December 4, 2008 – 11:09 pm
Number 47, in the Krailsheimer edition:
“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”
December 3, 2008 – 10:27 pm
Thomas Friedman, in his column in today’s Times, notes the usual silence from the world’s “moderate” Muslims in the wake of yet another despicable act of mass murder in the name of their religion.
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December 3, 2008 – 10:05 pm
I have several email accounts, and I get plenty of spam, just everybody else. Every now and then, though, something comes in that I simply cannot, for the life of me, imagine why anyone would bother to send. Here’s the latest example:
Hello ,
Am David i want to know if u carry (Aluminum Planks) For Sale. If i have not mention the size that you have you can tell me the one you have now and ready to sell … What is the price of one (Aluminum Planks) so that i can purchase .I want to know if you Accept Credit Card for this order as payment .Hope to hear from you soon .
Best Regard
David, if you are out there, thanks, but no planks.
December 2, 2008 – 10:29 pm
In yesterday’s Times the conservative columnist William Kristol notes how reluctant some are to acknowledge the Islamic roots — and explicitly Islamic agenda — of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai last week.
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November 30, 2008 – 11:09 pm
I do hope readers will forgive me for rather a rambling post yesterday. (My editorial staff was off for the holidays.) I think some clarification is in order.
The post was written as part of an ongoing discussion of the appropriate limits of tolerance. I have been upbraided on occasion for discussing certain topics, particularly those having to do with religion and the clash of secularism with fundamentalism, in harsh, and perhaps polemical, terms. Such a tone strikes some as insufficiently respectful of the people who believe and espouse the ideas in question, and organize their lives in accordance with them.
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November 29, 2008 – 5:02 pm
In a challenging and thoughtful comment on our recent post about tolerance, our reader Addofio chides me for the disdainful tone I have taken in some of my criticism of religion. She recommends that we discuss ideas, however preposterously absurd, in emotionally neutral terms, as a gesture of respect for the people who hold them. Should we try always to do this when discussing any idea, no matter what the idea, or the context? Is it even possible to do so? What are emotions for, anyway? And is everyone entitled to this sort of respect?
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November 29, 2008 – 12:29 am
I have a difficult time, occasionally, maintaining a seemly façade of unconditional respect for my fellow hominids. I try, I really do, but the older I get, the more I see of my conspecifics, and the more I come to understand of our origins, the more difficult it becomes. The recent sectarian barbarism in India gave further testimony as to what kind of creatures we really are, if anyone had any nagging doubts. But it certainly doesn’t require centuries of insane religious conflict and persecution to get us acting naturally. Why, right here at home, when we jingle Pavlov’s bell at the start of the holiday-shopping season, a few dollars off at Wal-Mart is more than enough to snap the leash.
November 26, 2008 – 11:25 pm
To all of you, a safe and happy Thanksgiving. Even on this day, as civilization’s foundations shudder and its enemies raise their bloodstained hands once again, we have much to cherish, and to be grateful for.
“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”
To all of the many friends I have met on these pages, thank you for enriching my life.
November 25, 2008 – 10:10 pm
More about Somali pirates: reader JK directs us to this insightful item by “Galrahn” over at Information Dissemination.
November 25, 2008 – 7:05 pm
Ah, the Clintons. Ah, Christopher Hitchens. In a brief and piquant essay, the latter reminds us why the last thing we need is another stiff dose of the former. Here. Also, if you feel like a longer and deeper mud-wallow, Mr. Hitchens’s piece links to this eight-page article by Todd Purdum on how the former scoundrel-in-chief has been occupying himself since leaving office.
November 25, 2008 – 10:50 am
In today’s news, we read that pirates have seized yet another ship off the Somali coast. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens asks why we no longer hang pirates when we catch them. A fair question, I think.
November 25, 2008 – 12:30 am
I tend to rail about religion now and then; some of you may have noticed. I’ve even suggested that we’d all, in the long run, simply be better off without it. Such remarks tend to evoke indignant responses, in which I am tartly reminded of the value of “tolerance”. But I must say that I don’t think I’m actually being intolerant at all. In a pair of comments to our previous post, philosopher Peter Lupu offered some thoughtful remarks about tolerance, and I think it would be helpful to take a closer look.
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November 22, 2008 – 6:59 pm
As I mentioned last night, there’s a discussion underway about interreligious dialogue at Kevin Kim’s place. The thread began with Kevin’s link to an article about Karen Armstrong’s call for worldwide interreligious harmony. I’ve been taking fire for my flint-hearted remarks, and would like to comment further here.
