Kafka, an employee of a workmen’s insurance company and a loyal friend of many eastern European Jews for whom he had had to obtain permits to stay in the country, had a very intimate knowledge of the political conditions of his country. He knew that a man caught in the bureaucratic machinery is already condemned; and that no man can expect justice from judicial procedures where interpretation of the law is coupled with the administering of lawlessness, and where the chronic inaction of the interpreters is compensated by a bureaucratic machine whose senseless automatism has the privilege of ultimate decision. But to the public of the twenties, bureaucracy did not seem an evil great enough to explain the horror and terror expressed in the novel. People were more frightened by the tale than by the real thing. They looked therefore for other, seemingly deeper, interpretations, and they found them, following the fashion of the day...
#ArendtOnKafka in #EssaysInUnderstanding #HannahArendt on #FranzKafka
#ArendtOnBureaucracy #KafkaOnBureaucracy
第六章原文
谷神不死。是謂玄牝。玄牝之門、是謂天地根。緜緜若存、用之不勤。書き下し文
谷神(こくしん)は死せず。これを玄牝(げんぴん)と謂(い)う。玄牝の門、これを天地の根(こん)と謂う。緜緜(めんめん)として存(そん)する若(ごと)く、これを用いて勤(つ)きず。英訳文
Valley goddess who produces all things never dies. I call her "mysterious motherhood". Heaven and earth appeared from her gate. Her existence is vague and obscure. But she is producing all things unceasingly.現代語訳
万物を生み出す谷間の神は、とめどなく生み出して死ぬ事は無い。これを私は「玄牝(げんぴん) - 神秘なる母性」と呼ぶ。この玄牝は天地万物を生み出す門である。その存在はぼんやりとはっきりとしないようでありながら、その働きは尽きる事は無い。
mage8.com/magetan/roushi01.htm…
#老子6 #LaoTzu6 #LaoTse6 #谷神
#ValleySpirit #谷中の思想 #ValleyThought #ValleyThoughts
#ValleyPhilosophy
Tomomi Akasaka of Kyodo News is among several journalists who have complained about being harassed after covering hate speech against Kurds in Saitama Prefecture. Japan’s small Kurdish community, clustered in the cities of Kawaguchi and Warabi, have been targeted by rightwing groups seeking their expulsion. Reporters who cover the story can often expect a tsunami of abuse.Hyogo Prefecture has a particular reason to be concerned about violence against journalists. In May 1987, a masked rightist murdered reporter Tomohiro Kojiri at the Asahi Shimbun Hanshin Bureau in Nishinomiya. His colleague, Hyoe Inukai, was badly hurt. The perpetrator has never been caught. “There’s a real possibility of escalation if we cannot put a break on what’s happening, especially when the line between the online world and the real world is so blurred,” Tanaka says.
Tanaka wants local politicians to do more to dampen campaigns against journalists in the interests of democracy. He says his newspaper has received a threat from a caller using the name, “Sekihotai,” the organization that claimed responsibility for killing Kojiri.
More than a statement, the Declaration is the fruit of an unprecedented collective process: shaped through years of local and regional assemblies, and translated into 18 languages during the Forum to ensure that every voice could be heard and every word shared in equality.
...The Kandy Declaration calls on movements everywhere to act in unity, defend the commons, and transform global governance so that it serves people, not profit.
Born from collective wisdom and multilingual solidarity, it is a living roadmap for the years ahead – lighting the way toward peace, dignity, and life for all.
viacampesina.org/en/2025/11/th…
#KandyDeclaration #ViaCampesina
/HT
@🦣 ViaCampesinaBE
"The same week that U.N. officials spoke of an “apocalypse” in Jamaica, American billionaire Bill Gates expressed a certain unease about officials and scientists concerned with climate change who, he thought, were being hysterical. He urged them to chill the hell out. It was an arrogant and manipulative oracle, uttered with all the privilege of the world’s 19th richest man. A symbol of monopoly capitalism, his individual net worth rivals the annual gross domestic product of the Dominican Republic. And when he responded to #HurricaneMelissa, he did so (not surprisingly, I suppose) in the narrow sectional interests of the world’s wealthiest class in Silicon Valley.
tomdispatch.com/the-hot-tub-of…
#JuanCole on #BillGates
#GatesOnHurricaneMelissa #TomDispatch
... And scientists now believe that, if cities with humidity levels of 80% experience a temperature of 122º F., that combination could be fatal to us humans.
Scientists have a formula for combining humidity and temperature, yielding what they call a “wet bulb” temperature. We cool off by sweating and letting the moisture evaporate from our skins, but that kind of heat and humidity would prevent such a cooling process from kicking in, which could mean that we humans would essentially be cooked to death.
#WetBulbTemperature
> ... Billionaire Bill Gates carps that a “doomsday outlook” is causing climate activists to “focus too much on near-term emissions goals.” Well, he’s wrong. The focus on near-term emissions goals comes from science. Gates doesn’t even mention the phrase “carbon budget” in his blog entry, which is telling.
