Signifying the emptiness, the indifference and hopelessness of her situation. And yet there is still light, still a hope that can be salvaged -- hence the title being Desperation

In this sense hope is tied irreversibly with fear. Having the freedom to do things is also the opportunity to get raped, to have frightening things happening. But that is hope, hope is fear, hope is an absence of certainty.

Aren’t you afraid to say such words out loud?

thoughts: - does wisdom exist because death exists? do we really only learn from our mistakes because it makes life smoother down the road? and that a smoother life is more desirable because there's a limit to our existence? - why should unfinished businesses haunt us in our last days?

( ~12:50 )

The difference being faith and atheism is one of ultimate hope & justice. Hope for life after "the end".

06.24 Giving into despair slips a person into his lower self. You must have hope, in dark times (Uncle Iroh). Despair is the lowest instinct.

• for: climate crisis - psychology - hope
• annotate

• for: Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap, The Upside of Down, Commanding Hope, Cascade Institute, Polycrisis

• SUMMARY

  • Thomas Homer-Dixon is a researcher in polycrisis and author of a number of books on aspects of the polycrisis.
  • Here he talks about "Commanding Hope", following his other books "The Ingenuity Gap", "The Upside of Down".
  • Homer-Dixon explores the idea of hope situated in his life, especially surrounding his children and their future in an uncertain world.
  • In particular, he explores a robust form of hope that is honest, astute and powerful and he unpacks the meaning of each of these qualities.
  • Even when the odds are stacked against us, robust hope gives us hope that we can make a big difference.
  • Homer-Dixon offers a bounty of insights for anyone engaged in rapid whole system change. His Cascade Institute is developing tools to assist individuals and organizations alike who want to find the leverage points for rapid system change.

• for: hope - Lord of the Rings

• for: story of hope - a new axial age

• for: book - Commanding Hope - essence - How about ?

• for: story of hope - Stephanie May

• story of hope

  • Stephanie May was a housewife who one day read the story of nuclear test fallout in the atmosphere and was dismayed
  • She started petition, phoned local people, worked with other housewife to get thousands of people to sign peittion
  • In 3 years, she mobilized mothers around the US, met Betrand Russell in UK, mobilized UK housewives.
  • Went on hunger strike in front of Russian embassy and inspired mothers across the US to also perform hunger strikes
  • She created a mobilization of a previously diffuse group
  • She had good understanding of different worldviews
  • Ultimately, she played an important role in securing a treaty to ban nuclear testing in the atmosphere

• for: story of hope - Stephanie May, hope - mothers stopped nuclear testing

• for: polycrisis, perfect storm, reinforcing feedbacks,

• paraphrase

  • the polycrisis is a network of self-reinforcing and diverse crisis:
    • political polarization
    • war
    • fossil fuel entrenchment and expansion
    • precarity
    • migration
    • climate crisis
    • extreme weather
    • AI
    • political polarization
    • misinformation and interference of sovereign voting
    • emergence of authoritarianism
    • incorrect focus of effort - tinkering at the margins
    • runaway inequality - wealth, racial, post colonial, gender
    • dominance of capitalist wealth aspiration
    • rapid change required for entire system
    • sense of despair, hopelessness, anger, fear
    • mass extinction
    • climate departure
    • increasing health burden
    • runaway pollution
    • lack of effective government regulation
    • approaching planetary tipping points
  • the "perfect storm" assumes that these crisis are not related, but they are all syncrhonizing through positive feedbacks -their self-reinforcing positive feedbacks amplify all of them together and it can reach a threshold beyond human institutions to be able to cope
  • Commanding Hope or "Hope to" is critical for meeting these challenges

for: comparison - hope that - hope to

• comparison: hope that - hope to
  • a part of honest hope is to be able to distinguish between
    • situations where we can't do anything about it and
    • situations where we can
  • start from
    • hope to - to explore possibilities
    • if nothing can be done, then goto hope that

• for: comparison - hope that - hope to

• comparison: hope that - hope to

  • hope that
    • is passive
    • I have no agency
  • hope to
    • is active
    • I have agency
  • Commanding Hope advocates flipping
    • from hope that to
    • hope to

• for: honest hope - description

• description - honest hope

  • a moral stance
  • based on the best of our scientific knowledge available

• for: powerful hope - description

• description - powerful hope

  • psychological view of what hope needs to be in order to motivate agency

• for: astute hope - description

• description - astute hope

  • our epistemological view of the world
  • In complex areas like climate change, we provide tools to help people look at these ideological views

• comment

  • Indyweb can provide a good framework for holding the diversity of worldviews for everyone to experience

• for: definition - hope

• definition: (robust) hope

  • has three characteristics:
    • honest
    • astute
    • powerful

• for: hope - controlling

• comment

  • while I agree with his analysis, I disagree that it must be about controlling hope. We've tried to control nature, and that hasn't turned out very well. Perhaps a better language is allowing a more authentic type of hope to emerge.

