Happy the Man

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call today his own:

He who, secure within, can say,

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

Be fair or foul or rain or shine

The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.

Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,

But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

--

My favorite poem. It’s by Horace, from Odes, Book III, xxix. Translation by John Dryden

Why Fascism is in Fashion

 

The global game plan —

"A right-wing populist harnesses the backlash to globalization’s failures to win an election on a grievance-filled us-versus-them platform. Cronies, enriched via corruption, finance the leader’s political agenda. Courts are packed with judges who allow further power grabs. Parliamentary districts are redrawn to entrench the ruling party. Voting laws are altered to favor certain parts of the population. The media is turned into an extension of the ruling party’s interests, while independent journalists are threatened, deplatformed, or imprisoned. Social media is used to monitor, intimidate, and demoralize political opponents. Civil society is demonized, harassed, or restricted." 

— Ben Rhodes, The New York Review of Books

How 'Centrism' Serves the Fascists

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 Enemy of the Good

“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."

Beyond Reward and Punishment

“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.”

The Squid Who Loved Me

“A shining example, really, of the uneasy contract between the public and private (Ian) Fleming is the story about him flinging a squid at the novelist Rosamond Lehmann when she was staying at his home in Jamaica. In the version told by the writer Peter Quennell, Fleming did this to frighten Lehmann into leaving early since he was expecting the arrival of another lover. Lehmann’s less well-known account sheds a more satisfying light on the story.

“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

Catching Time in a Bottle

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.