How does one begin? One begins. How does one survive? One survives.
Interesting goings-on in the sovereign district. Wondering if the principled neophyte might have missed a clue in the communications from the Sublime Porte of Lafayette. There was more than one national sovereignty involved in the res. Curiouser and curiouser. #notexpert #nothingtodowithme #ijustreadbooks
Really, anyone with a serious mind in this world is the spiritual equivalent of the protagonists of Godot, no matter whether you're eating roots from the field and trying to survive each day on the roadside, or ensconced in a comfortable house or apartment with a well-remunerated daily sequence of obligations. None of us should believe, or even take seriously the things around us. We can't, or we become dishonest and join the dishonest.
One can be in the world without believing in the world. I learned that through long years of working day jobs.
At the end of the day, if you turn right after leaving the office, you go to an apartment to which you have a key. If you turn left, you will have to find something. Life is precisely that turn in the other direction, to a path in which something will have to come up. You will be in that condition before the end, if only at the end. Tolstoy attempted to teach himself this in the end, and died in a village railway station.
In the museum in Cleveland, just across from the famous water lilies, there is a green landscape by Pissarro. Looking closer, or to be precise, looking more precisely (in the manner encouraged by detailed American landscape painting and discouraged by the clouds of Turner), you see a figure asleep on the green hill.
In the last country I was in, the famous 19th c. philosopher had a theory of the spiritual condition of his nation's culture. He saw it as a green hillside by a village, this location bringing out the conditions of life most conducive to beholding the mystery.
Watching a production of Hamlet at the Hungarian theatre in Cluj, I was struck with the thought that the play didn't begin until the skull in Hamlet's hand became Yorick. (Who was based on Richard Tarleton, a character actor with a quick wit, who would dance jigs with inprovised wordplay with the audience after the show.) Until then, we are holding props and speaking lines. All we have is this existence, this natural form, and so much of the present existence is about concealing this from us.
So. Uniting the thoughts. We are on the hillside. It is the only way that reveals who we are, and we are among those who are convinced that the world of most people's preoccupations is false. So we are left in this place, and the one gift it has for us is that last item in Pandora's case, that thing that made the old Russian writer hobble away from his house to parts unknown.
But, finally, in knowledge, we must hold the mystery.
You don't realize how completely filled with nonsense the American news is until you step away for a bit. It's clearly an entertainment mechanism, made real by claiming to describe some sort of reality supervenient over day-to-day life (and in that it perhaps has some predecessors). But like all forms of entertainment, it serves the function of legein, preserving the possibility of discourse, a range of things to be talked about and held in the mind, or perhaps combined and sifted through like some sort of Baconian cipher. Heid suggested that newspapers were the modern form of legein. Occasionally, they're rather up-front about it: "here's what to know/talk about."
A genuinely phenomenological description of what the news is might be interesting. It's a rather stark claim. "The things that I will read to you over the next thirty minutes (taking the 6PM news as a paradigm case) describe the fundamental condition of the world." Or perhaps only the recent changes.
And yet, once the actual impact is attenuated, if I'm certain that nothing said (outside the weather report) will predict anything that will happen to me in the near future, describing the changes without describing the general condition seems a stretch. I would learn more by reading a history book than listening to five minutes of nuanced discussion about current events.
So, like many forms of entertainment, perhaps it's not about knowing things. Or even speaking about them.
Basically, it's a colossal power grab, but in a mode of being that the current politics isn't calibrated against. In the story of the world that DC politics tells, the computers are just those machines that the interns waste time on, and that make the filing system go more quickly. Even in NYC business, simple passwords generally known among the office staff are a power move.
"But there is more than one history of the world." (John Crowley)
It's like that short space of time before word floats up to the C-suite that the brash outside consultants brought in by the new CEO have been spending their time making copies of virtually every database and system in the business.
(Translation: only a business where the CEO absolutely ruled both the board and the business would even think about risking something like this.)
As for the arts-related moves, taking over the KC board is likely a simple status move. Those board seats in NYC can't be bought with millions of dollars in contributions.
There are people who make every effort to pay at little as possible to go to the opera, and there are people who make every effort to pay as much as possible to go to the opera.
This is not a minor issue: an authentic rule of law is verified precisely in the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized. The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all — as I have affirmed on numerous occasions — welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable. This does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration. However, this development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others. What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.
