Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Ceremonies are important. But our gratitude has to be more than visits to the troops, and once-a-year Memorial Day ceremonies. We honor the dead best by treating the living well." -- Jennifer M. Granholm

"It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle." -- General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., 1991-03-15 (interviewed by Barbara Walters)

"Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so." -- G. K. Chesterton (b. 1874-05-29, d. 1936-06-14), Orthodoxy, 1908 (emphasis added to tag the part most often quoted)

[Wishing a meaningful Memorial Day to my fellow Americans treating it as a solemn occasion to honour those who died serving our country, and a fun day off to me fellow Americans who just look at it as the start of summer.]

From Freefall by Mark Stanley, 2021-10-11:

"Listen,

"bear spray
DOES NOT
work like bug spray.

"We would like to not have to say that again."

-- Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation (OKWildlifeDept), 2022-05-23

( context: a rant about not-always-sensical behaviour of the stock market (and markets in general) )

"It's pretty much an evolutionary environment that selects for chaotic nonsense, if anything makes too much sense then the locusts can (and will) descend and strip it to the bone. That might make for a fascinating experiment in a jar but not a very good way to run a society" -- ChastityEve (BeltedEve), 2022-05-20

[Today is the 64th anniversary of the first joint meeting of U.S. and European ALGOL definition committee. An important milestone for everybody who uses/has used Pascal, C, PL/I, SPL, C++, Javascript, ... ... (it's a damn long list). Tomorrow is the 63rd anniversary of the first meeting of COBOL definition committee.]

"On a winter evening a few years ago, we brothers were visited by a Montessori Middle School class who had been studying different faith traditions. Before Compline we met in the chapel to give the students the opportunity to ask questions. One young man raised his hands and asked, 'Why are all the depictions of Jesus in this church images of him on the cross, dying? I do not see a 'living' Jesus anywhere." I froze in fear for a moment, not expecting that question and I scrambled for an answer. I said that the depiction of Jesus on the cross is an image that assures us of God Emmanuel, which means 'God with us,' even in the midst of suffering, bearing all that we cannot handle. The answer seemed to satisfy his curiosity, but it did make me wonder also since I had not noticed what he had observed before. The next morning as we brothers were praying Morning Prayer, the sun began to rise and illumine the stained glass. At that moment I had an epiphany! The risen Jesus was everywhere in the glass: in St. John's chapel, in the lancet windows of the Lady Chapel, and most especially in the great Rose window. How could I have missed the resurrected and ascended Jesus in our Church windows all this time? I was then reminded of the line from the Psalms: Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning." -- Brother Jim Woodrum, 2020-04-10

[This is more of an Easter quote, but I think it kinda works for the Feast of the Ascension too. Anyhow, a good Ascencion Day to everyone celebrating it today!]

From Travis Cravey (TravisCravey), 2022-05-24:

11y saw me crying and asked if it was about Uvalde.

"Yeah," I said. "It's really sad and I worry about y'all."

"It's okay, Dad," he said to me, "we train for this."

Fuck. I'm broken. He's in sixth grade. A math nerd. A gamer. He's not a goddamn Marine. He "trains" for this?

"a lot of engineering by prudent engineers consists of overdesigning things so when the accountants insist on making cuts to the design it will still be safe" -- Lindsay (LLBroadwell), 2022-05-22

"Pause for a moment to consider just how extraordinary Roberts' claim is. Congress has no legitimate objective in preventing donors from putting cash straight into a candidate's bank account after an election? Really? It might seem like common sense that these contributions open the door to corruption. As Kagan noted in dissent, donors might contribute to victorious candidates in exchange for 'government benefits-maybe favorable legislation, maybe prized appointments, maybe lucrative contracts.' While Kagan condemns these agreements as 'sordid bargains,' however, Roberts deems them nothing more than 'influence and access.' And the court has already held that Congress cannot limit contributions to stop lawmakers from performing favors for those who bankrolled their campaigns.

