2024
April 4
I want to love you as an equal for the benefit of all.
Paul Atreides, Dune; Part Two
April 2
“The Hegemonic Function of the Law,” delineating how it serves the interests of those holding power in repressive regimes to ensure that the legal system operates with a modicum of fairness, ……
March 29
Human beings will naturally seek distractions rather than confront their own thoughts in moments of solitude and quiet because those thoughts will eventually lead them to consider unpleasant matters such as their own mortality, the vanity of their endeavors, and the general frailty of the human condition.
Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet by L. M. Sacasas
March 27
When we let ourselves relax and stop having dialogues and just start monologuing, stop listening, and stop asking questions, we can become a bad communicator again.
Charles Duhigg, “Supercommunicators”
March 26
"...The left needs to play more effectively on the new crossroads of politics, where culture and class have replaced economics.”
Fareed Zakaria on Why Biden Is Unpopular Despite a Strong Economy
March 25
To succeed in the 2024 election, Mr. Biden needs to convince voters that he has begun a long fight against today’s toxic form of capitalism. He needs them to understand that he is making the economy fairer and more productive. He needs to explain that Donald Trump’s invocations of economic grievance are real and justified...
Tim Wu
March 21
Solidarity is simultaneously a bond that holds society together and a force that propels it forward. After all, when people feel connected, they are more willing to work together, to share resources and to have one another’s backs. Solidarity weaves us into a larger and more resilient “we” through the precious and powerful sense that even though we are different, our lives and our fates are connected.
Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix
March 20
Progress, as we have come to understand it, means growth, the relentless process of more and more, of bigger and bigger... (and) the need for…the anonymous power of the administrators... Monopolization of power causes the drying up or oozing away of all authentic power sources in the country…. This generation, trained like its predecessors in hardly anything but the various brands of the my-share-of-the-pie social and political theories, has taught us a lesson about manipulation, or, rather, its limits, which we would do well not to forget… The manipulation addicts, those who fear it unduly no less than those who have set their hopes on it, hardly notice when the chickens come home to roost… They discovered what we call today the Establishment and what earlier was called the System, and it was this discovery that made them turn to the praise of violent action…. It goes against the very nature of self-interest to be enlightened... The self qua self cannot reckon in terms of long-range interest... Self-interest, when asked to yield to “true” interest — that is, the interest of the world as distinguished from that of the self — will always reply, Near is my shirt, but nearer is my skin.
On Violence, Hannah Arendt.
March 19
If we want to start getting kids offline, we need to give them better places to go instead.
Michelle Goldberg
March 14
I inhale great draughts of space,
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.
I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held so much goodness."
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Song of the Open Road, 1856
March 13
Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present
Albert Camus
March 12
It’s a riddle that economists have struggled to decipher. The U.S. economy seems robust on paper, yet Americans are dissatisfied with it. But hardly anyone seems to have paid much attention to the whirlwind experience we just lived through: We built a real social safety net in the United States and then abruptly ripped it apart.
Bryce Covert
March 11
The drift in American life towards chaos is masked by all these smiling faces and all these do-good efforts.
James Baldwin, 1963
March 6
America’s well-attested tendency to view secular success as a measure of triumph over the essential abasement of the human condition leads to a particular pathology: the fear of failure.
Robert Pogue Harrison
March 4
Our dream has been to turn circle facilitation over to the kids as they get into high school. We all know that middle schoolers are much more impacted by each other than by adults, so having them lead the practice will be more meaningful.
Daren Dickson, Valor’s Chief Culture Officer
March 1
"When we inject people with positivity, their outlook expands. They see the big picture. When we inject them with neutrality or negativity, their peripheral vision shrinks. There is no big picture, no dots to connect" (p. 95).
Barbara Fredrickson, Positivity, 2009
February 29
I’ve spent the past few days traveling from New Delhi to Dubai and Amman, and I have an urgent message to deliver to President Biden and the Israeli people: I am seeing the increasingly rapid erosion of Israel’s standing among friendly nations — a level of acceptance and legitimacy that was painstakingly built up over decades. And if Biden is not careful, America’s global standing will plummet right along with Israel’s. I don’t think Israelis or the Biden administration fully appreciate the rage that is bubbling up around the world, fueled by social media and TV footage.
Thomas L. Friedman
February 28
Circles have been used as structures for meeting communally for thousands of years. Some of the earliest known tribes and native people, across all continents, used Circles, sometimes called councils, to meet to discuss the most important matters their communities faced. In this sense, Circles are natural to us and are not anything new. In many ways, the Valor Circle is a new spin on an ancient practice.
