> 他方、ここに訳出する「理想郷からの知らせ」の原著題は、すでに書いていますように、News from Nowhere です。私自身は、Nowhere を No-where（どこにもない所）ではなく、Now-here（現にここにある所）と読みたいと思っています。といいますのも、モリスは、革命後の世界に実際に身を置き、本当にそれを体感しているのではないかと考えるからです。もはやそれは、「夢というよりは、むしろひとつのヴィジョン」の力を得て創出されるところの新世界なのです。その意味でモリスによる新世界の可視化は、単にセンティメンタルでロマンティックな dreamer（夢想者）によって生み出されたものではなく、さらにそれを一歩前に進めて、言葉の原義（designare／disegno）が示すとおりの、熱情と冷徹とに支えられたみずみずしくも知的な designer（創案者）の手によって表出されたのではないかと、私は解釈するのです。

> 一八九八年までに、News from Nowhere は、フランス語、イタリア語、ドイツ語に翻訳され、日本にあっては、『平民新聞』において、一九〇四（明治三七）年一月三日付の第八号から四月一七日付の第二三号までの連載を通して紹介されます。これは、枯川生（堺利彦）による抄訳で、「理想郷」というタイトルがつけられていました。連載後、ただちにその抄訳は単行本としてまとめられ、「平民文庫菊版五銭本」の一冊に加えられます。発行所である平民社の編集室の後ろの壁の正面にはエミール・ゾラが、右壁にはカール・マルクスが、そして、本棚の上にはウィリアム・モリスの肖像が飾られていました。しかし、連載を終えると、不幸にも訳者の堺利彦は、官憲の手によって獄窓の人となるのです。当時、社会主義弾圧下の日本にあってモリスを紹介する行為には、まさしくいのちをかけた、正義のための不退転の決意が寄り添っていたのでした。

> ここをひとつの起点として、News from Nowhere は、爾来百数十年になんなんとする日本へのモリス紹介の歴史のなかにあって、これまで多くの優れた文人たちによって訳されてきました。訳書題も時代とともに移り変わります。終戦以降は「ユートピアだより」がほぼ定着します。私自身もこれまで、慣例に従いながらも漢字表記を使って、「ユートピア便り」を訳語としてきました。しかし、それにもかかわらず私は、「理想郷からの知らせ」というタイトルをあえて新たに用いることにしました。それは、このユートピアン・ロマンス（夢想的物語）の翻訳者として、自分の身の危険を顧みず、勇敢にも日本の最前列に立つことを決意した堺利彦に敬意を表し、彼が使用した「理想郷」という文字をどうしてもここで再現したかったからです。News from Nowhere を訳したからといって、少なくとも今日にあっては投獄されることはありませんが、夢を語り、理想を掲げることが困難になる時代が、いつまた来るかもしれません。今日の世界を概観すると、戦争や核兵器の放棄に手をこまねいています、なぜ平和主義に徹することができないのでしょうか。原子力発電から自然エネルギーに転換することに躊躇しています、なぜ過去の教訓に学ぼうとしないのでしょうか。差別や迫害が横行し難民が生まれています、なぜ人権が守られないのでしょうか。気候の変動を止めることができません、なぜ自然のなかに生きる道を模索しないのでしょうか。富める者と貧しい者、多数者と少数者、そして勝ち組と負け組のあいだに理不尽にも大きな溝が存在します、なぜ同じ人間が平等に生を享受できる地平が用意されないのでしょうか。全体的に見ると、明らかに人類の生存が脅かされているのです。しかしそれは、いまに限ったことではありません。そうした状況は、かつては中世の「ジョン・ボールの夢」のなかに現われ、一九世紀イギリスの社会主義運動のなかで再び強く問われ、それを乗り越えた人びとの姿を、いま私たちは「理想郷からの知らせ」というユートピアン・ロマンスから読み取ることができるのです。しかし、すべての問題が解決されているわけではありません。私がいま確信していることは、理想を語ることを諦めてはいけないということです。そのためにも、モリスの芸術と社会に対しての語りと実践は、多くのヒントを与えてくれます。

www2.kobe-u.ac.jp/~shuichin/wo…

#NewsFromNowHere #WilliamMorrisJa #理想郷 #平民新聞 #枯川生 #堺利彦
#中山修一

> "The average American child sees about 40,000 television commercials every year. Companies target younger viewers all the time, selling everything from sugar cereals to minivans. Kids are requesting specific brands as soon as they can talk.

