arendt pete i'm trying to decide whether her off hand critique of science as not being political because it deals mostly with numbers and not in communication and thus leads to a level of naivety is flawed on the grounds that she includes anthropology and psychology under the umbrella of the term "science". those two fields primarily are centred around and always engaged in politics, now and in the 1950s when she was writing this book [human condition]... 070203 ... Ouroboros my friend tells me of the crush he has on her 070217 ... pete she's on the ground for basing her argument on premises derived from, it seems, out of her ass and not arguing the premises but continuing as if they are true. there is ENORMOUS possibility for action in the social realm. 070314 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I don't know about The Human Condition, but I'm 3/4 through The Origins of Totalitarianism and when I disagree with Arendt it's usually when she's talking about human nature as such... maybe this says more about the thought climate then vs now? She makes an interesting distinction between totalitarian leaders (Hitler and Stalin) and other dictators (e.g. Mussolini): the former weren't actually nationalists. Instead they planned to take over the world - or at least acted as if they would - and put the aims of their movement, whether of "race" or "class" politics, above most practical considerations. In the earlier chapters she also writes about the rise of racial science (and re science, she DOES seem to confuse Darwin and Social Darwinism), anti-semitism in Europe, and the totalitarian tendencies in 19th-century imperialism (e.g. Great Britain). 120705 ... . science has never really been free of politics i mean didn't galileo get thrown in prison and universally derided for his astronomical discoveries? wasn't albert einstein himself quite the political animal when he emigrated to america? not to mention government funding of research...as much as westerners want to worship the objectivity of Science the involvement of human brains, by their very nature of all kinds of biases, makes true objectivity impossible. the political narratives of the time color what is acceptable to the humans running the experiments. science does not exist in an objective vacuum. the current denial and gaslighting of the vaccine injured by supposed medical scientists comes to mind quite readily. humans only see what we allow ourselves to see. higher education creates specialization which creates an expert mentality that often blocks true objectivity... 'in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few' suzuki 221213 what's it to you? who go blather from