Valor Collegiate Academies
February 26
The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s adviser
February 23
The oppression of white people by white people in Germany, and the oppression of brown people by brown people in India, is not racism.
From the movie Caste
February 22
What he denies is that God exists as a being or intelligence separate from the rest of the universe.... Spinoza’s argument is disconcertingly simple. God is “a being absolutely infinite,” and the idea of infinity “involves no negation”: it would be contradictory to say that there is some quality an infinite being does not possess or some space it does not occupy.... If God exists, then he must be absolutely everywhere; not even our own bodies and minds can be separate from him.
Baruch Spinoza and the Art of Thinking in Dangerous Times
February 21
Trump showed himself to be an attentive student of disinformation and its operative principle: Reality is what you can get away with…. Previous presidents and national politicians. They may spin the truth, bend it, or break it, but they pay homage to it and regard it as a boundary. Trump's approach is entirely different…. He was asserting that truth and falsehood were subject to his will…. The lying reflects a strategy,... a national-level epistemic attack: a systematic attack, emanating from the very highest reaches of power, on our collective ability to distinguish truth from falsehood….
From The Constitution of Knowledge”
February 20
How one school is centering social-emotional learning
At Valor Collegiate Academy in Nashville, helping students thrive personally and academically through a weekly social-emotional learning practice called Circle is central to their values. The school encourages students to share what’s going on in their lives and to accept support, creating a community of care. According to one student, "It's half-way between a group therapy session and an AA meeting."
February 19
Don't wait for the last judgment -
it takes place every day.
-Albert Camus
February 17
To live is to risk it all. Otherwise, you are just an inert chunk of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you.
Aleksei A. Navalny
February 14
Americans fundamentally believe that people who suffer from addiction are morally flawed, and somehow don’t deserve all the help that we can give them.
February 13
To be a man is to dominate others. This is what I absorbed as a boy: masculinity means mastery, power, control. To be socialized into manhood is to gain a love of hierarchy and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to preserve your own position within it. ... (For Elon Musk these) avenues of escape...provided a terrain where the mandates of masculinity could be fulfilled, via conquests of a more cerebral sort.
"Ultra Hardcore" Ben Tarnoff
February 11
“Three Reasons Why You Need Anger.”
While anger gets a bad rap, studies suggest it can help us achieve difficult goals, if used wisely.
February 10
“Today’s future-positive writers critique our economies while largely seeming to ignore that anything might be amiss in our private lives,” writes Kristen Ghodsee. Even our most ambitious visions of utopia tend to focus on outcomes that can be achieved through public policy — things like abundant clean energy or liberation from employment — while ignoring many of the aspects of our lives that matter to us the most: how we live, raise our children, and tend to our most meaningful relationships.
Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
February 7
It starts to make you feel like, you know what, it's maybe OK if I don't have so much top-down control. And that's what I've internalized as a lesson from the book. In terms of society, I think the main lesson is resilience. I think that we have the tools to give us the illusion of control more than ever before....
So, instead of imagining that we can have this top-down control, I think we have to have a little bit less hubris and also accept the limits of what humans can and cannot control. And I think that's true for ordinary citizens as well as for politicians who are calling the shots.
Brian Klaas' "Fluke"
February 6
In saying that the domination/submission paradigm lies at the basis of many of our contemporary ills, I do not say that all of our ills can be traced to it, nor do I say that it is productive only of ill. In fact, I hold that certain versions of it can be useful and appropriate in various limited, specific, functional situations… However, in our culture we have tended to award to the functionally dominant persons and institutions a total value of superiority, privilege, and power that has often led to injustice, damage, and suffering.
I am suggesting that domination is basic to a great many ills from which our culture does suffer and that it may be possible to replace it with an alternative paradigm that would afford some improvement. I think that each of these paradigms lies at a sufficiently deep level in our consciousness to be a unifying principle for a great many particular behaviors, and therefore if we deal with the matter on a deep level, we could thereby effect alterations in the relatively superficial attitudes and actions much more efficiently than by trying to change those feelings and events piecemeal.
Beatrice Bruteau. a pioneer in interspirituality and contemplative thinking
February 5
Find a New Support Structure
Get matched in a tailor-made group
Invest in 6 gatherings → leave with a new support structure
Be seen and heard in your authentic self
Nearness
February 4
G.D.P. may look robust, but 64 percent of households live paycheck to paycheck from time to time, according to a March consumer survey… the top 1 percent now owns 31.4 percent of American wealth, more than that of the entire bottom 90 percent.
