miscellany

/ image from article in The Nation blockquoted below

critical theory: a Marxist-inspired movement in social and political philosophy originally associated with the work of the Frankfurt School, drawing on the thought of Sigmund Freud

critical race theory: a critical-theorist view of race

critical theorists maintain that a primary goal of philosophy is to understand and to help overcome the social structures through which people are dominated and oppressed: they believe knowledge has been used as an instrument of oppression; they caution against a blind faith in progress, arguing that knowledge must not be pursued as an end in itself without reference to the goal of human emancipation; and they have been immensely influential in the study of history, law, literature, and the social sciences*

air quality index readings on 2020-09-15 from a live page*

The Monk and the Fish – a film by Michaël Dudok de Wit*

there is no external refuge: be a light unto yourself (!?)

Stephen Batchelor, on the last word spoken by the Buddha:

clearly appamāda, both for the Buddha and for the tradition that immediately followed him, … somehow synthesizes everything he taught (!?)

one interpretation:

from the Financial Times today, 2020-09-14:

“to observe without evaluating”*  / Jiddu Krishnamurti

from an archived Wikipedia entry:

Krishnamurti held that outside of strictly practical, technical matters, the presence and action of choice indicates confusion and subtle bias: an individual who perceives a given situation in an unbiased manner, without distortion, and therefore with complete awareness, will immediately, naturally, act according to this awareness – the action will be the manifestation and result of this awareness, rather than the result of choice. Such action (and quality of mind) is inherently without conflict.

He did not offer any method to achieve such awareness;  in his view application of technique cannot possibly evolve into, or result in, true choicelessness – just as unceasing application of effort leads to illusory effortlessness, in reality the action of habit.  Additionally, in his opinion all methods introduce potential or actual conflict, generated by the practitioner's efforts to comply. According to this analysis, all practices towards achieving choiceless awareness have the opposite effect: they inhibit its action in the present by treating it as a future, premeditated result, and moreover one that is conditioned by the practitioner's implied or expressed expectations.

Krishnamurti stated that for true choicelessness to be realized, choice – implicit or explicit – has to simply, irrevocably, stop; however, this ceasing of choice is not the result of decision-making, but implies the ceasing of the functioning of the chooser or self as a psychological entity. He proposed that such a state might be approached through inquiry based on total attentiveness: identity is then dissolved in complete, all-encompassing attention. Therefore, he asserted that choiceless awareness is a natural attribute of non-self-centered perception, which he called “observation without the observer.”

Accordingly, Krishnamurti advised against following any doctrine, discipline, teacher, guru, or authority, including himself. He also advised against following one's own psychological knowledge and experience, which he considered integral parts of the observer. He denied the usefulness of all meditation techniques and methods, but not of meditation itself, which he called “perhaps the greatest” art in life;  and stated that insight into choiceless awareness could be shared through open dialogue.*

Robert Saltzman, author*

article: archived*

In this year of plague and depression, the most powerful nation in human history has become a sad amalgam of laughingstock, cautionary tale and pariah. Roughly 170,000 Americans are dead, in large part due to a near-total abdication of federal leadership,  a decades-long evisceration of the social safety net, and a health care and economic system built on a bedrock of racial and class discrimination.

What a powerful sentence this is.

“Even by the standards of an administration that has spent the better part of four years alternating between ineptitude and cruelty, it is a truly spectacular failure – a failure so fundamental it will live on as a schism between generations: those who knew life before ... “

“ ... the pandemic, those who didn’t.”

On television, the President of the United States is hawking miracle cures – something about blasting the body with light and disinfectant. Later in the day, a parade of public health experts will be forced to appear on the news networks to plead with people not to drink bleach.

“Farcical as the whole thing is, it is also a fitting distillation of the Trump era – a spectacle of callousness and cartoonish incompetence that dominates a single news cycle before the next spectacle obliterates it from memory.”

But in reality, most of the lasting carnage of this year exists in a kind of negative space – all the victims who died alone and afraid, who never received public mourning; all the weddings and birthday parties and graduation ceremonies cancelled; all the vast and hidden toll ...

“... of domestic abuse and mental-health crises exacerbated by this half-year and counting of purgatory.

There will likely never be a full accounting of all that was lost this year, all that was wasted, only the crushing knowledge that it never had to be this way.”

“But the Trump presidency is neither an anomaly nor an endpoint of some temporary misguided turn. It is impossible to frame the current administration outside a lineage that includes the racist Tea Party and Birther movements, the illegal wars of the Bush era, the rise of ...”

“ ... Fox News and the general hyper-partisan slide of the American right wing that dates back at least to the Reagan administration.”

“One way or another, there’s a different America waiting on the other side of this year – either a country that puts communal survival ahead of individual self-interest, or one that slowly slinks away from relevance as it stumbles from disaster to disaster, its insulated few ...”

“... oblivious to the suffering of the rest.”

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