Thursday, March 14, 2024
Quote of the day
Sunday, March 10, 2024
Quote of the day
Thursday, March 07, 2024
Quote of the day
"[C]onsider how much more pain is brought on us by the anger and vexation caused by such acts than by the acts themselves, at which we are angry and vexed." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Wednesday, March 06, 2024
Quote of the day
There are differences among various incarnations of "personalizations" and "assistance" offered by the tech giants, but these are trivial compared with the collective urge toward total knowledge - about your inner states, real-world context, and specific daily life activities - all in the service of successfully training the machines that they might better target market operations to each moment of life.
Tuesday, March 05, 2024
Quote of the day
"Tell yourself first of all what kind of person you want to be, and then act accordingly in all that you do." - Epictetus, Discourses 3.23
Monday, March 04, 2024
Quote of the day
Sunday, March 03, 2024
Quote of the day
"There was a time when you searched Google, but now Google searches you." - Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
This is a book with profound importance, detailing the ways that our lives and inner selves are being gobbled up by corporations to further manipulate our behavior and make money doing so. As the Guardian review linked puts it
It describes how global tech companies such as Google and Facebook persuaded us to give up our privacy for the sake of convenience; how personal information (“data”) gathered by these companies has been used by others not only to predict our behaviour but also to influence and modify it; and how this has had disastrous consequences for democracy and freedom. This is the “surveillance capitalism” of the title, which Zuboff defines as a “new economic order” and “an expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above”.
But, unfortunately, the material has to be read carefully and digested to appreciate how insidious this age of surveillance capitalism is. And we have a generation of young adults for whom the norm is having their entire lives available on-line for data tracking, without seeing any problem with it or even realizing it's happening. (The extent to which these companies gather information about our lives is vaster than almost anyone imagines, and I'm certainly not exempting myself, as I didn't realize it, either, until reading this book.)
Our right to our inner selves is one of the most fundamental, necessary rights for living a fully realized human existence. And this is now being threatened by the almost entirely unregulated behemoth that is surveillance capitalism, which has annexed all human behavior/experience as substrate for predictative models of our lives. This is not right.
Saturday, March 02, 2024
The end of America
It's surreal to me seeing someone who has lived his life as a narcissistic criminal and all around just horrible, indecent, unkind person still being described as "running for president." He is not running for president, because that would entail agreeing to abide by the election process. He has made clear that the only acceptable result of an election is for him to be the victor, no matter what the actual vote count is. So he isn't running for president: he is trying to install himself as Supreme Ruler of America, someone who is held accountable to no law but his own fiat. He is currently arguing that he is immune from all legal liability while President and asserts that every court case against him ever are by definition illegitimate. He attempted to stop the previous election, calling for an end to vote counting and declaring himself winner. He is on tape asking the Georgia Secretary of State to "find" i.e. fabricate the exact number of votes he would have needed to win the state. He refused to acknowledge his loss, resulting in the first siege of the US capitol since the War of 1812. The Confederate flag, a symbol of sedition, slavery and white supremacy was waved inside the Senate for the first time ever. These extremists, in devotion to their leader, attempted to stop the peaceful transition of the power of the Chief Executive officer of the United States for the first time in US history. A disgrace beyond description.
I feel like we're living through the Aesop fable where the frogs get bored when Zeus sends them the Rule of Law to be their king, so they ask him to send them a more exciting King, and in return he sends them a water snake. Which eats them. End of story. As Paul Woodruff put it in First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea
And so it was - and still is - when people are frustrated with the law's stupidities or delays or inconveniences. If they wish for a ruler who will rise above the law, they are offering themselves to be devoured.
Aesop commented elsewhere:
Chance shows us two roads in life; one is the road of freedom, which has a rough beginning that is hard to walk, but an ending that is smooth and even; the other is the road of servitude, which has a level beginning, but an ending that is hard and dangerous.
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
Quote of the day
"Someone despises me. That's their problem. Mine: not to do or say anything despicable. Someone hates me. Their problem. Mine: to be patient and cheerful with everyone, including them." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Sunday, February 25, 2024
Quote of the day
"You can generally be sure, whenever ideologues speak of true or serious freedom, that it will be at the expense of actual, ordinary freedom. And when the rhetoric is transcendental, the reality will probably be miserable." - Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible
Saturday, February 24, 2024
Baleful quote of the day
What’s troubling to me is the extent to which the rest of the country has just accepted that we live under the rule of theocrats in robes and there’s nothing we can do about it. Establishment politicians, media figures, and even non-theocratic judges just kind of shrug and pretend that scripture is a reasonable basis for judicial pronouncements in a free society. If these judges and justices were establishing any religion other than fundamentalist Christianity, people would lose their minds. If an Alabama court ruled that Trump had to be kicked off the ballot because he lies so much he lacks satya, and rested their opinion in quotes from the Vedas, there would be riots. The ruling would be overturned and the judges, probably, impeached.