Bidenomics Has a Mortal Enemy, and It Isn’t Trump
February 3
This piece reinforces my problem with the "left-right" spectrum
Progressives Aren’t Liberal
February 2
Wade: I posted this on Facebook & X. Got a number of good responses. Check out the link to Steve Wasserman’s article in The Nation. No paywall.
(@jedriffe) posted: In 1969, Wade Hudson came to Dallas with a slide show on People’s Park. I showed it at the Dallas Peace Center. Read Steve Wasserman’s eloquent article in defense of People’s Park published in The Nation. https://t.co/H5BJ9H4eob... https://x.com/jedriffe/status/1752756178516640001?s=66&t=RmEeH-LAosilPhTidnHDlw
February 1
Under the law, any Russian, even those in exile, found to be engaged in “crimes against national security” — including criticizing the invasion of Ukraine — could have their assets confiscated.
January 30
(John) Lewis reconciled SNCC’s unvarnished appraisal of the Kennedy bill with his elders’ understanding of the political benefits of a positive, uplifting event. The moment demanded a fierce adherence to principle and a willingness to listen and negotiate. Lewis exhibited both, just as he later would in his 33 years in Congress.
David Greenberg
January 29
I’m trying to tell you how a machine works. I’m just trying to tell you what happens to almost everybody in it... I wanted to call some players and institutions villains, (but) I had trouble figuring out a chain of causality… Every time I tried to trace [blame] down to the place where I could prove it, I would fail... I have trouble assigning the causality or even figuring out where it begins. All these things seem to be in a dynamic relationship with each other. It’s hard to figure out how if you replaced a player or even the institution how different of a result you would get… The thing I’m trying to build an idea of is a machine with different pieces all working together.
Ezra Klein
January 26
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. Albert Camus
January 25
Mr. Scorsese may have learned for himself that the optimism of Arendt and Levinas was too optimistic. He may have understood that encounters with Native people are rarely enough. His only choice may have been to bring the public closer to reckoning with American colonialism not through empathy but through shame.
Maggie Blackhawk
January 24
American parties are increasingly seen as distinct racial and ethnic camps rather than institutions for delivering unique policy bundles.
Kirill Zhirkov and Nicholas A. Valentino
January 23
“This is part of what breaks my heart,” Ziv told me. “When I see Israelis and Palestinians, I see twins, people who are alike in so many ways, mirroring each other, yet they go on inflicting more and more trauma on each other to the point where we refuse to see each other.”
Hadas Ziv
January 19
We desperately need a spiritual rewiring in our time. Imagine a society in which we learn to see one another in our pain, to ask one another, “What happened to you?” Imagine that we hear one another’s stories, say amen to one another’s pain, and even pray for one another’s healing. I call this the amen effect: sincere, tender encounters that help us forge new spiritual and neural pathways by reminding us that our lives and our destinies are entwined. Because, ultimately, it is only by finding our way to one another that we will begin to heal.
Sharon Brous
January 18
An orchestra, as Lydia points out, is “not a democracy,” but, nonetheless, might it be helpful if classical musicians took the word “maestro” and slung it out of circulation? Does the aura that enfolds it not lie at the rotten root of the story of Lydia Tár? If you worship a maestro, after all, don’t be surprised if you wind up as a slave to the rhythm.
Anthony Lane
January 17
The former president posted a video called “God Made Trump” on Truth Social. It begins:
On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump.” God had to have someone willing to go into the den of vipers. Call out the fake news for their tongues as sharp as a serpent’s. The poison of vipers is on their lips. So God made Trump. ...God said, “I will need someone who will be strong and courageous. Who will not be afraid or terrified of wolves when they attack. A man who cares for the flock. A shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave or forsake them. I need the most diligent worker to follow the path and remain strong in faith. And know the belief in God and country.”
The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions
January 15
Dear ChatGPT: Assuming widespread agreement, in 800 words or less, how can the U.S. best fix its immigration problem?
ChatGPT
Addressing the U.S. immigration system requires a multifaceted approach, balancing the need for security, economic growth, humanitarian responsibilities, and the preservation of America's core values as a nation of immigrants. Here's a comprehensive plan, within 800 words, to address the issue:
January 12
The Robbers Cave experiment suggests another way out.... Could “superordinate goals” help depolarize America? There would seem to be no shortage of crises for the two parties to work together on. The hitch, of course, is that they’d first need to agree on what these are.
Elizabeth Kolbert
January 15
Dear ChatGPT: Assuming widespread agreement, in 800 words or less, how can the U.S. best fix its immigration problem?
