#blaise-pascal — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #blaise-pascal, aggregated by home.social.
-
Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.
— Blaise Pascal
-
QOTD 💬
Each chapter of 𝘈𝘴𝘴𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘴 𝘈𝘯𝘰𝘯𝘺𝘮𝘰𝘶𝘴 by #RobHart opens with a quote from someone famous, the kind of line that sets the mood before the scene even starts.
Prologue: “𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺’𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘮𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘮 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘮𝘢𝘯’𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘪𝘵 𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘦𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘳𝘰𝘰𝘮 𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘦.” - #BlaisePascal
Read them all at our 🔗 link in the comments
#assassinsanonymous #qotd #bookstodon -
We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.
-- Blaise Pascal -
Since we cannot be universal and know all that is to be known of everything, we ought to know a little about everything.
-- Blaise Pascal -
Blaise Pascal on the Intuitive vs. the Logical Mind and How We Come to Know Truth
-
“Stercus accidit”*…
The Wealth of the Nation (1942) by Seymour Fogel. Fine Arts Collection, United States General Services AdministrationAs we try to understand the rifts afflicting our nation and world, many turn to Marx and his framework of class. But in a provocative essay, Catherine Nichols suggests that it was David Hume (in an 1752 essay that identified the unfethering of wealth from land) who identified the origin of our political divisions…
Describing the political map in terms of Left and Right is an accepted convention all over the world, almost to the point of cliché. Yet it is surprisingly complicated to explain whose interests lie on each side of this spectrum. For example, if the Left supports the interests of workers over the interests of employers, why are Left-leaning regions of the United States and elsewhere in the world among the richest? When Japan and South Korea sought to become economic powerhouses in the later 20th century, they adopted Leftist policies such as strong public education, universal healthcare and increased gender equality – if countries seeking to compete in capitalist arenas adopt broadly Leftist policies, then how do we explain why Leftists are always talking about overthrowing capitalism? And if the Left is somehow both the party of workers’ rights and the party of material wealth, then whose interests are supported by the Right? Given such contradictions, how did these terms become so central to modern politics?
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ come from the seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the French Revolution, where the combatants used the medieval estate groupings to define their battle lines. According to their writings, land-owning aristocrats (the Second Estate) were the party of the Right, while the interests of nearly everyone else (the Third Estate) belonged to the Left. This Third Estate included peasants working for the landowners but also every other kind of business owner and worker. Decades later, Karl Marx offered a different analysis of capitalism: he put owners of both land and businesses together on one side (the bourgeoisie), while grouping workers from fields and factories on the other side (the proletariat) in a single, world-wide class struggle. The trouble with both these ways of parsing Left and Right is that voting patterns never seem to line up with class. Both historic analyses leave us with questions about the contemporary world – and not just the paradox of why so many Left-leaning places are so rich. Why, for example, do working-class conservatives appear to vote against their material interests, year in and year out, across generations?
The 18th-century philosopher and political theorist David Hume had answers to these questions, though he was writing decades before the French Revolution. While his essay ‘Of Public Credit’ (1752) was a warning about the dangers of Britain’s increasing reliance on debt financing, his apocalyptic vision of the future turned out to describe some features of our current political map surprisingly well. Hume was writing because he believed that debt financing had the power to upend Europe’s traditional power structure and culture by creating a new source of money divorced from tradition or responsibility: stocks and bonds. Unlike land, anyone with some cash could buy war bonds and get an immediate passive income in the form of interest. This was the thin end of the wedge caused by the debt financing that Hume believed was destroying every part of society. The governments of antiquity, Hume argued, saved money to use in battle and then waged wars in self-defence, or else to expand their territory. But the British had invented a new form of warfare that Hume saw no precedent for, even in the merchant states of Nicollò Machiavelli’s Italy: war for trade, funded with money borrowed from private stockholders…
[Nichols unpacks Hume’s observations (centrally, that three groups with stakes in the status quo, heretability, and the sanctity of “family and family hierarchy”tradition”– landowners, aging parents, and want to preserve old power structures, including the family– and traces their relevance, from Hume’s time to ours…]
… There are many reasons for people aligning Right or Left, which is why analyses of class and material interests fall short of describing the realities of people’s politics. Hume foresaw that these specific groups would resent the economic sea-change of the 18th century – and he was correct. Many people would rather have land and power than money and liberty.
