Philosophy; definition of

Philosophy is the radical pursuit of the reality masked by convention. From 3quarksdaily.

Security and Surveillance

“It’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. No matter what the eavesdroppers and censors say, these systems put us all at greater risk.  Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in.” – Security Expert Bruce Schneier.

Taking the anti-abortionists seriously

Slactivist has a very salient point to make about the right’s response to the murder of abortionist Dr. George Tiller by Scott Roeder. They roundly condemn the murder and for all intents and purposes are horrified by it. But the truth of the matter is that they liken abortion in America to the Holocaust and people like Dr. Tiller to Nazis running death camps. If that claim is true then Roeder’s killing of Tiller is the logical and, frankly, moral outcome of the claims to be true. If abortion in America is the same as the Holocaust one does indeed have duty to stop it by means considerably more forceful than voting for the Republican Party every four years. The fact that they (the right) is shocked by Roeder’s murder of Tiller only shows that they really don’t take themselves seriously. If they did, they’d have to count it as a victory that Tiller was murdered. But they don’t and that means that the anti-abortion talk is at best disingenous – a convenient rhetorical high horse from which to harangue everyone not on Team Jesus and from which to push for a repeal of the estate tax. It is, in short, fatuous hyposcrisy.

It is dangerous fatuous hypocrisy, too. Tiller’s murder is the logical and natural consequence of the rhetoric of the Holocaust. We are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our actions and death is a reasonable consequence of that kind of overheated rhetoric.

(Very Gradual) Change We Can Believe In

via Mike Rosulek

Change

link

The Definition of Vice

A vice is something that you repeatedly do even though you know it will make you unhappier in the long run.

Stop the Bridge

The Powers-That-Be have all but decided that a bridge needs to cross the river from Gatineau and land on the front doorstep of our neighbourhood. Of all the options that could have been chosen, this one affects (negatively) the most people. Check out the fine purveyors of bridge-related information at Stop the Bridge.

For everything, a limit

From the Saturday (24 November) Globe & Mail interview with Yann Martel, authour of The Life of Pi:

Michael Posner: Are you Christian by practice?

Yann Martel: My parents were children of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution so I grew up in a completely agnostic household. We were very respectful of religion, but it was anthropological. And I think the reward of religion is harder to get to for young minds. Because they tend to be literal. There’s a certain metaphysical depth to Christ that isn’t acceible to young minds. By the time I got to India, I was just fed up with being reasonable. It’s a waste of life to be nothing but reasonable. If you do that, you strip away everything marvellous in life. It’s why classical music and fiction are suffering. They’re perceived as work, too difficult. Our imaginative lives are shrinking in the West and I don’t think we’re any the better for it. You go to India and the people are so bloody poor and I wouldn’t say everyone is happy there but there isn’t that mean edge of alienation you have here.”

Otonabee Girl

The naked, sqalling cherub of 1969
is no more.
Nor the C-note kid, coolly sizing up the candy store.
While the lithesome girl of sixteen years,
clad in frank gaze
and borrowed, sexy underwear,
stares
from a fading colour print.

These are but chimera;
the true ghosts;
traces
encoded in the fickle chemistry
of memory.

Sad, these versions of ourselves
lost to the past?
Put out your God-eyes!
History
is the fully human measure.
Change and loss, growth and novelty
our responsibility
and our birthright.

Here
on the keen-edged knife of the present
rippling under the skin of time
she is flesh.
Mine to have, hold and love.
Better than any ghost
or imagined past.

Voyageur,
take up your paddle.
The Otonabee of time awaits.

Not Bleak

Some thinkers find reasons for optimism at The World Question Centre.

A little ominous…

Andrew Rawnsley talks about Tony Blair’s relationship to GW Bush and says this in passing:

“Another result of this Prime Minister’s enthusiasm for a big British presence on the world stage is that she is taking on burdens which others decline to share and which she is now struggling to bear. The most senior British general in Afghanistan has just warned that the country is ‘close to anarchy’ and that western forces are ‘running out of time’. British forces in Afghanistan have already had to be reinforced because the perils of that mission have been terribly under-estimated.”

Are Canadian troops cognizant of this?