Dilip Simeon's blog

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt  published an essay  in  The Atlantic  in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality—Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, Twitter’s Retweet function—have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 2010 and 2014, when these features became widely available on phones. “What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision...

Dr  Gabor Maté is a renowned speaker and bestselling author; sought after for his expertise on drug addiction, stress and childhood development. Here is his speech on interpersonal relationships and health Dr. Gabor Maté on The Connection Between Stress and Disease Gabor Maté: In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts #GaborMaté #ToxicCulture CREDIT: Speaker: Dr Gabor Maté Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsRF... Website: https://drgabormate.com/ ******************************************* Tanya Gold - How materialism makes us sad Leon Fink - Socialized Love in the Face of Pandemic // Why the coronavirus could be the tipping point in reshaping the global economy The good news Enemies in Love Ravik Bhattacharya: Bengal Imam who lost son to communal clashes calls for peace // Students Across India Rise Up To Protest Citizenship Act And Police Brutality ‘Sometimes angels do walk among us’: Teacher shares tale of stranger’s act of kindness 'Homage to Humanity' Pravaa...

The story behind the first line of The Sounds of Silence      Adapted from Sandy Greenberg’s memoir : “Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: How Daring Dreams and Unyielding Friendship Turned One Man’s Blindness into an Extraordinary Vision for Life."...   Lyrics It began when Arthur “Art” Garfunkel, a Jewish kid from Queens, enrolled in Columbia University. During freshman orientation, Art met a student from Buffalo named Sandy Greenberg, and they immediately bonded over their shared passion for literature and music. Art and Sandy became roommates and best friends. With the idealism of youth, they promised to be there for each other no matter what. Soon after starting college, Sandy was struck by tragedy. His vision became blurry and although doctors diagnosed it as temporary conjunctivitis, the problem grew worse. Finally after seeing a specialist, Sandy received the devastating news that severe glaucoma was destroying his optic nerves. The young man with such a brig...

STANISLAV MARKELOV - Patriotism as a diagnosis Julien Benda: Our age is the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds Beginnings and Endings Some metaphysical music from Divine Comedy: Divine Comedy  Gin soaked boy Divine Comedy - Gin-Soaked Boy Lyrics

Even while hammering out the final details of his £35bn ($44bn) purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk took some time out this weekend to tweet. He likes tweeting, does the world’s richest man, usually from what he calls his “porcelain throne” (that detail disclosed on Twitter, naturally enough). This one was a  photo of Bill Gates , zeroing in on the 66-year-old’s modest paunch and placing it next to a cartoon of a pregnant man. To that ensemble, Musk added this sentence of supreme wit: “in case u need to lose a boner fast”… https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/26/elon-musk-king-of-trolls-purchase-twitter-dangerous Elon Musk, master of the ill-advised tweet? by Marina Hyde Quite where we’ll be in six months’ time as far as Twitter is concerned remains tantalisingly unclear, but it seems difficult to imagine it will be either a more or less pleasant space. It’s a social media platform. I’m not sure what further evidence humanity needs before we cotton on to the idea that such...

When my daughter asked why she couldn’t have an Alexa, I told her it is because Alexa steals your dreams and sells them    It is often said that people are entitled to their opinions. But are they really? Do you have a God-given right to believe that torture is good, or that the moon landings were faked? To the extent that opinions are not merely secret possessions but dispositions to act a certain way in society, they are everyone’s business. So, no, you don’t have an inalienable right to your dumb opinion. Freedom to Think: The Long Struggle to Liberate Our Minds . By Susie Alegre Reviewed by Steven Poole Unfortunately, that was also the position of the Spanish Inquisition and witch-hunters, who dreamed up vicious ways of attempting to uncover inner impiety. So these days we generally separate opinions (or beliefs) from the expression of them. Expression can be regulated, in the case of incitement to hatred, for example, but opinion is sacrosanct. It’s a fundamental freedom,...

If you’re unlucky enough to reside in a town where data centers house computer servers storing everything from financial data for giant corporations to military secrets, you’re likely to find that a loud, whining noise becomes life’s agonizing background. The sound peaks and subsides, but it’s always there, never allowing you to fully relax. Eventually, the stress of this kind of ambient noise can wear you down,  doubling your risk of mental illness , as well as  increasing your risk of diseases like heart attack and stroke . Living in an economy dominated by neoliberal principles can feel kind of like that: a background hum of constant psychological stress. The sense of precariousness never really goes away. Instead collectively of sharing the risks of life, we’re increasingly saddled with the heavy burdens of existing in an overwhelmingly complex, modern world. We’re lonely individuals, fighting to stay afloat no matter what our situation. There are a few lucky winners, su...

Julien Benda's classic book on the toxic mix of intellectuals and power is its own paradox    Treason of the Intellectuals  by Julien Benda Reviewed by Gustav Jönsson The title of Julien Benda’s  La Trahison des clercs - The Treason of the Intellectuals -  has become a synecdoche for a tradition that upholds truth in the face of moral corruption and castigates those intellectuals who succumb to the allures of political tyranny. Published in 1927, when street battles between fascists and communists were weekly affairs,  Treason  is a book that speaks to each generation’s own crisis. For Benda, the traitors were Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, the Action Française, and other reactionary nationalists. The betrayal in question was that of the intellectual vocation itself. Intellectuals - who should have devoted their lives to truth and justice - had, in Benda’s felicitous phrase, preached the abandonment of the toga for the sword. Instead of chal...

Mann returned to Europe in 1952, never to leave again... it was politics that had brought him to America, and politics that pushed him away. The mind is always in exile.. “I am an American,” Thomas Mann said during a radio interview in 1940. If he sounded relieved, it was because he was: He had been in limbo for years. Mann left Germany in 1933, and the Nazi government deprived him of his German citizenship in 1936. He first took up residence in Switzerland and later became a citizen of Czechoslovakia. As Adolf Hitler’s expansionist intentions became clearer in the late 1930s, Mann must have realized how unsafe it was becoming for him to stay in Europe. The occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 probably sealed the writer’s decision to move to the United States, when he was in his 60s. Mann’s first American home was in Princeton, which had already attracted prominent German figures fleeing the Nazis, most famously Albert Einstein. In The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton , Stanle...

It is tempting to harness Civilization and Its Discontents as a guide to our contemporary political morass, but doing so may obscure its most valuable message.    Civilization and Its Discontents;  translated by James Strachey and edited by Samuel Moyn Sigmund Freud was an ambivalent man, especially when it came to politics. He often held conflicting views of political ideologies: For example, he expressed sympathies for socialism (“anyone who has tasted the miseries of poverty,” he wrote, can understand why fighting “against the inequality of wealth” was necessary), only to reject it elsewhere as antithetical to human nature. He similarly supported Zionism (even serving on the founding board of the Hebrew University) while simultaneously criticizing it as “baseless fanaticism.” Few works embodied this ambivalence better than  Civilization and Its Discontents  (1930), Freud’s most all-encompassing reflection on social matters. Discussing everything from religio...