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A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
The “futures” and “careers” for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers’ paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown that they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable, and irrelevant.
An End to History
Mario Savio
The new biology improves upon the standard Darwinian view of spontaneous mutations and random selection as the motors of species adaptations; it demonstrates that __circumstances themselves can shape how genes adjust to the environment. Said another way, our lives are what happens when life acts upon life.__
The Myth of Normal
Gabor Maté, MD
But Hayek, who has a taste for paradox, goes further by claiming that there ‘can sometimes be many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under many democracies’. Under Pinochet, however, neither political freedoms (including the right to stand for election, but also freedom of expression, assembly and association, not to mention the right to strike and to protest), nor fundamental civil liberties (including that of not being subject to arrest, to arbitrary detention or execution) were preserved. So to argue, as he does, that this kind of regime can safeguard ‘personal freedom’ presupposes that it be redefined in a wholly different sense. But what content is left in such a truncated notion of freedom? Only ‘economic freedom’, understood as free disposal of one’s property.
The Ungovernable Society
Grégoire Chamayou
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