April 2013
2 posts
theramblertwo asked: I'm so glad I happened to run across your blog. Do you publish your posts elsewhere? If not, you seriously should look into it. All your wisdom is just kind of astounding (like, Exactly how old are you?) I hope to write essays similar to yours someday but I'm not quite sure where to start, nor am I aware of the kind of work other people would be interested in reading and publishing, or...
11 tags
Parallel deaths; the final calculations of Camille...
The third issue of Le Vieux Cordelier, published on 25 Frimaire in the feverishly sanguinary excesses of la Terreur, is often taken as the desperate manifestation of la vertu gone mad. Its almost propitiatory exordium - ‘the reigns of the most cruel emperors…had pleasant beginnings’ - progresses in that same apologetic manner, and thus seemingly ineluctably, to a restating of Tacitus’ Annals and...
March 2013
3 posts
11 tags
Thoughts on the fashion system.
The link between signifiant and signifié has never been more tenuous than in the context of fashion. With paint-splattered shoes, torn accoutrements and visually deteriorated fabrics, haut couture seems to be flirting with the floating signifier. Fashion could never have not been one of Barthes’ deconstructed mythologies, but the Barthesian structuralist interpretation of fashion, dating from his...
13 tags
Adam Smith, the invisible Marxist.
The common understanding of Adam Smith’s work is of course that it was intended to buttress a fledgling free-market capitalism and equally nascent classical economics; as for Karl Marx, it is understood that he advocated an overthrow of the capitalist system due to the flaws inherent in and inextricable from it. The common view of orthodoxy is that it is correct, which is why, of course, it is...
17 tags
We are sinners all; hypocrisy as a virtue.
Hypocrisy has always been one of the cardinal vices of the individual. No tort or trait elicits such a censorious and emotional reaction as he who promotes higher principles than his own. One needs not look further than how we have contrived our lowest characters, from Iago to Tartuffe, from the Pardoner to Elmer Gantry; yet the hypocrisy of these individuals only exists and is exprobrated in the...
January 2013
5 posts
21 tags
Trust, peace, and to put aside the bayonet; the...
It is a challenge to be known as the least-known President; a title which is usually afforded to Martin Van Buren, James Buchanan and a few select others. A true test of being unknown is that you are scarcely remembered at all, and this is an achievement which can only be ascribed to one man; Rutherford Birchard Hayes, President of the United States from 4 March 1877 to 4 March 1881, and quite...
23 tags
Vae victis; an examination of the War between the...
The doctrinal narrative of the ‘Civil War’ reads thusly: the secession of the Confederate states evidenced the position of the southern states as fighting only for slavery, while the cerebral Union took up arms in defence of the rights of man. Few stories read this smoothly and reality is not one of them. To provide the fundament for a more percipient understanding of what engendered the war from...
30 tags
Every inch a king; Lear as a reflection of...
The object of Shakespeare’s obeisance in writing King Lear was clear, being manifested as manifestly as Regan or Goneril, in stark contrast to his heroification of Cordelia; King James, who orated to his Parliament that ‘kings are justly called gods,’ would have found in Lear a tragic hero, a fond exhortation of absolute monarchy, and a justification of his own advice to his son, Prince Henry -...
30 tags
More things in heaven and earth? A refutation of...
The theory which what we perceive to be reality - the world or the state of things as they actually exist, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary - is not actually reality long predates Bostrom’s rather facile ancestor simulation theory. The aforementioned ancestor simulation theory demands a certain degree of credulity which out of courtesy I will not expect of readers, but insofar as to say...
Anonymous asked: Wow, can I be as smart as you?
December 2012
2 posts
24 tags
The third symbiosis (a Jaussian interpretation of...
Beckett’s Godot is notoriously open to interpretation. Indeed, perhaps what has rendered Godot immutably sempiternal is the manner in which it, like Ionesco’s Bérenger or Ibsen’s Irena, espouses or even embodies reader reception. There is no consensus gentium - any educated reader having realised that Godot does not connote or symbolise God, the only interpretation which Beckett himself has...
26 tags
Superflat; the defetishisation of nascency in...