"Still, Kagan argued, this particular restriction targets an uncommonly dangerous kind of 'dirty dealing': These donations do not even fund political speech, but instead 'personally enrich those already elected to office.' This distinction matters. When a donation funds 'electoral activities,' Kagan wrote, it 'in no way adds to his personal wealth.' When a donation helps to repay the candidate's loan, by contrast, 'every dollar given goes straight into the candidate's pocket. With each such contribution, his assets increase; he can now buy a car or make tuition payments or join a country club-all with his donors' dollars.' These donations 'have exceptional value to the candidate-which his donors of course realize. And when the contributions occur after the election, their corrupting potential further increases.'"

-- Mark Joseph Stern, "Elena Kagan Is Mourning American Democracy", Slate, 2022-05-16

"You can say a lot about bad things the internet brings, but finding someone far away who you like enough that just seeing a message from them makes you smile is something beautiful." -- M, morphin muscle matron. (ObviousrebelM), 2022-05-13

"i hope the next thing in graphic design is extremist skeumorphism. i want buttons that look like a power plant from 1958 and go CLUNK when I press them. i want to turn on my phone by throwing a brass lever. i want to scroll with a block and tackle

[...]

"pushes glasses up nose actually, skeumorphism is when things only LOOK like physical interfaces, i.e. a touchscreen app featuring realistic buttons with a clunk sound and animation

"however if I can have a physical giant thunky lever, I want a physical giant thunky lever

-- Cliff Jerrison (pervocracy), 2022-05-16

"How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?
 There is no monopoly on common sense
 On either side of the political fence
 We share the same biology, regardless of ideology
 Believe me when I say to you
 I hope the Russians love their children too"
  -- from "Russians" (1984) by Sting ( Wikipedia | lyrics | video)

"The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe ... I really think that. ... When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view, and if that code happens to be very, very right wing, almost toward Attila the Hun..." -- Frank Zappa (b. 1940-12-21, d. 1993-12-04), in 1986

From the middle of "Artifice and Intelligence" by Emily Tucker (Executive Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law), 2022-03-17:

While there is no indication that we are close to realizing Turing's narrower prediction of a computer that human beings reliably mistake for a human being, I am concerned that Turing's larger prediction has nevertheless been fulfilled. It is now quite usual, across all of journalism as well as popular and scholarly literature, to read of machines not only "thinking" but engaging in a wide range of contemplative and deliberative activities, such as "judging," "predicting," "interpreting," "deciding," "recognizing," and of course "learning." The terms "artificial intelligence," "AI" and "machine learning," placehold everywhere for the scrupulous descriptions that would make the technologies they refer to transparent for the average person.

Our lack of self-consciousness in using, or consuming, language that takes machine intelligence for granted is not something that we have co-evolved in response to actual advances in computational sophistication of the kind that Turing, and others, anticipated. Rather it is something to which we have been compelled in large part through the marketing campaigns, and market control, of tech companies selling computing products whose novelty lies not in any kind of scientific discovery, but in the application of turbocharged processing power to the massive datasets that a yawning governance vacuum has allowed corporations to generate and/or extract. This is the kind of technology now sold under the umbrella term "artificial intelligence."

[...]

Corporations have essentially colonized the imaginative space that Turing's paper asked us to explore. Instead of pursuing the limits of computers' potential for simulated humanity, the hawkers of "AI" are pursuing the limits of human beings' potential to be reduced to their calculability.

[Chag sameach to everyone celebrating Lag Ba'Omer tonight/tomorrow!]

"Whenever transness comes up with cis people it always goes to 'wow you're so strong. I could never' but I don't want to be strong. I want to sleep peacefully and exist safely.

"Saying I'm 'strong' isn't praise. It's an admission of failure to challenge the system hurting me.

"All I want is to be able to just exist and not need to constantly be on edge and to be able to go swimming again without it being deemed political. I just want to be able to exist for myself for a little while.

[...]

