Fiona > Recent Status Updates

"Their 2014 report on the effects of Fair Trade certification in Ethiopia and Uganda found no improvement in the lives of workers on coffee farms, especially women. A 2020 study of the effects of Fair Trade in Costa Rica also found little benefit for unskilled workers, but did report higher sales prices, greater sales, and more revenues for coffee-farm owners—the target for Fair Trade efforts."

"And hardly anyone except a lawyer or lobbyist can tell the difference between 'reduces the risk of heart disease' (an FDA-authorized health claim with considerable scientific backing) and 'supports a healthy heart' (a structure/function claim needing no or hardly any scientific substantiation)."

"Following the ingredients is “Contains.” For Blueberry Cheerios, the box discloses “Contains bioengineered ingredients.” This tells you that at least one of its ingredients, unspecified, has been genetically engineered. Presumably, you are supposed to know that the most likely bioengineered ingredients are from corn (corn starch, corn syrup), canola oil, or sugar (if from sugar beets)."

"Distance tests a horse’s strength; time reveals a person’s heart."

"I am even able to work out, for each line, the stations at which trains are passing one another at that particular moment. This brings me great pleasure. The crossing of the trains is inevitable in time, but the meeting of their passengers in space is entirely accidental. I can fantasize endlessly about the lives led by all these people who, in faraway places, are brushing past one another at this very moment."

I'd like this more if it weren't for the darned plot device of sidestepping some big lifechanging event in the past they're all avoiding mentioning except in indirect ways. 🙄

I am really enjoying this weird body horror-ish collection of short stories. I love stuff like this.

"The highly religious tend to view good works more in a personal, private context, helping to explain why religious Americans donate more of their income to charity than do the secular. In contrast, atheists are more likely to view good works as a collective responsibility, helping to explain why they are the ones who are more likely to support candidates advocating wealth redistribution to decrease inequality."

So do secular primes affect theists as well?

Footnote 8: "Physicist Sean Carroll emphasizes this dichotomy, noting how in the nonclassical micro world, there is no arrow of time; the only difference between the past and the future is that one is easier to explain and the other is easier to influence, and neither interests the universe. It is only at the macro level of classical physics that our usual sense of time becomes meaningful."

"One is that determinism allows you to explain why something happened, whereas predictability allows you to say what happens next. Another way is the woolly-haired contrast between ontology and epistemology; the former is about what is going on, an issue of determinism, while the latter is about what is knowable, an issue of predictability."

"Where I am definitely trying to sound pejorative and worse is when this ahistorical view of judging people’s behavior is moralistic. Why would you ignore what came before the present in analyzing someone’s behavior? Because you don’t care why someone else turned out to be different from you."

Is it supposed to be ironic that she's a sociopath who loves animals? "She flexed her fingers, wishing for a moment when she could pick up a rifle and shoot this cowardly prick who paid big money to kill animals bred for slaughter."

Should be "tic" not "tick" and this writing still sucks.

"Show me a neuron (or a group of neurons, or an entire brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will. The point of the first half of this book is to establish that this can’t be shown."

Oh, this is a guy who uses footnotes as commentary asides.

“Because those who are good question themselves. Because those who are good always wonder if there was a better way, a way that could have helped more and hurt less. That feeling is why you are good.”

This has been giving me vibes of a Greek tragedy.

This writing is so bad.

"How we imagine the matter of water matters. To recognize its ceaseless migrancy is to recognize that we live in a fundamentally decentralized world, engaged always in multiple forms of relation – and that power can be crucial in determining the capacity of those relations to animate or to exhaust their participants."

"Many details of what is known as the ‘Coromandel Slave Trade’ are only now coming to light – for the Dutch have been more efficient than even the British at disguising the barbarisms of their empire."

"The area is honeycombed by termites, but the villagers give rice to the termites each morning, so that the termites don’t eat their buildings. And it works! I am very interested in this idea of so-called “pest species” being better understood as “tax collectors” for the more-than-human world.’"

"To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of ‘life’, and in so doing – how had George Eliot put it? – ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’."

"A good grammar of animacy can still re-enchant existence. To imagine that a river is alive causes water to glitter differently. New possibilities of encounter emerge – and loneliness retreats a step or two. You find yourself falling in love outward, to use Robinson Jeffers’s beautiful phrase."

"This infrastructural reframing of the river, [Martin Heidegger] argued, was symbolic of the broader consequences of technocracy’s administrative effort to entrap nature ‘as a calculable coherence’. Nothing is good in and of itself; everything must be good for something."

“If two people are truly of the same mind, then they need not be swept away before acting. They can simply follow the proper procedures.” “Come on. Love is being swept away.”

"In another essay, comparing herself to a friend who was paralyzed from the neck down, Deegan writes, “Recovery does not refer to an end product or result. It does not mean that the paralyzed man and I were ‘cured.’ In fact, our recovery is marked by an ever-deepening acceptance of our limitations.” She proposes that “transformation rather than restoration becomes our path.”

"She had discovered that 'real loneliness,' as Fromm-Reichmann writes, is 'potentially a communicable experience, one which can be shared.'"

"But that question—'Am I the insane one, or is it society?'—diminishes the reality of mental disability and presumes the impossible: that the self can be divorced from the society that shapes it."

It's funny that this one about a woman who doesn't know what she is like when not on meds is the one that is resonating the most with me.