> In this shocking and engrossing expose, psychologist Susan Linn uncovers the marketing industry's $15 billion yearly effort to cultivate nagging, insatiable, cradle-to-grave consumers. This advertising blitz stifles creativity and exacerbates obesity, eating disorders, violence, sexual precocity, and substance abuse. Linn-a mother herself who teaches at Harvard Medical School-recognizes that parents alone are no match for the marketing experts.

- archive.org/details/consumingk…

fedibird.com/@bsmall2/11687037…

#SusanLinn #ConsumingKids #消費される子供 #AdvertisingAwful

> ... other effects of air-conditioning are more insidious: ‘The world before Freon was a world in which the people of the planet understood how to handle the heat—not just personally but as a community. If you were rich, the way to deal with the hottest months of the summer was easy: slow down and migrate to your summer home in the Hamptons or your vacation estate in the mountains… But even lower-income urbanites through the 1901 New York heat wave made it through without leaving, if only because they had no other choice. They slept on roofs or fire escapes or in the parks under the stars. They modified their work habits. They wore considerably less clothing. They opened fire hydrants. Some even stood under streetlamp-sized showerheads connected to the city’s water supply, once provided by the municipal government but now long gone.

amitavghosh.com/eric-dean-wils…

#AmitavGhosh on #EricDeanWilson's #AfterCooling and #MunicipalHeatMitigation #CommunityHeatMitigation ##NewYorkHeatWave #Refrigerants #SlowDownHeat

> Ancient and modern writers are my closest friends, with whom I am in sympathy. They are wise and talented and their conversation sends me. Maybe I am lonely more than average (How would I know?), but I need them. Books and artworks are extraordinary company (one does not need to make allowances), and in the nature of the case, they speak most clearly to us writers and artists because we respond to them most actively; we notice how he does that, and if it is congenial we say, “I could do something like that.” Despite its bloodlessness, the tradition of literature is a grand community and, much as I envy the happy and the young, I doubt that they have as good a one.” —from Speaking and Language: Defense of Poetry

zeitgeistfilms.com/sitelets/pa…

#PaulGoodman on #AncientWriters #LonelyWriters #CommunityOfWriters #WritersAsCompanions

'Ah! Admirable! That your art should have become so perfect!' (Having finished his operation), the cook laid down his knife, and replied to the remark, 'What your servant loves is the method of the Dao, something in advance of any art. When I first began to cut up an ox, I saw nothing but the (entire) carcase. After three years I ceased to see it as a whole. Now I deal with it in a spirit-like manner, and do not look at it with my eyes. The use of my senses is discarded, and my spirit acts as it wills. Observing the natural lines, (my knife) slips through the great crevices and slides through the great cavities, taking advantage of the facilities thus presented. My art avoids the membranous ligatures, and much more the great bones. A good cook changes his knife every year; (it may have been injured) in cutting - an ordinary cook changes his every month - (it may have been) broken. Now my knife has been in use for nineteen years; it has cut up several thousand oxen, and yet its edge is as sharp as if it had newly come from the whetstone.

- ctext.org/zhuangzi/nourishing-…

#荘子 #ChuangTzu #包丁 #DressingAnOx #荘子内編 #養生主 #ChuangTzu3 #LordOfLife

He who holds fast to the Way is complete in Virtue; being complete in Virtue, he is complete in body; being complete in body, he is complete in spirit; and to be complete in spirit is the Way of the sage. He is content to live among the people, to walk by their side, and never know where he is going. Witless, his purity is complete. Achievement, profit, machines, skill - they have no place in this man's mind! A man like this will not go where he has no will to go, will not do what he has no mind to do. Though the world might praise him and say he had really found something, he would look unconcerned and never turn his head; though the world might condemn him and say he had lost something, he would look serene and pay no heed. The praise and blame of the world are no loss or gain to him. He may be called a man of Complete Virtue.

terebess.hu/english/chuangtzu1…

#ChuangTzu on the #WholeMan or #CompleteInSpirit #CompleteInBody makes me think of #WaldenBerry in #TheUnsettling It must be some sort of #PrimaryPeoples or #PeasantWisdom #PrimaryWisdom #HeavenAndEarth #天地 #荘子 #荘子天地

