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Non ho mai deciso che cosa pensare di questo libro. È Virginia, però vista attraverso la lente del marito. Non so quanto aggiunga veramente ai diari pubblicati in seguito.
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is a 1902 collection of anthropological essays by Russian …
Kropotkin is a classic, of course, but what I didn't expect is that this book is packed with data and and historical information about different land management structures which existed across Russia before a specific economic model was imposed on everybody. I wish Kropotkin had had the resources to conduct studies of the sort Elinor Ostrom did on Swiss pastures. Now so much has been lost forever.
"John Kerry tells the story of his extraordinary life of public service, from decorated Vietnam …
Back in 2004 I had great hopes for John Kerry, and his digital campaign was very innovative, so I was interested in seeing his take on the classic genre, "memoir to re-write history and raise the profile of one's late career". The book is well written, no doubt, but it remains a bit hard to reconcile the anti-Vietnam war beginnings with everything happened afterwards.
It was nevertheless very interesting to learn about a number of episodes in decades of behind the scenes. There are a few remarkable admissions.
An open society provides its citizens with a mechanism for changing government; a closed society …
One of the best summaries of ancient philosophy I've ever read. Plato gets completely destroyed, and he deserves it.
From chapter 9: «Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a desperate hope for political miracles. This irrational attitude which springs from an intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach "back to nature" or "forward to a world of love and beauty"; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in makin it a hell–that hell which man alone prepares for its fellow-men.»
Piuttosto noiose: sono proprio cronache cronache e anche censurate. Non finito.
“There are two prices for this. Half…and half. One half is cash. The other is a deed. Do you understand?” …
Va bene, ho resistito per mesi ma dopo che ho cominciato ammetto che è vero: se ponete al libro una domanda assillante e lo aprite a caso, vi risponderà.
Noioso: inutile proseguire, non è qualcosa che mi interessi; ho preso un granchio.
Err:510
Noioso... non l'ho finito, non riuscivo a procedere a una velocità decente.
Orribile: pesantissimo e noiosissimo. Lo leggerò un'altra volta, perché leggere qualcosa di D'Annunzio è obbligatorio.
The real story behind the fiction of an orderly deployment of nuclear weapons, which is simply madness. We conveniently deceive ourselves into thinking that nuclear policy is no longer a threat to humanity, and can be separated from other evils like climate change, or that other issues should take priority. But how can we be so convinced that we'll make the best decisions about the nukes of today, when we've still not learnt our lessons from 1962?
«The real lesson of the Cuban missile crisis–the lesson that is consistently resisted because it marginalizes the value of nuclear weapons–is that nuclear armaments create ht eperils they are deployed to prevent, but are of little use in resolving them.»
A colpi d'ascia. Un'irritazione
Le relazioni personali e romantiche e un mondo della cultura che dalle relazioni molto dipende.
An open society provides its citizens with a mechanism for changing government; a closed society …
In this second volume, Popper puts to good use the concepts he developed in the first. I was a bit disappointed because we never get to learn a definition of this "open society", nor how to get there, but maybe that's the point. There is no single answer: Popper only shows us a method, which we need to learn by using it.
I've never had the patience to read Marx or Hegel in the original, and honestly I'm not sure one should, but I'm convinced Popper's analysis is one of the sharpest (at least for an empiricist point of view): it's brutal but also fair.
Every other page contains some insight that you may agree or disagree with, but remains useful food for thought for issues we're still facing some 80 years later, like the problem of NATO or climate change. Some of the concepts I've come to appreciate and …
In this second volume, Popper puts to good use the concepts he developed in the first. I was a bit disappointed because we never get to learn a definition of this "open society", nor how to get there, but maybe that's the point. There is no single answer: Popper only shows us a method, which we need to learn by using it.
I've never had the patience to read Marx or Hegel in the original, and honestly I'm not sure one should, but I'm convinced Popper's analysis is one of the sharpest (at least for an empiricist point of view): it's brutal but also fair.
Every other page contains some insight that you may agree or disagree with, but remains useful food for thought for issues we're still facing some 80 years later, like the problem of NATO or climate change. Some of the concepts I've come to appreciate and use in daily reflection are: the "mysticism" of any theory which proclaims a golden age to be either in the past or in the future; the untenable "psychological reductionism" which simplifies sociological constructs to the point of making them impossible to understand and govern.
A passage from chapter 23: «To sum up these considerations, it may be said that what we call "scientific objectivity" is not a product of the individual scientist's impartiality, but a product of the social or public character of the scientific method; and the individual scientist's impartiality is, so far as it exists, not the source but rather the result of this socially or institutionally organized objectivity of science».
As Bernie Sanders continues to cement his reputation as hero to the progressive left with …
Nothing new here unless you've been living under a rock since 2015, but it's an interesting piece of political communications and a very easy read. It's not all fluff: we get to learn interesting details about a number of concrete policy issues you rarely hear about, like energy saving, from the point of view of what has already happened in legislation rather than vacuous promises.
