You've missed my point entirely. The OP is playing a game by defining arts (clown mask on) to be all of the entertainment industry (and citing that size in the headline) while supporting an argument for (clown mask off now) the NEA, which is an organization for the Fine Arts, not Katy Perry videos and iPhone apps.
The US has 338M people and they are claiming $763B PER YEAR for art. That's $2257 PER YEAR for every man, woman, and newborn infant in America. Total BS. Even if you include music and movies and TV, this is still way too high.
It's also dishonest, since this is a politically motivated attempt to counter cuts in NEA funding, yet very little of TV, movies, or music is sponsored by the NEA, which just goes to show how unimportant it is except to pseudo-elites who think that a urinal in a museum is art as long as the rabble don't approve of it.
Of particular concern to some was the use of Palantir as a tool that could aid investigators both in connecting suspected gang members to others in the community, and in identifying people deemed at high risk of either committing gun violence or being the victim of it.
??? Isn't that precisely what the tool is meant to do?
Thank you so much for reminding me of his writing. I fell in love with a Greek woman on Crete many years ago. It was one of the most painful times of my life when I realized that I could not stay there with her, or she with me. Cavafy's poem Ithaca has haunted me whenever I'm reminded of it:
Reading this, I couldn't help thinking of an observation P.J. O'Rourke made after visiting the DDR ("East Germany"): "It takes a special kind of economic system to turn a nation full of Germans into a third-world country".
> Alito concurring...That's very interesting language coming from conservative Chief Justice Roberts.
Your implication seems to be that conservatives are the ones pushing weak privacy laws. I'll grant that many conservatives have been weak on privacy protection, which is one of the reasons that I'm a libertarian. But the primary parties arguing here for nearly unlimited cell phone search were "The Obama administration and the state of California, both of which sought to justify cell phone searches...".
I, on the other hand, hope that the three men that Marquez's close friend Castro had executed for trying to get to the US on a boat will rest in peace. Not to mention all the dissidents who died in his prisons.
Marquez lived in Cuba and for decades witnessed the daily suffering and poverty of the Cuban people. The endless monitoring of Castro's secret police. The constant rationing of basic necessities (though not for Castro or Marquez, who lived lives of luxury).
He was a master of writing about the lives of the people of Latin America. But he walked the streets of Havana, saw what anyone could see, and never wrote about any of that. Perhaps he was too busy sharing a fine repast with Fidel and Raul to get around to it.
Heidegger ... was member of the Nazi party throughout the war, in good standing at the beginning and bad standing at the end, but he never rebelled or retracted publicly -- complicated person.
He was not just another member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, he was Rector of Heidelberg University while Hitler was gambolling about Europe. Is "complicated person" what we're calling them these days? I can think of other words...
There are two ideas of deconstruction I find useful.
The first is basically Nietzsche,...
If it's from Nietzsche, then it isn't from deconstruction at all, so why attribute it to them? If instead you are saying that these are all ideas of deconstruction, then you're being arbitrary, I think. Walter Kaufmann, N's greatest interpreter and translator, attacked academics who did what I think you're doing here. They would perform exegeses of N's texts and then, oh happy day, find that N. supported their ideas in a preliminary way, then cite him as an authority and attach him to their ideology.
So when the Libertarians have an "objective" system that shows that markets are best in an objective way... they are all just protecting their jobs.
Umm, what jobs? The fraction of libertarians who get remunerated for their political beliefs is damn small. Since libertarian views are outside the mainstream, in some environments there is actually a real danger of being punished for refusing to conform to the norms of whatever sub-group the libertarian finds himself in. It's much easier in life to run with the herd. You don't end up being lunch as often.
The deeper problem with your comment is that you seem to be implying that N. was a relativist. He wasn't. See John T. Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche: A Study of His Metaethics and Epistemology, for a solid refutation of this (common) claim.
Every metaphysics hides an implicit morality of the universe, and every morality hides an implicit and very down-to-earth will to power, and this will to power is a good thing and the drive of Life itself manifesting in human ideas. N's big example is Judeo-Christianity, and how by inventing a selfless morality a bunch of folks took over Western Civilization in very concrete ways.
I could "deconstruct" this all night long, but I'll keep this short.
1) N's ideas on the will to power were never fully worked out and settled, so it's difficult to say with certainty what he believed in many cases regarding W2P. That said, he seemed to believe that...