The gardener looked up at him, and said, 'How does it work?' Zi-gong said, 'It is a lever made of wood, heavy behind, and light in front. It raises the water as quickly as you could do with your hand, or as it bubbles over from a boiler. Its name is a shadoof.' The gardener put on an angry look, laughed, and said, 'I have heard from my teacher that, where there are ingenious contrivances, there are sure to be subtle doings; and that, where there are subtle doings, there is sure to be a scheming mind. But, when there is a scheming mind in the breast, its pure simplicity is impaired. When this pure simplicity is impaired, the spirit becomes unsettled, and the unsettled spirit is not the proper residence of the Dao. It is not that I do not know (the contrivance which you mention), but I should be ashamed to use it.'

ctext.org/zhuangzi/heaven-and-…

#ChuangTzu #荘子 #HeavenAndEarth #WellSweep #Shadoof #天地 #SchemingMinds #SimplicityImpaired #TheUnsettling #UnsettledSpirit makes me think of Wendell Berry!!
_The Unsettling of America_...

In Chuang Tzu, Ch. 11 _Heaven And Earth_

"If you had a machine here," cried Tzŭ Kung, "in a day you could irrigate a hundred times your present area. The labour required is trifling as compared with the work done. Would you not like to have one?"

"What is it?" asked the gardener.

"It is a contrivance made of wood," replied Tzŭ Kung, "heavy behind and light in front. It draws up water as you do with your hands, but in a constantly overflowing stream. It is called a well-sweep."

Still used all over China.

Thereupon the gardener flushed up and said, "I have heard from my teacher that those who have cunning implements are cunning in their dealings, and that those who are cunning in their dealings have cunning in their hearts, and that those who have cunning in their hearts cannot be pure and incorrupt, and that those who are not pure and incorrupt are restless in spirit, and that those who are restless in spirit are not fit vehicles for Tao. It is not that I do not know of these things. I should be ashamed to use them."

At this Tzŭ Kung was much abashed, and said nothing. Then the gardener asked him who he was, to which Tzŭ Kung replied that he was a disciple of Confucius.

"Are you not one who extends his learning with a view to being a Sage; who talks big in order to put himself above the rest of mankind; who plays in a key to which no one can sing so as to spread his reputation abroad? Rather become unconscious of self and shake off the trammels of the flesh,—and you will be near. But if you cannot govern your own self, what leisure have you for governing the empire? Begone! Do not interrupt my work."

Tzŭ Kung changed colour and slunk away, being not at all pleased with this rebuff; and it was not before he had travelled some thirty li that he recovered his usual appearance.

"What did the man we met do," asked a disciple, "that you should change colour and not recover for such a long time?"

"I used to think there was only one man in all the world," replied Tzŭ Kung.

Meaning Confucius.

"I did not know that there was also this man. I have heard the Master say that the test of a scheme is its practicability, and that success must be certain. The minimum of effort with the maximum of success,—such is the way of the Sage.

The absurdity of attributing such doctrines to Confucius will be apparent to every student of the Sage's remains.

"Not so this manner of man. Aiming at Tao, he perfects his virtue. By perfecting his virtue he perfects his body, and by perfecting his body he perfects his spiritual part. And the perfection of the spiritual part is the Tao of the Sage. Coming into life he is as one of the people, knowing not whither he is bound. How complete is his purity? Success, profit, skill,—these have no place in his heart. Such a man, if he does not will it, he does not stir; if he does not wish it, he does not act. If all the world praises him, he does not heed. If all the world blames him, he does not repine.

Reminding us of the philosopher Yung of ch. i.

The praise and the blame of the world neither advantage him nor otherwise. He may be called a man of perfect virtue. As for me, I am but a mere creature of impulse."

So he went back to Lu to tell Confucius. But Confucius said, "That fellow pretends to a knowledge of the science of the ante-mundane. He knows something, but not much. His government is of the internal, not of the external. What is there wonderful in a man by clearness of intelligence becoming pure, by inaction reverting to his original integrity, and with his nature and his spiritual part wrapped up in a body, passing through this common world of ours? Besides, to you and to me the science of the ante-mundane is not worth knowing."

