― Stephen King, The Stand
There has been a rash of books in recent years by thinkers for whom the human race is getting nicer and nicer. Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker,Matt Ridley and Sam Harris are rational humanists who believe in progress, however many famines and genocides may disfigure the planet. We are en route to a vastly improved future. Perhaps this return to the values of the western Enlightenment is not unrelated to the threat of radical Islam. The philosopher John Gray’s role has been to act as a Jeremiah among these Pollyannas, insisting that we are every bit as nasty as we ever were. If there is anything he detests, it is schemes of visionary transformation. He is a card-carrying misanthrope for whom human life has no unique importance, and for whom history has been little more than the sound of hacking and gouging. One might note that Christianity is as pessimistic as Gray but a lot more hopeful as well ...
It would have been nice if more details of this “impressively erudite work” had been cited and less of the reviewer’s judgments. I was also unaware that Dostoevsky was a fanatical God-hater. This is, after all, the fellow who once wrote, “even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”
Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray review – is every atheist an inverted believer? | Books | The Guardian
What is "blogging"? Is it different from "writing"? - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
REBELS WITHOUT A CAUSE: “If you want to know who actually has the power in our society and who is actually marginalized, ask which ideas get you sponsorships from Google and Pepsi and which get you fired.”
Foreign students are arrested after they are caught forging signatures and withdrawing money from Australian banks in multi-million dollar scam
Foreign students Australia in multi million dollar ATM scam
When money goes missing on the way to the ATO
Cyberwarfare in a World War III?
We breathed
The scent
Barbwired
The scent
It
Lingers
Still
in the twilight quiet of the afternoon
Arbeit Macht Frei
Work will set you free
~M.f. latitude
~M.f. latitude
What is "blogging"? Is it different from "writing"? - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
THE WORKING CLASS CAN KISS MY FOOT: From Thomas Piketty, of all sources, an illuminating graph of how parties of the working class in the USA, Britain, and France all became parties of university graduates.
How left-wing parties in France, Britain & the US went from being parties for workers to parties for university graduatesSource: Piketty pic.twitter.com/cc5ldlyYBj— Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) April 20, 2018
(The title of this post comes from a scurrilous old British ditty about class warfare, sung to the tune of The Red Flag, which went “The working class can kiss my foot, I’ve got the foreman’s job at last.” The actual word sung may not have been foot.)
Ron Medich found guilty of Sydney businessman Michael McGurk's murder
Ron Medich found guilty of ordering execution of former business partner Michael McGurk
Ron Medich found guilty of Sydney businessman Michael McGurk's murder
Ron Medich found guilty of ordering execution of former business partner Michael McGurk
REBELS WITHOUT A CAUSE: “If you want to know who actually has the power in our society and who is actually marginalized, ask which ideas get you sponsorships from Google and Pepsi and which get you fired.”
Foreign students are arrested after they are caught forging signatures and withdrawing money from Australian banks in multi-million dollar scam
Foreign students Australia in multi million dollar ATM scam
When money goes missing on the way to the ATO
Brit teen hacker Kane Gamble posed as CIA boss to access secret ...
A BRIT teen hacker who posed as a CIA boss to access secret military files in a campaign of "cyber terrorism" has been locked up for two years. Kane Gamble, 18, hacked ... After Brennan, Gamble went on to carry out a series of similar attacks on other top security figures from his bedroom in Leics. His victims included the ...
Cyberwarfare in a World War III?
Graft, favours, bullying and barbecues at Canterbury Council
Councillor used $300000 payment to buy Gold Coast unit, ICAC ...
A reader alerted me to a letter written by Carlyle in 1843 to an unidentified young man seeking advice on which books he ought to read. Carlyle’s reply is prudent. Advice is a risky business, inviting disappointment and resentment:
"The
midcentury ideal — of literature as an aesthetically and
philosophically complex activity, and of criticism as its engaged and
admiring decoding — is gone. In its place stands the idea that our
capacity to shape our protean selves is the capacity most worth
exercising, the thing to be defended at all costs, and the good that a
literary inclination best serves. Democratizing the canon did not have
to mean abdicating authority over it, but this was how it played out." …
Read More
Bruce sent in Follow Me Here, which linked to 3 Quarks Daily, a high-quality blog I’d lost track of.
