Fragmenta Philosophica

On a break

I'm off to the U.K. - will return the week of October 4.

If anyone in the Southwest of England - Bristol area especially - would like to get together for a drink and a chat, I'd be glad to meet up (time permitting). Contact me via the "Email me" link at right.

Thanks, as always, for stopping by.

Ordeal

Thanks to Chris at the good ship Explananda, I spent a decent portion of last evening riveted by a harrowing account of journalist Scott Taylor's abduction by members of Ansar Al Islam, Five Days in Hell.

I don't admire Taylor's political views, but I do admire his courage, and his pithy writing - and he writes well enough that his own political commitments don't color or vitiate the sheer drama of the story. It's a good read for its own sake, and provides a very interesting window into the capricious moral psychology of Islamists: Middle Eastern etiquette alongside sadism and brutality, one morphing in manic fashion into the other, then back again. His constant 11th-hour reprieves from "execution" remind one of Dostoyevsky.

Read it.

Surreal

I've never understood the sense of the alleged Chinese "curse" - "may you live in interesting times." Regardless, these times are not without interest, are arguably cursed, and are just plain weird besides.

While making dinner tonight, I had the television muted. I looked up at one point to see that "Larry King Live" had come on CNN. The caption onscreen read: "Bob Woodward - on the CBS News Scandal, Bush & Kerry, and Americans Beheaded in Iraq."

Homo Homini Monstrum, Again

For the likes of Zarqawi, Hitchens' quip could hardly be better:

"Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting ... against the scum of the earth."

Johnny Come Lately

Well, I finally bit the bullet and saw Fahrenheit 911. I'm heading to the UK next weekend, and I know that many friends there have seen it and will want to discuss - i.e., debate - it, so I took myself off to a matinée showing earlier today.

I'm not going to attempt an assessment or critique. I've come so late to the film that many others have probably made exactly the same points that I would make. Nonetheless I'll mention two things that struck me.

The film is mis-titled; it should be called "George W. Bush" or somesuch (or even have the words "Michael Moore" in the title - his own "The World According to Garp").

Secondly, I await, with interest, Moore's planned sequel, focusing on Tony Blair (or was Moore actually rather noncommital about a Blair film? Read and judge for yourself). It will be a real narrative and cinematic feat of prestidigitation to present a plausible confluence of motives and interests between Blair and the gangsters depicted in Fahrenheit.

There is no signpost in ...

It's one thing to acknowledge that Iraq is in a parlous state at the moment.

It's another to treat any of the observable magnitudes as vectors - as if we now know what the ultimate outcome will likely be. In this connection, Victor Davis Hanson provides some interesting historical sweep:

"It is always difficult for those involved to determine the pulse of any ongoing war. The last 90 days in the Pacific theater were among the most costly of World War II, as we incurred 50,000 casualties on Okinawa just weeks before the Japanese collapse. December 1944 and January 1945 were the worst months for the American army in Europe, bled white repelling Hitler's last gasp in the Battle of the Bulge. Contemporaries shuddered, after observing those killing fields, that the war would go on for years more. The summer of 1864 convinced many that Grant and Lincoln were losers, and that McClellan alone could end the conflict by what would amount to a negotiated surrender of Northern war aims."

I have my hopes, of course, but I haven't a clue as to how things will turn out with/for Iraq - and I'm skeptical of those who offer more than provisional judgments.

Of Faith and Morals

I posed this question several months back on someone else's blog, but I'll ask it again, if only to amuse myself.

Was Kofi's pronunciamento made ex cathedra?

Gardener and Garden

Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitutde, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and grey. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!

Nietzsche, Daybreak, IV:382.

Get a life

This is bizarre on multiple levels ... but, even as someone who generally believes that we have far too many laws and regulations on the books, nothing I can think to say about this - "nomologically" - satisfies me.

A "victimless crime"? A crime with a victim in an attenuated sense? A practice so repellant that it's almost an act of mercy for the state to protect the perpetrator from himself?

Thanks

One of the themes that I beat to death around here is the importance of testing, and broadening, one's own views by reading the intelligent opposition.

I'm well aware that many of the people who visit here regularly - and most definitely those who comment here often - believe that I'm markedly in the wrong about all sorts of things.

Please know that I'm grateful for your continued tolerance and/or indulgence - and especially the thoughtful challenges.