Ideas
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The Logos
We do not prove the existence of the poem. It is something seen and known in lesser poems.It is the huge, high harmony that soundsA little and a little, suddenlyBy means of a separate sense. It is and itIs not and, therefore, is. In the instant of speech,The breadth of an accelerando moves,Captives the being, widens–and
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The Dream Prison of Conventional Wisdom, Part II
"To dare is to temporarily lose one's footing; Not to dare is to lose one's self." "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." –Soren Kierkegaard
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The Dream Prison of Conventional Wisdom, Part I
In the last several years I have been impressed with the power and persistence of conventional thinking in the face of powerful evidence that would contradict it. So what do I want to say here that hasn't be said a thousand times before referencing Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts, etc. Everybody reading here already understands
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Quote of the Day: Leon Wieseltier
The question of the place of science in knowledge, and in society, and in life, is not a scientific question. Science confers no special authority, it confers no authority at all, for the attempt to answer a nonscientific question. It is not for science to say whether science belongs in morality and politics and art.
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What’s the Difference between Mandela and Che?
Various notable individuals have lauded Guevara as a hero; for example, Nelson Mandela referred to him as "an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom",while Jean-Paul Sartre described him as "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age". Others who have expressed their admiration include authors Graham Greene, who remarked that Guevara "represented the idea
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Crashing the Frame
I've thought a lot over the years about persuasion and why it's so difficult, especially when it comes to political values and opinions, and the best conceptual tool that helps me to understand the difficulty is 'frames'. There are individual and group mindframes, and more often than not you can predict the individual's thinking if
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Krauthammer on The Daily Show
I don't know what happened to Charles Krauthammer. I read him in The New Republic back in the 80s, and he was a run of the mill foreign policy realist. And then The New Republic went all neoconservative and crazy pro-Israel, and I stopped reading The New Republic, and the next thing I know Krauthammer is
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Quote of the Day: Seth Ackerman
However disastrous or ridiculous the outcome of this crisis ultimately proves to be, the sub-democratic structure of American politics will guarantee that the consequences will be non-existent for those who initiated it: the regime of repressed competition will ensure no consequences for the individual legislators, while its separation of powers will probably ensure no consequences
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Tom Frank on the Creative Class
I like Frank, but I don't know quite what to make of this piece about recognizing creativity. It might be described as post that fits into the bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you genre. He protesteth too much. But it raises some interesting questions about how creativity gets recognized: And what was the true object of this superstitious stuff? A final
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Thoughtful Conservatives Hate . . .
"Individualism". Why? Because it creates a deracinated, anomic, atomized mass that looks to the State to solve its problems. Statism is the enemy, and individualism paves the road over which we will inevitably travel to get there. Here's Big Think's and PoMoCon's Peter Lawler on the subject: Modern individualism is the cause of modern statism.