Daily bread 10/26/2018

• 145 American/British Words People Frequently Mix Up and Misspell ~ IELTS Exams Tips Philippines | IELTS Review Strategies

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• Porvenir: Certificado de afiliación e historial laboral

  tags: porvenir pension

• 'The Invisible Network' Podcast - Episode 01: Ascension | NASA

  tags: NASA podcast

• Why Simone Weil is the patron saint of anomalous persons | Aeon Essays

  tags: ielts PTE

  • a species so rare, it had only one member
  • a Christian convert who criticised the Catholic Church
  • a communist sympathiser who denounced Stalinism and confronted Trotsky
  • As a child during the First World War, she refused sugar because soldiers on the front could have none
  • she died at 34 when working for the resistance government France libre in London, refusing to eat more than the citizens’ rations of her German-occupied France
  • ‘The intelligence is defeated as soon as the expression of one’s thought is preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word “we”.’
  • Uncritical collective thinking holds the free mind captive and does not allow for dissent.
  • she advocated the abolition of all political parties, which, she argued, were in essence totalitarian.
  • 1) A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.
    2) A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.
    3) The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.
  • ‘complete, unlimited freedom of expression for every sort of opinion, without the least restriction or reserve, is an absolute need on the part of the intelligence’
  • She believed it politically essential that every human soul feel ‘useful and even indispensable’ within the social body.
  • she believed in the redemptive power of punishment, arguing that it should ‘wipe out the stigma of the crime’ and offer an education to offenders, allowing for full re-entry into the community.
  • A perfectly pure love for one’s country bears a close resemblance to the feelings which his young children, his aged parents, or a beloved wife inspire in a man. The thought of weakness can inflame love in just the same way as can the thought of strength …
  • the ethical urgency with which she approached the problem of education
  • her sustained campaign against a self-interested, narcissistic citizenry
  • her emphasis on first-hand knowledge (of the assembly-line worker’s plight, for example, or the farmhand’s daily exertions)
  • her belief that technology’s distancing effects would lead to total alienation
  • the congruity of her preaching and her practice
  • ‘The youth of our schools are as much obsessed by their examinations as our workmen engaged in piece-work are by their pay packets.’
  • A lot of people think that a little peasant boy of the present day who goes to primary school knows more than Pythagoras did, simply because he can repeat parrot-wise that the Earth moves round the Sun. In actual fact, he no longer looks up at the heavens. This Sun about which they talk to him in class hasn’t, for him, the slightest connexion with the one he can see. He is severed from the Universe around him.
  • Weil also believed that by infusing every physical movement required by one’s trade with full, contemplative attention, one could become woven into the vocation and into the generation line of forebears who’d also practised it.
  • The alienation produced by the mind-numbing repetition of meaningless gestures would hence disperse, and factory workers, farmers and other manual labourers would recover the dignity they’d lost in the industrial age.
  • the body, with all of its burdens and pleasures, is the precondition for all thought and creation.
  • Weil forces us to see the body as the vessel out of which thought arises.
  • Her outsider status – as a woman in the man’s world of philosophy, as a mystic among secularists, as an intellectual among workers and peasants, as a woman whom Kraus calls ‘Bizarre-Simone’ and an ‘admirable freak’
  • Weil is the patron saint of anomalous persons.
  • a chronic illness that made it difficult to eat.
  • She did not want to be a woman … She wanted to disappear. Certain aspects of disappearance had to be concealed from the parents and so her many letters to them are repetitions of the one same glowingly factitious postcard that every good daughter sends home – Dear people what splendid weather thanks for the chocolate I’m making lots of friends here kisses to all – meanwhile she was dying.
  • We see Weil as emblematic of women and daughters who suffer and yearn for something beyond the self.
  • the advice that Weil gave to her students: ‘Always do what will cost you the most.’
  • ‘Fear and terror … whether they be caused by the threat of unemployment, police persecution, the presence of a foreign conqueror [or] the probability of invasion’, give rise to ‘a semi-paralysis of the soul’
  • She provides unusual but practical counsel for educators, students, workers and citizens.
  • For outsiders of any gender, creed or colour, she has something to say.
  • relentlessly anti-ideological, and gives judicious guidance for resisting the pull of narcissism.
  • Stressing the urgency to write, think and, most importantly, do

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