.....
The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation.
(bold: identical ES/EN/IT)
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2025/documents/20250210-lettera-vescovi-usa.html
I only joke about going completely mad because it seems the completely rational thing to do before going completely mad.
The clean air in February (rare in the Balkans) and the quiet kitchen are the two positive aspects of the current place. Slogging through, showering and laundering after each journey to the grocery, etc. But the quiet kitchen table is not to be wasted. If you don't run while you have the light, there's not really a point to pressing on.
I suppose if I had gone into this visit as a sort of voyage into the badlands, I might have bought some khakis and wandered the city, but having made an initial exploration or two, and observing how much work there is to be done, the wiser course seems to be following the scent of the lamp.
I did explore a bit, and I'll likely explore a bit more, but the work that is to be done at the table is the prevailing consideration.
Strongly dislike working on the Winbook model. I had a good system with the Chromebooks, which are very secure, and can be configured for decent privacy, but then had to make the shift (which actually involved a time of saving up during a low-revenue stretch) to the fenestrated models for extrinsic reasons.
It's no exaggeration to call it a panopticon; in default configurations, any marketer with sufficient interest could determine the average person's recent reading, precise location, long-range work, and social network. And that's before even thinking about the black-hat hacking.
Future ages will likely understand that we made these machines in order for humans to do what they do more effectively. They might be at a loss, though, wondering why we thought that was necessarily a good thing.
Perhaps the problem of the idealist understanding of the corporate form (on the model of Hegel's philosophy of law -- an idealist rather than rather than a social-science empirical study) is presented when a society exists primarily to preserve the industrial forms, along with the involvement of a healthy preponderance of the population (and the prosperity of this healthy preponderance). This is a different form of social organization, compared to the types of societies that prevailed when basic questions about the form of civilization in the West were answered. At minimum, these questions would need new answers, if the practice of thinking about what we do is to continue to guide life. (Or perhaps be returned after a century or two of pragmatic exile.)
Is the corporate form a modification of the old sovereignty based on the common good? Historically, this goes from the monopolies to the franchises, to the corporate structures that ruled entire colonial states. Perhaps. But the theory of deputed powers by the chartering sovereign appears to have been rejected over the last several decades. "Any lawful purpose" has become a bit of a fig leaf for spontaneously-arising forms of collaboration accomplishing much of the work of the society.
The reason for a Hegelian reading is on the analogy of his explanation of the building of a cloister, in the PR. One explanation could come from an empirical explanation, that a certain society needed a place of repose; another comes from the ideas, that there is something in the human spirit which seeks this form of existence. Over the last two centuries industries have transformed the planet, multiplied the population, and solved many problems. The philosophers in the West adopted a pragmatic approach, suggesting that the event would reveal the truth, and largely, this allowed industrial forms to flourish. (The East had a more sociologically-inflected form of industrialization.)
But now, having accomplished much at great cost, both human and environmental, perhaps it's time to explain what it was that arose in humans during this time. If only not to worship the work of our hands.
Perhaps.
The excitable young sidekick and his team of engineers have gained access to the government computer systems. The new leader attends a glitzy sports event and casts shade on the reigning pop diva, whose heartland, blue-collar team loses the game. It does feel a bit like ten minutes into a Bond film.
Executive branch announces that they intend to stop minting the Lincoln effigies. Interesting. Coinage is the quintessential act of the sovereign; practically the only interesting aspect of the UK privy council minutes. Haven't looked at it, but I can't imagine that the president would have that authority. So perhaps the interesting thing is that it's a logical point, like not printing the period on the end of the NYT motto, but one that would clearly contravene basic constitutional principles.
Also a bit off that the news is being dominated by these half-baked notions. Half-baked bread can be unhealthy. If they actually did the time-and-motion studies and thought about them for a bit, some interesting change might be possible.
Peculiar aside in Wilfrid Sellars' fourth Dewey lecture: discussing distributive form of an abstract entity as simply a collection of the relevant tokens (descriptors?) exhibited by the objects within that class. Offhand, perhaps joking, mention that there is a "Middle Eastern" version that can't be uttered.
