Huxley vs Orwell /  by mirena

This comic is based word from word on Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death. As someone who is often amused by the internet I often fear our dependency on Google, our expectation for the clicking on buttons to deliver and our thirst for the waterfalls of information. I also rarely post depressing stuff as I like to keep positive and posted this simply on account of it being pretty amusing. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.

Huxley vs Orwell

The High Art of the Low Countries /  by mirena

 

A review of the first in the series in the Telegraph with an outline of the ideas covered in this documentary.  Artists  and their masterpieces covered: van Eyck, van der Weyden, Bosch, Bruegel, Rubens.

I remember seeing the Rubens and Brueghel exhibit at The Mauritshuis in The Hague in the Netherlands and it was one of the most magical experiences in paint I had ever seen.

Some of the art covered in the documentary: Ghent Altarpiece Garden of Earthly Delights

 

THE USES AND DISADVANTAGES OF SOCRATES by CHRISTOPHER ROWE /  by mirena

Abstract: Socrates was and is one of the most influential figures in the history of Western philosophy. Yet it remains an open question just what the real, historical Socrates stood for: he wrote nothing, and none even of our most ancient sources can probably be relied upon to give us anything like an accurate picture of his ideas and methods. As if to fill the gap, successive individual philosophers and philosophical traditions—from Plato to Nietzsche and beyond—construct a range of different Socrateses, to serve either as a model for emulation or as a target of attack. Nevertheless, the single most vivid picture of Socrates is that provided by Plato, who was his immediate philosophical successor, and who gave the character ‘Socrates’ the leading role in the majority of his fictional dialogues. What is this Socrates like, and does he have any use for us? http://research.ncl.ac.uk/histos/documents/1998.09RoweUsesandDisadvantagesofSocrates216229.pdf

Toward An Impure Poetry by Pablo Neruda /  by mirena

Toward An Impure Poetry by Pablo Neruda

It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter's tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things—all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substances, foot-prints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.

Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.

A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soupstained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.

The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding—willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep penetration of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice-marked and tooth-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, and the woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and wheat kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.

Let no one forget them. Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away in a frenzy's abandonment—moonlight, the swan in the gathering darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet's concern, essential and absolute.

Those who shun the "bad taste" of things will fall flat on the ice.

Once we have computer outlets in every home, each of them hooked to enormous libraries. Where anyone can ask any question and be given answers. Isaac Asimov talks about the internet of today in 1988 /  by mirena

One of the amazing things of living in the 21st century is the access to obscure knowledge and self-directed learning which Isaac Asimov predicted in an interview in 1988:

For example.. each second, a trillion neutrinos pass through your hand, but only about two will interact with an atom in your body throughout your entire lifetime.