le penseur

"As jumping a stream in order to find out if it is jumpable is on a
higher sophistication-level than jumping to get to the other side so
exploring is on a higher sophistication-level than piloting, which in
its turn is on a higher sophistication-level than following a pilot's
lead. Similarly, Euclid trying to find the proof of a new theorem is
working on a higher accomplishment-level than Euclid trying to teach
students his proof when he has got it; and trying to teach it is a
task on a higher accomplishment-level than that on which his students
are working in trying to master it.

None the less it may still be true that the only thing that, under its
thinnest description, Euclid is here and now doing is muttering to
himself a few geometrical words and phrases, or scrawling on paper or
in the sand a few rough and fragmentary lines. This is far, very far
from being all that he is doing; but it may very well be the only
thing that he is doing. A statesman signing his surname to a
peace-treaty is doing much more than inscribe the seven letters of his
surname, but he is not doing many or any more things. He is bringing a
war to a close by inscribing the seven letters of his surname." -
Gilbert Ryle, 1968

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or
Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the
properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and
whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And
particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing
it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took
advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or
abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they
pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. Thus men forgot that
All deities reside in the human breast."

"Jim read as much and probably more than any student in class, but
everything he read was so offbeat I had another teacher (who was going
to the Library of Congress) check to see if the books Jim was
reporting on actually existed. I suspected he was making them up, as
they were English books on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
demonology. I'd never heard of them, but they existed, and I'm
convinced from the paper he wrote that he read them, and the Library
of Congress would've been the only source."

Dr. Bob's Last Drink

"Dr. Bob assured her that he would not drink. He said that
alcoholics, even those who had stopped drinking, would have to begin
to learn how to live in the real world. She finally agreed and off he
went. Dr. Bob kept his promise to Anne. That is, until he boarded the
train to Atlantic City."

"Wilson, an alcoholic who had learned how to stay sober by helping
other alcoholics through the Oxford Group in New York, was in Akron on
business that had proven unsuccessful and he was in fear of relapsing.
Recognizing the danger, he made inquiries about any local alcoholics
he could talk to and was referred to Smith by Henrietta Sieberling,
one of the leaders of the Akron Oxford Group."

"The only thing that can keep a drunk sober is telling his story to
another drunk."

Reblog: we need a better lexicon to talk about collaboration

The word "open" is frequently used in a vacuous way. So for example,
"Open Access" essentially just means "Access". We need to use a
richer lexicon to describe the dimensions of productive,
collaborative, and educational projects.

The terms "NC", "ND", "SA", "By", and "Zero" from Creative Commons
provide a limited way to talk about rights (or, rather, restrictions)
attached to resources, but they don't say very much. For the sake of
comparison, there are 82 tags used on Slashdot, and although most of
them aren't relevant to us, there are probably more than 5 that are.
It seems that as a movement we are stumbling around in the dark,
without even a shared taxonomy (much less a theory or practice) of
sharing.

The four freedoms are somewhat more descriptive, but they are by now
fairly obvious. Like, duh, of course we should be able to run
software for any purpose (anyone who thinks otherwise is actively
seeking to be repressed). Of course we should study and change
software if we're interested in that (but not every software project
has documentation that makes learning curves effective). We learned
about sharing on Sesame Street. The bit about derivative works follows
directly from the above.

But in the words of Jonathan Swift: "Let no man talk to me of these
and the like expedients, 'till he hath at least some glympse of hope,
that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them
into practice."

viciousness

«Aristotle requires the vicious person to pursue what she believes to
be good. It is important to note that this is not a necessary
condition of vice. One can be vicious by knowingly pursuing the bad.
One can also be vicious while lacking any conception of the good or
bad. Roger Sterling, a character on the television series Mad Men,
never bothers to develop a conception of the good or bad. But, since
he is blameworthy for failing to do so, and since he consistently does
what a self-indulgent person would do, he is still vicious.
Aristotle's conditions on vice are sufficient. His analysis of vice,
[...] enables us to account for the vices of people who falsely and
negligently believe that they are doing good.»
-- Heather Battaly,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9752.12024/full

nomadology of holes

«I know what I was doing, where and how I lived during those years,
but I know it almost abstractly, rather as if someone else were
relating memores that I believe in but don't really have... That's
what I find interesting in people's lives, the holes, the gaps,
sometimes dramatic, but sometimes not dramatic at all. There are
catalepsies, or a kind of sleepwalking through a number of years, in
most lives. Maybe it's in these holes that movement takes place.» -
Deleuze

in case you missed it the first time around

«According to Nietzsche, ressentiment is a „feeling of vengefulness
(Rachegefühl)‟. It occurs when, due to some impotence, a „reaction
ceases to be acted in order to become something felt (senti)‟ (Deleuze
2006, 111). As interiorized reaction, it is the local and
surreptitious illness that defines „those who came off badly‟ in any
healthy civilization, i.e. any culture based on a natural hierarchy
between masters and slaves. „While the noble man lives in trust and
openness with himself (...), the man of ressentiment is neither
upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His
soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back
doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his
refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how
to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble. A race
of such men of ressentiment is bound to become eventually cleverer
than any noble race; it will also honor cleverness to a far greater
degree: namely, as a condition of existence of the first importance‟.»
-- from Sjoerd van Tuinen, "A Thymotic Left? Peter Sloterdijk and
the Psychopolitics of Ressentiment"
http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/23451/Thymotic%20Left.pdf

Deleuze 2006 is:
 
  G. Deleuze (2006) Nietzsche & Philosophy, transl.
  H. Tomlinson, NY: Columbia University Press.