Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Saeed's private blog
tiny.cc/CodepenG
3.22.18
  • Joshua B. Freeman: Behemoth - History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. There are comments on 'stealing' of technologies (italy -> Britain -> US) Late night live
6.18.18
6/4/18
  • David Christian on Big ideas (nov 17)
    • Walter Scheidel
    • 2 levels
      • last 5000 years
      • prior to last 5000 (200K, and geological)
    • last 5000
      • class surplus vs personal surplus
      • energy sequestration
      • collective learning
      • 10% rule (emergence of hierarchy)
      • trophic levels
    • last 500
      • capitalism, industrialization etc
      • ability of growth to raise 90% along with 10%
      • collective learning
    • next 100
      • inability of growth to sustain
      • inability of growth to raise 90% along with 10%
  • Jim Holt (1 hr, 2015?, ny sceptics podcast)
    • Derek Parfit (explanation)
    • explanatory hierarchy, ascend (to what)
    • John Archibald Wheeler (participatory universe)
    • ideas generated from discussion
      • reactionary intellectualism (as opposed to anti-; need to develop further)
      • what's the revolt against post-modernism all about?
        1. defend reason, rationality and empiricism against an attack of nihilistic cynicism?
        2. Defend values of Western Culture
        3. A polemic against the left
6/5/18
  • Yanus Farokakas on Late Night live
    • hi-surplus and lo-surplus countries conflict in EU
  • Democracy options BL show
    • weighted voting
    • Dambisa Moyo, global economist and the author of Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth and How to Fix It (Basic Books, 2018), argues that most voters are ill-informed on economic issues and offers some proposals to correct for that.
6.8.18
  • How neoliberalism ate itself, on LNL
    • "D:\media\lnl_20180606.mp3" "D:\media\lnl_20180605.mp3"
    • Richard Denniss
    • there are great countries where there is less privatization, low taxes, hi social welfare (Sweden, Denmark)
  • Evangelicals
    • "D:\media\lnl_20180605.mp3"
    • lefty: soujourners, james wallaces, shane clayburn
    • righty: franklin graham, jerry falwell jr, james dobbs
6.10.18
  • Genes on afteron
    • "D:\media\genes on afteron.mp3"
    • robert green
    • medseq project
    • storage approaching youtube like limits
    • toxicity of information
    • complex common diseases
    • preconception planning
    • unnoticed fragments of genetic disease
    • francis collins
  • Reality isn't on afternon
    • don hoffman
    • "D:\media\Don_Hoffman_FINAL.mp3"
    • Observer theory
    • gravitational lensing (paradox)
    • slit experiment (particle knows)
    • roger sperry work on split brain
    • local realism
    • john bell
    • Mind/body
      • conciousness to materialism
      • relations between conscious agents
      • genetic algorithms
    • panpsychism
6.11.18
  • Korea
    • "D:\media\TheForum-20161126-KoreaTwoCountriesOnePast.mp3"
    • 10th through 20th century (from 3 kingdoms to K-pop, Korean Wave)
    • three dynasties (two about 500 yrs long till 1910
    • Korean script
    • Japan->WWII->Soviet U/ US -> 1948 two countries
    • 1950 invasion by north
    • 1946 land reform
  • Transgenic humans
    • "D:\media\bia_20180611.mp3"
    • Uncanny valley
    • Patricia Piccinini: In Our Image
    • chimera
    • Crispr
    • Gene drive
    • Cyborg foundation
    •             'The real problem of humanity is the following: 
            we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; 
            and god-like technology' (E.O Wilson, 2009)
    • transgenic humans and other forms
ideas
  • Kant to:
    • afteron don hoffman- unobserved world doesn't exist
    • Chomsky (on Bryan Magee) - unobserved world inaccessible
  • philosophy
    • paradoxes, boundaries, contradictions
6.12.18
  • Iliad
    • "D:\media\TheForum-20161203 iliad.mp3"
6.19.18
  • Balzac
    • New books in history Allan Pascoe
    • degeneration, in family in church turn of 18th to 19th centuries
    • focus on short stories (e.g. Flaubert, Zola, Hugo, Sand)
6.23.18
  • Plotonius
    • 'D:\media\pze_20110611.mp3
    • One; intellect; soul; material/body
  • Prof Ken Gemes on Nietzsche
    • "D:\media\Nietzsche on the Value of Truth-sWBIFavfCtM.mp3"
    • Truth vs Myth
    • Do we value truth?
    • Should we value truth
    • Truth not necessary for utility (can use just some predictive model that is good enough)
    • http://www.bbk.ac.uk/philosophy/our-staff/academic_staff/gemes-work/NietzscheAbstract
    • http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/on-the-tragedy-of-life/
    • https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/16895/JenkinsS_JHP_50(2)265.pdf;sequence=1
  • Erich Fromm and others
    • "D:\media\Erich Fromm on Sigmund Freud - Man is not a thing (1962).mp3"
    • Unconscious in Spinoza and in Nietzsche
  • Metamodernism and "Just do it" (compare to the 'illuminator' on epistemic unruliness 1)
    • "D:\media\metamodernism.mp3"
  • Esoteric (perinneal) Phil
    • "D:\media\SHWEP-Episode-1.mp3"
    • higher truth; soul; access via knowing beyond knowing (connect to Wittgenstein 1 and 2)
    • Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Gnoscis
    • Pagels, Jonas, and Nag Hamadi
    • Correspondence to Berlin 1 (dominant), 2 (serve 1) and 3 (punt)
    • Greeks; Augustine; Aquinas, Descartes, Rationalists, Empiricists, Kant, later stuff
6.28.2018
  • Rabinow Stanford lecture 2014
    • "D:\media\Paul Rabinow_ 2014 Stanford Contemporary Colloquium-RCHnukYZcG0.mp3"
    • http://anthropos-lab.net/
    • assemblages, affordances, gerhard richter, nachleben