• for: book - Commanding Hope - description

• book: Commanding Hope

  • This is a book about agency, activism and personal engagement
  • It takes a philosophical understanding of hope and applies it to the polycrisis we face

• for: polycrisis, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Cascade Institute Royal Roads University - Changemakers Speakers Series, etymology - polylcrisis

• Talk: Hope in the Polycrisis

• Speaker: Thomas Homer-Dixon
• Host: Royal Roads University - Changemakers Speakers Series

• Date: 2023

• SUMMARY

  • Thomas Homer-Dixon is a leading complex systems scientist and director of the Cascade Institute, which he co-founded at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C., Canada, to study the polycrisis and identify strategic high leverage interventions that could rapidly shift humanity's trajectory in the next few critical years.
  • The talk, entitled "Hope in the polycriisis" chronicles Homer-Dixon's multi-decade journey to understand the convergence of crisis happening in the world today.

  • In a real sense, the evolution of his thinking on these complex problems are reflected in the series of books he has written over the years, culminating in the 2023 book "Commanding Hope", based on a theory of hope:

    • Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton, 1999). - a book showing how other factors combine with environmental stress to produce violence.
    • “The Ingenuity Gap: Can Poor Countries Adapt to Resource Scarcity?,” which appeared in Population and Development Review in 1995
    • “Resource Scarcity and Innovation: Can Poor Countries Attain Endogenous Growth?" ?” coauthored with Edward Barbier, which appeared in Ambio (1999)
    • The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (2006), examined the threat to global stability of simultaneous and interacting demographic, environmental, economic, and political stresses. This led to examining energy as a major factor in our modern society.
    • "Commanding Hope: The Power we have to Renew a World in Peril"
      • https://commandinghope.com/

  • Homer-Dixon also talks about practical solutions, His team at Casacade Institute is researching a promising technology called ultra-deep geothermal, which could provide unlimted energy at energy densities comprable to fossil fuels.

  • He finishes his talk with his theory of Hope and how a "Robust" hope can be the key to a successful rapid transition.

• etymology - polycrisis

  • https://polycrisis.org/lessons/where-did-the-term-polycrisis-come-from/
  • Complexity theorists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern first used the term polycrisis in their 1999 book, Homeland Earth, to argue that the world faces
    • “no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem" (p. 74).
  • South African sociologist and sustainable transitions theorist Mark Swilling then adopted the term to capture
    • “a nested set of globally interactive socio-economic, ecological and cultural-institutional crises that defy reduction to a single cause” (2013, p. 98).
  • Climate change, rising inequality, and the threat of financial crises interact in complex ways that multiply their overall impact (Swilling 2013, 2019).

• for: meme - honestly can threaten hope

• meme: honesty can threaten hope

  • a reassuring lie is often preferred to na challenging truth
  • denialism is just human nature
    • it's difficult to face the truth when the truth is so unpleasant and triggers intense fear or despair
    • mortality salience could underlay much of this

• for: definition - robust hope, robust hope triplet

• definition: robust hope

• honest instead of false
  • astute instead of naive
  • powerful instead of passive

-for: polycrisis - leverage point - hope, quote - leverage point - hope

-for: adjacency - polycrisis - fear - hope - antidote

-adjacency between - fear - anger - hope - antidote - adjacency statement - hope is the antidote to fear and anger

• for: comparison - hope and hopefulness vs optimism and pessimism

via https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/phyllis-diller-raucous-comic-famous-for-her-withering-oneliners-8069891.html

• quote
  • "For many, Covid-19 was the rude awakening that death was not a long-distance relationship so much as a close neighbor."
• Author
  • Allison Hope

Pevear talking about Chekhov.

Ignoring Bob Hope's collection or possibly that by Sid Caesar.

If I'm not totally depraved, then I don't really need "future grace." My forward-looking hope is that more and more individual humans will progress toward peace and love (the so-called "red letters" of the Bible). This is a hope that Jesus seemed to have, but the overarching message of the Bible denies.

This is a really nice metaphor, especially if you think of "faith" as "hope".

Ithaka - C. P. Cavafy, "The City" from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.

The first version of "Ithaka" was probably written in 1894. Cavafy revised the poem in 1910, and it was first published in 1911. The first English translation was published in 1924, and there have been a number of different translations since then. The poem can be found in Cavafy's Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis, Princeton University Press, 1980.

!- claim : coordinated action among cities and their citizens may be our best last hope for effective climate and other action at global scale

People clung to the promise of salvation. The idea that the more you suffered here on earth, the better your time would be in the afterlife was a potent shield against the desperate realities of everyday life in the fifth and sixth centuries. This doctrine was central

Relationship to Eric Hoffer's thesis in The True Believer and mass movements' "hope for the future" even if the hope is for one's afterlife? This sort of hope can be seen in both Islam and Christianity

This is why one has some broad general rules for keeping and maintaining a zettelkasten. It helps to have some rules to practice and make a habit.

