cogito ergo sum

Not everyone cares about wild animals, but the people who consider them an irreplaceable, non-monetizable good have a positive ethical argument to make on their behalf.

Cimate change shares many attributes of the economic system that’s accelerating it. Like capitalism, it is transnational, unpredictably disruptive, self-compounding, and inescapable. It defies individual resistance, creates big winners and big losers, and tends toward global monoculture—the extinction of difference at the species level, a monoculture of agenda at the institutional level. It also meshes nicely with the tech industry, by fostering the idea that only tech, whether through the efficiencies of Uber or some masterstroke of geoengineering, can solve the problem of greenhouse-gas emissions.

--Franzen, The New Yorker.

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Those melancholic angels that live in the high world, strangely indifferent to power and earthly territorial ambitions (unlike the baboons). the monks in this kingdom have no interest in politics, only in ritual chants and singing.

'Not only had he the wisdom to stay high and small, protecting his treasured freedoms against the false lure of evolutionary progress into gravid grossness and social complication, but he also found the voice its diatonic home and saw that it was good and stayed there.'

---Dudley Young, Origins of the Sacred.