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The trans-humanist plan: to transcend the meat-space. What's their back-up plan? To do it better.
"Unable to achieve what it desires, 'progress' christens what it achieves desire." -- Don Colacho. This is great an explanation for neo-mania.
If living around beautiful old works is so edifying, if walkable towns so important, if there is a certain ineffable dolce vita to all things Italian, why did they invent fascism?
How often do you hear of the wealthy cleaning up a mess they created? 1) they refuse, as a matter of principle 2) it's cheaper to give to other causes, and they know it.
Instead of talking about having the wrong heroes, I think it is more useful to talk about admiring the wrong attributes. The dominate culture values the fact of fortune, no matter how it was earned. It values fame the same way. These are bad values.
To right-wingers who brag "we have more guns": history shows that once you overthrow civil order, ya'll will stop being a "we" pretty quickly.
Isn't that what Padmé said?:
"So this is how liberty dies . . . with robots everywhere."
*Glares at a droid.*
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Links and research
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As is known, I hate television. Here's some more anti-television content, which linked to this academic paper.
Pondering the third aphorism -- the one about fascism -- above lead me to do some background research, eventually coming to the interesting position of John Adalbert Lukacs -- he classified himself as a reactionary, but under the rubric of being against vulgarity, widely defined. This made him against the demagoguery of McCarthy and the invasion of Iraq. Judge a reactionary on what they are reacting against.
Coming further down this line of research, check out this book review.
Lilla presents his point succinctly: “Hopes can be disappointed. Nostalgia is irrefutable.”
. . . One might expect nostalgia to be a condition of the old. Surprisingly it isn’t. It is often the young who long for the return of a fictional past which never existed but offers a life without the tedious concerns of the present.
. . . The old know better than the young that cultural memory is selective, and like memory of childbirth, tends to obscure the worst bits and present them as quaint. The old have heard the stories before, and their counter-stories.
I discovered the word juggernaut
is probably derived from the Sanskrit/Odia Jagannātha (Devanagari जगन्नाथ, Odia ଜଗନ୍ନାଥ) "world-lord", combining jagata ("world") and natha ("lord"), which is one of the names of Krishna found in the Sanskrit epics.I learned that the Brother's Grimm began the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the German equivalent of Oxford English Dictionary.
Use Dubai as a metaphor for our times.
Here is another good blog of someone who understands the doom.
From reading Range, I was exposed to the music of Django Reinhardt.
Le Guin sure knows how to do a commencement speech.