"Nobody should need to be strong all the time. It fucks you up and changes you. Now I'm constantly on guard to make sure I and so many people around me are safe. Sometimes people think that's cool but being hypervigilant constantly changes you and you can never go back and relax."

-- Max has Nightmare Eyes (chaoticgaythey), 2022-03-25

"accessories can really boost a woman's self confidence. for example I know I would feel 10x sexier if I carried a sword with me at all times" -- em (uhhmmily), 2019-09-18

"SWORDS ARE POINTY JEWELERY AND I WILL NOT BE PERSUADED OTHERWISE" -- Ari! Lady Of Swords (genia_in_tauris), 2022-05-09

"The absence of conflict is not the same things as the presence of justice.

"Scripture & church history are full of examples of God working through oppressed people to create a productive conflict which leads to God's liberating justice. Oppression does not go away quietly."

-- Brian & Shay | QueerTheology.com (QTheology), 2022-05-11

"Optimist: The glass is ½ full.
 Pessimist: The glass is ½ empty.
 Excel: The glass is January 2nd."
  -- John Feminella (jxxf), 2022-05-07

"Every time there's a 'first' in terms of someone being elected to a position or achieving something (first woman, black person, indigenous person, disabled person, LGBT...) you get a lot of responses saying their gender/race/sexuality/disability shouldn't matter...

"And you're right - it shouldn't matter. But right now it DOES. Gender, racial and sexual identity and physical disability ARE barriers to people being placed in positions of authority acknowledged for their achievements or just being given an opportunity.

"So when someone from those underprivileged groups does break through a ceiling, we need to celebrate that and to proclaim that they've done so AS a person whose gender, racial and sexual identity has kept people from previously doing so.

"Until there are no barriers to people based on gender, race, sexuality and ability, saying 'those things don't matter' invalidates the courage and persistence it takes to overcome the oppression and injustice millions still face."

-- Rev. Daniel Brereton (RevDaniel), 2022-05-06

From "Stress, Hypervigilance, and Decision Fatigue: Teaching During Omicron" by Katy Farber, Education Week, 2022-01-24, so about halfway through the school year:

As teachers, we heard a lot about self-care, in suggestions to practice mindfulness, yoga, or gratitude. It was our responsibility as teachers to "self-care" our way through this pandemic. But better outcomes happen when we change systems. For example, teachers can't take "care" of ourselves unless we are given daily prep time or enough sick time to care for a family member that has to quarantine.

With the spread of omicron, the first week of the new year felt like a year. [...]

[...]

Before COVID-19, I sometimes struggled with simple decisions at the end of the teaching day, like what to make for dinner, what shampoo to pick. This is called decision fatigue. But now? The decisionmaker part of my brain is currently tapped out.

[...]

The hypervigilance continues well into the night with emails and texts. Close contacts. New cases. Changing plans. Substitute plans and shortages. New protocols. We nervously check our phones for news of cut pensions, wildly increasing COVID-19 cases, crowded hospitals. We try to sleep. But some nights, we can't turn our brains off because from the minute we got up to the minute we hit the bed, our nervous system was on high alert.

Nature helps. Meditation helps. Rest helps. It still feels like holding up a tsunami with our hands and a snorkel mask. We can only do it for so long.

And this is what I am experiencing in a highly vaccinated state in New England with strict mask requirements in schools. I cannot imagine how much worse this sense of dread, doom, and fear is in states where largely unvaccinated students and staff members are not wearing masks.

"Asking for civility in the face of systemic violence is playing right into the oppressors' hand. If we spend all of our time policing how people protest, then, conveniently, nothing will get done to attack the root of the issue. It's nothing more than an attempt to derail the public conversation surrounding reproductive rights." -- Arianna Coghill, "Protesters Showed Up Outside Kavanaugh's Home, and the Tone Police Lost Its Mind", Mother Jones, 2022-05-10 [thanks to extraarcha for pointing out this piece]