Repost of a Post Past
Going down the rabbit-hole of Cece’s post. Great rememberies here, following “flockers.”
Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood
Related to stuff we’re talking about.
Frank Chimero, The Shape of Design
I’ve become slightly obsessed with Frank Chimero’s talk on the purpose and philosophy of design:
To really think about design, you need to learn and think about everything other than it. Design is a vessel: the most important part is what it holds.
The first comment on the Vimeo landing is a single word: Nourishing. Such a perfect way to sum it all up.
Via: Swiss-Miss
from the moderated comments
It’s a fantastic dicovery, it’s mean that another species other than human that can understand permenantly the concept of death! But, it’s cruel, the poor gorilla is sad and because he understand it too well, he is experiencing the same desperate feeling that us when we face death … where’s the ethic ? I hope they confort him well … and that he can be a happy gorilla! :\
tweet of the day
Thomas Bernhard on Photography
«Every photograph—whoever took it, whoever is pictured in it—is a gross violation of human dignity, a monstrous falsification of nature, a base insult to humanity. [...] Photography is the greatest mockery in the world, the ultimate mockery of the world.»
More thoughts on photography & thinking, whilst reading Bernhard & Beckett in Dublin.
Three for Today (Day Two)
Troy Davis died yesterday by the hand of justice. Many factions fought both sides. When does truth lie?
shit in one hand, wish in the other, see which fills up faster
A debate is raging between philosophers and scientists over nature of free will. Neuroscientists say they can prove it is an illusion. But philosophers aren’t buying this.
Isn’t this the contemporary equivalent of asking the Pope whether the Earth is at the center of the solar system?
Genis Carreras, Philographics
– a series of posters each capturing a single philosophical ideology through simple geometric shapes.
Did Luke post this already?
(via @tcarmody)
from the moderated comments
I want a huge pint of Guinness. Now. Loved this post.
from the comments
Now I’m trying to determine just how much less a porcupine could care.
quote out of context
The tension, as I see it, is that if free will is a myth then it’s not clear why we should have an ethical goal of changing people as little as possible.
The Death of Postmodernism
means the arrival of what Kirby called pseudo-modernism in 2006:
To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more than a technologically motivated shift to the cultural centre of something which has always existed (similarly, metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishised as it was by postmodernism). Television has always used audience participation, just as theatre and other performing arts did before it; but as an option, not as a necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes have participation built into them. There have long been very ‘active’ cultural forms, too, from carnival to pantomime. But none of these implied a written or otherwise material text, and so they dwelt in the margins of a culture which fetishised such texts – whereas the pseudo-modern text, with all its peculiarities, stands as the central, dominant, paradigmatic form of cultural product today, although culture, in its margins, still knows other kinds. Nor should these other kinds be stigmatised as ‘passive’ against pseudo-modernity’s ‘activity’. Reading, listening, watching always had their kinds of activity; but there is a physicality to the actions of the pseudo-modern text-maker, and a necessity to his or her actions as regards the composition of the text, as well as a domination which has changed the cultural balance of power (note how cinema and TV, yesterday’s giants, have bowed before it). It forms the twenty-first century’s social-historical-cultural hegemony. Moreover, the activity of pseudo-modernism has its own specificity: it is electronic, and textual, but ephemeral.
I spent half the night worrying about this, particularly considering how much time I spend mucking around the internet.
[Not] the inside of my refrigerator…
from the comments
There’s more character in my freezer than in my fridge.
‘In Cookie-Monster related news’
Tim Carmody on Cookie Monster:
Not to get all Lacanian up in this mug, but it’s all about the mouth, and the regulation of desire in accordance with learning of language and letters.
Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus thought the best way to teach children how to learn the alphabet was to bake letter-shaped cookies for them to eat. I know one monster who would definitely approve.
Mysogyny, Labels, Isms, et cetera
Zach Weiner:
Part of my distrust of terms comes from a funny experience I had coming out of college. Allow me a brief digression: I went to a liberal west coast school. The kind of school where many of the kids manage to be oppressed and wealthy and socialist all at the same time. A frequent topic of discussion was the “inherent sexism” of the English language. There were two main lines of argument – 1) in English, the default pronoun is “he” 2) English contains a number of words, such as “bitch” and “pussy” that combine an insult with femaleness. So as not to digress too far, suffice it to say that I think these arguments are unconvincing. At the least, they require a lot of nuanced (even statistical) explanation in order to claim them as true. That said, this sort of thing was my impression of how “sexism” worked in society.
Then I moved to LA to get into the film business. In LA, it is considered acceptable to ask a potential secretary to send headshots. In LA, it is acceptable for a casting director to say “could you play that role blacker” as a way to say “act loud and dumb.” In LA, you hear people describe homosexuals who’ve died of AIDS as having “died of assfucking.” In LA, you hear even nice people say “women can’t be funny.” These aren’t exaggerations – these are things I experienced. Having seen these things, it was incredible for me to look back at the way that, in college, we’d parse the tiny details of language to try to locate some sexism. In Hollywood, it was real sexism, without doubt or hesitation. It was people holding back women (and other groups) actively and overtly.
It occurred to me what a bizarre thing it is that “sexism” blankets both the experience I had in college AND the experience I had in LA.
quote out of context
I think liberals, of both a libertarian, classical, liberal stripe and a more modern egalitarian stripe, see John Stuart Mill as a common ancestor, but he’s not really in the conservative pantheon. Indeed it was Mill who said, ‘While not all conservatives are stupid, all stupid people are generally conservative.’ So he was not only a liberal political theorist but a liberal Member of Parliament, and definitely not a Tory.
taking the strap to Ockham’s razor
The obvious question to ask about Ockham’s razor is: why? On what basis are we justified to think that, as a matter of general practice, the simplest hypothesis is the most likely one to be true? Setting aside the surprisingly difficult task of operationally defining “simpler” in the context of scientific hypotheses (it can be done, but only in certain domains, and it ain’t straightforward), there doesn’t seem to be any particular logical or metaphysical reason to believe that the universe is a simple as it could be.
Indeed, we know it’s not.
(via the browser)
Philosophy Referee Hand Signals
(via marginal revolution)
“The Good Book”
“When you contrast those philosophies with the great young religions — Judaism and Christianity date from only two and three thousand years ago — I saw the humanist-derived ethical outlooks tended to take their start from the most generous view of human nature, and the belief that human life is very short, and we must understand how to make good lives for ourselves,” he said in an interview. “Whereas religious systems premise themselves on relationships between man and deity.”
That focus on the deity, Mr. Grayling believes, distracts from seeking the good life in the short time we are allotted.
Amen.
The precepts in this section—many of them written in a digressive, self-serious style that reads as if Ayn Rand and Deepak Chopra had collaborated on a line of fortune cookies—are never about making money, at least not openly
There is nothing to fear from truth.
When a pack of hyenas takes down a young wildebeest, is this good or bad?
Ask yourself whether you have earned the right to have an opinion.
The pursuit of billions of dollars through aphorisms and “radical transparency.”
(via the browser)
quote out of context
The recognition that management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.
from the comments
It’s making me question my preconceptions of what pigeon-ness is.
quote out of context
“There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here,” he told us in Leviathan, “because life itself is but a motion and can never be without desire, or without fear, no more than without sense; there can be no contentment but in proceeding.”
