Lady Bug

Finished Reading: On Lying and Politics by Hannah Arendt 📚

I have only ever dabbled in my reading of Hannah Arendt, but she has maintained a voice in my head for years. Not, in my experience, an easily accessible writer/thinker. Whoever put these chapters of hers together in this short book deserves credit for undoing this fact. Very essential questions that need to be asked by current and future generations are quite accessible in these pages. In fact, I don’t think there is one page or paragraph that doesn’t point to some question you should ask when you read tomorrow’s news.

The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my conclusions, my opinion. . . . Of course, I can refuse to do this and form an opinion that takes only my own interests, or the interests of the group to which I belong, into account; nothing, indeed, is more common, even among highly sophisticated people, than the blind obstinacy that becomes manifest in lack of imagination and failure to judge.

“Arrogance of mind” (as defined by Hannah Arendt):

an utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality

The greatest modern plague? You be the judge.

Trying to buy a house in today’s market feels… dirty. When every house bid has to be 30–100k over asking to even be considered, driving up comp after comp, making each sale another death knell for low-wage (and even middle-wage) families, buying feels not unlike participating in a crime. I honestly don’t know any other way to feel about it. We’re still trying to buy, but ffs do I hate it

Daydreaming

Wendell Berry:

Honey bee

DB:

Quantities compete for space; qualities complement one another.

Walter Russell Mead:

“I don’t think America’s biggest problem is that we are divided between two coherent but opposed worldviews. Our problem is deeper. There are so many dots, and so many of them seem to be moving around the page, that it is getting harder to draw any kind of picture at all.”