[vesselsofmercy]

“Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky, from Notes from the Underground

[breadandflowers]

We won’t save the Earth with a better kind of disposable coffee cup | George Monbiot

We must challenge the corporations that urge us to live in a throwaway society rather than seeking ‘greener’ ways of maintaining the status quo, says George Monbiot

“Even marine plastic is in large part a fishing issue. It turns out that 46% of the Great Pacific garbage patch – which has come to symbolise our throwaway society – is composed of discarded nets, and much of the rest consists of other kinds of fishing gear. Abandoned fishing materials tend to be far more dangerous to marine life than other forms of waste. As for the bags and bottles contributing to the disaster, the great majority arise in poorer nations without good disposal systems. But because this point was not made, we look to the wrong places for solutions.

From this misdirection arise a thousand perversities. One prominent environmentalist posted a picture of the king prawns she had bought, celebrating the fact that she had persuaded the supermarket to put them in her own container rather than a plastic bag, and linking this to the protection of the seas. But buying prawns causes many times more damage to marine life than any plastic in which they are wrapped. Prawn fishing has the highest rates of bycatch of any fishery – scooping up vast numbers of turtlesand other threatened species. Prawn farming is just as bad, eliminating tracts of mangrove forests, crucial nurseries for thousands of species.

We are kept remarkably ignorant of such issues. As consumers, we are confused, bamboozled and almost powerless – and corporate power has gone to great lengths to persuade us to see ourselves this way. The BBC’s approach to environmental issues is highly partisan, siding with a system that has sought to transfer responsibility for structural forces to individual shoppers. Yet it is only as citizens taking political action that we can promote meaningful change.”

[edwordsmyth]

“Don’t you notice that there are particular moments when you are naturally inspired to introspection? Work with them gently, for these are the moments when you can go through a powerful experience, and your whole worldview can change quickly.”

—

Sogyal Rinpoche

(via

spiritualgateway

)

[stoweboyd]

Art and morals are, with certain provisos… one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

| Iris Murdoch (via stoweboyd)

[edwordsmyth]

“The Confucian state may have been the world’s greatest and most enduring bureaucracy, but it actively promoted markets, and as a result, commercial life in China soon became far more sophisticated, and markets more developed, than anywhere else in the world. This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist. Again, this seems bizarre, since we’re used to assuming that capitalism and markets are the same thing, but, as the great French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, in many ways they could equally well be conceived as opposites. While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of money—historically, ways for those with a surplus of grain to acquire candles and vice versa (in economic shorthand, C-M-C’, for commodity-money-other commodity)—capitalism is first and foremost the art of using money to get more money (M-C-M’). Normally, the easiest way to do this is by establishing some kind of formal or de facto monopoly. For this reason, capitalists, whether merchant princes, financiers, or industrialists, invariably try to ally themselves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market, so as to make it easier for them to do so. From this perspective, China was for most of its history the ultimate anti-capitalist market state. Unlike later European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed). Instead, like their officials, they saw them as destructive parasites—though, unlike the usurers, ones whose fundamentally selfish and antisocial motivations could still be put to use in certain ways…”

— David Graeber (via onancientpaths)

[kropotkhristian-deactivated2019]

I'm trying to learn about Anarchism and was wondering if you think I should read the conquest of bread or is it to complicated like using terms I that someone new wouldn't understand?

The Conquest of Bread is good, but it is a pretty old book and comes across as a bit dated to many people. It also isn’t a directly explanatory work about what anarchism IS in the same way that other books are. It was the book that convinced me, though. 

If you want something more modern and accessible, I recommend To Change Everything by Crimethinc

If you want an explicitly explanatory work from the same basic time period of anarchism as The Conquest of Bread, I recommend Now and After: The ABCs of Communist Anarchism by Alexander Berkman

[putonflesh]

Why won’t Instagram let me follow people? Pictured: Erich Fromm, A Good Man-darin is Hard to Find

[nemophilies-deactivated20190428]

“Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcis­sistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship. Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.”

— Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love 

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

autumn cicada serves as a mindfulness bell how fleeting this life

Frank LaRue Owen, from “Two Haiku,” The School of Soft-Attention (Homebound Publications, 2018)

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

Poetry comes from a forest where the roots of words, like mycelia in the soil, have been talking to other roots for a long time.

Jerry Martien, from “Song of the Redwood Tree: Language and the Loss of Our Forest,” Catamaran (vol. 6, no 3, Summer 2018)

[soundstudiesresource]

Anatomy of an AI System

Anatomy of an AI System - The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources. By Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler (2018)

‘Alexa, turn on the hall lights’

The cylinder springs into life. ‘OK.’ The room lights up. The woman makes a faint nodding gesture, and carries the child upstairs.

This is an interaction with Amazon’s Echo device. A brief command and a response is the most common form of engagement with this consumer voice-enabled AI device. But in this fleeting moment of interaction, a vast matrix of capacities is invoked: interlaced chains of resource extraction, human labor and algorithmic processing across networks of mining, logistics, distribution, prediction and optimization.

[smoketree]

“Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (tr. by Constance Garnett)

[sound-art-text]

A JUKEBOX of People Trying to Change the World is a CD jukebox, sitting between digital and analogue technologies which contains a growing collection of songs addressing a spectrum of social issues, some directly political in motive, some vaguely utopian and some chronicling specific historic events. The songs could all be described as progressive in subject matter. The archive currently contains over 2,000 tracks, with no more than two by the same artist, which are ordered into over seventy categories such as feminism, land ownership, poverty, civil rights and ecology.

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“It is not possible to sleep when everything still grows.”

— Fredrik Nyberg, tr. by Jennifer Hayashida, from “Armeria, Willd. Fem.,”

[objectnuminous]

“The capacity to ennoble everything sensual and give life even to the deadest material by wedding it with the idea, is the finest warrant of our supernatural origins.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1818 (via slaughterdew)

[ellaenchanted2004-deactivated20]

“Here’s the deal. The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through. Aye, there’s the rub. Many of us “helper” types are as much or more concerned with being seen as good helpers as we are with serving the soul-deep needs of the person who needs help. Witnessing and companioning take time and patience, which we often lack — especially when we’re in the presence of suffering so painful we can barely stand to be there, as if we were in danger of catching a contagious disease. We want to apply our “fix,” then cut and run, figuring we’ve done the best we can to “save” the other person.”

— The Gift of Presence, The Perils of Advice | On Being  

[cruciform-solidarity]

Bonhoeffer Revisited: from Christology to Politics | Rowan Williams 

Lecture 1: Modern Christology and the Reformation Legacy Lecture 2: Bonhoeffer’s Christology Lecture 3: Bonhoeffer’s Ethics