notes

Negative Action

On the part of the one who overdoes it, such negative affirmation is a self-pleasuring form of not really listening that is hardly heard, but more often resented, or, sometimes even worse, re-echoed.

Posted in Culture & Entertainment, Internet, notes, Politics Tagged with: , , , ,

Careful what you pray for – Morsi’s coup may not have much to do with Islamism

Political events in Egypt are being determined primarily by questions of sovereignty and systemic adjustment rather than by ideology, whether liberal-democratic, Islamist, or Egyptian-nationalist

Posted in notes, Politics Tagged with: , , , , ,

Seid nüchtern und wachet (Faust Cantata); VII. Es geschah (It came to pass)

http://youtu.be/dR78SQeRiC4

Posted in Music, notes

Wenn wir brüderlich uns einen…

Democracy Is Obsolete — The League of Ordinary Gentlemen In short: We condemned East Germany for a lot less than what we are doing to ourselves, right this moment. Whoever you vote for in November, that fact will not change.

Posted in History, notes, Philosophy, US History Tagged with: , ,

The Stationary Chait

The two main alternatives that are put forward and passionately defended by partisans are utopian, not because they are particularly imaginative, but merely because they cannot be implemented. They cannot be implemented, or no one can quite be bothered to implement them, in part because we seem to be heading to where they lead, or to where they fail to lead, to nowhere, anyway.

Posted in Economics, notes, Politics Tagged with:

btw

am busy with business and a bit of busyness… expect continued light posting until mid-August, with maybe at most some comments-left elsewhere collections or some dusting off of some nearly but never quite completed old draft posts… we’ll see…

Posted in Meta, notes

The perfect speech…

The perfect speech contains nothing slipshod; in it there are no loose threads; it contains no word that has been picked at random; it is not marred by errors due to faulty memory or to any other kind of carelessness; strong passions and a powerful and fertile imagination are guided with ease by a reason which knows how to use the unexpected gift, which knows how to persuade and which knows how to forbid; it allows of no adornment which is not imposed by the gravity and the aloofness of the subject matter; the perfect writer rejects with disdain and with some impatience the demand of vulgar rhetoric that expressions must be varied since change is pleasant. — Leo Strauss

Posted in Books, Miscellany, notes

A Mighty Tweet

A mighty tweet it was.
A mighty tweet it was.
A treat to re-tweet
and re-tweet without retreat,
Such a mighty tweet it was.

Posted in Internet, notes

(sketch of historicist paradox)

“Every philosophy is the philosophy of its own day… thus it can find satisfaction only for the interests belonging to its own particular time,” “philosophy… is its own time grasped in thought” (Hegel)

bounded particularity is universal

a uniquely determinative objective of a philosophy adequate to our particular time

to understand philosophy as always and everywhere in principle the same quest for timeless and universal truth (Strauss)

what is always most modern is modernity’s own obsolescence, the having arrived at a non-existent destination (the time-boundedness of thought negates thought as thought, producing time)

Posted in notes, Philosophy Tagged with: ,

a political theology analogy

libertarianism : liberalism :: Judaism : Christianity

Posted in notes, Politics, Religion