In this way of thinking about it (my parsing here, not Sellars), the name of the abstract entity that breathed o'er Eden would then be a novel expression standing for a certain set of tokens or descriptors common to everything in existence? #notexpert #musing
Interesting piece on St. Francis of Assisi in the TLS. Takes the intuitive view that deliberate poverty is in essence anticapitalist. But these orders became the institutional correlates of reformation. And this naturalistic individualism which was taken to greater extents to the north became one of the bases of reformation and the first stirrings of private industry. Even in the late middle ages, the OP and the OFM were associated with the global church as against the church of the native place. The OP tended to adopt saintly patrons associated with global trade and the episcopy, while the OFM would sometimes advocate the cults of the (then) new order of indigenous saints, furthering the sense of naturalistic individualism, as against the longstanding cults of the place, the latter frequently with ancient pagan overtones.
Characteristic of one of the Weekly Readers to use the present superficial divisions to explain all things, and thereby introduce the world to more things, but, having been introduced to more things, these superficial divisions seem less and less tenable. At a certain point, perhaps contra naturalistic individualism, it is error to think as a child thinks.
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, "You'll all be drowned!"
They called aloud, "Our Sieve ain't big,
But we don't care a button! we don't care a fig!
In a Sieve we'll go to sea!"
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.(Edward Lear)
I go mad, I go mad, I shall wear my trousers plaid...
Again, I only joke about going completely mad because the threadbare leprechauns pacing the ceiling seem to expect it. In fact, they worked it into the coronation oath.
It would be a mistake to think too much on the current politics. Like going to see a movie when there's work to be done. Actually, when I was doing Ph.D. work, the company that offered absurdly cheap movie passes launched, and I considered it, as the Sbux I walked three miles to in order to work on a stack of books had a movie theatre next door, but it was a bit like the philosophy professor who welcomed graduate students by suggesting that they spend their first year reading novels -- in the abstract, something to be thought about. Given the work at hand, quite mad. I have the daily queue, and the books I hope to get through in the coming days, but it can be a bit of a slog, especially with all the piecework.
The one good bit about the current rooms is a having a good kitchen table in a quiet room. The present location was a bit of a misstep. I'm not sure which is more disturbing in the evenings, the sounds of the barking dogs, or the sounds of the guns hopefully shooting above the barking dogs. It's an interesting place. But in the off-season, the sea isn't much use. At any rate, the air is cleaner than in the large cities, which was a significant factor in the choice. In the Balkans in January and February, the cities can be a problem.
Ora et labora.
Nietzsche, 1888: "It is not the victory of science that marks this nineteenth century of ours, but the victory of method over science."
Method: also the early modern English Christians smuggling prayer manuals printed by hidden presses in the shires among the endlessly sermonized parishioners of the established church. A substitution of a private and personal domination for a political domination.
Which then perhaps recursively appeared in the public space.
Absent notions of individual rights and basic fair play, the formal appearance of things simply reconstitutes itself in each generation, using some fraction of the population. It then becomes the meaning and justification of the shared life.
Given notions of individual rights and fair play, the appearance of things is falsified, but in a good way, by the material nature of the shared life; the nature of the shared life, shared by all, becomes the meaning and justification of the shared life.
An authentic society reveals the forms of things to be secondary; if the forms of society ever become the essence of society, it is virtually certain that a fraction of the population has simply been discarded.
Perhaps.
I can only say that I've sat at the desk all day (with the occasional break, like King Zog, as reported in Time magazine, for calisthenics) and that I never stopped working. I will assume that the disparity in time devoted and tasks accomplished reveals something about space and time that I've not yet understood.
The state universities, despite the intuitive Saturday-football notions of what it must be like to be there, are actually peculiarly dangerous places to be now. The reason for this is that they are consciously creating a social mechanism with some portion of the students who are in attendance. This has very little to do with scholarship, as one usually thinks of scholarship. (Outside of scientific technology, in which the university is explicitly committed to fostering discrete social mechanisms outside of the university.)
Part of the difficulty in the humanities is the imitation of positivism. (The disciples of Comte were angry at how broadly that term was used in the academy in the context of other fields.) Since scientific papers analyzing materials according to the assumptions of a particular field are knowledge for that field, the form of those papers is taken to be a verification of intrinsic value by those in other fields. The danger comes in the fact that the explicit purpose of the exercise is now the creation of the social mechanism, so this art of pseudo-postivism has been refined by explicitly political social networks as a social form in itself. And as the social form is entirely artifice, there's a significant danger of corruption.
