i really don't like posting from work but i just wanted to jot down a few notes on why the pinker article bothered me so much. all really sketchy and not very well explained or even that well thought out but oh well here you go ( Read more... )

and energy. and patience. and, uh, stuff like that.

-- the whole thing with daschle bothers me. it's weird. i mean, i think it was the "right" result, in a nontrivial sense. i just don't like the way it happened, which makes it hard for me to feel right about it. i guess ( Read more... )

this will be completely incomprehensible and improperly justified (if at all). you have been warned.

so i have an extreme--admittedly irrationally disproportionate--dislike for steven pinker. dr. pinker has an article in a semi-recent nytimes magazine--again ever-so-imaginatively titled "my genome, my self" (srsly, nyt editors, have you no shame ( Read more... )

[O]nly because its validity is suspended in the state of exception can positive law define the normal case as the realm of its own validity. (p. 18)
I get it now! I think maybe. The state of exception founds positive law by saying, "Look, guys, if it weren't for us, there'd be lawlessness! Total anarchy! You'd have no rights (or whatever)! So you ( Read more... )

no more, no less.

1. instrumentalizing language ("rhetoric") collapses into relations of power all of the potentialities of language to create/support/found* and make meaningful (and meaningfully different) relations upon something (anything) other than power ( Read more... )

personal identity is the enemy of personal progress.

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we are already responsible for ourselves long before we are able/allowed to take responsibility for ourselves.

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"progress" (of the (hegelian?) historical variety) is defined meaningfully only in hindsight. the work that is worth doing now always appears as a catching-up, as ( ( Read more... )

awesome: fully searchable full text of hamlet.
awesomer: copying said text into word and annotating it with your own weird thoughts and theories.
example: the resemblence between hamlet's father and his ghost is described at least twice (once in the first scene, once in the second) as like that between a person and himself.

awesome: the perseus ( Read more... )

i know i've mentioned this before, but--know what's awesome? realizing you actually enjoy the classics ( Read more... )

inspired by/in reply to this post. work in progress, as always.

---the trick(s) you cite ("silence is music," "property is theft") aren't necessarily merely rhetorical (though it is a useful and tempting trick, to be sure), nor are they, i think, pushing us to see the pair of concepts they address as antagonistic. in fact, i think, quite the ( Read more... )

written in response to this column reprinted in today's herald-mail. i admit the mill paragraph is over-the-top and kind of shady (appealing to authority is usually not my bag), but i'd already sent it by the time i reconsidered. the only thing i changed was the typo i just noticed in my (mis)spelling of "abolition ( Read more... )