It is only the present which concerns man.

This last is an utterance which might well have fallen from the lips of Confucius. But the whole episode is clearly an interpolation of later times.

- gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59709…

#HerberGiles translation of #ChaungTzu #荘子 #ChuangTzuCh11 #荘子十一 #HeavenAndEarth #天地 #Wellsweep #CunningMeans #CunningRestlessness #CunningHearts

This is not the Church of Galileo’s trial. This is a Church that says: bring us your data, your research, your expertise. Technical knowledge tells us what is possible. Moral wisdom tells us what is right. We need both.
...
But when human dignity is threatened by exploitative economic systems, by political structures that abandon the vulnerable, and by technological developments that trample ethical limits, then the Church has both the right and the duty to speak up. Its role, as Pope Leo frames it, is not domination but service.

facebook.com/share/p/191oh762N…

#PopeLeo #MagnificaHumanitas #TonyLaVina #HumanDignity #MoralWisdom

Neil Postman's #Technopoly comes to mind

‐-----------------

One of the more refreshing arguments in the encyclical is its treatment of the relationship between faith and human knowledge. Pope Leo insists that Catholic social teaching develops through genuine dialogue between Scripture’s wisdom and the insights of science — economics, sociology, political science, and yes, technology studies.

This is not the Church of Galileo’s trial. This is a Church that says: bring us your data, your research, your expertise. Technical knowledge tells us what is possible. Moral wisdom tells us what is right. We need both.

Magnifica Humanitas also makes clear that the Church does not seek political power or the functions of the state. It does not want to run governments or write legislation.

But when human dignity is threatened by exploitative economic systems, by political structures that abandon the vulnerable, and by technological developments that trample ethical limits, then the Church has both the right and the duty to speak up. Its role, as Pope Leo frames it, is not domination but service.

> The problem was how to calculate the injury, since this varied according to both the physical damage and status of the injured party. Here, Irish jurists developed the ingenious expedient of measuring different wounds with different varieties of grain: a cut on the king’s cheek was measured in grains of wheat, on that of a substantial farmer in oats, on that of a smallholder merely in peas. One cow was paid for each.

> What’s unusual about the Irish material is that it’s all spelled out so clearly. This is partly because Irish law codes were the work of a class of legal specialists who seem to have turned the whole thing almost into a form of entertainment, devoting endless hours to coming up with every possible abstract possibility. Some of the provisos are so whimsical (“if stung by another man’s bee, one must calculate the extent of the injury, but also, if one swatted it in the process, subtract the replacement value of the bee”) that one has to assume they were simply jokes. Still, as a result, the moral logic that lies behind any elaborate code of honor is laid out here in startling honesty.

> Mockery was a refined art in Medieval Ireland, and poets were considered close to magicians: it was said that a talented satirist could rhyme rats to death, or at the very least, raise blisters on the faces of victims. Any man publicly mocked would have no choice but to defend his honor; and, in Medieval Ireland, the value of that honor was precisely defined.

> What makes Medieval Irish laws seem so peculiar from our perspective is that their exponents had not the slightest discomfort with putting an exact monetary price on human dignity. For us, the notion that the sanctity of a priest or the majesty of a king could be held equivalent to a million fried eggs or a hundred thousand haircuts is simply bizarre. These are precisely the things that ought to be considered beyond all possibility of quantification. If Medieval Irish jurists felt otherwise, it was because people at that time did not use money to buy eggs or haircuts.

> Sometimes, one comes on a single haphazard detail that gives the game away. In this case it comes not from Ireland but from the Dimetian Code in Wales, written somewhat later but operating on much the same principles. At one point, after listing the honors due to the seven holy sees of the Kingdom of Dyfed, whose bishops and abbots were the most exalted and sacred creatures in the kingdom, the text specifies that

> > Whoever draws blood from an abbot of any one of those principal seats before mentioned, let him pay seven pounds; and a female of his kindred to be a washerwoman, as a disgrace to the kindred, and to serve as a memorial to the payment of the honor price.27

> A washerwoman was the lowest of servants, and the one turned over in this case was to serve for life. She was, in effect, reduced to slavery. Her permanent disgrace was the restoration of the abbot’s honor. While we cannot know if some similar institution once lay behind the habit of reckoning the honor of Irish “sacred” beings in slave-women, the principle is clearly the same. Honor is a zero-sum game. A man’s ability to protect the women of his family is an essential part of that honor. Therefore, forcing him to surrender a woman of his family to perform menial and degrading chores in another’s household is the ultimate blow to his honor. This, in turn, makes it the ultimate reaffirmation of the honor of he who takes it away.

