Category: Uncategorized
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What the hell is making me smile at 7:35 in the morning?
Have you seen this video? Watch it all the way through; it starts slow, becomes funny, gathers steam towards surreal, ends in tragicomedy. Plus, it’s got a catchy tune.
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What do we owe the worst-off?
SKates comments on Andrew’s post about anti-Spanish language sentiment among anti-immigrationists (and why haven’t they found a name that’s pro-something or other?): This policy in no way harms the quality of anyone’s life, nor does it judge anyone as lesser people. It does, however, ask people who are about to be gifted with alot of…
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Gov’t taps ABC to root out leakers.
This strikes me as very important, at least domestically. ABC’s calls are being tracked, or at least that’s the claim. We had all become comfortable with an uneasy cold war between the state and journalists, conducted with a string of double agents we called leakers and whistleblowers. The state was opposed to these unauthorized informants,…
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If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire…the A-Team
Dear Bill Gates, Please hire these guys to intervene in Darfur. I’ll chip in. Best, Joshua PS- The article says that 180,000 have died, while 400,000 is more realistic. Hope that helps!
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De gustibus non disputandum est
Kant is famous for inverting the claim that “there is no disputing taste.” Despite the fact that most people cannot imagine an argument for the pleasure or displeasure of flavors and foods, he supplies us a perspective from which we might establish a “common sense.” Namely, that each of us, in tasting or experiencing, might…
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When Fortune Does Not Want Men to Oppose Her Plans, She Blinds Their Minds
In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli wrote, “In order to make Rome greater and bring it to the greatness it attained, she [fortuna] judged it necessary to defeat it…. In ordaining this she prepared everything for its recovery [manipulating events] to form a great vanguard under a commander untainted by any shame of defeat and…
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“WWWSD?” Cultural relativists come from relativist cultures
I’ve spent the last semester sitting in on a seminar taught by a Vanderbilt philosopher named Robert Talisse. I’m not a student at Vanderbilt, so it was really great of him to let me sit in on his seminar. At the same time, despite the fact that one of my dissertation advisors is an analytically…
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Law Enforcement in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
On July 8, 2004, in my new home state of Tennessee, five Campbell County Sheriff’s deputies used torture and intimidation to try to get a warrantless search form signed. For more than two hours, they beat and threatened Eugene Siler with, among other things, genital electrocution: “…until you sign that form, its fixin to get…
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Refugee Life
“We must… build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee.” (Giorgio Agamben) If the nation-state is in decline, it is principally because the nation-form, that coalition of fellow natives born of common blood and soil has given way to the denizen-foreigner: the resident-alien who through dint of illegal…
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Sex and Judgment
So in the last post, I showed how the initial versions of Christian judgment were remarkably modest and fallibilist with regard to other people. This makes a certain amount of sense, since Augustine was attached to a fairly rationalist theology, and always gave both doctrinal and basically ethical reasons for his judgments. (For instance, with…