CK MacLeod has big major league out of the ballpark itsy bitsy micro-problems that not even he cares about, and it's a big problem to hardly anyone especially him. "A physics lesson not a person, sub-microscopic me with lightyears-across problems.
Problematicheski,
parsecwide,
problems.
Problarama.
Sentenced to life,
for my own murder,
a penalty too harsh
for so too trivial an infraction."
“was gesagt werden muss”/”what must be said,” Guenter Grass’s un-poetic poetic response to current events involving Germans, Israelis, Iranians and all of the rest of the world, is dominated, and justified, by a recognition emerging from geopolitical facticity, by that murderously coercive course of the world that Adorno juxtaposes to art: The wheel of historical fortune has turned in such a way that the national heirs of Nazism (of the genocidal) are supplying delivery vehicles for weapons of mass destruction (weapons of genocide) to the heirs of Zionism (and of genocide). Continue reading →
Since John Derbyshire brought his family into it, I feel free to imagine a response on the part of his child – in effect to mark the transition via adolescent resistance on the way to autonomous adulthood. “Why should I follow what you advise, father? So I can grow up to live a life as morally impoverished, as safe from the risky vitality of others, as immune to hope, as yours?” Continue reading →
The second problem is that social Darwinism loosely speaking describes the political unconscious of most centrist liberalism as well. Continue reading →
Quite impossibly (certainly), in a universally homogeneous global and probably near earth orbital super-stadium of stadia where the yoga-ball season never ends, those who refrain from singing along, are the loudest. Continue reading →
The problem that matters is that an attempted return to the original moment is a search for a primordial “constituting power” that does not arise in Eden or the Promised Land, but somewhere in the wastes. Continue reading →
the truth of the search for intelligibility might be in that search for intelligibility, not in any “clear” “particular” “inteilligibles” yielded by some finally successful reading. Because this type of observation, once uttered, strikes us as unutterably banal – we habitually turn immediately to any other content. Continue reading →
If you don’t know what you mean by “Jewish” or “American,” how can you possibly know whether or not it is or ever was or might someday be possible to be both American and Jewish Continue reading →
The absolute universal verges on nothingness (is suspended in nothingness) in psychology as well as philosophy, in science as well as religion, mathematics as well as history – is the point/merely virtual or non-existent point where modes of logic and its alternatives become “one”/”nothing,” and where nothing in modern and so-called “post-modern” thought surpasses the thought of the ancients, whether called philosophers or called prophets. Continue reading →
miguel cervantes: It's a comic book film re at least the fist two Spidermans, LA gets the treatment in Iron Man, somet imes one thinks too much on those things,
fuster: can you believe that people were calling the Lakers an underdog against the Thunder?
CK MacLeod: What's that? Baseball?
fuster: it most def ain't baseball the way Artest plays it. my twin nephews played on a pretty serious rugby team until one of them needed a rather extensive facial reconstruction.....happily everyone can now tell them apart ......and somehow it puts me in mind of Ronny.... who a few minutes ago, put an elbow unto Harden's face as he dragged him to the ground.
miguel cervantes: btw, how often does a Nicks or Lakers player, come down with
abdominal strain,
fuster: Heck, miggs, that's so minor compared to this.........
“I can’t even believe we won, to be honest with you,” BasSie said.
ticker-tape parade is being planned
fuster: Siri can be a real helper…… http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05 /17/science/bodies-inert-they- moved-a-robot-with-their-minds .html?hp
CK MacLeod: You mean in the sense that the crisis of the late ’70s was handled by putting the US economy as a whole on the credit card? Just speculating here, but we can use...
fuster: It ain’t so much where he came from, it’s where he’s going……… saying ” it may have to be done” doesn’t the fact that it can’t...
miguel cervantes: Well Mofaz came from Likud, didn’t he, it’s not an easy decision to strike Iran, but to deny that it may have to be done, is the delusion, similarly, the...
