I was like a seventy year old man but could never understand how there could be spatial dimensions curled until Brian Greene explained it to me, saying: they are like the circular dimension of a cylinder, which a 1-dimensional worm could crawl around.
http://ethicist.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/limited-tolerance/?hp
“Tolerance ends where harm begins.”
The essential ethical quandary of the 21sts century was brought into stark light by the actions of the morning of September 11, 2001, when ten men hijacked four airplanes full of civilians and piloted two of them into two of the the largest office buildings in the world, one into a government office-building serving the military of the largest military power in the world and crashing one into a field in western Pennsylvania. All this they did to advance their geopolitical goals. They were steeled by a particular conception of their religion, and their religion’s historical role, and the changes the world had undergone in the previous two hundred years, in which European peoples were able to dominate the rest of the world and imposse their cultures and political structures on these other peoples.
As European political philosophy neared the end of its own rationality, brought into rigorous objectiveness by the dialectic between its two predominant 20th century strains, communist authoritarianism and liberal capitalism, the own unfairness of its dominance which reflected power relationships Europeans and the others were increasingly uncomfortable with and unable to justify resulted in the rise of postcolonialism and postmodernism. The Death of the Western God led to the Death of All Gods — the removal of the curtain to reveal naked power politics (on both right and left) led to the great Crisis of Faith in our institutions and ethics. The devaluing of other cultures was replaced with a culture of tolerance — maligned as moral relativism, it was really a form of cultural relativism that admitted that our ethics and morals were the product of our histories, that they were contingent and could not be justified based on belief in some higher power or ultimate truth.
Yet, the lessons of evolution and of Marxian dialectic do propose another justification for certain of our ethical considerations: that the contending of many parties for their desires results in a dynamic consensus that is the best way we know how to approximate justice. That justice, true justice, though the daughter of particulars, is the mother of all. That harm and waste are difficult to justify. That benefits should outweigh costs.
Can we be tolerant of intolerance? Why be tolerant? One reason is uncertainty — we are uncertain that our way is right even for us, how much more so should we not take away some one else’s way. Another is the prevention of monocultures — the process of evolutionary justice that brought the West to where it is requires many voices, all seeking their own good. This preference against monocultures is a preference — hard to justify intrinsically if our first value is tolerance.
Hence, our first value should not be tolerance. It should be humanity, with the freedom to pursue their own ends, since we are mortal and uncertain. Everyone must choose for themselves. A Choice that hurts others must be made susceptible to the pressures of others. We are all free, but also responsible to guarantee the freedom of the others, for loss of freedom to one jeopardizes our freedoms. However, we are not free to take away freedoms.
What about tax? It is a restraint by government to correct externalities of our actions.
She stands alone, staring into the mirrorstone that occupies the far wall of the gloomcave where I’ve placed her. Even so, the terror and anxiety that stir her features are sometimes betrayed by the ghost of the girl as she adjusts the image’s hair by smoothing her own. I watch her, invisible, tracing her with my mind’s eye, each young line, absorbing the white color of her skin, the dark browns of her hair. She is my prisoner, yet she enchants me with her presence, with the song of those hands upon her hair.
Just like this, I watch her for a minute, or an hour, or a century.
In the halls of death, as on the edge of a lightbeam, time loses meaning.
I am old and eternal, all calcium and bone, thick and gristle — and I know that there is at least a cold fire that burns within me, that while it might not heat it may still bear light and in these subterranean caves that are merely the true rendering of the world above, such light is not unwelcome. All who have walked before and all who will ever walk must stand before that light — cold light, shadow light, but light nonetheless — is such light, such truth, capable of love? Deserving of it? Blood flows in her veins. She is the flower of the spring, and I am the memory of winter.
Out of shadows, I appear, startling her, stretching the edges of her pale eyes.
Given that Janet Napolitano wants to rebrand terrorism as man-caused disasters (which is a fairly clunkity-clunkity hyphenated neologism) what other better and more specific Names might we ascribe to this particular presentation of assymetric warfare? Terrorism seems particularly imprecise, given that it invokes a certain fear-based emotional response in some abstract sense of a victim, instead of describing what it is.
