To Consider - Tumblr Posts
“It would be useless to turn one’s back on the past in order simply to concentrate on the future. It is a dangerous illusion to believe that such a thing is even possible. The opposition of future to past or past to future is absurd. The future brings us nothing, gives us nothing; it is we who in order to build it have to give it everything, our very life. But to be able to give, one has to possess; and we possess no other life, no other living sap, than the treasures stored up from the past and digested, assimilated and created afresh by us. Of all the human soul’s needs, none is more vital than this one of the past.”
— Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (trans. Alan Wilis)
I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.”
— James Baldwin, "The Artist's Struggle for Integrity"
“By providing us with these false opposites (globalisation/anti-globalisation, imperialism/anti-imperialism, vegan café/McDonalds, etc) the ruling classes can ensure that debates are kept on their terrain, that those with a sense of self-righteousness are kept busy playing the tiresome political games of good versus evil. These political movements, naturally, never threaten to destroy the economy (how could they?), they only offer empty threats to refine it or save it. History shows us that it is not movements that lead to genuinely revolutionary events, it is only complete economic failure and mis-management. If this occurs, and it was close to happening at the time of World War One, then it may be that the workers in those industries that are essential for the economy to keep running will be forced to take them over. It is at this point that the material basis of society will have altered, and it is now that humanity has the chance to assert itself, and prevent the re-imposition of economics”
— Monsieur Dupont, Nihilist Communism: A Critique of Optimism on the Far Left
if you want to actually start to end homelessness, you need to give homeless people unconditional homes, including when we use them to do drugs or sit around drinking. either housing is unconditional or it isn't someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don't and didn't when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don't homeless people actually can't be rehabilitated if you want to end homelessness. we either affirm the right to shelter for the worst drunken, lying, filthy, cheating, self destructive homeless people that exist, genuinely irredeemable wankers, or we concede that shelter is not a right
““Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. (Roy Ascott’s phrase.) That solves a lot of problems: we don’t have to argue whether photographs are art, or whether performances are art, or whether Carl Andre’s bricks or Andrew Serranos’s piss or Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ are art, because we say, ‘Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen.’ … [W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you — so the value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.””
— Brian Eno (via jessiethatcher)
ALT
David Whyte in conversation with Krista Tippett, On Being [transcript in ALT]
The kernel of [Otto] Neurath’s philosophical system was the rejection of “pseudorationality” — the belief that any single metric, like money, could guide all decisions within any system, economic or otherwise.
Capitalism is an inherently irrational system because the pursuit of profit to the exclusion of all other considerations leads to disaster, such as the climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction. Notably, Neurath extended this insight to socialist economics and argued that an alternative system based on a universal equivalent (labor time, for example) would also lack the necessary conscious control that could rationally and democratically weigh tradeoffs between the incommensurate ethical, social, environmental and aesthetic considerations that comprise any decision. Neurath reasoned that socialism could not be based on market mechanisms, so he criticized the desire of fellow socialists to maintain the “uncontrollable monetary order and at the same time to want to socialize” as “an inner contradiction.”
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Neurath employed his insights from ancient Egyptian economics to study war economics during the Balkan Wars (1912-13) and World War I. He came to see in natura calculation as the solution to the problem of pseudorationality. After all, he argued, there were no “war units” to guide a battleship commander’s decisions. What mattered were incommensurate things: “the course of the ship, the power of the engines, the range of the guns, the stores of ammunition, the torpedoes and the food supplies.” In an emergency, prices fail to convey any information at all.
Twenty years later after Neurath theorized the possibilities of in natura socialism, [Leonid] Kantorovich’s linear programming offered what was perhaps the first practical method to actually implement it. Rather than reducing everything to a universal equivalent (like price), Kantorovich could balance competing restrictions in their natural units — tons of steel or watts of electricity — across many different projects simultaneously.
While not sufficient to organize something as complex as an economy, linear programming marked a conceptual breakthrough in planning theory. It offered a systematic way to allocate resources and thus optimize selected metrics of national well-being. That is, as soon as a planner could articulate the material constraints of an economy using mathematical language, plans of production and distribution could naturally follow without the aid of the market’s invisible hand. Even with the primitive computers available in the 1940s, Kantorovich could dream of “programming the USSR.”
In many ways, Kantorovich embodied the optimism of the “thaw” period after Stalin when rapid economic growth, the new universal science of “cybernetics” and the space age seemed to herald the coming of an abundant and humane socialism. Yet, despite these promising conditions, linear programming failed for two reasons: After the Prague Spring of 1968, anything that smacked of “market socialism” (a tradition that Kantorovich only tangentially belonged to) was compromised, leaving reformers little chance of revitalizing the USSR’s increasingly decrepit planning apparatus. And second, the lack of democracy in the Soviet Union meant that it was impossible to assemble a new political coalition strong enough to overcome the vested interests of economic planners and managers, who enforced the Communist Party’s five-year plans.
