Celebrating this paragraph by Robert Coover (1932–2024) in The Origin of the Brunists (1966).
Differently enchanting: He always believed God would "take care" of him after he dies. But what does that mean? "And what was grace? Did he have it? Who got it and how? Was it fair some didn't? He wished to hell something would happen to take his mind off it. ... And then Mike felt it coming. The grace. He didn't know whether to resist it or not."
Find the ebook on Archive.org
Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal by Marixa Lasso is about the legacies of a U.S. view of the world “in terms of tropicality, Western Civilization, and Progressive Era ideas of social improvement.”
She summarizes:
“Global trade and global labor had been at the center of Panama’s economy since the sixteenth century. Spanish ships and galleons brought European merchandise and Andean silver to its ports, and African slaves transported them across the isthmus. In the 1850s, American capital and West Indian and Chinese labor built the first transcontinental railroad in the Americas, and Panama’s ports were serviced by steamships, railroad, and telegraph lines — the latest in nineteenth-century transport technology.”
The opening sentences of the book:
“My earliest memories of the Zone are as a child looking out the window of my father’s car. It was the 1970s, and the Zone — a ten-mile strip of land, five miles on either side of the canal — belonged to the United States, which had acquired it through the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903. The treaty gave the United States the right to build and control the canal and to rule over the Zone as if it were a sovereign. Running down the middle of the Republic of Panama, the Zone bordered Panama City and divided the country in two…”
Yesterday I wrote: A Few Drops of Context: On Snatching the Panama Canal: And why Trump is talking about trans people too. It's a 6-min read on Medium.
See this video (1:23): ‘Gross ignorance’: Panamanians react to Trump’s threats to retake canal
On Christmas Day, Trump announced Miami-Dade County Commissioner Kevin Marino Cabrera as his pick for U.S. ambassador to Panama.
It's a purposeful irony of life, I suppose, that we never get to see ourselves in that state. We can only pay witness to our waking reflection, which to one degree or another is always fretting or afraid. Maybe that's why young parents find it so beguiling to spy on their children when they're fast asleep.
— Amor Towles. Rules of Civility (2011). New York: Penguin Books, 2012.
Spending evenings in front of a glowing computer, TV, or cellphone screen can put you at risk of depression, Science News reports. Nighttime exposure to light from gadgets has already been shown to contribute to insomnia, cancer, obesity, and diabetes. Now, a new study shows that screen glow can cause mood-related changes in the brain. For weeks, researchers exposed hamsters to eight hours a night of dim light — like that from a TV screen — instead of their usual eight hours of pitch darkness. They found that the rodents became lethargic and ignored their favorite sugary treats, suggesting that they weren't deriving "pleasure out of activities they once enjoyed" — a major indication of depression in humans, says study author Tracy Bedrosian. The rodents' brains also showed the same kinds of changes in the hippocampus that are common in depressed people. "The good news," Bedrosian says, is that the damage disappeared and the rodents' behavior returned to normal after researchers took the night lights away, meaning that simply powering down earlier may "undo some of the harmful effects" that late-night gadget users face. Over the past 50 years, depression rates in the U.S. have increased dramatically as artificial lighting at night has become more common.
— "Screen-viewing blues," The Week, August 10, 2012, p. 19.
As historian Robert Ekirch writes, sleeping for one uninterrupted interval is simply a function of artificial light and the industrial revolution. Before electricity and factories, segmented sleep — sleeping in two intervals — was all the rage. Benjamin Franklin was a fan: Between “first sleep” and “second sleep” he would get naked, throw open the windows and take cold air baths. The French called the period between the two sleeps “dorveille,” while the English called it “the watch.” Both terms sound ancient and spooky in a cool way, which made me search for other people who embrace this period of sleeplessness. On Medium, Ron Geraci describes this state as “an odd, placid form of being awake — more aware but less alert…a ripe sentience that allowed clear but limited thought and wanted stillness.”
* * * ...a shout out to the true sleep rebels, our beloved night owls. While they don’t necessarily have “two sleeps,” they do find themselves hyper-focused in the middle of the night. A self-described night owl, Stefanie Morejon, writes on Medium that her behavior is perhaps evolutionary, essential for human survival. “Somebody,” she writes, “had to stay awake to keep the fires burning, to protect the community and keep the night creatures at bay.”
