Create accountLogin

Recent searches

No recent searches

Search options

Only available when logged in.
en.osm.town is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
An independent, community of OpenStreetMap people on the Fediverse/Mastodon. Funding graciously provided by the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

Administered by:

Server stats:

248
active users

en.osm.town: AboutProfiles directoryPrivacy policy

Mastodon: AboutGet the appKeyboard shortcutsView source codev4.3.7

#books

653 posts453 participants96 posts today
Public
Flipboard Culture Desk

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to spend a year living in strict adherence to the Bible, lucky you, someone has already done it for you. A.J. Jacobs spent all of 2006 playing a 10-string harp, avoiding his wife when she was menstruating, and walking around Manhattan with dollar bills strapped to his hands (That last one comes from Deuteronomy 14:25). He wrote about his experience in his best-seller “The Year of Living Biblically” and tells BigThink.com about the things he learned and the limits of rigid, absolute thinking:

flip.it/jWX9dT

Big ThinkWhat happens when you follow the Bible literally for a whole year?Journalist AJ Jacobs spent one year following the Bible as literally as possible. Here's what he learned about himself, God, and America.
#Culture#Books#Bible
Continued thread
Public
Melissa Santos

that gives me an idea!

Does any one want to do a bookclub (at least 2 weeks between meetings, probably more) for any of the following books:

1. Storytelling With Data - Knaflic
2. The Logic of Failure - Dorner
3. Algorithms of Oppression - Noble
4. Where we Stand: Class Matters - hooks
5. Probably Overthinking It - Downey
6. The Utopia of Rules - Graeber
7. W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits

many of these I own in paper, but that doesn't make me read them on my own

#books#reading
Public
Melissa Santos

I am "only" 104 books behind on my reading list right now. (fiction only, nonfiction is a separate list that never moves unless I have a bookclub)

I figured that wasn't that bad and then I realized there's a twitter link in the source column for some of the ones coming up, which must be PRETTY OLD.

#reading#books
Public
mgorny-nyan (he) :autism:🙀🚂🐧

Time for another book, this time something kinda scary:

George Lakoff — Moral Politics (1996)

The expert in cognitive linguistics puts a bold thesis: the politics of conservatives and liberals in the USA is based on morality, and that morality stems from two central family models: the Strict Father model, and the Nurturant Parent model.

Basically, the book is mostly focused on justifying this thesis. The author proceeds from detailing the two family models to the relevant family-based morality, and then — via "nation as a family" metaphor, to the political ideologies. A broad range of issues is discussed, and the conservative and liberal stands on these issues are explained using these models. What's important, the models also explain the apparent contradictions within ideologies (such as opposite attitude towards the death sentence and abortion), variations within ideologies, and actual political events of the recent years.

At the very end, the author explains why he finds the liberal worldview to match better what we know about the human mind, while conservatism is based on disproven assumptions.

Things are quite grim, though: the morality is deeply embedded in people's minds, and you can't expect to convince them via rational arguments. Conservatives have been using the family as a central point of their political narration for years, and they have been investing a lot in the conservative intellectuals and the spread of their ideology. On the other hand, liberals have pretty much engaged in self-defeating activities, partially as a result of their own morality. They would try to convince people via rational arguments, work issue-by-issue rather than at a higher level, and preferring to fund social programs rather than liberal intellectuals.

In my opinion, the book is still true today, perhaps more than ever. Furthermore, it also applies quite cleanly to the Polish politics of left-wing and right-wing parties.

Quotes:
social.treehouse.systems/@mgor
social.treehouse.systems/@mgor
social.treehouse.systems/@mgor
social.treehouse.systems/@mgor
social.treehouse.systems/@mgor

