What defense against the apprehension of loss is at work in the blithe way in which we accept deaths caused by military means with a shrug or with self-righteousness or with clear vindictiveness? To what extent have Arab peoples, predominantly practitioners of Islam, fallen outside the "human" as it has been naturalized in its "Western" mold by the ( Read more... )

Levinas, for whom responsibility toward the other is paramount, himself figures responsibility as unassumable--that is, impossible actually for a human subject, a self, to take on. He says little about the possibility that the other absolutely other could be a non-human other but it seems clear to me that the deconstruction of the human subject not ( Read more... )

Amnesty International has links to the decision and suggested ways to take action. Pass it on.

ahhh. whatever other life forms there may be in this universe or in other universes, I hope they are able to experience something as unambiguously and uncomplicatedly Good as cool sparkling water.

someone somewhere probably thinks the same thing about boiling ammonia.

( here is your opportunity to escape )

I had meant to come back and finish the fourth thought last night but I ended up doing something else. what was it? oh. I shaved and showered. wo0t!

( cut early and often )

So I got some sleep and some coffee and reread the third chapter of Sachs' The Buddha at War (and that apostrophe at the end of Sachs indicating possession? that used to be grammatical. I was taught that with names ending in "s," one could either add an apostrophe-s for possession or just the apostrophe. Sometime in the recent past some ( Read more... )

I'm just going to spill out some percolating thoughts here in what might also turn out to be a blog post which might itself--the blog that is--turn out to be migrated to wordpress soon because I got robotospammed and had to turn off comments and that's no way to run a blog but it has finally sunk in that I am not going to program php for a living ( Read more... )

discovered via netsquared.org:

knowmore.org's firefox extension will alert a firefox user visiting a corporate url to knowmore.org's ratings of the company in their database, which is generated by users of the knowmore.org wiki. the wiki can also be searched by hand from knowmore.org's homepage ( Read more... )