  • Talking Politics podcast
    • Jill Lepore ("D:\media\lepore.mp3")
    • Judith Butler
  • Entitled opinions "Dan final"
    • "D:\media\danfinal.mp3"
    • where do rights come from
    • can moral laws be accessed via reason (implication for universality)
    • Natural law: God; reason; aquinas; calvin
    • Law of might; law of god; consequentialism; utilatarian; existential; categorical imperative
    • State(tyranny, protection, provider)
    • rights; privileges; benefits
    • Universal rights 1948 (where do you draw the line?)
  • Oblivion of India
    • "D:\media\pze_20180617.mp3"
    • The argumentative indian
    • Western apps (Ferguson)
    • stuff (material) moving through time
  • Wendy Brown on neoliberalism
    • "D:\media\Wendy Brown. In the account of Neoliberalism. 2016.mp3"
    • Neoliberal capitalism (marx)
    • neoliberal governmentality (focault)
    • both obscure
    • stand in the middle to draw out
    • thoughts: markets as truth; price manifests this truth
7.4.18
  • Linda Yueh on Brian Lehrer
    • "D:\media\bl060718dpod.mp3"
    • Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, Frederich Hayek David Ricardo, Joan Robinson, Joseph Schumpeter, Irving Fisher, Milton Friedman, Alfred Marshall, Douglass North, Paul Samuelson.
  • Cohen
    • "D:\media\CohenMixSes.mp3"
    • Cohen talks democracy and inequality
7.6.18
  • Arts and Ideas - philosophers
    • D:\media\ArtsAndIdeas-20180607-PodcastBernardHenriLevyEdithHallAndSimonCritchley.mp3"
    • Why philosophy
    • From people-watching with Aristotle in a London park, to meeting in a luxury hotel at midnight to discuss the fate of a continent, to using a lunchtime five-a-side game as the starting point for a meditation on the human condition, this programme treats 'philosophy' as a verb rather than a noun. Bernard-Henri Lévy is in London to perform a one-man play on Brexit. Simon Critchley's new book is What We Think About When We Think About Football, and Edith Hall's is Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life. Shahidha Bari talks to each of them about bringing philosophy out of the academy.
    • platitudes, pedagogies, polemics, and paradoxes
    • Fallacious appeals
    • appeal to emotions
    • Fallacies from Nizkor site
  • Milikan on New Books in Philosophy
    • "D:\media\162philosophymillikan.mp3"
    • Kant famously asked the question, how is knowledge possible? In her new book, Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information (Oxford University Press, 2018), Ruth Garrett Millikan responds to this question from a naturalistic, and specifically evolutionary, perspective. Millikan, who is distinguished professor emerita at the University of Connecticut, has long been a leading figure in theorizing about language and thought. Her latest work considers the “clumpy” world that organisms confront and the problem of how we recognizing the same distal objects and properties again, as well as their kinds and categories. Our cognizing machinery includes unitrackers, whose job it is to track these items and channel information of the same item to one place, called a unicept. Although each of us has distinct unitrackers and unicepts, they can be attached to the same word in a public language, which itself is a lineage of reproduced signs.
    • To Ruth Millikan from Ahmed_wyo: 1. In a clumpy world, if a unitracker is a process in a person’s mind that unifies objects (such that the person can identify objects as the same, or the same type, and differentiate them from other types), and a unicept is what the unitracker feeds into, then what is being fed (i.e. what is at the starting end)? 2. It seemed to me that somehow your ideas are related to Kant’s but couldn’t fully make the connection, but one relation I thought was to the notion of ‘synthetic apriori’ (whereby the unicept/unitracker process would allow for the possibility of synthetic apriori judgements to exist). I am not sure I am on the right track?
    • "Consider, for example, our knowledge that two plus three is equal to five and that the interior angles of any triangle add up to a straight line. These (and similar) truths of mathematics are synthetic judgments, Kant held, since they contribute significantly to our knowledge of the world; the sum of the interior angles is not contained in the concept of a triangle. Yet, clearly, such truths are known a priori, since they apply with strict and universal necessity to all of the objects of our experience, without having been derived from that experience itself. In these instances, Kant supposed, no one will ask whether or not we have synthetic a priori knowledge; plainly, we do. The question is, how do we come to have such knowledge? If experience does not supply the required connection between the concepts involved, what does? " (ref)
7.6/18
  • zero podcast (#156) - 1848
    • Pam Nogales is a PhD History Candidate at New York University, a member of the Platypus Affiliated Society, and a co-host of the Shit Platypus Says podcast
    • 1815, 1830, 1848, PC
    • Hosbawm book
    • Horne on paris commune
    • Marx and Mazzini
  • Zero podcast on hypermodernism (#155)
    • Postmodern -> Hypermodern (digital)
    • 'John David Ebert is the author of nearly 20 books, a youtuber responsible for over 500 videos on philosophy, and a blogger at cultural-discourse.com. This week he is also the guest on this podcast. We discuss his essay On Hypermodernity.''
    • lyotard - postmodern condition (dissolution of metanarratives)
    • Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on KnowledgeTranslation from the French by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
