Beautiful vision.

(Having a human voice read the words would be even more compelling.)

Fear still lingers, there's some past experience of something, the world isn't safe enough that clothes on the floor already create suspicion.

An alternate interpretation is that this natural reaction implies that Cora is a very humane character and will foreshadow both that Cora will be an ally and that this handmaid will draw parallels to the one who hanged herself.

This is symbolic of rape, which is ironic because now Offred seeks hope in getting raped -- to be immorally penetrated is a sign of hope. Even when their society's aim was to grant women freedom from rape.

Even though his words are reassuring, his power and the underlying tone. of rape still hangs. This is ironic because Gilead should be free from rape, of sin. And yet Gilead is turning women into sin, out of desperation. A utopia becomes more of a living hell than any sinful world.

Irony in this. A culture in which a producer of life is close to death -- Shows how this new world is upside down and wrong.

In some way, anyone born in Gilead would be born into a life for death.

"The land of milk and honey" usually means paradise; utopia, another sense of irony here. And touches on the idea that imperfect is as perfect as perfect gets, and perfect is as imperfect as imperfect gets.

Exactly.

Too many people would want conflict. The source of the conflict is not scarcity: it's human nature.

Tell that to the super-rich.

He concluded incorrectly.

Rich people already have more resources than they could ever use. The richest amongst us could not ever spend all the money they possess. But that does not seem to have stopped them from continuing to want more, and more, and more.

utopia. tribalism. such pacifist utopias only work in limited small spaces = islands.<br /> but in unlimited large spaces = continents, permanent tribal warfare is required to keep tribes small.<br /> so paradise on earth fails because people want "peace" and "order"<br /> while subconsciously, everything goes to shit, and the warfare moves to psychological warfare

overpopulation is just another intelligence test, and most people are failing, again.<br /> the problem is pacifism, the solution is permanent tribal warfare and legal serial murder.<br /> but first there is depopulation, killing 95% of today's population. fucking useless eaters... byye! no one will miss you.

Delete The Garbage. World Cure. RD9 Virus. The Brothers Grimsby 2016<br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGG0Nq3BwqQ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotopia

Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston by Ernest Callenbach (1975)

Note that this was published in the same year as The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey

54:30 Max utopian in his head, trust in random people

• see index zk on Apollonian and Dionysian theory (idealism, good or bad?)

57:00 inherently, people are good, but they get corrupted (good and evil)

57:44 “there is some light” (life can be good): see zk 9 section on light & darkness

• for: intentional community, intentional communities, eco-community, ecocommunity
• title
  • Utopia Inc Most utopian communities are, like most start-ups, short-lived. What makes the difference between failure and success?

Utopias vs Paradises; the author seems to posit that Taixu produced a description of a synthesis of both.

.

Is that a bad thing, to have something to look forward to? It implies that new technological inventions are the only way to make progress, but it is undeniably progress. Not everyone will hold this view, and no one should force it upon you. So why are people constantly criticing "techno-utopia" views instead of creating and moving towards their own visions of the future?

He did see a bright potential before him, and that's precisely why he had a change at succeeding. I don't like the latent criticism about innovation in this article, it feels mostly like envy to me.

Context: Sonia was watching Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath: Season 3: "Episode 1" and had previously been watching a documentary One of Us about people who had left oppressive seeming Hassidic Jewish communities.

I can't help but that that every culture could be considered a "cult" in which some percentage of people are trapped with comparison to all other cultures on Earth. Based on one's upbringing and personal compass, perhaps living and submitting to one's culture can become oppressive and may seem particularly unfair given power structures and the insidiousness of hypocrisy.

Given this, could there logically be a utopian society in which everyone lives freely?

Even within the United States there are smaller sub-cultures withiin which people feel trapped and which have the features of cults, but which are so large as to not be considered such. Even the space in which I freely live might be considered a cult by others who don't agree with it. It's only the vast size of the power of the group which prevents the majority who comfortably live within it from viewing it as a bad thing.

A Democrat may view the Republican Party as a cult and vice versa, something which becomes more apparent when one polarizes these communities toward the edges rather than allowing them to drift into each other in a consensus.

An African American may think they're stuck in a broader American cult which marginalizes them.

