June 18, 2023 - by Heather Cox Richardson
That was the whole ball game. The federal government had declared that a state could not discriminate against any of its citizens or arbitrarily take away any of a citizen’s rights. Then, like the Thirteenth Amendment before it, the Fourteenth declared that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” strengthening the federal government.
Is the world heading for disaster? I suppose so. We are constantly, relentlessly, told as much. Am I hopeful for its future? Well, yes, I am. I choose to be an optimist through a kind of necessity, because from my experience pessimism is a corrosive and damaging position to take – one that casts its shadow over all things, causing a kind of societal sickness, a contaminant that ultimately amplifies and glorifies the problems it professes to abhor.
– Nick Cave
Finally got a complete print of my accordion book, 15 Days by the Sea. The show can go on! Assuming I don’t screw up with the trimming and folding. I am quitting for today to reduce the odds of that.
On the other hand, the Grad-o-gram I sent my graduating nephew made it to the refrigerator door… 1 out of 75! On the other hand, his sister graduates in 2 years and I have set the bar high. At least I have time to figure out how to match the one I sent her brother:)
My photo printer keeps locking up while I am trying to print one of my accordion fold books. A 12’ long affair. I am blowing through a $100 roll of paper with nothing to show for it. My wife has had to don the earplugs to avoid the stream of profanities.
Smaller Is Beautiful :: Essays On Attention Paid
About making yourself smaller to be part of something bigger.
From this morning’s walk…
Safeguarding music | Global Music Vault | Svalbard
Well, apparently seeds are not the only thing being preserved in the event of apocalypse…
“But if we apply to the present the lessons of the past, we realize that the reappearance of witch-hunting in so many parts of the world in the (19)’80s and (19)’90s is a clear sign of a process of primitive accumulation," which means that the privatization of land and other communal resources, mass impoverishment, plunder, and the sowing of divisions in once-cohesive communities are again on the world agenda.”
― Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch
Since the debates about technology are often just masked debates about capitalism’s inescapability, the critiques tend to resolve into the same shape, highlighting the same problematic business models, the same disregard for the populations put at risk, the same speculative frenzies, the same modes of overpromotion and distortion.
As I said, really good article…
Thanks to @baldur for sharing… good article.
It is all too easy to see them as gratuitous innovations whose imagined use cases seem far-fetched at best and otherwise detrimental to all but the select few likely to profit from imposing them on society. They make it starkly clear that the main purpose of technology developed under capitalism is to secure profit and sustain an unjust economic system and social hierarchies, not to advance human flourishing.
“10 oz plant-based beef crunmbles.”
If you are going to go vegan, go vegan. None of these “I wish I still ate meat” substitutes!
Beautiful Mind boxes? Is it possible there was more delusion than already has met the eye?
“Well, of course, there’s Cormac,” he said.
[Long pause] “But he’s in a class by himself. So let’s talk about some others.”
heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-15…
There are two ways of viewing the government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman. The other is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.
— FDR
Based on recent reading I think one could evolve a thesis that Capitalism is under threat and consequently is lashing back through a variety of channels of oppression, oppression of women being one of them, and child labor being another…
But, now, thanks to a red-hot labor market that is driving up wages, immigration bans, and an influx of unaccompanied minor children who have been released to sponsors after arriving in the U.S., child labor is on the rise.
4 rolls, 4 books, two copies each… in final production mode for Unfolding Vision, a show centered on Leporello books curated by Eleni Smolen. Opens July 08.
Specifically looking at probability distributions for text-to-text and image-to-image AI generative models, the researchers concluded that “learning from data produced by other models causes model collapse — a degenerative process whereby, over time, models forget the true underlying data distribution … this process is inevitable, even for cases with almost ideal conditions for long-term learning.”
And this…
In other words, the witch-hunt came to an end, by the late 17th century, because the ruling class by this time enjoyed a growing sense of security concerning its power, not because a more enlightened view of the world had emerged.
– Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch
This seems important to me…
… there is no evidence that the new science had a liberating effect (on the attitude towards witch hunting in the 17th century). The mechanistic view of Nature that came into existence with the rise of modern science “disenchanted the world.”
– Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch
From this morning’s walk…
After relating the history of the Civil War and Richard M. Nixon, Heather Cox Richardson concludes:
Holding a former president accountable for an alleged profound attack on the United States is indeed unprecedented, as his supporters insist. But far from being a bad thing to stand firm on the rule of law at the upper levels of government, it seems to fall into the category of “high time.”