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November 22, 2008 – 12:04 am
Nothing here tonight, I’m afraid; I’ve spent my spare time this evening in a discussion about interreligious dialogue over at Kevin Kim’s. It’s an interesting conversation, which I will probably follow up with a post of my own. But for now, read the post and thread here.
November 20, 2008 – 3:52 pm
Should Hillary Clinton be the next Secretary of State? I’d rather she weren’t, and here’s why.
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November 19, 2008 – 11:56 pm
It has been a long day: it is almost midnight, and I’ve only just got home from the Manhattan hospital where my frail and elderly mother-in-law was admitted for tests. She is not so well. My lovely wife Nina is still there with her.
So, nothing long-winded tonight, I’m afraid. Although there are in fact a few things I’d like to comment on, they will have to wait.
Meanwhile, though, here is a happy story that has been making the rounds today (and was also sent our way by reader JK).
November 18, 2008 – 10:55 pm
This from entertainer Kanye West, whom some of you may even have heard of:
“I realize that my place and position in history is that I will go down as the voice of this generation, of this decade…
…Because I have sacrificed real life to be a celebrity and to give this art to people, which is great.”
We are not worthy.
November 17, 2008 – 10:30 pm
We hear a lot these days about inter-religious dialogue, and I suppose it’s a nice enough idea, in a surreal sort of way. It’s even, perhaps, a plausible one, as long as we are talking about, for example, a dialogue between the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians — which would surely be a generous and genteel affair, with refreshments. There are other religions, however, whose adherents are not only not interested in tolerance and dialogue, but who will not rest until the rest of us — believers and and atheists alike — are brought either to heel, or to the sword. And they are among us.
The restless activist Brigitte Gabriel reminds of of this awkward fact in this video clip, brought to our attention by Gates Of Vienna.
November 17, 2008 – 12:24 am
With a hat tip to our friend Jess Kaplan, here is P.J. O’Rourke’s wistful assessment of the wreckage of American conservatism.
November 15, 2008 – 10:04 pm
I recently began a careful re-reading of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, a book I had not looked at closely in decades. The work is primarily an argument for Pascal’s Jansenist Christian beliefs, but prepares the soil with a searching review of Man’s transience and wretchedness.
The genius Pascal, in his cruelly foreshortened life, acquired wisdom far beyond his meager allotment of years, and the collection is a treasury of coruscating aphoristic gems. I think I will post some of them here from time to time, with or without comment; I’ll present them as numbered in the 1966 Penguin translation by A.J. Krailsheimer.
Here, for example, is #26, which seems timely enough:
The power of kings is founded on the reason and folly of the people, but especially on their folly. The greatest and most important thing in the world is founded on weakness. This is a remarkably sure foundation, for nothing it surer than that the people will be weak. Anything founded on sound reason is very ill-founded, like respect for wisdom.
November 15, 2008 – 9:00 pm
Well, seven, now; I should have penned this post back in August, when the title was most apt.
But there are definitely strange things afoot in British Columbia: story here.
November 13, 2008 – 10:09 pm
I managed to get home from work by eight-fifteen this evening, which, in the context of the past week, feels like playing hooky. The little grey cells, however, are in weary and mutinous disarray, so I will probably be leaning on the “Shameless Filler” category for another few days.
But I do want to direct you to an excellent essay that reader and commenter David Duff sent our way in a previous thread. It is from Kenneth Anderson’s “Law of War and Just War Theory” blog, a website that describes itself as follows:
Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at Washington College of Law, American University, Washington DC, and a research fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, blogs on topics related to international laws of war, international law, related human rights topics, international NGOs, and the theory of the just war. (Everything here is first draft and subject to changing my mind.)
In this post Mr. Anderson takes up the subject of the role of intellectual elites in government: a topic that has been on everyone’s mind lately, provoked in large part by the sudden and freakish ascent to international prominence of the flamboyantly uncultured, proudly ignorant, but curiously gifted Governor of Alaska.
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November 13, 2008 – 10:04 pm
This from today’s Borowitz Report:
November 13, 2008
Bush in Race against Time to Wreck Country
Legacy of Destruction at Stake
Confounding the conventional wisdom that he is a lame duck president with no agenda as his days in office dwindle, President George W. Bush is redoubling his efforts to mutilate the country before his term expires, aides confirmed today.
“President Bush has spent the first seven years and ten months of his presidency doing everything in his power to leave the United States in smoldering ruins,” said White House spokesperson Dana Perino. “He certainly is not going to let the final days of his tenure go to waste.”
While Ms. Perino said that President Bush is proud to have led the U.S. into a “pointless and totally avoidable catastrophe in Iraq” and “the most terrifying financial cataclysm since the Great Depression,” he is “in no way prepared to rest on his laurels.”
Mr. Bush is “delighted,” Ms. Perino said, that the stock market has lost one trillion dollars of its value in the last three days, but “that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the damage he hopes to wreak in his remaining time in office.”
Among the targets for destruction that the President is currently eyeing, Ms. Perino indicated that the demise of the Big Three automakers was at the top of his list.
“If the President could preside over the disappearance of the Big Three and the millions of jobs they represent, that would be the ultimate feather in his cap,” she said.
For his part, Mr. Bush took few questions from reporters today, saying that he had to return to the Oval Office to order random airstrikes over Belgium.
November 13, 2008 – 10:02 pm
If you think your IPhone can do it all, you ain’t, as they say, seen nuthin’ yet. Have a look here.
November 12, 2008 – 11:50 pm
At my age, I certainly don’t enjoy working fourteen-hour days, and right through the weekend — I had quite enough of that in my long years at the recording console (and have the receding hairline and sunken eyes to prove it). But that’s just what I’ve been doing: I have a deadline to meet, and, to make matters worse, I set myself back several days by making some boneheaded design errors in the code I’ve been working on. The folks I work for are remarkably pleasant, understanding, and gracious — quite inexplicably so, under the circumstances — but a deadline is a deadline, and my comfortable paychecks come with the fair and reasonable expectation that when the time comes to deliver the goods, said goods will indeed be delivered, and in good working order besides.
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November 10, 2008 – 9:50 pm
Work presses heavily upon me just now, leaving little time for anything else. Please feel free to wander about the archives, or try our new “Random Post” feature. Things should be back to normal in a day or two.
November 8, 2008 – 7:20 pm
Last night we had friends over for dinner, a lovely couple we know from Wellfleet. They are both academics: she is a sociologist and associate professor at Harvard.
Naturally we were discussing the recently transformed political landscape, and the conversation turned to Mr. Obama’s possible choices for the composition of his cabinet. Among the names that came up was that of Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury Secretary who may serve in that role again in the new administration. He was also the president of Harvard University from 2001 until 2006, when he resigned after some remarks he made sparked a feverish social and political brouhaha.
At the mention of his name, our guests immediately expressed harsh disapproval. I replied that I had never understood what was so troubling about Dr. Summers’ comments, and a lively debate ensued.
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November 7, 2008 – 12:31 am
I note with sorrow the success of Proposition 8 in California, which will amend the state’s constitution to ban same-sex marriages. Of all the threats that imperil us in these uncertain times, that this is what they chose to focus on is a depressing comment indeed.
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November 6, 2008 – 11:54 pm
A thirteen-year-old girl, walking to visit her grandmother, is accosted and raped. She reports the assault to the local authorities, whose response is swift: they take her to a stadium, bury her up to her neck, and, with a large crowd watching, stone her to death as she begs for mercy. The men who raped her are not arrested.
It’s just a cultural thing. Not any business of ours, really.
November 5, 2008 – 11:24 pm
I may look and sound pretty tough, but actually I’m a pushover. Beneath my gruff and menacing exterior I’m a sentimental old softie, a big ball of moosh. I’m particularly susceptible to movies: the tear-jerkers move me to unseemly and lachrymose upwellings of empathy, and the scary ones just beat the hell out of me. I hate it.
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November 5, 2008 – 2:05 pm
Both John McCain and Barack Obama gave fine speeches last night. Mr. McCain gave an honorable and gentlemanly address that was untainted by bitterness, and Mr. Obama’s speech was both sober and uplifting. I must comment on one thing in particular, before I am scooped by all the language mavens out there: Mr. Obama’s phrase “the enormity of the task that lies ahead”.
The word enormity refers, in careful usage, not to hugeness, but to monstrosity of evil — as in “the world stood aghast at the enormity of Germany’s crimes”. I was startled to hear Mr. Obama, who is very careful with language, and who obviously put a great deal of effort into this speech, use this word. I wonder if he meant to.
November 4, 2008 – 11:38 pm
Well! There you have it. The Democratic Party seems to be giving the Republicans a thumping of historic proportions. (They might have managed this four years ago, had they not put forward as their champion that pompous and insufferable windbag, the lugubrious thatch-crowned Ent John Kerry.)
