1. Still, however glowingly Matthew (Arnold) spoke of the man who had wondered aloud if his father was Christian, he always referred to Newman with an air of condescension. In this he resembled Lord Acton, who referred to Newman in letters to his Liberal friends as 'the venerable Noggs.'
2. However, (despite Rippon's recent conversion to Catholicism) when Gladstone became Prime Minister again in 1880, he appointed Lord Rippon Viceroy of India, where he introduced local self government, improved Indian education, and lifted his predecessor Lord Lytton's censorship of the press. The Anglo-Indians loathed him. When he tried to pass a bill allowing Indian judges to try Europeans, they were furious because, as they saw it, Indian magistrates would try to stop them 'beating their own niggers.' In his his religious development-beginning as an Evangelical, finding common cause with F.D. Maurice's Christian Socialists, and even acting as Grandmaster of the Freemasons before converting to Rome and building up the Catholic Union of Great Britain-Rippon had charted a course not unlike that of Newman's early mentor, Thomas Scott, who had 'followed truth wherever it led him.'
3. In reviewing Clough's first posthumous collection of verse, Walter Bagehot described the author as a man 'who seemed about to do something, but who died before he did it.'
4. (Concerning Newman) one parishioner quipped: "They spoilt a jolly good navvy when they made that old cove a parson."
5. (Newman) was particularly amused by a story a friend had heard in London that 'I carried my austerity to such an extent that I would not let my wife wear nothing but sad colored ribbons in her bonnet.' In 1850, he wrote his fellow Oratorian Fredrick Faber, 'The report grows stronger and stronger here, that I am married, and have shut up my wife in a convent.'
One of the most interesting chapters was the the one that covered the intersection of Newman's life with the writer Arthur Clough, one of the great talents of mid-19th century English poetry, who, like Newman, was looking towards the Continent for an escape from the hemmed in mental and physical horizons of Great Britain. Another notable bit was the recounting of the confrontation between Gladstone and the Cardinal which illustrated some of the contradictions of late 19th century Whiggery as it found its practical and ideological limits in, among other fronts, the interrelated issues of Ireland and Catholic Emancipation.
On a more personal level, it was interesting to read the lyrical touches in his letters that Newman was able to throw into letters written for close friends and fellow ministers like Hurrell Froude:
It is quite impossible that some way or other you are not destined to be the instrument of God's purposes. Though I saw the earth cleave and you fall in, or Heaven open, and a chariot appear, I should say just the same. God has ten thousand posts of service. You might be of use in the central elemental fire ; you might be of use in the depths of the sea
But also for those composed for ordinary lay people under his spiritual direction like the governess Mary Holmes
You were right in thinking that your family reminiscences would interest me. I think nothing more interesting, and it is strange to think how evanescent, how apparently barren and resultless, are the ten thousand little details and complications of daily life and family history. Is there any record of them preserved anywhere, any more than of the fall of the leaves in autumn? or are they themselves some reflection, as in an earthly mirror, of some greater truths above? So I think of musical sounds and their combinations—they are momentary—but is it not some momentary opening and closing of the Veil which hangs between the worlds of spirit and sense?
Edited by RedMaistre ()
anyway.
I recently finished The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk. It's fairly well written, semi-autobiographical, by a neurologist-psychiatrist. It fucking sucks to read about the worst traumatic experiences of late capitalism. But there's a lot of interesting info in there - it's a survey of a bunch of different perspectives on how traumatic conditions affect people and a wide range of therapies that have helped some people.
The part that most stuck with me was that severely traumatized people disconnect almost completely from their experience of being in the world (hello Heidegger), as demonstrated in piles of brain imaging and other studies. In severely traumatized people, the parts of the brain that have to do with monitoring one's own body, location, and translating one's own feelings into language, etc, are almost completely shut down:
How do we know we're alive?
(...) in 2004, my colleague Ruth Lanius, who scanned Stan and Ute Lawrence's brains, posed a new questions: What happens in the brains of trauma survivors when they are not thinking about the past? Her studies on the idling brain, the "default state network" (DSN), opened up a whole new chapter in understanding how trauma affects self-awareness, specifically sensory self-awareness. (...)
When Ruth looked at the scans of her normal subjects, she found activation of DSN regions that previous researchers had described. (...) the posterior cingulate, which gives us a physical sense of where we are (...) the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), (...) the insula, which relays messages from the viscera to the emotional centers; the parietal lobes, which integrate sensory information; and the anterior cingulate, which coordinates emotions and thinking. All of these areas contribute to consciousness.
The contrast with the scans of the eighteen chronic PTSD patients with severe early-life trauma was startling. There was almost no activation of any of the self-sensing areas of the brain...
This is developed throughout the book in different ways, not just from the pure materialist/modern medical point of view, and it seems to line up well not just with the classical concept of A Traumatic Experience but also the increased alienation and dissociation of late capitalism - there have been many studies and theories that have discovered that constant background stress has a similar effect on the body and mind as severe short-term stress; it wouldn't be surprising if the constant anxiety of just existing in modern society has a similar but subclinical effect on people's sense of actual existence.