There is a Japanese proverb which apprises the subject that deru kugi wa utareru - literally, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Perhaps this was the desideratum of Aoshima, Murakami, Nara and others when they contrived the ‘superflat’ art movement. The movement pastiches, in some way, antebellum Japan, by denuding the two-dimensionality of post-war Japanese culture; it mocks how the...
October 2012
1 post
29 tags
A non-PC solution to linguistic subjugation.
In his last radio address to the citizenry of Chile before being deposed by a fascist coup, Salvador Allende, the last great Marxist leader, a man omitted from the capricious annals of history, declaimed that ‘history is ours, and the people make history’. Twenty-four years prior, Eric Arthur Blair had authored a discrepant reading of the ownership of history, one that survived him and...
August 2012
2 posts
16 tags
I knew him well (Infinite Jest and the necessary...
Infinite Jest is more often read than understood; by virtue of being a behemoth, it is conclusively desirable; a conspicuously modern phenomenon analogous in literature to Veblen goods in economics. Its value is compounded by the effect of this phenomenon on others, rendering it also a positional good for having read it. By treating it in this way, much of the book’s purpose is missed, for...
30 tags
Important, yet insignificant; solving socially...
In recent weeks, I have had the good fortune to be involved in a conversation with others more intelligent than myself which culminated in a solution to one of the most crucial problems in civilisation and our human history; situations where our input is crucial to the eventual outcome, but is seemingly marginalized by its dependence on the input of others. The human response is to disclaim the...
July 2012
7 posts
23 tags
Something outside the text (a response to...
As a classical liberal who has had his fair share of encounters with exponents of objectivism - a philosophy which lends itself to exponents more than proponents - it has become necessary to formulate a piece inveighing against it. While objectivism is often gainsaid amongst libertarian circles, as a philosophy, objectivism finds its roots instead in the literature of Ayn Rand, who espouses these...
30 tags
Condamné à être libre.
In the aftermath of the Aurora tragedy, the gun control debate has been shaken from its slumber, a frequent concomitant of calamity that, if not for Hume, could be stylised as a circadian rhythm. Gun control advocates have iterated that this tragedy could not have happened if it weren’t for lax firearm regulations; Second Amendment exponents reciprocate that if gun control were loosened, then...
15 tags
The child of intelligence; contra nationalism.
With the Olympics in full flow, it is hard not to draw a comparison between the manifold corporate sponsorships and Subsidized Time; the dispute over corporate control is going strong, with the attacks on Romney’s outsourcing of jobs during his tenure at Bain and the contracting of G4S to provide security for the Olympics inuring the public to the debate. The issue calls up the conflict between...
18 tags
To reason against reading.
In Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government, it is conspicuously accentuated that one of the characteristics of good government is intransigence to a certain degree; it exhorts that the leader be governed by ben comune, and be countervailed by checks and balances, but remain a benevolent dictatorship to a certain extent. This characterises the current problem with the British educational...
7 tags
Contra theological non-cognitivism.
I recently encountered an individual with whom I engaged in a philosophical debate about the veracity of theism; his overture that, as a theist, his assertion could only be validated, marked him out as a theological non–cognitivist from a theistic perspective (a rare beast indeed). His suggestion was that the concept of God was a non–cognitive statement and as such inherently meaningless, and by...
14 tags
Thoughts about Pascal's wager.
Around four hundred years ago, Blaise Pascal (in his role as a Catholic philosopher, though also a mathematician) dedicated a small paragraph in his Pensées to an argument for belief in God. Pascal’s wager, as it has come to be known, has been proponed throughout centuries as an ostensibly rational argument for believing the irrational; however strong the theistic arguments are, it is only...
30 tags
Aim above morality (an attack on morality & ethics...
It is as easy to aver that morality supports one’s beliefs as to say anything else with the same amount of words; nowadays, the assertion of morality demands neither debate nor definition, but merely acquiescence. It must be noted that morality is a human construct, deontologically peremptory or not, and is not inherent in life, meaning that a logical basis must be established for a system...
June 2012
11 posts
9 tags
Why communism does not adduce theism.
Those aiming to denigrate atheism succeed in seeking solace in the representation of antireligious communist states as examples of an atheistic society; I will aim to confute this ubiquitous and unctuously arrogant argument. Unfortunately, due to the simplicity of the refutation of this assertion, this post will be summary by nature.
