yet another politics, or how to stop worrying and love apathy

The single most constant complaint i heard about politics is that people are apathetic. The idea being that people do not get involved enough, that they do not fight enough for politics. That they don’t care. Supposedly, if everyone was fighting for some political goals everyone would be happy. But they wouldn’t. Without apathy you don’t get good politics, without apathy you get lobbying.

I suppose, or at least i hope, that we could find a better way to manage politics, such that lobbying wasn’t the best you can get.

backdrop

The first time you create a wallpaper for your desktop, you don’t really know what you are doing. You end up with too much photoshop effects. And probably a jpg you unduly expanded to subsequently blur and unsharp. You know. You did too. So did i. That’s not the point, though. At first the wallpapers are supposed to be ouvres in themselves, but as time goes by and you get more control, you start creating images that fit with the icons you have there, that you see every day.

So the familiarity brings some strains to the work, some structure. It makes one wonder: Does renaissance painting cue us to the painters’ social position? Does it reveal, for example, a duality between the themes in the paintings selected by priests (St. Anthony’s martyrdom) and the existential attitude subtly intertweened there in the painting technique (each living being is an unwavering beam of light)?

And if so, what was the point of the work, again?

Posted by Wordmobi

uncertainty, really?

I just came across, by one of those strange link-chains, this book called “From Certainty to Uncertainty”, by F. David Peat (curiously, today is his birthday — i actually wrote it yesterday but the coincidence was not disregardable). It’s hypothesis it that, at first, science was sought after for it would give us certainty, but now, on our brave new modern times, we are actually more bent towards uncertainty.

I do agree with him that certainty has gone passé, but i do not think it is big news. For crying out loud, good old Socrates already went on record to say that “all I know is that I know nothing” — though, yes, i know, this is probably an overly colourful translation. What i mean is: there has been no revolution on knowledge, there is no paradigm shift, the shift from certainty to uncertainty is not an event, it is just common sense.

damn u Friedman

Most of the time you see someone complaining that the State is too big, it’s business people whining about taxes. They don’t care about autonomy or efficiency or freedom or the will of the people or legitimacy or fairness or anything else besides their account books.