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Neurath made clear that conscious control is a planned economy’s greatest strength compared to capitalism, but it requires democracy to prevent authoritarian and inefficient supervision over the production and distribution of goods. …
Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese, Planning An Eco-Socialist Utopia
“These revolutionaries – who tell us that one day people will change their minds because they will realise the sinfulness of present society – are trying to make us see the world through a filter of hope. They have put common sense aside, they are offering us that same old pie in the sky that the clerics used to sell. There is no hope (but this does not mean I need not be enthusiastic in my life, or a participant in events. My negativity, which is at last written through me like rock, does not make me unhappy)”
— Monsieur Dupont, Nihilist Communism, pg. 72
“The greatest harm that strikes men is perhaps the reduction of their existence to the state of a servile organ. But no one realizes the despair involved in becoming a politician, a writer, or a scientist. There is no cure for the insufficiency that diminishes anyone who refuses to become a whole man, in order to be nothing more than one of the functions of human society.”
— Georges Bataille, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in Visions of Excess (Trans. Allan Stoekl)
“Who thinks abstractly? The uneducated, not the educated.[…] I have only to adduce examples for my proposition: everybody will grant that they confirm it. A murderer is led to the place of execution. For the common populace he is nothing but a murderer. Ladies perhaps remark that he is a strong, handsome, interesting man. The populace finds this remark terrible: What? A murderer handsome? How can one think so wickedly and call a murderer handsome; no doubt, you yourselves are something not much better! This is the corruption of morals that is prevalent in the upper classes, a priest may add, knowing the bottom of things and human hearts. One who knows men traces the development of the criminal’s mind: he finds in his history, in his education, a bad family relationship between his father and mother, some tremendous harshness after this human being had done some minor wrong, so he became embittered against the social order — a first reaction to this that in effect expelled him and henceforth did not make it possible for him to preserve himself except through crime. — There may be people who will say when they hear such things: he wants to excuse this murderer! […] This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.”
— GWF Hegel, Who Thinks Abstractly?
“Before dreams (or terror) invented mythologies and cosmogonies, before time was parceled into days, the sea, the eternal sea, was already here. Who is the sea? Who is that violent and ancient being that gnaws at the pillars of the earth and is one and many seas and abyss and brilliancy and chance and wind? To gaze at it is to gaze for the first time, always. With the wonder produced by elemental things, the beautiful evenings, the moon, the fire of a brazier. Who is the sea, who am I? I shall know this on the day that comes after agony.”
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Jorge Luis Borges.
I’ve been trying to parse out how Borges’ poetry seems to magnify with every reading, so that the earth in which it’s rooted falls away and falls away and you’re left with the vertigo of finite lines stretching into the chasmic and fathomless.
‘To gaze at it is to gaze for the first time / always.’ Reading in translation is like looking through darkened glass; and still.
(via kuanios)
“When we have consummated in ourselves the divorce with history, it is quite superfluous to attend the formalities. We need only look at man in the face to detach ourselves from him and to no longer regret his hoaxes. Thousands of years of sufferings, which would have softened the hearts of stones, merely petrified this steely mayfly, monstrous example of evanescence and hardening, driven by one insipid madness, a will to exist at once imperceptible and shameless. When we realize that no human motive is compatible with infinity and that no gesture is worth the trouble of making it, our heart, by its very beating, can no longer conceal its vacuity. Men mingle in a uniform fate as futile, for the indifferent eye, as the stars-or the crosses of a military cemetery. Of all the goals proposed for existence, which one, subjected to analysis, escapes the music-hall or the morgue? Which fails to reveal us as futile or sinister? And is there a single stroke of magic, is there one charm which can still deceive us?”
– Emil Cioran, A short history of decay
What are some things you wish you saw more of in lady whump?
ooooh i love this question <3 mostly i would love to see more comfort by someone who isn't a male love interest!! so much lady whump is just hetero romance woman in peril which is great if that's what you like, nothing wrong with it, but i don't vibe. give me platonic lady&lady hurt/comfort!
other tropes i love that i don't see enough for ladies:
ladies who are unpleasant when they're injured/ill. crabby, mean women who are crabbier and meaner please
false recovery. things are starting to look better, then take a nose dive really quickly before anyone knows what's happening. i looooove that trope.
wound complications. infections, hard healing journeys, etc. a lot of time women's injuries are barely a blip on the radar. STRETCH EM OUT.
lady leaders/captains! collapsing from exhaustion! crumbling under pressure! we see effortless lady captains but rarely complicated ones. give me tired lady captains who are disillusioned and bored! lady captains who don't think they should be leading! women who don't WANT to be leading! women who found out this is harder than they thought and are pushing themselves really hard and suffering the consequences!