Tag: culture
-
four sins
There are four sins against God, each equal in consequence and potency, and into which all sin falls.
-
freedom, control, and command
Ok, so I’ve been playing with this idea of tension between control and command as an paradigm of societies and it occurs to me, while reading Cass Sunstein’s republic.com that there is more depth to that than I recognized initially. Sunstein’s argument in the opening chapters is that the liberty to not encounter ideas, people,…
-
Senators and their sports
In the latest round of “Doesn’t he have something more important to work on?” a Senator is making a professional sport more important than the war in Iraq, the deficit, the Katrina debacle, the un-ending war on terror, the CIA leak, the looming crisis surrounding pension defaults, the continuing growth in the number of middle-class…
-
What we mean when we say what we say
We say a lot of things in the rhetorical battles that seem to occupy the majority of a lot of people’s time in this country these days. If you listen too long, you might become convinced that there isn’t anything that we don’t disagree on. But if you listen closely, you might find some of…
-
Blue Laws
I’m not sure what is more absurd – that Massachusetts has laws that prohibit stores from opening on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s or that the Massachusetts Attorney General is enforcing them. The AP story: Mass. investigates defiance of Blue Laws1 The absurdity of these laws, aside from their age (c. 1600s), is further emphasized…
-
What are you?
There is a particular practice at the event of meeting another person that, once I became aware of it, and more importantly, found I had not a pleasing or simple reply, seems to me to be quite vulgar and petty. I’m talking of course of the question, “What do you do?” I suppose that this…
-
ought, may, & can
When speaking of the difference between the meta-artifices of State, Market, and Church, it is proper to say something like the following: in the State the individual is concerned with what one ought; in the Church, with what one may; and in the Market, with what one can. One ought, one may, one can. The…
-
oh what a wicked web we weave
So the big news of the day is that a Federal Judge of the 9th Circuit – the one in San Francisco – struck down the addition by Congress in the 1950s of the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. This will send fundamentalists into a tizzy and, since it will have to,…
-
on hubris
Hubris is a word that has gotten a lot of use in the last two weeks and whenever that happens, its worth taking a look at the meanings of the word. Hubris is fun because it is a purely Greek word that hasn’t been morphologically changed since the days of Sophocles (4th Century B. C.).…
-
Booklist for the Network Revolution
I’ve been asked by a number of people for a list of books that would cover the “new ideas” that are driving the current transitional confluence of forces in those civilizations reaching the end of the Industrial Age. I have chosen to not list books in the domains of Technology, Economics, Business, and Politics because…