Choose rather than react.
-Nicholas Bate, from here
Monday, June 24, 2024
Well, yes......................
I saw a description of Bitcoin being everything you didn't understand about computers combined with everything you don't understand about money. Now I feel seen.
-Chris Lynch, from here
nudged.....................
Given how much our daily lives are nudged and steered into channels engineered by tech firms, one can no longer sensibly adopt a conceptual demarcation between "the private sector" and "government."
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
Evening wind................
 |
| Evening Wind Edward Hopper 1921 |
is the title of one of Edward Hopper's
pen-and-ink drawings,
which I spent some time looking at
in a gallery on the far west side of town.
pen-and-ink drawings,
which I spent some time looking at
in a gallery on the far west side of town.
Hopper could have called it
Totally Naked Women Crawling
on All Fours into an Unmade Bed
for she does occupy the foreground fully,
so it was only later that I noticed
the curtains behind her being lifted
by what must be an evening wind.
Then I noticed that the woman appears
to be looking at those curtains,
her face hidden by the dark curtain of her hair.
Or is she looking through the curtains
at the jagged outline of the city buildings,
topped with water tanks in silhouette?
It was not until I closed my eyes and imagined
her gradually falling asleep
after sliding naked under the covers
that I could envision the evening wind,
not just the wind as revealed by the curtains,
but the invisible wind itself blowing
through the room of this ingeniously titled drawing.
-Billy Collins, as published in Whale Day And Other Poems
Sunday, June 23, 2024
Fifty years ago.................................
a reaction to...................
There is something new and voracious in the world that feeds on individual agency, and is basically imperialistic in its aspirations. . . .
. . .the idea of sovereignty has suddenly reemerged as politically salient. If we take the political anger of populist movements at their word, it is a reaction to the imperiousness of political elites and corporate forces in pressing agendas of progress that seek to delegitimize the concerns of those deemed regressive.
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
a bracing concept................
. . . in Germany, where on certain roads you are free to drive as fast as you please. But if you cause a serious accident, you are never allowed to drive again, essentially. The law grants wide discretion and assigns total responsibility. That is, it treats citizens as adults. This is a bracing concept, maybe a little too radical for the United States.
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
play spirit.........................
To dare, to take risks, to bear uncertainty, to endure tension—these are the essence of play spirit.
advantage.......................
I believe that the people who institute our laws are the weak and the many. So they institute laws and assign praise and blame with themselves and their own advantage in mind.
-Plato, channeling Callicles, from Gorgias
a curious glance..................
The third form of traffic rationality is one that comes into view as soon as one recognizes the oddly gratuitous nature of such a project and permits oneself a curious glance backward, as it were, to "less developed" parts of the world. Rather than try to duplicate the efficiency of their driving practices with computers, we might instead look to such practices to remind ourselves what human beings are capable of, when left to their own devices. This becomes a meditation on the meaning of self-government.
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
a deep necessity.........................
A fundamental fact about human beings is that we are homo faber, as Hannah Arendt said. We make stuff. Doing so seems to express a deep necessity we have to point to something visible in the world and say, "I did that."
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
the most fundamental freedom..............
As creatures who are self-moving, freedom of movement would seem to be the most fundamental freedom there is, a minimal condition for that basic animal pleasure that makes life sweet. . . . What is at stake is not simply a legal right, but a disposition to find one's way through the world by the exercise of one's own powers.
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
safetyism..........................
If one cares about safety (and who doesn't), one does well to take a skeptical look at the safety-industrial complex, and its reliance on moral intimidation to pursue ends other than safety.
. . . if left unchallenged, the pursuit of risk reduction tends to create a society based on an unrealistically low view of human capacities. Infantilization slips in, under cover of democratic ideals. I will insist, on the contrary, that democracy remains viable only if we are willing to extend to one another a presumption of individual competence. This is what social trust is built on. Together, they are the minimal endowments for a free, responsible, fully awake people.
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
My kind of writer...........................
"Consistency of tone" is one of those precepts pressed upon writers by writing teachers. Any reader who expects consistency is likely to be bewildered in what follows, . . .
--Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
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