ChatGPT
Addressing the U.S. immigration system requires a multifaceted approach, balancing the need for security, economic growth, humanitarian responsibilities, and the preservation of America's core values as a nation of immigrants. Here's a comprehensive plan, within 800 words, to address the issue:
January 11
Hands of Peace empowers American, Israeli, and Palestinian youth to become agents of change.
Our Mission
January 10
I have thought for some time that America was suffering multiple elite-driven institutional breakdowns across the board, opening the door to a national and global maelstrom. But now I find myself so overwhelmingly distressed by it all, including the collapse of core values at my own university (Harvard), that I cannot write coherently about it.
Theda Skocpol
January 9
Rejecting the reductionist view does not mean resorting to mind–body dualism—positing some extra, nonphysical entity, like a soul or a spirit. There is no ghost in this machine. “Our minds are not an extra layer sitting above our physical brains,” Mitchell says. They are the holistic sum of that continuous, dynamic, distributed activity.
Kevin Mitchell
January 8
The universe doesn’t have purpose, but life does.
Kevin Mitchell
January 6
Organisms struggle to maintain themselves. They strive to persist and then to reproduce. Natural selection ensures it. “The universe doesn’t have purpose, but life does,” Mitchell says. "Living organisms are adapted for the sake of only one thing — their selves. This brings something new to the universe: a frame of reference, a subject. The existence of a goal imbues things with properties that previously never existed relative to that goal: function, meaning, and value. And yet...no one would say that (a single cell organism) has will, free or otherwise.”
The Fate of Free Will
January 5
And so, there is this combination of people living cheek by jowl, you know, trading licks, like, learning from each other, and these genres that come out of this cultural exchange, but it's also all poor people, you know, it's people of the working class, people who are trying to make a living and trying to do the best they can, and they're bringing their music into the mix. And like there's a certain energy that goes into that and all those who are kind of like scrabbling together, you know. And it's -- I'm not romanticizing it, because they fought a lot too. But ultimately, the music kind of wins out.
January 4
merit, itself, cannot be defined. That is why the concept is so useful for slippery slopes. It cannot be proved or disproved. It can only be argued.
Tressie McMillan Cottom
January 3
To be a man is to dominate others. This is what I absorbed as a boy: masculinity means mastery, power, control. To be socialized into manhood is to gain a love of hierarchy and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to preserve your own position within it. One of the many tragedies of this arrangement is that the people it makes miserable can nonetheless become its most loyal defenders.
Ben Tarnoff, Ultra Hardcore
January 1
Conformity comes in many shapes, and often it’s rational. Unfortunately, society fosters irrational submission that undermines personal and collective empowerment. Determining if rebellion is justified can be tricky, but these decisions are essential, and engaging in effective resistance is critical.
The Willingness to Submit, By Wade Lee Hudson
December 27
…I have learned something profound along the way. Being openhearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills….
David Brooks
December 26
I've been on a journey really over 15 years, and you've known me for a long time, Walter, to try to become a more -- a person better at recognizing my own emotions, recognizing other people's emotions, better intimacy, and better connecting with people. And so, the book is partly, you know, we writers work out our stuff in public. And so, I just wanted to become a much better person at understanding the people around me and making them feel respected, heard, listened to, and lit up.
David Brooks, Author, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
Transcript
December 19
I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.
- Henry David Thoreau
December 18
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama.
- Don Miguel Ruiz
December 17
Don't wait around for other people
to be happy for you.
Any happiness you get,
you've got to make yourself.
- Alice Walker
December 16
“It takes a group to change an individual, and an individual to change the world.”
Anonymous
December 15
Hands of Peace empowers American, Israeli and Palestinian youth to become agents of change...
“Hands of Peace taught me that it takes a group to change an individual, and an individual to change the world.” Anna
Mission, Vision, Values
November 28
The whole point of liberal democratic regimes is to find solutions that involve people not thinking the way we do about a problem and somehow still existing, however grudgingly, as fellow citizens.
Adam Gopnik
November 22
Dallas and Houston are two Democratic bubbles in Texas that have long faced the familiar urban ache of homeless people slumped on sidewalks and camping in parks. Both cities tried to address the challenge.
But smart policy matters far more than good intentions. In Dallas, homelessness worsened for years, and that city now has the most unhoused people in Texas. Meanwhile, the Houston region has slashed homelessness by more than 60 percent since 2011.
November 21
Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute, argued that cloud computing has become too important to be left to for-profits. Not only is it the backbone of artificial intelligence, but it is also the backbone of nearly all computing, from office productivity apps to games and social media.
“This is foundational infrastructure for our entire online economy,” he said. “The fact that there are only three corporations that do this gives them all sorts of power, including the power to exclude competitors or set pricing in a discriminatory way, and it also leads to them not paying enough attention to stability and resiliency.”
Mr. Lynn said that cloud infrastructure should be separated from Big Tech’s other businesses and regulated as an essential utility.
Imagine for a moment that cloud computing was a public resource that anyone could use for a modest fee, like public libraries. Innovation would blossom.
November 20
Capitalism no longer dreams of a unified world. Instead, market radicals have shattered the globe into thousands of zones, enclaves, and special jurisdictions. And they’ve left the rest of us to live among the shards.
Daniel Immerwahr
November 17
Speech is more than just about factuality. [Effective activists] try to point (people) to actual circumstances in their communities that ... the local community sees. ... You switch the vocabulary up to avoid the expressions that are connected with polarization... One goal of politics, a political strategy, is to infuse more and more words with this kind of identity.
So, as soon as your political opponent uses one of those words, in this case, climate change, people's minds shut off. So, they group people into groups and people don't listen to the arguments... The vocabulary affected policy... It justified treating children in terrible ways.
November 16
Dan P. McAdams: Trump’s unique personality profile — the high extraversion and low agreeableness, the narcissistic motivations, the “warrior” life story — seems perfectly suited to assume the authoritarian mantle at a time in American history when many Americans crave the security and exult in the excitement that such a mantle seems to confer. Even as he creates chaos, Donald Trump — as president of the United States — confidently assured Americans that he would deliver them from chaos. We will be standing safe and strong in the end. We will win. We will dominate…
Kevin Smith: [Democratic Norms] are incredibly hard to institutionalize but, unfortunately, apparently much easier to destroy. And once they are gone, they may be incredibly hard to re-establish. If that’s correct, then the end result may be a political system that is indeed more open to shocks of unconstrained coercive alpha male behavior but also to unprincipled behavior among political elites more generally. If there are few costs and clear benefits to such behavior, what’s the argument for not seeking power solely to benefit you and yours and to heck with everybody else? (Posted in Domination/Partnership)
Why Trump Won’t Let Go of His Dream of Domination, Thomas B. Edsall.
November 15
So, yes, I think NOW's story can help us understand what we lose when the grassroots is no longer in the driver's seat... The national landscape, at least of these D.C. based organizations, what they're offering people is oftentimes a way to give money, a way to sign up as a member, perhaps sign a petition, open your e-mail inbox to lots of messages, but what's missing from the research that I've done on NOW in its most productive years in the early '70s is a way to do something, a way to organize in your community around those issues in a local sense, a way that matters to you and to the people where you live, but can also be nationally coordinated... In the early '70s, in its first decade or so, was really only loosely coordinated from the top, and it was local members who were in the driver's seat, not only signing petitions and, you know, paying those membership dues, but actually driving the movement's agenda. And what's lost when it's a more top-down model is people's sense of ownership, not only belonging, but really being able to shape the agenda of a movement that is also theirs.
November 13
“A research project that explores the hypothesis that flexworkers in the arts, communication, and cultural industries are protagonists of a recomposition of labour politics today.”
Cultural Workers Organize
November 8
One word that you rarely hear concerning U.S. foreign policy, as in Biden’s Oct. 10 and Oct. 18 remarks on the Israel-Hamas war, is compassion.
November 7
Known as the “conception,” Netanyahu’s strategy was aim was "to weaken the Palestinian Authority, which sought territorial compromise, by bolstering its enemy Hamas. As he reportedly put it in a Likud meeting, 'Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state must support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. . . . This is part of our strategy.'”
November 6
In 2020, I didn’t like what Trump had to say and his womanizing wasn’t great. But Trump is also more dominating and aggressive, and maybe we do need someone like that to fix our economy and our country.
Elaine Ramirez
November 4
People have to be shown or given options. We don’t have the option of being pessimistic.
Sari Nusseibeh
November 2
“How Israel Is Splitting the Democrats.” The Democratic coalition once seemed united in its staunch, unquestioning support for the country. Today, that consensus seems to be cracking. By Andrew Marantz
October 31
The key difference is the question of regime change. Does the Israeli military go in with the intent of putting tanks on the streets of Gaza City and setting up some kind of alternative governing arrangement inside Gaza, or at least creating room for one, or is the goal to, as we discussed a little bit earlier, degrade Hamas to the point where it will no longer be able to pose a threat, at least in the immediate term, to Israeli civilians, other than the occasional sporadic rocket fire that’s very hard to repress?
Zack Beauchamp
October 30
“The world will be better for this.”
