Search Results for: let the games begin

Samaranch & pals... --------------------------------------------------- A few disparate thoughts as the Olympics descend on us. The games of Dow Chemical, McDonalds, and British Petroleum. The games of UK swat teams on neighborhood roofs. The games of forced evictions. But anyway.... The "father" of the modern Olympics is Pierre deCourbetin. Born to parents Baron Charles Louis Frédy, Baron de Coubertin and Marie–Marcelle Gigault de Crisenoy, in 1863. Pierre's father was a royalist and dilettante painter; who's themes ran to the Roman Catholic Church and the royal family. Pierre developed an interest in education, fueled by a visit to England where he met Thomas … [Read more...]

"The hunter could have been the first 'to tell a story' because only hunters knew how to read a coherent sequence of events from the silent (though not imperceptible) signs left by their prey." Carlo Ginzburg "It is now necessary to ask ourselves a question: Why, in order to define the Nazi régime, should the argument regarding the one-party dictatorship be more valid than that of racial and eugenic ideology and practice? It is precisely from this sphere that the central categories and key terminology of the Nazi discourse derived. This is the case with Rassenhygiene, which is essentially the German translation of eugenics, the new science invented in England and successfully … [Read more...]

“So many things happening, so many stories one inside the other, with every link hiding yet more stories … And I’ve hardly hatched from my egg,” thought an exultant Garuḍa, heading north. At last a place with no living creatures. He would stop and think things over there. “No one has taught me anything. Everything has been shown to me. It will take me all my life to begin to understand what I’ve been through. To understand, for example, what it means to say that I am made of syllables …” Roberto Calasso (Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India ) "Much seems to be fixed...Perhaps it was once disputed. But perhaps, for unthinkable ages, it has belonged to the scaffolding of our … [Read more...]

“Art’s truth appears guaranteed more by its denial of any meaning in organized society, of which it will have no part—accomplished by its own organized absence of meaning—than by any capability of positive meaning within itself.” Theodor Adorno (Philosophy of Modern Music) "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future." Simone Weil (The Need for Roots) "I can resist everything but … [Read more...]

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance." Karl … [Read more...]

"With their marked gift for calculation, the Jews "live" according to the principle of race, and indeed have done so for the longest time, for which reason they themselves most vigorously resist its unrestricted application. The arrangement of racial breeding stems not from "life" itself, but from the hyper-empowerment of life by machination (Machenschaft)." Martin Heidegger (Überlegungen XII, 82. Überlegungen XII-XV, GA. Peter Trawny translation) "Carl Schmitt's polemical discussion of political Romanticism conceals the aestheticizing oscillations of his own political thought. In this respect, too, a kinship of spirit with the fascist intelligentsia reveals itself." Jurgen Habermas … [Read more...]

"The repeated attempts that have been made to improve humanity, and in particular to make it more peaceable, have failed, because nobody has understood the full depth and vigour of the instincts of aggression innate in each individual. Such efforts do not seek to do more than encourage the positive, well wishing impulses of the person while denying or suppressing his aggressive ones." Melanie Klein (The Early Development of Conscience in the Child) "Finally... there results the generally acclaimed 'popularization'...in science. This is the notorious tailoring of science's coat for the figure of a 'mixed public,' to use a tailor-like activity for a tailor-like German (sic!)." Friedrich … [Read more...]

"What can be done?“ said Zeus, “for all is given; The crops, the hunt, the marts are no more free." Friedrich Schiller (The Division of the World, tr. Wm Wertz Jr.) " W.E.B. Du Bois deciding he had “not been Freudian enough” when he observed the body parts of a lynched Negro displayed in a local store." Eli Zaretsky (Political Freud) "Among the precepts of the Moses religion there is one that is of greater importance than appears to begin with. This is the prohibition against making an image of God—the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see." Sigmund Freud (Moses and Monotheism) "Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly … [Read more...]