#books #bookstodon @bookstodon

Treehouse Mastodonmgorny-nyan (he) :autism:🙀🚂🐧 (@mgorny@treehouse.systems)""" Only a tiny amount of our thought is conscious. A typical estimate is about 2 percent, with about 98 percent of thought unconscious. Moral worldviews, like most deep ways of understanding the world, are typically unconscious. The more that a neural "idea-circuit" is used, the stronger it gets — and may eventually become permanent, effectively "hard-wired." Hence, most of what we will be discussing in this book occurs at the neural level and is likely to be unconscious. […] We know from experiments that conscious perception is not immediate. To recognize a visual input, a sound, or a touch input you have to have in your brain neural circuitry that is able to recognize it — that fits it. What if your sense input doesn't fit what is in your brain? Your brain changes it, if possible, to make it fit. Inputs from the senses presented to the eyes, ears, or touch take about one hundred milliseconds (a tenth of a second) before they can become conscious. That is so fast for conscious functioning that we don't notice any difference between the input to the senses and our conscious perception. But neurons fire on the scale of one millisecond (one thousandth of a second), and it take three to five milliseconds to fire again. It takes many neurons and a sequence of neural firings to take a sense input and turn it into a conscious perception. In that time, it is common for the visual, sound, or touch system to make a change, cancelling out part of what is present to the senses and creating a new input that fits the circuitry already in your brain. […] All of these happen in political discourse. Deep and persisting moral worldviews tend to be part of your brain circuitry and tend to become part of your identity. In most cases, the neural wiring — and your identity — stay, and the facts are ignored, dismissed, ridiculed, or attacked. It takes extraordinary openness, training, and awareness of this phenomenon to pay critical attention to the vast number of facts we are presented with each day. Few members of the general public — or those in politics or the media — fit this profile. […] The normal dismissal of daily facts that don't fit moral worldviews explains why so many conservatives deny global warming in the face not only of the vast range of scientific facts, but even in the face of images of melting glaciers and the reality of droughts and fires. It is not that science deniers say to themselves, "I'm going to deny the scientific facts." Instead, their brains work automatically and unconsciously so as to produce the effect of science denial. But science denial is not just relegated to conservatives. Many liberals took courses in fields like political science, economics, public policy, and law. They implicitly learned a worldview about reason itself, a worldview that is at odds with the scientific facts from the cognitive and brain sciences. They learned a centuries old theory of rationality that says that thought is conscious (when it is mostly unconscious), that it works by logic (it actually works by embodied primitives, frames, conceptual metaphor, and conceptual integration), that all people have the same logic (which is supposed to be what makes us rational animals). As a consequence, it should be true that if you just get the facts out to people, they will reason to the right conclusion. And so year after year, decade after decade, liberals keep telling facts to conservative audiences without changing many minds. This behavior by liberals is itself a form of science denial — the denial of the cognitive and brain sciences. It is simply irrational behavior by many people proud of their rationality. It is for this reason that so many liberals have a low opinion of conservatives, considering them to be either uninformed, stupid, greedy, mean, or just nuts. Some may be, just as some liberals may be. But on the whole, conservatives are normal people who happen to have a conservative moral worldview deeply embedded in their brains and whose personal identity is significantly defined by that worldview. It is not that facts don't matter. They obviously do — enormously. But the facts have to be framed in appropriately moral terms so that they can be taken seriously. To do that, you have to understand the worldviews of the people you are talking to, whether you are a liberal or a conservative. You have to know whether or not they are hardcore believers or bi-conceptual or pragmatic moderates. To have any hope of healing the divisions in our culture, we need to understand the worldview problem and make it part of public discourse. """ (George Lakoff, Moral politics: how liberals and conservatives think)
Continued thread
Public
Hannu Ikonen, MD

Oof, I'm not a true misanthrope or have hope not to be but this hits home.

"Risa finds herself unsettled in this part of the woods [on the lam] seeing food wrappers & broken bits of plastic bottles. The first sign of civilization is always trash."

#books#Unwind
Public
Paria sans portefeuille

"Jones is impatient with the outsize expectations laid at the feet of librarians. She stresses that the extent of what librarians owe their patrons, including the care they provide to those who wander in through their library doors, is elastic but not infinite."

Melina Moe considers #AmandaJones’s #ThatLibrarian: The Fight Against #BookBanning in America”

lareviewofbooks.org/article/ho

#USpol #bookbans #censorship #wokebashing #moralPanics #cyberharassment #memoirs #libraries #books @bookstodon

Public
Excessively Diverting

This is a newly updated list of events not only for Spring 2025 but also into December!

