no problem

When religious, I never went far into the 'problem of evil' issue, partly because it never struck me as dire. It seemed to assume a relatively high weight to the resulting attendant human (and other) suffering. But that weighting, in the mind of God (or a God), isn't knowable except by the assertion (or revelation) that it is weighty. And that isn't useful: what we'd need to know is the relative weight of human suffering compared to the weightiness of producing an interesting human world (for which one needs both good and evil), or of having an exposition (for which things need to play out), and so on.

In other words, the 'problem' of evil is largely the 'problem' of suffering, but there are things worth suffering for in our conception (achievement, freedom, etc.), and the same things, when necessary, are worth permitting others to suffer for - again, in our conception. So it would be no surprise if God had things that were, in his conception, worth making us suffer for.

The problem of evil becomes a productive subject, however, when we step back and consider it in relation to how people accommodate themselves to religion. This is why the problem of evil becomes is more pronounced for a liberal than a conservative theologian.

In fact, this latter point can be backed into a point that isn't specifically religious. One crude account of the conservative impulse (contrasted with libertarian or progressive impulses) is that it flows from, and in proportion to, the considered view that human evil is widespread, salient, and persistent - in which case virtue had better set its jaw, gird up the loins of its mind, and set out into the world armed to the teeth.

My own view, admittedly a heuristic in the absence of solid evidence, is that any human individual, institution, or community is, by default, unless shown otherwise, to be taken as exactly half evil, half good, with the halves admixed: neither offering a division of each in two nor resolving into a third state neither good nor evil. This balance does strange things to conservative, libertarian, or progressive assumptions, and stranger things still to the implicit formulae that result from those assumptions. Those strange things are, I tell you, my convictions. They are why I must be an exile from politics, from religion, and from the other thoughtful societies - my thoughts are sports, neither hybrid nor purebred.

Epstein

Yes, each act of compassion should weighed against the cumulative negative consequences. But since this lesson sticks with the stingy and eludes the generous, it is not well to teach it. That is, whether to teach the weighing habits of law-and-economics be determined in part by questioning whether the teaching act would pass the test that is taught. And that is the path from law-and-economics to Strauss.

perfect answer

Mr. Mayor, a reporter demanded, do you regret the response to the snowstorm?

Mr. Bloomberg, deadpanning: “You know, I regret everything in this world.”

mystery

If there are eternal questions, it is happenstance if mankind knows any of them. Our persistent questions result from, rather than whisper beneath, our social, specific lives.

robe

Uniforms show the beauty, in its place, of impersonality.

displacement

I do not know whether it is because most important questions cannot be absolutely decided, but I do know that the natural state of man involves a great deal of conflict - one might even say that war is man's natural state. But 'conflict' is the more accurate term, because it sets up the true social choice: not between war and peace, but between two kinds of conflict: between violent conflict and verbal, legal and other nonviolent conflict. That we live in a society filled with the latter more than the former is a great blessing, and indicates the true social value of the seemingly craven corporate banker, lawyer -- Wall Streeter. These are, even in their worse days, engaging in a kind of nonviolent conflict and pillage that crowds out a great deal of what would otherwise be bloodshed. It is a case of a lesser evil that is the best seal against a greater evil. Of course there is a great deal of directly virtuous work to be done to keep this state of affairs manageable and tolerable.

felt

One great threat to integrity is that it feels something like success to say "I will succeed"; and something like spiritual integrity to say "I have decided to follow Jesus". That the thought feels something like the doing - or at least it does to those who have never felt the done deed - reduces the incentives to do.

from John Donne

She, she is dead; she's dead: when thou knowest this,
Thou knowest how poor a trifling thing man is,
And learn'st thus much by our anatomy,
The heart being perish'd, no part can be free,
And that except thou feed (not banquet) on
The supernatural food, religion,
Thy better growth grows withered, and scant;
Be more than man, or thou'rt less than an ant.
Then, as mankind, so is the world's whole frame
Quite out of joint, almost created lame,
For, before God had made up all the rest,
Corruption ent'red, and deprav'd the best;
It seiz'd the angels, and then first of all
The world did in her cradle take a fall,
And turn'd her brains, and took a general maim,
Wronging each joint of th'universal frame.
The noblest part, man, felt it first; and then
Both beasts and plants, curs'd in the curse of man.
So did the world from the first hour decay,
That evening was beginning of the day,
And now the springs and summers which we see,
Like sons of women after fifty be.
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.

another political one

Yes, a democracy results in poor policy outcomes, and routinely so. It's simply that, on balance, those poor choices kill and injure fewer people, and do less other damage, than would result from not having a democracy.

