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Helen De Cruz

@Helenreflects

10 Mar

Watching a Sanderson video on how to publish your novel. S. says how it used to be publishers would also publish "mid-listers", books that had a steady fan base but not bestsellers. Now, the big publishers just want bestsellers. Why? 1/

Sanderson says that that it's because of indy publishing. If you can self-publish and have a fan base you'll be better off than if you're mid-listing at a big publisher. But I'm not so sure. It seems to me this is really driven by the publishing world. 2/

Another thing that's remarkable is how the shifting/slush reading is now done by agents and basically you can't (already for a while) send directly to big publishers. So you get all these middle-people where no middle-person used to exist (cf also real estate etc). 3/

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Helen De Cruz

@Helenreflects

20 Jan

@travisthewriter

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan Ah that's a pity! I think Arendt works very well for intro phil course. She sought to understand how ordinary, decent people could enable something like the Nazis. I mean, people who voted for Nazis were people w families etc. not psychopaths, law-abiding citizens. So why?

@travisthewriter

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan Arendt also focused on stalinism. To her, Nazism and stalinism (in her Origins of Totalitarianism) were similar in that respect that they are totalitarian regimes enabled by a mass of people 2/

@travisthewriter

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan A key term for her is a "mass", a mass is when people are fractured, isolated, the social fabric is destroyed to such an extent they can't organize themselves according to common or public interest 3/

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Helen De Cruz

@Helenreflects

12 Jan

I keep on seeing these calls that it's time to "heal our country", "heal our divisions". I see those calls now after the storming of the Capitol, and I saw them after the Brexit vote.
Christian philosophy can help us understand why this doesn't work. (small thread) 1/

The concept that I think is going to be very useful in helping us understand why we can't just call for healing is the concept of atonement. Here I draw on recent discussion in an excellent book by my colleague Eleonore Stump global.oup.com/academic/produ… 2/

As Eleonore Stump (2018, 7) has remarked, the word “atonement” does not mean repentance, though it has acquired this meaning over time. It literally means “at-onement,” the making whole of what is separate, the healing of a relationship that has been damaged. 3/

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Helen De Cruz

@Helenreflects

4 Jan

Little thread on the "We'll be fine, it will be my turn soon" narrative. When I express frustration and the snail pace of vaccine rollout, people will often say "I am fine, I'll be happy to let HCW, the vulnerable etc go first". Some reasons why I resist this narrative 1/

First, it is not at all clear that we are fine. We, as a society, are not fine. We have tried to make the best of it, but it's clear that the roll in human lives, economy, happiness and flourishing, mental health etc is huge and this will only stop when the pandemic ends 2/

So why have we grown all complacent so close to the finish line? Why should we accept that although states and countries have had *months and months* to plan this fall so behind their own targets? I mean, the fact that vaccines are coming wasn't exactly a surprise! 3/

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Helen De Cruz

@Helenreflects

29 Dec 20

Some philosophers whose work I read in 2020 that I didn't really know before
Wang Yangming (1472–1529), neo-Confucian Chinese philosopher and general
Jane Addams (1860-1935), American social reformer and pragmatist
Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), Russian anarchist. 1/

I think an interesting thread that unites all of them, though they lived and worked in different times and places, is the notion that we are all interconnected and interdependent. It's such an important insight, as we are all experiencing now 2/

And yet, most western societies do not have the notion of interdependence in what Mary Midgley would call their "philosophical plumbing". Western societies still have the weird belief that technology alone (vaccines, green tech etc) will bail us out of any problems 3/

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Helen De Cruz

@Helenreflects

29 Dec 20

Reading Kropotkin (1903, Mutual Aid, ch on the medieval city) sing the praises of the Medieval free city, of the principles of cooperation, localism, independence and interdependence enjoyed by its citizens, lamenting the nation state building of 16th century 1/

He thinks guilds are a natural and spontaneous way for people to organize themselves. Guilds respond "to a deeply inrooted want of human nature ; and it embodied all the attributes which the State appropriated later on for its bureaucracy and police, and much more than that." 2/

Contrast Kropotkin's sunny view of guilds with more negative appraisals, e.g., Adam Smith "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices" 3/

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