#DavidGraeber #DebtBook #MedievalIrishHonor

After more than four decades, one of the few things I believe I have really learned is that the teacher, that professional amateur, teaches not so much his subject matter as himself. If he is a teacher of literature, he provides for those less experienced in song and story, including the reluctant, the skeptical, the uncooperative, the incompetent, a model of one in whom what seemed dead, mere print on the page, becomes living, a way of life — palpable fulfillment, a transport into the world of wonder.

To do so effectively, he must show himself capable of responding not only to those works which his students are not likely to discover without his guidance, but also to those which have persisted in spite of critical disapproval. He must, moreover, teach such works in the same courses, as chronology or theme or his own whim dictates, thus avoiding even the semblance of celebrating already established works at the expense of those still despised, much less those preferred by an elite at the expense of those loved by the great majority. Only in this way will he be able to make clear the continuity of all song and story, preprint, print and post-print, high, medium and low.

I am not talking about English as vocational training, much less English as elitist brainwashing. I mean English for everyone: an introduction to works of the imagination over which all humankind can weep, laugh, shudder and be titillated; communal dreams, shared hallucinations, which in a time when every­ thing else tends to divide us from each other join us together, men and women, adults and children, educated and uneducated, black and white, yellow and brown-- even, perhaps, teachers and students.

archive.org/details/whatwaslit…

#LeslieFiedler #EEnglish #EveryonesEnglish #WhatWasLiterature #LitCrit

Optimi corruption pessima
The best corrupted is the worst.. rotten lillies smell terrible..

Taking a great word and making it stupid.. like what the did with the free, open, and interesting internet.. collaboration without exploitation for enough of a utopia would work but...

Abundance adherents often bristle at the suggestion that the project is orchestrated by Silicon Valley elites. But as the leaked documents demonstrate, Rosen and his colleagues clearly view it as such, and even frequently use the word “elite” by choice.
In a statement, Phoenix Project executive director Jeremy Mack said that the fundraising document demonstrates that “Abundance to-date is being backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from Silicon Valley’s wealthiest tech elites, and they are investing heavily into a movement that will support their interests.”

prospect.org/2026/06/12/new-do…

#ZackRosen #AbundanceNetworkBS
#ProspectOrg

Zack Rosen the Walter Lippman and Edward Bernays and Trilateral Commissoon Crisis of Democracy genre dork of the day..

> Howard observed and came to support traditional Indian farming practices over conventional agricultural science. Though he journeyed to India to teach Western agricultural techniques he found that the Indians could in fact teach him more. One important aspect he took notice of was the connection between healthy soil and the villages' healthy populations, livestock and crop. Patrick Holden, Director of the UK Soil Association quoted Howard as saying "the health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible." He was president of the 13th session of the Indian Science Congress in 1926.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_H…

#AlbertHoward #SirAlbertHoward #WheelOfLife from Wendell Berry's _The Unsettling of America_ #HealthySoil

Mr. Esfandiary sees the future as an earthly Heaven in which, by the miracle of technology, humans will usurp the role of God — who, it may be recalled, was once thought to be the only maker of manna...

He is berating us, with the fervor of an evangelist because we do not abandon ourselves to machines as people of faith abandon themselves to God. He is berating us, in fact, for not being gods or at least acting as if we were gods.

The crucial concept here is that of“limitless” or “infinite”quantity.

From _The Unsettling of America_: Wendell Berry on a 1975 article where F. M. Esfandiary
nytimes.com/1975/08/09/archive…

#WendellBerry #TheUnsettling #FMEsfandiary more #FuturologyBullshit like for Nukes in the 1950s "too cheap to meter" or "AI" (LLM Salami data-center waste) "generative AI" "agentic AI" probability games will save us from the over-use add the wasting of everything..

If animals are regarded as machines, they are confined in pens remote from the source of their food, where their excrement becomes, instead of a fertilizer, first a “waste” and then a pollutant. Furthermore, because confinement feeding depends so largely on grains, grass is removed from the rotation of crops and more land is exposed to erosion.

