Aristotle (via disobey)
aye… the echo of phronesis there: right thing, right degree, right time, right telos. A spacing and timing that is everything
Taken too seriously, pure concept contraposed to the manifold of intuition renders an horrific scene: The bumping and grinding of sheer moronism - and a fate, where real understanding is inaccessibly aloof. Schematism can’t be invoked as an explanation to ward off a Night of the Living Dead. It must be an old act, an echo we can hear, an atmosphere we can breathe.
DuckDuckGo and Ixquick take a tiny bite out of Google
Private: some search engines make money by not tracking users
Cyrus Farivar - arstechnica »
“The problem is that [people] have never had a choice…They don’t perceive that they have a choice. If you say: yes, you can go to this privacy search engine, they feel that they’re sacrificing something for that. But I don’t want to hamper my search experience. We’ve been trying to offer high privacy and a comparable or better search experience [than Google].”
[Gabriel] Weinberg’s not the only one saying it. Search Engine Land wrote last month that in terms of user experience and interface, DuckDuckGo “has begun to beat Google at its own game.” >continue<
While a “tiny bite” may sound quixotic in a world where Google is almost synonymous with ubiquity, the emergence of “filter bubbles” and the inescapable avalanche of personally tailored information appears to mark the extreme frontiers of sophistry. Constantly being told what we want to hear, given what we want to see, subtly subverts both intelligence and its emergence. If Socrates told any interesting stories or asked any interesting questions, that and how one might counter it should be remembered above all.
It’s not just balkanization into ever more finely tuned demographics and the herding of citizens into a consumeristic fate here in the Age of Marketing - but the chief mode whereby soul is rendered into slavishness, and where the hope for an adroit political intellect is forever attenuated into an infinity of desire.
Which is to say, the linked Eli Pariser video and the arstechnica piece above are worth more than passing attention.
Odd… One can imagine the humans saying it’s ethically wrong. And yet, they’d be arguing with something that “far exceeds” human intelligence. If they had a taste for humans, they might even say that our lack of intelligence about ethics is what makes us taste so damned good. Our best chance, it seems, would be if they already agreed it was wrong. That’s closer to where the reality of the ethical is anyway.
Perhaps a chance too that they’d laugh at any objection to eating us that referenced ethical grounds…. especially if they saw careful and limited predation as a noble means of improving our stock, of making us run and think faster. Besides, quoting Bertolt Brecht they might say: “First comes a full stomach, then comes ethics.”
People are hungry for an intelligible, honest trajectory - what with the heady stuff of Kubrick’s 2001 imagery collapsing into the letdown of 21st Century clusterfuck. They see stupendously vapid religious posturings and bullshit atavism jerking us into oblivion, all while academicians thrive in cloistered, irrelevant spheres. Harris and Dawkins kinda look interesting, but in the end essentially show up as religious grandstanding all over again, once one’s eye gets trained.
We’re moving so fast now, into a ripening encounter with civilization’s fate. The challenge to reflect and tease forth self-knowledge in a real narrative - it’s always still there.
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“DragonFly” by Johanes Siahaya :)
Imagine dialectic as a plant, bursting perhaps through concrete. It’s still not self-sufficient… except perhaps only in managing to conduct that labor which opens itself into a fertilizing encounter with nous. A helpful image for ancient Greek thinking.
Muriel Rukeyser
via Brainpickings, The Storytelling Animal: The Science of How We Came to Live and Breathe Stories
“It’s probably fitting for someone about to move over there to speculate and tell tales about what he thinks the move will be like.” - Phaedo (61e)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (via sublimehysteric)
This medium… this drive for the guarantee; it appears to show itself on page 2 of Harris’ The Moral Landscape where he throws out a faith based affirmation of the medium: “The most important of these facts are bound to transcend culture”