— Adeline Dimond, "It’s not (always) insomnia, it’s segmented sleep," Medium Newsletter, December 19, 2024
"Any temptation I had at age twenty-three to categorize oppressed people in binaries, as either heroic resisters or unjust victims, was ended." Wonderful to see this new piece from Natalie Zemon Davis, with forward by Stefan Hanß #OpenAccess #EarlyModern 🗃️ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
— Brodie Waddell (@brodiewaddell.bsky.social) September 23, 2024 at 3:37 AM
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Quote: "I was without a passport and not part of a university community for years. This article reflects on the impact of this experience of persecution on my work as a historian, and the relationship between politics, activism, and what Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre called ‘the historian’s craft’ and ‘consciousness’."
Experiencing Exclusion: Scholarship after Inquisition Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2024. Natalie Zemon Davis and Stefan Hanß.
You shouldn't take action because it will make you feel good; you should do it because it's the right thing to do.
I believe the concept of "happiness" in this discourse functions to say that people are intrinsically motivated to do what we feel is right, and that this intrinsic motivation delivers a long-term "reward" in terms of brain chemistry.
From a 15-year-old article by Drake Bennett:
At least if recent research is to be believed, political activism, no matter the cause, seems to make people happy - even if they don’t win an election or triumph in a ballot initiative. Psychologists curious about what fuels human happiness have looked at political engagement and political activism, and they’ve found that it provides people with a sense of empowerment, of community, of freedom, and of transcendence.
* * *
It’s not just a life of self-denying dedication to a larger cause but a pursuit with immediate and enduring psychic rewards.
* * *
They gave their subjects, again college students, a survey about the food in the dining hall. Some were given questions that primed them to think about what Kasser and Klar call the “ethical-political aspects” of the food: For example, they read a statement asserting that the cafeteria should offer fair trade products, then were asked to rate the importance of two different rationales offered for that decision. Another group was given suggestions that focused on apolitical aspects like the variety and the taste of the food. Both groups were then asked to write a note to the cafeteria director about the aspect of the food that was most important to them. ... “What we found,” says [Tim] Kasser, “was that the activist felt significantly more vital and alive and energized than did the nonactivist group.”
* * *
Other studies, including one in 2001 by the psychologists Holly Hart, Dan McAdams, Barton Hirsch, and Jack Bauer, found that activism was strongly correlated with a quality called generativity, a sense of responsibility for others. And generativity, several studies have found, is in turn correlated with happiness.
* * *
The power of political activism, says Kasser, is that it manages to provide so many of the requirements for human happiness. It gives people a sense of efficacy and a conviction that they are changing their world. It provides an often rich social network. Because political causes are freely chosen, activism enhances a person’s sense of their own independence. And it gives a sense of self-transcendence, of being a part of something larger than your own individual concerns. All of these things, Kasser says, have been shown to make us happier.
Other researchers question whether there’s anything special about activism’s ability to make us happy. Tom Sander, the director of the Saguaro Seminar, a Harvard initiative studying levels of trust and civic engagement in American society, points to Saguaro research on religious belief, another reliable predictor of happiness. What’s interesting about religion, he points out, is that the actual believing part doesn’t seem to account for the greater happiness. What does account for it is the deeply social nature of churches and synagogues and mosques.
“It’s not how often they pray or belief about the afterlife or any content from the pulpit,” he says. The best predictor of happiness is “the number of friends they have at church.”
"The upside of 'down with.'" Drake Bennett. The Boston Globe: Ideas. October 11, 2009.
Be brave
Trust the light and the voice within, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg tells us. Follow your inner guidance even if it means deviating from your plan. Find your place in the work, and be accountable when you cause harm. "May you grow into your greatest, bravest, most loving self." I'll try to do this, and I pass on her words to you.