If plants are regarded as machines, we wind up with huge monocultures, productive of elaborate ecological mischiefs, which are in turn productive of agricultural mischief: monocultures are much more susceptible to pests and diseases than mixed cultures and are therefore more dependent on chemicals.

If the soil is regarded as a machine, then its life, its involvement in living systems and cycles, must perforce be ignored. It must be treated as a dead, inert chemical mass. If its life is ignored, then so must be the natural sources of its fertility — and not only ignored, but scorned. Alfalfa and the clovers, according to some of the most up-to-date practitioners, are “weeds”; the only legitimate source of nitrogen is the fertilizer manufacturer...

#WendellBerry #TheUnsettling #AnimalsAsMachines #PlantsAsMachines #SoilAsMachine
#DirtAsMachine #EarthAsMachine

Amitav Ghosh's books _Nutmeg's Curse_ and _The Great Derangement_ come to mind...

> We’ve heard about upskilling and re-skilling due to AI — but how about de-skilling? A new study published this week found that doctors who frequently use AI to detect cancer in one medical procedure got significantly worse at doing so.
> The researchers set out to discover whether continuous exposure to AI impacted doctors’ behavior when conducting colonoscopy..

>The rate was about six percentage points lower.

> The study was published in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology journal by medical professionals and researchers in countries including Poland, Norway, Sweden, the U.K., and Japan.

theverge.com/ai-artificial-int…
#HaydenField on
#SalamiAI #SalamiDoctors #AIDeSkilling #SalamiCancer #AICancer

“Everything got a whole lot worse once they rolled out AI.” Ken said the company’s executives shifted the blame to staff when they pushed back about AI-fueled productivity decreases."...
While initial drafts were a breeze to create, Ken and his co-workers had to spend more time rewriting, correcting errors and resolving disagreements between each other’s chatbots than if they had never used AI at all.
“Quality decreased significantly, time to produce a piece of content increased significantly and, most importantly, morale decreased,” said the copywriter,

theguardian.com/technology/202…

#AISalami

The US—they call it NATO, though it was primarily the US—bombed North Korea almost to oblivion. When there was nothing left to bomb, they targeted dams—a major war crime for which Nazi criminals were hanged. Official histories, like the Air Force Quarterly, exult over these bombings. Huge torrents of water flooded valleys, destroyed crops, and killed people dependent on rice for survival. It’s monstrous, the praise for massive war crimes.

jurist.org/features/2026/01/06…

#BombingWaterSupplies #USBombing #WaterSupplyWarCrimes #NorthKorea

... since everything else in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the water supply — a war crime, by the way, for which people were hanged in Nuremberg. And these official journals were talking excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys, and the Asians scurrying around trying to survive. The journals were exulting in what this meant to those “Asians,” horrors beyond our imagination. It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation and death. How magnificent! It’s not in our memory, but it’s in their memory.
chomsky.info/20130604/
#BombingWaterSupplies #WaterWarCrimes #NorthKorea
#NoamChomsky

Community of Practice..

Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died a few years ago that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society. ...
Politeness is not really the problem. I think we got into this situation in part by a lot of people in the mainstream thinking it was more important to be polite than to call things by their true names. There’s a wonderful historian and scholar of nonviolence named George Lakey who says polarization is good. That’s when you have clarity. Sometimes people have to pick sides. You do not get authoritarians to behave better by being meek and gentle and polite. You get it by being strong.

nytimes.com/2026/03/07/magazin…

#RebeccaSolnit #ThichNhatHanh
#CommunityOfPractice

> It is worth noting that Jurgen Habermas and many of his disciples consider communicative structures as important as decision-making structures. When they assess the processes as well as results of social decision making, they find the fairness and efficiency of communication systems as important as the rules of decision making. The relevant questions are: Who has access to what information? What means for conveying information and opinions exist? How is the communicative interchange organized? These are some of the interesting questions the "modern" Frankfurt school has focused on. Remarkably, just by setting minimal goals for "humane communication," members of this school have elaborated guiding values for much of society.

znetwork.org/wp-content/upload…

znetwork.org/wp-content/upload…

#HumanCommunication #FrankfurtSchool #ModernFrankfurtSchol #JurgenHabermas

"A sterner conscience and a friendlier home." --- W. B. Yeats

In I.A. Richards's _So Much Nearer_ p. 150~

"The Future of Poetry"

p. 151~

Try it again: "the central importance of poetry." What do you feel about that?... That would be a danger: should not enough people care enough to resent poetry's exacting and perennial claims.

