Here we go again, more both-sider BS from the corporate news media…
“The loss of the moderate center in both parties?” What claptrap. One party is “moderate” to the point of ineffectuality. The other is a fascist steamroller.
The perpetually surprised "both-sider civility" crowd effectively runs intellectual interference for the fascists. It sprays out the fog through which they attack.
“The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg,” wrote Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker.
“After all, an iceberg is thrilling, and anyway the White Star Line has classes, and the music the band plays is second-rate, and why is the food French instead of honestly English? ‘Just as I told you, the age of the steamship is over!’ they cry as the water slips over their shoes. They imagine that another boat will miraculously appear — where all will be in first class, the food will be authentic and the band will perform only Mozart or Motown, depending on your wishes. Meanwhile, the ship goes down."
“To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments,” wrote Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
“To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances. This challenge is both easier and more difficult than it sounds: easier because the ability to do so is entirely within each person’s hands; difficult because it requires a discipline and perseverance that are relatively rare in any era, and perhaps especially in the present.”
“Lehmann came across the squid on the kitchen floor; Fleming had speared it, intending to have it for dinner. ‘As I looked at it,’ she recalled, ‘I suddenly caught its eye. It seemed to stare at me, and I felt for some reason that this was a creature every bit as intelligent as we were and that it was suffering terribly. So I persuaded Ian to throw it back in the sea.
“He grumbled a bit and said, ‘How typical of a soft old pseudo-liberal like you. You may think nature is beautiful, but it is very cruel, very ruthless. Just you see. As soon as we throw the squid back, all the other creatures will go for it. Just you see.’
“So we did throw it in, and it was quite extraordinary, for suddenly this odd, grey, inanimate creature began to light up in the water until it was quite phosphorescent. Then it swam away as we watched and Ian was completely speechless. It was an incident I always intended to write about, but never have.”
— Nicholas Shakespeare, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
This gets at something I have long suspected intuitively — that things do not really come into being and pass away. On some staggeringly deep level that’s beyond ordinary human comprehension, they simply always are.
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan in New Scientist magazine: “Time may not be a fundamental element of our physical reality. New calculations add credence to the idea that it emerges from quantum entanglement, in which two objects are so inextricably linked that disturbing one disrupts the other, no matter how distant they are…
“At its core is the suggestion that when we see an object change over time, that is only because that object is entangled with a clock. That means a truly external observer standing outside the entangled system would see a completely static, unchanging universe. Within this framework time is not a given, but purely a consequence of entanglement…”
“…This may mean that if we perceive the passage of time, then there is some entanglement woven into the physical world. And an observer in a universe devoid of entanglement – as some theories suggest ours was at its very beginning – would have seen nothing change. Everything would be static."
Nietzsche posited eternal recurrence — the idea that our lives will repeat infinitely and that in each life every detail will be exactly the same.
“An agnostic Buddhist looks to the dharma for metaphors of existential confrontation rather than metaphors of existential consolation,” wrote Stephen Batchelor in Buddhism Without Belief.
“The dharma is not a belief by which you will be miraculously saved. It is a method to be investigated and tried out. It starts by facing up to the primacy of anguish, then proceeds to apply a set of practices to understand the human dilemma and work toward a resolution.
“The extent to which dharma practice has been institutionalized as a religion can be gauged by the number of consolatory elements that have crept in: for example, assurances of a better afterlife if you perform virtuous deeds or recite mantras or chant the name of the Buddha.”
“Much of the time we are driven by a relentless and insistent surge of impulses. We notice this in quiet moments of reflection, but usually just get carried along on the crest of its wave. Until, that is, we crash once more onto the rocks of recriminatory self-criticism, and from there into moods and depressions.”
“Worrying about what a friend said can preoccupy us so completely that it isolates us from the rest of our experience. The world of colors and shapes, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations becomes dull and remote… We feel cut off and adrift.
“To stop and pay attention to what is happening in the moment is one way of snapping out of such fixations. It is also a reasonable definition of meditation.”
— Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Belief