https://wapo.st/3Sct3EL Cautionary tales abound about the danger of persnickety obsessions with seeing the one thing wrong with an other wise splendid entity. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale The Birth-Mark presented to the Sophomore English Honors class at St. Peter’s Prep in 1966 by Mr. John Casey told of the peril of obsession with trying to remove the […]
Tag: politics
Our Problems With Authority III: The Helluva Lot of Hail Marys Project
The final installment in our trilogy about Our Problems With Authority takes on the hard part: what do we do about them? No easy answers, but lots of references read and considered during this exercise that should be important to all of us. We need both freedom and authority, we need to regain a commonality among citizens
TESTING ASSUMPTIONS: Our Problems With Authority Part II
Authority itself is inherently an act of imagination Richard Sennett By definition, an assumption is a belief or concept taken for granted. Testing assumptions generally only happens when circumstances contradict that which we have presupposed as rules and realities of life. Or we want to make sure that our current plans under those assumptions won’t […]
TESTING ASSUMPTIONS: Our Problems With Authority
Part I of III Part IA: AUTHORITY — Missing Person or Murder Case? The end of the world as we know it bleeds endlessly through my screens and newspapers. The ‘times’ in end times is plural, so fixing one particular day as the finale is tricky and there might yet be a rescue, but some cliffhangers do result in the heroes […]
Testing Assumptions: Meritocracy
My dear friend Zeineb Mahzouz sent me an article that drills into a subject that surfaces again and again in my stew of concerns: meritocracy.
TESTING ASSUMPTIONS: NOT BORN YESTERDAY BY HUGO MERCIER
The subtitle of this book is The Science Of Who We Trust And What We Believe, and its purpose is to disabuse us of ideas about how we decide, who we can have faith in, and what we should accept as real. Mercier, research director at the CNRS, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, is of the […]
Attitudes And Beatitudes Part III: Cornel West & Robert George Give Me The Perfect Ending For This Trilogy
Yes, that Cornell West and that Robert George. That leftist, rapping, divinity school teaching preacher and that deeply conservative, Latin mass going, James Madison worshipping establishment professor. Those two guys. But first, let me remind you of my argument from Part I and Part II. It drove me nuts that so many people write posts, […]
We’re All Outfluencers: Attitudes & Beatitudes II
Whether what we write, broadcast, or otherwise put out there changes the attitude and subsequent actions of someone, anyone, depends more upon them than us. Doesn’t the best writing come out of a kind of frustration? The angsty sense that people have it wrong (whatever ‘it’ might be at the moment) or that something is […]
What’s a Metaphor? The Case of the Symbolic Capitalist
My Aunt Bess died last week; my father’s youngest sibling, the last of that generation. She was 96 and had a full, exciting, and satisfying life. Seeing her discomfort in the hospital (they remain horrible places in which to lie) affirmed that her death brought relief to her and to the family especially my kind […]
Old Friends
Old friends can be countries as well as people, and we do well to realize the value of such relationships.