Tao Te Ching - chapter 13

From Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - A Comparative Study :


Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 13

Accept disgrace willingly.
Accept misfortune as the human condition.

What do you mean by "Accept disgrace willingly"?
Accept being unimportant.
Do not be concerned with loss and gain.
This is called "accepting disgrace willingly."

What do you mean by "Accept misfortune as the human condition"?
Misfortune comes from having a body.
Without a body, how could there be misfortune?

Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things.
Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things.


(translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)

Thirteen kinds of women should be avoided [as lovers]

From Notes on the Kama Sutra :

Thirteen kinds of women should be avoided [as lovers]: Lepers, madwomen, women thrown out of their caste, those who are incapable of keeping a secret, unchaste women, those who are too old, those whose skin is too white or too black, and those who smell bad, as well as kinswomen, those with whom one has friendship, those who have taken monastic vows, as well as the women of one's family, the wives of one's friends, of Brahmans, and of persons belonging to the royal family. According to the Babhravyas, when it is certain that a woman has had relations with five men, there are no longer any prohibitions. (p. 82)

Later we are told:

A girl who sleeps too much, weeps a lot, or goes out walking alone should be rejected [as a wife]. If she has a bad reputation, is secretive, breaks her word, is bald, has marks on her skin like a cow, has breasts that are too big, or yellowish hair; if she is round-shouldered, very thin, hairy, disobedient, immoral, has uterine hemorrhages, is agitated; if she has childhood friends or a very young brother, and if her hands are always damp, she should be rejected. (p.220)

[ Also fun: Kama Sutra Positions For Internet Writers ]

No Earth Hour in China; it conflicts with Serf Liberation Day, AKA Invasion of Tibet Day

From Treehugger :

by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 03.27.09

They are not celebrating Earth Hour in China; it conflicts with Serf Liberation Day, a holiday intended to "thoroughly reveal the vicious nature of the feudal serf system and the ulterior political purpose of the 1959 armed rebellion by the Dalai Lama group".

According to Jonathan Watts in the Guardian, "Chinese journalists and student groups have been told to scale back their participation because images of cities and campuses turning dark do not fit the upbeat propaganda message that the authorities wanted to convey.... on the anniversary of the entry into Tibet of the People's Liberation Army and the fleeing of the Dalai Lama into exile."

Some cities in China are participating; Shanghai is turning out the lights. And some are subverting the rules a bit:

At Beijing University, the authorities have forbidden students from overtly participating in Earth Hour. Instead they will organise a "star-gazing" evening that will require them to turn off the lights to see the heavens more clearly.

[ source: Psychedelic Tourist ]

'On April 1 (no joke), Milan Kundera turns 80'

From Eternal exile of Milan Kundera by Geordie Williamson :

For those of a certain generation, the sight of a Milan Kundera paperback can provoke a jolt of involuntary memory every bit as effective as Proust's madeleine.

[ image: Milan Kundera by Eric Lobbecke ]

Faber &Faber's black-and-white editions of his novels and stories were once the obligatory intellectual furniture of a thousand student bookshelves.

Titles such as Life is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being promised a kind of metaphysical bawdy, mixing high seriousness and low humour, and subverting traditional realism with elements of the surreal.

But these fictions were always more than Iron Curtain exotica. Kundera's talent, though unevenly applied throughout his career, has always been impressive in essence and deeply original. His method has been to graft abstract philosophical ideas with fictional invention to create narrative cyborgs: intellectually speculative, formally experimental, intermittently essayistic, yet warm-blooded, grounded in human experience. His characters are not mere automatons, programmed with pure theory and set to shuffling: they are sophisticated neural networks that grow through those dilemmas of love, history, nation and politics the author obliges them to confront.

Few, for example, have read and fewer understand German philosopher Martin Heidegger when he writes about truth and untruth, and their relation to human freedom (me included). But everyone can appreciate Sabina, the embodiment of his ideas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Sabina is one of the four central characters of Kundera's best-known and most successfully realised fiction. She escapes from communist Czechoslovakia to the West, only to be ground down by what Janet Malcolm, in her review of the novel, called a perpetual struggle against theunbearable banality of her situation as an emigre artist:

Sabina had once had an exhibit that was organised by a political organisation in Germany. When she picked up the catalogue, the first thing she saw was a picture of herself with a drawing of barbed wire superimposed on it. Inside she found a biography that read like the life of a saint or a martyr: she had suffered, struggled against injustice, been forced toabandon her bleeding homeland, yet was carrying on the struggle. "Her paintings are a struggle for happiness" was the final sentence.

