Habits are the very stuff our identities are made of. In them we enact and thus define what we effectively are as social beings, often in contrast with our perception of what we are. In their very transparency they are the medium of social violence. My notions—of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant,…
Sunday was the occasion of a mild 40 degree day. I especially enjoyed the shades of brown and tan illumined by the afternoon sun as we passed a wetland, undeveloped, tall grasses waving in the breeze. White oaks were showing spiky leaves hanging on to face the coming frost. Everything is as it should…
There is more truth in the “decontextualized” French Nietzsche of Deleuze and Foucault than in the historically accurate Nietzsche………… The universal frame of Nietzsche’s thought and its particular historical contextualization is inscribed into the very edifice of Nietzsche’s thought. Ergo…. In the same way the tension between the universal form of human rights and…
The feast day began with paying homage to Nature. This is it should be, since each of us is a child of Nature, flesh and blood, born of the Earth, sustained by the sun, rain, the recurring force of Gaia’s productive effort. Is it not proper on this day to personify Nature’s dispassionate, life-giving…
I anticipated this day for a while. Fall days come one by one, daylight lessening, leaves falling, my spirit waiting for the coming interlude–a day dedicated to taking stock of the goodness that life serendipitously has offered. Thanksgiving! The benefits that come our way are unaccountable. I did not expect them. Indeed no one…
Instrumental rationality— namely the calculation of the most efficient means for achieving a given desire— has overwhelmed Western thinking for the last 300 years……….. We must change the aesthetic tone of the world. –Adbusters Nov/Dec 2017
Our daughter and her partner are expecting a baby girl. Kai is to be born in January. I am awed that the child is to bear my mothers name as her middle name. My mother was a extraordinarily courageous and kind woman. She would have been greatly honored to have her name given to…
Did not post yesterday since most of the day was spent on I-65 traveling from Chicago to Louisville. We departed in a gentle rain which surely will bring down the few remaining leaves from the trees in the neighborhood. The plus side of the 6 hour drive was the brisk movement of traffic around…
“Hello, do you hear me?” Is the channel working? Are we both using the same code? Thus we understand the outbreak of public violence in Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia, with Monticello nearby. And the mass slaughter at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs Texas….. There was and is no underlying…
Axiom: there is no simple “reality.” I remember the promise of the internet. Ease of connectivity would produce greater understanding. Instead what we got was not the spread of democracy but “mobocracy.” We are being fractured by a firehose of falsehood. Facebook estimates that 126 million Americans, about 40% of the population were reached…