    • In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (Untimely Meditations) by Byung-Chul Han
    • 'A boost in web users was triggered in September 1993 by NCSA Mosaic, a graphical browser which eventually ran on several popular office and home computers.[87] This was the first web browser aiming to bring multimedia content to non-technical users, and therefore included images and text on the same page, unlike previous browser designs;[88] its founder, Marc Andreessen, also established the company that in 1994, released Netscape Navigator, which resulted in one of the early browser wars, when it ended up in a competition for dominance (which it lost) with Microsoft Windows' Internet Explorer. Commercial use restrictions were lifted in 1995. The online service America Online (AOL) offered their users a connection to the Internet via their own internal browser.' (from wikipedia history of internet article, accessed 7.6.18)
    • Marshall Mcluhan Full lecture: The medium is the message 1, 2, 3,
7.9.18
  • syllabus: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/history/winter/w3206/edit/course_syllabus.html (WW1 -> WW2)
  • Was Hegel a Romantic? [and what is romanticism]
    • It's complex; labels can be misleading, and arguments can be made both ways. "Romanticism" emerged in the 18th century in art, literature and thought, and engaged many thinkers. Hegel, a great thinker himself, of course would be greatly influenced by his forebears and contemporaries, as he went through the process incorporating, critiquing, and expanding their thougths.
    • No: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10509585.2016.1190098?journalCode=gerr20
    • yes: https://mises.org/library/hegel-and-romantic-age
    • Romantic Chess: 'a style of chess which emphasized quick, tactical maneuvers rather than long-term strategic planning' (from wikipedia accessed 7.9.18)
    • Carlyle: 'heroworship'
    • nationalism
    • emphasis on 'unification' and respect for nature vs. empiricism in sciences (Fichte, Schelling)
    • self-understanding
    • Hegel's triads (see WT jones)
  • Nietzsche
    • Birth of Tragedy (1872) - apollinian and dionysian synthesis in Greek tragedy
    • On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense -> postmodernism
    • Philosophy in the Tragic Age of Greeks ("C:\Users\Ahmed\OneDrive\books and articles\books\Friedrich_Nietzsche - Philosophy_in_the_Tragic_Age_of_the_Greeks_(tr._Marianne_Cowan_1996).pdf") - focuses on 5 presocratics: " [philosophers] always have one wholly incontrovertible point: personal mood, color. They may be used to reconstruct the philosophic image, just as one may guess at the nature of the soil in a given place by studying a plant that grows there" and "The only thing of interest in a refuted system is the personal element"
    • Untimely meditations (1876) - essays on David Strauss, History, Schopenhauer and Wagner ("C:\Users\Ahmed\OneDrive\books and articles\books\Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997).pdf") " 'Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.' "
    • Human, All too Human (1879) - start of 'aphoristic style'
    • Gay Science (1882) - nod to the troubadors (Provencal knight poets); ' God is dead'; "the 'realists' who congratulate themselves on having the measure of human unreason and self-deception are usually themselves in the grip of some ancient fantasy (from intro in translation)"; "Eternal Recurrence "; value of truth
    • Zarathustra (1883+); giannina braschi - united states of banana
    • Beyond Good and Evil - expands the ideas of his previous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with a more critical and polemical approach (1886); "SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman--what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women--that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Certainly she has never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged men"
    • On the Geneology of Morals (1887); ll those who feel disenfranchised and powerless in a situation of subjugation and physical impotence (e.g., slavery), develop a deep and venomous hatred for the powerful. Thus originates what Nietzsche calls the "slave revolt in morality"
    • Twilight of the Idols - short intro to Nietzsche (1888) and looking ahead to 'reevaulation of all values' (exhaltation of life as opposed to suffering) (1, 2)
    • The Antichrist (1895) - on decadence, christian pity, priests/philosophers, scientific method, christian god, buddhism; Origins of Christianity
    • Ecco Homo (1888) - kind of an autobiography; reviews many of his own works. Contents: "why I am so wise; why I am so clever; why I write such excellent books; why I am a fatality"
    • On music and words (1)
    • Wagner books (case of...; contra...)
    • 'Instaurators' Ludovici and others (1)
  • Gustave Le Bon 'The Crowd'