I have a feeling I am not the only blogger banging at his machine this evening, so I will say only that it will be interesting to see, now that he has claimed the glittering prize, how Barack Obama will govern. Given his background, and the conquest of both House and Senate by the Democrats, he might be emboldened to press forward with a far-left agenda, one that would surely enrage the powerless Right. Or he might make good on his campaign pledge to work toward national unity, and govern much more toward the center than people such as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (and indeed many of the folks in my neighborhood) would like. We’ll just have to see.
I will say that it is a triumph for America that a black man can now have been elected President. Maybe in another hundred years or so we can get an atheist in there too.
November 4, 2008 – 7:19 pm
I know I said I would shut up about Sarah Palin, and I will, sort of. But Christopher Hitchens is under no such obligation, and he wrote a tart little item a few days ago. We read:
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November 3, 2008 – 11:56 pm
We’ve heard a lot lately about anti-intellectualism. The word “intellectual” often evokes, it seems, negative associations even in people who could fairly be called intellectuals themselves; we’ve even seen some of that in recent discussions here. Why?
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November 1, 2008 – 3:01 pm
I have a fairly uncomplicated genealogy: Cornish, Scottish and Welsh (Pollock/Polk, and Lloyd) on my father’s side, and Scottish, back into the remotest mists of time (along the Calder/Cawdor and Morrison lineages) on my mother’s. (That my name is Pollack, not Pollock, is only due, as it turns out, to a paperwork error that happened when my parents came to the US in 1956 — which I was startled to learn only about a year ago.)
So, because I am caught up in a busy social swirl today, with scant time for scribbling, here is an old Welsh song for you all to enjoy, as transcribed for us by the late, great Robert Benchley:
Welsh Song
Wirion digon gul noch noch
With a hey down derry and a ddwpllwdpoch
Ei gsith och deb nam ryddid gam
With a hey derry derry di-do caethion pam.
Llewsithery fwllned dinam cru
Gwerthyr yw brenin myy fansth
Sing hey for the nhaith meddyn ddica gstrth.
Rousing, no?
Speaking of Robert Benchley, by the way, you haven’t really gotten to know the fellow without having seen his Oscar-winning short documentary from 1935, How to Sleep. Here it is.
October 31, 2008 – 10:57 pm
The current presidential contest — which got underway, if memory serves, back in the late ’50s or early ’60s — appears, impossibly, to be in its final days. It has seemed so hyperbolically prolonged, like some geometric distortion of spacetime itself, that I rather suspect that when it is over the world will end in a thunderclap, as was the predicted result in that old story about the monks moving metal discs in the temple in Benares — but more likely, I suppose, is that Wednesday will simply dawn as usual, the parties’ lawyers will get on with their lawsuits, and the rest of us will get back in the barrel.
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October 29, 2008 – 10:49 pm
I’ve got into a bit of a scuffle commenting on a post over at The Gypsy Scholar; I made some unkind remarks about the Republican vice-presidential nominee, and elicited a snappy rebuke.
I will cop to the charge of using fairly strong language, bordering on incivility. I may even be showing symptoms of what some GOP partisans have been calling “Palin Derangement Syndrome”. I confess in open court that the shocking fact, and ludicrous spectacle, of Ms. Palin’s vice-presidential candidacy does indeed arouse in me an uncomfortably itchy irritation, and an unwelcome emotional mixture of sadness, embarrassment, and vexation.
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October 28, 2008 – 11:51 pm
From a commenter over at Gypsy Scholar (by way of our reader JK) comes a link to an article by George Monbiot entitled “How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington”:
How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind’s closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama was a Muslim and a terrorist?
Like most people on my side of the Atlantic, I have for many years been mystified by American politics. The US has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.em>
Reason number one that Americans are such blockheads: their mind-strangling religious fundamentalism. Read the rest here.
October 28, 2008 – 11:08 am
I haven’t written much about music lately, and have almost never, I think, written about my own musical background, other than as a recording engineer. But I have played the drums and the guitar since I was a boy, and before I landed my first job in a recording studio and began a career at the console, my plan was to achieve mega-stardom at the drum-kit.
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October 27, 2008 – 10:18 pm
We note with grim satisfaction the conviction of Senator Ted Stevens. It has the feeling of justice long-postponed and richly deserved.
It’s just a drop in the bucket, though, as Mark Twain reminds us:
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class, except Congress.”
Celebration would be premature: the man is still seeking re-election. He may well win; as we have seen lately, standards are rather low up there.
October 27, 2008 – 10:34 am
In today’s Wall Street Journal, economist Arthur Laffer (he of the famous Laffer Curve), tells us just how bad things are.
October 26, 2008 – 9:55 pm
Following on from yesterday’s post, I’d like to look more closely at the matter of potentiality.
