If we get tough with them politically, then we may be able to avoid having to get tough with them extra-politically. Let's hope and pray that we only have to prepare to enter the extra-political and not actually go there. For it won't be pretty.
But I see no good reason to be particularly sanguine. The Muse of Blog must be with me this morning: 'sanguine' is exactly the right word.
The demand to feel aggrieved exceeds the supply of grievances. Hence the invention of 'micro-aggressions.'
As privacy perishes, privacy policies proliferate.
. . . is one that has been X-ed out.
(Crossposted at Twitter.)
You may complain, with justification, that women are more tribal than men, but the point needs to be balanced by the observation that they are also more familial, social, communal, helpful, group-oriented, and nurturing. Where would we be without them?
. . . when you find charming in her what would be annoying in others.
Do not multiply enemies beyond necessity.
William of Ockham: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
William of Alhambra: Inimici non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Enemies are worse than friends are good. The enmity of the enemy is more to be feared than the friendship of the friend is to be desired. But show me a man with no enemies, and I'll show you a man with no character. We of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable are distinguished by our enemies, in two senses of 'distinguish': we are set apart from them and we are set above them. A man is judged by the nature of his enemies — and by the nature of his friends.
Top o' the Stack
A life well-lived cannot have grievance as its organizing principle.
There is some consolation in the thought that Rome did not fall in a day. The older you are, the greater the consolation.
What I haven't been able to learn by living, I now hope to learn by dying.
Talking to oneself in the wee hours, rehearsing a rant, as the caffeine kicks in.
Kitsch is art's comfort food: familiar, reliable in its satisfactions, readily available, not particularly nourishing, but also not challenging to its consumers, remunerative for its producers.
A dialogue is not a confrontation between two monologues. (Inspired by Frithjof Schuon)
"Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein)
If so, there is no 'insect' like the hyper-specialized analytic philosopher. (See here for quotation and context.)
The true philosopher is "a spectator of all time and existence," (Plato) and of everything sublunary and superlunary.
Panoptics and synoptics are the optics of the true philosopher. Spinoza the lens-grinder would agree.
