The 1990s were a heady time. The Cold War had ended, and America’s version of liberal capitalism seemed triumphant. And yet, amid the peace and prosperity, anxieties about the project of self-government could be glimpsed beneath the surface. Fast forward to 2023, democracy’s discontent persists. Abetted by pandemic, hyper partisanship, recalcitrant racial injustice, and toxic social media, the discontent is now more acute than it was a quarter century ago— more rancorous, even lethal.
Undefined words have a special power in politics, particularly when they invoke some principle that engages people’s emotions.
“Fair” is one of those undefined words which have attracted political support for various policies. While the fact that the word is undefined is an intellectual handicap, it is a huge political advantage. People with very different views on substantive issues can be unified and mobilized behind a word that papers over their differing, and sometimes even mutually contradictory, ideas. Who, after all, is in favor of unfairness? And who, after all, dares to point out the fallacies of a belief as long as it carries the “intent” for fairness?
What is Justice?
To ask whether a society is just, is to ask how it distributes the resources we prize—income and wealth, duties and rights, powers and opportunities, offices and honors. A just society distributes these goods in a reasonable way; it gives each person his or her due. The hard question begins when we ask what is the reasonable way, what people are due, and why.
“Deserve”. “Earned it”. “Self-made”. We hear these phrases awfully lot these days. Actually I’m not sure about other people, but at least I do.
The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. The author brought forth the central thesis that it is not racial biology that determines the victors in history but rather a complex combination of agriculture, geography, population density, and continental orientation. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. Throughout the book, Diamond showed us how history is not just “one damn fact after another” as cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.
"Every piece of knowledge contains valuable ingredients side by side with ideas that prevent the discovery of new things."
To live in data in the 21st century is to be incessantly extracted from, indexed, classified, and categorized, sold, discriminated against, and monitored. The new data reality is made by us, but it isn’t for us. Data come from us, but rarely return to us. In the book Living in Data, Data artist Jer Thorp takes an enlightening excursion through human’s ever-changing relationship with data, and asks the crucial questions of our time: How do we stop passively inhabiting data, and instead become active citizens of it? How can we build new data systems that start as two-way streets where data can actually service the belonging?
We live in a time when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets and market values have come to govern our lives as never before. What Money Can’t Buy is a book that takes up one of the missing debates in contemporary politics of our time: Is there something wrong with a society in which everything is for sale? Are there any moral limits of markets? If yes, what are they? How can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where we have decided that they don't belong?
This book is written by an atheist for atheists. The author, Alain de Botton , bases his comments on the premise that supernatural claims of religion are false, yet, we can discover religions as repositories of a myriad ingenious concepts which we can try to assuage a few of the most persistent and unattended ills of secular life. The author believed that the error of modern atheism has been to disregard the multiple aspects of the faiths remain relevant even after their central tenets have been dismissed. It is when people cease to feel that they must either prostrate themselves before religion or denigrate them, we can import religious ideas into the secular realm.
When singularists attempt to address multiple things at once, they create this ambiguous interpretation. The sentences above contain collective predicates, which apply to their arguments collectively, not individually. As a result, the theory of plural quantification stated that plurals cannot be satisfactorily analyzed in terms of the singular. Thus, plural reference, plural quantification, and plural predication must be recognized as primitive. They can then form part of genuinely plural logics.
Humans are dedicated to suffering.
Various reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the feebleness of our souls, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of relationships, the deadening effects of habits. In the face of such perpetual ills, one might see that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own death.
The question is: How to suffer successfully?
Ever since he went insane and silent in 1889, Nietzsche’s ideas have been most things to most men. Devout Christians can hardly derive any comfort from Nietzsche’s writings, which are centrally preoccupied with a destructive analysis of Christianity, its birth, its triumph, its unfortunate longevity; nor could principled democrats find much to please them in his political views. However, nihilists and existentialists, cosmopolitans and chauvinists, followers of Freud and his critics, Anti-Semites and Philo-Semites, Francophiles and professional Teutons, nature worshipers and pragmatists have all been struggling over Nietzsche’s legacy for a century and more.
The author, Thomas Sowell, demonstrates that the prevailing vision of our time emphatically offers a state of grace for those who believe in it. Those who accept this vision are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane. To paraphrase, to disagree with these visions, even if backed by statistics and empirical evidence, one will still be deemed as not merely incorrect, but selfish or evil. With various examples, Thomas enumerates the pattern of the anointed holding on to their visions, their quest is not for reality but for vision—the vision would allow them to assume their own moral superiority.
There is nothing in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death of the metaphysical Camus; all the subjects are socio-political, and the essay topics vary from the French Spirit, European civilization, colonial warfare in Algeria, to the social cancer of capital punishment, death, resistance, rebellion, and freedom. In this Camus is relatable, not because we necessarily are in concord his views or values, but because consistently and without rest man lived the views and values.
The modern problem is that reevaluating what we consider “true” or “facts” is becoming increasingly difficult. In a frame work where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes to ask “What if”. Certainty can often be paralyzing. It locks us into paths that may not be preferable. The problem is never about finding what is right, but realizing oneself can be wrong even when proven right.
Until the 19th century, people were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of white swans…. Then boom! There comes the discovery of mutant black swans in Australia.
The Atomic Habit is not a book consists of revolutionary ideas, but James Clear took the already known insights and developed actionable plans for readers to create their system. It is the proposed system that really brings value to this book. Positive/Negative Habit tracking method, Habit forming system, step-by-step guide on making unwanted habits less attractive etc…these are some simple yet effective systems that readers can implement. After all, we do not rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems.
Shoshana Zuboff provides a shockingly harrowing glimpse into the surveillance economy we are in, how surveillance capitalism and its rapidly accumulating power exceed the historical norms of capitalist ambitions, claiming dominion over human, societal, and political territories that range far beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm or market; and how we the people can reverse this course, first by identifying the unprecedented, then by mobilizing new forms of collaborative action.
Hughes succeeded magnificently in cramming in 2500 years of history from the early Etruscans and aqueducts to the Caesars to shift from Paganism to Christianity to the Papal States to the Middle Ages, Renaissance, to Baroque and Classicism to Modernity and Mussolini into this book