Sabina's anger at this falsification leads her to make her own. Kundera regards this decision, to alter aspects of her background, then hide her nationality altogether after moving to the US, as an "attempt to escape the kitsch that people wanted to make of her life". Indeed, all of the freedoms that Sabina wins are won through untruth, concealment, betrayal. She is an emigre who achieves absolute freedom -- from country, parents, friends and lovers -- only at the cost of displacement, solitariness and growing dread at the thought of death:

they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

Of course, Sabina's response to the experience of exile shadows Kundera's own; she is his ideal and his cautionary tale. In the novel, Sabina flees to Geneva soon after the Russian invasion of 1968. Kundera was expelled from Czechoslovakia's Communist Party in 1970 for his involvement in the events of that same Prague Spring. He was made a non-person in his home country -- his poetry, essays, drama and fiction pulled from the shelves -- before deciding on French exile in 1975.

Kundera shares with Sabina the emigre's necessary betrayal and subsequent disappointment. He, too, escaped from totalitarian kitsch into a free world possessed of what John Updike calls our more subtle enslavements. It is the same world that inspired James Joyce to write the following:

No man can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.

On April 1 (no joke), Milan Kundera turns 80. An international conference will be held in his birthplace of Brno. In New York, a series of concerts of the music of Leos Janacek are being held in his honour. Kundera will attend none of these events. And while newspapers, magazines and websites across the world weigh up the cost for the author of his adherence to Joyce's dictum, pondering how well has he balanced the demands of the crowd with his isolate stance, it's worth asking how much of Sabina's future has become Kundera's, too.

~ more... ~

Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse

From Wikipedia :

The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse is a term for internet criminals, or the imagery of internet criminals.

A play on Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, it refers to types of criminals who use the internet to facilitate crime and consequently jeopardize the rights of honest internet users. There does not appear to be an exact definition for who the Horsemen are, but they are usually described as terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, and organized crime. Other sources use slightly different descriptions but generally refer to the same types of criminals. The term was coined by Timothy C. May in 1988, who referred to them as "child pornographers, terrorists, abortionists, abortion protestors, etc."[1] when discussing the reasons for limited civilian use of cryptography tools. Among the most famous of these is in the Cypherpunk FAQ,[2] which states:

   8.3.4. "How will privacy and anonymity be attacked?"
   [...]
          - like so many other "computer hacker" items, as a tool for
             the "Four Horsemen": drug-dealers, money-launderers,
             terrorists, and pedophiles.

  17.5.7. "What limits on the Net are being proposed?"
   [...]
          + Newspapers are complaining about the Four Horsemen of the
             Infocalypse:
            - terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money
               launderers

The term seems to be used less often in discussions about online criminal activity, but more often in discussions about the negative, or chilling effects such activity has had on regular users' daily experiences online. It also used frequently to describe the political tactic Think of the children. A message from the same mailing list states:[3]

 How to get what you want in 4 easy stages:
 
 1. Have a target "thing" you wish to stop, yet lack any moral, or
 practical reasons for doing so?
 
 2. Pick a fear common to lots of people, something that will evoke a
 gut reaction: terrorists, pedophiles, serial killers.
 
 3. Scream loudly to the media that "thing" is being used by
 perpetrators.  (Don't worry if this is true, or common to all other
 things, or less common with "thing" than with other long established
 systems - payphones, paper mail, private hotel rooms, lack of bugs in
 all houses etc)
 
 4. Say that the only way to stop perpetrators is to close down
 "thing", or to regulate it to death, or to have laws forcing en-mass
 tapability of all private communications on "thing".  Don't worry if
 communicating on "thing" is a constitutionally protected right, if you
 have done a good job in choosing and publicising the horsemen in 2, no
 one will notice, they will be too busy clamouring for you to save them
 from the supposed evils.

The four supposed threats may be used all at once or individually, depending on the circumstances:[4]

Pedophiles fill in the gaps when the terrorists aren't doing anything. I mean, how many more buildings have fallen here in the U.S. since 9/11? Not many. So, given the absence of an active external threat, an internal one must be manufactured.