social justice is about more than fairness in the distribution of goods

from Justice and the Politics of Difference by Iris Marion Young:
… as doers and actors we seek to promote many values of social justice in addition to fairness in the distribution of goods: learning and using satisfying and expansive skills in socially recognized settings; participating in forming and running institutions, and receiving recognition for such participation; playing and communicating with others, and expressing our experience, feelings, and perspective on social life in contexts where others can listen.*


Danielle Allen, in her foreword to this 2011 edition:
More than twenty years after its original publication in 1990, Iris Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference can be seen to have been prescient …*


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the British Royal family: “a dysfunctional tribe on an Olympic scale”

Harry and Meghan expose a ruthless, racist anti-fairytale in their primetime Oprah interview

John Naughton:
That’s the headline on the Independent story. As an Irish citizen rather than a British subject (contrary to popular belief, monarchical states don’t have citizens), I don’t have a dog in this fight. But the interview confirms two things we knew already. One is that the British Royal family is a dysfunctional tribe on an Olympic scale. The other is that British tabloid culture is vicious, racist, and xenophobic to a pathological degree. Poor Meghan is in the same boat as Diana Spencer was in all but one respect: she has been able to persuade her husband to dump the charade before it was too late.*

See also Caitlin Johnstone*


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the real you (Alan Watts)


at 0:47 in the video:

What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now.


***

you are inseparable from what the whole universe is doing,
as a wave is inseparable from what the whole ocean is doing

nothing depends on nothing, and nothing doesn’t change

only in the mind is anything or anyone an entity

you are not an entity acted upon by the universe;
you are nothing other than what is:
being aware of being;
and you are this being aware of being
unless you are unconscious, fast asleep, or dead

you are nothing other than the universe aware of itself:
the observer as the observed* * * *


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Noam Chomsky on the new antisemitism

off-topic: Noam Chomsky speaks during a program titled "Why Iraq?" attended by an overflow crowd at Harvard University November 4, 2002 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. William B. Plowman / Getty (from Jacobin)

Harrison Samphir of Jacobin interviews Noam Chomsky, July 2019:
HS
In Britain, efforts to keep Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn out of power over accusations of antisemitism have had the alarming effect of conflating criticism of Israel or anti-Zionism with hatred of Jewish people. You have described these tactics as a disgrace, and said they insult the memory of Holocaust victims. I’d like you to comment on how erroneous charges of antisemitism ultimately hurt Jews, and why expanded definitions of the term (which, for example, consider certain advocacy for Palestinian rights as anti-Jewish bigotry) can be problematic.
NC
The classic statement of this position is by the distinguished Israeli statesman Abba Eban, highly regarded particularly in England as a British gentleman (Cambridge graduate, cultivated accent, etc.). In 1973, when he was Israeli foreign minister, Eban wrote an interesting article in a leading liberal Jewish journal [Congress Bi-Weekly] in which he explained that “One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism.”

That defines the task very explicitly. Here “anti-Zionism” means criticism of policies of the State of Israel. He made that quite clear by adding: “Let there be no mistake: the new left is the author and the progenitor of the new anti-Semitism.”

The New Left in fact was overwhelmingly Zionist, but beginning to be mildly critical of some of the policies of the occupation and illegal settlement over which Eban was presiding. Eban also identified two arch-criminals: I.F. Stone and me, “whose basic complex is one of guilt about Jewish survival” and therefore are beyond the range of rational discussion. His wild accusations about the “New Left,” worth reading, are equally ludicrous — as he certainly knew, being literate.

…*

***

Chomsky, writing in DiEM25, July 2020:
Fifty years ago, the distinguished Israel statesman Abba Eban wrote that “One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism.”

As the examples he gives make crystal clear (e.g., the committed Zionist I.F. Stone), by “anti-Zionism” he means criticism of the policies of the government of Israel and some sympathy for Palestinians.

That principle has become a last-ditch defense of apologists for Israel crimes under the occupation. Any critic, any proponent of Palestinian rights, can be tarred as an anti-Semite. This weapon has recently been wielded to great effect against Jeremy Corbyn in a campaign of vulgar deceit and slander that is shocking even beyond the disgraceful norm.*


Boris Johnson replaced Theresa May in 2019 and at the end of that year won the UK election


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on the hubris of the immensely rich (or powerful)

John Major, right, in 1996, John Naughton, centre, observing: “The amazing thing about Major, though, is that he didn’t go crazy (unlike Thatcher before him and Blair afterwards). In fact he remained a perfectly normal person. On the day after his 1997 defeat, for example, he went off to watch cricket at the Oval.”

John Naughton:
I have a theory about this hubris. Great wealth does strange things to people — and to those around them. It’s a combination of aphrodisiac and reality-distortion field. Immensely rich (or powerful) people think they are rich (or powerful) because they’re very special. And the people around them think that if someone is immensely rich or powerful they must be smart. And so there’s a kind of positive feedback loop that intensifies with time.

That’s bad enough when the wealthy are middle-aged. But when the money arrives at a point when the recipient is barely out of short trousers — as, for example, with some of the Silicon Valley crowd, then not only do they think they’re geniuses, but so too do those around them, not to mention the journalists who fawn upon them. Live like that for a while and you go bananas.

That’s why political leaders go crazy after a while. They’re surrounded by people who admire them, or look as if they do.

I once had an interesting demonstration of this. …*


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email makes us miserable

image source: New Yorker article by Cal Newport – cached*

email makes us miserable, and Slack (!?) just piles it on: Tenner’s paradox*

Edward Tenner at TED 2019:

Summing up, to be truly efficient, we need optimal inefficiency. The shortest path may be a curve rather than a straight line. Charles Darwin understood that. When he encountered a tough problem, he made a circuit of a trail, the sandwalk that he'd built behind his house. A productive path can be physical, like Darwin's, or a virtual one, or an unforeseen detour from a path we had laid out. Too much efficiency can weaken itself. But a bit of inspired inefficiency can strengthen it. Sometimes, the best way to move forward is to follow a circle.

Cal Newport suggests we not dump email, but “no longer allow it to be used in such a way that guarantees our misery.”


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Posted