In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 Every pompous, self-involved high school student with a science fiction fascination reads Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged .  Maybe not every high school student.  Maybe just boys.  It's a little like Rush.  In fact, given the band's objectivist leanings, it's a lot like Rush.  Self-indulgent, overwhelmingly male, and mostly if you get into it in adolescence, you get out of it by early adulthood because wow is it overwrought.  Actually, I still like Rush, and you can stick your judgment up your 4/4 because I do not care what anyone thinks of my taste, so take that 7 and shove it up your 8. Ayn Rand was not a skilled writer, in the sense of artistic prose, and as a philosopher, I found her to be a long-winded writer.  Philosophically, I subscribe to no particular school of thought, finding value in many thinkers, from Socrates to the Stoics to Kant, and objectivists detest Kant, Stoicism (the actual philosophy, not the colloquial term) and all such philo...

 Joe Lieberman died this week, and as I think through his place in modern American politics, I struggle through my assessment of him.  I never had a high opinion of him, but generally speaking, I judge most politicians harshly.  Time, though, changes how we view people and events.  I still cannot say that I find Lieberman virtuous, but I can at least seek a more sympathetic reading.  Don't look for condemnation.  You may find it anyway, but you don't seek it, and 2024 puts someone like Lieberman in a different perspective. Why?  Because everyone else in American politics is now bonkers. Blah-blah, polarization, blah-blah extremism, OMG, hair-on-fire, yadda-yadda, look at my virtue, look at my virtue, tap tap, dance the dance of the self-righteous, sanctimonious centrist. Get over yourself.  (Myself?)  Also, maybe I should work out a tune to go with that.  It's kind of catchy, no? Anyway, the Democratic caucus in the House of Representati...

 This morning, we consider Salman Rushdie's 2019 novel inspired loosely by Don Quixote , complete with a novel-within-a-novel structure that will have even those of us who do not generally favor musical theater singing certain songs in our heads.  Rushdie approaches the concept, as one may expect, from the perspective of Indian-Muslim immigrants to the West, and consistent with his style, the novel is almost too densely packed with backstories and ideas to contemplate.  Somewhere between satire, brutal social commentary and fantastical fiction, with a sharp enough tongue to earn the highest literary honor one can earn-- a fatwa, although Cervantes may have approved of this one.  Hard to say.  Let's try  to make some sense of, and derive some observations from Quichotte . The role of Cervantes here is played by "the Author," also known as, "Brother," because the novel addresses his relationship with... yeah.  Anyway, the siblings grew up in Bombay befor...

 My intention for this morning was another philosophy-oriented post, but then Congress went and congressed all over the floor.  Bad  Congress!  I write this morning of a persistent behavioral problem with one of the strays that Congress adopted, who goes by the name of Marjorie Taylor Greene.  Sure, adopting strays is a moral good, as long as you spay and neuter them, because the last thing we need is more stray politicians in the world-- remember, politicians will rut with anyone and anything-- but of course, there will always be behavioral problems.  Note, for example, Marjorie Taylor Greene.  I humbly apologize for my failure to aim my space laser, and hence we are stuck with her.  It was my responsibility, I did not take the shot, it is my fault.  Anyway, we consider, this morning, the latest in the saga of the party that cannot govern.  So much for the philosophy post I had intended.  But as Bob Barker used to say when I had th...

 It is time, once again, for a persistent grumble.  The screen industry does nothing but remake and adapt, and in the case of Dune , Hollywood is remaking an adaptation, which is the ouroboros of laziness.  Of course, any complaint cannot have real weight.  There are more books than anyone can read in a lifetime, many of which are great, and even for those of the visual persuasion, so much has been produced that you could spend hours, days, weeks, months and years consuming that which has been produced, including multiple versions of Dune  and a speculative documentary about what a different director would have done had he been the one to adapt Dune  because the snake finished eating its tail, vomited itself out, the universe of self-referentialism collapsed and for fuck's sake, if you want to make a movie, make a new movie, this is part of why I have not seen a new movie in years.  Yet Dune  has value for me, not because it is the greatest book e...

 I have been thinking a lot about the nature of evil lately.  You will encounter evil.  This is inevitable.  How and why does evil occur?  Let us turn to the founder of the Peripatetic school, for this morning.  The term, "peripatetic," comes from the fact that Aristotle began his teaching by walking around and giving his lectures while taking walks around the Lyceum.  He did not have the fixed school of the Academy, which was Plato's school, so instead, he wandered, his flock followed him, he lectured, they discussed, and from walking, the school of philosophy derives its name.  Aristotle was full of it, in many areas.  Physics, most obviously, but Nicomachean Ethics?  We still read that, and assign that because we still think it has value, and it is to Nicomachean Ethics I turn this morning. Recall, of course, that Aristotle traces his lineage to Socrates, for whom the four cardinal virtues were wisdom, temperance, justice and courage....

 On Saturday, I examined the major party nominees for 2024 in terms of "red lines," directly referencing then-President Barack Obama's empty threat of a "red line" if Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people.  Both Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden have crossed moral red lines, and I can vote for neither.  Mere hours later, Joey Robinette announced his own "red line."  The IDF must not, under any circumstances, launch an attack on Rafah.  Rafah, one may note, is where Hamas is keeping the bulk of its resources and personnel at the moment.  But leave Britney Hamas alone!!!!   What have they ever done to you?!!!!   Oh, right.  Tough shit, you're Jews, and Jews don't have a right to defend yourselves, or rather, you do, but , and everything before the 'but' is irrelevant. But, you cannot launch an attack on Rafah, Rafah being where Hamas has hunkered down.  You can defend yourself, but any action that might lead to ...

 As I indicated earlier in the week, I picked up another K. J. Parker book.  This time, it was Shadow , which is the first book in his Scavenger  trilogy.  This one is an odd duck.  Or rather, crow.  I'll explain, to the degree that I can.  The novel is told from two characters' perspectives, one of whom is an amnesiac, and one of whom is a member of a religious order, and he follows orders without a full understanding of context, because he does not need that in order to follow orders, so the reader does not necessarily get the full picture, leading to something disjointed, which is the point, one supposes, but like I said, odd duck.  Or crow.  Crows are a recurring theme, as scavengers and harbingers of the god, Poldarn, who is either the fictional creation of some con artists a few years back and now ironically used as a con again, or a real god using one or both of the aforementioned primary characters as avatars.  Odd.  Let's d...

 The events of this week have done at least one good thing.  We are no longer being told to pretend that the parties are holding presidential nomination contests.  We are no longer being told to pretend not to know things that we know.  Well, actually, there are people telling us to pretend not to know things that we know, but I shall not address that particular set of points this morning.  Instead, I shall address the now universally acknowledged fact that the 2024 presidential election will be a rematch between Joseph R. Biden and Donald J. Trump. Well, nearly universally acknowledged.  There are some conspiracy theorists who claim that there is some secret plot, hatched within the bowels of a pizzeria/Satanic temple, to replace Biden with a different lizard person, or some such, but oy.  At least those who pretend to live in the real world moved from pretending that there were ongoing contests to acknowledging the final determination this week....