only class allied with them currently is a generally conservative class (the old petite bourgeoisie), any revolution that would happen would not be a leftist one.
From this morning’s walk…
Modern society has a lot in common with a schizophrenic patient…
As people become more like machines, machines become more like people–both in the modern world and in schizophrenia. Schizophrenic individuals often seem to inhabit the ‘uncanny valley’–a term that virtual reality and video game designers use to refer to that unsettling, liminal realm in which one is uncertain whether something or someone is alive or dead, real or unreal.
— The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist a.co/aU3khC6
Apparently it’s time to start thinking about my Halloween decorations…
From Caliban and the Witch I learned that capitalism reorganized peasant labor away from a more egalitarian split amongst men and women to one that emphasized men as laborers and women as the producers (through the womb) and caretakers of laborers. This system has prevailed since that time. Today, laborers are not exclusively men, as strength is no longer a job requirement in large swaths of the job market, and the womb is no longer required to produce laborers (think robotics and AI). This is a massive shift in the dynamics of the system. — Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh
About Habit :: Essays On Attention Paid
… this is how we dance, you and i, moving from solo to duet to solo again, in a continuous flow of the habitual…
From today…
… this article kind of blew me away… i think i saved half of it in quotes to Drafts…
Dark forces in society were intentionally “making men weak.” Transgender people lived in a “delusion.” The fight for gay rights was “corrupting the minds of youth.” It could all be summed up in a catchphrase: “reject degeneracy, embrace masculinity.”
About Habit :: Essays On Attention Paid
… we sit and eat, sometimes wrapped in our thoughts, sometimes in steady conversation… some days, you tell me you had a bad dream… i have learned not to ask for the details… i find your bad dreams too disturbing…
About Habit :: Essays On Attention Paid
… sometime during my walking, and coffee, and reading, and writing, and walking home again, you have gotten up, made the coffee, let the dogs out, fed the dogs, and turned on the news… maybe you have started to message with your friends, or to catch up on Facebook…
Just received my SealVax starter kit with two large bags and two smaller bags. Already tested it on a block of frozen broth. Seems to work well. The bags are well made. Will see how durable.
That little triangle shaped thing is the vacuum pump.
About Habit :: Essays On Attention Paid
… these summer days, my walk is a photo meditation up and down Main Street… i have been photographing the same mile and a half of sidewalk, street and store fronts for years now… the possibilities are more inexhaustible than you would think…
Switched from Optimum to Verizon FIOS, canceled Optimum. Had to be pretty forceful and blunt to rebuff their attempts to keep me. My position, you should have been giving me your best price all along. And, your best price isn’t any better than FIOS. Goodbye Felicia.
About Habit :: Essays On Attention Paid
Habit is far more dependable than inspiration. Make progress by making habits. Don’t focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout. –Kevin Kelly
… you and i are habit, both individual and coupled… we have taken this advice to heart…
From yesterday…
… today i started to build my music collection in Bandcamp… i have decided that i want to pay artists decently for their music and that i get overwhelmed by the unlimited nature of other streaming services… i want to be limited… i want to choose the music i have available to me carefully…
August 6, 2023 - by Heather Cox Richardson
And then, on August 1—last Tuesday—the Department of Justice charged Trump under laws Congress passed during Reconstruction to protect the Black Americans’ political rights. Trump is charged with conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding—violating a law passed to stop Ku Klux Klan terrorists from breaking up official meetings in the late 1860s—and obstructing that proceeding: the counting of electoral votes.
August 6, 2023 - by Heather Cox Richardson
That resolve did not hold. In the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act. Republican-dominated states immediately found ways to keep minority voters from the polls and their votes from being counted, and in 2020, then-president Trump tried to throw out the votes of people in majority Black districts in order to overturn the results of that year’s presidential election.
August 6, 2023 - by Heather Cox Richardson
On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act to guarantee Black Americans the right to vote.
From yesterday…