Monday, February 19, 2024
Quote of the day
"Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value." - Albert Einstein
Via The Quotable Einstein edited by Alice Calaprice
Sunday, February 18, 2024
Stealing from the future to give to the present(ly) rich
I hear often people saying there is too much free stuff given away by the government. Almost always this ire is directed towards people on the lower end of the economic spectrum, and that this is how people have their votes purchased. What I very rarely hear spoken against, however, is the much vaster sum of money that is given to the already rich and powerful; corporations and the super-rich - people who have vastly more political influence than people who receive some form of social welfare. This is why I consider Free Lunch and Perfectly Legal by David Cay Johnston to be such important books. They detail how our economic system has been rigged across decades to transfer the nation's wealth from the many to the few, flowing money upwards like Niagra Falls in reverse, and how the wealthy benefit extensively from taxpayer subsidies.
So today I come across this: a detailed article about how corporate tax breaks are leading to the defunding of education across the nation. Read it and weep for the future: "Students lose out as cities and states give billions in property tax breaks to businesses − draining school budgets and especially hurting the poorest students."
What exactly Atlanta and other cities and states are accomplishing with tax abatement programs is hard to discern. Fewer than a quarter of companies that receive breaks in the U.S. needed an incentive to invest, according to a 2018 study by the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a nonprofit research organization.
This means that at least 75% of companies received tax abatements when they’re not needed – with communities paying a heavy price for economic development that sometimes provides little benefit.
Saturday, February 17, 2024
Quote of the day
"I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794)
Via Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell
It's still difficult for me to wrap my mind around how someone could express this kind of sentiment and end up so despised (only 6 people saw fit to attend Paine's funeral, despite him having played a significant part in the birth of the United States and generally lived as an avatar for democracy.)
People are fickle and take it personally when their beliefs are criticized; and many were inclined to see his criticism of superstition and organized religion to be corrosive to organized society. But Paine believed that "[i]nfidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what [one] does not believe."
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
Quote of the day
"There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being." - Montaigne
Via Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell
This quote compliments and extends the previously quoted quote of the day from him (and Bakewell) about living a life well.
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
Quote of the day
"The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies ... A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. " - George Eliot, "The Natural History of German Life" (1856)
Via Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell
Monday, February 12, 2024
Quote of the day
"Concedo nulli"
According to Sarah Bakewell in Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope this was "the emblem and motto of Terminus, Roman god of boundaries and limits." Sixteenth century Christian humanist Erasmus adopted this phrase as his personal motto and his friends had it inscribed on a memorial plaque when he died. It translates to "I yield to no one."
Sunday, February 11, 2024
Quote of the day
"[T]o be happy is to be good." - Aristotle, eulogy for Plato
Via Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages by Richard RubensteinTuesday, February 06, 2024
On haters
From Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
What their minds are like. What they work at. What evokes their love and admiration.
Imagine their souls stripped bare. And their vanity. To suppose that their disdain could harm anyone - or their praise help them.
There is just something so human about seeing someone who lived almost two thousand years ago struggling (recall that this is an entry in his personal journal) with dealing with toxic people in his life and reminding himself that their opinion doesn't matter.
He has another passage that compliments this one well: "It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinions than our own."Sunday, February 04, 2024
Quote of the day
"Become who you are." - Nietzsche
Via Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are by John Kaag
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
Quote of the day
"[The] man who insults me ... becomes my training partner; he trains me in patience, in abstaining from anger, in remaining gentle." - Epictetus, Discourses 3.20
Monday, January 29, 2024
Quote of the day
"Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
And he didn't even live in the age of social media, where everything is designed by social psychologists to deliberately shorten a person's attention span.
Sunday, January 28, 2024
Quote of the day
Via The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization by Arthur Herman
Saturday, January 27, 2024
Quote of the day
"When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you'll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
It's important to remember when seeing quotes from Meditations that it is written for an audience of one: he is saying this to himself. He is telling himself to make an active, conscience effort not to bear ill will towards anyone, for any reason. Putting this into practice, "you will have no enemies," Epictetus taught.
The less inclined we are to categorize people as "enemy" the better: it tends to tap into the part of human nature that wants to hate without limit.
Friday, January 26, 2024
Quote of the day
"I am not in the right place - I am not a painter." - Michelangelo, Letter To Giovanni Da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel 1509 (Gail Mazur translation)
There is just something so humanistic about an artist over 500 years ago feeling perhaps not up to a task chosen outside of his comfort zone (Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor primarily) and second guessing himself even while creating one of the greatest artistic achievements in human history.
Thursday, January 25, 2024
Quote of the day
"'My brother shouldn't have treated me in this way.' Indeed, he shouldn't, but it's for him to see to that. For my part, however he treats me, I should conduct myself towards him as I ought. For that is my business, and the rest is not my concern. In this no one can hinder me, while everything else is subject to hindrance." - Epictetus, Discourses 3.10
This is something I attempt to put into practice but sometimes have difficulty with. I find that ego and pride can get in the way. What's ironic is that often when we feel wronged by someone we retaliate in such a way that we become like the person we feel wronged by. It's why Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his journal that the best revenge is to be unlike the person who wronged you. This is quite a remarkable sentiment considering how many other Emperors were perfectly content to use their power to take the more traditional vindictive and violent revenge.
