"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
31.10.03
30.10.03
OKAY: So as part of the neverending parlor game that is my political beliefs, I have a successor to the "Is Nick a Democrat?" question: am I a Marxist? Consider:
Do I believe in history and the expression of the inevitability of human progress? Sure do.
Do I think that competitive capitalism is the biggest progressive force in the history of mankind? Yuppers.
Do I think that monopolistic capitalism is fundamentally retrogressive? yes...
Do I believe that the only way for capitalism to survive is by spreading itself out over as wide an area as possible? Si
So am I a Marxist?
Do I believe in history and the expression of the inevitability of human progress? Sure do.
Do I think that competitive capitalism is the biggest progressive force in the history of mankind? Yuppers.
Do I think that monopolistic capitalism is fundamentally retrogressive? yes...
Do I believe that the only way for capitalism to survive is by spreading itself out over as wide an area as possible? Si
So am I a Marxist?
LINK: So I've been reading the guest posts from this Sara Butler girl on Crescat Sententia, and I've been very impressed, so I finally went to her blog and, well, I'm totally in love.
29.10.03
AND AGAIN: Paglia:
"Instead of writing shrill books, the way the liberals are doing these days, why don't they look deeply into what's happened to the Democratic Party? It's lost its connection with the mass of people and is now driven by a snobbish elite of lawyers, snide journalists and consultants. Bush would be defeated if there was a strong Democratic candidate. But there isn't one. "
"Instead of writing shrill books, the way the liberals are doing these days, why don't they look deeply into what's happened to the Democratic Party? It's lost its connection with the mass of people and is now driven by a snobbish elite of lawyers, snide journalists and consultants. Bush would be defeated if there was a strong Democratic candidate. But there isn't one. "
QUOTE: Camille Paglia:
"Unless there's some huge change, I'll be voting for Dean in the Democratic primary, simply as a gesture for the antiwar side. But I'm not thrilled. I don't think Dean is remotely presidential in manner. He hasn't thought any of this through -- the style of presidential authority. You can't just run around wildly with this dour, dyspeptic, sanctimonious persona. Dean's ability to galvanize a wide-ranging electorate is very limited. I don't see how he's going to inspire or attract African-American or Latino voters, or anyone outside white upper-middle-class professionals and the media elite."
"Unless there's some huge change, I'll be voting for Dean in the Democratic primary, simply as a gesture for the antiwar side. But I'm not thrilled. I don't think Dean is remotely presidential in manner. He hasn't thought any of this through -- the style of presidential authority. You can't just run around wildly with this dour, dyspeptic, sanctimonious persona. Dean's ability to galvanize a wide-ranging electorate is very limited. I don't see how he's going to inspire or attract African-American or Latino voters, or anyone outside white upper-middle-class professionals and the media elite."
28.10.03
HOT STOVE LEAGUE: Before I get started on Nikolai Bukharin's Economics and Politics of the Transition Period, I thought I'd just put out the following entirely plausible speculation on what the Yankees lineup should look like next year:
C: Jorge Posada
1B: Nick Johnson
2B: Derek Jeter
SS: Alex Rodriguez
3B: Bernie Williams
LF: Hideki Matsui
CF: Alfonso Soriano
RF: Vlad Guerrero
DH: Jason Giambi
you can, of course, then say goodbye as you like to Boone, Rivera and Garcia... and, frankly, they should trade Fonzie too...
C: Jorge Posada
1B: Nick Johnson
2B: Derek Jeter
SS: Alex Rodriguez
3B: Bernie Williams
LF: Hideki Matsui
CF: Alfonso Soriano
RF: Vlad Guerrero
DH: Jason Giambi
you can, of course, then say goodbye as you like to Boone, Rivera and Garcia... and, frankly, they should trade Fonzie too...
27.10.03
WE'RE EVERYWHERE: Buffy fans, that is. To wit, from Jonah Goldberg's latest column:
"I feel Jonathan Chait's pain.
Oh, not the flesh-searing agony he clearly feels every time he reads the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. I sometimes wonder whether the poor New Republic scribe has a "pain chip" in his head that goes off every time he hears the words "supply side" or "a rising tide lifts all boats" (think of Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or maybe the pain collars from "The Gamesters Of Triskelion" episode of Star Trek).
"I feel Jonathan Chait's pain.
Oh, not the flesh-searing agony he clearly feels every time he reads the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. I sometimes wonder whether the poor New Republic scribe has a "pain chip" in his head that goes off every time he hears the words "supply side" or "a rising tide lifts all boats" (think of Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or maybe the pain collars from "The Gamesters Of Triskelion" episode of Star Trek).
QUOTE: Gregg Easterbrook on the biases of physicists:
"At Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other top schools, researchers discuss ten unobservable dimensions, or an infinite number of imperceptible universes, without batting an eye. Scientists banter offhandedly about invisible realities that might incorporate trillions of billions of galaxies, and suppose such things are real in spite of there being no physical evidence whatsoever to support such speculation. No one considers discussion of other dimensions to be peculiar. Ten unobservable dimensions, an infinite number of invisible parallel universes--hey, why not?
Yet if at Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or top schools, you proposed that there exists just one unobservable dimension--the plane of the spirit--and that it is real despite our inability to sense it directly, you'd be laughed out of the room. Or conversation would grind to a halt to avoid offending your irrational religious superstitions.