Let us see for a few moments, ow great these claims are. W. B. Yeats wrote of Shelley's _Defense of Poetry_: "The profoundest essay on the foundation of of poetry in English." The culminating and closing sentence of that _Defense_ is...:"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." It is with a view to heightening, not by any means reducing, this claim that I would propose an emendation---as a quick way of making a crucial point. I would like to read, not "/Poets/ are the unacknowledged /legislators/," but "/Poems/ are the unacknowledged /legislation/ of the world." That would take the weight off the poor, brief, human, limited poet and put it on the august, enduring, superhuman artifice of eternity the poet can be the means of bringing into existence. That would hand the legislative function over to a Being much better fitted to bear it. An influence that is to help us with how we should and shout not /choose/ needs all the authority it can get.

#IAR #IARichards #WBYeats #PBShelley #PercyShelley #FutureOfPoetry #PoetLegislators #PoemLegislations #PoetryAsLegislation

"A sterner conscience and a friendlier home." --- W. B. Yeats

In I.A. Richards's _So Much Nearer_ p. 150~

"The Future of Poetry"

p. 151~

Try it again: "the central importance of poetry." What do you feel about that?... That would be a danger: should not enough people care enough to resent poetry's exacting and perennial claims.

Let us see for a few moments, ow great these claims are. W. B. Yeats wrote of Shelley's _Defense of Poetry_: "The profoundest essay on the foundation of of poetry in English." The culminating and closing sentence of that _Defense_ is...:"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." It is with a view to heightening, not by any means reducing, this claim that I would propose an emendation---as a quick way of making a crucial point. I would like to read, not "/Poets/ are the unacknowledged /legislators/," but "/Poems/ are the unacknowledged /legislation/ of the world." That would take the weight off the poor, brief, human, limited poet and put it on the august, enduring, superhuman artifice of eternity the poet can be the means of bringing into existence. That would hand the legislative function over to a Being much better fitted to bear it. An influence that is to help us with how we should and shout not /choose/ needs all the authority it can get.

#IAR #IARichards #WBYeats #PBShelley #PercyShelley #FutureOfPoetry #PoetLegislators #PoemLegislations #PoetryAsLegislation

Anand Gridharadas on the Epstein Class:

A close read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising. When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at disregarding pain.
At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.

Greg Grandin on Noam Chomsky:

... In 1970, he lectured at Hanoi’s Polytechnic University, a building half-destroyed by US bombs, and then went on to tour refugee camps in Laos. He also lectured in 1985 in Managua, Nicaragua, during Ronald Reagan’s contra war, and then in the West Bank in 1997. In late 1999, Chomsky flew to Timor-Leste, as the Indonesian forces were slaughtering thousands following a vote in favor of independence. In 2002, he arrived unannounced in Istanbul to stand side-by-side in court with his Turkish publisher, Fatih Tas, who was being prosecuted for publishing Chomsky’s essays, including on Turkey’s repression of its Kurdish population. The state prosecutor dropped the charges rather than agree to Chomsky’s insistence that he be listed as a codefendant.

Noam was married to his first wife, Carol Chomsky—herself an influential scholar in the field of linguistic pedagogy—for 59 years. After Carol died in 2008, the inhabitants of two Colombian Andean villages, Santa Rita and La Vega, named a forest after her, El Bosque Carol Chomsky, in appreciation of her husband’s advocacy on their behalf in the fight to protect water rights. In August 2012, it took Noam two days traveling by jeep and on horseback to reach the high woods to attend the dedication ceremony. He sat in silence as villagers described violence, land theft, and water poisoning they suffered at the hands of ranchers, death squads, and gold miners. Chomsky tried to speak but couldn’t find the words. Later, he sent a note to the communities saying that he hoped that “Carol’s spirit” would help them fight the “predatory forces” they face.

And, throughout all of this time, Chomsky spoke to everyone. In 2004, he let the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, posing in character as Ali G, into his office...