Once one can get past the ego and follow this advice, a new kind of tranquility arises. What we commonly feel to be the slight at being "treated in this way" is what Epictetus calls being hindered because you're trying to control what is not in your power to control; but if you can learn to recognize what's not in your control and let go, peace of mind can be found.
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Quote of the day
Monday, January 22, 2024
Quote of the day
"Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, 'I have been harmed.' Take away the complaint, 'I have been harmed,' and the harm is taken away." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (circa 171- 175 CE)
There are various translations of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius's journal in which he practiced his Stoicism but the gist of what he is saying here is that it is not events in themself that cause us harm, but the judgements and opinions we form that cause the harm. If you can let go of the feeling that something harms you or has happened to you, and see it instead as just something that has happened, then, as Epictetus put it "you will not be harmed."* This seems like such an obvious truth but is often easier to say than do, which is why Marcus wrote this note to himself, he is reminding himself to put this psychological technique into practice.** And, more broadly, is why Meditations is such a remarkable text: it is the personal journal of someone who at the time was one of the most powerful people on the planet, and it reveals that what he was most concerned with was not riches, fame, power, or revenge, but training himself to be a better, kinder, wiser and more just person.
*This is no coincidence. Aurelius was heavily influenced by the teachings of Epictetus.
**He reminds himself again later in the journal: "It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul, for things themselves have no natural power to form our judgements."
Sunday, January 21, 2024
Quote of the day
"Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom." - Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers from Ptahhotep to Sartre
Saturday, January 20, 2024
Quote of the day
"Through doubting we question, and through questioning we perceive the truth." - Peter Abelard
Via The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization by Arthur Herman
Friday, January 19, 2024
Quote of the day
So if you want to be beautiful for your own part, you should strive to achieve this, the excellence that characterizes a human being.
'But what is it?'
Consider who it is that you praise when you praise people dispassionately: is it those who are just, or unjust? - 'Those who are just.' - The temperate or the intemperate? - 'The temperate.' - The self-controlled or the dissolute? - 'The self-controlled.' - You should know, then, that if you make yourself a person of that kind, you'll be making yourself beautiful; but if you neglect these virtues, you're bound to be ugly, whatever techniques you adopt to make yourself appear beautiful.
- Epictetus, Discourses 3.1
Thursday, January 18, 2024
Learning something new (about Plato)
The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization by Arthur Herman which, as a partisan for Aristotle, I'm quite enjoying. (Next I will read Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages by Richard Rubenstein.)
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
Quote of the day
This quote comes via Sarah Bakewell in her magisterial book* on Montaigne, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, which is in a section of the book explaining how Montaigne drew upon the practical wisdom of the ancient Greek Stoics and Epicureans on how to live a life well.
Tuesday, January 16, 2024
Quote of the day
Monday, January 15, 2024
Quote of the day
"[Zeno] said that well-being is attained little by little, yet it is no little thing itself. Some attribute this saying to Socrates." - Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (3rd century CE)
Sunday, January 14, 2024
Putting it in perspective
Saturday, January 13, 2024
Quote of the day
Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.
The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you suppose that only to be your own which is your own, and what belongs to others such as it really is, then no one will ever compel you or restrain you. Further, you will find fault with no one or accuse no one. You will do nothing against your will. No one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you will not be harmed.
Thursday, January 11, 2024
Quote of the day
Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Tuesday, June 04, 2019
Quote of the day
Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Latest discount book buys
Thursday, March 02, 2017
Latest discount book buys
- Closing Time by Joseph Heller
- Anathem by Neal Stephenson
- Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind
- The Pillars of Creation by Terry Goodkind
- Naked Empire by Terry Goodkind
- Confessor by Terry Goodkind
- Phantom by Terry Goodkind
- Chainfire by Terry Goodkind
Had been thinking I'd like to read the sequel to Catch-22 recently, so finding this nearly pristine copy of Closing Time was a bit serendipitous. All of the Goodkind books are brand new donation copies; have never read any of this fantasy series but figured at worst case I can donate the books back for the next sale if I don't care for them.
With the addition of A Most Wanted Man, I have several le Carre novels but have yet to get around to reading any.
I find Stephenson's writing to be a bit odd, as it can be both enjoyable and incredibly tedious to finish at the same time; Anathem looks as though it will fit this pattern for me.
Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Quote of the day
Tuesday, September 13, 2016
Quote of the day
Monday, September 12, 2016
Quote of the day
via Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels by Gregory Sumner
Friday, September 02, 2016
Quote of the day
Most recent discount book buy
Saturday, July 30, 2016
Quote of the day
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Quote of the day
Thursday, April 14, 2016
More discount book buying
The Age of Uncertainty (hc) by John Kenneth Galbraith
Planet Earth (hc) by Jonathan Weiner
The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe Report (pb) by Timothy Ferris
The White Plague (hc) by Frank Herbert
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (hc) by James Gleick
The Ascent of Science (hc) by Brian Silver
The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity by Jeffrey Sachs
Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution (hc) by Steven Poole
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin (hc) by Erik Larson
A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World (hc) by Tony Horwitz
I already have a Kindle edition of Genius but will gladly add it in hardcover to my collection given my admiration for Feynman.