I mean, seriously, if “raising important issues” is all it takes to get some kind words from liberal authors, bloggers and activists, and maybe even votes from some progressives, just so as to “shake things up,” then why not support David Duke? With the exception of his views on the drug war, David shares every single view of Paul’s that can be considered progressive or left in orientation. Every single one. So where do you draw the line? Must one have actually donned a Klan hood and lit a cross before his handful of liberal stands prove to be insufficient? Must one actually, as Duke has been known to do, light candles on a birthday cake for Hitler on April 20, before it no longer proves adequate to want to limit the overzealous reach of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? Exactly when does one become too much of an evil fuck even for you? Inquiring minds seriously want to know.
Meanwhile, at what point do you stop being so concerned about whether a presidential candidate is pushing the issues Paul raises (so many of which do need raising and attention), and realize what every actual leftist in history has realized, but which apparently some liberals and progressives don’t: namely, that the real battles are in the streets, and in the neighborhoods, and in movement activism? It isn’t a president, whether his name is Ron Paul or Barack Obama who gets good things done. It is us, demanding change and threatening to literally shut the system down (whether we mean Wall Street, the Port of Oakland, the Wisconsin state capitol, Columbia University, a Woolworth’s lunch counter, or the Montgomery, Alabama bus system) who force presidents and lawmakers to bend to the public will.
The reason the philosopher can be compared with the poet is that both are concerned with wonder.
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Thomas Aquinas in Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, quoted by Josef Pieper, who adds:
And because of their common power to disturb and transcend, all these basic behavioral patterns of the human being have a natural connection among themselves: the philosophical act, the religious act, the artistic act, and the special relationship with the world that comes into play with the existential disturbance of love or death. Plato, as most of us know, thought about philosophy and love in similar terms… On the basis of their common orientation toward the “wonderful” (the mirandum —something not to be found in the world of work!) — on this basis, then, of the common transcending-power, the philosophical act is related to the “wonderful,” is in fact more closely related to it than to the exact, special sciences…
If it is the case that all sciences reduce to physics, it is not the case that the liberal arts —as opposed to the servile arts— must do so as well. To what, then, do they reduce? Surely they are not mystical exceptions to reductive scientific materialism! But what epistemological framework can account for or justify for the value of wonder, not as a consumed, expressed, posted emotional state but as a contemplative response to the irreducible? Indeed, can we even accept the possibility of irreducibility? No: all arts must cease to be liberal, must be made servile; this is the role of culture today: it serves ends.
The contemplation of wonder is a posture which is not inclined towards action; it is a stance of silent, self-effacing appreciation, not self-aggrandizing use. Thus, wonder is in a sense useless, but is the source of poetry and philosophy alike (and perhaps much more, perhaps even love); it can only grow within leisure, which we are laboring to eliminate.
(via mills)
“Scientists at CERN cannot claim with enough confidence they have found the Higgs particle, but neither can they rule it out. There’s a good chance they have have found something, and it very well may be real, but they cannot say with complete confidence that it’s the Higgs.” (vía Mass effect: Maybe Higgs, maybe not | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine)
Cool.
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I’m a Bore, Mostly - Deaf Havana