#knowledge systems

[flyingpurplepeopleprogrammer]

One of my hottest takes, one that I absolutely (and somewhat meanly) judge how people engage with, is that rituals like astrology, tarot, and so on are Actually Fine.

This tends to surprise people: I'm an annoying scientist with occasionally extremely vocal opinions about scientific philosophy and the nature of reality. I don't think the arrangement of the planets has any bearing on our birth, so why do I get down with astrology?

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in our selves.

Astrology isn't actually about planets or constellations of stars. It's about concepts and images. Libra isn't a collection of points in the sky or a sector of the sidereal plane; it's an ideal set alongside other ideals. The interplay of houses and wanderers is a workbook of deeply human ideas: ideas like Justice, Lust, Fortune, and Kinship. It is a set of tools for relating those ideas to our selves and to our place in the universe. It's like any other form of divination, and used properly, it works.

But what does it work for?

I think it's easier to understand if you look at cartomancy. With Tarot, you have very clearly labelled symbols - concepts like death, betrayal, misapprehension, love, desire, and so on - that you quite literally arrange in relation to eachother. It's a tool for arranging thoughts.

Formally, there are set and rigid rules, but like all divination the real meat is in interpretation and folk practice. When you ask your question, whether it's to the cards, the bones, stars, or stones, the answer you get isn't a specific command: it's a scaffold for you to arrange your own feelings on, and a reading that you walk away from rejecting is as valuable as one you embrace for the simple reason that it helped you think.

Or, at least, it would have if you'd let it.

[protoslacker]

A commemorative quarter honoring the late Edith Kanakaʻole, venerated Hawaiian cultural icon, kumu hula, composer, chanter, and a key influence in the Hawaiian renaissance of the 1970s has been released into circulation by the U.S. Mint. Her designation as an honoree is an unbelievable honor for her family, foundation, and people. Featured on the quarter depicting Edith Kanakaʻole is the inscription “E hō mai ka ʻike,” which refers to the intertwined role hula and chants play in this perpetuation of Hawaiian knowledge systems.

Edith Kanakaʻole Foundation. US Mint Quarter Release Celebrations By Edith Kanaka 'ole Foundation

[protoslacker]

The unifying principle between repressing photography of a war and photography of a pandemic is that a population that cannot see human carnage will not object as strongly to its perpetuation and will not care as much about the incompetence that brought it on. Hospitals and nursing homes may not have the mendacious intent of the U.S. military, but their actions have a similar effect of making it nearly impossible for ordinary Americans to be confronted with visual evidence of the true cost of the calamity that’s unfolding.

Peter Maass in The Intercept. HIDING COVID-19: HOW THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SUPPRESSES PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE PANDEMIC

The U.S. government has reinforced media restrictions at hospitals, reducing the flow of disturbing images of the pandemic.

[protoslacker]

Of course, it’s not the case that Sontag treats reality as a sort of finite resource that will be ‘used up’ by being duplicated photographically. What concerns her is the way in which photography modifies – and distorts – our relationship to the world around us, obscuring the connections that make understanding ‘reality’ possible on a social, historical and political level, in favour of an ‘image’ that is, quite literally, depth-less.

Darren Campion. The Morals of Vision: Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ Revisited (Part 2)

Part 1

On Photography

[adammonago]

Most orgs aren't information starved. They're metabolically overwhelmed. Dashboards multiplied. Copilots summarized. Decision cycles got slower. The constraint isn't data. It's judgment capacity. New essay on Judgment Infrastructure: adammonago.com #OrganizationalDesign #Leadership

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[blackponderer]

"Hospicing Modernity" by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (p. 235 - 238)

[blackponderer]

"Hospicing Modernity" by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (p. 202)

[blackponderer]

"Hospicing Modernity" by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (p. 142 - 144)