The project of constitutional government is to configure the democracy so as to perpetuate and extend its blessings while mitigating its harms.

a political one

I'm for an immigration system with four key characteristics:

1. A person who tries long enough, hard enough, scrupulously enough, and lacks demerits, should eventually be able to immigrate and, later, naturalize. The process for such a person may and should be lengthy and tedious, but should not be costly.
2. There should be a material bias in favor of family reunification.
3. There should be a means for rapid and effective humanitarian movement.
4. There should be a very substantial bias in favor of academic and professional merit -- academically and professionally meritorious persons should have every incentive to live here.
5. There should be a high, but absolute, limit on immigrant volume, keyed to the national population.

the old kind

Consider the ant, yes, and the blackberry.

also true

Just another pretty face.

true

I don't want to teach you a lesson, quite. I want to change your mind.

on the subway platform

Regarding some theatrical stunt gone wrong:

Man to woman: "Oh my God, he fell how far?"
Woman: "At least 20 feet. They took him to the hospital. People were screaming"
Man: "I hope he's ok, but I wish I had been there to see that. Is that wrong?"

Yes, it's wrong. In fact, it's straightforwardly evil, the sort of evil common to us all. Rubbernecking is (slightly) more defensible, because there is a slight avoidance motive.

we

Man really is a social animal. Add people, serious interactions, to my day, and I get better, I elevate - even if I don't enjoy it.

grip

The need for some certainty is a great cause of self-deception, but truly a need all the same. Not everyone will be satisfied with acknowledged heuristics and mental habits. Most will want to lean on something felt to be so.

now

One of the benefits of reading history is to realize that, all in all, we (the large, global we) live in the best time yet. (At least that we know of since widespread civilization, I mean.)

Senate at 3pm.

Happiness. Thankful.

struck

It is probably unanswerable, and almost certainly inarticulable, but: What is happening when we are sexually attracted to strangers by sight? There is little knowledge of their personality (but some, from their carriage, attire and expression), no direct knowledge of their fecundity, and so on. Why are some people attracted to tall women, or red haired men, or high cheekbones, or powerful legs, or deep set eyes? One senses deeper waters, simultaneously more animal, more calculating, and more instant - indeed this is the topic that leads most easily into an intuition of the unconscious mind and self.

common

Nearly all politicized dispute and debate about science actually treats the boundary between common knowledge and esoteric knowledge. It isn't about what is or isn't so. In a democracy it is about the knowledge base of the voter, especially.

Take creationism versus evolution and aligned old-earth theories. If there were any factual plausibility -- even a small one -- to the creation and flood account, the mineral and oil industry would use it to price fields and predict valuable deposit locations. Nobody - not even a oil or mineral executive with a deep personal religious commitment to biblical inerrancy - will put real money on the flood account being true, or even on it being plausible. Contrast that with biblical references to ancient civilizations, towns, kings, battles and so forth. These are occasionally perfect in their accuracy, often partly true, sometimes invented. That's more than enough plausibility to motivate archaeologists to inform their digs partly using biblical material. If the creation and flood story were in the same "sometimes true, often plausible" category as the stories of ancient Israel, they too would be used for predictive purposes. But they are not.

So the debate over evolution in schools isn't about whether evolution is so. It is about keeping evolution out of the body of common knowledge. The motivation for this isn't necessarily bad. Although I do think evolution should be forthrightly taught in schools, I also recognize that some truths carry dangerous implications, and that bad moral implications can be and have been improperly but easily derived from natural selection. So I have patience for a debate over whether evolution should be taught, even though I have little patience for a non-scientific debate over whether evolution is so.

Now take an intermediate case: climate change. Here again, the serious money (the insurance and real estate industries) speaks clearly: there is a real risk here, although nothing like a certainty as to severity of effects. Will there be dire climate change? We do not know. Is there a serious risk of dire climate change? Yes.

The debate over climate change thus falls into two categories: the first treats likely outcomes, mitigating policies and efforts and the general probabilities. That's the genuine policy arena. Then there's the question of whether climate change is bogus - this is really a question about the boundary between common knowledge and esoteric knowledge, motivated by voting effects.

Most knowledge can't and shouldn't be part of common knowledge - there's only so much that will be known right across the range of normal adults in a society. But what gets in, is important for just that reason. Celebrity versus salience.

hen

The most useful and beautiful falsehood I know - the myth I'd most want to be true - is that there is a benevolent omniscience above who stores away every secret or hidden or quiet human virtue, remembers these forever, and delights in them.

regulation

The trouble with paternalistic regulations - even necessary ones - is that rational motivations are often obscure and various. Far better to have somewhat arbitrary regulations that people can work around, if need be, whenever such will still serve the purpose.

autonomic

My instincts about people and situations wax and wane according to a sense of their needfulness that is not subject to my will.

silky

The differences among the the attractive, the erotic and the pornographic are as interlocking, and yet as sharp - and indeed the same as - the distinctions among the social, the individually human, and the animal. They are as the web, the spider, and the fly.

kidding

Nobody thinks that. Nobody.

boilerplate

Why do I tolerate dreary things? Because they are the moat around the real.

post

Why is advertising so often of high quality? It isn't that we're a consumer culture. It's that we're a culture with few competing public images. Few altarpieces, few totems.

oh

I acknowledge a silent, background sadness that the world, and that I, disappoint. To let this sadness remain, quiet and undriving, true but never central, seems the best way.

over lunch

A conversation with a friend is a sure joy.

solvent

Love need not be mutual to be love. But it must be mutual and intelligent if it is not to be too cruel and degrading. Love, real but mishandled, can make a man into a pet, then dog, then worm: finally a zero, or, more precisely, a pure, notional object.

don't read this - it's dense and unclear

Most of my view of the world is conventional. Now, I don't usually put it so plainly, but the part of my world view that is unusual is the conviction that important systems, ideas and cultures never really work - at best, they muddle through and achieve mitigated successes at a tolerable cost (significant but bearable waste, cruelty, etc.). And, therefore, that the ways and means of muddling through are more valuable than the ways and means of vaulting success. Also, therefore, that a knowledge of where, when and how things fail, and a focus on building systems that can fail non-catastrophically, are of very high value. And finally, therefore, that significant acknowledged shortcomings are not a sufficient reason to accept a proposal to do or refrain.

This is an intrinsically moderate position, in this sense:

• a conservative view is that we live in an order that exists underneath all our corrupting troublemaking, and that order would work well if only people would comply with and live out that order;
• a liberal view is that we live in a broken order that warps our fundamentally decent selves, and our decency would shine through if only the order were reformed to allow people to flourish.
  

My position is that what is made bent can never be straight, and that our human world is made of somewhat - but not very - bent stuff: ourselves.

It's also a position with its own peculiar weaknesses. Here's just one: nothing works suggests an idea of high function, and I ambivalently borrow those ideas from conservatives and liberals (I don't mean to polarize thought along political dimensions, but the axis orients this particular explanation nicely). The conservative system that works is a natural order, at bottom. The liberal system that works nourishes expression, at bottom. (Order and fertility are the poles of human effort, but that's another subject.) No human system reliably and sustainably results in either. But these ideals are exterior to my own conception. Muddling through - if you were tendentious and out to show me up - could very well be said to work, as muddling through.

My reply would be that my view of the world is moderate, but my ideals and dreams are liberal and conservative. Nothing works, said by an optimist, is a view that has to borrow it's ideals to function. And that's a weakness.

basic

Democracy's value is in social stabilization through legitimization without appeal to an external standard. Democracy's value does not lie in its effect on good governance.

James Franco

If narcissism's so bad, then why am I so beautiful?

bureau, yet again

Generally speaking, the functions best carried out in our society are those performed by institutions whose professionals are adequately compensated in money and security, but well compensated in interest, salience and recognition of work.

my hope

Craig Ferguson said it well: "The triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism."

loosening

Earthworms creep, aerate the soil,
Enrich and break apart what they
Ingest along the way.

For this we value them.

Hope aerates the fields that lie before us,
Puts heart into us to till and turn, saying
Our plows will not be broken,
Our seeds will not smother,
Harvest will come, in season.

Hope, as an attitude merely,
Obscures rational expectation,
And is blinders to the horses among us
Who must trod, and trod:
Hope is mercy to them.

But hope, as a loosening of expectancy,
Is no mere attitude, but an ever-creeping
Function, deep in the fertile mind.
And there, may it be a healthy multitude;
Make more workable what reason sets upon;
Increase reason's scope, broadcasting seeds:
That rise to shoot, then ear, then full grain within the ear.

buddy

There is more to money, but less to consuming it for yourself, than you think.

sure

We want adventure, outward if possible, but if not - within.

of A

Practically nothing of importance works, nor could it be otherwise. An important system that suffices is a success.

Gorgon

Is there a sight that would kill? Not a gorgon nor the almighty, but an actual, available sight?

probably wrong

This is probably wrong, but I can't think of a counterexample and anyhow it is trivial:

Anything that is cute may, by a slight change, be made scary. But most of what is scary cannot easily be made cute.

punt

Early September was, long ago. A green breath, it took in the end to summer's troubles and knew nothing of tomorrow's changes.

lick

Decoration is as proper to design as salt is to to a boiled egg, and in about the same proportion.

noise, heat, fuzz

The primary layer of abstraction is vital. And abstractions of abstractions are occasionally necessary, sometimes of use. But further abstractions upon abstracted abstractions are seldom of use, often very dangerous, and carry - moreover - the ordinary dangers even beneficial abstractions carry.

I do not mean to preclude grand theories. Even an ideology may be of use, on balance. But the good grand theories and the useful ideologies, with all their heft and sweep, lie close upon the phenomena, even as an atmosphere clings to its planet.

vampiry

I believe in the usefulness of capitalism expressed into creative play upon a fair market: the marketplace as such. What I do not believe in is efficient market capitalism, whereby a marketplace becomes a unitized and abstracted rudiment of a model that then parades the ability to read the slope of a graph as if that were capitalism. That is not. That is either (benign) a study upon a marketplace, or (malign) a silent vampiry upon the market.

There are many reliable tests of which of those is in operation. The easiest: are greedy men, by their greed, producing usefully, allowing that the use may be subtle?

good breeding

Congregational religion can breed raw populism into civil democracy.

maybe

A peaceful and open society persisting over more than a generation is typically a precondition to widespread political rationality, although hardly a sufficient one, nor - fortunately - even quite a necessary one. This, as much as anything culturally specific, accounts for the post-colonial advantages many democracies experience after their revolutions.

trick question

Does living in a free country mean you have the right to be taken advantage of?

Yes, it's a trick question. But it's also a hard question.

can't buy

Money is enabling. No question about it.

what I am thankful for

I can be better
Without being bigger.

You can be better
Without the prod of pride.

We can be better
By tending what we have.

She can be better
Tell her she is her own.

He can be better
Take none of what is his.

It can be better
As we each tend our plots.

They will be better
When their neighbors are.

Service's Stalin

The productivity of a productive evil man may be interesting. The fitful self-collection of a cowardly man may be interesting. But the evil of an evil man, and the cowardice of those around him -- are not interesting. They merely wait for the septic needfulness of death in this wicked world.

the fall

I want a car
Because it makes me feel good
To have one
And not because I need it.

likewise

Money workers should get paid. Food workers should get fed. Care givers should get love. Interrogators should get tape recorded. Muzzle not the ox that treadeth out the grain.

alas

My sentiments are conservative even if most of my views are not. And that conservatism is of a national bent. Put it this way: my feelings want, contrary to fact, something like a Baptist, perhaps even a Mormon, cosmos to exist.

invasive

Action despite incomplete knowledge - often despite considerable ignorance - is a necessary part of life. Certainly we try to increase our understanding and decrease the need to leap into the dark. But we are still often called to decisive action despite substantial uncertainty and ignorance.

Heuristics are called for: morals, mythologies, beliefs. And that's why I can't, as an agnostic, simply say I don't care what other people believe. What we believe, privately, has a profound public impact because our beliefs inform necessary acts in the absence of (or in the teeth of) full, true knowledge.

corner

It is in my veins now; I feel the strong, silent passions again. I am terribly awake.

Peniel

Oh yes, I will put away childish things. I will work upon this world. I will till it and have it yield. I will wrestle with the soil until it blesses me and those I love.

more learned

And why joie de vue? Chiefly because we must treat time as a path down which we walk by our own feet, by our own power, with our own will to progress even though, in truth, time will carry us, conveyor like, whether or not we press forward. But we must own the progression of time in our lives: take the future as something to reach, and not just to let arrive.

