Alignment

Reality is the ultimate arbiter of truth. If your thoughts, beliefs, and actions aren't aligned with truth, your results will suffer. -- Steve Pavlina

the application of colonialism to Europe

The conventional opinion is that the Second War should be regarded as a continuation of the First. While the First was produced by competing imperialisms, the Second was the outcome of the very imperfect settlement imposed at the end of the War, and the difference in interpretations as to how the War really ended (was it an armistice, or was it an unconditional surrender). But that interpretation is (perhaps) faulty because it cannot account for the most distinctive character of the World War II, namely that it was the war of extermination in the East (including the Shoah).  That is  where Mazower’s placing of the War in a much longer European imperial context makes sense.

The key features of Nazi policies of “racial” superiority, colonization of land and conscious destruction of ethnic groups cannot be understood but as an extreme, or even extravagant, form of European colonialism, as it existed from the 15th century onward. If one thinks of the Soviet Russia as of Africa or indigenous American continent (as it seemed to the Nazis), then Nazi policy of mass extermination and (more liberally) enslavement of the Slavic population that would provide forced labor for the German aristocracy living in agro-towns dotted across the plains of Russia does not look much different from what happened for several centuries in the mines of Potasi, in the Congo, in the ante-bellum South of the United States, in the Dutch Java or indeed in German-ruled Namibia.

The creation of two ethically and racially distinct social classes, with no interaction and with one openly exploiting another is exactly how European colonialism presented itself to the rest of the world. As Aimė Cėsaire, quoted at the end of the book, wrote (I paraphrase) “Nazism was the application of colonialism to Europe”.

There were, however, some differences that made the realization of this dream of conquest and domination unrealizable for the Nazis.

The technological and military gap between the “master” class and the Untermenschen was much smaller, and at the end it got even overturned in the military sphere. By 1942, the Soviet Union was producing more airplanes and tanks than Germany with all her factories in conquered Europe. The technological gap was indeed much smaller than it seemed to the Germans, and than it objectively was between the European conquerors and the peoples of Africa or the Americas. Tiny forces of Spaniards or English could conquer huge spaces and rule many people because of enormous superiority of their military power. But this was not the case in Europe. In other words, when the technological (military) gap between two groups is small, a complete annihilation of one by another is impossible.

The Nazis were blinded to this, not only by their misjudgment about the technological development of Russia, but also by their belief in rigid racial hierarchy where the very fact that such hierarchy existed (as they believed) made it impossible to entertain the possibility that the lower classes might rise sufficiently to challenge the “masters”. The rigidity of self-created racial hierarchy blinded them to reality.

The second difference between the Nazis and classical European imperialism was that racial hierarchy, pushed to its extreme, and leading to the attempted annihilation of the entire ethnic groups (Holocaust) was not motivated by economic interests of the elite but took place, as it were, outside it. Mazower makes very clear the tension that existed throughout the Nazi rule between economic needs for more forced labor, both in European factories and in the fields in the conquered territories in Poland, the Ukraine and Belorussia, and the ideologically-motivated drive to exterminate the “inferior races”. The military and civilian administrations tended to prefer the former approach (exploitation to death through labor), the SS the latter (pure destruction). This single-minded pursuit of annihilation, regardless of, or even against, economic benefits, was not something that existed in European colonialism.

It is this macabre and economically and politically irrational drive toward extermination that might have differentiated colonialism as applied to Europe from colonialism applied elsewhere. But establishing racial hierarchy, believing in eugenics, being indifferent to the death of the “lower races”, creating a system of forced labor, shooting or maiming people who do not deliver their quotas of produce was not exactly new. Aimė Cėsaire might have been right. --  Branko Milanovic

In-group Dynamics

The truth is common property. You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true. -- Lies We Tell Kids, Paul Graham

Ruins

A culture as maniacally and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment -- James Hillman

Buddha IV

Buddhism, in origin an Indian ideology, spread over half the ancient world and took root in quite disparate civilizations. Despite huge setbacks, it is still spreading. I would suggest that it acquired this adaptability not by chance, but because the Buddha himself was able to see that local mores were man-made, and could show that what brahmins believed to be ingrained in nature was nothing but convention. In much the same period (though they started somewhat earlier) the Greeks were making the distinction between phusis, nature, and nomos, man-made rule, and drawing similar conclusions.

