Dream tool. Creates a fully-fledged VPN forwarding all or some addresses, and it only requires SSH access to the remote server and a python interpreter, no root access required. Available in Debian Wheezy, which is due out this weekend at long last!
http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/04/21/the-battle-for-buddha/
”Mindfulness goes corporate — and purists aren’t pleased: How the Buddhist tradition has been marshalled to grow profits and productivity | Maclean’s”
I think I’m a bit late on this but I only heard about this yesterday. rms has it right: this will go against everything W3C stands for. Openness is more important than the semantic web.
Almost everything that I want to do in my life, both with regard to possible career choices and other activities, involves sitting in front of a screen. And this includes a lot of my leisure activities too. I am increasingly convinced that this is really bad for both my mental and physical health (I’m more concerned with the former). Even my mental list of “cool things to try” mostly involve sitting in front of a screen. Whether or not I have to sit in front of a screen all day will likely be a major factor for me in choosing jobs: if I’m going to be doing it when I get home, I don’t want to be doing it all day too.
POP UTOPIANISM: a manifesto / WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT K-POP: a mix | Occupied Territories
There’s a lot of hand-waving going on here but some interesting ideas relating to pop music and society. I think that there might be a lot of good stuff under the heading “critical theory” that I would like to look into, but my background means that I find it hard to deal with imprecision, obscurantism (deliberate or not) etc.
I sympathise a lot with the below. Thinking about this sort of stuff as I come to the end of university and try to figure out how I should be spending my time.
We must develop a way of thinking about the economy of pleasure, how it is produced and used. Many of us halfheartedly walk around disbelieving in capitalism on an ideological level yet fall prey to its tendency to reduce everything to an economy of profit and production. Our very notion of waste, not just in terms of production but in a more metaphorical sense (e.g. “That’s a waste of my time”), has been inherited by capitalism, and it frustrates our attempts to embrace pleasure. It just might be that pleasure is wasteful, but it is “productively” wasteful, burning off excess dissatisfaction accumulated over the course of our lives under capitalism. We are taught by capitalism that leisure in the form of rest and relaxation, or a vacation, is what we need in order to regain the energy consumed by our work, but a worn-down body can only be revivified through pleasurably productive use (e.g. dancing). We no longer believe that money and profit alone can bring us happiness, but we are still tied to a view of our lives inherited from this ideology. Consider instead what I call the intersubjective economy of being found in indigenous cultures, where gifts are exchanged and food is shared not to reallocate resources but to share our being and presence with one another, producing pleasure and strengthening social bonds. This is most evident in certain customs of gift-giving where the participants largely end up with, more or less, what they started with: the gifts are not as important as the social act of exchange.
Edit 9/v/2013: replaced quotation
Epistemic contextualism, which I’ve been revising yesterday and today, is the thesis that the word ‘know’ is context-dependent. Perhaps one initial motivation for this sort of view is the common response to classic sceptical thought experiments, that the philosophy lecturer is working with some high, overly-demanding sense of ‘know’, and the rest of us can do quite alright with our ordinary sense (thank you very much), in which case the possibility that we’re in the Matrix doesn’t mean that we don’t know we have hands.
This is a very nice write-up of non-reductive virtue ethics. Wish I’d written it.
What Do You Desire? | Emily Witt, n+1 magazine
An interesting read about the attitudes of extreme pornographers to what they do.
It is not the case that if there had been exactly j people I should not have believed that there were not exactly j.
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaahhhh
I have spent some time over the past few days getting very paranoid about my online privacy. It seems that what you “like” on Facebook can be used to predict your demographic; since humans are as similar to each other as we are, this amounts to revealing an awful lot. Fortunately I never ever like anything on Facebook, but I do use the site enough that my usage patterns probably reveal a lot about me to Facebook. Not quite as bad as any corporation being capable of reading the information off a public list of likes, but still uncomfortable. Everytime I take an action on Facebook I think of the information this leaves behind.
If you’re university-educated in an abstract subject (like me) then it’s very easy to think that you are successfully seeing through the foolishness of the rest of society; everyone’s lives are meaningless, based on foolish pretences etc. We all know this is bad, because it’s usually untrue: casual analysis is almost always wrong.
Nor do you want to go to the opposite extreme, as I tend to do at the moment, thinking that philosophical discussions had with friends aren’t worthwhile because we’re not being careful enough and anyway if a tutor came along they’d show us all up. You can still get insight casually.
Today I had an exam called “knowledge & reality”, arguably on topics at the heart of philosophy, where I answered this question:
Suppose there is only ever one ball-throwing. Can throwing the ball cause the window to break?
Six years of studying philosophy and it all comes down to this. Brilliant.