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In this Professor Roy presentation we get to hear about how international sanctions killed half a million Iraqi children, how Saddam Hussein was first backed, then baited, and then finally killed off by US foreign policy, and the true reasons we invaded Iraq in 2003 and kicked off what Chris Hedges called “the greatest strategic blunder in the nation's history” and what Noam Chomsky calls “the greatest crime of the 21st century”.

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Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8BGpohOupQ

Posted December 2018

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In this conversation with environmental ethicist Guillermo Zapata we discuss the role of indigenous philosophy in shaping our approach to environmental problems, the most pressing threats emerging from climate change, and how we can resist the encroachment of corporate and political interests that are contrary to rational and urgent action of climate change and the Sixth Mass Extinction.

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Citations

1. Indigenous philosophy and Rousseau/Enlightenment: The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-everything
2. French philosopher who conceived technology as an organism: Jacques Ellul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul#On_technique
3. Dutch microplastics study: https://phys.org/news/2022-03-scientists-microplastics-blood.html
4. All rainwater is poison: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62391069
5. The Green Scare 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Scare
6. Sheldon Wolin concept “Inverted Totalitarianism” is developed in his book “Democracy Incorporated." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Wolin#Fate_of_democracy

Guest Reading Recommendations:

1. Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17465709-braiding-sweetgrass
2. Right Story, Wrong Story - Tyson Yunkaporta: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199122606-right-story-wrong-story
3. Sand Talk - Tyson Yunkaporta: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45449501-sand-talk
4. How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42771901-how-to-do-nothing
5. Indigenizing Philosophy through Land - Brian Burkhart: https://msupress.org/9781611863307/indigenizing-philosophy-through-the-land/

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Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world.

-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

00:00:00 Intro

00:00:51 Part 1: The Grand Wealth Redistribution Scheme

01:57:01 Part 2: From Poland to Reagan

03:54:18 Part 3: The Promotion of Unfettered Greed

05:38:33 Part 4: Radiation and Madness

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Original YouTube Page - https://www.youtube.com/@TheAustinSchool

Original YouTube Video (Part 1) -https://youtu.be/8Dnp7lOObjU?si=ju8L-KH9Vzu7Bcwg

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Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves.

-Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 1948

The Rainer Maria Rilke text that Merton references is Letter Seven from "Letters to a Young Poet"

https://genius.com/Rainer-maria-rilke-letter-seven-annotated

Later Merton cites Rilke's "Book of Hours"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Hours

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Original Reference (Titled “Rilke and his search for God”) - https://merton.bellarmine.edu/s/Merton/page/AVnovices

Publication Date - February 2nd, 1966

Thomas Merton - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton

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When we are the victims of illusion, we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty…. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

-Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1947

Presented by Sr. Ann Astell at the University of Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.

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Original Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X3vuOiFYKc

Publication Date - August 25th, 2014

Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture - https://www.youtube.com/@ndethics

Simone Weil - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil

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According to Max Planck, ‘Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.’ And he continued: ‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

-Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

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The Master and His Emissary - https://a.co/d/2gDbuCW

The Matter with Things - https://a.co/d/2jJVXZg

Original Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REB7GOxX5Mk

Dr. McGilchrist's YouTube Page - https://www.youtube.com/@DrIainMcGilchrist

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Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.

-Slavoj Zizek, 2005 citing Frederic Jameson.

Happy Labor Day, you disgusting proles (I love you)

-Will

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Original YouTube Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgPqk8-HPGQ&t=1380s

Pervert's Guide to Cinema:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYuI4SFw4g0

Frederic Jameson:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Jameson

Slavoj Zizek:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEe

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A Portuguese Jew living in Holland, Spinoza was excommunicated because of the unorthodox view he took of God. Spinoza wrote in the rationalist style of a geometric proof to develop his idea of God as the infinite, indwelling cause of all things, a unified causal system that is virtually synonymous with nature.

In this system, there is no free will, for all things are necessary and inevitable, and all objects, including humans, are part of God's active self-expression. Our minds can participate in the eternity of God by focusing on natural laws and the way all things follow from God or nature. Human fulfillment is possible, he believed, only by rejecting our finite, flawed selves and identifying with the eternal within us. Spinoza believed that by doing so we can love God with an immediate devotion without asking anything in return.

Script authored by Spinoza scholar J. Thomas Cook.

Enjoy.

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https://philpeople.org/profiles/j-thomas-cook

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza

https://archive.org/details/thegiantsofphilosophy