As mentioned previously, the argument put forward by Bill Vallicella in his discussion of abortion at The Maverick Philosopher is that from the moment of conception the zygote has the potential to become a fully developed adult, a rights-possessing member of society, and that in virtue of this potential the zygote itself should be accorded the right to life. We should do this, the argument goes, because we already accord the right to life to other entities that are only potentially qualified, namely babies and small children, and therefore to deny this consideration to the conceptus is to apply the principle inconsistently.
A central assumption in this line of reasoning is that the potential for full-fledged personhood is not only present in both zygote and neonate, but is also only either present or absent, and not the sort of property that admits of degrees. In other words, Bill insists that it is wrong to say that the full-term fetus has more potential for rights-possessing adulthood than a unicellular zygote. I think this assumption is wrong.
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October 25, 2008 – 2:17 pm
As mentioned in our previous post, there is a discussion ongoing at The Maverick Philosopher on the subject of abortion. The argument put forward (see yesterday’s post for a very brief synopsis) is that a fertilized zygote has the potentiality to become a fully developed, rights-possessing adult — and, in virtue of that, should be accorded moral consideration, and the right not to be deprived of life, from the moment of conception. I think this is an oversimplification of at least two aspects of the problem.
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October 23, 2008 – 11:35 pm
Over at his website The Maverick Philosopher, Dr. William Vallicella has been puting together a philosophical defense of the pro-life position based on an argument from the potential personhood of the conceptus. His argument runs as follows:
1. We ascribe the right to life to neonates and young children on the basis of their potentialities.
2. There is no morally relevant difference between neonates and young children and fetuses.
3. [This principle of potentiality] should be applied consistently to all like cases.
Therefore
4. We should ascribe the right to life to fetuses on the basis of their potentialities.
This is a coherent and possibly persuasive argument, but I think it must overcome two objections that I hope to put forward in the next few days (as time permits). Meanwhile, please have a look; I am curious to know what you all think.
October 23, 2008 – 11:24 pm
A while back we offered a link to videos of a conference called Beyond Belief. It featured talks by an outstanding panel of thinkers — most of them Godless heathens — about the growing scientific understanding of religion as a biological and anthropological phenomenon, and about the alarming role still played by faith and superstition in human affairs. Another round of the conference took place earlier this month, and there is a new crop of videos to watch. The theme this year was stated as follows:
Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark is the third in an annual series of conversations: an ongoing project to foster and promote the use of reason in formulating social policy. This year, we asked participants to propose a Candle — a potential solution to a problem that they have identified in their area of expertise or informed passion.
You can find the videos here.
October 22, 2008 – 11:05 pm
There is a mode of locution known as the Sports Present: one hears it often, and almost exclusively, during broadcasts of athletic competitions. It is employed, when discussing some action that has just taken place on the field, to point out that had something in the execution gone differently, a different result would have ensued.
For example: imagine that a running-back, having broken free in midfield, has just been dragged to the ground at the five-yard line after a long and promising sprint. Our announcer, having glimpsed in his mind’s eye some neighboring “possible worlds”, offers the following counterfactual analysis:
“If Csonka breaks that tackle, it’s six points for Miami!”
That’s the Sports Present.
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October 20, 2008 – 11:19 pm
Well, we’ve just got back to New York, and should be resuming normal operations shortly.
In the preceding post I neglected to mention the award given to the second-place winner: it was a copy of an amusing little book called Plato And A Platypus Walk Into A Bar…, in which the authors, Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, introduce readers to basic philosophical ideas by way of jokes. Those with any familiarity with the subject won’t be learning anything new, but it’s an entertaining, breezy read, and the jokes are good. I offer a couple of examples below.
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October 18, 2008 – 10:28 pm
Well, the 2008 Wellfleet Oysterfest Spelling Bee is in the books, and I did not win. I did come in second, but my hope of building on last year’s triumph to establish the foundations of a dynasty is dashed. I was beaten by a fine speller named Maria something, from Jamaica Plain, which is apparently a neighborhood somewhere in Boston.
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October 18, 2008 – 11:53 am
I apologize for the scanty content this weekend; we are in Wellfleet for the annual Oysterfest, and there has been little time for solitary scribbling. (This afternoon I will attempt to defend my title at the town’s annual Spelling Bee.)
Back to normal later this week.
October 16, 2008 – 2:37 pm
We’re traveling this evening, and there won’t be much time for writing. But as you know, I hate to send you along empty-handed — so here is a particularly gratifying video clip, courtesy of Alex Bragg, one of my younger (and more formidable) training brothers down at the kwoon.