From the song “The Impossible Dream”
October 27
Anyone who has devoted years of their live to founding and sustaining an organization is likely to have trouble letting go of control of the direction of that organization. This is especially true if the founders believe that the newer people who are trying to take control of the organization are inexperienced or are not very committed to the organization or to the cause. Sadly, I have seen that happen in a number of organizations, where new people criticized the founders and pushed them out of the organization because the newer people wanted to take the organization in a more radical direction, but then as soon as the founders were gone, the newer people who had taken control didn't actually do much work and soon lost interest and the organization fell apart.
Kathy Labriola
October 26
There was never a question of having a choice...
Whatever the calling, the stumbling or falling
You follow it knowing
There's no other way, there's no other way...
No roadmaps, no signposts
No North Star, no lifeboats
No cavalry coming in sight
But we're all right
Mary Chapin Carpenter
From "The Calling" and "We're All Right"
October 25
Sociocracy is a theory of governance that seeks to create psychologically safe environments and productive organizations. It draws on the use of consent, rather than majority voting, in discussion and decision-making by people who have a shared goal or work process.
The Sociocratic Circle-Organization Method was developed by the Dutch electrical engineer and entrepreneur Gerard Endenburg and is inspired by the work of activists and educators Betty Cadbury and Kees Boeke, to which Endenburg was exposed at a young age while studying at a school led by Boeke.
Sociocracy has informed and inspired similar organizational forms and methods, including Holacracy and the self-organizing team approach developed by Buurtzorg.
October 23
This paper explores the democratic nature of school leadership in Waldorf schools and compares this with the wider framework of the principles of holistic democracy. The study is set against a background of calls for the reform of international educational policy and what the author sees as the need for reform in school leadership within the movement. In a number of respects, Waldorf schools practice elements of democratic or developmental school leadership that are felt by some commentators to be lacking in mainstream education, yet at the same time, there are some elements of school leadership common to Waldorf schools that do not fully reflect democratic principles. Tough mainly theoretical, this paper draws on some qualitative data generated using questionnaires and interviews with around 80 Waldorf teachers in over 10 countries. The paper concludes that the conceptual framework of holistic democracy could be a useful tool for self-reflection in Waldorf schools. The paper identifies some areas in which Waldorf practice of school governance could be fruitfully analysed using Bourdieu’s theory of social practice.
Democratic leadership in Waldorf schools, by Martyn Rawson
October 20
Being openhearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills. The real process of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete actions well: being curious about other people; disagreeing without poisoning relationships; revealing vulnerability at an appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view…
David Brooks
October 18
Why do we want to dominate or be subservient to another?, Krishnamurti
It is essential, is it not?, if one is to resolve any of these problems of our life, to tackle them oneself directly, to be in relationship with them, and not merely rely on specialists, experts, religious leaders, or political givers of panaceas. …
One of the problems, amongst others, which most of us have not very deeply and fundamentally faced, is the question of domination and submission. …Why is it that we dominate, consciously or unconsciously? (read more) [posted in Domination]
October 17
After 9/11, Israelis essentially told Americans, Now you know. In fact, most of us knew almost nothing and had to spend years learning by painful experience. If Americans now have anything useful to tell Israelis, it would be: Don’t. Don’t let your justified fury replace reason. Give vent to rage, but think coldly—avoiding civilian casualties is in your self-interest. Don’t storm into Gaza without a plan for afterward. Don’t imagine that overwhelming military force can solve an immensely complex historical and political problem. Don’t continue to ignore or inflame Palestinian grievances in the West Bank, even if they’re raised by people who celebrated Israeli deaths.
George Packer, “Israel Must Not React Stupidly.” If this is Israel’s 9/11, it can learn from America’s mistakes.
October 16
What Happens When a Woman Chooses Career Dominance Over Her Relationship, Jessica Grose
In 2020 the economist Robin Ely and the sociologist Irene Padavic wrote an article for Harvard Business Review titled “What’s Really Holding Women Back?” exploring “why women remain so dramatically underrepresented in the senior ranks of most companies.” The pair interviewed more than 100 employees from a global consulting firm over 18 months and found that the main culprits holding women back are an unyielding, 24/7 culture of work and gendered assumptions about how women — and particularly mothers — should behave.
