Directed by Mai Vu (10′ – 2022) Produced by The National Film & Television School Lights on Women Award – Cannes Film Festival 2022 A Vietnamese…
Source: Spring Roll Dream on Vimeo
Directed by Mai Vu (10′ – 2022) Produced by The National Film & Television School Lights on Women Award – Cannes Film Festival 2022 A Vietnamese…
Source: Spring Roll Dream on Vimeo
I quite like this short essay/biography of Machiavelli. The author of The Prince. (free ebook) Or Barnes & Noble
Chutzpah, perhaps? Entitlement, even? Or maybe just an ironic contrast to Vettori, who has access to the real halls of power? Probably all of the above, but it is above all a performance. Machiavelli here uses an ancient rhetorical technique called prosopoeia. From the Greek prósopon (“face, person,” and poiéin “to make, to do”), it is a trope of personification. As the Roman orator Quintilian explains, prosopoeia is used “to introduce conversations between ourselves and others. We are even allowed in this form of speech to bring down the gods from heaven or raise the dead.”8 This is exactly what Machiavelli is doing: he conjures the souls of the dead. After all, every time we read, we breathe into texts whose afterlife exists because of us. We revivify figures that are no longer here. But we are dependent on them in turn — they give us a storehouse of language and ideas, and we make them live again through our own words and voices. Reading as necromancy, then.
W. E. B. Du Bois may have been thinking about Machiavelli when he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.9
I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.
Personally, I’m happy to pay an extra 4.3 percent for my fast food burger if it means the person making it for me can afford to feed their own family. If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.
I’m perfectly content to pay taxes that go toward public schools, even though I’m childless and intend to stay that way, because all children deserve a quality, free education. If this seems unfair or unreasonable to you, we are never going to see eye to eye.
If I have to pay a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care? SIGN ME UP. Poverty should not be a death sentence in the richest country in the world. If you’re okay with thousands of people dying of treatable diseases just so the wealthiest among us can hoard still more wealth, there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.
I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy. I cannot have one more conversation with someone who is content to see millions of people suffer needlessly in exchange for a tax cut that statistically they’ll never see (do you make anywhere close to the median American salary? Less? Congrats, this tax break is not for you).
I cannot have political debates with these people. Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society, how to be a good person, and why any of that matters.
There are all kinds of practical, self-serving reasons to raise the minimum wage (fairly compensated workers typically do better work), fund public schools (everyone’s safer when the general public can read and use critical thinking), and make sure every American can access health care (outbreaks of preventable diseases being generally undesirable).
But if making sure your fellow citizens can afford to eat, get an education, and go to the doctor isn’t enough of a reason to fund those things, I have nothing left to say to you.
Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society.
Source: I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People | HuffPost Latest News
Euan Ashley joins Derek to discuss the benefits of exercise and our current scientific understanding of why it helps
Source: “Exercise May Be the Most Potent Medical Intervention Ever Known” – The Ringer
Given that I have sarcopenia due to chemo, etc. this is important.
Ashley: I think it’s because it’s just such a potent intervention. I mean, I think of it as an intervention as a doctor. Exercise is just the single most important intervention you can think of for your health. There are plenty of other important ones. I’m sure we could talk about diet, we could talk about sleep, we could talk about other things. But I truly believe that nothing is more important among those than physical activity and exercise. And that there are deep-seated reasons within our human history to believe that that’s a reasonable assumption to make.
This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
― George Bernard Shaw
This answer during a Q&A with Austin Kleon really hit me. The rest of the talk, and Q&A is pretty good also.
Maybe if we all said ‘maybe’ more often, the world might be a nicer place.
–Robert Anton Wilson
via RAW Week: Pope Bob Remembrance, by Rev. Ivan Stang – Boing Boing.
Playing with iSight and PhotoBooth on my new Macbook. It’s grainy because it’s dark in here.