miguel cervantes: Those interested in casuistry and determinism, the film suggests that Loki came to Earth, because of the research into higher order weapons, at their own version of White Sands.
miguel cervantes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jo hngaudiosi/2012/05/08/disney-c onfirms-the-avengers-2-movie-t heme-park-rides-games/
The traditionalists do not just believe that the word "marriage" should be taken to refer to the union of a man and a woman, and they do not admit of a distinction between a popular or common usage and a legal one: They insist, over and over if rarely with explanation, likely under instruction by pollsters and spin-sters, that marriage is between a man and a woman. State and the law, they believe, should reflect this primary denotation, not merely because a one-to-one correspondence between common or traditional usage and the law is preferable in the abstract, but because the heterosexual union is biologically and organically the basis of human life, making any attitude towards it other than reverence both inhuman and morbid, all the more ominous as a principle of the state. →
The bigot is the individual whose beliefs are so contrary to the fundamental commitments of an egalitarian culture that they are not and cannot be worthy of serious discussion, but only of scorn and ridicule - or, for those whose political sensibilities are still impaired by remnant sympathies, of mandatory confession, self-criticism, and disassociation. →
Marriage, and essentially monogamy, is one of the absolute principles on which the ethical life of a community is based; the institution of marriage is therefore included as one of the moments in the foundation of states by gods or heroes. →
The concept of revelatory sacrifice may even be the best frame for understanding potential Israeli action, but also the potential withholding of action, against Iran. If the effect is more maddening than practical or helpful, it may be because the whole predicament is already so tragically mad, something Morris probably understands, or at least understood, as well as anyone. →
Installed and designed two new sites: Anam Cara Yoga Studio and Wright Turn Only. →
Recently Read or Reviewed or Currently Reading or Just Like Looking At It
The Tsar, Who Is Above the Law, Declares Nothing To Be Above the Law
In short:
"It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves."
not necessarily great like good great
In short:
"Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself..."
among others
In short:
"Inner things or outer things, what are they but things and things!"
What a Concept
In short:
The perceived intellectual exhaustion of liberalism, along with receding memories of the 1930s, has in recent years led to renewed interest in Carl Schmitt's work, including this tract, written at the time that Schmitt was urging Hindenburg to save the Weimar Republic from itself. Hindenburg had other ideas. The author was a German who joined the Nazi Party in the same month as Martin Heidegger, and was active in subequent years as an ideological anti-semite, but THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL remains arguably one of the most important and challenging pieces of political writing of the last 100 years.
Enigma wrapped in the obvious
In short:
"A synoptic view of the current crisis would say: while the epicentre lies in the technologies and organisational forms of the credit system and the state-finance nexus, the underlying problem is excessive capitalist empowerment vis-a-vis labour and consequent wage repression, leading to problems of effective demand papered over by credit-fuelled consumerism of excess in one part of the world and a too rapid expansion of production in new product lines in another."
Eghel Lehge Gheel Ghele Leegh
In short:
Fredric Jameson re-reads Hegel's most perplexing work - intended to be a dispensable preface, but translated since Hegel's time into a core statement - for the (for whatever) present moment. He therefore begins at the end: "Absolute Spirit cannot be considered as a terminus of any kind, without transforming Phenomenology of Spirit into a developmental narrative, one that can be characterized variously as teleological or cyclical, but which in either case is to be vigorously repudiated by modern, or at least by contemporary, thought of whatever persuasion."
Free to Oppress but Could Be Worse!
In short:
Wood's THE CREATION OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC is an acknowledged classic, combining exhaustive research into the political literature of colonial and revolutionary America with an original and durable interpretation of "American Political Science" and its first great product, the Constitution. EMPIRE OF LIBERTY moves the story into the new, rapidly changing nation's difficult first decades, pitting the greatest names in early American history directly and even violently against each other, as a comprehensive early national portrait emerges - along with the basic contradictions of the American polity mirrored in the title.