The Epstein Class's uncaring attitudes and the list of Chomsky's caring actions brings to mind a 2012 article by Fred Branfman:^3

I was also struck by his self-deprecation. He had a near-aversion to talking about himself — contrary to most of the “Big Foot” journalists I had met. He had little interest in small talk, gossip or discussion of personalities, and was focused almost entirely on the issues at hand. He downplayed his linguistic work, saying it was unimportant compared to opposing the mass murder going on in Indochina. He had no interest whatsoever in checking out Vientiane’s notorious nightlife, tourist sites or relaxing by the pool. He was clearly driven, a man on a mission. He struck me as a genuine intellectual, a guy who lived in his head. And I could relate. I also lived in my head, and had a mission.[/b]

[b]...One of the reasons I was so horrified by the bombing is that I had come to know the Lao as people by living in my village for the previous three years – particularly a 70-year-old man named Paw Thou Douang whom I had come to love as a kind of surrogate father. He was kind, wise and gentle, and I respected him as much as anyone I had ever met. I was particularly struck by how warmly Noam related to Paw Thou during our dinner with him and his family. He clearly felt an immediate affinity with them that I hadn’t seen in the many other visitors I had taken to the village. He also displayed a focused curiosity about the details of what was happening in Laos, to which I was more than pleased to respond.

But what most struck me by far was what occurred when we traveled out to a camp that housed refugees from the Plain of Jars. I had taken dozens of journalists and other folks out to the camps at that point, and found that almost all were emotionally distanced from the refugees’ suffering. Whether CBS’s Bernard Kalb, NBC’s Welles Hangen, or the New York Times’ Sidney Schanberg, the journalists listened politely, asked questions, took notes and then went back to their hotels to file their stories. They showed little emotion or interest in what the villagers had been through other than what they needed to write their stories. Our talks in the car back to their hotels usually concerned either dinner that night or the next day’s events.

I was thus stunned when, as I was translating Noam’s questions and the refugees’ answers, I suddenly saw him break down and begin weeping. I was struck not only that most of the others I had taken out to the camps had been so defended against what was, after all, this most natural, human response. It was that Noam himself had seemed so intellectual to me, to so live in a world of ideas, words and concepts, had so rarely expressed any feelings about anything. I realized at that moment that I was seeing into his soul. And the visual image of him weeping in that camp has stayed with me ever since. When I think of Noam this is what I see.

One of the reasons his reaction so struck me was that he did not know those Laotians. It was relatively easy for me, having lived among them and loved people like Paw Thou so much, to commit to trying to stop the bombing. But I have stood in awe not only of Noam, but of the many thousands of Americans who spent so many years of their lives trying to stop the killing of Indochinese they did not know in a war they never saw.

As we drove back from the camp that day, he remained quiet, still shaken by what he had learned. He had written extensively of U.S. war-making in Indochina before this. But this was the first time he had met its victims face-to-face. And in the silence, an unspoken bond that we have never discussed was forged between us.

As I look back on my life I feel I was a better person during this period than I have been before or since. And I realized that at that time we were both coming from the same place: Compared to the unconscionable Calvary of these innocent, gentle, kind people — and so many others — everything else seemed trivial. Once you knew that innocent people were dying, how could you justify to yourself doing anything other than trying to save their lives?

And I realized in the silence of that car ride that beneath Noam’s public persona as the intellectual’s intellectual, who relied on facts and reason to make his case, there lay a deeply feeling human being. For Noam these Lao peasants were human beings with names, faces, dreams and as much of a right to their lives as those who so carelessly laid waste to them. But for many of these visiting journalists, not to mention Americans back home, these Lao villagers were faceless “unpeople” whose lives had no meaning whatsoever.^3

^1 archive.is/TbYs7
^2 thenation.com/article/society/…
^3 salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chom…

#TheDayNoamChomskyCried #WhenNoamChomskyWept #GrandinOnChomsky #BranfmanOnChomsky #FredBranfman #ChomskyInLaos #EpsteinClassVsChomsky
#NoamChomsky #BranfmanOnChomsky #FredBranfmanNoamChomsky

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.

fccj.or.jp/number-1-shimbun-ar…

#DavidMcNeil #JapanesePressBashung