Current news and contemporary events

¶ … philosopher's names like Confucius and Plato, stood out much more than they would if I was just reading a news article in the morning. When I am reading the news, I am usually just reading for information. I don't pay much attention to the style or quality of the prose, or even the philosophical 'spin' of an article, unless I'm reading something purely as an editorial. But this made me think about what Confucius or Plato might say about our modern world. Other details, like the numbers, stood out much more than they might have otherwise -- maybe even more than if I was reading a conventionally organized piece. I had to focus not just on the quantity, but what numbers mean out of context -- and ask myself if they do mean anything. Is the death of 300 people worse than the death of 30 people or 1 person?

Response 2 loved this piece -- I don't know why you said that you wish you had taken another article to deconstruct. There is something so poetic about the image of violence in the flowers, and made me think how even during a beautiful time like spring, tragedies can still occur. It also shows how we don't think very much about the weather, and what weather means, unless there are some violent implications in its intensity. In terms of Dada being anti-ethical, though, I have to say that I don't really 'let go' of my ethics when reading a Dada poem, rather I tend to reconstruct a new ethical system from the fragments of the piece, but in a new and unexpected way that is really exciting. I like the references to structures like trees, which painted a picture for me, rather than encouraged a linear reading of the information -- although I don't think that you can completely abandon the need for logic, because it's so hard-wired within our brains or at least our culture, shifting from a stress on the verbal to the visual can be a positive intellectual exercise. This work helped me understand this truth.