He goes on to discuss how this unknowing of the self is a key factor in many of the antisocial symptoms of trauma - the short version being that when one has no ability to process one's own mental/emotional state one also slowly loses the ability to comprehend or imagine those of others, as well. Traumatized people even show less ability to imagine in general - less ability to conceptualize the future, or any future, and consequently less ability to form personal plans of any kind, even if they might be suppressing every other symptom of the trauma and be intensely, highly functional in jobs.
This is all totally related to the shit I want to study (am studying(?)) so it's extremely my shit and I sort of want to write a book about the feedback loop between the calculated psycho-PR machine of modern media/marketing, the alienation of capitalist society, psychological dissociative responses to trauma/anxiety, and fear.
If anyone has any ideas of stuff I should read in order to do that well, please advise thx.
NoFreeWill posted:it matches up with my wild theory that to build an AI brain we have to first build an AI body
yeah! I've been thinking for a long time that maybe it would work if you put an complex neural network ai brain in a baby android body and raised it with another baby, and treated it the same way. but that requires some completely insane people to raise it like that and risk their own baby's sanity and their own. and incredible dedication. and then dealing with the uncanny horror of whatever resulted
so I'm hoping no one does that but someone will, someday
"The others called for wine; Cornudet demanded beer. He had a special fashion of uncorking the bottle, making froth on the liquid, carefully filling the glass and then holding it before the light to better appreciate the color. When he drank, his great beard, which still kept some foam of his beloved beverage, seemed to tremble with tenderness; his eyes were squinted, in order not to lose sight of his tipple, and he had the unique air of fulfilling the function for which he was born. One would say that there was in his mind a meeting, like that of affinities, between two great passions that occupied his life -- Pale Ale and Revolutions; and assuredly he could not taste one without thinking of the other."
reminds me of some people here...
drwhat posted:
read Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman. she advances the theory of a separate "complex post-traumatic stress disorder" diagnosis with distinct features, caused by prolonged captivity or entrapment.
i couldn't give you any papers but i would also check for work on the BPD/PTSD correlation. there is a theory that BPD results from some sort of priming of the patient to experience events as traumatic.
Keven posted:I've got an Al brain that's when my friend and co worker is looking at a lawn mower like This needs more power Arooo roooo rawrrr and I'm like I don't think so.
Change keven's username to A.I. caramba
ai play joke
ai do weiwei in your coke
chickeon posted:you're literally never ever ever ever ever ever ever going to get an "AI brain" so don't sweat it
I think the thing is that an "AI brain" might actually be much less mysterious than we might think and a sufficiently large and interconnected (computer) neural network with inputs and outputs generally analogous to the inputs and outputs of the human brain could, with enough time and patience, be trained into, at least, some low level form of what we could consider intelligent.
A palace car was summoned by the Rai, and came rolling along into our presence without any person to operate it; came in at the door of the office, which opened to allow its passage precisely as if some court page had opened it. It wheeled into the room and came to a stop in front of us. All this was done exactly as if under a guiding hand. But no visible hand was there. This was the first time I had ever seen any exhibition of occult power on the part of Gwauxln;
NEET dingus foresees future technology but misspells Google? i don't think so tim.
drwhat posted:chickeon posted:you're literally never ever ever ever ever ever ever going to get an "AI brain" so don't sweat it
I think the thing is that an "AI brain" might actually be much less mysterious than we might think and a sufficiently large and interconnected (computer) neural network with inputs and outputs generally analogous to the inputs and outputs of the human brain could, with enough time and patience, be trained into, at least, some low level form of what we could consider intelligent.
one of the vom-inducing technosingularity types back on SA had a pos'n on AI which held it would naturally develop as a vast agglomeration of the tools we develop to automate more and more tasks - it would never develop a consciousness as we understand it nor could we communicate with it as an entity - it would just be capable of doing everything a human being could, and more, at every single task ever required anywhere. that sounds more plausible than anything else as it both excises the idea of human "intelligence" as anything naively reifiable and reproducible, and also is more capitalism's speed
solzhesnitchin posted:U guys ever seen the movie Lawnmower Man?
the nadir of comic book superheroes
daddyholes posted:a dweller on two planets by frederick oliver. all modern New Age occultism is based on this book. people say it predicts a lot of real-world inventions but uhhh:
A palace car was summoned by the Rai, and came rolling along into our presence without any person to operate it; came in at the door of the office, which opened to allow its passage precisely as if some court page had opened it. It wheeled into the room and came to a stop in front of us. All this was done exactly as if under a guiding hand. But no visible hand was there. This was the first time I had ever seen any exhibition of occult power on the part of Gwauxln;
NEET dingus foresees future technology but misspells Google? i don't think so tim.
he spoke to aliens, and they have unusual vocal cords so they were saying "google" but it came out "guaghl" and he tried writing it down the best he could when he came back to earth. cut him some fucking slack.