To modern thought, one extra spiritual dimension is a preposterous idea, while the notion that there are incredible numbers of extra physical dimensions gives no pause. Yet which idea sounds more implausible--one unseen dimension or billions of them? "
"At Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other top schools, researchers discuss ten unobservable dimensions, or an infinite number of imperceptible universes, without batting an eye. Scientists banter offhandedly about invisible realities that might incorporate trillions of billions of galaxies, and suppose such things are real in spite of there being no physical evidence whatsoever to support such speculation. No one considers discussion of other dimensions to be peculiar. Ten unobservable dimensions, an infinite number of invisible parallel universes--hey, why not?
Yet if at Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or top schools, you proposed that there exists just one unobservable dimension--the plane of the spirit--and that it is real despite our inability to sense it directly, you'd be laughed out of the room. Or conversation would grind to a halt to avoid offending your irrational religious superstitions.
To modern thought, one extra spiritual dimension is a preposterous idea, while the notion that there are incredible numbers of extra physical dimensions gives no pause. Yet which idea sounds more implausible--one unseen dimension or billions of them? "
LINK: Interesting argument about how academic scientists are whores for money and so inculcated with groupthink that it prevents them from doing the sort of interesting research done in the humanities and social sciences.
THE ONLY SOLACE: I have about the upcoming bloodbath in the Bronx is that it's already worse elsewhere, and at least the Yanks won the pennant.
26.10.03
LINK: Fascinating and interesting article by a philosophy professor at Rutgers on how he got hooked into philosophy. Not to imply that this is almost exactly the story of how I got interested in philosophy, though it is:
"The paperback British edition of my memoir The Making of a Philosopher has a photograph on the cover of a man sitting on a bench, placed in a grey and listless landscape. He is overlooking the sea on a misty grim day, and the atmosphere is bleak and melancholy. The man, hunched up, immobile, coiled almost, has a pensive posture, as if frozen in thought. This picture is based on a story I tell in the book about sitting on a bench in Blackpool, aged 18, pondering the metaphysical question of how objects relate to their properties. Is an object just the sum total of its properties, a mere coalescence of general features, or does it somehow lie behind its properties, supporting them, a solid peg on which they happen to hang? When I look at an object do I really see the object itself, or just the appearance its properties offer to me? I remember the feeling of fixation that came over me when I thought about these questions - a kind of floating fascination, a still perplexity. The photograph itself is an exercise in Cartesian dualism, presenting both the outer world of substance and drizzle, and the weightless inner world of thundering thought, so silent and so arresting. I had begun living in those two worlds, suspended between them, as my intellectual interests took root.
When I look back on this period in my late teens, I recall the harnessing of undirected mental energy by intellectual pursuits. Up until then, my mental energy had gone into things like reading Melody Maker, which contained fairly serious articles about pop musicians; I always knew the top 20 off by heart, and studied the articles about drummers intensely, hoping to improve my own technique. I suspect that this kind of swashing mental energy is fairly typical of boys that age. School doesn't seem to connect with it, and it goes off in search of some object of interest, often trivial, sometimes destructive. In my case, it was philosophy that seized that energy and converted it into a passion - though one that took several years to form fully. It is a delicate and fastidious energy that I am speaking of, despite its power, and it will only be satisfied by certain employments, which of course vary from person to person. I had had a similar passion for chemistry when I was ten, and for butterflies and lizards before that. How to harness such passions to formal education remains a great and unsolved problem: how to convert a love of Harry Potter stories, say, into a taste for good literature. The mental energy of young people is not to be underestimated, even when it leads to nothing but an elaborate obsession with piercing."
"The paperback British edition of my memoir The Making of a Philosopher has a photograph on the cover of a man sitting on a bench, placed in a grey and listless landscape. He is overlooking the sea on a misty grim day, and the atmosphere is bleak and melancholy. The man, hunched up, immobile, coiled almost, has a pensive posture, as if frozen in thought. This picture is based on a story I tell in the book about sitting on a bench in Blackpool, aged 18, pondering the metaphysical question of how objects relate to their properties. Is an object just the sum total of its properties, a mere coalescence of general features, or does it somehow lie behind its properties, supporting them, a solid peg on which they happen to hang? When I look at an object do I really see the object itself, or just the appearance its properties offer to me? I remember the feeling of fixation that came over me when I thought about these questions - a kind of floating fascination, a still perplexity. The photograph itself is an exercise in Cartesian dualism, presenting both the outer world of substance and drizzle, and the weightless inner world of thundering thought, so silent and so arresting. I had begun living in those two worlds, suspended between them, as my intellectual interests took root.
When I look back on this period in my late teens, I recall the harnessing of undirected mental energy by intellectual pursuits. Up until then, my mental energy had gone into things like reading Melody Maker, which contained fairly serious articles about pop musicians; I always knew the top 20 off by heart, and studied the articles about drummers intensely, hoping to improve my own technique. I suspect that this kind of swashing mental energy is fairly typical of boys that age. School doesn't seem to connect with it, and it goes off in search of some object of interest, often trivial, sometimes destructive. In my case, it was philosophy that seized that energy and converted it into a passion - though one that took several years to form fully. It is a delicate and fastidious energy that I am speaking of, despite its power, and it will only be satisfied by certain employments, which of course vary from person to person. I had had a similar passion for chemistry when I was ten, and for butterflies and lizards before that. How to harness such passions to formal education remains a great and unsolved problem: how to convert a love of Harry Potter stories, say, into a taste for good literature. The mental energy of young people is not to be underestimated, even when it leads to nothing but an elaborate obsession with piercing."
QUOTE: Interesting physics/politics speculation, from Crescat Sententia:
"From Terry Pratchett:
The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles - kingons, or possible queons - that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed."
"From Terry Pratchett:
The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles - kingons, or possible queons - that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed."
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