Bộ Túi Bé Tô Màu Thỏ Con Khéo Tay (Trọn Bộ 5 Cuốn) tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Gabriel Monk gamonk19991a5a — Coming from a position that cannot be easily characterized as either Left or Right, Saul critiques technocracy and the anti-democratic culture of management and conformity, the favoring of private profit to public good, which comprise what he calls "corporatism." Regularly citing Adam Smith in opposition to the received truths of contemporary "free market" evangelists, Saul argues that markets do have a proper place in society (a fun game for those with the means to enjoy them!), but that they do not necessarily lead to free speech or democracy. For Saul, the corporatist emphasis on management involves aversion to risk and innovation (hence the past three decades of financial card shuffling in lieu of real economic activity), short-term decision-making without long-term vision (e.g., over-fishing, inaction on global warming, etc.), and an absence of critical thinking and reflection in general. He isn't what you would call a "conspiracy theorist" (i.e., someone like Jim Marrs) in regard to the corporatist culture he critiques. In fact, for Saul, "there is no need for a conspiracy. These are structures managed by servants. Their logic is public and self-evident. Complex, long-range conspiracies require conscious leaders. To treat the technocrats as such is to give credence to their illusions about themselves" (122-3). If society will permit and reward robbery, robbery will be invested in. (151) Practical humanism is the voyage toward equilibrium without the expectation of actually arriving there. (154) At the very origin of management theory lies the falsely scientific Taylorist model of the mechanistic human. The uncertainty of time, which surrounds human activity, is to be removed by encasing us in a structure fit for machinery. Machines may depreciate, but they do not fear death....[C]orporatism--with its markets- and technology-led delusions--is profoundly tied to a mechanistic view of the human race. This is not an ideology with any interest in or commitment to the shape of society or the individual as citizen. It is fixed upon a rush to use machinery--inanimate or human--while these are still at full value; before they suffer any depreciation. (156, 158) The intellectual life of both Right and Left is thus similar because both are based upon a conception of individualism as self-absorption or selfishness. The Left, of course, would protest that these rights are equally distributed and therefore represent a form of fairness. They would also protest that they see government, regulation and taxation as making up the essential structure that enables society to function fairly. But if their definition of rights creates a form of individualism independent from that essential structure, well then, they have created the conditions for the aborting--both theoretical and practical--of the fair society they wished to create.... As for the version of individualism advocated by the Right, it is the product of either naivete or cynicism. What are they saying? That individualism requires the individual citizen to deny himself the use of his ability and his right to pool his strengths with those of other citizens through the public mechanisms of their on making. This is a maniacally self-destructive view of human society. It abandons the individual to isolation before enormous, unpredictable and uncontrollable forces. (159) I would like to mention one last source of the Left's weakness. From the beginnings of the Enlightenment there has been among reformers at least the hint of a fear of the citizen. The liberals in particular have been devoted to the citizen in theory, but not really to the citizen in flesh and bone and in mind. (162) The individual's rights are guaranteed by law only to the extent that they are protected by the citizenry's exercise of their obligation to participate in society. Rights are a protection from society. But only by fulfilling their obligations to society can the individual give meaning to that protection. (163-4) Now the very essence of corporatism is minding your own business. And the very essence of individualism is the refusal to mind your own business. This is not a particularly pleasant or easy style of life. It is not profitable, efficient, competitive or rewarded. It often consists of being persistently annoying to others as well as being stubborn and repetitive....Criticism is perhaps the citizenry's primary weapon in the exercise of her legitimacy. That is why, in the corporatist society, conformism, loyalty and silence of so admired and rewarded; why criticism is so punished or marginalized. (165) We have progressed in our control of high treason. We no longer need to draw and quarter. The heretic today merely finds his career shattered and himself cast to the margins of corporatist society. (169) It is through language that we will find our way out of our current dilemma, just as a rediscovery of language provided a way out for Westerners during the humanist breakthrough that began in the twelfth century. For those addicted to concrete solutions, this call for a rebirth or rediscovery of meaning may well seem vague and unrelated to reality. But language, when it works, is the tool that makes it possible to invoke reality. (171) The difficulty with many of the arguments used today to examine reigning fallacies is that they have fallen into the general assumptions of deconstructionism. They do not seek meaning or knowledge or truth. They seek to demonstrate that all language is tied to interest. The deconstructionists have argued against language as communication in order to get at the evils of rhetoric and propaganda. But if language is always self-interest, then there is no possibility of disinterest and therefore no possibility of the public good. The net effect has been to reinforce the corporatist point of view that we all exist as functions within our corporations. To rephrase this problem in terms of my argument, the deconstructionists have effectively attacked our addiction to answers, but in such a way as to undermine the validity of our questions. And so the answers, assertive as they are, stand reinforced. (172-3) It seems to me that a sensible list of the human qualities would run as follows: common sense, creativity or imagination, ethics (not morality), intuition or instinct, memory and, finally, reason. I have arranged all six in alphabetical order because I do not believe that equilibrium is aided by attempts to create orders of importance or precedence. (182)

Ronald Saper _onald_aper — The Grandfather of Horror has some great ones. From the Mountains of Madness and Call of Cthulu to my fav. the Shadow over Innsmouth, Lovecraft paints a bleak picture of doom fated man left bereft and tiny against the the mighty expanse of huge, deathless space. Lots of interesting points could be made in the same vein of Shelly's Frankenstein, but regardless, the stories rock like a good death metal guitar solo.