    • According to George Mosse (now deceased historian at the University of Wisconsin), Le Bon 'believed that the substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activities of individual was the the principal characteristic of his age. He went on to ...emphasizing the effect upon crows of the theaterical imagination, of appeals to glory, honor and patriotism, and above all, of its need for leaders whose intensity gave power to their words -- leaders who must not be innovative but share the sentiments of the crowd and express its sentiments and feelings.' Previously this approach to crowds had been used by George Boulanger in France to overthrown the Republic of France at the time (France has gone through a number of 'republics' alternating with authoritarian rule since 1789), but more importantly perhaps Le Bon's ideas were used by Hitler and Mussolini, and you can see echoes of how they are being used now in our time here in the US, in various countries of the European Union, and in other parts of the world. [https://amzn.to/2N0ZgaM] Note the date is 1890 when this synthesis was provided, well before so called 'fascism' was formulated. It is claimed that we are in a time where we don't have crowds, but 'swarms'; the difference being that crowds have a centralizing tendency even when they are disorganized, whereas swarms do not, being made up rather of atomized individuals who interact with each other in a fragmented and superficial way. [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/swarm] My fear is that swarms may be more susceptible to the Le Bon effect than crowds, but we'll see.
  • George Mosse - The Culture of Western Europe
  • Kant's four Qs (3 in pure reason, one elsewhere)
7.14.18
7.19.18
7.21.18
    • 7.22.18
    • 1968
      • search of key terms
      • "D:\media\ideas-GWzpKcsA-20180503.mp3"
      • The student-led protests of May 1968 on the streets of Paris dominated the news of the day and have since entered the realm of popular mythology. Contributor David Zane Mairowitz was there. He was, as he puts it, an observer-participant, documenting the myth as it was being made — not only in Paris, but in other epicentres of protest: San Francisco, New York, and London. The exhilaration and the revolutionary fervour also had a darker, violent side, he shows. In the end, May 1968 was as much about social change as it was a publicity stunt for itself. David Zane Mairowitz is a dramatist and documentary radio maker living in France
      • Bamn: Outlaw Manifestos And Ephemera 1965-70
        • Diggers of SF
    • Mona Lisa and the Symbolists
    • Holbrook Jackson - the 1890s (in Art)
    • aurignacians and german mythology
    • venus lower paleolithic
    • Taiping rebellion ("D:\media\Platt_Taiping_FINAL_MP3_1-2013.mp3")
    • Steven Brill ("D:\media\Steven_Brill_edited_6_22.mp3")
    • Marco Polo ("D:\media\ideas-hUkRIiSF-20180605.mp3")
    • Sokol affair and postmodernism ("D:\media\Did the Sokal affair _destroy postmodernism__-Rnmfe6qskRY.mp3")
    7.24.18
      Truth
    • Coherence/correspondence/acceptance/pragmatic
    • why do we need to go beyond the two c's; important things are there (Berlin's third category)
    • Synthetic apriori wasn't even thought to be possible, but then it was really important, maybe the most important of the four types of propositions
    • synthetic apriori and aesthetics
    • Charles Taylor on CBC ("D:\media\bia_20160929_2005 charles taylor on big ideas.mp3")
      • identity politics
      • [1. vector of western civ positive aspects][threats]
      • 1. Two visions: 1. Based on some nationalistic or other concept from point in past, 2. Diversity
      • 2. internal ('elites'; 'jews'), external, perceived 'other'
      • Malignant forces and polarization in our societies
      • hijab/headscarf vs. ten commandments statue (imposing on someone else)
    • Kathy Acker
      • "D:\media\Unpopped-20180226-TheSpiceGirlsAndKathyAcker.mp3"
      • "D:\media\bw920831Kathy_Acker.mp3"
    • Isaiah Berlin
      • Isaiah Berlin's last available interview (on Swedish TV in 1997, a few months before his death) is a revelation. I got curious about Berlin after listening to him talk to Bryan Magee (I have previously posted about that). There he categorized three types of questions; and it was the third type (those which can't be answered empircally or rationally) which interested me most. In his last interview, he develops certain themes relevant to that, but also discusses or raises a few other questions: 1. What is it to be human [the importance of 'choice'?] 2. What is the role of the philosopher [to understand] 3. Is there a difference between 'universal values' [shared vision] and 'absolute values' [values from some absolute metaphysical place]? 4. What are two uses of the word 'freedom', and what are the implications of these [how many paths are open to me, that I control]? As can be expected, even after more than 20 years, his discourse remains highly topical today. There is a little bit of Swedish in the audio, but I actually found this somehow added to the experience, even though I didn't understand most of it.
      • "D:\media\berlin\Thinkers of Our Time - Isaiah Berlin-p8jxEnNHksY.mp3"
      • on pcloud
      • the Age of Enlightenment
    7.26.18
    • Shashi Tharoor
      • Tharoor argues that Britain deliberately created and encouraged divisions in a society which remain until this day, demonstrated most dramatically by the partition of 1947
      • "D:\media\lnl_20180718_2205.mp3"
    • Jean Rhys
    • Doris Lessing
    • Clive james (autobiography) - "D:\media\Bookclub-20171231-CliveJames.mp3"
    • Jennifer Egan (goon squad) - "D:\media\Bookclub-20171203-JenniferEganDiscussesHerPulitzerPrizeWinningNovelAVisitFromTheGoonSquad.mp3"
    7.29.18
    • Fichte
    • Critical theory
      • see the great courses lecture set from Markos
      • Critical theory is a maligned discipline. It makes the likes of Jordan Peterson's head explode... But remember after deconstruction, [almost always] the critiqued structures and discourses remain. The only thing the critiques have done is a kind of dance, a performance, occasionally good, sometimes aweful, and usually bad that stands in for something that is missed, a path that is blocked or a loss of control over something vital (8.1.18)
      • Critical theory converted videos from youtube ("D:\media\critical theory short mp3s")
    8.1.18
    • Hindu Nationalism and Raj

