Sunday, July 31, 2011
Friday, July 08, 2011
Friday, June 03, 2011
Top Ten Ideas in the History of Philosophy (according to me)
Top Ten Ideas in the History of Philosophy
1. Human beings make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing - Karl Marx
2. The starting point of any ethical system should be suffering - Jeremy Bentham
3. Disbelief in God does not mean Evil does not exist - Alan Badiou
4. The problem with pragmatism is that it is inherently tautological - Max Horkheimer
5. Gender is not biologically determined; it is socially performed - Judith Butler
6. Art's purpose is to break the spell cast by the commodity fetish - Theodore Adorno
7. There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a documentation of barbarism - Walter Benjamin
8. Know Thyself - Socrates (via Plato?)
9. Philosophy's job is not finished until its utopian promise is fulfilled - Herbert Marcuse
10. There is nothing outside the text - Jacques Derrida
*Note: many of these are not direct quotes, but paraphrases.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Aphorism du Jour
I would rather make the old new than pretend that the new isn't already old by the time it makes itself known as new.
Monday, April 25, 2011
The Top Ten Worst Ideas in the History of Philosophy
1. I will take your silence as assent (Plato)
2. That which is useful, is inherently good (Bentham)
3. Doing and Being have nothing to do with one another (Agamben)
4. We live in the best of all possible worlds (Liebniz)
5. Everything is Permitted (Sartre)
6. Do what thou wilt (Crowley)
7. The truth is in ideal forms (Plato)
8. There is no place for the poet in the Republic (Plato)
9. The king is god’s representative on earth (any number of court philosophers)
10. Nothing is true but that which is willed (Stirner) Tweet
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Scenes from a War: Episode 2
Hold on to your eyeballs!
Rockets fire out of a mini-tank. Cheap generic drug export and import. Infra-red cameras on the missiles. Lives on auto-destruct. The Canadarm takes lasers, whose application has been mostly medical in spite of how they were envisioned in Star Wars, and uses them as a guidance system rather than for their destructive potential. But mostly to zap poppy milk into arms.
In that case, people will need to be programmed. Conditioned. Boundaries must be surveyed, enforced, guarded. Negative and Positive reinforcement.
Luckily, we can Youtube videos to propagate the fields of flander. Slander through spillage. Pushing through blood and so modulate exactly what you hear. Shock filters, Bomb-deafness, snow-blindness. Leverage opportunism. Blood spatter, drops on sand.
Information jamming. Future shock non-sequitor global village, local pillage. Trophies of the battlefield, the dessicate surface of earth, war of the worlds. Dan Ackroyd with a bazooka, firing indiscriminately and aufhebung-ing Destructive explosions.
What this war needs is a snappy jingle. Don’t die for my Libyan beans. And Don’t forget the button-happy tact-island. Enjoy the slaughter. It’s going to happen anyway, so you might as well. Either that, or you have to. Those boots in your closet scare the shit out of me, but not enough to stop me from being able to mock-up a pie graph, a pig’s head on a stick, tea in a human skull.
I will be polite to you before I stick this bayonette through your midsection. Mad max out the Robinsonade.
Mel Gibson called and tried to order some more crazy for a kickstart. Gossip for him is like Red Bull: he does it to stay awake and alert. His breath killed a small village in Africa. But I had to tell him, we were fresh out of crazy. Seriously, the person who walked in the store before you called bought the last little bottle of crazy. It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it? The next battle will be broadcast live on a channel that projects its visions directly on the eyeball.
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