#WrongBillGates
The scandals coming into view with Harvard Professors like Alan Dershowitz and Lawrence H. Summers in the Epstien Files have me going back to Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967!!) by Noam Chomsky... It's no surprise the money, power, and status has people lying with few consequences in support of USA corrupt policy for Israel and Wall Street Economics now.. For back then, I wonder if The Kennedy "Intellectuals" may just be lucky there wasn't unencrypted e-mail back then, so we won't know what sort of perverse rapey pricks they were in private life, if their private lives match up with their policy participation like they do for Dershowitz and Summers...
When Arthur Schlesinger was asked by The New York Times in November, 1965, to explain the contradiction between his published account of the Bay of Pigs incident and the story he had given the press at the time of the attack, he simply remarked that he had lied; and a few days later, he went on to compliment the Times for also having suppressed information on the planned invasion, in “the national interest,” as this term was defined by the group of arrogant and deluded men of whom Schlesinger gives such a flattering portrait in his recent account of the Kennedy Administration.
It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community—for example, no one has said that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in the humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort. And what of the incredible sequence of lies on the part of our government and its spokesmen concerning such matters as negotiations in Vietnam? The facts are known to all who care to know.
... there is indeed something of a consensus among intellectuals who have already achieved power and affluence, or who sense that they can achieve them by “accepting society” as it is and promoting the values that are “being honored” in this society. It is also true that this consensus is most noticeable among the scholar-experts who are replacing the free-floating intellectuals of the past.
Let me finally return to Dwight Macdonald and the responsibility of intellectuals. Macdonald quotes an interview with a death-camp paymaster who burst into tears when told that the Russians would hang him. “Why should they? What have I done?” he asked. Macdonald concludes: “Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster.” The question, “What have I done?” is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities
#NoamChomsky #ResponsibilityOfIntellectuals with #DwightMacdonald and #ArthurSchlesinger #KennedyIntellectuals #EpsteinFilesMusings #AlanDershowitz #LarrySummers #LawrenceHSummers
I read.a Guardian article about that, until I see more details I'll just chalk.it up to Chomsky responding to.emails.8 hours a day... and probably reflexively writing blurbs for people and books. Maybe it's bad but I'm waiting because he wasn't a prick in other ways like Larry Summers and Alan Dershowitz...
Correction on Larry Summers. I mentioned that when I cited his paper on a tax on securities trading, he reacted angrily when a Nation factchecker called him—he didn't want his work used "politically." The way I remembered it, we ran it anyway, but in fact The Nation chickened out. Quoting a footnote from my book Wall Street:"When he was still an academic, Summers did not like it that his paper tentatively promoting a transactions tax on securities to discourage pointless trading was going to be quoted in an editorial in The Nation; the editorial used his numbers, but was stripped of his timorous endorsement (Nation 1989)"
Citation:
Nation (1989). “Tax the Big Casino,” Nation 249 (August 21), p. 189.
facebook.com/share/p/1CzjAbfDi…
#DougHenwood on #LarrySummers
#TransactionTax #TobinTax
#LarrySummersAsDisciplinedMind
disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
#SummersDershowitz
@bsmall2@nerdica.net
When Lauren Vaughn, a kindergarten assistant in South Carolina, saw reports that right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk had been shot at an event in Utah, she opened Facebook and typed out a quote from Kirk himself.Gun deaths, Kirk said in 2023, were unfortunate but “worth it” if they preserved “the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given Rights.” Following the quote, Vaughn added: “Thoughts and prayers.”
Vaughn, a 37-year-old Christian who has taken missionary trips to Guatemala, said her call for prayer was sincere. She said she hoped reading Kirk’s words in the context of the shooting might prompt her friends to rethink their opposition to gun control.
#CsncelCulture #CancelCultureCK #CharlieKirkShooting #LaurenVaughn
/HT #JeffreyStClair FB
> In the pro-Kirk camp, at least one academic was put on administrative leave after threatening to “hunt down” those celebrating the assassination.
600 to 1, sounds like a Israeli//Palestinian deaths sort of ratio, or a USA military/South Vietnamese peasant ratio..
This account is the most comprehensive to date of the backlash against Kirk’s critics, tracing how senior officials in President Donald Trump’s administration, local Republican lawmakers and allied influencers mobilized to enforce the Trump movement’s views. The story maps the pro-Trump machinery of retaliation now reshaping American political life, detailing its scale and tactics, ranging from shaming on social media to public pressure on employers and threats to defund institutions. Earlier reports by Reuters have documented how Trump has purged the federal government of employees deemed opponents of his agenda and cracked down on law firms defending people in the administration’s crosshairs.
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Brian Small
in reply to Brian Small • •#ArendtOnTheTrial #KafkaTheTrial