      ideology (Hindutva)
      charismatic leader (Modi)
      spiritual leader (Modi)
      https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjPxva6WsAUhl1U.jpg
      A century ago, it was different
      http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/modernworldhistorytextbook/imperialism/section_4/riseofnationalism.html

      While the Muslim and Hindu couldn't ultimately agree on a permanent solution, the bogeyman was British, and main source of tension was the two hundred year old rule that he had imposed.

      Was this empire good or bad for India?
      The answer to this question has wide implications for how the legacy of colonialism is viewed now, not just in the Indian Subcontinent but elsewhere where colonial regimes ruled in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and (still do) in islands in the Pacific and the Atlantic.

      One way to frame this is to have two experts provide diverging opinions; Niall Ferguson and Shashi Tharoor do just that. Though the two podcasts below are some years apart and the two public intellectuals are not directly talking to each other, the tension that is perceived after listening to these back to back can be quite intense, which for me at times had noticeable effects on knots in my back and neck, and in visceral reactions in my stomach and chest.

      D:\media\lnl_20180718_2205.mp3"
      Shashi Tharoor
      https://amzn.to/2AxvuJz

      https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1231547
      https://amzn.to/2v8YhPq
      Niall Ferguson

    • Why philosophy

      Absolute truth - No
      most important questions not answered

      enduring questions - why

      pragmatic - science

      Freud
      Darwin

      Nietzche
      takes a dump

      discourse of a discourse - no
      autism (analytic), narcissitic (continental), both obscure

      -because--
      universal vs absolute

      flip the above

      perspective, color, texture to the picture

      limits of knowledge

      layers of a very large onion.

      Never ending in expanse and in between.

    8.11.18
    8.19.18
    • Brian Lehrer show summary of the 8's
      • Beats
      • "D:\media\bl081718_eights_pod.mp3"
    • LNL including Alt-right hx
      • 'Cultural marxism' invented by alt-right in 1990s
      • Conspiracy theories
      • Author David Neiwert, "America's canary in the coalmine", has been sounding the alarm on the rise of the radical right for more than thirty years. Here's what he's learnt about Alt-America.
      • "D:\media\lnl_20180816.mp3"
    • LSE
      • Russian theater of media
      • Conspiracy theories
      • "D:\media\20180815_lseiq_ep17_newColdWar_plp.mp3"
      • http://www.lse.ac.uk/iga/people/peter-pomerantsev
      • http://www.lse.ac.uk/lse-player?id=4497
    8.23.18
    • LNL episode on Shakespeare's library
      • MP3
      • Imagine a man living in a time when access to the wonders of literature of the ages across many regions has become possible, yet also a time of cycles where one's consciousness is shaped by diurnal, lunar and seasonal rhythms, and by pagan and christian influences. For this man, experience forms as much from the works of Ovid, Plutarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer, as from the cadences of the old and new testaments, from the festivals and feasts which occurred every few weeks, from the inns and taverns he frequents, and the stages he occupies. It is a time when bards and playwrites compete with each other for patrons and audiences, while they freely steal (not 'steal' then for this practice was accepted, even encouraged) from each other's works. He is a precocious and astute man, interested in works of wisdom and beauty that came before his own, who has the sensitivity to perceive much that forms the core of human relationships, and the talent to convey what he knows in forms of writing that both speak to audiences of his day and those who are to come.
      • Stuart Kell's book
      • Book on weird Shakespeare decoder
    • Irish writers
      • mp3
      • episode
      • Colm Toibin, Anne Enright, John Banville, Colum McCann
    8.24.18
    8.27.18
    8.28.18
    • There is a meme that capitalism always works, and socialism always fails. Much can be said for this, and about this, yet unfortunately most of what is actually said far more often generates heat rather than light. Many lines of historic and theoretical analysis are often provided to support this claim; one of the most common forms of evidence is the example of the old Soviet system, which collapsed in 1989. Why did it collapse? What was it? What indeed; this second question is perhaps the more fundamental one. Two podcasts explore this (and other questions) in very different ways. Janos Kornai is a Hungarian economist, whom I heard about in the "rationally speaking" podcast's 51st episode featuring Joseph Heath. Heath spoke about Kornai's 1992 book "The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism". What's special about this book? Well, it describes describes both the edifice and its failures, particularly showing how a fairly complex system can be established for production and distribution of goods, without a market, and function for a time. This episode did not otherwise explore this, so I went elsewhere and found the first of my highlighted podcasts (https://soundcloud.com/user-617631673/slow-convergence-eastern-european-economies-after-1989). The second podcast (https://soundcloud.com/thecasualacademic/the-russian-post-modern-condition-in-venedikt-erofeevs-moscow-to-the-end-of-the-line). I wanted to mention that explores this is episode 5 of the Casual Academic podcast, which features Venedikt Erofeev's prose-poem (or as the podcasters call a 'poema')"Moscow to the End of the Line". The method here is one of cultural exploration, examining the response of intellectuals to a system that was full of frustrations and contradictions. Erofeev (https://theculturetrip.com/europe/russia/articles/venedikt-erofeev-the-lost-genius-of-soviet-literature/) in particular, who in his poema, did for his system what in 1922, fin de siecle intellectual Karl Kraus (with "Last Days of Mankind") and the great 20th century poet TS Eliot (in the "Wasteland" ; https://genius.com/1708983) did for theirs, which was not so much to describe it, but to immerse us in it, as much as literature can do that for us.
    • Ezra pound's 'make it new'
    • africa congo ; mp3
    8.29.18
    9.2.18
    • Sign/Signifier/Signified/Saussure theory big in humanities departments. Why have philosophers not reached agreements after repeated attempts to apply their collective thoughts, facts based on experience, theorems based on reason, axioms based on reasonable starting positions. Well the drunken philosophers say it's ok. They could be wrong and so could you. Signs that people rely on are usually never the same (for the same signfied). The signifers used may have different meanings, or the signified may be experienced differently. Forms vs. particulars (is there an ideal triangle, or just a bunch of specific triangles). Well how we talk about triangles whether some sort of unifying notion at least. What's the ideal triangle? What's the ideal penis? (see how that slighly changes things, but adding some ludeness into the mix) MP3