Today's trans teaching:
"What I want to suggest is not that accounts of the archive’s absences are misguided per se but rather that we consider the extent to which theories of the damaged or incomplete archive are animated by a tacit injunction to historical recovery. Operative within this language of lack is, I think, what Arondekar has called queer history’s “seduction of access” and the concomitant privileging of recuperative reading practices. Even as queer critiques of the archive proliferate, and the turn to alternative archives becomes increasingly common, there remains a conviction that whatever it is that we hope to find can, in fact, be known—that it can do something for our narrative and political possibilities if only we can develop more capacious and oppositional ways to look [emphasis mine]. The critique of sexuality’s incitement to discourse has not, in the end, deterred formidable efforts to make a supposedly taciturn archive speak, and scholars (within and beyond historical studies) have continually labored at reading and creating the queer archive anew. As in Derrida’s account, the archive stands as a primary site of queer historical loss but also, importantly, of possibility. As such, the array of discourses that self-describe as critiques of the archive collectively emerges as a return to and reaffirmation of the archive’s ultimate promise. These discussions evince an apparent faith that if only the archive can be found or created, can be deciphered or coaxed into revealing our mystified pasts, then we will be able to claim our own history that restores."
— Abram J. Lewis. “‘I Am 64 and Paul McCartney Doesn’t Care’: The Haunting of the Transgender Archive and the Challenges of Queer History.” Radical History Review, no. 120 (2014): 13–34. This passage is from p. 17. doi 10.1215/01636545-2703697
The part I bolded is cited to Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 6.
There is a personal reason I take note of this phenomenon.
"[Journalist Samuel] Mena, of Phoenix, ignited his left arm — becoming the second person this year to set fire to themselves in the nation’s capital to protest Israel’s military actions in Gaza..." Yesterday, here in DC. www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202...
— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 8:33 PM
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"Mena was a news photographer for Arizona’s Family, a Phoenix-based broadcast network...“Arizona’s Family expects its newsroom employees to conduct themselves with neutrality and objectivity,” the statement on its website reads. “Mena is no longer an employee.”"
— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 8:34 PM
"Norman R. Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker from Baltimore, burned himself outside the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War in 1965. Wynn Bruce, a 50-year-old from Boulder, Colo., who was described as a climate activist dedicated to Buddhism, self-immolated outside the Supreme Court on Earth Day 2022."
— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 8:35 PM
"And Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old senior airman in the U.S. Air Force, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy and shouted “Free Palestine” as he burned in February. A man also died in September after setting himself on fire near the Israeli consulate in downtown Boston."
— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 8:35 PM
"How many Palestinians were killed that I allowed to be branded as Hamas?” Mena wrote. “How many men, women, and children were struck with a missile cosigned by the American media?"
— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 8:36 PM
"The smell of gasoline wafted through the air as police and other protesters rushed toward Mena. Rallygoers screamed for a medic while bystanders tried to put out the blaze with kaffiyehs. Mena was transported to a hospital for treatment of injuries not expected to be life-threatening..."
— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 8:43 PM
"Parallels between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and early America’s treatment of indigenous peoples are stark. Once you know the twin histories, you cannot unsee it. ... Americans are discouraged to draw parallels between Native American and Palestinian history. ... If anyone should understand ethnic cleansing, it is Americans, because our country was founded upon the genocide of indigenous peoples, followed by centuries of cover-ups." &mdash Sarah Kendzior, "Trails of Tears," Substack newsletter, Jan 11, 2024
Noura Erakat says:
"The worst thing that can possibly happen to any Jewish person, the thing that they’re most traumatized by and afraid of, is literally happening to Palestinians. Siege for 17 years, occupation for 57 years, forced displacement, being placed on a caloric diet subject to systematic military campaigns, a restriction on movement, a lack of ability to determine your own future, and then on top of that, to be killed with advanced weapons technologies in the most painful way and to be denied medical access and then starved to death.
What else would we want to protect people from? And yet none of that, none of the pain that Palestinian flesh bears registers. And there’s this commonsense logic that this is not flesh."
"The Limits of the Law," Noura Erakat interviewed by Afeef Nessouli in the Fall 2024 issue of Acacia (Issue 2)
Genocide has a legal definition, yes, but I would say — as a descendant of survivors of the genocide that led to the term being coined — that what makes something a genocide is not numbers of deaths, but an attempt to fully eradicate an entire community through the destruction of family lines.
— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:33 AM
What is happening in Gaza is not a genocide simply because massive numbers of people are dying — though yes, genocide often leads to mass death. It is a genocide because a significant amount of Israeli government rhetoric has framed Gazans as a people who must be wiped out in entirety.
— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:34 AM
When I think about what the descendants of Gazan survivors will grow up with, I think of the shadows that haunt my own family legacy. The inability to talk about the past. The family trees that just stop. The generational trauma. That, for me, is genocide.
— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:36 AM
The most tragic thing about the way we wrestle with the concept of genocide was that the term was coined in the hopes of *preventing* future groups from experiencing what my family went through. But instead it only serves to acknowledge the lost and horror trauma in the aftermath.
— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:38 AM
Having your loss recognized as a genocide is a pretty abysmal consolation prize. And it sucks that 80 years after my own ancestors were being slaughtered en masse in an attempt to wipe out their people, this is the best we have to offer.
— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:39 AM
This is an important framing of the idea of genocide. It's not mass murder for cultural reasons, its the attempted murder of a culture (which often involves mass murder). Case in point: The residential school system for Native Americans would have been a genocide even without the mass graves.
— Greg Muller (Dr Math) (@morilac.bsky.social) October 7, 2024 at 11:40 AM
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Important: Israel's public channel (Kann 11) reports that the military effort that commenced today in Jebalia refugee camp is part of a bigger operation to expel all Palestinians from North Gaza, according to the "Eiland Plan".
— Yair Wallach (@yairwallach.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 7:19 AM
Estimated 300,000 Palestinians remain in North Gaza. The plan is to force as many of them to leave and then proceed as if no civilians remained edition.cnn.com/2024/09/22/m...
— Yair Wallach (@yairwallach.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 7:23 AM
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When the genocide is over, and everyone agrees that it was wrong and should have been stopped, the cheerleaders will console themselves with saying that they may have been wrong to support the war, but it was for the right reasons, unlike those who opposed it at the time for all the wrong reasons.
— Julia Carrie Wong (@joolia.bsky.social) February 11, 2024 at 10:13 PM
Once you persuade your students to read, do they think critically about what they read?
Cameron Summers has written "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anything: A Sketch of a Philosophy of Language" (October 2, 2024). Summers says that students should:
"question things that they find written down. This is an important development: to think critically about something, you need to suspend yourself in the space between believing 'this is true' and 'this is untrue' — you must sort the good information from the bad by testing it and thinking about it and verifying it. Many of my students seem to come into the classroom thinking, 'Well, it wouldn’t be written down if it isn’t true/good/worthwhile, would it?'"
However, "being correct or incorrect doesn’t always matter."
"So much of our discourse in this (and increasingly, it feels, every election cycle) is about pointing out gaffs from the other side — about how the former President denied climate change but built sea walls to protect his golf courses, that sort of thing. As if the mere fact of this contradiction is somehow material.
This is partially what allowed them to succeed in the 2016 election. The emphasis was on the fact that the other side was a grotesque mockery, rather than a credible threat. As liberals often do, they reduced things to aesthetics.
Now, a lot of people are talking about how think tanks attached to the party of “small government” and “states’ rights” is putting forward a plan for national controls on abortion and other reproductive healthcare. The contradiction here doesn’t matter to them, and pointing out their hypocrisy is just going to allow them to retain their advantage, because no one actually cares about that."
"We’re all explicitly taught to use language" in a "factual" mode, Summers says, which means we first try to understand information and root out our contradictory beliefs, and then we try to commmunicate it truthfully and clearly so others can know what we know.
But there's an "instrumental" mode too. This mode tends to generate contradictions.
The Instrumental Mode is not concerned with the horizontal(ish) transfer of information, but with the hierarchic imposition of will. You say things not to inform, but to achieve a particular end goal. In this stance, language is a tool that you use to achieve a material end result.
As such, contradiction serves the same purpose as exhaust, noise, and waste heat do for a combustion engine: it makes it clear that the apparatus is working as desired, it makes it obvious that it’s doing its job. As such, pointing out the contradiction is sort of like telling someone revving a muscle car, “That’s very loud and you’re putting out a lot of smoke.”
