The Wrong Empire
An Englishwoman in New York
The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen.
Saul Bellow - Herzog, Penguin Books, New York, 1964
(via lightthroughrain)
(via nancym)
Jun
14
Sales of George Orwell’s 1984 have spiked since the revelations of the US government’s access to everyone’s electronic communications but John Le Carre’s latest novel, A Delicate Truth, is equally prescient as he rails against the privatization of the British intelligence services:
Private defence contractors. Where’ve you been ? Name of the game these days. War’s gone corporate, in case you haven’t noticed.However in Le Carre’s book it is Toby, a British civil servant, who is fighting to reveal information about Ethical Outcomes, a private US defence company:
which in turn led Toby into a rather inarticulate condemnation of the Deep State, and thence into a denunciation of the ever-expanding circle of non-governmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of Whitehall and Westminster.Le Carre’s themes are echoed in the new Star Trek Into Darkness movie - a sentence I never thought I would write - as the military tries to take over the Enterprise’s scientific mission.
From Slate:
Unfortunately in real life, the differences between heroes and villains is not quite as obvious.Admiral Marcus orders Kirk to fly to the edge of enemy space and execute Khan using a payload of classified, high-tech torpedoes that are capable of seeking out enemies from long distance. In other words, he orders an extrajudicial killing by drone strike. The fact that this measure isn’t strictly kosher under Starfleet law worries Spock, who reminds Kirk of Khan’s right to due process, noting that there is no Starfleet regulation that allows the killing of a Federation resident without a trial.
Jun
13
Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat. The phone didn’t make me avoid the human connection, but it did make ignoring her easier in that moment, and more likely, by comfortably encouraging me to forget my choice to do so. My daily use of technological communication has been shaping me into someone more likely to forget others. The flow of water carves rock, a little bit at a time. And our personhood is carved, too, by the flow of our habits.
Jonathan Safran Foer believes that technology is making us more detached. Pair with The New Yorker’s essay on netiquette. (via millionsmillions)
Jun
12
If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
David Foster Wallace (via explore-blog)
(via explore-blog)
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