flâneur

Phuong Ha Tran Nguyen

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on the atlas — 79

highlights — 296

  • People will focus on such matters or not: that is a question of culture, not justice. So long as yachts and hi-fi sets and rugs have only use value and individualized symbolic value, their unequal distribution does not matter.”
    The origins of Bentoism
  • We are all culture-producing creatures whose customs have meaning and any attempts to override them are tyrannical.”
    The origins of Bentoism
  • The problem is when they rule where they shouldn’t. “We should focus on the reduction of dominance, not or not primarily the breakup or constraint of monopoly,
    The origins of Bentoism
  • Walzer’s counterintuitive insight is that just dominance within a sphere is fine. Justice should be dominant in areas relating to justice. Love should be dominant in areas of the heart. Each value has its own rightful place where it should rule. According to Walzer, even a business monopoly within a category is fine if it is not unfairly earned. These monopolies and dominant positions can be justly earned and to everyone’s benefit.
    The origins of Bentoism
  • The chart shows that almost 10% of the world's population lives in extreme poverty. It also tells us that two hundred years ago, the same was true for nearly 80% of the world’s population.
    The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it - Our World in Data
  • lobal temperature leaped more than 0.4°C (0.7°F) during the past two years, the 12-month average peaking in August 2024 at +1.6°C relative to the temperature at the beginning of last century
    Full article: Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?
  • With malice towards none; with charity towards all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right…” I chose the quote partly because of the concreteness that questions about otherness and control can take on, in the midst of the sort of war Lincoln was fighting, and the sort of peace he was trying to prepare for. But I also like the way it mixes both yin and yang; gentle and firm; humility and strength.
    Loving a world you don’t trust - Joe Carlsmith
  • To acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”
    Loving a world you don’t trust - Joe Carlsmith
  • Of course, in both these cases, the foe in question has been vanquished. Forgiveness is easier once you’ve won—and it can seem the wrong response to evil triumphant. But even so: I want to notice this energy of including something bad, and even evil, within some broader and ultimately life-affirming frame. “Tragedy.” “Grace.”
    Loving a world you don’t trust - Joe Carlsmith
  • He was a terrible person. He died a hard death. So maybe . . . A queen can forgive her vanquished foe. It isn’t easy, it doesn’t count if it’s easy, it’s the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet. Peace, at least.
    Loving a world you don’t trust - Joe Carlsmith
  • And notably, in the context of deep atheism, this doesn’t mean that mother love is any less conscious of the child’s faults; or that it makes worse predictions. Fromm’s mother and father can trust the child to the same degree—for example, with the finances. But the mother has some other sort of yin towards the child that the father does not. Some kind of softness, and ongoing attention. Some still-there-for-you. Some not-giving-up.
    Loving a world you don’t trust - Joe Carlsmith
  • Fromm’s archetypal father assesses the child’s merits, and apportions love accordingly—the child has either met a certain standard, or not.38 But Fromm’s archetypal mother does something more complicated. She comes from some more nurturing and loyal place—some place more resilient to the child’s faults; a place that does not push the child away, when she sees imperfection, but rather, stays engaged.
    Loving a world you don’t trust - Joe Carlsmith
  • It’s the work of campfire, garden, healing water. To unbend our backs. To make gentle the life of this world.
    Loving a world you don’t trust - Joe Carlsmith
  • . It’s not just that earth’s forest is brutal and bloody; it’s that the forest is campfire compared to that dark void, the true wild. Maybe green trusts in the Universe; but the Universe itself is notably un-green, color-wise.18 So too “Nature.” Green is not God’s color—not now. Rather, it’s a thin film coating a mote of dust.
    Loving a world you don’t trust - Joe Carlsmith
  • Green is often shy about that word, “enemy.” It is suspicious of anger; suspicious of the impulse to kill, to end, to banish. The green-like point, often, is not to defeat darkness, but rather: to know it; to find yourself in its gaze; to bring darkness and light together; and so to become more whole.7 Indeed, green often emphasizes the importance of honoring and making space for the archetypally “bad” side of some duality. Death, decay, suffering, loss—for everything there is a season.8 And no wonder: unlike deep atheism, green often tries to find some trust or holiness or sacredness in Natur…
    Loving a world you don’t trust - Joe Carlsmith
  • But deep atheism has no such allegiance to Nature. And so it is free to recognize that bad things can be just bad: they do not also need to be somehow good, or sacred, or profound. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t try to understand them—to see how and why they might be tied up with your own heart, and what it loves. And badness rarely comes pure; rarely “just” bad. But even if something is merely bad overall: still, sometimes, once you have looked something dark in the eye, and learned its True Name, then the right choice is, in fact, to fight it; to defeat it; and sometimes, if you don’t …
    Loving a world you don’t trust - Joe Carlsmith
  • In this sense, I think, black is the color of actually caring. That is: one becomes serious, centrally, when there are stakes; when one has what Yudkowsky calls “something to protect.” And the void is the virtue that won’t forget, or half-ass, or look away; that fuels its life with its real fire, and so channels living energy and heat. Indeed, professions of care that seem lacking in black can easily seem like they are missing a mood. Thus, for example, the core push of effective altruism. “Wait, you said that you cared about helping others. So where is the black?”