Making the individual conscience the ultimate authority is both a liberating and a dangerous move. What if someone acts on wrong moral reasoning? Society needs a sanction. That is why it was immensely important for the Buddha, and indeed for the whole tradition that followed him, to keep stressing that the law of moral reckoning worked throughout the universe: that good would be rewarded and evil punished in the end. That, I suggest, is also why the Buddha made belief in this law of karma the first step on his noble eightfold path to nirvana. -- What the Buddha Thought, Richard Gombrich 2009

Buddha III

If karma is completely ethicized, the whole universe becomes an ethical arena, because everywhere all beings are placed according to their deserts. If this is generalized into a view of the world, as it has been in Theravadin cultures, it means that ultimately power and goodness are always perfectly correlated, both increasing as one proceeds (literally) up the universe. [...] This picture of a universe under control is from one angle reassuring; but in its belief that there is really no undeserved suffering it can also be harsh. Logically it solves the problem of theodicy, but at a price. Many have found this solution as unbearable as the situation it resolves, and it is hardly surprising that Buddhism as it developed after the Buddha’s death became rich in ways of obscuring or escaping such an intransigent law of the universe, often at the cost of logical consistency. Obeyesekere has also shown how it is logical that the ethicization of a society’s eschatology should lead to its universalization. Once ethics is reduced to the simple values of right and wrong, and located in the mind, something common to all human beings, distinctions of gender, age and social class become irrelevant. Moreover, Buddhism - like mercantile wealth—was not ascribed but achieved. -- What the Buddha Thought, Richard Gombrich 2009

Buddha II

The Buddha taught that all thoughts, words and deeds derive their moral value, positive or negative, from the intention behind them. This does not make the effect of actions irrelevant: Buddhism is no less familiar than is modern law with the idea of negligence. But the basic criterion for morality is intention. Morality and immorality are mental properties of individuals. Metaphorically they were often referred to as purity and impurity. Each good deed makes a person purer and thus makes it slightly easier to repeat such a deed. The same applies to bad qualities, such as cruelty. An intention, carried out, becomes a propensity.

Introductions to Buddhism written for westerners tend to begin by quoting the Buddha’s advice to a group of people called the Kalamas.They had complained to him that various teachers came and preached different doctrines to them, and they were confused about which to follow. The Buddha replied that everyone has to make up their own mind on such matters. One should not take any teaching on trust or external authority, but test it on the touchstone of one’s own experience. [...] If people are responsible for their own decisions, and in particular for deciding which teaching to follow, this sets a high premium on intelligence. [...] In every traditional society, including that into which the Buddha was born, education consists largely in parroting what the teacher says. The Buddha even made a monastic ruling that one of the duties of a pupil towards his teacher is to correct him when he is wrong on doctrine or in danger of saying something unsuitable. That, I think, has few parallels in world history. -- What the Buddha Thought, Richard Gombrich 2009

Buddha I

Nothing in the world [i.e., that which we can normally experience] has an unchanging essence. [...] Buddha is not primarily concerned with what exists - in fact, he thinks that is a red herring - but with what we can experience, what can be present to consciousness. For his purposes, what exists and the contents of experience are the same. At this level, if we want a label, his doctrine looks like pragmatic empiricism.

in this view of the world, to ‘exist’ is not to change: existence and becoming are defined as opposites. But is change random? Surely not. Even if we and everything around us change all the time, life could not go on if we did not recognize continuities at every step. The change, in other words, is not random. The Buddha axiomatized this in the proposition that nothing exists without a cause. Another, simpler way of saying that all phenomena exhibit nonrandom change is to say that everything is process. -- What the Buddha Thought, Richard Gombrich 2009