shriekingviolet posted:some big revelations about mossad being a bunch of self important bullies who act like they already own the world, because that was a total mystery to us beforehand
while i;m sure there's a good critique to be found for anything al-Jazeera reports these days i don't think "it's just stuff we already knew" is ever a good one.
people keep saying it whenever new documents are declassified or leaked and it gets kind of annoying. how is having more confirmation for something a bad thing?
another way in which it's functionally useless is that the vast majority of leaked materials that get filtered to us is just international diplomacy gossip, one capitalist regime having a petty bickering match with another. tabloids for leftists. suspiciously absent is any information on the actual on the ground realities of counterintelligence programs which could be an asset for actual organizing. we hear plenty of things about back-end infrastructure, but this isn't very useful without specific information about how that infrastructure is leveraged against dissent on the human level.
but all that ranting wasn't really my intent with the above post. i enjoyed reading it and am glad of news links, as long as i reserve the right to piss and moan about them. i just wanted to riff on mossad being even more thuggish than your average intelligence org.
shriekingviolet posted:because the vast majority of the western left will sit around forever, tallying abuse after abuse which they know damn well is going to continue indefinitely, and never lift a finger to actually stop it? the current narrative around intelligence and surveillance culture that is being pushed in response to the new environment of leaks, which has embedded itself entirely in left discourse with no opposition, is that all these things are just happening. this is happening, that is happening. it's an endless litany of bare facts that always cuts short of any call to action, especially anything that would be truly effective. passive engagement provides the emotional release of resistance without any material consequences.
another way in which it's functionally useless is that the vast majority of leaked materials that get filtered to us is just international diplomacy gossip, one capitalist regime having a petty bickering match with another. tabloids for leftists. suspiciously absent is any information on the actual on the ground realities of counterintelligence programs which could be an asset for actual organizing. we hear plenty of things about back-end infrastructure, but this isn't very useful without specific information about how that infrastructure is leveraged against dissent on the human level.
but all that ranting wasn't really my intent with the above post. i enjoyed reading it and am glad of news links, as long as i reserve the right to piss and moan about them. i just wanted to riff on mossad being even more thuggish than your average intelligence org.
I'm not sure it is necessarily totally useless.
Part of the issue is that the answer to "how do you stop the abuses of the western intelligence services" isn't something realistic short of overthrowing the western imperialist nations.
The NSA is a subcomponent of the DOD. The CIA stands alone. Beyond them, there are, or were 10 years ago, 14 other factions of the US intelligence community. Each branch of the military has its own, including the coast guard, and there's another military intelligence agency outside of all the above as well. State, FBI, DEA, shit I think even the commerce department has some intelligence branch. The point is that the functions of the intelligence branches are inherently interwoven into the fabric of the empire and you cannot excise them without killing the host. You will never get even the liberalest of congress or the president to even hint about proposing to dissolve any of the above. At best it would be limiting their actions in certain areas. And if you get a liberal congress or a liberal president to say the NSA is banned from doing a thing, they will
1. keep doing the thing anyway because there's no enforcement. who the fuck will know unless some other nutty computer janitor snitches a few years from now at which point the "important" people will be retired anyway
2. stop doing the thing and continue doing the many other things virtually identical
3. stop doing the thing and another agency will start doing the thing
4. let canada or england do the thing.
etc.
However the litany of offenses can in the long run establish a pattern of abuse in the minds of people around the world which may help politically isolate the US. If the empire is degraded by the loss of client, puppet, or ally states, then the possibility of socialism in other countries is not so easily destroyed. Recall that a fair amount of the early gossip revealed that the US was engaging in operations against Brazil and Germany. Alienating large and powerful states by revealing that information over time is beneficial to the world as a whole.
Some of the things revealed were also specific actions targeting the people of socialist states, such as the programs to steal the cuban doctors from venezuela's public medical services. Concrete proof of specific ways the US is assaulting the people in those countries can help shore up support for their revolutions. Revealing evidence of americas corruption and support of opposition parties and candidates can allow the traitors to be arrested or destroyed, which in addition to the obvious benefits may also make it somewhat more difficult to attract other vermin, and allow bonafide revolutionary states to stain their opposition as american lapdogs.
alternatively, an increasingly isolated america will launch the nukes in an orgiastic fit of despair and vengeance resulting in the fiery death of billions of people and the counter nuking and cleansing of america which would allow Full Communism to rise from the ashes or the extinction of humanity which is obviously the most desirable outcome.
But, theoretically, if a Communist movement seizes power they would have to engage in the same types of surveillance programs. It would be suicidal not to use the same surveillance tactics that the Capitalists' use.
In my opinion, calling out the abuses of the surveillance state is something that is only useful for propaganda. The only thing that a revolutionary government could hope for is a more "softer" domestic surveillance. But, all the same, surveillance as whole would need to continue.
Edited by walkinginonit ()