Fragmenta Philosophica

Again, I intermit ...

Friends, adversaries, visitors ...

I'm soon off to my second home, England, for the holidays. I'll try to get some kind of posting done while I'm over there. If not - see you sometime in January.

Happy Holidays.

Just Curious

We know the fate that was meted out to the guy on the right:

Any idea about what happened to the furry fellow on the left?

Servile Security

As the debate heats up about Social Security "privatization" - if only! - you can bet your whiskers that your friendly commentator here will have something to say. For now, I'll call on Zarathustra to prefigure my testimony:

"O my brothers, am I cruel? But I say: what is falling, we should still push it. Everything today falls and decays: who would check it? But I - I even want to push it ... And he whom you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall faster!" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On Old and New Tablets," 20).

Homonymity

I've often had a fantasy of composing a poem, lyric, or just some doggerel involving a bunch of homonyms - which, when heard aloud, would confuse and amuse the audient owing to the similar phonetics.

To that end, I had amassed a sizeable list of candidate terms, but alas it's disappeared. So I'm back to the proverbial square one. It is fun to put little homonymic phrases together, though.

"I won one"

"Behold the arc of the ark"

"Thy shins thou did'st bark on the bark lining the bark"

"Is a tocsin a kind of aural toxin?"

And one which is definitely borderline:

"The perineal is perennial"

Doggy Style (stylus caninus)

... in Japan, that is.

According to this article from the BBC:

'Veronique is just one of a string of establishments catering for a boom in Japanese dog owners.

'But its success seems as much due to a rejection of marriage as a new-found love for the canine.

'"There are lots of women who have dogs as their family or child," said Rie Shimozono, the shop's owner. "They carry the dog in a bag so that they are always spending time with it."'

(Apologies - I'll have a serious [not Sirius] post up soon)

Flew abjures atheism

I find this very interesting indeed - noted British philosopher Antony Flew (one of my "mentors from afar") has now come out for a kind of deism.

I've always thought that the argument from design is the strongest "motive of credibility" for theism. Flew seems to agree, finally viewing it as the tipping-point:

'There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.

'Yet biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved," Flew says in the new video, "Has Science Discovered God?"'

I wonder how the argument would be affected if one didn't view life as something that had to originate (that had to be explained in terms of prior causes), but was rather the fixture of an eternal cosmos?

I teach you ... the moustachio

Skullduggery

Attitudes to Nature

In light of my recent road trip through some of the spectacular National Parks on/around the "Grand Circle" of the Colorado Plateau - Zion, Bryce, Canyonlands, Arches, Grand Canyon - a friend wrote to rib me:

'Good thing those environmentalists saved our canyons, eh? (had to take the shot, man. Had to. Couldn't help it ...)'

I wrote back, in part,

'Ha! Actually - as I do in my "About Me" section - I'd draw a sharp distinction between conservationism and "environmentalism," the evil step-sibling.

Not to say that I agree with conservationists on every particular, by any stretch (or that they agree with each other much of the time), but to my mind their ethos is more honest and pure: they usually realize that they're pursuing an aesthetic end, rather than a employing the rhetoric of the rapture/armageddon, etc. E.g., sticking John Wesley Powell in the "environmentalist" camp is a Procrustean exercise - [but] no violence is done to his legacy (good and bad) by calling him a "conservationist," surely.'

I'm foolish, but not foolish enough to try to write off a whole mode of thought - "environmentalism" - with an alleged silver-bullet explanation. But I do think it's characteristic of a lot of environmentalist discourse to commit tacit category shifts, where the question is asked in the category of something like "systematic causality" and ends up being answered by morphing into an aesthetic discussion.  As I said to my pal, I think that conservationism is more honest about its concerns and motivations - it doesn't view "Nature" (which, if we buy in at all to a Darwinian view, is the ultimate domain of upheaval, cataclysmic change, etc.) in some simplistic steady-state fashion (sensitive mechanism).  Lovelock's Gaia, for example, is not so easily thrown off-kilter.

I mean, we want our wild lands to be preserved in their wildness because they're staggeringly beautiful, right?  That's enough reason for me.

Half-full or Half-empty?

These things change quickly, but as of now (10:06 am PST), the lead story on CNN is entitled, "Bush thanks Canadians for post-9/11 help."

On the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) site:
"Canada urged to sign on to Bush's crusade," which opens as follows: "U.S. President George W. Bush suggested Canada should take a more active role in his 'war on terrorism' in a speech he gave in Halifax on Wednesday."  (Within this  piece, there's a link to a "related" story, entitled "Bush in Halifax: 'Thank you for your kindness')