A Hassidic Jew may feel they're stuck in a cult (of religious restrictions) with respect to the perceived freedoms of broader American Culture. Some may feel more comfortable within these strictures than others.

A gender non-comforming person living in the deep South of the United States surrounded by the Southern Baptist Convention may feel they're stuck in a cult based on social norms of one culture versus what they experience personally.

What are the roots of something being a cult? Could it be hypocrisy? A person or a broader group feeling as if they know "best" and creating a rule structure by which others are forced to follow, but from which they themselves are exempt? This also seems to be the way in which authoritarian rules arise when privileging one group above another based solely on (perceived) power.

Another potential thing at play here may be the lack of diversity within a community. The level of cult within a society may be related to the shape of the bell curve of that society with respect to how large the center is with respect to the tails. Those who are most likely to feel they're within a "cult" (using the broader definition) are those three or more standard deviations from the center. In non-diverse communities only those within a standard deviation of the norm are likely to feel comfortable and accepted and those two deviations away will feel very uncomfortable while those who are farther away will be shunned and pushed beyond the pale.

How can we help create more diverse and broadly accepting communities? We're all just people, aren't we? How can we design communities and governments to be accepting of even the most marginalized? In a heavily connected world, even the oddball teenager in a small community can now manage to find their own sub-community using the internet. (Even child pornographers manage to find their community online.)

The opposite of this is at what point do we circumscribe the norms of the community? Take the idea of "Your freedom to strike me ends at my nose." Perhaps we only shun those extreme instances like murder and pornography, and other actions which take extreme advantage of others' freedoms? [This needs to be heavily expanded and contemplated...] What about the over-financialization of the economy which takes advantage of the unprivileged who don't know that system and are uncapable of the mathematics and computation to succeed. Similarly hucksters and snake oil salesmen who take advantage of their targets' weaknesses and lack of knowledge and sophistication. Or the unregulated vitamin industry taking rents from millions for their superstitions? How do we regulate these to allow "cultural freedom" or "religious freedom" without them taking mass-scale advantage of their targets? (Or are some of these acculturated examples simply inequalities institutionally built into societies and cultures as a means of extracting power and rents from the larger system by those in power?)

Compare with Hester Prynne and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

Avery Trufelman ends her podcast series, Nice Try! with these words in an episode entitled, Germania: Architecture in a Fascist Utopia.

One person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia.

The structure of the mind becomes the architecture of our reality. This thought became the foundation for a mental model for human experience, since these architectural plans for utopia seem like good ideas on paper, but when we live inside these structure in our daily reality, we realize that we have constructed our own mental prisons, the iron cage envisioned by Max Weber.

Avery Trufelman ends her podcast series, Nice Try! with these words in an episode entitled, Germania: Architecture in a Fascist Utopia.

Yesterday, I found some books in the stacks at the University of the Fraser Valley Library to research the evolution of design from physical artifacts to living systems.

• The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design by Lance Hosey
• The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946 by Victor Margolin
• Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism by Julia Watson
• Architecture of Thought by Andrzej Piotrowski
• Exiles and Emigrés by Stephanie Barron
• Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, Edited by Vincent Katz
• Modernism: Designing a New World, Edited by Christopher Wilk

the defense of utopian ideals

This is the second time her impression of the workers has made me really laugh. This story so far feels like it takes place in some strange utopia, I guess Laura and her family are very rich, but it seems much stranger than just that--the rose bushes are visited by "archangels", Jose is a "butterfly". and 'workers' are practically alien. Laura seems as taken with the beauty around her as if she is seeing it only for the first few times. This story has a very dreamy feel, maybe even a dystopian quality.

Imagining Our Future Through Tech Frank Chen - a16z Operating Partner

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

utopia, for documentators

… but is it really desirable?

from wikipedia: "Blazing World is a fanciful depiction of a satirical, utopian kingdom in another world (with different stars in the sky) that can be reached via the North Pole."

Already sold.

This strikes me as a key distinction between postmodernism and posthumanism. Postmodernism can be thought of as post-utopian, while posthumanism works toward an affirmative, generative future. I don't know if posthumanism is utopian, per se, but it doesn't seem to be dystopic in the way that postmodernism often is.