Still, the power of the Right hasn’t doomed the Left – no more than the Spanish Inquisition doomed the rise of the Left in 18th-century England and France. As long as governments want to keep the value of their currencies from falling, someone in their ranks will be using the methods of the Left and inventiveness that brought us everything from our banking system to gay marriage. We don’t need to resurrect communism or focus narrowly on class, following Marx. The experiments are far from over, and we should remember that the Left is generally where money comes from in modern times. We give away too much power when we forget it…
Rethinking Right and Left: “Landholder vs stockholder,” from @catherinenichols.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
As for how it’s going at the moment (and further to Hume and the quote in this post’s title), see: “MAGA’s Betrayal of Small Business,” from @pkrugman.bsky.social.
* “shit happens”– often attributed to David Hume, reflecting his skeptical view that human understanding, particularly of cause-and-effect, is limited to habitual belief from experience, implying that unforeseen, messy outcomes (“shit”) inevitably occur in life despite our reasoning.
###
As we sort the Whigs from the Tories, we might recall that it was on this date 1656 that Blaise Pascal (writing under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte) published the first of his Provential Letters (Lettres provinciales), a series of eighteen polemical letters using humor to attack Jesuits for their use of casuistry and their moral laxity. Though the Letters were a popular success, they had little immediate effect on politics or the clergy. But they influenced later French writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and ultimately persuaded Pope Alexander to condemn “laxity” in the church and order a revision of casuistic texts.
#BlaisePascal #culture #DavidHume #economics #history #JeanJacquesRousseau #Jesuits #KarlMarx #philosophy #politicalDivision #politics #ProventialLetters #religion #society #sociology #Voltaire -
Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
-- Blaise Pascal⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #BlaisePascal #Infinity #Nothingness
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #ChacoCanyon #Panopainting #NewMexico
-
Who is going to teach you to sit silently?
That is the most difficult thing in the world. You can do everything very easily, but the easiest thing, to sit silently, seems to be the most difficult.Osho
-
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.
-- Blaise Pascal⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #BlaisePascal #Evil #Religion
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Mangrove #RabbitKey #Everglades #Florida
-
RE: https://mastodon.social/@cobrate/114823795441512769
Suite 1642 https://mastodon.social/@cobrate/114846875517408939
(2/3) ... de Cinq-Mars contre le cardinal Richelieu #religion #politique -> Abraham Fabert nommé gouverneur royal de Sedan : par sa diplomatie, permet à la ville de conserver ses privilèges et tolère le culte protestant + développe #economie de la ville -> début draperie #coton sedanaise #textile #agriculture (cf 1424 1611 1646 1870) + #BlaisePascal 19 ans créé la 1ère 'calculatrice' = la 'pascaline' ...
-
A Paris court blocks the auction of the earliest-known calculator.
One of the world's first calculating machines will not go to auction as scheduled after a Paris court provisionally blocked La Pascaline, a 400-year-old calculating machine, from being exported from France.
Auction house Christie's confirmed it will not proceed with bidding for the machine, developed by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1642.
-
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.
-- Blaise Pascal⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #BlaisePascal #Evil #Religion
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Panopainting #Flowers #Junkyard #Minnesota
-
Since we cannot be universal and know all that is to be known of everything, we ought to know a little about everything.
-- Blaise Pascal -
#livre Petite vie de #BlaisePascal de Bernard Sesé
-> UK : John Wallis via son frère qui utilisait des livres imprimés (cf ....) pour marchands -> naissance de la science à l'aide des mathématiques mis en forme par ... avec les chiffres indo-arabes. -> invention du signe algébrique de l'infini + pariticipe à la création de la Société Royale -> France imitation -> toutes les cours royales.
#science #maths #chiffre #nombre #culture #zero #calculs #gestion #comptabilite #mesures #code #quantite
-
It is not certain that everything is uncertain.
-- Blaise Pascal -
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.
-- Blaise Pascal⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #BlaisePascal #Evil #Religion
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Guangxi #China #LiRiver #LiJiang #TowerKarst #Geology
-
We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.
-- Blaise Pascal
