jlj

book

Life in the UK test: Geography and Romans

I've started studying for my Life in the UK test next month. What follows are notes from my zettelkasten. Sorry, all: between work, children and this, I don't have time to think about anything more interesting, let alone offload it.

  • Read [[Deep Work by Cal Newport]]
  • Started [[Life in the United Kingdom- A Guide for New Residents]]

Life in the United Kingdom

Tags: #book #uk #lituk Title: Life in the United Kingdom- A Guide for New Residents Author: Home Office Published: 2020 (3rd edition) ISBN: 978-0-11-341340-9

  • Fundamental principles of British life:
    • Democracy
    • The rule of law
    • Individual liberty
    • Tolerance of other faiths and beliefs
    • Participation in community life
  • Responsibilities of all Britons are, to:
    • Respect and obey the law
    • Respect the rights of others, including their right to their own opinion
    • Treat others fairly
    • Look after yourself and your family
    • Look after your local patch, and the environment more broadly
  • The UK offers Britons:
    • Freedom of belief and religion
    • Freedom of speech
    • Freedom from unfair discrimination
    • The right to a fair trial
    • The right to join in the election of a government
  • Geography
    • The official name of the country is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
    • Great Britain refers to England, Scotland and Wales
    • The Crown dependencies are:
      • The Isle of Man; and
      • The Channel Islands, made up of:
        • The Bailiwick of Jersey; and
        • The Bailiwick of Guernsey, comprising:
          • Guernsey, Alderney, Sark, and Herm
    • There are 14 British Overseas Territories:
      • Akrotiri and Dhekelia (Cyprus)
      • Anguilla (Caribbean)
      • Bermuda (North Atlantic)
      • British Antarctic Territory
      • British Indian Ocean Territory
      • British Virgin Islands (Caribbean)
      • Cayman Islands (Caribbean)
      • Falkland Islands
      • Gibraltar
      • Montserrat (Caribbean)
      • Pitcairn Islands (Pacific; officially Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno Islands)
      • Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha (South Atlantic)
      • South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (South Atlantic)
      • Turks and Caicos Islands (North Atlantic)
    • Britain became permanent separated from the continent by the Channel around 10000 years ago.
  • The UK is governed from Westminster; parliaments or assemblies, with certain devolved powers, sit in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

[[Early British history]] [[British Roman history]] [[British Anglo-Saxon history]] (Empty, for the moment)

Early British history

Tags: #lituk

  • Hunter-gatherers came and went from Britain by a land bridge in the Stone Age
  • The first farmers arrived around 6000 years ago
    • South-east European descent
    • Built the monument Stonehenge
      • Skara Brae on Orkney is another, well-preserved Stone Age site
  • Around 4000 years ago, the Bronze Age begins
    • People worked the metal (and gold), lived in roundhouses and built tombs called round barrows.
  • The British Iron Age (800 BC to AD 100) marks the beginnings of British history
    • It saw the rise of culture, economy — including the first coins to be minted in Britain — and hill forts, such as Maiden Castle, in Dorset.
    • They spoke a language that was part of the Celtic family; related languages are still spoken today in parts of Wales.

On to [[British Roman history]]

British Roman history

Tags: #lituk

  • The Romans, led by Julius Caesar, failed to conquer Britain in 55 BC.
  • In AD 43, Emperor Claudius led a successful invasion
    • Boudicca, the queen of the Iceni, is killed, in what is now eastern England; her statue stands on Westminster Bridge.
  • Areas of what is now Scotland were never conquered by the Romans, however; a wall was built — beginning in AD 122 — under Emperor Hadrian's reign, to keep the Ancient Britons (including the Picts) out.
    • Later, under Emperor Antoninus Pius, construction began on a turf wall — Antonine Wall — in AD 142, representing the northernmost frontier barrier of the Roman Empire.
  • The Roman Army left Britain in AD 410 to defend other parts of the Empire, never to return.
    • They left behind roads, public buildings, a structure of law, and new plants and animals.
  • In the third and fourth centuries AD, the first Christian communities began to appear.

On to [[British Anglo-Saxon history]]

End of Notes

End of Day 49

— jlj@Fosstodon #100DaysToOffload

I'm writing this as part of the 100 Days To Offload project; join us at: https://100daystooffload.com/

Arguments for Depth: more from Deep Work

What follows is more work from my zettelkasten (contained in a single entry, on this occasion).

Note that I did listen to Huxley's Brave New World on cassette tape — yes, I'm that old — many years ago; I'm simply using the To read backlink — Obsidian's terminology — for everything I want to read or read again, for simplicity.

Deep Work by Cal Newport

Tags: #book #freud #jung #technopoly #esm #flow Title: Deep Work Author: Cal Newport Published: 2016 ISBN: 978-0-349-41190-3

  • Pg 2: Sigmund Freud was Carl Jung's mentor and friend. Then Jung published contradictory material.
    • I am fascinated, and deeply impressed, by a mind that conceives of this tower, travels to it regularly, away from the practice and patients that are surely the beginning of most of his great thoughts, and then publishes such a seminal opus against this larger-than-life figure, in his world, but also in the world of everyone around him.
  • Pg 67, under the heading The Cult of the Internet: Neil Postman is quoted, on a term that it's implied he coined: technopoly. That such a culture doesn't make its alternatives illegal or immoral. “It doesn't even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible, and therefore irrelevant.” Postman died in 2003.
    • I enjoy the Internet. I may have been an unintentional adherent to this philosophy, at one time. I don't believe I have been for many years, however.
    • I still enjoy hacking, in the traditional sense, but I believe I'm well aware of what works well on the Internet and what doesn't. Postman didn't even live to see the first tech bubble burst, or not completely. I don't think anyone could live through that without developing a healthy skepticism of technology writ large. And then there was the fallout of 2016: now everyone should understand the Internet's potential for targeting and magnifying our cognitive biases on an unprecedented scale, with truly dire consequences.