    Loving a world you don’t trust - Joe Carlsmith
  • In this sense, I think, black is the color of actually caring. That is: one becomes serious, centrally, when there are stakes; when one has what Yudkowsky calls “something to protect.” And the void is the virtue that won’t forget, or half-ass, or look away; that fuels its life with its real fire, and so channels living energy and heat. Indeed, professions of care that seem lacking in black can easily seem like they are missing a mood. Thus, for example, the core push of effective altruism. “Wait, you said that you cared about helping others. So where is the black?”
    On attunement - Joe Carlsmith
  • Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave—that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing. But that is the pulpit speaking. What have I to leave you but the ruins of old co…
    On attunement - Joe Carlsmith
  • . So, worries my friend, the conditioners will make future agents—human and artificial—in their own self-image; blind, not just to the content of the Tao, but to the existence of the Tao; asking only, ever, about what they want, rather than about what’s right, what’s good, what’s worthy. And thus, the True Way will be lost forever; and the world will go blind.
    On attunement - Joe Carlsmith
  • This is partly because I think we do understand the thing-attunement-sees, at some level—that’s why, I think, that goodness and beauty and holiness feel so much like coming home.
    On attunement - Joe Carlsmith
  • told him my theory that paradigmatic Effective Altruism wants the story to be: knowledge, therefore morality. He said that for him, it feels like the story is more like: morality, therefore knowledge-therefore-morality. Or perhaps more accurately: morality, therefore: whatever it is such that therefore-morality. That is: the primary allegiance is to morality, whatever that is; whatever grounds it.12 He is moralist, first; and meta-ethicist, second.13
    On attunement - Joe Carlsmith
  • In particular: experiences of attunement often feel much more like “realization” than like a change in belief. It’s often the same old facts; but with new resonance, new intensity, a new remembering.
    On attunement - Joe Carlsmith
  • Yet amidst all the shouting of ten thousand often-louder voices, when attunement speaks, the room goes quiet. And when attunement leaves, the room tries, so hard, to remember what it said, and to call it back again.
    On attunement - Joe Carlsmith
  • Some vision, some seeing, that says “this, this; don’t forget.” And said in some distinctive way; not as just-another-emotion, but with, it seems, some different depth—some particular harmony and clarity. For me, at least, this sort of depth is core to the weight and mystery and authority of that strange word, “goodness.” It’s related, I think, to the way sincerity feels like coming home; like something falling into its proper place. Chögyam Trungpa talks about “basic sanity.”
    On attunement - Joe Carlsmith
  • What is attunement? I’m thinking of it, roughly, as a kind of meaning-laden receptivity to the world.6 Something self-related goes quieter, and recedes into the background; something beyond-self comes to the fore. There is a kind of turning outwards, a kind of openness; and also, a kind of presence, a being in the world.
    On attunement - Joe Carlsmith
  • Alexander speaks about the future as a garden. And if a future of nano-bot-onium is pure yang, pure top-down control, gardens seem an interesting alternative—a mix of yin and yang; of your work, and God’s, intertwined and harmonized. You seed, and weed, and fertilize. But you also let-grow; you let the world respond. And you take joy in what blooms from the dirt.
    On green - Joe Carlsmith
  • And I think this joy is at least one core thing going on with green. Contra green-according-to-black, green isn’t just resigned to yin, or “serene” in the face of the Other. Green loves the Other, and gets excited about God. Or at least, God in certain guises. God like a friend, or a newborn bird, or a strange and elegant mathematical pattern, or the cold silence of a mountain range. God qua object of wonder, curiosity, reverence, gentleness. True, not all God-guises prompt such reactions—cancer, the Nazis, etc are still, more centrally, to-be-defeated.27 But contra Black (and even modulo Whit…
    On green - Joe Carlsmith
  • They discover something, and take joy in the discovery. Reality, in such experiences, is presented as electric and wild and alive.
