Kafka In Amadora

7. Wipe out imagination: check desire: extinguish appetite: keep the ruling faculty in its own power. [Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations – Book Nine] Endowed with a pure understanding, restraining the self with firmness, turning away from sound and other objects, and abandoning love and hatred; dwelling in solitude, eating but little, controlling the speech, body, and mind, ever engaged in meditation and concentration, and cultivating freedom from passion; forsaking conceit and power, pride and lust, wrath and possessions, tranquil in heart, and free from ego – he becomes worthy of becoming one with the imperishable. [Bhagavad Gita, 18:51-53]

[by Zach Goldberg (2019), https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-white-saviors ] A sea change has taken place in American political life. The force driving this change is the digital era style of moral politics known as "wokeness," a phenomenon that has become pervasive in recent years and yet remains elusive as even experts struggle to give it a clear definition and accurately measure its impact. Where did it come from? What do its adherents believe? Is it just something happening inside the Twitter bubble and on college campuses or is it really spreading across the social and cultural landscape and transforming the country as sometimes appears to be the case? In reality, "wokeness"is a broad euphemism for a more narrow phenomenon: the rapidly changing political ideology of white liberals that is remaking American politics. Over the past decade, the baseline attitudes expressed by white liberals on racial and social justice questions have

Carved alabaster, Assyria, 885-860 B.C.

Based on the blog post of Stephan Schmidt: The Framing of the Developer We have a dominant frame in Software Development since Scrum arrived, the backlog . Scrum tells developers to take responsibility for throughput and deadlines, but the product is owned by the product owner, because he owns the backlog . Features are put in the backlog by him after he talks with marketing, sales, management, the CEO, customers… It isn't the developers asking the customer what a product should look like, but the product owner telling them what features he wants. Success is tied to implementing the items of the backlog : the more features from the backlog we complete, the more success we have, and the more developers we have, the more features we can implement, so more success we will have! In this context, developers are treated as a resource. The more of them and the more efficient the resource is used, the better. If there are problems, CEO's think "Tech didn't deliver"

Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. [Joseph Campbell (1949), The Hero With A Thousand Faces]