BitchPudding wrote: ↑Tue Apr 01, 2025 5:32 pm
I made a reading list
Also worth reading is the Martin Ferguson Smith translation of Lucretius,
On the Nature of Things.
https://hackettpublishing.com/on-the-nature-of-things
I know from personal experience that some amount of filtering out the news media madness feels not only helpful, but necessary. But I would caution that when taken too far this is harmful. We can't just close our eyes and hope for this nightmare to end. They are "flooding the zone" in an effort to shut down our brains and our ethics and morality and put us into a docile state of discombobulated disbelief and exasperation.
In my opinion the best news source on American TV, the least tainted with "infotainment" and bias, is the PBS Newshour. And... you guessed it, there are active efforts underway by MAGUmplicans to defund and destroy PBS.
Libraries are under attack. An informed electorate is central to democracy. The core mandate of libraries and universities is to preserve information and to provide equal access to that information and their other services.
Reading, informing yourself, isn't about
what to think, but
how to think. Certain demagogues claim that libraries and universities are "indoctrinating" people—but what libraries and universities are actually doing is teaching people how to ask questions, thereby arming people with the tools necessary for critical thought—
how to think, how to weigh a set of experiences or facts as recorded in history or the arts when a person is considering what to do in an important, real-life situation in the real world.
Which is what they fear the most: an informed electorate making decisions based on rational thought and not solely on emotion (fear, anger, hatred) and personal animus and stereotypes and prejudices that are based on one or a few bad perceived or real experience.
Anybody trying to crack down on what can be said or thought is a clear and present danger to this central pillar of democracy (creating an informed electorate).
So the solution is to engage with and protect the public institutions that store and provide information. Privatized information that is "owned" by some oligarch can be deleted or altered to suit their personal needs.
There is a fantastic 1988 short film by Richard Linklater in which he claims that the film's title is an "old Russian Proverb":
"It's Impossible to Plow by Reading Books."
But this isn't true. In China they not only invented a plow in the 1000s that a single farmer with a single draft animal could control in order to plow an entire field all by themselves, but they also wrote books about how to plow (with illustrations).
Robert Temple writes:
"By the end of the Song dynasty in 1279, Chinese ploughs had reached a state of development that would not be seen in Holland until the 17th century."
