“Character is easier kept than recovered.”

from The International.

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

“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.

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.

via Joey deVilla, some advice for young (and not so young) men.

Currently up to #359: If you are going to reinvent yourself, hold the patent.

I like #16: You are what you do, not what you say.

via Mike Rosulek

Change

link

By politics I do not mean how you voted in the last election, although that is included. I mean who is entitled to do what to whom, with impunity; who profits by it; and who therefore eats what.

Margaret Atwood – The Writer’s Responsibility

“Mrs. Tulliver was what is called a good-tempered person – never cried when she was a baby on any slighter ground than hunger and pins, and from the cradle upwards had been healthy, fair, plump, and dull-witted, in short, the flower of her family for beauty and amiability. But milk and mildness are not the best things for keeping, and when they turn only a little sour they may disagree with young stomachs seriously. I have often wondered whether those early Madonnas of Raphael, with the blond faces and somewhat stupid expression, kept their placidity undisturbed when their strong-limbed strong-willed boys got a little too old to do without clothing. I think they must have been given to feeble remonstrance, getting more and more peevish as it became more and more ineffectual.”

-George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Chapter 2, pg 62 in the 1979 Penguin edition.

This is the peril of the parent (moi) who has always gotten by by getting along. Your kids don’t care whether you’re amiable (although they do want you to be kind). The result is a parent whose remonstrances are feeble and who can’t understand why Johnny won’t try to get along himself. Growing increasingly frustrated with the ineffectualness of their corrections, they become frustrated and (great word!) peevish.

Peevish. Don’t let that be my epitaph.

(See also, Teaching, frustrations with)

Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant.

-James Madison

Wanna know how to build an igloo? This handy NFB doc shows it being done. This is radical simplicity in the service of practical needs.