"And I’ve also gotten into this habit of doing songs that are about personal relationships and then I throw a verse about politics in there."

"That’s a trick that I’ve learned from other songwriters, because nobody wants to hear a whole song about politics or social comment. A blues song like 'Rough and Twisted,' you talk about women and everything, but then you throw in stuff that’s obviously political: 'The only club was called conspiracy.' 'What they wanted was tyranny.' So you find yourself using these tricks."

Said Mick Jagger, in an interview at "Mick Jagger Knows He May Have Played His Last Rolling Stones Show" (NYT).

ADDED: I like this part about philosophy: 

"They’re always having so many arguments, these philosophers, and always disagreeing with their masters. I was reading this book on Kant. They’re quite rude to each other and then they have to make up later, and I can’t understand what they’re really talking about. Was Kant a Christian? Was he an atheist?"

The interviewer, David Marchese, enthuses, "I think it’s cool that you’re reading Kant." And Mick responds coolly: "Well, it’s all vaguely fashionable."

"Benjamin Robinson, an Indiana University professor, is one of those under the new microscope. In his class on the history of German thought..."

"... he touches on Kant, Hegel, Arendt and Nietzsche, connecting the thinkers’ big insights — 'the aha moments' — to real-life experiences and contemporary politics. In late 2024, a student anonymously complained, saying that Dr. Robinson — who has been vocal about his pro-Palestinian views — had spoken negatively about Israel, mentioned personal experiences like being arrested at a protest at the Israeli consulate in Chicago and 'repeatedly spoke against Indiana University' during his classes. The university found in favor of the student and reprimanded the professor, citing a recent state law meant to improve 'intellectual diversity' and prevent students from being subjected to political views unrelated to the course...."

From "Professors Are Being Watched: 'We’ve Never Seen This Much Surveillance'/Scrutiny of university classrooms is being formalized, with new laws requiring professors to post syllabuses and tip lines for students to complain" (NYT).

"Dr. Robinson, who is Jewish, acknowledged that he referred to Israel’s conduct as a genocide in class but he insisted that he never asked students to agree with him. He said he brought up his personal experiences of activism during a discussion of Kant and the philosopher’s distinction between private and public stances. 'If I can’t appeal to people’s intuitions, what it’s like to publicly use reason versus to have a private feeling of conscience,' he said, 'if I can’t evoke what that feels like, I can’t possibly teach Kant.'"

"[O]blivion is restorative: we come apart in order to come back together. (Sleep is a case in point; without a nightly suspension of our rational faculties, we go nuts.)"

"Another is the notion that oblivion is integral to the possibility of personal evolution. 'The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning,' Foucault writes. To do so, however, you must believe that the future can be different from the past—a belief that becomes harder to sustain when one is besieged by information, as the obsessive documentation of life makes it 'more fixed, more factual, with less ambiguity and life-giving potentiality.' Oblivion, by setting aside a space for forgetting, offers a refuge from this 'excess of memory,' and thus a standpoint from which to imagine alternative futures. Oblivion is also essential for human dignity. Because we cannot be fully known, we cannot be fully instrumentalized. Immanuel Kant urged us to treat others as ends in themselves, not merely as means.... [O]ur obscurities are precisely what endow us with a sense of value that exceeds our usefulness.... The modernist city promised anonymity, reinvention. The Internet is devoid of such pleasures. It is more like a village: a place where your identity is fixed...."

Writes Ben Tarnoff, in "What Is Privacy For? We often want to keep some information to ourselves. But information itself may be the problem" (The New Yorker).

The article is mostly about the book "The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life," by Lowry Pressly (commission earned).

ADDED: Here, I made you an "Oblivion" playlist:

Have I written about this topic too many times? Oh, but I must be entitled to have another go at it.

Because there's a new New Yorker article : "The Case Against Travel." 

The new article — subtitled — "It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best" — is by the philosopher Agnes Callard.

A few of my old efforts: 

• "What if Americans stopped believing the travel propaganda?" 

• "'Travel isn’t just framed as a cure-all for what ails us...'" 

• "Of course, I'm reading 'If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?'" 

• "The philosophy of travel... the psychology of travel..." 

• "'I learned about post-tourism, which is just research jargon for traveling hipsters...'" 

• "What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?"

I'll take a few excerpts from Callard, and certainly some of this is new (and all of it is well expressed):

"Though 'obscurantism' may be a word that is, well, obscure, to Americans, [Macron] is right. The line between the fight for freedom..."

"... and the surrender to hatred is absolute. The assault on Rushdie only clarifies its contours."

Writes Adam Gopnik, reacting to what Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, said on Friday evening:

“For 33 years, Salman Rushdie has embodied freedom and the fight against obscurantism. He has just been the victim of a cowardly attack by the forces of hatred and barbarism. His fight is our fight; it is universal.”

That comes at the end of "Salman Rushdie and the Power of Words/Efforts are bound to be made to somehow equalize or level the acts of Rushdie and his tormentors and would-be executioners. This is a despicable viewpoint" (in The New Yorker).

"Modern-day Russian penal colonies have become moneymaking enterprises... [E]very correctional facility has a production unit such as a sewing factory..."

"... or a woodworking or metalworking shop, with most of the profits going to intermediary companies buying and selling on low-cost goods, or to the prison authorities 'through kickbacks by companies that purchase the goods directly.'... [O]pposition politician Alexei Navalny... painted a grim picture of life inside Penal Colony No. 2, calling it 'our friendly concentration camp.' He accused guards of denying him proper medical care or the chance to sleep and described dehumanizing surveillance. Media investigations have reported abuse of prisoners at such facilities."