      More: More on the semantic’s podcast. How did the discussion go for semantics to AI and cloning. It had something to do with signifiers and signified and how what is meant can very depending on who is speaking and who is being spoken of. What are some different types of ‘creatures’? In the old world, there were ghosts, spirits and chimera; demons, angels, and jinn. What about literary characters? Don’t writers often speak of characters ‘taking over’? What is going on there? The most likely explanation is probably attributed to the workings of the authors subconscious, but what if multiple authors write about the same character? What happened to Helen of Troy, as she moved through the imaginations and writings of Homer, through the fifth century Greek dramatists, to the renaissance, to the romantics to the moderns? Where was she (as pointed out in the proms plus episode XXXX) after being interpreted by SO many men? What happens when we add AI to the mix. Let’s feed all the texts that mention a particular character and let AI form further narratives? What would emerge from that? Would we have some sort of autonomous character? What are the modern chimeras, ghosts, spirits and demons? If we are able to upload all of someone’s memories, skills and automatisms (all the functions of the conscious and unconscious mind) into the ‘cloud’, and then download and three-D print this consolidated packet of information, thus creating a clone. What would the relationship be to the original? Would the relation change when the original dies? What if there is more than one copy? What about androids? Cyborgs (combos)? Drones (genetically created biological organisms that have very low-IQ but certain human like characteristics allowing them to do special tasks very well, such as repetitive tasks that machines can’t do very well yet (not sure if that is a shrinking subset or not)

    • Types of humor (superiority: aristotole; relief: Freud/Spencer; incongruity; Kant, Schopenhauer, others) MP3
    • Indonesia lit : Beauty is a wound
    • ecstatic states Evernote
    • Auden and Romany (Gypsies)

      Auden Some years ago I tried to read sections of the “Shropshire Lad”, by W. H. Auden. It was not accessible to me at the time. I am not sure why that is; i.e. why it is that some can derive so much from a work, while others (like me) derive virtually nothing. I can guess that it was some deficiency in me that created this barrier, which I didn’t have the tools of perspecacity or sensitivity to penetrate. I left Auden then, and didn’t approach him again till today, when i listened to an episode of Proms Plus, which featured two writers, one a poet and the other a novelist, who shared perspectives on both Auden and his work, in this case primarily one of his major works, “The Age of Anxiety”. This discussion was paired with a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s work inspired by this poem. While each clearly a fan of Auden, neither one of the two discussants felt the work was perfect. This somehow opened it up for me, because clearly I felt the distance between myself and Auden. Having heard part of the discussion, I was able to listen to the passages they read on air with a little more confidence, and I honestly claim, they did speak to me.

      Romany For almost a thousand years, in many parts of Europe, people who originated in the Indian subcontinent have formed communities that sometimes settle, sometimes roam, both influencing and being influenced

    9.4.18
    • Much of the history of the world over the last four centuries, up until about the middle of the 20th century was a history of colonialism, because during this period most of the world was either a colonizer or a colony; very few places didn't fall into this dyanmic. The empires that represented the colonizers begain to fall apart in the early 20th century, particularly after WWI with it's losers, and then in after WWII with most of the remaining ones, even the victors of both world wars. We don't talk much of colonial legacies now, but many of grew up and came of age during this era are still with us, and these legacies continue to affect all of us in many ways. What are these legacies and how do they affect us? Three perspectives are provided in podcasts that feature N.F, S.T (see above) and Min Jin Lee. Ferguson and Tharoor primarily discuss the British empire, and have decidedly different perspectives. Ferguson has a 'balance-sheet approach', which Tharoor categorically rejects, and provides his rationale for so doing with an expose of the British Raj in India. Min Jin Lee takes a different approach (a novel), and illuminates the legacy of a different type of colonialism, that which occurred primarily in the early 20th century when Japan was in its expansionist phase. Not blessed with a abundance of arable land, felt that it needed places to grow food. Korea, separated from Japan by a strait, provided such a place. According to Min Jin Lee colonial powers often require a cultural justification to take from others, and the effects of this justification is what her book is about. Besides being an accomplished author, she is an exceptionally interesting interviee and reader of her own work (this is not always the case even with great authors; sorry T.S. Elliott and James Joyce). Her presence made the episode of Radio times on which she was featured particularly interesting.
    • Life to come; An australian novel about writing
    • Beauty is a wound; a multi-gen novel about Indonesia
    9.5.18
    • Recently Alex Jones and Steve Bannon have been 'platformed', by major social media companies and by the New Yorker magazine, respectively. Events of this type raise the question about free speech. Despite the absence of true 'free speech' everywhere objections can be raised to platforming of this sort. Free speech is restricted by various statutes (e.g. those against libel, incitement and decency), by natural security concerns, by conventions and manners, and its limits can on who the restricting party (private or government) is. Very few would argue that the right of making spurious 911 calls or of shouting 'FIRE' in a crowded theater should be protected, but where is the line? These issues are raised in the Zero Books podcast's episode 165 (link)
    9.6.18
    • There were three things I listened to today at the gym: On late night live, I heard about Russian billionaries; also on LNL, I heard about the Wilheminian Germany; lastly, I heard Alan Kors talk about Deism and Voltaire
      1. Billionaries