The first and foremost objection, which is often overlooked for...
30 tags
An appearance of solidarity to pure wind...
In 1984, George Orwell famously explored the notion of using linguistic relativity based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in order to oppress free thought by controlling the vocabulary, elaborating on his criticism of euphemistically obfuscatory English in 1946’s Politics and the English Language by introducing Newspeak to the people of Ingsoc; earlier, in the antecedent We, Yevgeny Zamyatin...
15 tags
The sincerity of the martyr.
Robert Ingersoll once wrote that martyrdom establishes the sincerity of the martyr, not the correctness of his thought, and having survived too many soporific arguments with obdurate religionists to subitize, I have found that the argument usually regresses to a form of religious disingenuity; the texts of the Old Testament are rejected, along with selected parts of the New Testament (especially...
6 tags
A brief Dostoevskian critique of utilitarianism.
It is easy to critique a deontological ethical system; Laplace spoke well when he commented that nous n’avons besoin de cette hypothese, and da Vinci was insightful in commenting that he who adduces authority does not rely on his intellect but his memory, although in my opinion it was Christopher Hitchens who spoke most truthfully when commenting that that which can be asserted without...
12 tags
The Les Misérables case against the death penalty.
There is a poignant juncture close to the end of Les Misérables, Victor Hugo’s 1862 chef d’œuvre and since-acclaimed stage musical, in which Javert, the punctiliously righteous police chief, after having pursued Valjean, who skipped parole after being released from his 19–year prison sentence imposed for stealing a loaf of bread and subsequent escape attempts, for many years, realises,...
30 tags
Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
The second of Rilke’s Duino Elegies begins ‘every angel is terrible’; perhaps, as he perambulated the cliffs near Trieste, his thoughts on the internecine extirpation that characterised the Great War pervaded these thoughts on religion. Rilke elected to use the term schrecklich, a term much more focused and powerful than the more common furchterlich, which elucidates his attitude considerably. It...
15 tags
Der Prozeß, or the trial of Cyntoia Brown.
In late 2006, a girl named Cyntoia Brown was sentenced to life for first-degree murder, felony murder and aggravated robbery; I was asked by a friend to assess the matter. A sixteen–year–old lady of the night, she had shot a man in the back of the head after his actions caused her to become apprehensive - this ended their meretricious agreement. The burden of proof is on the defence to raise and...
One must imagine Sisyphus happy; an end to a means...
Recently I was made aware of a video on YouTube portraying a slinky tackling a treadmill. The metal spring ambulates valiantly for three minutes and twenty minutes, in which it embodies Camus’s work in The Myth of Sisyphus. It not only symbolises the mindless struggle for senseless salvation and redemption, and the inconsequential soteriological revendications of world religion, but it also...
20 tags
In the eyes of the gods; an brief critique of...
Some regard Socrates’ assertions in Plato’s Crito, a discussion between Socrates and Crito prior to the execution of Socrates (for corrupting the youth and impiety) in which Crito, a wealthy friend, entreated Socrates to escape from his sentence, as a precursor of social contract theory. Socrates’ reprobation hinged little on ethical utilitarianism, as the consequential benefits...
16 tags
Scapegoat theory; the real scapegoat.
What many call scapegoat theory, the theory that the Jewish diaspora in Germany were assigned culpability purely as scapegoats for the Depression, for the Treaty of Versailles, and for Germany’s troubles, is prevalent in the modern world. Partially, it is, indeed, prevalent, because it serves as facile and escapist casuistry. The reality of the issue is, as can be expected, much more complex...
“There are no actors, only actions.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
May 2012
4 posts
16 tags
The Clodia connection.
The question of the identity of the Lesbia addressed in most of Catullus’s poetic repertoire (to be specific, twenty-five of his 116 poems) is prevalent in discussion of not only Catullus’s poetry, but also the intricate tapestry of ancient Roman high society. I propose one theory to link the identity of Catullus’s Lesbia with Cicero’s Clodia Metelli.
Marcus Tullius...
10 tags
Gott ist tot?
In the late 18th century, Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher, popularised the concept of ‘Gott ist tot’, or ‘God is dead’. To analyse this, we must dismiss the unfortunately regnant proclivity towards literalism regarding this, one of Nietzsche’s many aphorisms. This does not mean that Nietzsche is asserting simply that there is no God. These mellifluously exiguous three words can be...
