As is well-known, God helps those who help themselves, thus executing a policy that renders His help superfluous. Far more effective would be an apposite God, He who is committed to helping exactly those who do not help themselves. Unlike Bertrand Russell’s barber, who is free to shrug off as impossible his duty to shave those, and only those, who ( Read more... )

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To claim an interest, I have been in social media for over 21 years, and signed up on Facebook long before it opened beyond Harvard students and alumni. From this perespective, I am reminded of an anecdote told by Jerry Weintraub:Samuel and Rose Weintraub came west to visit their older son, the one who would not go into the gem trade, to see what ( Read more... )

“A normal person who does insane things on the internet” is an oxymoron. We all are a little bit insane, in our online capacities. What separates the men from the boys is the willingness to extend this insanity into the realspace.

Message-ID: <6010@husc6.harvard.edu>
Date: 15 Mar 91 22:59:27 GMT
In article <1991Mar14.001224.20441@daimi.aau.dk> pilgrim@daimi.aau.dk (Jakob G}rdsted) writes:I myself think, that the 1/20 should be sustained. Not because I dislike gays or think they should not practice what makes them feel good, but because heterosex have a better performance ( Read more... )

The trouble with Martha Nussbaum’s analogy between revulsion at “taking the penis of one man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wriggling it around in excrement”, and discarded disgust-based policies, from India’s denigration of its “untouchables” to the Nazi view of Jews, to a legally sanctioned regime of separate swimming pools and ( Read more... )

A problem for libertariansFollowing Aristotle and Aquinas, it is customary to distinguish commutative justice, which deals with the relations that arise between individuals, between individuals and groups, and between groups that comprise any given community, from distributive justice, which deals with the overarching relation of that community as ( Read more... )

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Howard M. Kaminsky of 6130 Ridge Lane, Ocean Ridge, Florida 33435 writes in a letter to the TLS regarding Bernard Wasserstein’s Commentary on Hannah Arendt:As for his charges relating to Arendt’s use of Nazi authors and her inadequate love of the Jewish people, I admit, Jew that I am, to believing that some Nazi authors had important things to say ( Read more... )

“Will we ever be able to think of Hannah Arendt in the same way again?”
-Ron Rosenbaum, “The Evil of Banality: Troubling new revelations about Arendt and Heidegger”, Slate, Friday, 30 October 2009, 12:37 PM ET
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