It’s not going to have the desired effect. You think you mentioned a problem; they think you’re describing the cool thing that they’re doing: only one of you is any closer to your goal."
The instrumental mode can be authoritarian. It can be modeled after a parent–child hierarchy. This "creates a hierarchic relationship where the speaker claims they know better than the listener. What becomes upsetting about the whole thing is when the listener repeats what is heard, creating a sort of linguistic pyramid scheme where the one receiving the repeated message is two steps removed from the one who supposedly knows best."
But this effect isn't really avoidable by retreating to a supposedly "factual" mode, as there's no way to entirely avoid norms.
"Even in the most informative utterance, there is the implicit message you should care about this. In answering a stranger’s request for help, there is the message that we should help each other.
Every utterance is, at least implicitly, a statement of belief about how the world works.
Language also has a "social" mode in which we try to connect to each other.
"My belief is that every composition or utterance has all three of these uses in different proportions. There’s always going to be an effort to make the other person do something, there’s always going to be an effort to make a connection, and there’s always going to be an attempt to give the other party some information that they don’t currently have."
Communication, including "storytelling" of various sorts, always has these dimensions:
Here are the facts I'm aware of. I'd like to connect with you. Let's get something done together.
In pointing out that what we call Generative AI is just a tool for bullshitting, Damien P. Williams said:
“The idea here isn’t to say that there’s some perfect capital-O, capital-T Objective Truth that Google Bard must actually adhere to, that GPT must adhere to, must reflect in the world. It is rather to say that when we uncritically make use of these [generative AI] tools, what we are doing is we are muddying the process of generating knowledge together. We are embodying and empowering a system which does not, in any way, shape or form, care about what is true or what is factual. Does not care about the impacts of providing non-factual, non-true knowledge. Does not care about the impacts of not going through the process of trying to understand what knowledge values and beliefs mean to each other. ... They do not care about truth. They do not care about fact. They are, in fact, bullshit engines.” (38:40–39:32, 39:48–39:55)
ICYMI: our latest @leftanchor.bsky.social ep we are talking the philosophy of bullshit as applied to Trump, Elon Musk, and JD Vance www.leftanchor.com/e/the-bs-epi...
— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper.com) October 1, 2024 at 1:42 PM
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Both Summers and Williams, as well as the podcast discussion, refer to Harry Frankfurt's definition of bullshit.
Today, Jimmy Carter turns 100. His book Talking Peace (1995) is free to read on Archive.org.
See how he explains this in the first few pages:
For 400 years, the Ottoman Turks ruled Palestine. After World War I, the League of Nations allowed Britain to take over. After World War II, the United Nations wanted to split the land into separate Jewish and Arab states. War broke out. Israel declared victory, though no surrounding Arab states would recognize it. Jordan took the West Bank. Egypt took the Gaza strip. In 1967, Israel seized territory from Egypt, Syria, and the Palestinians.
A Rural Georgia Town Formed a U.S. President: Jimmy Carter’s memoir ‘An Hour Before Daylight’. Tucker Lieberman, May 19, 2024, 9-min read.
How Jimmy Carter's so-called betrayal of evangelicals led to MAGA: Evangelicals loved Jimmy Carter — until his anti-racism turned them against him. Amanda Marcotte. Salon.com, January 9, 2025
"the work of Rosa Luxemburg [1871–1919], which theorizes, among other things, the alchemical process which transforms local disruptions into a revolutionary crisis" — Aparna Gopalan, news editor for Jewish Currents, Sept 20, 2024
In Kate Evans's book, Red Rosa, Gopalan says,
"We see Rosa growing up as a Jewish, disabled girl in Tsarist Poland, reading Marx as a teenager, and quickly coming to situate her own experiences of discrimination inside a grander narrative of global racial-capitalist exploitation ('I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch . . . I have no special place in my heart for the [Jewish] ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears'). We see her break gender barriers to study in Zurich; fall in revolutionary love; speak at the Socialist International; publish both propaganda newspapers and a dissertation on Polish industrialization; and eventually, move to Berlin and join the rapidly growing Social Democratic Party, whose trajectory she quickly influenced with her writing and speeches."
