larvatus prodeo

To claim an interest, I have been in social media for over 21 years, and signed up on Facebook long before it opened beyond Harvard students and alumni. From this perespective, I am reminded of an anecdote told by Jerry Weintraub:

Samuel and Rose Weintraub came west to visit their older son, the one who would not go into the gem trade, to see what kind of life he had made for himself. “Now I have a big mansion in Beverly Hills, a Rolls, a chauffeur, fresh flowers, butlers, swimming pools—everything,” Jerry told me. “My mom and dad arrive, and I pick them up with my driver, and my mom is beaming. We get to my house and we’re serving caviar, Havana cigars for my father, and champagne—the whole deal. After a couple of days of this, my dad says, ‘I want to talk to you. Let’s take a walk.’ We get outside and he says, ‘I want to ask you a question and I want you to tell me the truth and I don’t want any bullshit from you. Are you in the Mafia? How did you get all this? You were never that smart.’”
    I’m creative. I did it.
    Where’s your inventory? How can you have this much money and not have an inventory? It doesn’t make sense to me.
    “The next day I made arrangements. My mother’s favorite was Cary Grant. And horses. We drove to Hollywood Park [racetrack] and Cary Grant was waiting for us. He opened the door and looked at my mother and said, ‘Rose, I’m your date for lunch.’
    “They had lunch and he made her bets for her and sat with her. I don’t think my father liked it so much. That evening I made a dinner party with all the stars. And Cary came. I remember going to the bar, and my mom was having a glass of champagne. And Sinatra came up and said, ‘Hey, Rose, I heard you had a great date for lunch today.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, but I like my Sammy better.’”

— Rich Cohen, “Jerry Weintraub Presents!”, Vanity Fair, March 2008

In the instant conversation, I am struck by the preponderance of cutting edge XXIst century cinematographers channeling an itinerant Jewish jeweler from a century ago. Lighten up. Everyone serves as inventory to all sorts of entities, from governments to maggots. No one leaves this world uneaten. My favorite strategy is enjoying the set and its setting whilst pacing my consumption, as an agent and patient alike.

Message-ID: <6010@husc6.harvard.edu>
Date: 15 Mar 91 22:59:27 GMT
I believe in the objective existence of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.^[1] […] I believe that in the realm of politics, there is no place for moral judgements. Morality neither can (in practice), nor should (morally) be legislated. The best that a government can hope for is to guide its laws in accordance with some standard of common Good.
    A corollary of the above: homosexuals, drug users, gun owners, in short everyone who deviates from that, which by any statistical standard may be accepted as the Norm, have absolutely the same rights as everyone else, provided that they, as individuals, do not injure or coerce anybody else. “Setting a bad example” does not count as coersion.
    This is the old “consenting adults cannot do anything legally wrong to each other” thesis. Note that children are automatically excluded, until they reach legal majority.^[2]
    Concerning the main issue: death is the price we, as a species, pay for the privilege of having sex. While, as Sade among many others very clearly understood, the degree of erotic excitement increases with any increase in the distance between recreation and procreation, some measure of restraint must be imposed on this distance out of moral considerations. Where to draw the line is subject to many questions. Personally, I believe that many organized religions go to far in their proscription of “spilling the seed on the ground”, birth control, and so on. On the other hand, it is equally clear to me that, until and unless homosexual reproduction has been invented, homosexual intercourse will remain morally wrong. ( tl:dr )

A problem for libertarians:

Following Aristotle and Aquinas, it is customary to distinguish commutative justice, which deals with the relations that arise between individuals, between individuals and groups, and between groups that comprise any given community, from distributive justice, which deals with the overarching relation of that community as a whole to all of its constituent individuals and groups. ( Read more... )

Some inadvertent long range prognostications:

MZ:
Suppose that Lefty the hedge fund manager is a compulsive gambler who has been rescued from the brink of ruin by a bunch of wealthy arsehole buddies in the investment banking industry, owing to their government connections. Suppose further that Lefty, bloodied but unbowed, and certainly none the wiser, is continuing to make leveraged bets to the tune of 80% of your government’s budget. Suppose finally that there are some 100,000,000 Righties encumbered with the usual variable rate credit obligations. What does Lefty owe to the Righties at the point of his financial collapse precipitating a global credit crunch?

PMJ:
I can’t see that Lefty owes the Righties anything. If a credit crunch is a relative unwillingness (compared to the status quo ante) of credit vendors to extend credit at the previous rates, then to consider the occurrence of this a compensatable cost is tantamount to saying that the Righties somehow had a right to the continuance of the credit vendors’ willingness to offer credit at the previous rates, which notion seems to me to be absurd on its face.
    It is a commonplace that bad consequences can result from people acting entirely within their rights. Often, A’s coming to terms with B forecloses C’s dearly cherished hope. This is called “bad fortune“.

MZ:
But if Lefty trades in legal tender, i.e. goods backed by fictitious mortgages upon public properties, his trades perforce manipulate very real mortgages that bind millions of Righties. Such manipulation can warrant commutative compensation even before you decide how you feel about property taxes.
    Consider another example: Soros shorting the pound sterling and the ringgit to enrich himself and precipitate economic turmoil in Great Britain and Malaysia.
    “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.”

( Read more... )

Is semiotics bullshit?
Is gay marriage an oxymoron?

Looking back over fifteen years of Usenetting, I gratefully recall one man selflessly expending his time and effort on making it a better place. Torkel’s learned and benevolent presence single-handedly made up for a myriad ephemeral and persistent sophistical frauds striving to overwhelm our forum with self-serving nonsense. I am proud to have benefitted from his learning and character.
    Torkel Franzén earned his PhD in philosophy in 1987 for work on provability and truth, available online and in hard copy in the imprint of Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, deposited at university libraries worldwide. He was a world-class expert on incompleteness and inexhaustibility and an able and tireless expositor of the use and abuse of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. Torkel will be remembered and celebrated for his incisive contributions to logic and his magnanimous bestowals of honesty and wisdom in public discourse. My condolences for this untimely loss go out to his friends and family.

Another Usenet discussion.

    alt.comp.acad-freedom.talk
    alt.discrimination
    alt.flame
    alt.folklore.urban
    alt.politics.homosexuality
    alt.postmodern
    alt.peeves
    alt.politics.socialism.trotsky
    alt.sex
    alt.sex.bondage
    alt.sex.services
    alt.sex.wizards
    alt.stupidity
    alt.tasteless
    alt.usage.english
    alt.usenet.kooks
    comp.ai
    comp.ai.philosophy
    comp.unix.advocacy
    gnu.misc.discuss
    humanities.classics
    misc.legal
    news.admin.misc
    news.admin.policy
    rec.arts.books
    rec.arts.movies
    rec.arts.poems
    rec.autos.driving
    rec.guns
    rec.knives
    rec.motorcycles
    rec.pets.dogs.rescue
    sci.classics
    sci.cognitive
    sci.lang
    sci.logic
    sci.math
    sci.philosophy.meta
    sci.psychology.misc
    sci.skeptic
    soc.culture.jewish
    soc.culture.soviet
    soc.culture.usa
    talk.philosophy.misc
    talk.politics.guns
    talk.politics.mideast

    Few doctrines are announced and articulated as clearly in Plato’s writings, as the thesis that the cosmos hands down certain moral commandments, that it is imbued with an absolute moral authority. Thus Socrates rebuts amoral hedonism advocated by Callicles:

And wise men tell us, Callicles, that heaven and earth and gods and men are held together by communion and friendship, by orderliness, temperance, and justice; and that is the reason, my friend, why they call the whole of this world by the name of order (κόσμος), not of disorder (ἀκοσμία) or dissoluteness (ἀκολασία). Now you, as it seems to me, do not give proper attention to this, for all your cleverness, but have failed to observe the great power of geometrical equality amongst both gods and men: you hold that self-advantage is what one ought to practice, because you neglect geometry (γεωμετρίας γὰρ ἀμελεῖς).
— Gorgias, 508a-b translated by W.R.M. Lamb

Therein lies its obstacle to casual understanding. As Plato wrote above his door, let no one devoid of geometry enter here, ἀγεωμέτρητος μηδεὶς εἰσίτω. (Quoted in Elias’ coommentary on Aristotle’s Categories.)( Read more... )

    Usenet can still be fun.