Suicide bombing is better. Mass Homicides or Civilian Targeting might be better. Attacks on Vulnerable Civilian Populations. Attempting to hold populations hostage. Attacks on Civilian Targets.
Disaster is almost certainly wrong — like terrorism, too results oriented; it neglects that which is essential about terrorism and how to stop it, which is the Act and the Intention. (Actus Reus and Mens Rea). The result is relevant, but disaster has a connotation of amorphous guilt — when terrorism is very much about specific guilt. Terrorism assumes too much — assumes that the goals of the act are terror — when they may not be the goals, but only the response the victim feels.
Nuance? Or precision? By Naming correctly, do we get closer to the truth? I think so.
Marx said: “Each against all competition is antithetical to the idea of society and therefore sets up a contradiction or historical dynamic which over time is resolved in favour of the class with the greatest ability to act in its own rational self interest.”
From Wikipedia, False Consciousness
Question: Is Marx saying that unfettered competition destabilizes society to the point that the winners must then swoop in and reimpose order and constraints upon the workings of society? Since competition/capitalism does create wealth in extraordinary measures (which Marx aknowledges elsewhere), someone must control it. The question, as always, is who. Does our democracy, tempered with the “probability of upward mobility” meme in the minds of the non-winners, begin to provide an answer. When the “POUM” is bullshit, the proletariat is fooling themselves and working to create Other’s Wealth OR will get wise and press for Redistribution. When the POUM is real, Rawlsian bargaining will tip to favor wealth maximization.
Further Investigation: POUM as a critical factor in determining what kind of society is formed.
Bad Faith —
1) We always have a choice, to guide our lives to our chosen goods. 2) Though this freedom may be limited, it can never be eliminated. 3) We choose in anguish, knowing there will be consequences. 4) To then claim that we have no choice, that we are forced by circumstances into one particular action, is to assume the role of an object in the world, at the mercy of circumstance, a being-in-itself.
“Human reality is what it is not, and it is not what it is.” Human Existence reaches, it does not rest. Being the void that sits behind our perceptions, we are only defined negatively — like God — “we are not our history, we are not our occupation, we are not our body, we are not our thoughts” — and in this negative we begin to sketch the outlines of ourselves — and our choices are our shadows or our footprints in the sand.
I read the Iliad yesterday. Oh Achilles. Oh Hector. Oh Patroclus. Born to die. But that is not us. We are not our deaths. We are our lives. We are our living.
Bad Faith is the the free decision to deny ourselves our inescapable freedom. We choose to lie to ourselves. I am a white male, with responsibilities, and these responsibilities mean I have no choice. That is the lie — we always have a choice. Whatever you do, you have chosen to do. I’ve chosen law school — for a myriad of reasons – I know why I’m here — to alleviate risk, to learn how the world works, to gain the opportunity to have a seat at the table. The choice was freely made — The choice to become more than I was. To learn more and to be more. To reach. To gain wealth and the love of beautiful women.
Now the expected rewards have been snatched away, from me as from so many others. This is not a problem or a crisis. The present is omnipresent and everpresent. I am me, RIGHT NOW. I must CHOOSE NOW. I have CHOSEN TO STAY IN LAW SCHOOL — to try at least — so as to put this feather in my cap and wear it with me for the rest of my life — so as not to quit, since it’s smart to quit, but it’s also smart to quit at the RIGHT TIME, not the WRONG TIME.
I may die, and therefore have wasted my final year of life. But that is always the way of it. HAVE A GOOD RUN. If I die tomorrow, make sure you can say YOU’VE HAD A GOOD RUN. Spring has sprung. Next Year in Jerusalem. We were SLAVES but now WE’RE FREE. We were slaves but now we’re free. We are the Choosers. We are not our Choices. But We make our Choices. We do not serve our Choices, Our Choices Serve Us. We were someone else’s Choices once, and we will Choose later, Choose to create life or not. We are the Chosen, and We are the Choosers. This year we are slaves. Next year may we be Free.
Addiction — not so hard to understand. Cigarette ends the surprise — all surprises, but mostly the daily surprise — replacing the endless open anxiety of life into seven minute cigarettes, to ease you through your day.
“Most people don’t know how they’re gonna feel from one day to the next, but a drug fiend has a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles.” – Drugstore Cowboy
The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees 