ellauri069.html on line 393: —the love affair between statistician Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake, whose love seems to be all that can save him from being psychologically consumed by the war;
ellauri108.html on line 252: The Rasta message resonates with many people who feel marginalised and alienated by the values and institutions of their society. Internationally, it has proved most popular among the poor and among marginalised youth. In valorising Africa and blackness, Rastafari provides a positive identity for youth in the African diaspora by allowing them to psychologically reject their social stigmatisation. It then provides these disaffected people with the discursive stance from which they can challenge capitalism and consumerism, providing them with symbols of resistance and defiance. Cashmore expressed the view that "whenever there are black people who sense an injust disparity between their own material conditions and those of the whites who surround them and tend to control major social institutions, the Rasta messages have relevance."
ellauri161.html on line 631: I’ve seen some people criticise Don’t Look Up for lacking subtlety. I’m not bothered by this. I don’t necessarily need or want the communications about climate change to be subtle. The issue itself certainly is not subtle. We are heading towards—and, again, already are in the midst of—unprecedented death and destruction. Our systems and rulers are not just woefully ill-equipped to deal with this or to prevent the worst of it, they are actively complicit in bringing it about. Those communities around the world that are the most vulnerable and that have had the least part to play in causing the crisis will be the ones to suffer the first and the worst. This isn’t subtle sh*t! This is horrifying, grotesque, psychologically debilitating stuff to ponder—if you even have the privilege to ponder in the first place! I don’t necessarily need subtlety here. Sometimes, to fight propaganda, you need to go loud and bold. But you still have to be effective. We are fighting an almightily powerful enemy. Competence is a necessary minimum. Regrettably, Don’t Look Up does not meet those standards. Its central metaphor doesn’t even make sense! Yes, capitalism is responding as dreadfully to climate change in real life as it does to the comet in the film—the key difference is that capitalism didn’t cause that comet to come hurtling out of the sky in the first place.
ellauri189.html on line 214: The boundless steppe of the Ukraine turns out to be a cage with invisible bars. Man appears at first sight to be free, without apparent goal roaming over the plain of life, being a lord of the steppe, “a king of the wilderness” (“król pustyni”), or tries to create in a premeditated manner his own future, deciding – by the way – on the fate of his fellow men (the source of unceasing conflicts). However, in the latter case he often unwittingly obeys the voice of his own wild, unruly nature. The ambivalence of this situation seems to be intimately connected with the concept of romantic irony. Man possesses the ability to objectify his passions, i.e. he can explain them psychologically, by means of a chain of causes and effects, but he still remains the slave of this volitional nature that constitutes his innermost self, always and ever receding (like the horizon of the Ukrainian plain) when he tries to catch it (the idea of the Unconscious does not really explain this “schizophrenic” state of mind – it merely affirms man’s essential homelessness: I am myself, when I realize that my self eternally escapes me). - I can relate to that, says the Russian tank driver sitting stuck in the Ukrainian mud.
ellauri391.html on line 574: One consequence of Kimhi’s view is that “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining” becomes a logical contradiction. Another consequence is that a contradiction becomes something that you cannot believe, as opposed to something that you psychologically can but logically ought not to believe (as the traditional cleavage between psychology and logic might suggest). A final consequence is that thinking is not just a cognitive psychological act, but also one that is governed by logical law.
xxx/ellauri187.html on line 101: W. H. Auden once remarked that would-be poets had better learn a manual trade. But Rilke was cast more in the haughty Yeatsian mold that Auden, not exactly a day laborer himself, haughtily disdained. And unlike Rilke's contemporary Franz Kafka, who performed his tasks as an insurance executive with initiative and even enthusiasm, Rilke was too frail psychologically to balance his art with the demands of full-time employment. Even a desk job in the Austrian army during the First World War, when the forty-year-old literary celebrity was conscripted, proved too much for him. After three weeks of parade-ground training and living in barracks, which nearly killed him, Rilke was assigned to the propaganda section. There his literary powers deserted him, and his frustrated superiors transferred the stunned poet to the card-filing department, where he remained for six months, until his friends interceded and got him discharged. André Malraux he was not.
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