the soulful gamble known as trust......

 

     Raising our children under the telescope of our permanent gaze is costly.  If you are trusting, you win some encounters and lose others, but in the long-term, you gain much more than you would from distrusting, which results in lost opportunities, says Hardin.  A panoptic culture teaches our children that we cannot take a chance on others.  Unintentionally, such a culture also teaches children that they are to be distrusted, and that we cannot take a chance on them.  Cameras, breathalyzers, software monitoring, GPS tracking, and other far-reaching paraphernalia of the eye take away our children's brief chance in life to gradually, with inevitable stumbling, to learn to take responsibility for their actions.  Surveillance erodes their freedom to fall.  "What I always say to parents is if you are giving your kids appropriate freedom, it will feel like neglect in our culture," says psychologist Wendy Mogel, author of The Blessings of a Skinned Knee.  We're setting up safe zones that are cages.  And we're substituting instamatic fragments for the homegrown mutual knowledge that slowly builds into the soulful gamble known as trust.  We've mistaken the monologue of surveillance for the dialogue that is care.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

The gentle morph into a surveillance state......

 

During the Superbowl there was an amazing Rorschach test masquerading as a feel-good Ring doorbell commercial.  For those who missed it, find it here.  Essentially it touts a new service where neighborhood networks of Ring doorbell cameras can combine with Amazon AI to find a lost dog based on an uploaded photo.  Half the population reacted, "isn't that wonderful" and the other half of viewers, of whom I am one, reacted "that's freaking scary."

-Warren Meyer, from this Coyote Blog post

masks off.................

 

Most people fear a surveillance state. Me? I fear the people who fear the surveillance state. I wish there were cameras everywhere watching everything and that we all had access to them. Because we are beginning to lose the behavioral feedback loop that kept us in line.

-Hugh Howey, from this post

thanks seth

imitation......................

 

We learn best through other people.  Our ability to learn from each other greatly exceeds our ability to solve problems on our own. . . . "The secret to our species' success lies not in our raw, innate intelligence or in any specialized mental abilities," writes Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich.  Instead, he argues it's the ability to learn easily from the innovations of others that makes us uniquely capable as a species. . . . Imitation is the foundation for human ingenuity.

-Scott H. Young, Get Better at Anything

that salutary fear................

 

. . . for a long time they will prevent the establishment of any despotism, and they will furnish fresh weapons to each succeeding generation that struggles in favor of the liberty of mankind.  Let us, then, look forward to the future with that salutary fear which makes men keep watch and ward for freedom, not with that faint and idle terror which depresses and enervates the heart.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 2, Chapter VII (1840)

I'm conflicted...............................

 

...................is this cool - or is it scary?

Shortcuts...........................

 

The successful learn vicariously; the foolish insist on firsthand pain.

-Farnum Street

When YouTube...........................

 

.............................................watches you back.

Watching, always watching......................

 

        back story and enlargeable photo here

We may be suffering..................

.......................... from a lack of inculcation:

 In his sixties, Adams would say that vigilance in civic life had been inculcated in him at an early age.  "Let the people keep a watchful eye over the conduct of their rulers," he explained, "for we are told that great men are not all times wise.  It would be indeed a wonder if in any age or country they were always honest."

-Stacy Schiff,  The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

Our friend at Sippican Cottage........

 ........................makes some observations:

When I returned, I looked around, and realized the world I was born into was completely gone. I’d been watching it sluice down some sort of drain for so long, that I wondered if I was some sort of involuntary antichrist, making each tomorrow worse than today, every day since I was born. The whole 200,000,000- way handshake seems to have been totally replaced with nothing but a Balkan competition to see which sect could pull themselves to the top of a greasy pole with nothing but a Netflix login screen at the top. The competition was desultory, because no one wanted any job but greasing the pole. Climbing is a lot of work.

On the importance........................

 

................................................of example.

a point of view............

Edward Hopper   Cape Cod Morning   Oil on Canvas   1950

It is a woman looking out to see if the weather is good enough to hang out her wash.

-Josephine Hopper remarking on her husband's painting, Cape Cod Morning.

Did I say that?  You're making it Norman Rockwell.  From my point of view she's just looking out the window, just looking out the window.

-Edward Hopper's reply

Entropy...........................

 Entropy applies to every part of our lives. It is inescapable, and even if we try to ignore it, the result is a collapse of some sort. Understanding entropy leads to a radical change in the way we see the world. Ignorance of it is responsible for many of our biggest mistakes and failures. We cannot expect anything to stay the way we leave it. To maintain our health, relationships, careers, skills, knowledge, societies, and possessions requires never-ending effort and vigilance. Disorder is not a mistake; it is our default. Order is always artificial and temporary.

-Farnam Street, from here

The James Webb Space Telescope..........

 ....................goes spiral galaxy watching:

life its ownself.........................

 Sometimes you can learn more about a person by watching how they talk to a waiter than by asking some profound question about their philosophy of life.

-David Brooks, How To Know a Person:  The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

Maybe some good will come..................

................from all the drama over the Speakership:

According to ZeroHedge, here is a list of concessions McCarthy had to make to secure the votes of some Representatives.  This one caught my eye:

4.   Bills presented to Congress will be single subject, not omnibus with all the attendant earmarks, and there will be a 72-hour minimum period to read them.

We will see.

more cartoons here

Wisdom.......................

 21. Practise observing your moods, rather than being them.

-from this list from Nicholas Bate

Sometimes............

 

Laying on my back, watching the stars emerge, I was struck by how they'd been there all along, invisibly lining my day even when I couldn't see them.  Sometimes the darkness reveals, it's ways more mysterious than light's.  Sometimes the darkness gives a gift of stars by which we can navigate our way home.

-Boyd Varty, Cathedral of the Wild

image via

Step outside..................................

      Smith in his book and with his life is telling us how to live.  Seek wisdom and virtue.  Behave as if an impartial spectator is watching you.  Use the idea of an impartial spectator to step outside yourself and see yourself as others see you.  Use that vision to know yourself.  Avoid the seductions of money and fame, for they will never satisfy.

-Russ Roberts,  How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life:  An Unexpected Guide To Human Nature And Happiness