For at least the next 200 years, weather forecasts predict shitstorms, with global temperatures now set to remain elevated for hundreds of years to come. The latest IPCC report explains that our emissions are nearing the point of no return. Even if industrialized nations switched to solar power overnight, it is now too late to fully reverse the planet’s course. Geologists have officially termed this new epoch, where the human species has irreparably shaped earth’s geological history, the
Anthropocene. Policymakers no longer have the luxury to decide how we might “stop” global warming. Instead, we have to figure out how we’ll manage amidst climate instability.
Yearly Archives: 2015
23 posts
An iconic taxonomy of bias.
Vermont forest shroom shots.
What is “The Birthday Dirge”? “The Birthday Dirge” is sung to the tune of “The Volga Boatmen”. If you don’t know the tune by name, you know it by sound. It’s the depressing sounding Russian folk tune that nearly everyone has heard at one time or another. The resounding thud that follows each “Happy Birthday!” is traditionally accompanied by a “HUHN”-like grunt. The sort of groaning grunt that workers lifting heavy loads might find natural. What are the lyrics? The Dirge is known in various circles as “The Barbarian Birthday Song”, “The Viking Birthday Sang,” “The SCA Birthday Dirge,” etc. […]
Non-white? Waiting for justice? While you wait, here are some “Dos and Don’ts” should you encounter police: “Surviving a Police Encounter: A Guide for African Americans,” by Christopher Keelty
Okay, “Rights: The bureaucracy of ethics” is an album title, not a band name. I admit it.
This Saint Thomas Aquinas selection comes from his Summa Theologica, PRIMA PARS, Second and Revised Edition, 1920; trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. The William Paley selection is drawn from Natural Theology (1801).
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859: Harvard Classics Volume 25, 1909 P.F. Collier & Son).
Plato argues, in The Republic, that engaging the world through the lens of a craft intimates – even instantiates – Good.
… trumps Participation in the Form, and The Regulating Ideal.
Liberal politics – even those promoting the most liberal constitutions – conceive of humanity on an atomistic model (as egos concerned with Lockean individual rights), rather than a model which embraces the sociality of our species-life.
The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light.
I hold it to be an impious and an execrable maxim that, politically speaking, a people has a right to do whatsoever it pleases, and yet I have asserted that all authority originates in the will of the majority. Am I then, in contradiction with myself? A general law—which bears the name of Justice—has been made and sanctioned, not only by a majority of this or that people, but by a majority of mankind. The rights of every people are consequently confined within the limits of what is just.
from John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859).
The selection is Mary Midgley’s “Trying Out One’s New Sword,” from her Heart and Mind (St. Martin’s Press: 1981). Many thanks to Professor Midgley for permission to use this piece on thereitis.org.
Where to find the template for “that” page…
The selection comes from Chapter 9 of Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759–1797) classic, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), titled, “Of the Pernicious Effects Which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society.”
Our selections come from Volume 1 of Marx’s 1867 Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin, 1976), 280, 381.
Our selections come from Book IV, Chapters 2 and 9 of Adam Smith’s 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (The Modern Library, New York, 1937), 649 – 51.
Our selections come from Chapters 2 and 3 of Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.