The Cutest Little Dictator Around
“We all have evil within us. Even small children are evil towards each other,” Danish-Norwegian artist Nina Maria Kleivan tells Haaretz as she explains why she chose to dress up her baby daughter as the most evil historical figures of the 20th century.
from the comments
On the other hand, desires and dreams can be simultaneously robust and fragile, and a few words of heartfelt encouragement from a mysterious stranger can change a person’s life.
ready-to-hand
“The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.”
dear clusterflock
Is it only the internal compass that points true north?
Hey bitches
From here.
From The Comments
You gotta beget while the begetting is good.
Redemption
Sorry I’ve been quiet of late. I have much to share that may or may not be of interest to ‘flockers, but this glimpse into the mind of my late Uncle Ray (through a letter to his friend Jim) may provoke:
The once “Bro. Jim”,
After prayer and meditation the Lord, in His wisdom and compassion, has led me to extend the hand of civility and forgiveness to you who have fallen so far from the fold. But I do not want to place undue emphasis on how far you have fallen or the depths of your depravity but rather on the Hope that shines eternal through His grace and redemptive power. It is truly grace because you, of all people, have through your sins, blasphemies and contemptuous behavior, earned an eternity in hell. If you escape your destiny only grace can account for it. It warms my heart to extend a gracious welcome back to the fraternity of the true believers, the promise keepers if you will. All you need to do is open your heart. It matters not that you reek of fish, gin, campsmoke and possibly loose women (could not tell from the fish odor) so long as you are sincere in your confession of sin.
Come as you are as we softly sing “Just As I Am”.
You cannot imagine how my heart swells to see a sinner return to the Truth as I see it. You should be aware that the Lord’s forgiveness is complete and total but mine is more exacting. Lacking the supernatural powers to see into your heart, I must judge by outward behavior. You would serve your rehabilitation well by inviting Joyce and me up to a Cardinal game before the season is over. That would be a splendid sign of an intent to climb out of the cesspool of degradation and self-elevation that you have inhabited.
You were once a good boy. I’ve been told that. By you, but it was convincing at the time. Open your heart. Accept this lifeline. Put on the raiments of salvation and join me when we celebrate for an eternity. Just put your hand on the computer and say “Bro. Ray intercede for me because I am lost and unworthy but I want to be found and redeemed.”
Jesus and I patiently wait,
Bro. Ray
Spiritual Warrior
These letters keep my dear Uncle alive for me. I hope you enjoy them too.
this unique 18-minute genre has its own requirements
From a Wired article on how to ace a TED Talk:
“I’m surprised to see that half the people here know my career in some detail and the other half don’t know who I am,” he says.
Science is fine, but not when it messes with our illusions.
If she had included solar power and African child warriors, it would have been so perfect a TED talk that there would have been no need for others.
Wolfram wraps his talk by saying that when it comes to trying to boil down the universe to a simple algorithm, “it’s almost embarrassing not to at least try.”
“Just because someone has an ego,” he says, citing a writer whose name I can’t read from my scribbled notes, “doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
MURDER! and Descartes
Was Descartes murdered by a Catholic Priest? There’s reason to believe so:
According to Theodor Ebert, an academic at the University of Erlangen, Descartes died not through natural causes but from an arsenic-laced communion wafer given to him by a Catholic priest.
Ebert believes that Jacques Viogué, a missionary working in Stockholm, administered the poison because he feared Descartes’s radical theological ideas would derail an expected conversion to Catholicism by the monarch of protestant Sweden. “Viogué knew of Queen Christina’s Catholic tendencies. It is very likely that he saw in Descartes an obstacle to the Queen’s conversion to the Catholic faith,” Ebert told Le Nouvel Observateur newspaper.
[...] Descartes, who had been summoned in 1649 to tutor Queen Christina, was regarded with suspicion by many of his theological coreligionists. His theories were viewed as incompatible with the belief of transubstantiation, in which the bread and wine served during the Eucharist become the flesh and blood of Christ. “Viogué was convinced that … his metaphysics were more in line with Calvinist ‘heresy’,” said Ebert.
Poison-laced communion wafers? Sounds like the punch-line to a really bad PZ Myers joke.
(tip)
Heidegger
Heidegger’s works are artifacts of darkness, not paths toward Enlightenment. By design, they perpetuate Nazism long after its battlefield defeat. His effect on philosophy is pernicious.
from the comments
I own stuff I wish I didn’t and resist owning stuff that I love.