Concerning Meditation

• A sign of growth is having more tolerance for discomfort. But it’s also having less tolerance for bullshit.
• Who you are is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
• If you don’t train your mind to appreciate what is good,  you’ll continue to look for something better in the future, even when things are great.
• Spend more time cultivating a mind that is not attached to material things than time spent accumulating them.
• Peak experiences are fun, but you always have to come back. Learning to appreciate ordinary moments is the key to a fulfilling life.
• There are three layers to a moment: Your experience, your awareness of the experience, and your story about the experience. Be mindful of the story.
• You cannot practice non-attachment. You can only show your mind the suffering that attachment creates. When it sees this clearly, it will let go.
• One of the deepest forms of peace we can experience is living in integrity.
• Monks love to fart while they meditate. The wisdom of letting go expresses itself in many forms.

-- Sayadaw U Pandita

Not choosing is not an option III

It is irrational to expect that an economic system that is predicated on externalizing the costs of ecological destruction will somehow automatically stop driving ecological destruction. -- Jason Hickel

Difference

[There's a] difference between problems which are to be solved, and predicaments which are to be endured. -- td0s

The hand you give

The wolves you feed are not your friends.

Respect!

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his  theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." -- H. L. Mencken

Analytical vs. what's possible

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations. -- John Von Neumann

Opções

Aceitar o que  a vida nos trouxe é reprimir a ilusão de que merecíamos mais; adaptarmo-nos é não desistir da ideia. Nos intervalos, morangos e champagne (a versão jet set) ou cerveja e futebol (a minha). -- Filipe Nunes Vicente

The Priority of the Obvious

We need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure. -- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Calculus of Blame

In everyday thinking, things you've done on purpose are highly blameworthy, risks you understood but disregarded are less blameworthy, and risks you didn't understand but should have are even less so. On the other side of the equation, risks that you had no reason to understand, or risks so remote that they couldn't have reasonably been avoided, are basically not blameworthy at all. They may have bad effects, but we can round those bad effects down to zero and ignore them. -- Andreas Schou

Categorical mistakes

There are decisions where:

1. Outcomes are known. This is the easiest way to make decisions. If I hold out my hand and drop a ball, it will fall to the ground.
2. Outcomes are unknown, but probabilities are known. This is risk. Think of this as going to Vegas and gambling. Before you set foot at the table, all of the outcomes are known as are the probabilities of each. No outcome surprises an objective third party.
3. Outcomes are unknown and probabilities are unknown. This is uncertainty.

We often think we’re making decisions in #2 but we’re really in #3. Ignorance is a state of the world where some possible outcomes are unknown: when we’ve moved from #2 to #3. -- Suhit Anantula

in a way that makes sense

"What happens, happens," Carla offered gnomically. "Everything in the Cosmos has to be consistent. All we get to do is talk about it in a way that makes sense to us"-- The Eternal Flam, Greg Egan

Quality over quantity

Well, we know less than we did before, but more of what we know is actually true. -- John C. Reynolds

Meanings

The discovery that the universe has no purpose need not prevent a human being from having one. -- Irwin Edman

 

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with the indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light. -- Stanley Kubrick

Bits and bytes of Ancient Wisdom

A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake. -- Confucius

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle

 

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting. -- Buddha (?)

 

Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind is obsessed with it. -- Bruce Lee

Theories, not Truth

There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature. [...] This ‘working model’ of science acknowledges that reality-in-itself is metaphysical, that the objects of scientific study are the shadows, the things-as-they-appear or things-as-they-are-measured. It accepts that the facts that scientists work with are not theory-neutral — they do not come completely free from contamination by theoretical concepts. It accepts that theories are in their turn populated by metaphysical concepts and mathematical abstractions and are derived by any method that works, from induction to the most extreme speculation. It acknowledges that theories can never be accepted as the ultimate truth. Instead, they are accepted as possessing a high truth-likeness or verisimilitude — they correspond to the facts. In this way they become part of the authorized version of empirical reality. -- Jim Baggott

Borders

Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in everyday life that you don't notice. Words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them break if you push them far enough. -- Paul Graham

 

When you get near the borders of definitions things get fuzzy, definitions become less than useful. -- Phil Plait

Not choosing is not an option II

Some say that degrowth would be "unacceptable" to people in the global North.  But so was abolition, decolonisation, civil rights and, until recently, climate action.  We should not judge the value of a movement by what is politically palatable, but by what is just. -- Jason Hickel

Not choosing is not an option

The question asked by serious political economy now is not ‘how do we perpetuate growth’, but rather, if it will be degrowth by design, or by disaster -- Ben Shread-Hewitt

Blind Custodians

The planet’s apex predator is too stupid to understand he’s really just the gardener -- Charles St Pierre

Interiors

Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time. -- Jean-Michel Basquiat

against a revolution that never took place

In his book The School for Dictators, Ignazio Silone famously called fascism "a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place." A core feature of reactionary (I'll use that term rather than "fascist" because people love to pointlessly debate semantics) movements is an inversion of power. They cast the weak as looming threats, and status-quo powers as the trembling victims. This is a familiar move, in macro and micro terms, in every reactionary movement. You see it in the US when they talk about gay or trans people imposing themselves on everyone, "forcing their lifestyle down our throats." Or when they talk about how white people face more racism. Or, on a grander scale, when they talk about how social justice warriors have taken over every institution in the the US, ruthlessly imposing their woke worldview. It's self-evidently ridiculous, but why do they do it so consistently?

The point is to justify their own escalating violence and lawlessness. They hate difference, they hate the status quo being challenged, they hate the existence of Others in their midst, so they need to convince one another that it's ok to cast off norms and let the violence out. This is why the only mode of moral argumentation you ever see from a reactionary is whataboutism. The point of "they did it first" (for whatever "it," censorship or voter fraud or whatever) is not that "it" is bad and no one should do it, but that it's ok for us to do it too. It's not even really a moral argument. It's just a permission structure -- they did it, so we can't be held accountable for doing it too.  So when they create this mythology about Dem voter fraud, the point is not "voter fraud is bad," the point is, "it's ok for us to do it too."

The long-running narrative about left bias in the media is not about "bias is bad," it's about, "it's ok for us to make full-on propaganda." The point about violent rioting urban lefties is not "violence is bad," it's, "it's ok for us to be violent." [Or] the classic example we're living through: endlessly accusing the left of censorship to justify banning books and rewriting history. The cliche goes "every conservative accusation is a confession," and that's kind of true, but it's more accurate to say every accusation is permission -- permission for the right to do in reality what it has worked itself up to believe the left is doing. 

It's all a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place -- a way of defending and reinforcing status quo hierarchies by exaggerating the power and efficacy of the marginalized and vulnerable, the outsiders trying to reform the status quo in an egalitarian direction. [...] that is the most primal and formative feature of reactionary psychology: the belief that everyone is selfish, everyone is out for themselves, it's a zero-sum world in which tribes compete for dominance, and all the progressive talk about universalist values is just a clever con.

They have to believe that. Their worldview has no room for people of good will trying earnestly to do good for humanity. They need for all the Others they hate to be sinister and powerful and right on the verge of taking over, and destroying everything. They need it because it gives them permission to indulge their base instincts. "We have to do this violence/censorship/lawbreaking, it's the only way to stop the gays/immigrants/professors from destroying our way of life." Every time it's the same. -- David Roberts

Up in our country we are human

Joining an Inuit hunting party in Greenland in 1910, Danish explorer Peter Freuchen was pleased to receive several hundred pounds of meat because he’d thrust a harpoon into a walrus. When he thanked the primary hunter, the man looked at him and said nothing. Back at camp he told Freuchen:

Up in our country we are human! And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. If I get something today you may get it tomorrow. Some men never kill anything because they are seldom lucky or they may not be able to run or row as fast as others. Therefore they would feel unhappy to have to be thankful to their fellows all the time. And it would not be fun for the big hunter to feel that other men were constantly humbled by him. Then his pleasure would die. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves, and by whips one makes dogs.

Freuchen wrote, “I have come to understand the truth of his words. The polar Eskimos were a free people when we met them.” -- Adventures in the Arctic, Peter Freuchen 1960 [ref: Futility Closet]