I am not timber, clamped to a belt that ratchets towards the buzz saw of death. I am a man, and I will walk all the way, by my own feet, to my own purposes, and be in possession of my time, until I am cut asunder.

I will own myself and leave others glad that it is I and not they, and not fate, and none other, that so owns. I will reverence will; I will reverence love. I'll walk. Nobody and nothing will carry me but that which cannot be stopped, and even then, I will moonwalk upon the conveyer belt of time, as if the passage of my hours were by my own two feet.

what I have learned

What I have learned over the last month is that human expectation is maladapted to time. For time, in fact, is our storehouse: we should fill the racks in sequence, placing the largest items first, letting the smaller items fill the surrounding space, and putting the most awkward items nearest their use or exit, leaving the weildy items to fill the crannies.

But this is not what we do - we treat time not like a warehouse but as a vantage, and clear all impediments to our view of the desired next. Great open vistas, airy boulevards of time stretching to it, but at great cost in productivity.

A middle way is required - to self-discipline and redemption of the time, packing in the work, but also to permitting a certain joie de vue.

bureau again

There is a self-serving variety of self-control that I commend to myself now: to let the leaven work, to have the full loaf, but in due season.

malaprop

Eventually I stale to a task. That misuses 'stale', but none the less what I mean and feel.

fortune cookie

Nobody is good at everything; and those who excel at something excel in little else. Play to your strengths, even as you address your weaknesses.

before next

Expectation makes the interval sag, a the telephone line sags between two old pine poles, weeping tar. This is because inwardly, we tend to measure time from event to event, and not as a clock does.

steely georgian

That we are stuck with others as they are, and ourselves much as we are, sets the outer space, the surrounding void, to our will, which exists on an improbably hospitable and extensive planet of human possibility, both of hope and despair.

policy versus polity

Well, yes, of course it chills renumerated efforts to make a tax code more progressive. That doesn't make it wrong, but it does make it less good. And everyone likes to spend money that isn't their own. But where is the population mature enough for these and a thousand such observations? Nowhere in time or place. This is the policy point of bureacracy - to create a space, itself costly and distorting, to be sure, for these truths to have a bearing.

parade

It is rare to get an external view of one's intimate friends, and hardly helpful to friendship.

becalmed

I am rarely depressed in the sense of being emotionally down. But I do have periods - stretches of days - in which I am befogged and becalmed, all told.

magnificat

Haunting, profound, and great: that the proud be cursed to be scattered in the imaginations of their own hearts.

fujimori

Scientists and engineers can make fine politicians, but are disproportionately among those who become tyrannical. And that is no suprise.

obvious

Young men unemployed: trouble.

bureau

We do not live in a dystopian world, although there is a great deal of dysfunction, and a significant amount of evil. I would rather live now than in any prior age, if the choice of where I were to be placed were made random per capita (that is, if I had an equal chance of ending up as a person here or there, male or female, sick or healthy, etc.). Obviously if I could pick who I'd end up being, what body and brain I'd comprise, and so on, I might choose something else (to be Abigail Adams?). But realistically, we - the larger we - are the blessed of the ages.

more today

The ennobling is directional, of course, as I've long said. The vote ennobles people, rather than people ennobling their votes.

today

For all my hesitance about democracy, and certainty about its many limits, I remain convinced of the value and superiority of democracy over other forms of government experienced by man. And I remain a lover of its dignification of man, of the romance - and how it romances me - of the polling place, of the vote, of the school cafeteria and folding tables made noble.

next two

A transition succeeds or fails by preservation of momentum coming into the turn, and the application of acceleration coming into the new straightaway.

next

One must come upon a chance, a wonderful chance, first as one who would catch a bird, unawares, but then, as Jacob who would wrest a blessing.

workplace

You play chieftan, and I'll be your priest.

zeppelin

A strong argument for maintaining a degree of ritual in society is that doing so acclimates - and in some measure desensitizes - people to ritual force. A society without ritual leaves people with a compelling yearning that becomes the more powerful, if suddenly engaged, for being unfamiliar. But of course a ritualized society also reinforces the power of ritual. There's a happy minimum of background ritual to be maintained.