From "Brittney Griner may go to a Russian penal colony. Here’s what you need to know" (WaPo).

Here's the article linked at "our friendly concentration camp": "Putin foe Navalny once described prison life with dark humor. Now his messages are just dark" (WaPo). The "posts" in social media were made, we're told, by "anonymous members of his team," who have somehow received messages from Nalvany, messages written in his "familiar wry style":

"There’s a clinical name for what Apathetic Idealist and many of us are feeling: it’s called compassion fatigue."

"Psychologist Charles Figley defines compassion fatigue as 'a state of exhaustion and dysfunction, biologically, physiologically and emotionally, as a result of prolonged exposure to compassion stress.' Symptoms include behavioural changes (becoming easily startled, a reduced ability to remain objective), physical changes (exhaustion, anxiety and cardiac symptoms) and emotional changes (numbness, depression, 'decreased sense of purpose').... There are those who argue, following Kant, that a subjective experience of empathy should not be required for moral action, and those who go further, contending that empathy actually gets in the way of morality. But the more commonly held view today seems to be that empathy is vitally necessary, not just for direct human interaction, but as a spur to solve the world’s most pressing problems. Why would we come to the aid of people who are suffering, the thinking goes, if we don’t on some level feel their suffering, too?"

From "Is compassion fatigue inevitable in an age of 24-hour news?/We have never been more aware of the appalling events that occur around the world every day. But in the face of so much horror, is there a danger that we become numb to the headlines – and does it matter if we do?" by Elisa Gabbert in The Guardian.

I don't see why we should reject the Kantian idea just because it's a "more commonly held view today... that empathy is vitally necessary." In fact, the constant pressure to feel feel feel, coming at us all the time, is making this dependency on empathy more and more of a problem. People get tired. They get numb. Then what?

I'm thinking that some people will just turn away. I know, I only read the news (and look at photographs). I cannot tolerate the grinding music, the flashing, swirling graphics, and the human yelling and warning and worrying that is news television.

Other people will keep watching as if it's something like a movie — loaded with violence and conspiracies and endlessly unfolding anxiety. You're actually enjoying it. You're taking it. Consuming it. And who knows what effect this has on your soul? But why would it amount to any significant moral behavior from you? At best, you'll toddle over to the polls and check the box that seems to advance the plot.

"Genius is a talent for producing something for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition consisting of a skill for something that can be learned by following some rule or other."

 Immanuel Kant.

Ryan Lizza talks to 2 witnesses to the notorious Aqua Buddha incident that's been dogging Rand Paul.

From the long — read the whole thing — piece in The New Yorker titled "The Revenge of Rand Paul/The Senator has fought to go mainstream with the ideology that he shares with his father. How far can that strategy take him?":

[During] the 2010 Senate race... GQ.com posted a report in which an anonymous source said that Paul and another NoZe brother had taken her from her apartment, encouraged her to smoke pot, and asked her to pray to something called Aqua Buddha.

The NoZe Brotherhood was a group at Baylor University that "was founded in the nineteen-twenties mostly to mock Baylor’s clubs and fraternities and to satirize its earnest religiosity." Lizza uncovers GQs source, Kristy Ditzler, and talks to her, and he also talks to Paul's confederate, George Paul (who doesn't seem to be related to Rand, despite the last name).

Ditzler is a Democrat who told Lizza she's "speaking up" because she "was a little bit irked by him making himself out to be all about God and country and all about conservative values, because he was clearly not promoting that when I knew him." Nevertheless, she was "appalled" (Rizza's word) at the way the Aqua Buddha story was distorted. She says: “They did pretend they were abducting me, but it wasn’t a forced sort of thing... It was weird, with all of these tents with bongs inside and piles of clothing. Completely bizarro."

Ditzler said that George and Rand asked her to go into one of the tents and smoke pot, but when she declined they drove to a creek in Elm Mott, north of Waco, and told her to wade into the water and worship Aqua Buddha. “They never explained what was going on, but that’s the way they were about everything—vague and mysterious.”

George Paul says that "they took her to a dark pub, where they had an easel set up and pretended to sketch a portrait of her while reading Kant — but he insisted that no drugs were involved...."

He also said that the Aqua Buddha incident took place on another night, when he and Paul blindfolded Ditzler and several other members of their swim team by putting cotton in their goggles, and then loaded them into the back of a pickup and drove to the creek, where they were asked to “pay homage to the Aqua Buddha, and then we all went swimming.” He explained that Aqua Buddha was an inside joke on the swim team. During practice, George, Rand, and others would descend to the bottom of the pool and strike a Buddha pose, creating an amusing sight for swimmers at the surface. “It broke the monotony and helped us get through the workout,” he told me.

That's practically wholesome. What are the lingering questions here? Drug use? After Obama, are we even going to talk about politicians using drugs in their distant past? The insincerity of Rand Paul's religion? He was in a college group that was founded to (Lizza's words) "satirize" the "earnest religiosity" they saw around them. I guess I should do my own research into the NoZe Brotherhood, but I'll just end this here by saying that satirizing earnest religiosity is what Jesus did.

"If everyone you knew spoke the truth, it would be almost as terrible as if everyone you knew lied."

"Kant, who was searching for some universal moral principle, believed that if everybody lied the world would fall into shambles. Nobody would ever trust another person.... I say, “You wouldn’t want to live in a world where you can’t be conned, because if you were, you would be living in a world with no trust. That’s the price you pay for trust, is being conned."

The relationship between lying/truthtelling and trust.