Councillor used $300000 payment to buy Gold Coast unit, ICAC ...
A reader alerted me to a letter written by Carlyle in 1843 to an unidentified young man seeking advice on which books he ought to read. Carlyle’s reply is prudent. Advice is a risky business, inviting disappointment and resentment:
“. . . a long experience has taught me that advice can profit but little; that there is a good reason why advice is so seldom followed; this reason, namely, that it so seldom, and can almost never be, rightly given. No man knows the state of another; it is always to some more or less imaginary man that the wisest and most honest adviser is speaking.”
Corporate Planning in the Australian Public Sector 2017–18 So… Blame Humanities For Today’s Bad Politics?
"The
midcentury ideal — of literature as an aesthetically and
philosophically complex activity, and of criticism as its engaged and
admiring decoding — is gone. In its place stands the idea that our
capacity to shape our protean selves is the capacity most worth
exercising, the thing to be defended at all costs, and the good that a
literary inclination best serves. Democratizing the canon did not have
to mean abdicating authority over it, but this was how it played out." …
Read More
A few weeks ago, I asked the readers of the Noticing newsletter to send in links to their blogs and newsletters (or to their favorite blogs and newsletters written by others). And boy, did they! I pared the submissions list down to a representative sample and sent it out as last week’s newsletter. Here’s a smaller excerpt of that list…you can find the whole thing here.
Several people wrote in about Swiss Miss, Subtraction, Damn Interesting, Cup of Jo, sites I also read regularly.
Ted pointed me towards Julia Evans’ blog, where she writes mostly (but not exclusively) about programming and technology. One of my favorite things about reading blogs is when their authors go off-topic. (Which might explain why everything on kottke.org is off-topic. Or is everything on-topic?
Bruce sent in Follow Me Here, which linked to 3 Quarks Daily, a high-quality blog I’d lost track of.
Marcelo Rinesi blogs infrequently about a little bit of everything. “We write to figure out who we are and what we think.”
Futility Closet is “a collection of entertaining curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics, designed to help you waste time as enjoyably as possible”. (Thx, Peter)
Michael Tsai blogs about technology in a very old school way…reading through it felt like a wearing a comfortable old t-shirt.
Sidebar: the five best design links, every day. And Nico Lumma’s Five Things, “five things everyday that I find interesting”.
Pamela wrote in with dozens of links, among them visual blog But Does It Float, neuroscience blog Mind Hacks, the old school Everlasting Blort.
Elsa recommends Accidentally in Code, written by engineer Cate Huston.
Madeleine writes Extraordinary Routines, “sharing interviews, musings and life experiments that explore the intersection between creativity and imperfection”.
Kari has kept her blog for the last 15 years. I love what she wrote about why she writes:
I also keep it out of spite, because I refuse to let social media take everything. Those shapeless, formless platforms haven’t earned it and don’t deserve it. I’ve blogged about this many times, but I still believe it: When I log into Facebook, I see Facebook. When I visit your blog, I see you.
In The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman writes about the benefits of time-shifting your news reading.
One excellent way to stay calm but well-informed, I’ve found, is to consume the news a day or three later than everyone else. Print is one way to do this. But it works online, too: more and more, I find myself promiscuously cruising the web, saving umpteen articles in a “read later” app (in my case Evernote, though you could use your browser’s bookmarks). By the time I read them, the time filter has worked its magic: a small proportion of them stand out as truly compelling.
A new car loses about 10% of its value as soon as you drive it off the lot; most news depreciates a lot faster than that. Humans are curious, hard-wired to seek out new information on a continuous basis. But not everything we haven’t seen before is worth our attention. As Burkeman says, a great way to determine if something is intrinsically interesting or worthwhile apart from its novelty is to set it aside for awhile.
Social media is as compelling as ever, but people are increasingly souring on the surveillance state Skinner boxes like Facebook and Twitter. Decentralized media like blogs and newsletters are looking better and better these days…
The $211 trillion problem: IMF sends warning about record global debt
The $211 trillion problem: IMF sends warning about record global debt