In my pre-Christmas book splurge, I picked up Kafka’s The Trial, which has so far reminded me why I wait 1.5 decades between reading Kafka books, and Camus’ The Rebel, which has delicious bits of tasty absurdity. And deliberately so. One cannot be a rebel without a set of values to hold higher than the powers-that-be,… Read More Camus is a Rebel, and Custer is a Hero, and I Read Books
Earlier this month, when some highly educated matron or other had to reach for her smelling salts upon hearing “Under My Thumb” whilst shopping for groceries (the Trader Joe’s manager who refrained from saying “Lady, I’ve heard that song so many times in the last month I don’t even notice it anymore. All possibility of… Read More Fun With Camille Paglia
…at least according to this apparently famous 1993 essay by Chip Morningstar, linked from Ace. He pretty much covers the steps of writing like Judith Butler in order to inflate your ideas, such as they are. It’s all great fun and the disciples of Derrida deserve every bit of trivialization. However, he says there’s a… Read More Deconstruction is Almost A Thing…
Via Protein Wisdom. I seem to recall a saying that “the poor need nothing but the spur of their poverty.” That’s not precisely true, but the poor know what they need better than anyone else trying to help them. Collective responses to poverty create massive instituions but do not give the poor what they truly… Read More “Planning is the Kiss of Death to Entrepreneurship”
A writer quickly moves from one project to another, and I have one suited for these troubled times. I am fascinated, and long have been, by the dynamics of revolution, ever since first tasting the heady brews of Pareto and de Tocqueville. A while back, I wrote an essay, which some of you may have… Read More A Man May Never Have Too Many Books
Neo-Neocon penned a refutation on Friday (h/t: Ace) of the notion, oft fulsomely asserted in the 2008 campaign, that eloquence is a substitute for competence: Wordsmiths fancy they could govern quite well, if only they cared to. Neither the skills nor the knowledge base of oration or of writing—especially fiction, although it’s also true of… Read More Politics and the Eloquence Fallacy
Ace has a nice good long post (which are always the best posts at Ace) on the staggering inanity of deciding that this: is sexual assault. His response, appropriately, is to troll the trollers: Many movements or eras — most, probably — enter a decadent phase at some point. I don’t know of a textbook definition… Read More How Many Rapes Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?: Feminism in Its Decadent Phase
Riposte Publishing is about to unload my first book! So get your Sophist on, y’all.
Era of Philosophy Immediate Goal Overall Goal Classical Organization of a Chaotic World Survival Modern Understanding of a Rational World Utopia Post-Modern Self-Awareness in an Unknowable World Avoidance of Guilt
I’m a theist, so I’ll answer them: Why is the physical universe so unimaginably large? Why should it not be? More to the point, isn’t the description “unimaginably large” relative only to humans (and their imagination)? And what’s the point? Under either a materialistic or theistic explanation, the question is irrelevant: ie, the Universe is as… Read More 20 Questions For Theists, Answered
Content Blues 