39 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. The scale on which we can happily live is given by our own embodied being. It is the scale of feet and hands and eyes, the scale of what we can see and touch, and walk towards. It is the scale of beauty, which must always recognizably reflect our own proportions. Beyond this scale, we quite literally take leave of our senses and arrive at something which is ultimately monstrous and inhuman. What we can love, what we can know, what can be beautiful for us, all depend on there being a limit, “a certain measure,” Kohr says. Smallness is good because it is necessary, and necessary because it is the only scale on which we can actually grasp the world around us.

      NB

    2. An analogist is really very theological because he assumes there is only one law. No one used more analogies than Jesus. And that was his impact. Because things we do not understand in one dimension and which we are unfamiliar with in economics, we can understand in another dimension.

      NB

    1. While the boys of �?Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read. Media historians even credit him as being the unwitting originator of one of the most popular entertainment genres on television today: reality TV. “I read and reread Lord of the Flies ,” divulged the creator of hit series Survivor in an interview. It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty;

      Similar to the counterintuitive findings of human resiliency found by Leopold Kohr during the Spanish Civil War.

    1. We’ve got very strong prejudices against what we call child labor, which have historical roots in the nineteenth-century exploitation in the sweatshops. But this needn’t be the case. I think we’re still living in the shadow of that nineteenth-century exploitation, so it’s hard to see whether the idea of protecting children by keeping them out of the workplace has any meaning anymore. Maybe if we broke that down we’d go back to the exploitation, or maybe if we broke it down we could find a much more harmonious way of making less of a distinction between work and play, childhood and adulthood, learning and teaching.

      The distinctions at the end should still be characterizable but there is more advantage to childhood apprenticeships then ever before, with protection from exploitation coming from the existing labor laws. Adds fifteen valuable years to a career.

    1. I wasn't a noble child resisting tyrannical teachers. No, I loved the game of fear and humiliation and played like the masters.

      Golding's children are isolated and makes it incorrectly appear their viciousness just came from them.

    2. I wanted to learn about the adult world, but was restricted to a world which adults believed children wanted.

      NB

  2. Feb 2025
    1. It's the problem with needing to be a follower of someone in order to understand them. I can see comprehension being achievable with effort, but I can also see putting in that effort in order achieve comprehension, and then immediately awakening to the fact I won't get that time back. Hence, I'm going roll with apprehension.

      That's it. My instinctive evaluation of several prominent posters on this damn forum.

    1. I’m not saying you should develop the personality of Melvin the Paranoid Android from Hitchhiker’s Guide, but any idea that requires you to smile UNTIL you are happy, rather than BECAUSE you are happy, just can’t be a good.

      NB

    2. We live in a world where the people in charge know they are being lied to virtually all of the time by their underlings, even if they can hardly complain because their underlings have been trained to always be positive and to never present senior management with problems, unless those ‘problems’ are referred to as opportunities after having been covered in a mountain of sugar.

      NB

    1. Based upon their faith — in a lord who died as one forsaken by God — they argue that, even in the midst of hell, God is to be found in solidarity with the godforsaken.

      NB

    1. that ever unique boundary-making limit within which each community can engage in discussion about what ought to be allowed and what ought to be excluded.

      This is explored further in The Congregational Principle, Chapter 5 of John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down, The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (New Society Publishers, 2005).

    1. intrepid commenter

      Couple of corresponding theories that may provide some cross-fertilization to what is being built at autismtheory.org.

      Spatial Anthropology<br> The Hidden Dimension by Edward T. Hall

      Philosophies of Human Nature<br> A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell

  3. Jan 2025
    1. An awful lot has got to go right overnight for you to get to see the light of a new day

      NB

  4. Dec 2024
    1. it is much more rewarding to engage with art if you look at how it makes you think that just looking for if you like it

      NB

    2. Imagine a post in a featureless desert – and you put all your effort into running from it. Obviously there’s less structure and direction the the 360 degrees of possible ways you can go, compared to if you see that post on the horizon and make it your business to run towards it. As a general rule in life, run towards the light rather than away from the darkness.

      NB

    3. That is the way of youth, to borrow from others in the early days, experience of life gives you the hinterland to find your own way of storytelling.

      Trust in that eventual subjective coalescence.

  5. Sep 2023
    1. in this case someone who is under-appreciated and over-achieving and constantly feels disrespected.

      isn't that everyone I've read on here hahaha

  6. Oct 2022
    1. his escape to virtual reality afforded by an embedded earpiece, like a tiny, protective shell for some kind of inside-out hermit crab.

      Important to stick with this metaphor.

  7. Sep 2022
    1. The principal problem would seem to be that in present day economies, a great many luxuries and amusements, which properly belong in a secondary economy, are sold so as to acquire the necessities of life generated in the primary economy. There are artists and authors and musicians who earn their daily crust through their art. This means that it has become a matter of necessity for people to make and sell luxuries. And it never ought to be necessary to perform such unnecessary work.
    1. Play is thought of as the opposite of "work." Yet under the existing order play is officially allowed only children and the workers of play-as-spectacle, which is not play. It is reified through the professionalization of select people as "athletes," "artists" or "entertainers." These physical, creative activities are reserved for "professionals," who must sell the product of their "play" as spectacle.
    1. he can draw the things that are impossible to draw: fire, beams of light, thunderbolts, flashes and sheets of lightening, and the so-called clouds on the wall, feelings, attitudes, the mind revealed by the carriage of the body, almost the voice itself.  All this he can do just with lines in the right place, and those lines all black!

      Similarly, could extend to Citizen Kane.

    1. which is perhaps why a medieval monk, illuminating one capital letter for months, say, was living as full a life as Brother Busymitts, who rushed through a dozen in an hour.
    2. More sternly, in a mood of utmost reverence, they recognize that what you bring to the act of perception is often just as important as what you perceive.

      cf. Goethe's Morphology of Knowledge. Also history of ideas accounts of holism that place Coleridge and Goethe on the same vector.

    1. There is no need, therefore, to despise, no need even to feel pity for months or years of life sacrificed in some minimal enquiry: say, the study of some uninspired medieval text and its fumbling dialect

      cf.

  8. Aug 2022
    1. curation

      The rise of web curation attracted a lot of different views, like Matt Langer's, contemporary to this post.

    2. Comment-forms are dropping off blogs like vestigial tails.

      All the better to be toggled marginalia.

    3. We want the words. We want words that have been lovingly prepared, and agonised over. We want them when they’re ready, not served up haphazardly with artificial deadlines and incomplete information. Our interconnected world changes so rapidly, and there’s a corresponding glut of disposable publishing, and writing, and even thinking. That might not be a bad thing in itself, but it’s not what fires the imagination (and opens the wallet) of the discerning reader.

      N.B.

    1. Making sense of presence invokes the full sense of the living human body in continuous seeking to understand another who cannot be fixed in any particular representations.  In making sense of presence, sense is integrated and processed in mutually interacting networks of cells encompassing from the most direct physical transformation of stimuli to the most abstract cognitive processing.

      As described here, making sense of presence has close parallels with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the 'flesh' in his work The Visible and the Invisible. Suzie Gibson has a very effective introduction and application of this phenomenology to James Bond in p.49 of the James Bond and Philosophy anthology. What's well highlighted there are references to Bond's embodied cognition in evading danger and interacting with his world, just like the bodily actions of Louis IX described further on here.

    2. base, ignoble

      same wording Huxley gives for Mr. Savage when talking to Vanina about three weeks in a helicopter “It was base. It was ignoble”

  9. Jul 2022
    1. Dust is the stuff of their kind, the Gods of the Copybook Headings.

      idk the meter of this one clanged a little for me

      I haven't read poemfics before, this is good.

    1. I can imagine an equally true fable in which the ant, who spends his summer in grim preparations and resists all the grasshopper's invitations for fun, romance, and enlightenment, is stepped on before the first snowflake falls. The grasshopper attempts to comfort him in his final moments, but the ant sadly reflects that he now wished he had spent some of his time enjoying life. Life is short and death comes quickly to all regardless of preparations, so it's all the more important to use the time well.

      "Many a man will say, 'After my fiftieth year I shall retire and relax; my sixtieth year will release me from obligations.' And what guarantee have you that your life will be longer? Who will arrange that your program shall proceed according to plan? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the tail end of life and to allot to serious thought only such time as cannot be applied to business? How late an hour to begin to live when you must depart from life! What stupid obliviousness to mortality to postpone counsels of sanity to the fifties or sixties, with the intention of beginning life at an age few have reached!..."

      ––Seneca

  10. idletheory.trevorcarpenter.name idletheory.trevorcarpenter.name
    1. Human tools allowed humans to at one time hold spades, at other times to hold swords, and again to hold paddles, as circumstances required.

      Multimodal representation automated.

    1. Dr. Campbell says, "The more general the terms are, the picture is the fainter; the more special they are, 'tis the brighter."

      😏

  11. Jun 2022
    1. They sprinkle their spoors (technically, known as hyperlinks) over the floor of the Internet jungle in the hope of being one day chanced upon by an Internet user and ingested.
    1. Use: Hypothes.is web annotation for comments, feedback, and recommendations by highlighting this sentence or paragraph.

      Start here

    1. The prospect of finitude helps to account for the turn to sensation, as if intensity of presentation could make up for repetition. Of course, sensation is also a response to sheer clutter on the screen, a way to grab the most possible attention in the least amount of time. But that clutter also accounts for why everything's already been done, and so it cycles on relentlessly
  12. Sep 2021
    1. premature attempt to add to knowledge

      This general phrase implies more academic activities than just the latter thesis process e.g. every term paper along the way.

      It may even be that thesis making, as the reification and ritualization of understanding, stilted and regurgitated in practice, is the telos pedagogues desire to arrive at as soon as possible, thus accounting for the cursory and time constrained qualities of curriculums designed to get to the thesis stage more efficiently.

      Either way, that kind of directed subject overview for non-self-directed learners is usually the only exposure they will ever get and are content to have.