Getting Your Gun Off
They don’t call themselves the Proud Boys for nothing. Post-teen to middle-aged men gather in the woods. They dress in camouflage. They are armed with the latest in assault weapons. They carry knives. Are they protecting their right to bear arms, as the NRA would have them believe, or are they assembled to mimic a pubescent rite of passage? The symbolism strikes me as too potent to ignore.
Insurrection Day
Turn the bigot magnet on unleash the storm
“Wide Awake at the Banquet”: Pierre Hadot & Ancient Philosophy
“Hadot deserves to be far more widely known. In the Anglophone world, he is usually eclipsed by Foucault, who was his colleague at the College de France and a great supporter of him, although, as you have probably gathered, Hadot did not agree with Foucault on many issues.”[1] Professor Peter Brown
In Praise of Philosophy
What follows is a compaction of Merleau-Ponty’s first address to the Collège de France after he took over the Collège’s chair of philosophy. Pierre Hadot commended Merleau-Ponty’s tribute to Socrates.
“That Strange, Mysterious and Indescribable”: The Fugitive Legacy of Frederic Douglass’s Political Thought
Nick Bromell’s The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass rests on a tour de force reading of Douglass’s own account of his childhood. Bromell grasps how Douglass’s infancy gave him a foundational sense of dignity that fueled his resistance to slavery in America and injustice everywhere. What follows is the final summative chapter of Bromell’s book which underscores how “Douglass was always a political thinker not a ‘bare’ theorist. He did not seek the truth for its own sake; he sought it because it carried him closer to justice.”
As I have underscored many times throughout this book, Douglass’s thought remains elusive today because the philosophical lexicon at his disposal to articulate it was inadequate to the task.
Do Good Things
I’ve been thinking about writing and activism—which one is “better” for a person to do, a person with limited time and energy, a person in a pandemic, a person living in a country where basic voting rights are not at all secure. I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about it like this—as in one or the other. Except for the obvious fact that there are only 24 hours in a day, even a strange pandemic day, and everyone I know is exhausted and demoralized. What “should” people do? I’ve been thinking about that.
“A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communication”
Among the distant ancestors of Onora O’Neill’s A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communication (Cambridge University Press) is a work by Plato, the Phaedrus, in which Socrates expresses misgivings about telecommunications technology.
The dialogue is not usually understood in just those terms, of course. But the technology that gets Socrates wound up is the written word, which allows a message to be stored and retrieved, minus the context in which it was created or the nonverbal signals that go with proximity to a speaker.
Mindful Keil
to be in the now can stop pandemics
to be in the now
means not to be in the know
in the very long term we will all be covered with snow
Yesterday at the NRA Convention
When Beto invokes Alithia Ramirez above, his repetition of the phrase “gifted and talented” seems slightly class-bound, yet his attentiveness to the murdered girl’s picture-making and the familial scene where he took in her images is deeply humane. As is his readiness to talk to those on the other side of the debate about gun laws. Quash noise from ideologues who lack Beto’s feel for the American people’s fluidity. Don’t conflate his democratic temper with a sell-out’s disposition. Beto aims to work with and for us. His purer-than-thou critics are dancing with the Donald…
Again
The Ten Dead Adults In The Supermarket
Are Pushed Aside By Nineteen Children
who smile naively from photographs –
Her proudly-raised Honor Roll certificate,
his “Change Maker” t-shirt.
For Christmas cards, politicians
pose their families with guns.
The guns shine. The guns are bleeding
the children again. Again
and yet again, rounds spent in endless repetition.
That church or concert hall. This classroom
with floors bleached, swept clean
of hair and bone. What needs to be done
not done. “The school had too many doors.”
Holes blown through their hearts, the parents
buy wood boxes, carved stone.
It’s Coming for Us All
“Don’t talk to me about mental illness! Anyone who does something like that is just a coward!” I was at the park, walking my dog. Excepting my dog, I was the lone solitary walker. Huddled groups of twos and threes trampled the blacktop. The mostly geriatric crews traded thoughts on yesterday’s slaughter in Uvalde, Texas. Some comforted each other, Most traded justifications or vows of revenge. The air was bad; bloodlust hacked from many wrinkled throats. I feared going to work. On days like these in retail, with all the displaced anger, the rituals of hierarchical debasement get worse. I felt horror at the unspeakable, mundane child murders in Texas. But I couldn’t understand the crack about cowardice. It seemed like there were two competing braveries – the world-destroying violence of the shooter, almost certainly consigning himself to death. And the teachers acting as human shields – the parents who literally broke the hold of the cops to run in and rescue their babies.
Mobile Soul
https://youtu.be/sztxZR3ag50
Jordan Poole is impossibly fast on the court where his athleticism goes with a sweet touch (he’s the best free throw shooter in the world), genius passes, and stop-start gambits as flashy as his eye-moves above.
Russian Shadows, Ukrainian Light (Arendt’s Lens, Babel’s Visions, “Come and See” & “The Brest Fortress”)
“Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est–‘that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.” Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt’s up ender to Origins nails what autocrats fear most about humankind. It speaks to why Putin went wilding in Crimea and the Donbas after stand-up Slavs made Ukraine new in 2014.
Beto’s F-ing Coming!
Greg Abbott is not pro-life. pic.twitter.com/mqOuBzlgBP
— Beto O’Rourke (@BetoORourke) May 11, 2022
Members, Don’t Get Weary
I’m with the OG Tonight‼️ @DoloresHuerta @amazonlabor✊🏽
Jolene
I once worked in a factory with a girl named Jolene. We were 17 and I had lied to get hired; we couldn’t legally work in the plant for another year.
She was white, from somewhere around “Taylor-tucky”, a name that mocked the southern roots of working class whites of the suburb of Taylor, Michigan. I lived in Detroit (still do). I was black, and I still am, as a matter of fact. Without the factory we’d never have met.