Matt Ridley in The Journal of Private Enterprise, 32(3): 1-7.
Karl Marx’s Radical Antisemitism
Anti-semitism as a term just doesn’t cut it any longer — the term should be more specific — Jew hatred. Here from a few years back Michael Ezra argues in The Philosopher’s Magazine that Karl Marx’s anti-Semitism is clear and unambiguous.
Norbert Wiener
Born on this day. Here’s an assessment of Wiener’s legacy from a few years back. Having read most of the notable work on “epistemic ignorance” (yes, there really is a specialized small literature) there is one prize that still alludes me and that is Wiener’s “The Theory of Ignorance” (1906), a philosophical demonstration of the incompleteness of all knowledge written aged just 10 or 11 years old, Wiener going on to obtain a BA in mathematics aged 14. See here for a listing of his more accessible work. Here too are a few Wiener quotes that have struck me:
- Those who suffer from a power complex find the mechanization of man a simple way to realize their ambitions.
- Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape.
- May we have the courage to face the eventual doom of our civilization as we have the courage to face the certainty of our personal doom. The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belong to acquiescence and hence to weakness.
- The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.
My kind of GP
Especially during prohibition. See: Winston Churchill Gets a Doctor’s Note to Drink “Unlimited” Alcohol in Prohibition America (1932)
“I do not wish to be hurt any more. Give me chloroform or something,” he directed, while waiting for the anesthetist.
*****
[Otto Pickhardt] is perhaps best known as the doctor who treated Winston Churchill when he was hit by a car while visiting New York in 1931. Pickhardt remained friendly with Churchill and when on duty in the UK during WWII he received a telegram inviting him to lunch with the Churchill’s at 10 Downing Street.
Though according to the Observer:
That prescription is also weirdly specific, reading in full, “Martinis with olives only, twists forbidden. How dare you even suggest twists? What are you, a Hitlerite?”
Here are Winnie’s thoughts on booze as per Finest Hour 86:
Why Women Have Sex
Here’s a elegantly and amusingly written review by Tanya Gold of David Buss and Cindy Meston’s book from about seven years ago — way and above the pseudo-sophisticate dross that The Guardian typically dishes up. And here they are in person.
Why don’t we remember the victims of communism?
The Fragile Generation
Lenore Skenazy and Jonathan Haidt in Reason on how many of our generation fucked up their kids: the upshot being that these kids are vulnerable to regressive group- think/hug at university. Because of this fostering of over-dependence and therefore of associated incompetence and laziness (mum will always intercede) these parents have only succeeded in frittering away their own valuable “me time” — and this will continue to encroach well into the free time they’d banked on once their children had come of age and had supposedly even left the house.
The problem is that kids learn by doing. Trip over a tree stump and you learn to look down. There’s an old saying: Prepare your child for the path, not the path for your child. We’re doing the opposite.
Even as adults, play, especially in liberal education properly understood, is vital — as Michael Oakeshott wrote:
The complete character of a human being does not come into view unless we add Homo ludens, man the player, to Homo sapiens , intelligent man, Homo faber, man the maker of things, and Homo laborans, man the worker.
I shall also use the word “play” in a wide sense, to stand for an activity that, because it is not directed to the satisfaction of wants, entails an attitude to the world that is not concerned to use it, to get something out of it, or to make something of it, and offers satisfactions that are not at the same time frustrations.
Nick Cave: kicking against the pricks
The phrase “kicking against the pricks” takes on a whole new meaning . . . if you get my drift. Good on you Nick!
George Avakian
Walker Percy Wednesday 160
An unvarying element in the situation is a pointing at by context. There must occur a preliminary meeting of minds and a mutually intended subject before anything can be said at all. The context may vary all the way from a literal pointing-by-finger and naming in the aboriginal naming act, to the pointing context of the poem which specifies the area where the metaphor is to be applied. There is a reciprocal relationship between the selectivity of the pointing and the univocity of the metaphor: The clearer the context and the more unmistakable the pointing, the greater latitude allowed the analogy ofthe metaphor. The aboriginal naming act is, in this sense, the most obscure and the most creative of metaphors; no modern poem was ever as obscure as Miss Sullivan’s naming water water for Helen Keller. A perfectly definite something is only the most tenuous analogical similarities.*
Given the situation of naming and hearing, there can only be one of three issues to an act of pointing at and naming. What is said will either be old, that is, something we already know and know quite overtly; or something new, and if it is utterly new, I can only experience bafflement; or new-old, that is, something that I had privately experienced but which was not available to me because it had never been formulated and rendered intersubjective. Metaphor is the true maker of language. The creative relationship of inscape, the distinctive reality as it is apprehended, and the distanced metaphor is illustrated by Hopkins’s nature metaphors. His favorite pursuit in the nature journals is the application of striking (sometimes strained) like-yet-unlike metaphors to nature inscapes. There are some pleasing effects. A bolt of lightning is
a straight stroke, broad like a stroke with chalk and liquid, as if the blade of an oar just stripped open a ribbon scar in smooth water and it caught the light.
* The old debate, started in the Cratylus, goes on as lively as ever: what is the relation between the name and the thing, between the word green and the color green, between slice and slice, tree and tree? Most linguists would probably say there is no relation, that the name is purely an arbitrary convention (except in a few cases like boom), that any seeming resemblance is false onomatopoeia (no matter how much you might imagine that slice resembles and hence expresses the act of slicing, it really does not).
But here again, do likeness and unlikeness exhaust the possibilities?
Apparently not. Curtius remarks that “despite all change, a conservative instinct is discernible in language. All the peoples of our family from the Ganges to the Atlantic designate the notion of standing by the phonetic group sta-; in all of them the notion of flowing is linked with the group plu, with only slight modifications. This cannot be an accident. Assuredly the same notion has remained associated with the same sounds through all the millennia, because the peoples felt a certain inner connection between the two, i.e. , because of an instinct to express this notion by these particular sounds. The assertion that the oldest words presuppose some relation between sounds and the representations they designate has often been ridiculed. It is difficult, however, to explain the origin of language without such assumptions.”
It is this “inner connection” which concerns us. The sounds plu and sta, which could hardly be more different fro m the acts of flowing and standing, must nevertheless exhibit some mysterious connection which the mind fastens upon, a connection which, since it is not a kind of univocal likeness, must be a kind of analogy.
