William James
Friday, May 6th, 2022
May 6, 2022♀︎
“I know that I say this all the time, but that’s only because it’s what gets me through the times when everything seems to be on fire.
No one is coming to save us
That’s why we have to save each other.”
-Eva
Director of Cybersecurity EFF
[Electronic Frontier Foundation]
Go forth to what? To uncertainty,
to a country with no connections to us
and indifferent to the dramas of our life.
Is this the start of a new life?
-Rilke
“Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”
-William James
“Because modern man is in a state of uncertainty, we must not be too quick to think that what he
S
H
E
wants it absolute certainty at any price.”
-Thomas Merton
#MustRead
AXIOS
‘If the leaked [Alito] draft becomes law, court orders could arrive at tech firms seeking info about people searching for emergency contraception, or seen near a suspected abortion clinic.
Anyone who is pregnant and has a miscarriage might find prosecutors seeking their internet search or other data to determine whether a provider delivered illegal services.
Experts say it may be time to rethink period-tracking apps and to rely more on incognito mode in browsers, turning off location tracking and understanding your options for data deletion.’
‘What you can do: Experts say it may be time to rethink period-tracking apps and to rely more on incognito mode in browsers, turning off location tracking and understanding your options for data deletion.
The Digital Defense Fund has a detailed set of recommendations:
This page is organized into different security-related threats. You can jump to the ones that most concern you. Along with each scenario is a list of digital security tips to neutralize the threat.
These are possible concerns you might have.
https://digitaldefensefund.org/ddf-guides/abortion-privacy/#block-yui_3_17_2_1_1651771016254_439983
Attention is Resource
October 3, 2018
Life is what we pay attention to. [William James] Attention is “key to life and a meaningful life.”
Tim Wu, a Columbia University Law Professor, delves into the history of the advertising industry in his book, The Attention Merchants. Hidden Brain: “In his book, Wu reveals the techniques media companies have developed to hijack our attention. “This sort of of surrender of control over our lives speaks deeply to the challenge of freedom and what i means to be autonomous.”
This Is Your Brain On Ads: How Media Companies Hijack Your Attention
Posted by Daniel Natal:
‘Vulnerabilities and our capabilities…’
December 21, 2017
James cataloged one type of experience: the personal; the intimate. The subtitle, “A Study in Human Nature,” is perhaps a more accurate reflection of its contents. James’s subject was not theories of heaven nor different types of congregations; it was each congregant at 3 a.m., staring at the ceiling, alone. His sensitivity was to the reasons we feel compelled to believe — among them our “conscience,” “helplessness” and “incompleteness” — and how belief might reward those reasons.
In Praise of William James
The Enthusiast
by John Williams, NYTimes
A psychologist and philosopher (and oldest brother of the novelist Henry), James was not a follower of any church, and had little academic interest in institutional religion, but he was obsessively curious about the inner experiences of believers.
“Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?” (Leo Tolstoy)
To James, the very broad category of religious experience was inextricably human, and to attempt to argue people out of it would have struck him as similar to trying to argue someone out of right-handedness. “Taking creeds and faith-states together, as forming ‘religions,’ ” he wrote, “and treating these as purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question of their ‘truth,’ we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions of mankind.”
Seth.
September 3, 2015Rearranging our prejudices
Change is the point. It’s what we seek to do to the world around us.
Change, actual change, is hard work. And changing our own minds is the most difficult place to start.
It’s also the only place to start.
It’s hard to find the leverage to change the way you see the world, hard to pull on your thoughtstraps. But it’s urgent.
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices…”
-William James