Why infinite libraries are treated skeptically in the annals of science fiction and fantasy
.. “The number of pages in this book is no more or less than infinite. None is the first page, none is the last.”
.. The appearance of order is an illusion. Many of the books contain “senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency,” and many of the people who are born and eventually die in the library are miserable for their fate.
.. Socrates worried that writing would destroy human memory. And, indeed, the oral tradition was, across many cultures, upended by print. In the Victorian era, people were cautioned that reading fiction would make their minds atrophy. The telegraph, telephone, television, and internet, among other technologies, have all prompted similar concerns about how technology might destroy intellectual rigor.
.. The expectation, increasingly, is that information ought not be collected in one place, but kept everywhere, so that it is accessible at all times.
.. The great paradox for those who seek to reconfigure the world’s knowledge systems, is that the real threat of information loss is occurring at a time when there seems to be no way to stop huge troves of personal data from being collected—by governments and by corporations.
He is winning the nomination on the strength of the unshakable bond he has built with the white Republicans who consider themselves to be the most dispossessed of Americans.
.. in North Carolina, where one of his white supporters sucker-punched a black protester, he said, “I thought it was very, very appropriate. [The protester] was swinging. He was hitting people. And the audience hit back. And that’s what we need a little bit more of.”
A videotape of that event had emerged, and needless to say, Trump was lying. The black protester was walking up a flight of stairs inside a sports arena with his arms at his side when seventy-eight-year-old John Franklin McGraw yelled “Hey!,” got the young man to look his way, and hit him in the face.
.. Each new outrage only confirms to his supporters that Trump is gleefully defying the establishment, and they love him for it.
.. He first vowed that he would look into paying the sucker-puncher’s legal costs; then a few days later denied he ever said that, even though it was there on video tape for all to hear.
.. The Trump movement clearly has some elements of the fascistic, at least in affect and tone. He evidently does not call for a one-party dictatorship; but he has been willing to approve of force against the opposition; and he has expressed “belligerent nationalism, racism, and militarism,” as one basic definition has it.
.. As long ago as last November, I was hearing from conservative sources that the big Republican money people were drawing up plans to mount an extensive campaign of attack ads against Trump designed to finish him off before Iowa. I was told that a few such meetings or conference calls took place. But nothing ever came of them. The different players had different ambitions, supported different candidates, or couldn’t agree on the best lines of attack.
.. The racial politics Trump has brought to the surface is something the party is particularly incapable of dealing with, since they all must know deep down that he is only doing openly what they have done more subtly for decades.
.. If you’re scheduled to do a segment at a certain time and date, and it becomes apparent once you get to the studio that Trump might be speaking at any moment, you know there’s a very strong chance your segment won’t happen. The channel will cut away to Trump.
.. And Trump? He’d spent not more than $10 million on paid media and received $1.9billion in free media. That’s nearly triple the other three major Republican candidates combined.7
.. Moonves said that the Trump phenomenon “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” adding:
Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now?… The money’s rolling in and this is fun…. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going. Donald’s place in this election is a good thing.8
.. Sanders attacked Clinton effectively on the ill effects on employment of trade deals, which she had supported throughout her career until her recent turnabout on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. She had no answer
As the theorist Walter J Ong pointed out in Orality and Literacy: Technologizing the Word (1982), it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, now to imagine how differently language would have been experienced in a culture of ‘primary orality’. There would be nowhere to ‘look up a word’, no authoritative source telling us the shape the word ‘actually’ takes.
.. In the absence of fixed, textual anchors for words, there would be a sharp sense that language is charged with power, almost magic: the idea that words, when spoken, can bring about new states of affairs in the world. They do not so much describe, as invoke.
.. Writing rapidly turned customs into laws, agreements into contracts, genealogical lore into history. In each case, what had once been fundamentally temporal and singular was transformed into something eternal (as in, ‘outside of time’) and general.
.. The freezing in text of dialectical reasoning, with a heavy admixture (however impure or problematic) of poetry, aphorism and myth, became the model for what, in the European tradition, was thought of as ‘philosophy’ for the next few millennia.
.. Within academic philosophy today, there is significant concern arising from how to make philosophy more ‘inclusive’ ..
.. As it happens, there are few members of primary oral cultures left in the world. And yet from a historical perspective the great bulk of human experience resides with them.
The event, carried live on the major cable networks, showed how Mr. Trump uses his media omnipresence to control his message. By railing at the questions, he was able to send a headline to voters, repeated on the chyrons — that the candidate raised money for vets — while mostly pushing past questions of when he did it and whether his earlier claims had been truthful at the time he made them.
.. He’s collected, by a New York Times estimate, $2 billion in free media. And he attacks, mocks and threatens news outlets when they aren’t “nice,” building bona fides with a voter base that has been encouraged for decades to see Big Media as the enemy.
.. He can glad-hand journalists, then turn peevish and furious. The whole impetus for the news conference, remember, was an event he held when he was angry at Fox News. Now he has nothing but nice things to say about Fox News, because he’s sewn up the nomination, and the network has become very, very nice to him.
.. “There were moments with the gorilla, the way he held that child, it was almost like a mother with a baby. It looked so beautiful and calm. And then there were moments when it looked pretty dangerous.”