Links With Your Coffee - Monday
- George Lakoff: Whose Betrayal?
MoveOn hit a nerve. In the face of truth, the right-wing has been forced to change the subject -- away from the administration's betrayal of trust and the escalating tragedy of the occupation to of all things, an ad! To take the focus off maiming and death and the breaking of our military, they talk about etiquette. The truth has reduced them to whining: MoveOn was impolite. Rather than face the truth, they use character assassination against an organization whose three million members stand for the highest patriotic principles of this country, the first of which is a commitment to truth.
- Bob Herbert | The Nightmare Is Here
President Bush may not be aware of this. In his televised address to the nation he warned that a pullout of U.S. forces from Iraq could cause a "humanitarian nightmare."
A trusted aide should take the president aside and quietly inform him that this nightmare arrived a good while ago. - 'The Stuff of Thought' by Steven Pinker - Los Angeles Times by Douglas Hofstader
Pinker would like language to be as precise a guide to the mind's machinery as the behavior of particles in force fields is a guide to the laws of physics. He sees linguistic regularities abounding, and he tries using them to penetrate the hidden "language of thought," whose most critical ingredients are "ethereal notions of space, time, causation, possession, and goals." Although I'm less sanguine than Pinker about language's regularity -- and, indeed, about the existence of a "language of thought" -- I find his thesis well worth contemplating.
- Online Books, Poems, Short Stories - Read Print
A warm welcome to Read Print, your free online library. Our website offers thousands of free books for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast.
- Anecdotal Evidence: `Glee and Admiration'
Above all personal qualities I admire resilience. By this I mean indifference to adversity, an enthusiasm for getting on with the business at hand and unwillingness to linger over pain, fear, inconvenience, resentment or self-pity. Resilience is associated with soldiers and saints, but among the most resilient characters I know was the unwarlike, unsaintly William James, who wrestled with depression, neurasthenia and thoughts of suicide but worked like a slave and maintained a confounding zest for life.
- Curb Your “Age Of Turbulence” Enthusiasm » Mad Kane's Political Madness
- Another Health Insurance Lie
I support universal coverage in a single-payer system. I won't belabor the point. Today I just want to point out another insurance industry lie, printed in the New York Times today.
It's in an article about Mrs. Clinton's health care finance reform proposal. (Which I do not support.) - Evolution » Racist Racing Model Stumbles
On one hand, everyone knows that the differences between humans that are often categorized as “racial traits” are either overstated or irrelevant. All humans have essentially the same basic potentials, and the genetic differences that do exist between people are not sorted out by the usual racial categories. Not even the differences that are foundational to those racial categories sort out by racial categories particularly well. By and large, racial categories are cultural fictions vaguely supported by quirky historical circumstances. On close examination they are not real.
- Interview with Christopher Hitchens
The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe
Comments
Re: "Evolution: Racist Racing Model Stumbles" ... I'm laughing out loud at this one. It must be great to be a crazy liberal: even when scientific fact proves your feel-goodism to be wrong, you can just pretend you know more than the scientists.
Probably the first key to the stupidity of this article is the inaccurate use of the word 'racist'. It is not racist to talk about racial differences - which clearly and obviously exist. It is racial. The use of the term 'racist' is an attempt to frame any recognition or study of race as pejorative ... which is a common liberal tactic.
Still not paying attention I see...
Nope, he's not paying attention.
I would think that most people would be enlightened enough to have figured this out by now.
What is it exactly that defines one "race" from another "race"? Are blonds and brunettes from different "races"?
Re: Glee and Admiration, I wish such resilience for myself, and all too often find it out of reach for the reasons James might have. I found a complementary quotation, attributed to G.B. Shaw, that goes, "This is the true joy of life: being used up for a purpose recognized by you as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish clot of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy." I don't have a citation, but if it isn't Shaw, I am grateful to whoever said it. Wm. James, Abe Lincoln, Van Gogh, et al: lots of folks have struggled with the balls and chains that their psyches have represented. They may not have tamed them, but they found ways to keep them at bay, at least for a while. Maybe they even found ways to turn them to advantage: seems like any factor as potent as depression would give one immense strength if channeled.
More Monday reading, a lawsuit against god.
http://www.ketv.com/news/14133442/detail.html
"Chambers lawsuit, which was filed on Friday in Douglas County Court, seeks a permanent injunction ordering God to cease certain harmful activities and the making of terroristic threats.
The lawsuit admits God goes by all sorts of alias, names, titles and designations and it also recognizes the fact that the defendant is “Omnipresent”.
In the lawsuit Chambers says he’s tried to contact God numerous times, “Plaintiff, despite reasonable efforts to effectuate personal service upon Defendant (“Come out, come out, wherever you are”) has been unable to do so.”
The suit also requests that the court given the “peculiar circumstances” of this case waive personal service. It says being Omniscient, the plaintiff assumes God will have actual knowledge of the action.
The lawsuit accuses God “of making and continuing to make terroristic threats of grave harm to innumerable persons, including constituents of Plaintiff who Plaintiff has the duty to represent.”
It says God has caused, “fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects, and the like.”"
There is no such thing as race.
Re: Another Health Insurance Lie,
Does anyone even have the slightest hope that the next President will achieve real health care reform?
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