Situationally, I have a different angle. Still, worth looking at. | There is a dominant conception of the human animal as a rational, or at least reasonable, preference-driven chooser, whose behavior reflects preferences, moderated by information processing and will, but little else. Laws, policies, and the most influential legal theories are premised on that same conception. Social psychology and related fields have discovered countless ways in which that conception is wrong. “The situation” refers to causally significant features around us and within us that we do not notice or believe are relevant in explaining human behavior. “Situationism” is an approach that is deliberately attentive to the situationRead more at thesituationist.wordpress.com |
| To do so, situationists rely on the insights of scientific disciplines devoted to understanding how humans make sense of their world—including social psychology, social cognition, cognitive neuroscience, and related disciplines |
| It's
not up to us to believe in God, but only not to grant our love to false
gods. |
| First,
not to believe that the future is a place capable of fulfilling us. The
future is made of the same stuff as the present. We well know that what
we have that is good, wealth, power, esteem, knowledge, love of those we
love, prosperity of those we love, and so on, does not suffice to satisfy
us. But we believe that the day when we will have a little more, we will
be satisfied. We believe it because we are lying to ourselves. For if we
really think about it for a while we know it's false. Or again if we are
suffering affliction, we believe that the day
when this suffering will cease, we will be satisfied. There again we know
it's untrue; as soon as we have gotten used to the cessation of suffering
we want something else. |
Always good to read Marcus as an antidote to the noxious self-fulfillment and happiness industries. Between the hyper-intellectual abstractions of university philosophers and the calculating, materialistic schemes of self-help gurus, lies another philosophy. This is the philosophy of the ancients, of Marcus Aurelius. It is a practice that intends to help individuals answer life's great metaphysical questions in both material and spiritual terms: What is my place is the world, the cosmos? What is the purpose of existence? How do I live a good life? What is happiness and how do I achieve it? |
| According to the Stoic cosmology, we are each but a tiny part of a greater whole (humankind, and then the universe) and our individual disappointments and triumphs, even our deaths, are not to be mourned in this greater scheme |
| Stoic holism offers a refuge from individualism, the intrinsic faith of our age, and its petty, exhausting calculations. |
| "Remember that everything is but what we think it," Marcus writes |
| we are all ears of corn for the reaping, "leaves that the wind scatters earthward": |
Enter the fascinating world of Mark Turner, | cognitive limits when we think about economic or political questions? |
| Our cognitive limits in thinking about anything are severe. The human brain operates at a basic, local, human scale except that our capacity for double-scope blending allows us to understand vast conceptual networks by anchoring them in human-scale blends. The indispensability of human-scale blends is a strong constraint on thought. There are many aspects of our thinking about political and economic decision-making that should be universally accepted, such as that a self is variable, and that a self at any moment knows that it is subject to variation and takes defensive and offensive actions against its past and future versions. These basic truths from cognitive science are papered-over by classical economics, which assumes a constant self, in the form of a utility function. But a self is a complicated and dynamic outcome of complicated conceptual integration networks.Read more at ilevolucionista.blogspot.com |
Anyone looking for the "new normal" doesn't have to look too far from the
events that drove this week's trading so far. In summary, academics and
economists (reportedly there is a difference between the two) have been
searching for a "new normal" for the world economy as it attempts to recover
from the crisis of 2007.
|
What they are missing is that the "new normal" isn't going to be |
defined by the relative economic growth of various countries or the dynamics of
inflation; what will define it (as is increasingly becoming clear) is the
return of absolute, gut-wrenching volatility that makes investing a permanent
state of siege. In that environment, investor behavior is reactive rather than
proactive and surprises abound on both the up and down directions.
|
In Irish lore, aos sí (shee), were descendants of the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Ireland. They are members of a powerful supernatural race comparable to the fairies or elves of old. They are often called the Kings and Queens of the Fairies. However, they are neither winged nor diminutive, and are in no way like the cute little fairies of our modern-day imagination. |
| No matter where they abide, it is in an invisible world that coexists with the world of humans, a different dimension of space and time other than our own. This world is described as a parallel universe in which the aos sí walk amongst the living. |
| Belief in this race of beings who have powers to move quickly through the air and change their shape at will once played a huge part in the lives of people living in rural Ireland and Scotland. |
| Aos sí are generally benign until angered by some foolish action of a mortal. |
| Belief in aos sí has survived for thousands of years.The hold that they had on the Celtic mind was so strong that the new religion of Christianity could not shake it. |
It's relatively easy to chart what the internet is 'used for', to do content analysis and look at traffic - be it from the frenzied urgency of social networking entrepeneurs or marxist sociologists: the "deep space" analysis relates to how a human 'subjectivity' is interpellated by the dynamics of technology, culture and 'minds'. Such a look will help explain what goes on at the 'content' level. | Rather than merely participating in
this computerized space, people begin to discuss its varied social
ramifications. Among those that attract people's attention, the
issue of subjectivity is quite urgent, especially in the contemporary
cultural and political milieu. Discourses in this area generally
fall into two groups based on different, even opposing, premises. |
| new subjectivity as fluid,
decentered, heterogeneous, playful, and malleable |
| On
the other hand, discourses |
| are eager to direct people's attention to
the inherent inequality of cyberspace in distributing social resources
among different classes or genders |
| the social criticism of cyberspace needs
more sophisticated reflections to rid itself of the danger of
becoming a hollow cry of protestation. |
| On the other hand, discourses overflowing
with celebratory and utopian tones also need to avoid the danger
of easily falling prey to the unexpected totalizationRead more at www.isoc.org |
Quietly profound. The idea, focused upon composers, writers, poets, and (in further sources) political intellectuals, goes against the comfort that old age brings resolution: instead, it can bring a stronger power. | what of the last or late period of life, the decay of the body, the onset of ill health (which, in a younger person, brings on the possibility of an untimely end)? |
| the work of some artists acquires a new idiom towards the end of their lives - what I've come to think of as a late style. |
| it has the power exactly to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them. What holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist's mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.Read more at arts.guardian.co.uk |
| Just as Nazi ideology itself was, in the words of the German political scientist Karl Dietrich Bracher, essentially “an eclectic conglomeration of ideas and ways of thinking,” Hitler himself was little more than (to refer once more to Frederic Spotts) “a notorious pickpocket in the marketplace of ideas.” |
| Hitler did claim to be an obsessive reader—but even if that were believable, being an obsessive reader is not the same thing as being a selective or thoughtful one. Ryback himself points to Hitler’s method of reading, as disclosed in Mein Kampf: First you decide what you want to know, then you collect information that confirms what you already believe. Hitler did not read to expand his knowledge, and his earliest and perhaps greatest education came from stridently nationalistic and anti-Semitic newspapers, not from books. Read more at www.weeklystandard.com |
Unlike fringe parties in Europe such as the BNP in the UK which largely reflect mainstream concerns over immigration issues (as well as including more extreme elements), Furedi signals the extreme Right, as articulated through well educated middle class people, as representative of a much deeper and more basic urge to invent "a cause". A melding of rreligious, economic and nationalist narratives to ease existential dread? | The massive electoral triumph of the right-wing Fidesz party in yesterday’s elections in Hungary has been overshadowed by the electoral breakthrough of the radical nationalist Jobbik movement. |
| The success of this backward-looking, chauvinist party, which has gained seats in the Hungarian parliament for the first time, suggests that zombie politics can potentially make a significant impact on public life today. |
| I sensed the same feeling of melancholy bitterness when I happened to wander into a Jobbik rally a few years ago. What struck me was the intense, bitter hatred that dominated the proceedings. |
| What seemed unusual to me was the feeling of restless anger, which seemed to be in search of a cause. |
| These were not eccentric malcontents standing on the margins of society, but articulate individuals who felt that they were giving voice to mainstream concerns.Read more at www.spiked-online.com |
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