October 15
What Happens When a Woman Chooses Career Dominance Over Her Relationship, Jessica Grose
...For women who didn’t want to take a step back, there were two additional barriers to success. One was “the pressure to give up what they saw as their relational style in favor of the hard-charging ‘masculine’ style the firm venerated in client interactions.” The second was that the mothers who did make it to partner were “routinely” belittled by colleagues as bad mothers and bad role models. ...Ely and Padavic interviewed one man who was, in their words, “resolute in his conviction that women’s personal preferences were the obstacle to their success.” This left him “unable to account for such anomalies as childless women, whose promotion record was no better than that of mothers. In his calculation all women were mothers, a conflation that was common in our interviews.” ... And this truth has echoes in economic research like that of Claudia Goldin, this year’s winner of the Nobel in economics. This week, in an interview about her award, she said, “We’re never going to have gender equality until we also have couple equity.” ...[The film] “Fair Play” at least understands that we’re a long way from that happening. . [Posted in Domination]
October 13
The Pathways to Peace Are Getting Darker
By Dahlia Scheindlin
I fear the world's commitment to peace is fading.
…As the old peace paradigms collapse, those of us working on new approaches toward partnership-based peace (including a group called “A Land for All,” where I am a board member), rather than the hard partition that stokes us-or-them competition, generate new energy. Political peace may be light-years away, but these rare sparks of optimism are the fuel that will carry us there…
October 12
Many progressive Jews have been profoundly shaken by the way some on the left are treating the terrorist mass murder of civilians as noble acts of anticolonial resistance. These are Jews who share the left’s abhorrence of the occupation of Gaza and of the enormities inflicted on it, which are only going to get worse if and when Israel invades. But the way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own.
Michelle Goldberg
October 11
Rank-and-file members appear to have become more committed to their leaders’ negotiating strategy as unions have become more democratic and involved members more in the push for a contract, said Jane McAlevey, a longtime labor organizer and scholar.
Noam Scheiber
October 5
Secular Buddhism: the embrace of Buddhist rituals and philosophy for their secular benefits by people who are atheist or agnostic.
Wikipedia
October 4
The United States now has the ability to survey and influence the world’s communications and supply chains, should it choose to. …“To protect America,” Mr. Farrell and Mr. Newman write, “Washington has slowly but surely turned thriving economic networks into tools of domination.”
Christopher Caldwell
October 2
Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth — this conviction is the inarticulate background against which these profiles were drawn. Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of the blazing sun.
Hannah Arendt
September 29
Our culture is dominated by efforts to score points and win arguments. But do we really talk anymore? ...“In past eras, daily life made it necessary for individuals to engage with others different from themselves,” Paula Marantz Cohen explains... Cohen, a professor of English at Drexel University, is the author of “Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation” (Princeton). She makes the case that talking to others — sharing our stories — is how we learn things and sharpen our belief systems, how we piece together what it means to be funny or empathetic. Conversation can change our minds while sustaining our souls...
Hua Hsu
September 28
(Bobby) Duffy cites a survey, conducted in 2019 by a market-research firm, in which people were asked to name the characteristics of baby boomers, Gen X-ers, millennials (1981-96), and Gen Z-ers. The top five characteristics assigned to Gen Z were: tech-savvy, materialistic, selfish, lazy, and arrogant. The lowest-ranked characteristic was ethical. When Gen Z-ers were asked to describe their own generation, they came up with an almost identical list.
Louis Menand
September 27
I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.
bell hooks
September 26
Why Aren’t Cops Held to Account? Decades of Supreme Court decisions have converted qualified immunity from a commonsense rule into a powerful doctrine that deprives people injured by police misconduct of recourse.
Linda Greenhouse
September 22
Native Americans arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area 10,000 years ago. When the Spanish invaded in 1769, fifty independent nations lived peacefully in this lush environment.
September 21
We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. For they are receiving starvation wages or no wages at all. While we stand here, there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in the fields working for less than three dollars a day, 12 hours a day. While we stand here, there are students in jail on trumped-up charges. Our brother James Farmer, along with many others, is also in jail. We come here today with a great sense of misgiving. It is true that we support the administration’s Civil Rights Bill. We support it with reservation, however.
John Lewis at the 1963 March on Washington
September 20
If much recent academic work defending equality had been secretly penned by conservatives, could the results be any more embarrassing for egalitarians?
Elizabeth S. Anderson
September 19
Ultimately, we still don’t know what makes us conscious. We just know that we are.
Oliver Whang
September 18
I don't know how many powers exist at play in the universe beyond my control, but it's simpler to apply Occam's Razor and suppose that, at the most basic, there's only one such power. Everything I've learned from scientific evidence suggests that there's altogether too much order in the sensible cosmos for there to be an eternal battle raging between two or more opposing powers with different laws.
Yahya Abdal-Aziz
September 15
it is a solitary world. And, to escape from that, we try to be something, we try to assert, we try to dominate. And hence, in order to escape from what we are, domination becomes a means through which we can take flight from ourselves.