Unmentioned here is that true artists known all the rules and can then more profitably break those rules for expanding and improving upon their own practice. This is dramatically different from what is seen by some of those who want to have a commonplace or zettelkasten practice, but begin without any clear rules. They often begin breaking the rules to their detriment without having the benefit of long practice to see and know the affordances of such systems before going out of their way to break those rules.

By breaking the rules before they've even practiced them, many get confused or lost and quit their practice before they see any of the benefits or affordances of them.

Of course one should have some clear cut end reasons which answer the "why" question for having such practices, or else they'll also lose the motivation to stick with the practice, particularly when they don't see any light at the end of the tunnel. Pure hope may not be enough for most.

source? date? (obviously on/before 2005-09-22)

Any relation to Robert Boice's work on writing every day?

https://www.npr.org/2010/07/02/128245468/a-true-champion-vs-the-great-white-hope

origin of the phrase "Great White Hope"

The phrase "now you're coking with gas" was coined by American Gas Association publicist Carroll Everard "Deke" Houlgate. Deke's son indicated that his father "planted it with Bob Hope's writers" and it was ultimately used in one of his radio shows. From there it turned into one of his catchphrases and it was adopted by others including The Jack Benny Program and Maxwell House Coffee Time.

Incidentally, Houlgate was also a football journalist who devised the first college football rankings methodology that determined the national champions from 1929 to 1958.

Is this the same Houlgate, or perhaps his son who played for USC Trojans in the 1931 and 1932 Rose Bowl games?

References: (see also and check...) - A Way With Words co-host Martha Barnette https://soundcloud.com/waywordradio/now-youre-cooking-with-gas

Niklas Luhmann kept a portion of his note taking system (ZK II Note 9/8j) specifically for joke related slips. It has been referred to as his jokerzettel.

This would seem to be in keeping with other examples kept in America by Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, George Carlin, and a wide variety of comics like Adam Sandler et al. who have moved to using notebooks.

This is the first time I've seen the word/phrase jokerzettel in print.

http://hackeducation.com/2022/03/08/hope

David Louis Edelman's Jump 225 had a wonderful expression that punctuated it regularly, "May you be ever moving towards perfection," which this resonates with.

Kim Stanley Robinson

I've been wanting to read Zinn, so perhaps this is a good place to follow along? A sort of pseudo book club perhaps?

It's interesting to see Dan struggle with an obvious listicle article in Forbes as an authoritative source. This example is a great indicator that Forbes online has created far too much of a content farm to be taken seriously anymore. From what I've seen of it over the past several years it's followed the business model of The Huffington Post before Huffington sold it and cashed out. My supposition is that Forbes is providing a platform for people to get reach and isn't actually paying those writers to create their content.

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States

• Covering a chapter a week
• companion edition, Voices of People's History of United States by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnov
• Erik Foner's article about Zinn
• Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism by E. P. Thompson *
• cultural theorist Raymond Williams' idea of resources of hope
  • Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism by Raymond Williams
• An Indigenous People's History of the United States

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlnYt9NOUAw

This is a really interesting insight. These conversations can really veer into "whatchgonnado" or "not my job".

the Guardian. ‘Israel Says 600 Children given Covid Jab Had No Serious Side-Effects’, 10 March 2021. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/10/israel-says-600-children-given-covid-jab-had-no-serious-side-effects.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), who was not only a respected mathematician and philosopher, but also librarian at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, is said to have had a filing cabinet built for him as book furniture according to his own ideas.

I'm curious to hear more about what this custom library furniture looked like? Could it have been the precursor to the modern-day filing cabinet?

I can picture something like the recent photo I saw of Bob Hope amidst his commonplace book.

Bob Hope's commonplace book of jokes has been scanned digitally and available at the United States Library of Congress.

Compare and contrast the materials of comedians versus magicians.

Collection was an important piece. Protection/secrecy was relatively similar, though with a joke, the item was as ephemeral as a magic act which would have been confounding on it's nature.

Link to Ricky Jay's collection of magic acts and pieces. Other comedy collections include George Carlin, Joan Rivers, etc.

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/bobhope/images/vcjokes1.jpg Annie Leibovitz. Bob Hope in his joke vault. Photograph, July 17, 1995. Courtesy of Annie Leibovitz

Bob Hope amidst his commonplace book of jokes.

Bob Hope's joke file of over 85,000 pages represents a massive commonplace book of comedy.

Para nos sentirmos mais esperançosos, temos que começar por enfrentar o problema de frente ("elephant in the room").

Não vale a pena falar de outras realidades pois isso só afastará os alunos e também não vale a pena minimizar o que eles sentem comparando com outros que estão pior. Em vez disso devemos focar-nos em 1 ou 2 aspetos.

Quando os problemas forem explicitados e soubermos quais os aspetos a atacar é altura de dar bons exemplos, mostrar situações em que os alunos se possam rever, preferencialmente de colegas, ainda que com pequeno impacto. A partir daqui definir 1 ou 2 objetivos e alternativas para o caso de se falhar.

reason for coming to America - economic prosperity, a better life

Welle (www.dw.com), Deutsche. ‘Access to COVID Vaccine Patents Is Not the Same as Access to Vaccines | DW | 06.05.2021’. DW.COM. Accessed 11 May 2021. https://www.dw.com/en/access-to-covid-vaccine-patents-is-not-the-same-as-access-to-vaccines/a-57448750.

We have reified a lot of implicit aspects of ourselves and it's hard to know what to do with this newfound knowledge. Right now this knowledge is subordinate to the machinery of capital but it doesn't have to be. This same understanding can be used for pro-social endeavors instead of making more and more money.

Imagining the Next Decade of Behavioral Science. (2020, January 20). Behavioral Scientist. https://behavioralscientist.org/imagining-the-next-decade-future-of-behavioral-science/

Petersen, M., Christiansen, L. E., Bor, A., Lindholt, M. F., Jørgensen, F. J., Adler-Nissen, R., … Lehmann, S. (2021, February 9). Communicate Hope to Motivate Action Against Highly Infectious SARS-CoV-2 Variants. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gxcyn

Researchers and Their Stories (2020) WEBINAR: Managing your mental health is an ongoing journey – Let's embrace the process!. Retrieved from https://www.editage.com/insights/managing-your-mental-health-is-an-ongoing-journey-lets-embrace-the-process

Sridhar, D. (2020, November 16). It’s not just the vaccine. There are many causes for hope in the fight against Covid | Devi Sridhar. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/16/vaccine-hope-fight-covid-tests-treatments

Horton, R. (2020). Offline:Reasons for hope. Lancet, 396

The COVID-19 Crisis and Telework: A Research Survey on Experiences, Expectations and Hopes. COVID-19 and the Labor Market. (n.d.). IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. Retrieved August 7, 2020, from https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13229/

Woolston, C. (2020). Take our postdoctoral-researcher survey. Nature, d41586-020-01863-y. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01863-y

Avaaz. 10 Reasons to Love Humanity right now. https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/covid19_reasons_to_hope/

What Happens Next? COVID-19 Futures, Explained With Playable Simulations. (n.d.). What Happens Next? COVID-19 Futures, Explained With Playable Simulations. Retrieved May 4, 2020, from https://ncase.me/covid-19/

Yildirim, M., & Arslan, G. (2020, April 28). Exploring the Associations Between Resilience, Dispositional Hope, Subjective Well-Being, and Psychological Health Among Adults During Early Stage of COVID-19. Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/vpu5q

Ahmad, A. S. (2020, March 27). Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-You-Should-Ignore-All-That/248366

I want to reflect on this more, but this is just to say I find Freire's vision of hope to be a call to action.

A frustrated parent, Rathburn retaliate by confronting her son's bully and later got arrested. Many parent can understand Rathburn and may also feel they would have done the same. The natural instinct of protect their own. Still she hope to create a new policy or program that better handle these incidents before parent's retaliate.

A few states have resorted to fining parents of bullies in hope to encourage their kids to stop bullying. Many may agree, but it also raise the question of how effective is it?

Fish's definition of a theory.

Here is my sense of what you say in translation:

A Numbered LIst

1. I am aware, so aware, that definitions rule. They make us imagine our practice.
2. I am aware that less is so often more.
3. The R&D arm of each generation is already at work constraining and cajoling.
4. Our poets and dogs drag home the damndest things: bones, mirrors and seeds.
5. And still it is not enough.
6. The margins are a moving target that even its authors may no longer recognize.
7. Even if Yeats is right and the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate hootery, we still note our thanks, we continue to add to the pile, and we keep open and keep on. and get down now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BARAHLk-8dk

Key words repeated here.

What do you think about this extension?

Hmm. Wonder why the Washington Post links to Amazon.com here?

This sounds more hopeful than ambivalent, and shows an ability to confront injustice without shame or fear.

This is especially true when we think about segregated schools, and how we need to teach in them without accepting them

I am now viewing the "Workman's Sandwich" and wondering what it would take humankind to provide the WorkWOMAN's Sandwich... Ladies on the job deserve just as much roast beef as any male laborer. If I may, I'd like to propose an ideal sandwich: it would include the contents of; Cheese churned from the breast milk of strong, independent mothers, Turkey of the female farmer's land, and mustard from a female CEO-owned grocery store on Wall Street.

No rejection of the Bush doctrine from this president