        We can draw parallels between the Russian billionaries (subject of this podcast) and the bollygarchs of india posted previously

        (posted on LNL [here]-- Interesting topic today on Russian oligarchs. One can draw parallels with the Indian billionaires (or "Bollygarchs"), which were discussed a few days ago on LNL. It's amazing how we seem to be circling back to a new kind of feudalism in different parts of the world, where elites roam in their own circles, have their own rules, and create vast networks of power, control, and patronage. "Vassals" in our era (most of the rest of us) must increasingly live in a world where we are becoming dependent on these networks, and thus their subjects. )

        Schimpfossel's book ((LINK)
      2. Wilhelmine Germany

        We can draw parallels between today's podcast, the 'Belle Epoque' (posted previously) and the Fin-de-Siecle

        The Bohemian Countess's book (link)

      3. Deism and Voltaire

        Postive deism (sort of like intelligent design) and negative deism (critique of other views, e.g. sectarian religions). General providence vs. particular providence. Voltaire's views on Deism

          Four purposes of religion (according to me):
        1. Explanation for existence of world as it is
        2. Moral foundation
        3. Belonging
        4. transcendance

        Voltaired probably would have endorsed 1 and 2, was against three (in its versions leading to sectarianism), and I am not sure how he felt about #4.

    9.7.18

    • https://www.udacity.com/courses/all (search free and beg/int) x x x x x x x x x x

    9.7.18 
      Borges

what was he doing?

Relationship to QM and Einstein

cosmic inflation and infinities (check email to ilya)
(1979- about 1 nanometer to 10.6 lightyears in a duration of about 10^-32 seconds)

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-different-types-of-infinity-in-mathematics#

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26261-hugh-everett-the-man-who-gave-us-the-multiverse/

Borges argenitan on cbc
(link to episode 1)
(link to episode 2) 

author's unconscious producing a work ((podcast))
      9.8.18
      • 'The most secretly interesting place in America', where the Southern Wind blows through the middle of downtown, over the widely carved street after series of urban renewals, which in 1889, the federal government allowed to come into existence in a land grab, which itself was celebrated by its inhabitants for generations despite the mayhem it cause for almost 20 years before Oklahoma became a state. This is the story that Sam Anderson tells in his book.
      9.10.18
      • Shakespeare and Company. Previously, I wrote about a podcast on 'Shakespeare's library,'' which shed light into the potential sources of his inspiration, which included some of the great works in Western listerature available at the time (Ovid, Horace, Chaucer, Spencer, Dante, and others). Another place that he drew inspiration was his milieu, in a time of relative stability (during the reign of Elizabeth I), when a great tradition of theater was forming, when playwrights (Ben Johnson, Thomas Marlowe, Thomas Kydd, Thomas Middleton, to name a few) and actors (Kemp, Burbage, Alleyn and others) influenced each other through direct and indirect forms of collaboration. Drama was the entertainment for the masses, and going to the theater was the civic habit. In such a milieu, the fact that prohibitions against plagiarism and protections for copyright didn't exist, lubricated perhaps with ample amounts of alcohol and gatherings at inns and taverns, may have fostered an exchange of ideas in way that perhaps can't be seen today. The tradition, the milieu, and the man, have left us the legacy. The previously highlighted podcast discussed the tradition, this one discusses the milieu.
      9.13.18
      • backlisted -> david seabrook's 'all the devils are here' (link)
      • Sylvia Townsend Warner screenshots
      9.14.18
      • voter registration
      • Flickr rss feed 
                    If you go to your photostream ( www.flickr.com/photos/maryaaekbal/ ) 
            and then add "?details=1" to the end of the URL in your browser 
            address bar, you will arrive at www.flickr.com/photos_user.gne?path=maryaaekbal&nsid=.
            .. . This is the old photostream display - the RSS links are at the bottom left.
      • Kors Voltaire on history (2001)- Louis the XIV history, other history ('Essay...'). Used sources, rigorous. Emphasized 'natural' while acknowledging 'divine' causes. Important thing is progress of ideas ('philosophical spirit that sought the secular improvement of manking' vs. 'ever-present spectre of fanaticism, supersitition and intolerance', and backsteps from the 'gains of civilization' can cause divisions, dissention and depair. ((guidebook)
      • link to vols 1,2 and 4 of essay on history
      9.17.18
      9.21.18
      • Capitalism and the chicken nugget (LNL environment site (neocities)) In this episode, Raj Patel notes that if in the distant future an archeologist examines the remains of our current epoch, what s/he would discover is radioactivity, plastic and chicken bones. Chicken bones? How that could possibly be is discussed in this episode, which delves into the aspects of capitalism that don't get discussed often enough, namely the effects of our markets on the environment, on resources, and on humans