Krishnamurti
September 14
It’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult.
Ryan Grim
September 12
Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People.
Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire entrepreneur depicts a mercurial “man-child” with grandiose ambitions and an ego to match.
September 11
When a reporter asked Coco Gauff about her kneeling to pray during the celebration after she won the U.S. Open women’s finals, she said, “[My faith] has been so important. I don't pray for results, I just ask that I get the strength to give it my all, and whatever happens, happens.”
September 8
I really expected to love “Barbie.” As someone with proudly lowbrow taste in movies, I normally adore a big summer popcorn blockbuster, and every millennial woman I knew seemed to consider it a pop-nostalgia masterpiece. So when I finally settled in to watch it this week, I wasn’t expecting high art, but I did think that I was probably in for a delightful couple of hours. Instead, I left unsettled and frustrated: Something about the story seemed profoundly wrong to me, but I couldn’t articulate what it was.
September 7
People all around me dropping like flies
I got the miseries of the world in my eyes
Looking for the sunny side of love
Bob Dylan
September 6
What all the ads and whoreoscopes seemed to imply was that if only you were narcissistic enough, if only you took proper care of your smells, your hair, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, and your choice of Scotch in bars—you would meet a beautiful, powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat … and fly you to the moon.
Erica Jong
August 31
Lewis reconciled SNCC’s unvarnished appraisal of the Kennedy bill with his elders’ understanding of the political benefits of a positive, uplifting event. The moment demanded a fierce adherence to principle and a willingness to listen and negotiate. Lewis exhibited both, just as he later would in his 33 years in Congress.
David Greenberg
August 29
In a country of eighty-five million, there are thousands of [good] people who have continued to do their jobs at significant peril. “I am not a man of great talents,” Kimyon told me. “The system brought out this capability in me, it brought me to this place.”
Suzy Hansen
August 28
If I were asked to trace the decline of the American psyche, I suppose I would go to a set of cultural changes that started directly after World War II and built over the next few decades, when writers as diverse as Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Tom Wolfe noticed the emergence of what came to be known as the therapeutic culture.
David Brooks
August 25
Listening Dyad
Two people pair up, agree on how much time they have to be together and divide the time into three equal segments. First, one person talks, and the other listens. They speak from the heart, sharing whatever they want to share. Second, they reverse roles. Third, they engage in open-ended dialog about what has emerged.
Posted in Social/Actions
August 24
We find ourselves in binds that seem to call for tragedy by asking us to make impossible choices between multiple things we hold dear.
The Marginalian
August 23
“For Xi, the goal is to try to discredit the West and show that there is an alternative out there,” said Eric Olander, the chief editor of The China-Global South Project website. “He’s trying to tap into this incredible well of grievance and frustration among many Global South countries over what they perceive as this massive duplicity and hypocrisy on the part of rich countries.”
David Pierson and Lynsey Chutel
August 22
Groups actually made smarter decisions when leaders were chosen at random than when they were elected by a group or chosen based on leadership skill.
Adam Grant
August 21
The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990.
David Brooks
August 3
In saying that the domination/submission paradigm lies at the basis of many of our contemporary ills, I do not say that all of our ills can be traced to it, nor do I say that it is productive only of ill.
In fact, I hold that certain versions of it can be useful and appropriate in various limited, specific, functional situations… However, in our culture, we have tended to award to the functionally dominant persons and institutions a total value of superiority, privilege, and power that has often led to injustice, damage, and suffering.
—Beatrice Bruteau
August 1
Both parties have drifted closer to something like mercantilism; the language of the market has lost its magic. “Bidenomics” entails immense government spending; meanwhile, a new cadre — protectionists, crony capitalists, ethno-nationalists, and social and cultural provincials — has been rewriting party platforms. Republicans eagerly lambaste Big Tech and clash with “woke” corporations, more intent on fighting a culture war than on championing commerce. People used to pray for the end of neoliberalism. Unfortunately, this is what it looks like.
—The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism, Louis Menand
July 27
“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
―Lilla Watson
July 24
Consider first the bonobos [along with the common chimpanzee, the bonobo is the closest surviving relative to humans], who are much more peaceful and playful than chimpanzees... Bonobos presumably found themselves in an environment where aggression was less beneficial, and so evolution kept selecting individuals whose development was completed before the arrival of the aggressive traits typical of adult males. This process started some 50,000 years ago, and,in Wrangham’s view, it is still in full spate... With tamer people, the path was now set for larger and more complex societies...
—Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade
July 12
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
—From "Sounds of Silence," Simon and Garfunkel