Varia – Page 12 – Maverick Philosopher

A Slip of the Tongue and a Bit about Me and Mary Jane

One morning recently I was talking with a thirtysomething woman about Obamacare. "If you like your period, you can keep your period" came out of my mouth. I was intending, "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period."

Thanks to Obama, the period is one punctuation mark that will never be the same. From now on, no one will be able to say 'period' without conjuring up the great man, just as words like 'inhale' and 'is' conjure up the first black president, Bill Clinton, along with images of chubby star-struck interns. "But I didn't inhale." I suppose it all depends on the meaning of 'inhale.'

Presidents need to realize that there is such a thing as videotape and that lies are easily exposed. In this clip, Bubba say that he tried marijuana a time or two, didn't like it, didn't inhale, and never tried it again. But obviously, there is no way to tell if you like it without inhaling it, and quite a bit of it, over several sessions. The man was obviously lying, and he must have known that we knew he was lying.

I tried it, and from '68-'72 smoked my fair share of it, inhaling deeply as one must to get any effect, but I did not like it. I'm an intense guy whose life is already plenty intense. My reaction was similar to Lenny Bruce's: "I've got enough shit flying through my head without smoking weed." (Quoted from memory from How to Talk Dirty and Influence People which I read around '66. My copy is long gone, my mother having confiscated it and thrown it away.)

Having just checked the quotation, I was pretty close. What Bruce actually said was this:

"I don't smoke pot, and I'm glad because then I can champion it without any special pleading.
The reason I don't smoke pot is because it facilitates ideas and heightens sensations.
And I got enough shit flying through my head without smoking pot."

Customer ‘Care’

I just wasted 30 minutes on the phone with a customer service representative straightening out a screw-up emanating from their end. The automated intro said that a "helpful customer care" rep would be available in one minutes (sic)." Don't tell me how helpful and caring you are. Just do your job and do it right.

This change from 'service' to 'care' is squishy, bien-pensant liberal feel-good bullshit and quite in keeping wth the Age of Feeling, the Age of Obama Yomama. It's humbug I tell you, humbug!

Merry Christmas.

Thanksgivukkah

How often do Thanksgiving and Hanukkah (or the first day of Hanukkah) fall on the same day? Wikipedia to the rescue.

What do John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and C. S. Lewis Have in Common?

All three exited the mundus sensibilis 50 years ago, today. Whither? The Whither like the Whence remain in suspense.

The three illustrate the truth that "The pen is mightier than the sword" (Bulwer-Lytton).

A Brit's take on 22 November.

Halloween Varia

1. Mark Anderson's Halloween greeting takes the form of a quotation from Moby Dick, the relevance of which escapes me: "The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick?" Wider context here.

2. Why Liberals Love Halloween

3. Zombies and Other Minds

4. Fake Halloween Tombstones and the Brevity of Life

5. On this date in 2008, MavPhil moved to Typepad which has proven to be a satisfactory blogging platform with an extremely reliable server. It works best with Mozilla Firefox. Traffic is up: on good days 2000 pageviews and up.

6. Zombie Girl: But She's Not There!

7. A Strange Experience in the Charles Doughty Memorial Suite

8. Screamin' Jay Hawkins, I Put a Spell on You

9. Mark Anderson explains #1 supra:

On Halloween I take to class a medical-school skull with a removable skull cap.
Inside are various gloomy or semi-gloomy thoughts on slips of paper. Each
student takes one, and next time we meet students read them aloud one by one,
and when they're done we discuss them. Anyway, I was preparing the skull this
morning and thought you might enjoy Melville's thought.

10. October, sadly, ends once again. How fast she flies. But here in the Sonoran desert she is the harbinger of the loveliest time of the year. Happy Halloween, everyone.

Copy Editor Makes Me Out to be a Disease

Dear Dr. Varicella:

Attached you will find two PDFs: a copyedited version of your manuscript and a version indicating changes to the original file. This is your final opportunity to make any clarifications or stylistic changes to the manuscript.

An honest mistake, no doubt, so I won't reveal the names of the editor or the journal. But it is a little ironic that a copy editor would make such a mistake. It's tough being an editor. It's a lousy job. So I want to thank all of the editors out there without whom those of us who publish would not see our words in print.

The only thing that really gets my goat is political correctness in a copy editor. I vent my spleen in The Paltry Mentality of the Copy Editor and Copy Editors and Political Correctness.

Let me end with a bit of praise for the tribe of bloggers. Most people 'massacre' my name and it "pisses me off" in the phraseology of Jeff Dunham's Walter; but bloggers almost universally get it right. No surprise, I suppose: bloggers are an elite group of highly literate natural-born scribblers.

Why I Rarely Allow Comments

Because of comments like these, though they are surely not the worst one can find. (I cite them only because my Referral List pointed me to the post to which they are appended.) But they are characteristic. In my experience, to discuss religion with the irreligious and the anti-religious is a sheer waste of time. You may as well discuss logic with the illogical, music with the unmusical, or poetry with the terminally prosaic.

I am regularly surprised by how much garbage Victor Reppert tolerates in his ComBox. He will even allow people to insult him in vile ways. It may be that he is a model of Christian detachment, slow to anger, quick to forgive, tolerant to a fault. It may also be that he doesn't appreciate that to tolerate bad behavior is to invite more of the same. A conservative, I take a harsher line, one more in keeping with the realities of human nature, realities liberals tend to ignore. Conservatism as I espouse and practice it subsumes the classically liberal commitment to toleration. But toleration has limits. In any case, a weblog is private property where no one has free speech rights.

A man's home is his castle, and his blog his cybercastle. Just as I do not tolerate bad behavior in the first, I do not tolerate it in the second. But bloggers are free to run their blogs any way they see fit.

You might think that disallowing comments limits my traffic. Not so. Traffic is better than ever, recently up around 2000 pageviews per diem. Readers I respect tell me that they like my Comments Policy.

To end aphoristically:

The best arguments against an open combox are the contents of one.

There’s No Place Like . . .

Good Reads

Roger Kimball, Racism, Inc.

Victor Davis Hanson, The Decline of College; The Late, Great Middle Class

Leon Wieseltier, Crimes Against Humanities

Edward Feser, Man is Wolff to Man. I was going to write this post, but Ed beat me to it. Ed beats down the superannuated Wolff for boarding the bandwagon of benighted bashers of Nagel. These lefties just can't stand Nagel even though he is a naturalist, an atheist, and a liberal. Why? Because he is not an extremist like they are. Because he could conceivably be interpreted by someone as giving aid and comfort to the enemy: the theists. For not toeing the party line. For thinking for himself. For being the Real Thing and not a leftist ideologue. It is sad to see professional philosophy ideologized like this.

Kirsten Powers, A Global Slaughter of Christians. The 'religion of peace' is at it again. But the PC-whipped churches stay silent.

By the way, I admire the hell out of Kirsten Powers, even though she's a Dem (why Lord, why?): she has beauty, brains, and (the female equivalent of) balls. And she puts up goodnaturedly with the sometimes obnoxious Bill O'Reilly. But I admire the hell out of him as well. That leftists despise a moderate such as him shows what contemptible extremists they are.

The Journal of Analytic Theology

I had the pleasure of meeting Trent Dougherty at the Prague conference on Analytic Theology. He informed me that he is an executive editor of a new on-line publication, The Journal of Analytic Theology.

The Journal of Analytic Theology is an open access, international journal that twice anually publishes articles, book reviews, and book symposia that explore theological and meta-theological topics in a manner that prizes terminological clarity and argumentative rigor. This includes historical studies that seek to elucidate conceptual challenges or explore strategies for addressing them.

Trent also had a limerick for me that I don't think he'll mind if I share:

I follow this really cool blog,
And I just met the author in Prague.
They call him a "Maverick,"
and act quite barbaric:
He leaves them indeed quite agog.

Blasted Typos!

I am astonished at my poor ability to spot typographical errors despite my assiduous exercise of what is pleonastically referred to as 'due diligence.' I see what I bloody well want to see. I read the following a good dozen times and failed to see the mistake:

Astinence is no mark of a rounder

which I just now corrected to

Abstinence is no mark of a rounder

which is my response to Jeff Hodges'

Absinthe makes the heart go founder.

But I can't hold a candle to my old friend Monterey Tom, the undisputed master of the typo, as he demonstrates here.

Jim Ryan’s Truths

Jim Ryan posts infrequently but thoughtfully. His latest entry is a list of truths he considers self-evident. I don't consider them all self-evident, but I do consider them all true.

Another Zimmerman: The Plagiarist Jára Cimrman

You've heard of Robert Zimmerman, better known as Bob Dylan, and the 'white-Hispanic' George Zimmerman whose nomen has proven to be one bad omen indeed. (Would we have heard about him at all had his name been Jorge Ramirez?)

Permit me to introduce you to Jára Cimrman whose Czech surname, if I am not badly mistaken, is pronounced like 'Zimmerman' when the latter is pronounced as it is in German.

Cimrman is quite a character with many noteworthy accomplishments to his credit. One of them is authorship of the philosophy of non-existentialism. As one reputable source has it:

Long before anyone had heard about Camus or Sartre, in 1886, Cimrman wrote pieces like 'The Essence of the Existence', which became the basis for his "Cimrmanism" philosophy, also referred to as "non-existentialism" (the main premise of this philosophy is that: "Existence cannot not exist").

But if truth be told, this Cimrman is a plagiarist. He stole the idea from me! In Does Existence Itself Exist? I defend the thesis that existence does indeed exist, and necessarily. The despicable Cimrman passed off my idea as his own and tried to hide his crime by packaging my thesis under the verbally different but logically equivalent 'Existence cannot not exist' He then falsely claimed to have developed his theory in 1886 long before my birth.

Ohne Fleiß Kein Preis

Loosely translated: No pain, no gain. Der Fleiß (Fleiss) is German for diligence. Thus 'Heidi Fleiss' is a near aptronym, diligent as she was in converting concupiscence into currency.

Another interesting German word is Sitzfleisch. It too is close in meaning to diligence, staying
power. Fleisch is meat and Sitz, seat, is from the verb sitzen, to sit. One who has Sitzfleisch, then, has sitting meat. Think of a scholarly grind who sits for long hours poring over tome after tome of arcana.

And that reminds me of a story. Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann were German philosophers of high repute, though Scheler was more the genius and Hartmann more the grind. As the story goes, Scheler once disparaged Hartmann thusly, "My genius and your Sitzfleisch would make a great philosopher!"

Getting back to Heidi Fleiss, she is in the news again. This time her diligence has taken a turn toward the cultivation of the noble weed, some 400 plants worth, without a license. But the long arm of the law has 'smoked' her out.

No vice, no Fleiss. From madam to mary jane.

William Lane Craig to Debate Lawrence Krauss

In Australia, soon, details here. Topic: Why is there something rather than nothing? Poor Krauss is going to get slaughtered, and deservedly so. Debating Craig is like getting into a gun fight with Doc Holliday. I would never debate him on anything, even if I thought debate was philosophically worthwhile. He has been honing his skills since high school.

According to the linked site, Krauss' A Universe from Nothing is being translated into 20 languages. Well, that is the way of the world. A piece of garbage becomes a best seller and is translated into 20 languages while books worth reading fall still-born from the press.