      9.22.18
      • LNL 9.17.18 Half the perfect world -writers, dreamers and drifters on Hydra ,1955-1964 is a different kind of literary biography. George Johnston and Charmian Clift set up an Australian literary commune on the Greek Island of Hydra in 1955. The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs originally taken for Life magazine by James Burke.
      • Daniel McCarthy - S Huntington, F Fukiyama, Yoam Hazony
      • Mexican american war - in our time (Guardino) (Greenberg)
      9.26.18
      10.2.18
      10.6.18
      • Slate Academy Reconstruction final episode 
      •             Ny times book review
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_9?k=heartland+sarah+smarsh&sprefix=heartland&crid=1VFAKELXHBSWW
Why not just pick yourself up from your bootstrap?
-low chance
-public programs
Vote against economic interest?
hot button issues capitalized upon
Not a good way to frame question. Judgmental
Relationship to public services. Detachment
—-Damn proud of work they do themselves
Insulation
—-xenophobia
https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-America/dp/080507774X/ref=mp_s_a_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538841137&sr=8-1-spell&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=whats+the+mayter+with+kansas
https://www.amazon.com/Hillbilly-Elegy-Memoir-Family-Culture-ebook/dp/B0166ISAS8
Right to vote, by Allan lichtman
-13: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, 
except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, 
shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
-14: https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/hobby-lobby-argument;  'equal protection'
-15: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or
abridged by the United States 
or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
The embattled vote

Margaret Millar
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Millar%2C+Margaret%22
            
          
      •             tomato timer
https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/707?related=3227&relationship_name=ANOTHER%20ANGLE
    
https://aeon.co/essays/why-foucaults-work-on-power-is-more-important-than-ever
https://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/events_readings/cgc/
https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.technologiesOfSelf.en/ 
https://monoskop.org/images/0/03/Technologies_of_the_Self_A_Seminar_with_Michel_Foucault.pdf
https://cognitiveenhancement.weebly.com/uploads/1/8/5/1/18518906/technologies_of_self_michel_foucault.pdf
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/4gcf37/could_someone_define_for_me_foucaults/  
    
          
      •           https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06m8l28
Can causing offence be a good thing? Philip Dodd explores this question with the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, the American author, Camille Paglia and the Danish journalist, Flemming Rose.
Camille Paglia is a Professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia whose Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson was rejected by seven publishers before it became a best-seller.
Flemming Rose was Culture Editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten when in September 2005 it published a series of cartoons of Muhammad which caused controversy.
Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism by Slavoj Zizek is out now.
Provocations: Collected Essays by Camille Paglia will be available from October 9th.
Flemming Rose is the author of The Tyranny of Silence, and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Washington DC.
Our playlist looking at Culture Wars and Discussions about Identity can be found here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06jngzt
      • podcast by Kelly and Zack WeinerSmith (weekly weinersmith)
      10.11.18
      10.14.18
      10.19.18
      • forum shows (1 and 2)
        • fukiyama 'inclusive identity' -- link to Harrari's 10 to 100000 difference much greater than 100000 to 1B
        • 4 women philosophers in Oxford Putting women back into the C20th history of British philosophy. Shahidha Bari talks to Alex Clark about the 2018 Man Booker Prize, considers the thinking of Mary Midgley whose death at the age of 99 was announced last week and puts her alongside Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch who were undergraduates at Oxford University during WWII. The In Parenthesis project of Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman asks whether you can call them a philosophical school. Plus, Mark Robinson of the University of Exeter on how new archaeological discoveries in the Amazon are changing our understanding of the rain forest. http://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/about/ Mary Midgely talks to Rana Mitter about her philosophy in 2009 https://bbc.in/2RRA4qF Mary Midgley at Free Thinking Festival November 2010 plus Havi Carel https://bbc.in/2P1wqf6
        • identity in ottoman empire-- Alev Scott has travelled through 12 countries, talking to figures including warlords and refugees for her book Ottoman Odyssey: Travels Through a Lost Empire but she can't return to her birthplace. She's joined by New Generation Thinker Michael Talbot who teaches at the University of Greenwich and whose research has uncovered the drunken antics of soldiers in post World War I Istanbul. He's a contributor to http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/ and he reviews Like a Sword Wound by Ahmet Altan -published now in an English translation by Yelda Türedi and Brendan Freely. It's the first book in the Ottoman Quartet, a narrative that spans the history of Turkey during the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The writer is now in prison for life.
      • Marshall Mcluhan
      • Accents
      • G A Cohen, marxist oxford professor
      10.21.18
      • craft by invision web design
      • delts exercise
      • biceps/triceps exercise
      • tutorial purgatory
      • mooc update

        I was able to create a local django app Pro1, but uploading to one of the webhosting services (pythonanywhere etc) was problematic. I learned boostrap, jquery and something about git, github and gitlab. I created repositories in github and gitlab, and a new file in githum which has git commands (here). Now I am going to try and see if there is an alternative to this so that I can get online database capability, without the hassle and limitations of what I ran up against here. In looking around I found this and this. Unfortunately, 000webhost turns out to be really slow. So moving to 5gbfree. That didn't work. So back to neocities? alternatives? Github pages seems to be but loads really slowly too. But github was having issues, so try again this way using this video later (link). It didn't work well. So we'll try nearlyfreespeech next. registered and put in excel file. then there is this video with instructions (video). And here is an option with gitlab (video)

      • indian programmer dude link. He works on freehostia

      • chest exercise
      at
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