Sunday, June 14, 2020

In the Shadow of Justice; Greeks and Us


"There may be liberty and justice for all, but there are tax breaks only for some."
-- Martin Sullivan


The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.” 
~Marcus Aurelius


In the Shadow of Justice by Katrina Forrester, reviewed by Susan McWilliams Barndt at Commonweal

Tragedy, the Greeks and Us by Simon Critchley, reviewed by John Kaag at Los Angeles Review of Books



Norah Jones’s Extraordinary At-Home Concerts New Yorker 

Sure, Online Opera’s Nice, But There’s Real Magic Inside Any Opera House Not Only in Sydney 





Physics Or Free Will?


Consider that “everything we see around us – rocks and planets, frogs and trees, your body and brain – is made up of nothing but protons, electrons and neutrons put together in very complex ways. In the case of your body, they make many kinds of cells; in turn, these cells make tissues, such as muscle and skin; these tissues make systems, such as the heart, lungs and brain; and these systems make the body as a whole. It might seem that everything that’s happening at the higher, ‘emergent’ levels should be uniquely determined by the physics operating beneath them. This would mean that the thoughts you’re having at this very moment were predetermined at the start of the Universe, based on the values of the particle physics variables at that time.” – Aeon


NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights – Who Moderates the Social Media Giants? A Call to End Outsourcing. Paul M. Barrett, June 2020: “In our latest report on the social media industry, we look at how the major platforms handle the problem of content moderation: deciding what remains on their sites and what should be removed. Despite the centrality of this task—without it, the platforms would be inundated by harmful content—the social media companies outsource content moderation to third-party vendors. The report examines the consequences of this marginalization of a core element of the social media business model, including how content moderation has played out during the coronavirus pandemic.