Whatever!

Oh, you MUST post a submission to Kristen's Blast-The-Bromide contest.

I would SO like to be witty and funny and lighthearted, but there's a bromide that's so common and so immoral that I just can't see straight -- or rather, can't see a comically curved path around it. It's 'Everyone's entitled to his own opinion' -- the paradigmatic gesture of closed-minded self-indulgence masquerading as liberalism -- the short form of which being, of course, 'Whatever!' Both are gestures that imply that there's no disputing matters of opinion. This bit of cowardice or laziness (as you please) would be, if true, bad news for anyone who was foolish enough to say anything, since all statements, even the most 'objective,' are only opinions variously warranted. For this same reason, the 'entitlement' aspect is banal flummery: are you really 'entitled' to have something that you must always only have? The most insipid thing about the platitude is that it uses an ostensibly liberal and wise gesture to cover conservatism and ignorance; nine times out of ten, it means 'I neither know what I'm talking about nor care to,' i.e., 'Fuck you.' But this bromide all by its lonesome is merely absurd. To be sublime, it must be followed by the corollary: 'Einstein proved it.'

Hentai, tentacles and The Pirate Act.

I could never figure out how the Japanese developed a whole sub-market of porn dedicated to women being penetrated by octopi. Duh. Island nation.

But why didn't the Brits invent tentacles hentai, then? No fishy flesh in English vaginas, THANK you very much. No, it's all horses and stockings and French maid costumes. Maybe the occasional pirate.

I think everyone should have to dress up like a pirate one day of the year. Particularly serious, dignified public figures: statesmen, poets and, above all, scholars. How can you take someone seriously who thinks they'll be annihilated somehow if they dressed up like a pirate and said "aaaargh"?

I'd sooner trust the judgment of a fundamentalist Christian who dressed up like a pirate now and then than that of a philosopher who didn't.

Of course, I must concede that acting in a subtly piratical fashion daily might beat dressing up like a pirate one day of the year.

Or it might not.

BTW, moon = cheese

“Let us be on our guard against supposing that anything so methodical as the cyclic motions of our neighboring stars obtains generally and throughout the universe; indeed a glance at the Milky Way induces doubt as to whether there are not many cruder and more contradictory motions there, and even stars with continuous, rectilinearly gravitating orbits, and the like.” -- Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882.

A carefree science, that with a glance disputes Newton and Kepler. Let us be on our guard.

Addio a Dio

Thinking since 1500 means struggling with the problem of judgment; thinking prior to 1500 means having the problem of judgment.

"Endless entailment is an impossible travesty of verification."

"Does 'This is a telephone' entail 'You couldn't eat it'?" -- J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, 1962

This is terrible

This is terrible. You -- one -- I’m unable to say “I” -- can post directly and immediately, from Word, with one click. No wonder people post so much ephemera. For whose eyes, though?

Definitions.

"Feare of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publiquely allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, SUPERSTITION."  Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.

Virgil.

"It never troubles a wolf how many the sheep be."