Tomorrow (May 4), there is a virtual event by the Massachusettes region of JASNA called "Austen's London." It begins at 2 p.m. EST. Click the link below for more details and where to buy tickets!

open.substack.com/pub/excessiv

#AmReading #AmWriting @bookstodon #books #Bookstodon #WritingCommunity #ReadingCommunity #Regency #Georgian #JaneAusten @romancelandia

Faded picture of Jane Austen holding a pink laptop. The overlay white text says, "Jane Austen and the Brontes: Issue #30 Upcoming virtual events for spring 2025. A list of virtual talks and presentations on Austen and the Brontes this spring."
Public
Dan McCullough

This is a long shot but does anyone have a Golden Guide “Reptiles & Amphibians” from the 50s?

I have a memory that in it, amphibians were said to be “less valued” (or something similar) compared to reptiles that could be used for science experiments and human food. There was a picture of a turtle soup can?

I don’t know if this is a real memory. I donated most of my guides when I left my naturalist position so was hoping someone might confirm. Kinda hoping I’m wrong.

#books#FieldGuides
Public
osfa_2030

Empecé a leer "Desacelerar o morir. Todo lo que hay que saber (y desmitificar) para comprender el decrecimiento" de Timothée Parrique (2022, en esp. 2024). TP es autor de una tesis doctoral sobre la economía política del decrecimiento: quería aprender sobre eso.
El título me parece regular... Me salté el principio que supuse que era la habitual crítica deprimente del crecimiento, que ya he leído media docena de veces, la parte de "morir". Empecé por el medio, "Pequeña historia del decrecimiento", que me está pareciendo apasionante. El desarrollo y descubrimiento paulatino de la crítica y las propuestas, desde los 60-70. ¿Cómo emerge un paradigma radical y emancipador?... Quizás demasiado eurocéntrico y androcéntrico hasta ahora, si acaso?!

Gracias a los amigos de Traficantes en Madrid
traficantes.net/libros/desacel
#decrecimiento #books #lecturas #Parrique #degrowth

Traficantes de Sueños · DESACELERAR O MORIR | TODO LO QUE HAY QUE SABER (Y DESMITIFICAR) PARA COMPRENDEREl deterioro ambiental ha llegado a niveles alarmantes. Y no se piense que ello es producido por "una supuesta naturaleza humana"; es el resultado de una organización social específica vinculada con una determinada visión política del mundo. "La primera causa del deterioro ecológico ?nos dice Parrique? no es la humanidad sino el capitalismo, la hegemonía del elemento económico sobre todos los demás y la búsqueda desenfrenada del crecimiento". El crecimiento se mide con una noción salida de la contabilidad en los años treinta del siglo XX: el producto interno bruto, un nuevo mito. Para la mayoría el crecimiento es sólo un aumento del PIB. Pero definir así el crecimiento equivale a describir el calor como un aumento de la temperatura: se trata de una descripción sin explicación. El crecimiento contabiliza con rigor una parte cada vez más insignificante de las actividades humanas: los bienes y servicios, pero no su repartición; las transacciones mercantiles, pero no los vínculos sociales; los valores monetarios, pero no los volúmenes naturales; "el PIB es tuerto en lo que se refiere al bienestar económico, ciego al bienestar humano, sordo al sufrimiento social y mudo respecto al estado del planeta". El decrecimiento, por otro lado, es una reducción de la producción y del consumo destinada a aligerar la huella ecológica, planificada democráticamente con un espíritu de justicia social y preocupada por el bienestar. Debemos construir el poscrecimiento, esto es, una economía estacionaria en armonía con la naturaleza, en la que las decisiones se tomen de manera conjunta y en la que las riquezas se compartan equitativamente con el fin de prosperar sin crecimiento. Este libro propone elegir lo menos, lo más ligero, lo más lento, lo más pequeño. Se refiere a un "decrecimiento sostenible y convivencial", que no es sólo una crítica del crecimiento económico sino también una exploración de la intersección entre la sostenibilidad medioambiental, la justicia social y el bienestar.
ExploreLive feeds
About