is aspiration good or bad?
is envy good or bad?
is optimism good or bad?
are they eternally linked?
Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton is a great book… that disturbed me (a wee bit)
Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea has just dropped through my letter box from Mr Amazon. It’s supposed to be great, so i hope it doesn’t let me down
Expert opinion is only expert if it agrees with you
History is like a lantern, but on the stern of the ship
Into the midweek hinterland between Christmas and new year, enters the Zen master’s great ‘pas de deux’
Sorry darling, I’m having an important dream about civil rights, it would be wrong to interrupt it
Our purchases are tribal, neo-religious signifiers. “I think I’m the type of person who buys this sort of wine so I’ll tell myself it tastes better than the sorts other types buy.” “Guys like me buy fish and chips not kebabs/Macs not PCs/Dan Brown not Ian Rankin/the Guardian not the Times.” David Mitchell.
Just because a relationship ends, doesn’t mean it’s a failure
the facts speak for themselves
no they don’t
analysis is translation
What we learn from history, is that we don’t learn from history.
I used to take that as a cynical motto, in that we really should try harder to learn from history. It’s really the other way around, we need to accept the limits of what we learn from history and not always trying to ‘fight the last war’.
The military hubris of 1914 gave rise to the shameful anti-war appeasement of the 1930s, which led the way to the militarism in Vietnam and Korea, then the non engagement in the Balkans and Rwanda, to the Iraq war, to who knows what justified humanitarian military action we will hesitate in carrying out because of the Iraq mistakes.
We learn from history, that the hindsight from the last crises shouldn’t write the play-book for the next one.
when cyberpunk Stewart Brand said in 1984 that ‘Information wants to be free’, could he have envisaged the digitisation/infomistaion of everything?
yes, i made that word up.
Is it the 21st century curse to know what we don’t know?
…what drives men and women to revolt against injustice is not dreams of liberated grandchildren, but memories of enslaved ancestors…
Walter Benjamin
via Nick Cohen in the Observer
A mob fighting a good cause is still a mob. To fight back, you need to remember that although the internet age is hugely expanding the number of complaints, the old rules still apply. Whether you are the owner of a tiny blog or the editor of a national newspaper, if someone points out an incorrect fact, you correct it; if someone challenges an argument, you argue back; and if someone says that you must think what they think, you ignore them.
…but not exactly all the time, other wise we wouldn’t appreciate it. To appreciate happy growth we need to experience a happiness recession once in a while.
If you ever wish to discredit or malign a well evidenced and righteous discovery, theory or idea… over sell it
Are we humans are constantly and tragically drawn to utopian ideas, such as the endlessness of economic growth, one way bets and eventual heavens and justice beyond the stars?
