Thursday, December 12, 2019
autumn 2019
May youth feel holistic power.
And make The Donald eat his sarcasm: Thunberg “jabs back,” notes the NYTimes, by changing her Twitter bio to mock the President's words, referring to herself in Trump's terms as: “A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.”
Go, girls (different article: about teen political ambitions).
And may our heirs not have to emigrate from deserted hot Earth to Mars, though vacationing to Mars is surely to happen.
A posting this week on corporate concentration conveys a very different, yet complementary, context of holistic power.
Dec. 7 | To have you appreciate where I am in virtual woods, I’d have to describe for you an array of thickets that can’t be imaged, because my point today isn’t exemplary: The Impossibility of Perfection, 2012, by Michael Slote, subtitled “Aristotle, Feminism, and the Complexities of Ethics.”
Is ethics (as standardly understood) better conceived as derivative of value conceptuality? Is the latter actually what so-called meta-ethics always was (hiding itself from its self-conception)?
Indeed, what’s the point of ethicality if that serves one’s being well less than interactive relations that come and go?
Here I am, alive to live, in any event.
All in all, we go separate ways, while each of us is always a singular life in which an ultimate artistry of flourishing may be little about relationships with others.
That’s a keynote of Slote’s concerns, though it’s been mine longer than for him (given the precursory degree of his analyses). How that’s so would be a little thicket in the array I don’t want to give time now to detail.
Someone in an intimacy dies, “leaving” the other to move on.
Some artistry may be remembered by the afterlife of others. But what was between us is no greater than each of us flourishing together more than anyone else outside the woods may know to be exemplary.
Nov. 23 | I’m swamped with reading and offline writing—and keeping up with the Congressional House inquiry into the Swamp Man Show—and also giving too much time to ephemeral Attitude about it all, via comment at NYTimes articles, tracking tedious dramas soon to be forgotten.
Nov. 9 | My time is filled with analytical reading and discursive emailing. It’s too much to describe fairly, let alone detail. Sorry.
“So, Claude, I hear you’re painting water lilies. Sounds dull. But tell me about it.”
“It is so much.”
“Yeah, well, tell me about one?”
“There are so many.”
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And I really have little interest in filling space here about my obsessions with news, the ephemorae of being in Time.
Oct. 19 | 1:10 AM: I’ve been so obsessed with “Brexit” that I now don’t want to do an update here, early in the crucial day. And who knows where the puerile Donald circus will be in merely a week!
I’ll update next Saturday.
12:38 PM: Ha!: So far, my earlier predictions about Brexit are right: Boris will become a whisp of history, and Britain will stay in the E.U. Elections are on the way.
The Donald is so pathetic: He applauds today (via Twitter) that a State Dept. official raised concerns in 2015 about a risk of appearances in Hunter Biden’s Ukraine business involvements, no intimation of questionable actuality. The State official says that Joe Biden didn’t follow up because he was preoccupied with his son Beau’s brain cancer therapy. But Swamp Man wants to tarnish Joe Biden’s integrity anyway? “Have you no shame, sir?”
Oct. 11 | Let me not seem vain for sharing that I expressed my view yesterday that appellate courts would side with House entitlement to subpoena as it sees fit, against Trumpist obstruction, and today an appellate court did that.
Oct. 5 | Believing in 2016 that the Donald is mentally ill (as well as unfit for the presidency) is now little consolation in the face of how obviously valid my surmise was back then. The chronic distraction of his pathetic salesmanship—his ceaseless blather that sucks the air out of media time-space—is a waste of time to track.
Trump will be driven from office through the Impeachment process.
Look, World: The U.S. form of government is working, not failing. (And Mitch McConnell is not immortal.)
I’m glad I did tens of pages (8” x 11” size) of comment on Trump’s “reality” show at the New York Times and Washington Post, over the past few years. But I’m also glad I didn’t bother to link from here to much of it.
I’m a good citizen with thoughtful polemic, but it all should be as forgettable as the illegitimacy of Trump’s pathetic occupation of the White House.
In other news: I predict that the UK will stay in the EU. Johnson would want to request an Article 50 exit date extension that is so limply warranted that the EU would reject it, thus apparently compelling a no-deal Brexit, even though the UK Parliament has outlawed that. Johnson would happily go to jail for letting “Leave” happen (thus fulfilling his ego), and just let Scotland and Northern Ireland secede from the UK, because he’s got a spiffy fantasy about great trade prospects with Trumpism. [Nov. 7: I was proven wrong, of course; but the point here is sober thinking about Brexit, not about being right. So, I’m leaving the comment here.]
No, what’s going to happen is that Johnson goes to jail and the UK stays in the EU, because there is congruence between (1) the EU’s baseline desire that the UK stay in the EU; and (2) the will of the UK Parliament. [Nov. 7: The rational point is not that Johnson goes to jail, but that he loses PM leadership, now a matter of upcoming elections.]
The rational solution, which I’ve expressed at the Times, is that the EU grants an extension on the condition that Johnson resigns. A caretaker UK PM then engineers an election which shows what UK polls have shown for over a year: The majority of Brits don’t want Leave (while the Scots and Irish never did). [Nov. 7: We shall see, indeed. Quite evidently, Johnson is put into a position of caretaker PM just by being compelled to hold elections.]
September 21 | I’m sick of scholars who do bad faith readings of snippets of Heidegger notes, thus creating “Heidegger” fictions that, I guess, serve their careers. I don’t want to give attention to that.
To the public, an aura of scandal is more appealing than the tedium of careful reading. That’s good for marketing. (Academic journals have budget issues, too—as well as peer reviewers needing to bolster their guild specialties.)
Several Annotations journal notes by Heidegger—supplemental entries from circa 1944—have become public recently, glossed by a few flippant scholars, causing glosses of the flippancy at some news sites. Does that cause timidity among good-faith scholars of Heidegger’s essays and lectures?
Maybe some genuine dwelling with Heidegger’s notes can be worthwhile. So, I did “thinking relative to 3 notes by Heidegger.”