lawyer

One way I am more persuasive is by picking up the personae strewn about in each institution. That I am, in saying and urging something, also being something. One reason lawyers occupy such a rich set of jokes is that it is so entirely and wonderfully a role.

beadle

Exception spotting is a weak and faulty form of policy reasoning, made strong by it intuitiveness.

words

Beautiful electronic words: transistor, diode, capacitor, fuse, resistor, rheostat, solenoid, transformer.

hire

Why Wikipedia works: that's a worthwhile subject of thought.

orlando

Evil, as the cliche suggests, really is usually banal. And even when it is not, it tends towards banality. Which is not to equate the two. Most banality is neither of nor from evil. But banality that is not from evil does have this danger: that it diminishes the difference of evil from good.

punctuation

I am drawn to the dash because I hear what I read and hear what I write.

All punctuation is, fundamentally, acoustic, not just at the moment of placement, but as a capitulation of the swell or ebb that preceded. But the dash is the most purely oral, most purely paratactic, of all standard contemporary punctuation -- the least syntactic, the least logic-plated: the least like a colon. (But lordy: I do like my colons!)

There used to be a rival to the dash for pure acoustic indication: that peculiarly poetic comma that grew from the King James translation's focus on church scripture readings. The comma of playwrights and politicians and preachers.

next

We are wired to react. Do you want to get something out of someone? Give them the occasion and path to react.

serve

We are all, to varying degrees, fitted out for devotion. And figuring out what to do about this is one of the personal projects that we each, with more or less awareness, must muddle through.

practice

I'm at an Orlando hotel split about evenly between tourists and convention goers (I'm a convention goer).

Stepping out of my room a moment ago, I saw a bit of good parenting.

An affluent father with a dear little 5-year-old in tow approaches the housekeeper wheeling her cart down the hall.

Father: "Excuse me, ma'am, did you clean the rooms down this hall?"

Housekeeper: "Yes."

Father to daughter: "Okay, Sheila, go ahead and ask her."

The girl hesitates, but then says, "Excuse me, ma'am, but I put a Disney bag in the trashcan in our room." (She's been practicing.)

The girl bites her lip, her father takes her little hand, and he finishes the thought: "If it's not to much trouble, could you look for it?"

The housekeeper reaches into her bin and finds it after a few seconds' rummaging. She hands it to the child.

The little girl catches her breath, takes the little plastic bag, and after a moment hugs the housekeeper's leg and cries out: "Oh, thank you, thank you."

And I slip past.

He's a good dad. His "Excuse me, ma'am" was a simple bit of modeling, and effective. He had had already led his daughter into taking responsibility. A good showing all around, with a sweet and easy happy ending, too.

chords

What in us is so easily moved by the rescue of distant miners? This correspondence of emotion is beautiful, but a sign of so much that is dangerous and weak in us, too.

bone carving

Strange to realize that cultures sometimes regress technologically. That seafarers, on reaching an island, may become a tribe, bound to the land. Or that the ability to make the tools that are buried with ancestors may become lost to those who follow.

Neither is common: both are possible. Even in the absense of calamity, technological advance does not always ratchet forward.

work aright

It is in some ways mere word play, but a profession is a sort of faith, an orientation to preserve in a swarm of small acts that all, like iron filings, must point to the poles. This is what makes a true lawyer or doctor unlike a non-professional who does the same work. A doctor or lawyer is freely and truly bound.

porphyry

War, even a good war, is mostly coarsening for the soldier and the populace. War, even a bad war, is mostly ennobling for the commanders and political leaders. And this is the great threat to a war-fighting democracy, as a democracy. Starting with its Revolution, America has become less democratic by each successive war. Fortunately, counteracting developments (expanding enfranchisement and popular education, diversity and wealth, mostly) have greatly mitigated (but also complicated) the end result.

America will find its Napoleon if it fights many more significant wars in close succession.

-----:---:--:-.

It is just as well there is a convention against multiple colons in a sentence. In most workaday writing, however good, the colon is just a splice, although a pregnant one.

But in creative writing, a really strong writer with a delicate hand can create a galloping sentence that joins clause after clause with propulsive colons. This can be thrillingly effective. Wilde has a few of these in De Profundis and they have the effect of the best cinematic montages that compress a development of years of into a minute of breath-snatching sequence:

It was, let me say frankly, the sort of letter I would, in a happy if wilful moment, have written to any graceful young man from either University who had sent me a poem of his own making, certain that he would have sufficient wit or culture to interpret rightly its fantastic phrases. Look at the history of that letter! It passes from you into the hands of loathsome companions: from him to a gang of blackmailers: copies of it are sent about London to my friends, and to the manager of a theater where my work is being performed: every construction but the right one is put upon it: Society is thrilled with the absurd rumors that I have had to pay a huge sum of money for having written an infamous letter to you: this forms the basis of your father's worst attack: I produce the original letter myself in court to show what it really is: it is denounced by your father's counsel as a revolting and insidious attempt to corrupt innocence; ultimately it forms part of a criminal charge. The Crown takes it up: the Judge sums it up with a little learning and much morality: I go to prison for it at last.

more inertia

One objection is that the mind may fly from place to place in an instant - that thought is unbounded by inertia, indeed physicality. But to think of Rome, and then Beijing (or both at once), is not to travel in place or (usually) even in thought.

inertia

The preservation of momentum is consistently observable not only in obviously physical phenomena, but in mental, social and otherwise abstract human phenomena as well. So much so that to say so is barely even an insight. But what if this omnipresence of inertia is the signature of the covert physicality of all abstractions?

now what

Some people want to eat not because they are hungry, or for the taste of it, or the social aspects, but simply because they are bored. Some people want conflict because they are bored. Some think from boredom. Some work from boredom. Some save lives from boredom.

S

An earthworm dies on driveway concrete and leaves a mark - an iron stain that will not go.

mosaic

A moderate must have programs and a narrative, or else lose all advantage to the flanks.

tent

Truth, like oxygen, must be mixed or regulated.

aie

It's an beautiful, unnerving thought: that black holes glow with the widowed halves of nascent particle-antiparticle pairs, one half born(e) into the fateful horizon. That they dimly ululate with particular mourning.

Sally's Beauty Supply

Makers of electric hair clippers provide a particularly clear - almost pristine - exhibit of how to handle and mishandle race in a commercial context. Clippers may be generalist models that will cut any kind of hair reasonably well, or specialist models that will cut some kinds of hair especially well. So for the specialized models, there is the question of how to convey that this model is great for this hair type. And one way to do that is to associate the hair-type with a race for which the type is common. I say all this because I went to a beauty supply store to buy a pair (pair? Oh language, how I love thee) of hair clippers. And the shelves gave these examples:

• Total code: it turns out the "Five Star" line of Wahl clippers is the brand for thick, dense hair and thick beards prone to ingrown hairs. This isn't a bad approach since it doesn't imply that the line is solely for one hair type or one race. But it takes a while to catch on to. (And the other Wahl lines have completely different names - there isn't a Six Star or Four Star line, etc.)
• Total race: Oster has both an "Afro-American" line and an "ethnic" line. This approach is offensive in part because it is simply inaccurate. It's skittish and inaccurate enough that "black" would have been better by a tad. But only a tad: the trouble here is that hair type is being conflated with (rather than simply associated with) race. The only virtue of this approach is that it suggests what the better alternative would be.
• Total substance: Andis gives their clippers names, but prominent on the packages are what the clippers do: "Balding trimmer for thick, curly beards"; "All-day use clipper for any human hair"; "cut-down t-clipper for barber or veterinary use". This is clear, and it is focused on function: what do clippers deal with - various manipulations of hair of various types.

Good job, Andis. Second place to Wahl, since the total code approach does suggest that the specialized buyer (barbers, mostly) may know how a tool may be adapted to uses not anticipated by its maker. And Oster simply fails.

All in all, a really fine example of how especially accuracy, sometimes avoidance, but not obscurity, are the havens in which true respect of others is found.

youth; branding

The Starbucks near my office opens at 5:30, and when I don't carry my coffee from home, I stop in. It's really shelving and prep time - not many customers - and the kids who work there are punchy, and don't stop horsing around just because an early customer happens by.

This morning, much laughter - one kid is stocking the pastry case, and another is aiming coffee beans at her head. One at a time, about ten feet away, nice high arcs and pretty good aim. The third kid is impressed. Laughter all around.

Mock anger: "You're throwing beans at me!"
Sly answer: "No I'm not!"
Mock fury: "You are throwing beans at me!"
Arch reply: "It's Starbucks."

Happiness all around.