I cannot, of course, provide documentary proof for that claim. But as the Marxists used to say I believe it is no accident that the shaking of the foundations of the global economy and “the longest period of declining real incomes in recorded economic history” happened just as the iPhone was taking serious hold on the imagination of the developed world, and Facebook and Twitter were becoming key components of everyday life in that world. On your smartphones you can get (a) a stream of prompts for visceral wrath and fear and then (b) games and distractions that accomplish the suddenly-necessary self-soothing. Between the wrath and fear and the subsequent soothing, who can remember what happened last week, much less ten years ago? Silicon Valley serves the global capitalist order as its Ministry of Amnesia. “What is it I was so concerned about?”
We got all festive today! This morning we cut our Christmas tree and decorated it. This is our second year with a live tree and I think we’re officially converts. We also set up a Yule space (pictured is the Yule log centerpiece). We’ve been looking into some Yule traditions and developing a plan.
Good essay from @tinyroofnail:
But here again Farmer stands out as an example. He did not begin by trying to change the world, but by applying himself to something relatively small. Whether in Haiti or in downtown Augusta, each of us can be inspired to do the same.
Jamie Dimon says AI will lead to shorter work weeks. We’ve heard this one before. Screw you, Jamie Dimon.
Watching the turmoil of my 78 year old mom has made me utterly certain that the doctrine of eternal, conscious torment in hell preached by fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity is cruel. I live and breathe religion and religious ideas, but that one is dangerous and wicked.
Wendell Berry:
This book, like several others I have written, is intended as a part of a public conversation about the relationship of our lives, and of our communal and economic life, to the lands we live from. That no such public conversation exists presently, or has existed for the last sixty or seventy years, has never been, and is not now, an obstacle to my “contribution.”
Going to the store on a Saturday with some small plumbing part in hand always makes me think of my dad. Of course, now I’m going to Lowe’s instead of the little hardware store in Oolitic but, still, a good memory. The smell and feel of those classic hardware stores was wonderful.
Wendell Berry’s characterization of agrarianism (from his introduction to The Art of Loading Brush):
- An elated, loving interest in the use and care of the land, and in all the details of the good husbandry of plants and animals.
- An informed and conscientious submission to nature, or to Nature, and her laws of conservation, frugality, fullness or completeness, and diversity.
- The wish, the felt need, to have and to belong to a place of one’s own as the only secure source of sustenance and independence. (The freed slaves who pled for “forty acres and a mule” were more urgently and practically agrarian than the “Twelve [white] Southerners.")
- From that to a persuasion in favor of economic democracy, a preference for enough over too much.
- Fear and contempt of waste of every kind and its ultimate consequence in land exhaustion. Waste is understood as human folly, an insult to nature, a sin against the given world and its life.
- From that to a preference for saving rather than spending as the basis of the economy of a household or a government.
- An assumption of the need for a subsistence or household economy, so as to live so far as possible from one’s place.
- An acknowledged need for neighbors and a willingness to be a neighbor. This comes from proof by experience that no person or family or place can live alone.
- A living sense of the need for continuity of family and community life in place, which is to say the need for the survival of local culture and thus of the safekeeping of local memory and local nature.
- Respect for work and (as self-respect) for good work. This implies an understanding of one’s life’s work as a vocation and a privilege, as opposed to a “job” and a vacation.
- A lively suspicion of anything new. This contradicts the ethos of consumerism and the cult of celebrity. It is not inherently cranky or unreasonable.
Bless Brother Ali. He can be righteously angry on one track and beautifully moving on another. Indeed, using your heart for what hearts are for.
Ferdinand, IN
