Quote of the day

"What DOGE sought to automate, media researcher Eryk Salvaggio noted, was 'not paperwork but democratic decision-making.'" - Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed

Quote of the day

"[W]e need investigations, hearings, prosecutions, and likely some kind of truth and reconciliation commission. We need a full postmortem of our brush with national death, as well as prison sentences and severe financial penalties for those who participated in, or profited from, the defiling of our government." - Gil Durán, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy 

Quote of the day

 "Months earlier, [Trump] had shared an AI-generated video of a dystopian future Gaza, complete with a Trump resort, a golden statue of himself, and dollar bills raining from the sky. His Gaza fantasy was the network state in its most ghoulish incarnation: a tech-fascist casino amid the ruins of a genocide." - Gil Durán, The Nerd Reich: Silican Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

Quote of the day

"Donald Trump's election represents the ultimate triumph of enshittification in the political realm." - Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

Quote of the day

"That young Elon Musk read Hitchhiker's Guide [to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams] in South Africa and, failing to perceive its indictment of apartheid, took it as a lesson in the importance of asking the right question is hardly surprising. He was a kid. It's that he stuck to that interpretation into his late middle age that's odd, especially because much of the book today reads like a spoof of Musk himself." - Jill Lepore, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

Musk, who said that empathy is a threat to civilization, also apparently absorbed absolutely zero percent of the book's humanism; that was absolutely not the point Adams was making about the question of the meaning of life. Adams was saying (at least as how I read it) that the question itself is meaningless because the universe is capricious and life has no meaning other than what we give to it. This is, of course, a humanist point to make.

Quote of the day

"We must look to the mind, the mind! What use are good looks if one has inner thoughts that are not beautiful?" - Euripides, Oedipus

Via Since You're Mortal ...: Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays by James Romm

A rebuttal of Broicism

"The misogynist appropriation of Stoicism is especially suspect since the Stoics held that virtue has no gender. As Zeno understood it, an ideal moral community of sages included women in that utopian society. Since the Stoics also held that there are no degrees of perfect wisdom - you either are or are not a sage - women and men are equally sages and equal models for the ideal of full virtue. Moreover, if reason, for the Stoics, is a common feature of all humans, then that also has implications for the education of girls and boys. For even if there are gender differences, so long as reason is shared and at the core of human good, then the cultivation of human good through educating reason ought to be open to all." - Nancy Sherman, Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience

Quote of the day

"I know that the Stoics have a bad reputation among the ignorant for being too callous ... they're charged with asserting that the wise man does not feel pity and does not forgive. Taken by itself, that assertion is invidious, for it implies that the Stoics leave human error no hope, but instead refer all shortcomings directly to punishment. ... But no philosophical school is kinder and gentler, nor more loving of humankind and more attentive to our common good, to the degree that its very purpose is to be useful, to bring assistance, and consider the interests not only of its own members but of all people, individually and collectively." - Seneca

Via How to Do the Right Thing: An Ancient Guide to Treating People Fairly by Robert Kaster

Quote of the day

"The virtues that Machiavelli scorned made for orderly and peaceful societies; those that he admired (and, like Nietzsche, because he lacked them) made for strong and warlike states, and for dictators capable of murdering by the million to enforce conformity, and of incarnadining a planet to extend their rule. He confused the good of the ruler with the good of the nation; he thought too much of the preservation, seldom of the obligations, never of the corruption, of power." - Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers from Ptahotep to Sartre

Quote of the day

"Seneca's cautionary lesson is that the psychologically and morally weak bite back at the slightest provocation. Narcissistic injuries, status damages, a sense of being down-ranked or bested in competition all fuel the payback. The point resonates in the current political moment. Over and over again, we have seen President Donald Trump's vindictive payback in response to narcissistic injuries. The Stoic moral teaching is that the injuries are attached to diseased values. They are injuries we ought not to be suffering if we were valuing the right goods. They are morally flawed responses, in Trump's case, profoundly dangerous, flawed responses that imperil a democracy." - Nancy Sherman, Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience 

Quote of the day

"Bad men who prosper are unbearable." - Euripides, Chrysippus

Via Since You're Mortal ...: Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays by James Romm

Quote of the day

"The payment for having done a virtuous deed is that you have done it." - Seneca

Via How to Give: An Ancient Guide to Giving and Receiving by James Romm 

Quote of the day

"Everyone helps themselves when they help another ... because the reward of all virtues is in the virtues themselves." - Seneca, "Epistle 81"

Via How to Give: An Ancient Guide to Giving and Receiving by James Romm

Quote of the day

"Here's the mark of great and good hearts: To seek good deeds for their own sake, not for the profits that flow from them, and to look for good people even after meeting bad ones." - Seneca

Via How to Give: Ancient Guide to Giving and Receiving by James Romm

Quote of the day

"Wherever I go, I will be fine, because I was already fine here - not on account of the place but as a result of my principles, and I am going to take them with me. No one can take them away from me; they are my only possessions, irremovable ones that are enough for me wherever I am and whatever I do." - Epictetus

Via How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life by A. A. Long

Quote of the day

"If you ever find yourself looking for outside approval in order to curry favor, you can be sure that you have lost your way." - Epictetus

Via How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life by A. A. Long

Quote of the day

 "[B]y making happiness conditional on circumstance, we surrender autonomy and equanimity, and put ourselves at risk of failure and disappointment." - A. A. Long, How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life

Quote of the day

 "[Anger] betrays the nature of humankind, since that nature urges us to love, but anger urges us to hate; human nature bids us to help others, but anger, to harm." - Seneca, "On Anger"

Via How to Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management  by James Romm

Quote of the day

"If you are a good person, you stand in the same relation to your friend as to yourself, since a friend is another self. You value your friend's existence in the same way as you value your own, or almost." - Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

Via How to Flourish: An Ancient Guide to Living Well by Susan Suavé Meyer

Something about this passage, a sentiment expressed thousands of years ago in a place and time so different than now yet speaking to the universality of human experience is just overwhelmingly heartwarming. It brings a tear to my eye.

Quote of the day

 "You see, whoever looks upon a true friend looks, in a sense, at an image of himself." - Cicero 

Via How to be a Friend: An Ancient Guide to True Friendship by Philip Freeman