    On green - Joe Carlsmith
  • Here I think of Martin Buber’s opposition, in more spiritual contexts, to what he calls “doctrines of immersion” (Buddhism, on his reading, is an example), which aspire to dissolve into the world, rather than to encounter it. Such doctrines, says Buber, are “based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself—the delusion that spirit occurs in man. In truth it occurs from man – between man and what he is not.”25 Buber’s spirituality focuses, much more centrally, on this kind of “between”—and compared with spiritual vibes focused more on unification, I’ve always found his visio…
    On green - Joe Carlsmith
  • a lot of our deepest values are animated by taking certain kinds of joy in otherness and yin—in being not-God, and relatedly: not-alone.
    On green - Joe Carlsmith
  • But this doesn’t mean that your brain, in seeking out guidance about what to do, needs to look, ultimately, to itself. Rather, it can look, instead, outwards, towards the world. “Your values” can make essential reference to bits of Reality beyond yourself, that you cannot see directly, and must instead discover—and stuff about your past, your lineage, and so on is often treated as a salient candidate for mattering in this respect; an important part of “who you are.”
    On green - Joe Carlsmith
  • consider the idea of casually cutting down a giant, ancient redwood tree for use as lumber—lifting the chainsaw, watching the metal bite into the living bark. Green, famously, protests at this sort of thing—and I feel the pull. When I stand in front of trees like this, they do, indeed, seem to have a kind of presence and dignity; they seem importantly alive.13 And the idea of casual violation seems, indeed, repugnant.
    On green - Joe Carlsmith
  • In a world of shapes of my desires, each one here is a shape of one of my desires, and each is known to me and dear by virtue of each one’s unique corruption of those texts, the face, the body: that jut jaw to gnash tendon; that wide nose to meet the blows a face like that invites; those long eyes closing on the seen; those thick lips to suck the meat of animals or recite 300 poems of the T’ang; these teeth to bite my monosyllables; these cheekbones to make those syllables sing the soul.
    The Cleaving by Li-Young Lee | Poetry Foundation
  • The soul too is a debasement of a text, but, thus, it acquires salience, although a human salience, but inimitable, and, hence, memorable. God is the text. The soul is a corruption and a mnemonic.
    The Cleaving by Li-Young Lee | Poetry Foundation
  • The future of energy is solar+batteries+synthetics.
    Future of Energy Reading List – Casey Handmer's blog
  • In Technopoly, Postman distinguishes between a tool-using culture and a technopoly. All cultures have tools, but some cultures have moral resources necessary to constrain and direct the uses to which tools are put.
    Smash The Technopoly! - by Nicholas Smyth - After Babel
  • It’s a very dangerous time.
    The free world teeters on the edge of a knife
  • but an engaged humility, an earnest acceptance of life’s pains and promises.
    What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic
  • seeing a defense is easier than changing it. Only with patience and tenderness might a person surrender his barbed armor for a softer shield.
    What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic
  • One man did not acknowledge to himself until he reached his late 70s that he was gay
    What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic
  • “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”
    What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic
  • In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.
    What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic
  • Interestingly, while the Glueck men were 50 percent more likely to become dependent on alcohol than the Harvard men, the ones who did were more than twice as likely to eventually get sober. “The difference has nothing to do with treatment, intelligence, self-care, or having something to lose,” Vaillant told Harvard magazine. “It does have to do with hitting bottom.
    What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic
  • industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether the boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor, including family cohesion and warm maternal relationships. “What we do,” Vaillant concluded, “affects how we feel just as much as how we feel affects what we do.”
    What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic
  • That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.
    What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic
  • Regular exercise in college predicted late-life mental health better than it did physical health. And depression turned out to be a major drain on physical health: of the men who were diagnosed with depression by age 50, more than 70 percent had died or were chronically ill by 63.
    What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic
  • Even if they had been in adequate physical shape at 50, the men who had three or fewer protective factors were three times as likely to be dead at 80 as those with four or more factors.
    What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic
  • Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight
    What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic
  • Much of what is labeled mental illness,” Vaillant writes, “simply reflects our ‘unwise’ deployment of defense mechanisms. If we use defenses well, we are deemed mentally healthy, conscientious, funny, creative, and altruistic. If we use them badly, the psychiatrist diagnoses us ill, our neighbors label us unpleasant, and society brands us immoral.”
    What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic