#wolin

[ancientorigins]

Astonishing evidence points to a 10th-century Viking stronghold, possibly the elusive Jomsborg. As artifacts emerge from the excavation on Wolin Island, a centuries-old mystery is on the brink of being solved.

[weil-weil-lautre]

Today in the United States there is a circular system whereby elites are produced and the institutions producing them are confirmed as 'elite institutions,' thereby attracting a fresh supply of promising material that further confirms the institutions' special status. A small number of institutions select, groom, train, and certify a small number of individuals as exceptionally talented and warranting privilege. 'Elite' private preparatory academies, colleges, and universities, including Bible colleges and theological seminaries, perform the function of identifying and producing, not just elites, but authorities. At elite institutions, unlike community colleges and many public and private educational institutions, the humanities and social sciences are featured prominently, whereby those subjects are designated as a badge of superiority distinguishing their students from those at lesser schools emphasizing 'work skills.' The vocational education of elites is deferred to the highly competitive graduate and professional schools in law, medicine, business, the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, where not only qualified practitioners but 'leaders in their field' are produced. Although a few public universities, even an occasional public high school, make the cut, the high costs of elite institutions convert attendance into an investment. The expectation is that there will be a 'return' in the form of a prestigious career.

Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy, Inc, 163

[fieriframes]

[GUY FIERI: Look at that, man. There you go. Wolin, Heidegger’s Children, 134–72. Mm. It's dynamite, man.]

[stromuprisahat]

Kult Triglava (u Wolina) nepřímo potvrzuje i lidová tradice uváděná ještě v 19. století, podle níž lze v kraji za svatojánské noci spatřit při měsíčním svitu pasoucího se nádherného černého koně (Triglavovo posvátné zvíře), který však okamžitě zmizí, pokud se k němu člověk pokusí přiblížit. ~ The cult of Triglav (near Wolin) is also indirectly confirmed by a folk tradition reported as far back as the 19th century, according to which a magnificent black horse (Triglav's sacred animal) can be seen grazing in the region in the moonlight on Midsummer night, but which, however, immediately disappears if approached.

Bohové dávných Slovanů ~ Gods of ancient Slavs (Martin Pitro, Petr Vokáč)

[nicklloydnow]

“The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism calls our system “inverted totalitarianism.” The façade of democratic institutions and the rhetoric, symbols and iconography of state power have not changed. The Constitution remains a sacred document. The U.S. continues to posit itself as a champion of opportunity, freedom, human rights and civil liberties, even as half the country struggles at subsistence level, militarized police gun down and imprison the poor with impunity, and the primary business of the state is war.

This collective self-delusion masks who we have become — a nation where the citizenry has been stripped of economic and political power and where the brutal militarism we practice overseas is practiced at home.

In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, economics was subordinate to politics. But under inverted totalitarianism, the reverse is true. There is no attempt, unlike fascism and state socialism, to address the needs of the poor. Rather, the poorer and more vulnerable you are, the more you are exploited, thrust into a hellish debt peonage from which there is no escape. Social services, from education to health care, are anemic, nonexistent or privatized to gouge the impoverished. Further ravaged by 8.5 percent inflation, wages have decelerated sharply since 1979. Jobs often do not offer benefits or security.

(…)

In my book America: The Farewell Tour, I examined the social indicators of a nation in serious trouble. Life expectancy in the U.S. fell in 2021, for the second year in a row. There have been over 300 mass shootings this year. Close to a million people have died from drug overdoses since 1999. There are an average of 132 suicides every day. Nearly 42 percent of the country is classified as obese, with one in 11 adults considered severely obese.

These diseases of despair are rooted in the disconnect between a society’s expectations of a better future and the reality of a system that does not provide a meaningful place for its citizens. Loss of a sustainable income and social stagnation causes more than financial distress. As Émile Durkheim points out in The Division of Labor in Society, it severs the social bonds that give us meaning. A decline in status and power, an inability to advance, a lack of education and adequate health care, and a loss of hope result in crippling forms of humiliation. This humiliation fuels loneliness, frustration, anger and feelings of worthlessness.

In Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist.

(…)

Anti-politics masquerades as politics. No sooner does one money-drenched election cycle end, the next one begins, perpetuating what Wolin calls “politics without politics.” These elections do not permit citizens to participate in power. The public is allowed to voice opinions to scripted questions, which are repackaged by publicists, pollsters, political consultants and advertisers and fed back to them. Few races, including only 14 percent of congres­sional districts, are considered competitive. Politicians do not campaign on substantial issues but on skillfully manufactured political personalities and emotionally charged culture wars.

The militarists, who have created a state within a state and who plunge us into one military debacle after another, consuming half of all discretionary spending, are omnipotent. The corporations and billionaires, which orchestrated a virtual tax boycott and gutted regulation and oversight, are omnipotent. The industrialists who wrote trade deals to profit from unemployment and underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run the healthcare system, whose primary concern is profit not health and who are responsible for 16 percent of the worldwide reported deaths from COVID-19 although we are less than 5 percent of the global population, are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that carry out wholesale surveillance of the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to strip them of their original meaning to ensure corporate control and excuse corporate crimes, are omnipotent. The courts gave us Citizens United, for example, which permits unlimited corporate financing of elections by claiming it upholds the right to petition the government and is a form of free speech.

Politics is spectacle, a tawdry carnival act where the constant jockeying for power by the ruling class dominates the news cycles, as if politics were a race to the Superbowl. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.

(…)

Our corporate overlords and militarists prefer the decorum of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But they worked closely with Donald Trump and are willing to do so again. What they will not allow are reformers such as Bernie Sanders, who might challenge, however tepidly, their obscene accumulation of wealth and power. This inability to reform, to restore democratic participation and address social inequality, means the inevitable death of the republic. Biden and the Democrats rail against the cultish Republican Party and their threat to democracy, but they too are the problem.”

[danielszysz]

Powstaje nowy most w Wolinie na trasie S3 - zobacz zdjęcia

Powstaje nowy most w Wolinie na trasie S3 – zobacz zdjęcia

Powstaje nowy most w Wolinie na trasie S3 – zobacz zdjęcia Na S3 Dargobądz-Troszyn w rejonie Wolina powstaje nowy most przez cieśninę Dziwna, prace prowadzone są przy podporach oraz wiaduktach prowadzących do mostu. Na S3 będą tu dwa węzły drogowe Wolin Wschód i Wolin Zachód. – GDDKiA Szczecin GDDKiA Szczecin GDDKiA Szczecin GDDKiA Szczecin GDDKiA Szczecin

[atrakcjenapomorzu]

Oceanarium w Międzyzdrojach

[dopetaleobject]

Woliński Park Narodowy Wolin National Park 

Woliński Park Narodowy Wolin National Park 

Woliński Park Narodowy (National…

[mima-foto]

Colorkey am See www.mima-foto.de #colorkey #herbst #see #wolin #picoftheday (hier: Warnowo) https://www.instagram.com/p/CfBBxFkNlbK/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[geezerwench]

My wife and I recreated Aja Trier's Calvin and Hobbes Starry Night using roughly 38,000 LEGO pieces. There are 144 of the 16x16 art series plates with a final size around 5 foot wide by 5 foot tall. Big thanks to the creators of LEGO Art Remix, which was used to render the mosaic. This was displayed at Brick Days in Omaha and won the award for best artwork!

via Ben Woline and Tigon Woline

[redshift-13]

The philosophical community knows by now that philosopher Martin Heidegger was fiercely antisemitic and personally drew connections between his philosophy and his support for Nazi ideology. The posthumous publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks beginning in 2014 made this much more apparent. The delayed publication was Heidegger’s own decision, likely in the belief that future generations would be amenable to the views expressed in them. In the Black Notebooks, we meet a Heidegger who claims that Jewish scheming corrupted Western metaphysics, reducing it to ‘empty rationality and calculability’ and arguing for the ‘total extermination’ of the Jewish people (188). In Heidegger in Ruins, Richard Wolin contends that responses to the publication of the Black Notebooks have failed to take full account of this information. Some philosophers’ responses have included abysmal denials and minimizations, as well as simply prescribing a solution of ‘more Heidegger,’ hoping to use Heidegger’s philosophy against his politics without reckoning with his own linkages between the two. Meanwhile, Heidegger’s work influences today’s resurgent fascist movements, as Wolin explores in one of the book’s chapters. Heidegger is lauded and read by many across today’s far-right, influencing the French New Right’s ‘metapolitics’ and Russia’s Aleksandr Dugin, Martin Sellner’s ‘Identitarian’ movement and alt-right fascist websites in the United States. Former Trump administration member and far-right networker Steve Bannon even called Heidegger ‘my guy.’ Wolin shows that Heidegger’s antisemitism and fascist affinities are long running in his intellectual trajectory, before, during and after World War II. Wolin also demonstrates that this has been systematically buried, including by Heidegger’s literary estate, which produced ‘politically sanitized versions of Heidegger’s texts,’ including removing endorsements of Hitler and Mussolini (27).

...

More at the link.

[grandhotelabyss]

I'm sure everything Wolin says here is true, and deplorable, but still, we know Heidegger was a Nazi, we've known in detail for at least 40 years, no one except the far right excuses it, and we've had plenty of time to detach it from what he had to say that was worthwhile, and so much worse for the revolutionary left or the liberal center that they never had a proper answer to that.

Whence the logic of contamination? Why will it be assumed that if I allow Heidegger had a point about the proper affect inspired by the work of art—a kind of reverent stillness, rather than an imperial willfulness—I will thereby necessarily be implicated in his (in this case totally irrelevant) nonsense about "world Jewry"?

I haven't read Wolin's Heidegger book, but I did read his Seduction of Unreason, which calls a symptomatically bewildering range of thinkers "fascist" (Nietzsche, Blanchot, Jung, Bataille, etc.) because they dishonored "reason." He winds up with an attack on left-wing anti-Americanism, this written just before and published just after the Iraq invasion—speaking of academic complicity with political terror. And I read at least some of The Wind from the East, Wolin's book on how the Maoism of the soixante-huitards usefully aerated the culture of the French intelligentsia, softened it up for American-style participatory democracy—though why intellectual credulity before Mao should be treated with so much more forgiveness than intellectual credulity before Hitler is not immediately clear to me.

I am no great admirer of the stylistically rebarbative Heidegger beyond an essay or two, but the constant spectacle of his execration has the "look over there" function of diverting our attention from more contemporary theoretical collaborations with oppressive power. The Financial Times has reported that rates of cancer are rising in my generation due to the bubblegum-pink amoxycillin they had us swilling as kids several times a year; but this somehow seems less important than yet another reminder that the most famous philosopher to question the high holiness of science was a bad man. And finally, it has the effect of totally politicizing the whole of culture in a style known both to Hitler and to Mao.

[cinematitlecards]

"Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan" (2006) Directed by Larry Charles (Comedy) . . "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery Of Prodigious Bribe To American Regime For Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" (2020) Directed by Jason Woliner (Comedy)

[rickchung]

Paul T. Goldman (prod. Jason Woliner).

Peacock’s very strange six-episode docu-comedy series hybrid blends true crime narrative adaptations with documentary and reality television filmmaking conventions for an uneasy but highly original take on a surreal life. 

What we’re watching is ostensibly the filming of the eponymous main character’s own life story starring the man himself while breaking the fourth wall with actors commenting on the project they are making with the actual producers and director commenting as themselves. It’s a strange meta-narrative that presents clear moral quandaries.

[ortodelmondo]

Guest Register © Penny Wolin

[mycstilleblog]

"Hybris und Nemesis" von Rainer Mausfeld. Rezension

Wir leben in einer Zeit der Krisen. Nicht zuletzt in einer Krise der Demokratie. Haben wir überhaupt eine Demokratie? Hatten wir je eine? Oskar Lafontaine etwa urteilte in einem Interview mit Tilo Jung einmal: „“Deutschland ist keine Demokratie, sondern eine Oligarchie“. Beispielsweise sind 73 Prozent der Deutschen gegen einen Militäreinsatz der Bundeswehr in Syrien (Welt-Trend). Dennoch findet…