Month: October 2006
-
Lakoff 1, Pinker 0
George Lakoff responds to Steven Pinker’s review of Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea. Highlights include shocking charges of deception or incompetence on both sides. This is the only paragraph of vitriol-free prose I could find in the review, and since it’s mostly summary I’ll include it here: Lakoff’s theory is aimed…
-
Manifestos
People don’t write manifestos like they used to… Whatever happened to the Surrealist Manifesto? How about the the Italian Futurist Manifesto (and its many spinoffs)? There’s also First and Second OuLiPo Manifestos, Humanist (I, II, & III) as well as Post-Humanist Manifestos, not to mention Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto: “…an ironic political myth faithful to…
-
Steven goes 99 Theses on your ass.
The simple truth is that such accumulation of earthly power is ruinous because it takes the eyes of good Christians “off the prize”. Perhaps you wonder what gives me the right to say what is good or bad for Christianity when so many religious leaders would disagree. Because Christianity is the religious faith of another…
-
PINR on North Korea’s Nuclear Weapon Test
The article is here, and mostly quotes PINR’s prior analyses. They see little risk of imminent conflict but rather note that this is a matter of asserting influence in the region: As PINR stated in May 2005, “it is feasible that Pyongyang would go one step further to declare itself a nuclear power by testing…
-
What’s up with democrats who don’t believe in the demos?
“Quoting Madison or Tocqueville about how contemporary instituitions operate in 2006 has little more merit than reading sheep’s entrails.” There’s a quote that makes a civic republican like me sit up and take notice. While Madison and Toqueville could never have imagined today’s society, they pretty much told us what would go wrong with institutions…
-
North Korea’s got da bomb
Oh my. Although, really, this just means we have to start feeding them. I make a low probability that they nuke China… say 1%. Look for an article on the Power and Interest News Report tomorrow. If this old report is correct, we only have ourselves to blame: our hawkish post-9/11 axis of evil spiel…