Self Celebration

Fotógrafo retrató como avanzó el cáncer de su novia, hasta...

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:21:18 -0500

Fotógrafo retrató como avanzó el cáncer de su novia, hasta la muerte

higgsbr0son: United States Homicide Rate 1885-2012 Including...

Sat, 11 May 2013 23:19:23 -0500

United States Homicide Rate 1885-2012

Including all non-negligent homicides, meaning homicide with or without guns.

Arguments against gun control are not always “ah wunna keep mah guns” but people that believe that armed citizens make a safe country, and it is a factually supported claim.

reddit

FBI American Thinker End of Prohibition

Power Relations and the Press

Sat, 11 May 2013 00:11:44 -0500

Argentina: The government is attempting to maneuver a purchase of the number one paper supplier for newspapers in Argentina. During Peron’s reign, paper was denied to companies that opposed his government, eventually running almost all of them out of business. Kristina is attempting to emulate this tactic and there is a national outrage from her non-supporters.

U.S.A: Simultaneously, the Koch Brothers are attempting to orchestrate the purchase of 8 major newspapers. There is liberal outrage.

Interesting that both events are happening simultaneously, perfectly symbolizing the very different power dynamics that exist in these two countries. One is a government exerting control over a business; the other consists of businessmen attempting to take control of the government (by wielding media power to influence elections).

If Obama’s government had seized control of the newspapers, would ALL Americans be outraged?

If a private enterprise with a strong political ideology was attempting to control a huge media outlet, would ALL Argentinians be outraged?

Insofar as the answers to these questions differ, so the virtue, rationality, and democratic spirit of these nations do as well. A favoring of government to business can be a cultural difference. A favoring of one’s own ideology at the expense of Democracy, equality, and freedom, is not merely a cultural difference. It is irrational and immoral.

Photo

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:28:58 -0500

Greece 350 BC: “Excellence is never an accident. It is...

Sun, 05 May 2013 18:38:10 -0500

Discus Thrower, 450 BC--Greece

Piss Christ, 1987 AD--U.S.A.

Greece 350 BC: “Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives. Choice - not chance - determines your destiny.”

The United States 1971 AD: “That we deserve the superior character that enables us to make the effort to cultivate our abilities is… problematic; for such character depends in good part upon fortunate family and social circumstances in early life for which we can claim no credit.

The initial endowment of natural assets and the contingencies of their growth and nurture in early life are arbitrary from a moral point of view … the effort a person is willing to make is influenced by his natural abilities and skills and the alternatives open to him. The better endowed are more likely, other things equal, to strive conscientiously”

Lots of questions. Here’s one: Progress or regress?

Why am I so funny?

Sun, 05 May 2013 17:13:51 -0500

Why am I so funny?

"…at least, if mine prove a castle in the air, I will endeavour it shall be all of a piece and..."

Sat, 04 May 2013 01:04:30 -0500

“…at least, if mine prove a castle in the air, I will endeavour it shall be all of a piece and hang together.”

- John Locke, An Essay on Human Understanding, conclusion of bk. 1

It’s 3 am. What am I doing with my life?

How to Perform a Nozickian Bank Heist

Fri, 03 May 2013 17:36:29 -0500

How to Perform a Nozickian Bank Heist

"ONE PLACE TO BEGIN You need a reason, any reason—skiing, a job in movies, the Golden Gate..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:33:00 -0500

“

ONE PLACE TO BEGIN

You need a reason, any reason—skiing, a job in movies,
the Golden Gate Bridge.
Take your reason and drive west, past the Rockies.
When you’re bored with bare hills, dry flats, and distance,
stop anywhere.
Forget where you thought you were going.

Rattle through the beer cans in the ditch.
If there’s a fence, try your luck—they don’t stop cows.
Follow the first hawk you see, and when the sagebrush
trips you, take a good look before you get up.
The desert gets by without government.

Crush juniper berries, breathe the smell, smear your face.
When you wonder why you’re here, yell as loud
as you can and don’t look behind.
Walk. Your feet are learning.

Admit you’re afraid of the dark.
Soak the warmth from scabrock, cheek to lichen.
The wind isn’t talking to you. Listen anyway.
Let the cries of coyotes light a fire in your heart.
Remember the terrible song of stars—you knew it once,
before you were born.

Tell a story about why the sun comes back.
Sit still until the itches give up, lizards ignore you,
a mule deer holds you in her eyes.
Explain yourself over and over. Forget it all
when a scrub jay shrieks.
Imagine sun, sky, and wind the same, over your
scattered white bones.

”

- John Daniel.

I’m going on the record as saying that this is the future spirit of culture.

"Dworkin…has turned a garish history of mental instability into feminist grand opera. She publicly..."

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 18:16:00 -0500

“

Dworkin…has turned a garish history of mental instability into feminist grand opera. She publicly boasts of her bizarre multiple rapes, assaults, beatings, breakdowns and tacky trauma, as if her inability to cope with life were the patriarchy’s fault rather than her own. Dworkin’s shrill, kvetching, solipsistic prose has a sloppy, squalling infantilism.

….

Dworkin, wallowing in misery, is a “type” that I recognize after twenty-two years of teaching. I call her The Girl with the Eternal Cold. This was the pudgy, clumsy, whiny child at summer camp who was always spilling her milk, dropping her lollipop in the dirt, getting a cramp on the hike, a stone in her shoe, a bee in her hair.

In college, this type—patsy, bilious, and frumpy—is constantly sick from fall to spring. She coughs and sneezes on everyone, is never prepared with tissue and sits sniffling in class with a roll of toilet paper on her lap. She is the ultimate teacher’s pest, the morose, unlovable child who never got her mama’s approval and therefore demands attention at any price.

Dworkin seized on feminism as a mask to conceal her bitterness at this tedious, banal family drama.

”

- Camille Paglia on Andrea Dworkin, who originated the idea that all sex is rape, and thereby inflated the theory of “rape culture”

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 18:09:18 -0500

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?:

By Robert Nozick

"A laboriously achieved finding of the new science of hedonics is that, if you plot real incomes of a..."

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:21:00 -0500

“

A laboriously achieved finding of the new science of hedonics is that, if you plot real incomes of a bunch of people against their “happiness” numbers, the upward tending plot levels off as income gets high. It has a ceiling, called in the trade the “hedonic treadmill.” And so there is no point in getting more income, either for a person or for a nation. The conclusion is offered all over the new literature. In a way, it is the only conclusion. It is the essence of the “set-point” result, for example, which says that, if you lose the use of your limbs, you will in a year or so be pretty much as “happy” as you reported before. And so we can trim the tort award to a paraplegic.

But wait a minute. The scale is 1-2-3. Of course it levels off: The ceiling, namely 3, is built into the question, and so the survey researcher gets back what she put in. When did you stop beating your wife? If the plot is correctly scaled to have no built-in upper limit, the findings on which so many of the “policy” proposals depend disappear.

”

- Deirdre McCloskey (Blowing my mind with two paragraphs on a topic I have been thinking about for years with this article)

The distinction between assumptions and implications is, indeed, a shallow one that rests on nothing but the particular formulation of a theory.

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 18:28:00 -0500

The distinction between assumptions and implications is, indeed, a shallow one that rests on nothing but the particular formulation of a theory.:

“Economic Methodology in a Nutshell” by Dan Hausman (Check it out econ friends. What is your “science”?)

Reason #5,376 that I am a Libertarian

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:15:20 -0500

Reason #5,376 that I am a Libertarian:

This is pathetic. cities like New Orleans are able to handle year round festivities that vastly dwarf Mifflin. Mardi Gras, for example, draws in around 1,000,000 attendees, while the city itself only has a population of about 343,000. Proportionally, then, Madison—with a population of 237,000—should be able to handle a festival of at least 690,000 attendees. But why stop there? As true Badgers, shouldn’t we always strive to rise above? To out-do, to outperform, and of course, to out-party? If our Police Chief is unable to manage a lousy block party of 11,000 then I say he isn’t fit for the job. Maybe he would be happier in rural connecticut where he occupy himself by proposing regulation for the placement of outdoor wicker furniture. As for the rest of us Wisconites, we have a reputation to maintain.

Gay Marriage: A Non-Issue

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:11:00 -0500

Maybe I’m just addicted to contrarianism (NOT to be confused with contractariansism, which sucks), but gay marriage strikes me as an embarrassingly irrelevant technicality. People are starving around the globe; people are dying in unjust wars; and the income tax still exists. Meanwhile, a pack of accusatory loudmouths sit around planning parades and obsess over arguing with a pack of ignorant, stubborn sextogenerians.

I know of at least 3 very potent reasons why we need to stop voting on and obsessing over gay marriage:

(1) Everyone opposed to marriage equality will be dead within 30 years. You don’t need to fight for it, it’s going to happen.

(2) The effort and money that are being put into this pointless endeavor could be more effectually exerted in other areas: ending poverty, ending the wars, ending the income tax (and yes, the third one is meant to be slightly ironic. slightly.). This would have a two-fold benefit: (a) it would help people, people with real problems, not people that are obsessed with titles and tax benefits. And (b) it would fortify the reputation and respectability of the gay community, making more explicit the heinous absurdity of denying equal rights under the law to this group of people.

(3) The battle for the right to marriage is not a battle for the right to marriage. It is a battle for a government title and a tax benefit. This is often forgotten and it is very frustrating. Christians, the gays are not threatening what you refer to when you talk about marriage. For you, it is between a man and a woman; everything else is a secular union, similar to but unrelated to your strange ceremonial wizard spell. Gays, the Christians can’t stop you from living together, sharing everything, and having kinky sex. All you are fighting for, I repeat, are tax benefits and a title. So please, stop granting such monumental status to a stupid argument, an argument you shouldn’t need to have, an argument that you are inevitably going to win, and one that is taking place over things that really don’t matter

PLAY THE VIDEO (USE HEADPHONES, DUH) Self-consciousness is the...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:13:00 -0600

PLAY THE VIDEO (USE HEADPHONES, DUH)

Self-consciousness is the basis of critical thought and thus the mark of man’s unique nature. The first great philosopher appropriated the phrase “know thyself,” from the Delphic oracle, and dogmatic ideologies, symbolic of animalistic ignorance, are marked by a distinct lack of this kind of knowledge, a lack of self-awareness, a lack of context.

WHEN YOU ARE AT ABOUT 1:40, CONTINUE READING THE PASSAGE BELOW

America is our context, and its dominant largesse swallows us whole, passive pieces of krill sucked through the baleen of a blue whale. The American ‘form of life’ shrouds and distorts our perspective like a rich fog with a distinct but shifting shape, which is why it is so easy to remain unaware of this country—and ultimately ignorant of ourselves.

America contains 4.5% of the world’s population, but it is responsible for over 25% of the world’s economic activity. It is the birthplace of the global zeitgeist, the creator of modernity as we know it. Imagine the world without the automobile, without airplanes, computers or the internet. Without penicillin, without the atomic bomb, without Hollywood, without pop music or pop art or soda pop. Imagine literature without Hemmingway, Mark Twain, Emerson (and therefore Nietzsche), F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Edgar Allen Poe, without the great resurrectors of tragedy: Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neil, Tennessee Williams. We are the first test-case of classical Liberalism, and the creators of modern Liberalism, from Feminism to Multiculturalism, to Black Nationalism. We are also the source of modern Conservativism and Libertarianism. From infrastructure, to technology, to medicine, to warfare, to music, art, literature, and politics—America is the mother of modernity.

America contains 4.5% if the world’s population, but it is responsible for over 25% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The expansive and complex block—made of states and people—spans from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is topped and bottomed by two nations with the military power of anthills, nations we coerce through economic and political threats into serving out interests. Further south than Mexico, we topple dictatorships. Across the Atlantic, we negotiate deals through the medium of the U.N., funded and controlled by us. Further East, we build nations and instate new dictators to serve our interests. We have killed millions of people on five different continents. Our military presence is felt in 150 countries, and our cultural presence is felt in every country. We are the only nation to ever use an atomic bomb in warfare—and we did it twice. There are currently about 8,500 sitting in our arsenal. And like all other empires, we are saturated with glorifying monuments—Mt. Rushmore, the Empire State Building, Washington D.C., Yellowstone National Park.

America is not the new Babylon, the new Greece, or the new Persia. It is not the new Rome. America is the new standard. Modern history is centered around the United States, for better or worse. We cannot know what hindsight will reveal about us; it is impossible to know how historians will characterize this massive empire after it has withered away, centuries from now. In this regard, we necessarily remain ignorant of ourselves. However, there is one thing we can know about ourselves, there is one fact that requires no speculation: America is epic.

Dr. Albert Mohler: Women Serving in Direct Combat as a Moral Issue

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:53:00 -0600

Dr. Albert Mohler: Women Serving in Direct Combat as a Moral Issue:

All of Mohler’s points are cheap, absurd rationalizations for his sexist views. One example is his claim that a man taking a lifeboat spot at a woman’s expense is “unmanly and immoral,” which has a threefold effect. First of all, it separates the human populace by a morally arbitrary feature: gender. Second, it suggests that one of these groups–the woman group–is more vulnerable, so the real man will step up and and demonstrate his manly manliness by dying in her stead. This principle clearly holds men to a higher standard of nobility and bravery–why? The historical basis and obvious implication is that women require protection, that women need special care due to their womanly fragility. Thirdly, it completely misrepresents the situation. In the army, men are not taking scarce spots in a Missouri suburb at the “expense” of women, who must now drown in the waters of war on the front lines. Instead, there are a limited number of spots on the front lines and women are deliberately leaving the safety of the U.S. in order to claim the honor of defending their country. To deny them this is to deny them the level of self-determinacy that we allow men. This is humanistic inequality.

Speaking of equality, Mohler’s points on it are equally as incoherent as his Titanic comparison. How does equality of responsibility justify not allowing women to enter the front lines? Women have responsibility over their lives; men have responsibility over theirs–so why should one have to “protect” the other by not allowing her to exercise her responsibility? Unless, that is, Mohler is suggesting that men have responsibilities to the same degree as women, but these responsibilities are different. This pulls us back into the 50′s with all of that “separate but equal” nonsense. This principle is so broad and unsubstantial that it could justify making women wear veils or denying them the the right to work altogether.

Just think about the sheer anachronism of denying women a certain job because of tradition. How will your great grandchildren view this issue, Mr. Mohler? By then, your ideas will be as dusty as your body.

"The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle..."

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 11:48:53 -0600

“The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.”

- Walter Pater

consepticism: Free, 2012

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 16:33:59 -0600

consepticism:

Free, 2012

Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 14:30:41 -0600

Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception:

Here is a brilliant 30 page article by Georges Rey. I can’t recommend it highly enough, despite the fact that it will take a good chunk of time to comb through. If I actually convince anybody to read it, then this Sunday is a success.