Category: Varia

I regret having to kill you, but one of my thoughts is worth more than your entire life.

"But if the fly could speak, he would most assuredly disagree with your value assessment."

If the fly could speak, then I would consider him a spiritual being and accord him the respect I accord myself.

I met a man on Sunday who, after introducing himself, remarked that he was Irish-Catholic.  "And I'm still Irish," he continued.

Today is the 42nd anniversary of the shootings at Kent State in 1970.  Here is what happened. Here is Neil Young's song performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young about the events of the day.

I read the above-captioned message on a sign in front of a church. I doubt that the pastor coined it. It is a watered-down variation on a line most likely passed on to him by his teachers.

Three questions. What was the original saying? Who was its famous author? Where did he or she say it?

Why did Hitler commit suicide on this day in his bunker in Berlin in 1945?  One reason was that he didn't want to end up like Mussolini and his girlfriend.

I was in Hitler's suicide bunker.

Despite the attempts on Hitler's life, in particular Claus von Stauffenberg's of July 1944, the Leader of the 1000 Year Reich died by his own hand. 

Addendum.  I woke up in the middle of the night and asked myself how Hitler could have known how Mussolini and his girlfriend ended up.  After all, the execution of the two Italians occurred on 29 April, 1945, the day before Hitler's murder of Eva Braun and his suicide.  Could Hitler in his Berlin bunker have gotten word that quickly?  Apparently yes, as I discovered when I pulled Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945 (Penguin, 2002) from the shelf of my well-stocked library:

Apart from Himmler's betrayal, Hitler's other great preoccupation remained his fear of being taken alive by the Russians.  News had come through of Mussolini's execution by partisans and how the bodies of the Duce and his mistress, Clara Petacci, had been hoisted upside down in Milan.  A transcript of the radio report had been prepared in the special outsized 'Fuehrer typeface' which saved Hitler from wearing spectacles.  It was presumably Hitler who underlined in pencil the words 'hanged upside down.'  (p. 357)

For another excerpt from Beevor's book, one  which recounts the savage rape inflicted upon German women by the Soviet army as it approached Berlin from the east, see  They raped every German female from eight to 80.

It is important  to rub one's nose in the horrors of history as prophylaxis against the dangerous utopianism of progressives with their Rousseauean fantasies about  man as inherently good. Man is capable of some good, but he is not inherently good.  The study of the history of just the 20th century should disabuse one of that notion once and for all.

The following is from the Powerblogs archive.  Originally posted 5 November 2005.

Can't get a job teaching philosophy? Perhaps you can market yourself as a talk show umpire. There is a dire need for argumentative quality control on the shout circuit.

Last night I was pleased to see my favorite gun-totin' lesbian on Hannity and Colmes, the irrepressible Tammy Bruce. (That's her above with her pal 'Snubby.'  The gal needs a lesson in trigger discipline: 'Get yer booger-hooker off the bang switch!') At one point, Bruce came out against governmental wealth redistribution via the tax code. Colmes the liberal replied in effect: So you're opposed to taxation!

At this point, a competent umpire would have called a timeout and thrown Colmes into the penalty box. For he committed a truly grotesque conceptual mistake by gratuitously assuming that it is somehow built into the very concept of taxation that it should involve redistribution of wealth. Taxation is the process whereby monies are extracted from the populace to offset the costs of government. There is nothing in the nature of taxation as such to require a 'progressive' scheme of taxation. Otherwise, a flat tax would be a contradiction in terms.

Here is an analogy. Suppose I warn you not to confuse insurance with investment and advise you to buy a term life insurance policy. An insurance agent, eager to line his own pockets, objects: So you're
opposed to insurance! The counterresponse is that there is nothing in the concept of life insurance to require that it have any investment  features. An umpire on the scene would slap a penalty on the greedy agent.

Of course, my umpire proposal is utopian. Average viewers apparently like shouting and mindless contention. They wouldn't put up with any close analysis or careful argument assessment. Ratings would plummet.   Hannity and his sidekick would be out of a job.

This  begs raises the question: Are the masses inherently stupid, or have they been stupefied by the media? The answer, I suspect, is both: thinking is hard work and even people with an aptitude for it are not inclined to engage in it. But it is also the case that the media do not encourage thoughtfulness and are quite willing to pander to their audiences to turn a buck.

It is the ugly side of capitalism; but socialism and government control of the media would obviously be a disaster.

The solution? C-Span and cyberspace. (By the way, I apologize for my uses of 'masses'; I thereby violated my own rule that a conservative  should not talk like a leftist. So maybe I shouldn't have used   'capitalism' either.)

London Ed quotes neurologist Steven Novella who makes an insightful observation in Cranks and Physics (the whole of which is well worth reading):

… cranks around the world have been able to form their own “alternative” community, publish their own journals, and have their own meetings. There is just one requirement in this alternative community – acceptance. All ideas are accepted (there is no chaff, all is wheat), that is except for one. Whatever is accepted by mainstream science is wrong [my emphasis]. That is “the one ring” of crank mythology, that brings all crank theories together and in the darkness of their community binds them together. Otherwise they are largely mutually incompatible. Each crank’s “theory of everything” is a notion unto itself, and is mutually exclusive to every other crank’s own theory of everything (unless there is some incidental overlap). So they get together, present their theories without criticism, and all agree that the evil conspiracy of mainstream science must be taken down. Of course, if any of them got their way and their ideas became accepted, they would instantly become rejected by the rest of the crank community as mainstream physics.

Ed comments:

Correct. My enemy's enemy is my friend, whatever my enemy believes. I have seen this effect in Wikipedia a number of times. Cranks unite to defeat the mainstream, orthodox view. Orthodox editors get blocked or banned. Cranks then war with each other, and get banned themselves. The orthodox editors mount appeals to the powers that be – the arbitration committee, none of whom have any expert credentials as far as I can see, and get unbanned. Or they just open 'sockpuppet' accounts and start editing again under a different name. So do the cranks, and the whole nightmare begins again. Another difficulty that Novella omits is 'mainstream' crankery. That is, bad science or quackery that unites its practitioners by financial interest. Homeopathy and 'Neurolinguistic programming' are good examples of this.

This would not matter at all, if Wikipedia were not increasingly used as a 'reliable source' by students, and even some medical researchers, as I noted in an earlier post.

One of the (very minor) drawbacks of having a Web presence is that one becomes the target of crackpot e-mail from people like this.  He describes himself as an autodidact, thereby illustrating the perils of autodidacticism. 

And yet some negotiate the straits of autodidacticism quite well, Eric Hoffer for example.  In general, however, he who educates himself has a fool for a pupil. That being said, I advise a modicum of skepticism concerning academic credentials.

If you expect to have 'cred' in the 'sphere, it helps to have established credibility in peer-reviewed venues.  Some of my publications are listed here, at PhilPapers. 

It comes as no great surprise that the crackpot in question is an anti-Semite.