Hi Hello Now's A Great Time To Read Umberto Eco's Essay On Ur-fascism If You Haven't Already

Lightly, child, lightly. You've got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such humourless little prig. Lightly, lightly - it was the best advice ever given me.

Aldous Huxley Island (1962)

One of the big dangers, one of the big problems with technology. It develops much faster than human society and human morality, and this creates a lot of tension. Once you really solve a problem like direct brain-computer interface ... when brains and computers can interact directly, to take just one example, that's it, that's the end of history, that's the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this. If life can basically break out of the organic realm into the vastness of the inorganic realm, you cannot even begin to imagine what the consequences will be, because your imagination at present is organic. We're basically learning to produce bodies and minds. And if there is a gap between those that know how to produce bodies and minds and those that do not, then this is far greater than anything we saw before in history. And this time, if you're not fast enough to become part of the revolution, then you'll probably become extinct. ... You look at Japan today, and Japan is maybe 20 years ahead of the world in everything. And you see these new social phenomena of people having relationships with virtual spouses. And you have people who never leave the house and just live through computers. And I don't know, maybe it's the future, maybe it isn't, but for me, the amazing thing is that you'd have thought, given the biological background of humankind, that this is impossible, yet we see that it is possible. Apparently, Homo Sapiens is even more malleable than we tend to think. Nobody would doubt that all the new technologies will enhance again the collective power of humankind, but the question we should be asking ourselves is what's happening on the individual level. We have enough evidence from history that you can have a very big step forward, in terms of collective power, coupled with a step backwards in terms of individual happiness, individual suffering.

Yuval Noah Harari Edge.org, 'Death is Optional'

I’m not so worried about the dangers of mental junk food. No, my worry is that you won’t put enough really excellent stuff into your brain. I’m talking about what you might call the “theory of maximum taste.” This theory is based on the idea that exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness. The theory of maximum taste says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit—the best that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming. ... Our maximum taste shrinks. Have you ever noticed that 70 percent of the people you know are more boring at 30 than they were at 20? I’m worried about the future of your maximum taste. People in my and earlier generations, at least those lucky enough to get a college education, got some exposure to the classics, which lit a fire that gets rekindled every time we sit down to read something really excellent. I worry that it’s possible to grow up now not even aware that those upper registers of human feeling and thought exist.

David Brooks

She found it difficult to discuss physics, much less debate it, with her predominantly male classmates. At first they paid a kind of selective inattention to her remarks. There would be a slight pause, and then they would go on as if she had not spoken. Occasionally they would acknowledge her remark, even praise it, and then again continue undeflected. She was reasonably sure her remarks were not entirely foolish, and did not wish to be ignored, much less ignored and patronized alternately. Part of it—but only a part—she knew was due to the softness of her voice. So she developed a physics voice, a professional voice: clear, competent, and many decibels above conversational. With such a voice it was important to be right. She had to pick her moments. It was hard to continue long in such a voice, because she was sometimes in danger of bursting out laughing. So she found herself leaning towards quick, sometimes cutting, interventions, usually enough to capture their attention; then she could go on for a while in a more usual tone of voice. Every time she found herself in a new group she would have to fight her way through again, just to dip her oar into the discussion. The boys were uniformly unaware even that there was a problem. Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, “Gentlemen, let’s proceed,” and sensing Ellie’s frown would add, “Sorry, Miss Arroway, but I think of you as one of the boys.” The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female. She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. “Misanthrope” is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men. And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: “misogynist.” But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.

Carl Sagan, Contact (22)

“The boys were uniformly unaware even that there was a problem.”

(via varanine)

Let me introduce a pair of rather less admirable siblings in the relativist family. The first of these is the familiar "freshman relativist," who urges that all opinions and actions are equally good and should be equally tolerated. He has two mantras: "Who's to say?" and "That's just your opinion." The other sibling is less amiable. Instead of a grin, he wears a sneer. He takes himself to have seen through or debunked the claims of others. So when we use words like truth, reason, objectivity, justice, fairness, or progress, we may think we are putting on robes of state, dignities that with luck we have earned and come to deserve, by doing our thinking properly. But to this sibling we are doing nothing but putting on tawdry theatrical props, disguises, and masks - and what is disguised is a Pandora's box of ugly things like persuasion, rhetoric, self-deception, and ultimately power and force. So where the previous sibling was tolerant and vacant, this sibling is destructive and bitter. Standing on the shoulders of modern thinkers, he tries to crush them under the weight of contempt. But this sibling is equally obnoxious. He is oblivious to his own intellectual limitations and laziness. He could not describe a transistor, let alone make one, but he will use computers and faxes and mobile phones full of them to spread the message that "transistor" is just a construct of Western bourgeois culture. Where the freshman relativist was promiscuously vacant, this relativist is promiscuously suspicious. - We still have to make judgments and act in the light of them. We just have to make sure that we do so as well as we can. Once we have to make up our minds about something, the issue is the issue. The other siblings duck issues, either retreating to an ironic, playful, aesthetic detachment from the business of life, or substituting allegiance to a realpolitik of naked force. ...They shy away from convictions and causes altogether. They suppose they have seen through the whole business of taking issues at face value. They say that we should not and cannot judge whether Tolstoy is a more interesting writer than Stephen King, or whether there was ever a Holocaust, or whether a religion that enjoins slaughtering the infidel is worse than one which does not. Expressions of opinion on such matters would be bad form: politically incorrect, disguises for colonialism, liberal hegemony, dominations of gender, and so on. It is this paralysis of judgment that the commentators lament. You cannot drive down the freeway with a mind vacant of opinion on where the traffic is and how fast it is going.

Simon Blackburn Relativism's Ugly Siblings

You coffee shop revolutionary son of a bitch.

Felipe Andres Coronel

Vanessa Stockard

"Another Day, Another Chair"

Finnish bread advertisement, hinted to me by anonymous submitter. “Only in this country you can avertise bread this way.” This piece has no subtitles but here’s translation:

Father: “Well are you hungry or not?” KOVAA KUIN ELÄMÄ (HARD AS LIFE)

(And if you’re interested in the last part the guy says that you can get jälkiuunileipä or after-oven-bread in smaller bits too)