The soul, which is created quick to love, responds to everything that pleases, just as soon as beauty wakens it to act.

-Dante, Purgatorio, Canto 18

Come join my Patreon!

⁠https://patreon.com/HemlockPatreon⁠

-//-

Original Youtube:

⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOxpl-cIPJg&t=191s

"The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters."

-Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1929.

Come join my Patreon!

https://patreon.com/HemlockPatreon

Come join my Patreon!

https://patreon.com/HemlockPatreon

Credit for the copy below as well as the source videos goes to the great YouTube channel Philosophy Overdose. The lectures were first delivered in 1965.

Isaiah Berlin gives a series of 6 lectures on Romanticism and some of its sources. For Berlin, the Romantics set in motion a vast, unparalleled revolution in humanity’s view of itself. They destroyed the traditional notions of objective truth and validity in ethics with incalculable, all-pervasive results. As he said of the Romantics elsewhere: “The world has never been the same since, and our politics and morals have been deeply transformed by them. Certainly this has been the most radical, and indeed dramatic, not to say terrifying, change in men’s outlook in modern times.”

-//-

Philosophy Overdose:

https://www.youtube.com/@Philosophy_Overdose

YouTube Source Material:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhP9EhPApKE_9uxkmfSIt2JJK6oKbXmd-&si=6livdDSyZL9-vzhk

This is a personal post, I hope you enjoy.

"Our joy today is equal to the pain that made it"

-Aeschylus, Agamemnon.

Come to my Patreon for more.

https://patreon.com/HemlockPatreon

Come join my Patreon!

https://patreon.com/HemlockPatreon

In this episode, Chris Hedges interview Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin, exploring his work in books like Democracy Incorporated and Politics and Vision.

Recorded October 2014.

Professor Wolin passed away in October 2015.

-//-

Original video

https://youtu.be/YjfKosDBOzQ

The Real News Network

https://www.youtube.com/@therealnews

Sheldon Wolin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Wolin

Come join my Patreon!

https://patreon.com/HemlockPatreon

In this Professor Roy presentation we get to hear about how international sanctions killed half a million Iraqi children, how Saddam Hussein was first backed, then baited, and then finally killed off by US foreign policy, and the true reasons we invaded Iraq in 2003 and kicked off what Chris Hedges called “the greatest strategic blunder in the nation's history” and what Noam Chomsky calls “the greatest crime of the 21st century”. 

-//-

Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8BGpohOupQ

Posted December 2018

Come join my Patreon!

https://patreon.com/HemlockPatreon

In this conversation with environmental ethicist Guillermo Zapata we discuss the role of indigenous philosophy in shaping our approach to environmental problems, the most pressing threats emerging from climate change, and how we can resist the encroachment of corporate and political interests that are contrary to rational and urgent action of climate change and the Sixth Mass Extinction.

-//-

Citations

Guest Reading Recommendations:

Come join my Patreon!

https://patreon.com/HemlockPatreon

Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world.

-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

00:00:00 Intro

00:00:51 Part 1: The Grand Wealth Redistribution Scheme

01:57:01 Part 2: From Poland to Reagan

03:54:18 Part 3: The Promotion of Unfettered Greed

05:38:33 Part 4: Radiation and Madness

-//-

Original YouTube Page - https://www.youtube.com/@TheAustinSchool

Original YouTube Video (Part 1) -https://youtu.be/8Dnp7lOObjU?si=ju8L-KH9Vzu7Bcwg

Come join my Patreon!

https://patreon.com/HemlockPatreon

Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves.

-Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 1948

The Rainer Maria Rilke text that Merton references is Letter Seven from "Letters to a Young Poet"

https://genius.com/Rainer-maria-rilke-letter-seven-annotated

Later Merton cites Rilke's "Book of Hours"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Hours

-//-

Original Reference (Titled “Rilke and his search for God”) - https://merton.bellarmine.edu/s/Merton/page/AVnovices

Publication Date - February 2nd, 1966

Thomas Merton - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton

Come join my Patreon!

https://patreon.com/HemlockPatreon

When we are the victims of illusion, we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty…. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

-Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1947

Presented by Sr. Ann Astell at the University of Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.

-//-

Original Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X3vuOiFYKc

Publication Date - August 25th, 2014

Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture - https://www.youtube.com/@ndethics

Simone Weil - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil