Dimensionally Barrett

Albrecht Dürer: St. Jerome in his study Thoughts on this morning’s reading:   The endgame is near. The military invasion of cities to “prevent crime/clean up the streets”; rewriting history by persecution of schools and universities; demanding states gerrymander districts to win elections for the GOP; claiming pedophiles and traffickers are innocent. The Regime is going to push and push and it’s waiting for a violent push-back. Deployment of troops to cities is the most obvious move; the Regime knows cities will push back, likely declare mayors and governors of opposition states criminals and completely abolish “states’ rights” (those are for Republicans only, you see). We’re going to keep writing, keep organizing, keep fighting, keep showing up. It might seem futile, but this isn’t just for us in this present moment.  We can’t count on anything except what we, each of us,are doing right now. Not for some figure to swoop in and lead the fight, not for a “blue wave”, not for sp...

Rereading “On Tyranny” served to reinforce how important context is in our current moment. We are faced with a fascist-oligarchy hybrid government/assault on the citizens of this country and by extension, the world. Today, a Russian medical researcher at Harvard was detained by ICE for not declaring biological samples she had been requested to bring; instead of treating this as the minor offense it is, she is now detained in Louisiana after having landed in Boston. Additionally, USAID terminated almost all the remaining employees. There will likely by more disappearances and it feels likely that the rule of law will be suspended and martial law imposed as protests grow in number and numbers.  All of this helps underscore why “On Tyranny” and other tomes like Paine’s “Common Sense” and Havel’s “The Power and the Powerless” are important to read and share. Any political action should be supported with an understanding of historical context and precedent.  There are a couple of r...

This chapter, it seems to me, is less about “being kind” to language than recognizing language’s power, not just to communicate outwardly with others, but as the means by which we frame and order out thoughts and take in the messages from without. Snyder here is asking us to be aware of the epistemic nature of thought and words and how we as individuals can shore up and reinforce thinking independently and critically while offering tools on how to do so. Snyder introduces us to Victor Klemperer, a phonologist and scholar of Jewish origin who used his training to combat Nazi propaganda. He noticed how.the a term like “the people” was exclusionary; it meant some but not all people. This may seem tangential, but I don’t think it is: the term of “people” in German is   Volk , and had been used, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries as equivalent to “national spirit”. This was part of a larger philosophical movement that sought to identify the uniqueness of the German people withi...