[[To read]] Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

  • Pg 77, under the heading A Neurological Argument for Depth: most people feel that life is something that happens to them; that the shape of their lives, writ large, is outside their control. Decades of research suggest just the opposite, according to Winifred Gallagher. In what she calls the grand unified theory of the mind, “our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.”

    • This is deeply satisfying to me. It's taken me a long time to come to a similar conclusion — that is, that some thoughts not only warrant little attention: they are actually damaging, and need to be stopped — but I do feel I've been living by it for many years now, much happier than I was as a young man, for the most part.

  • Pg 84, under the heading A Psychological Argument for Depth: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory about human happiness is validated through his work with Reed Larson, broadly called the experience sampling method or ESM.

    • Achieving a mental state he called flow is directly related to the amount of satisfaction one has in their life.
    • While achieving this state in one's free time is certainly possible, its unstructured nature can present challenges.
    • Deep work, on the other hand, lends itself to flow, by its very nature.

End of Day 48

— jlj@Fosstodon #100DaysToOffload

I'm writing this as part of the 100 Days To Offload project; join us at: https://100daystooffload.com/

The Social Contract has a rich history

What follows are notes from zettelkasten. I hope they retain some of their flow; I wanted to get this down, as it's been in my head for weeks, while not then spending more time away from my family to blog about those notes.

Daily note 2020-06-26

  • Watched [[How Can We Win_ by David Jones Media]]
  • Read [[Deep Work by Cal Newport]]
  • #rain

How Can We Win_ by David Jones Media

Tags: #video #racism #usa Link: Published: 06/2020

  • Referenced in the comments — https://tildes.net/~tv/pk7/police_last_week_tonight_with_john_oliver — of a Tildes post on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
    • I dislike that show's inconsistent policy on blocking content to those outside the US. As a result, I've given up on it.
    • Kimberly Jones is unbelievably eloquent, considering how emotional she clearly is. She's probably seen and heard quite a lot, even with this being her first day conducting interviews.
  • Kimberly Jones referenced:
    • Rosewood
      • Read [[Rosewood Massacre]], part of Wikipedia's series Nadir of American Race Relations
    • Tulsa
      • Read [[Tulsa Race Massacre]], also part of that series
    • Trevor
      • Watched [[The Daily Show with Trevor Noah 30052020]]

Rosewood Massacre

Tags: #article #wikipedia #racism #usa #florida #mena Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood_massacre#Culture_of_silence Accessed: 06/2020

  • Kimberly Jones seems well informed.
  • That a reporter travelling to small-town Florida in 1982 is completely unaware of this incident is shocking, to me.
    • It seemed like the victims, and their descendants, conspired in what the article labels a culture of silence.
      • The [[Tulsa Race Massacre]] references an eerily similar fallout.
    • How different from, say, the nakba (or “catastrophe”) of 1948. Well, in terms of the reactions of the Palestinian survivors, at the time (at least as I recall), and certainly of their descendants, long before any journalists needed to dig.
      • There is more in this point, I'm certain.

Tulsa Race Massacre

Tags: #article #wikipedia #racism #usa #oklahoma Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre Accessed: 06/2020

  • The associated state commission published their report in 2001.
  • The state curriculum only now, this year, references the incident.
  • That is deeply shocking to me, even after what's seeped into my psyche — despite my best efforts to isolate, for my own mental health — surrounding the death of George Floyd, and the prominence of Black Lives Matter.

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah 30052020

Tags: #video #racism #usa Link: Published: 05/2020

  • Trevor Noah is very eloquent. If this wasn't him speaking off the top of his head, he certainly did a thorough job of editing.
  • Two points stand out:
    • That footage of Amy Cooper is significant.
      • As a cis white male regularly pushing out the boundaries of my empathy, I can't hope to understand what it means to actually see a white woman — a 'Karen' — knowingly use her proxy power, in the form of the police. And, therefore, to knowingly put a black man's life in danger. Because she could.
    • IIRC — as it's been a few weeks since I watched this — Noah talks about the social contract in more general terms. (Very effectively, I might add.) It reminded me of [[The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau]].

The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Tags: #book Title: The Social Contract Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau Published: 1762

[[To read]]

For Rousseau there is a radical dichotomy between true law and actual law. Actual law... simply protects the status quo. True law... is just law, and what ensures its being just is that it is made by the people in their collective capacity as sovereign and obeyed by the same people in their individual capacities as subjects. Rousseau is confident that such laws could not be unjust because it is inconceivable that any people would make unjust laws for itself.

– So much of Rousseau seems to be predicated on the idea of “civil society as an artificial person united by a general will, or volonté générale.” A laudable ideal that the US is still clearly falling well short of.

Rousseau... says that under the pact by which they enter civil society people totally alienate themselves and all their rights to the whole community. Rousseau, however, represents this act as a form of exchange of rights whereby people give up natural rights in return for civil rights. The bargain is a good one, because what is surrendered are rights of dubious value, whose realization depends solely on an individual’s own might, and what is obtained in return are rights that are both legitimate and enforced by the collective force of the community.

– Emphasis mine, and one of the main thrusts in [[The Daily Show with Trevor Noah 30052020]], without direct reference (again, IIRC).

END OF NOTES

I'd be interested in any feedback you have: is this jarring, annoying, interesting, largely similar to any other blog post? You can mention me on Fosstodon, or, if you'd prefer, email jlj@ctrl-c.club.

End of Day 46

— jlj@Fosstodon #100DaysToOffload

I'm writing this as part of the 100 Days To Offload project; join us at: https://100daystooffload.com/