Category: Uncategorized
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Your Occasional Stoic — Do Not Mourn An Unknown Future; Do Not Fear Death
Even if you are going to live three thousand years, or as many times ten thousand years, remember that no man loses any other life than the one which he now lives, or lives any other life than the one he now loses. The longest and shortest are then to the same. For the present…
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Your Occasional Stoic — Pity the Gossiping Neighbor
Nothing is more wretched than a man who is always out and about, running around in circles. As Pindar says, the poet says, “delving deep in the bowels of the earth” seeking by conjecture what is in the minds of his neighbors, without perceiving that it is sufficient to attend to the divinity within him.…
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Proulx’s The Shipping News
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx I read the Shipping News in 1997 when I was twenty-two years old. It is hard to articulate now the effect it had on me. It’s moving, its beautiful, and it’s the first time I self-consciously realized I was reading a literary novel. I’d read other serious novels before,…
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Your Occasional Stoic — Only Children Fear Death
How quickly all things disappear, our bodies lost, in time even the memory of them will disappear, what is the nature of the things we experience, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain? How worthless, contemptible, sordid, perishable, and dead they are — all this is part…
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My Idiosyncratic Guide to Books on Postwar Fascism
I’m a little puzzled myself at how many books on post-war fascism I’ve read. What’s the allure? Perhaps its a fear that these ideas, which never went away, would one day resurface into the mainstream? Perhaps its trying to grapple with how anyone can be filled with this kind of hate and paranoia? However you…
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Leonard and Gallagher’s Heavy Radicals
Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists Revolutionary Union / Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980 Aaron J. Leonard In the late sixties and early seventies, many young American leftists began drifting away from the amorphous politics of the mainstream anti-war movement and towards a sort of militant leftism influenced by Moa. They formed first…
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Review: Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air
Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che Max Elbaum In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Students for a Democratic Society dissolved, some young leftists took the path of nihilistic armed struggled and joining weatherman, and other such groups. Others decided to take their lessons from Lenin ad Mao…
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Your Occasional Stoic — You May Die Today
It is possible you may die today. Regulate every act and thought accordingly. But to die, if there are gods, is not a thing to be afraid of, for the gods will not involve you in evil. But if indeed the gods do not exist, or if they have no concern about human affairs, what…
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Ahmed, My Old Bodega Guy
I was inspired by last night’s demonstration by Brooklyn’s Yemeni bodega owners and thought I’d share a little about my local guy, Ahmed from New Dubai Mart. Ahmed and his brother left Yemen more than a decade ago, first working as laborers in Dubai to save up enough money to make the trip to the…
Milo and the Calf 