Oh, Phil! Yes. I intend to change that equation, soon.
the first legal male prostitute
I think for a male, if you want to be successful in this type of venture, you’re not a prostitute. You’re a surrogate lover. You encompass everything that’s required of you—not only emotionally, physically—but psychologically. Because women are wired differently. They’re much more sensitive creatures. You actually have to enjoy what you do. You can’t necessarily say, “Oh, it’s just a job.” You actually have to say it’s a passion. I think it’s the same situation as with anything that happens when you break apart a social institution. There has to be some kind of change in terminology to describe persons like myself. And it’s more of a civil rights thing now. Basically this is the first time in the economy of the United States that a male has actually stood up and said, “I want to do this for a living.” And be protected under law to do it. It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front instead of the back. She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman. And I’m doing the same. I’m actually standing up now, and hopefully I can be supported by the male community and be understood as a person. This actually isn’t about selling my body. This is about changing social norms.
Congratulations.
(via marginal revolution)
Quote Out of Context
I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.
Whittaker Chambers on Rand
An old National Review article that susses out why we have no business ever taking Atlas Shrugged seriously. To put it simply, Randian philosophy is incapable of being any more than pseudo-intellectualism grounded in unfounded egotism:
Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture-that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.
cultural erosion
In which Chris Onstad refutes the Jeremiad “kids these days” argument.
g v e
Tyler Cowen on good vs evil thinking:
An alternative response is 5. “Sooner or later the Republicans will in fact win and I cannot prevent that. Right now the Democrats should spend less money, given the truth of #3. In this regard the Republicans, although evil, are in fact correct in asking the Democrats to spend less money, if only to counterbalance their own depravity.”
reprogramming predators
Ultimately, it’s an ethical choice whether intelligent moral agents opt to create such a world – or instead express our natural status quo bias and perpetuate the biology of suffering indefinitely.
(via marginal revolution)
The Really Traditional Socratic Method
A=A
math is what exists and what exists is math
William Shatner reads Levi Johnston’s tweets
“Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.”
I think Gordon Marino is correct. We have lost the distinction between depression and despair:
These days, confide to someone that you are in despair and he or she will likely suggest that you seek out professional help for your depression. While despair used to be classified as one of the seven deadly sins, it has now been medicalized and folded into the concept of clinical depression. If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube video, he would certainly complain that we, who have listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair.
There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all smiles and has accomplished everything on his or her self-fulfillment list, is, in fact, a case of despair. But while Kierkegaard would have agreed that happiness and melancholy are mutually exclusive, he warns, “Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.”
Science, it seems, is taken too seriously and as a culture we find ourselves mythologizing it. This, I suspect, is the reason we call ourselves “spiritual” (whatever that means) but take Prozac to feel happy.* I’m remind of something Jean Bethke Elshtain said:
So, what does it mean to be “living in the truth?” I think there, Havel would say, “Well, it means doing what I did in my own context, which is piercing through, penetrating that dense tissue of mystifications that you will find in every society.” It was clear what those were in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia. It’s harder here, but there certainly are such things. For example, if there isn’t the possibility for authentic speech and action, then it means that certain elites simply get on automatic pilot and do what they want. That’s why some of the debates surrounding the embryonic stem cell debates have been disheartening to me, because you have some who will say, “Oh, those people who are making arguments against it are not letting science do what science does. We have to ‘believe in science.’” And I think, “What the heck does that mean? Everything science does we just roll over for?”
Sadly, ”living in truth” for many may mean living in despair.
*Don’t hear what I am not saying: there are a great many people who have benefited profoundly from such treatments.
Dear Clusterflock
What keeps you where you are, instead of pursuing what you are truly passionate about?
Quote out of context
A harried coworker runs up to me:
Do you want to be the doer or the thing?!
character doesn’t exist.
Or, more aptly put, character is contextual:
But, as Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton philosopher, notes in his book “Experiments in Ethics,” this philosopher’s view of morality is now being challenged by a psychologist’s view. According to the psychologist’s view, individuals don’t have one thing called character.
The psychologists say this because a century’s worth of experiments suggests that people’s actual behavior is not driven by permanent traits that apply from one context to another. Students who are routinely dishonest at home are not routinely dishonest at school. People who are courageous at work can be cowardly at church. People who behave kindly on a sunny day may behave callously the next day when it is cloudy and they are feeling glum. Behavior does not exhibit what the psychologists call “cross-situational stability.”
from the moderated comments
hi
you are forgeting two main points here
1-verginity is not that important, but rather the commitment, you have sex with a person becuase you love him/ her, or you need sex, not money,
2-do you really want to have you first memory of sex and love cheeply, feeling like a prostitute for the rest of your life.