14 tags
On obedience to authority.
Between 1961 and 1962, Yale assistant professor Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment which is known to all; one which has bifurcated the sententious and perspicacious, inciting panegyrics and polemics, simultaneously sagacious and deleterious, polarising even the benighted. Despite this, the regnant interpretation of the results is rarely repudiated. It is mine to expostulate with this...
15 tags
Sum?
The so-called cogito, or René Descartes’s statement ‘cogito ergo sum’, was intended to defend the existence of the mind, or to affirm Cartesian dualism. It is often cited as a definitive proof, but I would side more with the alternative.
The statement cogito ergo sum is riddled with flaws; for one, it appears to be an obfuscatory enthymeme; the second inferred premise, the first...
April 2012
12 posts
11 tags
Die Konylösung (or, cash for karma).
Last night, the Kony campaign definitively failed to cover London in posters denouncing Kony; I witnessed a few around Bond Street, and felt beholden to remove them myself; why? The Kony 2012 campaign is fundamentally wrong.
The first thing to keep in mind is that Kony 2012 and the intention of saving lives and upholding the fabric of society are not one and the same. It is deleterious to...
13 tags
Dumb and silent we may be led.
Angela Corey has just announced that charges have been filed against George Zimmerman, who, for those living in a Platonic cave for the past months, was vilified after the murder, supposedly in self-defence, of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. I will not take the cheap position of siding against George Zimmerman simply because the word ‘racist’ has been tagged onto him. However,...
16 tags
On Goliath.
As the story goes, David, the true king of Israel, was determined by his fight to the death with Goliath, whereby he destroyed the huge Philistine warrior, the military hegemon of his age. Caravaggio painted a beautiful work of art, David con la testa di Golia, depicting David holding Goliath’s severed head. This painting, and indeed the Biblical story itself in the Old Testament, is an...
18 tags
Ex nihilo nihil fit?
Although I attempt to profess no religion or preferences it all, it would be intellectually dishonest if I weren’t to comment on the frequent use of ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing comes out of nothing, by many believers. While I am not a quantum physicist, I have become familiar over many similar arguments with the notion of quantum vacuum fluctuations, otherwise known as virtual particles....
25 tags
A Pigovian proposal.
We are in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Many have lost their jobs, and even the self-employed have lost huge amounts of money, especially individual investors. Institutional investors, especially those who promise relative returns, have lost huge amounts of money as the indices fell, and this money belongs all too often to mutual funds and...
20 tags
The ethics of profiting from disaster.
I’ve just watched a television show about the possibility of personal satellites (in that they could cost under £100,000), and I couldn’t help wondering if TEC analysis for earthquakes/tsunamis could be performed by privately-owned companies (or indeed individuals) before anybody else, and the possibilities if that were true. One could, for example, purchase a CDS on cat bonds for the...
“Words can be deleted, but the facts won’t be deleted with them.”
– Ai Weiwei
19 tags
Isolationism & legislation.
The Monroe Doctrine was introduced in 1823 by the President of the United States, whom was at the time James Monroe. The Doctrine promulgated US isolationism in return for European self-determination with no interventionism. It seems that in this day and age, the first clause is cited much too often in comparison with the second. America’s foreign policy aims, largely with regard to Israel...
“Proles and animals are free.”
– George Orwell, 1984
15 tags
A brief critique of Print 25.
This is print 25 of Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji. They are vastly under-appreciated, but for the first print, ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’, which has become Hokusai’s chef d’œuvre, and is often misinterpreted as a tsunami (the literal translation of the okinami would be more akin to a large wave); in my opinion, the original tones of the first print (in the...
“We are here as on a darkling plain,
swept with confused alarms of struggle and...”
– Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
27 tags
The rise of ptochocracy?
I don’t intend to fall prey to Godwin’s law, but it’s increasingly impossible not to draw a parallel between the current ideology of the leftist populace of Britain, and the demagogic policies of the Third Reich (not to mention Democratic Kampuchea) in the current appetite to punish the upper-middle class, whereby the Nazis appealed to the desires of the recently unemployed,...