But if you sidestep the frenzied mimetic in which you simply use the same words as the others and say things that make you popular there, it's possible to use your time there to do some real work using the legacy assets of the place, such as the (book) libraries and (basketball) gymnasia.
The danger is particular to the state universities because, to put it bluntly, there is usually a great mass of fungible students to be dealt with according to the rules of the place, largely without concern for external social networks or internal mechanisms contrary to the prevailing norms. In America, the state universities exist to teach the young folks a lesson or two. Mostly by faculties recruited from the more prestigious schools to the east or the west.
But the work can be done. Just don't expect it to be recognized. For the simple reason that no one will be looking to find it. They have different purposes in mind.
(Preemption: this is not the Aesopian sour grapes from being refused a dissertation defense -- the point is that there were always two completely different sets of grapes at issue.)
Interesting politboro machinations perceptible from nomadic exile: targeting an agency whose organic authority seems to come from executive act, and which operates in a sphere of authority (foreign affairs) in which the courts usually handle questions of presidential authority with kid gloves seems well thought-through. The real target seems opaque. The agency has only two of the three letters of another agency working in the service of democracy abroad, so unknown trip wires might or might not be found at various levels of access. Ultimately, though, this is where the authority of the executive is at its height, so this is the vehicle they'd probably want to take to the courts, rather than the goings-on at Treasury, for example. The best counter-argument is the appropriations authority, but the theory there would be that the existence of the agency is necessary to the mandate, and that's both a question of fact, and not the best ground on which to plan the battle. Apolitical, as always. Interesting times.
Christian outposts in the southern Balkans, perhaps for the obvious historical reasons, seem to be in the mountains. And as soon as I understood where I had landed in this latest jump, I did have the strong urge to flee to the Bulgarian mountains. The present country is generally thought of as a bad place to be, and although I try not to let these generally held perceptions affect my thinking, the physical aspects of the place do genuinely make it an unpleasant place to walk down the street. And that's right next to the ocean, inaccessible behind wall-like private developments, with platoons of strays guarding the street-level in the evening hours.
Man, flee!
And yet, one interesting aspect. This sort of place seems to traditionally be the place where the less well-off of Central Europe go to the sea when they manage to get away, and there's a chance that the ancestors, perhaps proximate ones, spent some time here in the summers. So less a nostalgie de la boue than a sort of solidarity.
From the propaedeutic session of a seminar I recently listened in on: Bad philosophers point out the errors in others' philosophies. Good philosophers find the merits in others' philosophies. Great philosophers find the reasons for the errors and meritorious aspects of others' philosophies.
Bit historicist and possibly Hegelian, but no less true for that. Plato didn't argue against his interlocutors, he led them to their own strengths.
There is a correlative to travelling through these societies. Just as you can see the direction of the wind from the way the trees have fallen after a storm, the great north-south and east-west currents of history have marked the peninsula. I don't think you can understand the present nature of this city without knowing that it was an important place on the road from Rome to Constantinople, and one that fell under the control of the Sublime Porte. Just as you can't understand the 14th c. mass conversions slightly inland further up the coast without realizing that the military forces from the south would invade within a century. And forces from the east, west, and north have left similar traces.
The challenge is to fashion individual lives of fullness within these world-historical lines of force. One you get past the Hegelian fallacy that since the nation can do things that individuals can't do, it is therefore the grounding for the individual, you cease to look to these winds for actual sustenance or even ultimate spiritual purpose. But, and this is where the greater reading comes in, it was the greatness of those times, and offers a dimension of experience to the present. And the challenge is to bring these spiritual purposes forward in time within a culture that values individual human lives a bit more. (Without identifying that with a wind from any direction -- it must come from the place simpliciter.)
The richness of earth, but lifted a bit more out of the mud.
Dystopia could never emerge if only the nefarious folks work away at the technology. Widespread commercial pressure to innovate the technology so that people could more effectively feed cartoon farm animals, win the crypto-spinning lotto, or doomscroll while staring into the glowing screen would be essential to developing the means.
Much of the last three days taken up with trying to get the laptop to act as expected. (For example, not spinning an hourglass when asked if the antivirus is working correctly.) Rebuilt Windows, should work for the nonce.
Still very much at the ragtag-fleet level of technology. Sufficient is the CPU.
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