2) W2P isn't good or a bad thing, it just is, like gravity. Our moralities are reflections of some inner drives, all of which are manifestations of W2P. Those moralities that derive from an inner sense of fullness and overflowing N. judges to be good. Those moralities that derive from an inner sense of deficiency, self-loathing, and especially revenge, N. judges to be bad.
3) The early Jews and Christians were heavily persecuted by (variously) the Pharaohs and the Romans. The "slave moralities" they invented were quite different from the "master moralities" of the aristocratic Greeks. Slave moralities are motivated, at their core, by a drive for revenge against the people who brutalize them. Since they are slaves, they don't have power in this life to take their revenge, so they invent another life (the afterlife, the Thousand Year Reich, the Age of New Socialist Man, the Dar al Islam) in which they will enjoy pure happiness and 76 virgins and the "evil ones" (Pharaohs, Romans, Jews, Capitalist Exploiters, Infidels, the One Percent) will suffer (the Fires of Hell, Zyklon B, beheadings, property nationalization, starvation by Maoists (my wife had fun with this one), execution by the Khmer Rouge, etc.)
It's fascinating to watch all of this play out in America today, with Obama explicitly calling last October for his supporters (the core of which are the descendants of slaves who were brutalized by their owners) to "vote for revenge", the coming glorious age of Hope and Change, the coming destruction of the evil One Percenters (as soon as Obama and his fellow One Percenters finish their golf games on Martha's Vineyard), etc. [I suppose we should cheer up. I mean it's not like he's running a massive surveillance state and murdering American citizens and foreign innocents via drone strikes without judicial review while his propaganda media manufactures consent for his policies.]
>> Unfortunately, in the day of Fox News, being an informed populace is even becoming difficult.
Equality doesn't just mean that everybody has the same wealth, regardless of how hard they work. This is superficial. It means everyone has to think the same way. That's the only way we'll ever get true equality, and we won't get that until everyone's getting the same information. Conformity, equality, obedience: these must be our core values. Fox News must be stopped.
Current US (federal) debt is $16.1 trillion, the burden of which is largely hidden by the fact that interest rates are currently extremely low.
Add to the above numbers an inflation tax of about 1.5 - 2.5%.
Your analysis starts by excluding any taxes you find inconvenient (such as, apparently, social security, inflation, tariffs, ad-valorem taxes, and especially state and local taxes -- which you somehow don't regard as governments) to get the numbers you want. If a business did accounting the way you just did, they'd rightfully land in jail.
But if you're just going to point to the national budget, echo popular political talk-show points about "$16 TRILLION IN DEBT OUR GRANDKIDS WILL HAVE TO PAY"...
You fail to mention who's going to pay it then? It must wonderful to be an Entitled One and write checks that someone else has to cash.
...and "WE'RE ON THE ROAD TO GREECE" then I'd argue you're completely missing the forest for the trees.
Unfortunately, you didn't argue it, you merely asserted it without any evidence and worse, started by providing "evidence" that was misleading at best.
As for Greece, I actually lived there 15 years ago. Even then the government was obviously bloated beyond all recognition, with government "jobs" that required little or no work being handed out as political favors. I left in part because I knew that the country would deteriorate eventually, with a rapidly aging population and three -- count 'em -- viable communist parties and one socialist party (PASOK) that was at that time the largest party in the country. Current newspaper reports and email accounts from a friend there sound pretty ominous.
Years ago a prominent foreign politician -- I'm sorry I can't remember who -- was asked how his country went bankrupt. He replied "Two ways. Slowly at first, then quickly."
Ummm, what irony? 1) The article doesn't say that Thomas used the word. 2) The word is hardly a "ten-dollar" word, since many foreign imports are standard usage ("gung-ho" is Cantonese). 3) Finally, I would expect that he would indeed use the word in his writings, since there really isn't a good substitute ("transistion" is rather too vague).
>> It feels as if western state-assisted assassinations of civilians are becoming a more frequently documented reality
And when were they documented the first time? It's much more plausible to believe that you are paid by the Chinese government to spread that rumor than to believe what you've written.
>> Sounds like a classic case of corporate murder.
No, it sounds like a case of Chinese government murder, something they have plenty of experience with. They must have known that there was a good chance that he would talk to the US government. The more interesting aspect is that the IME, a agency of the Singaporean government, would appear to be in on at least the suppression of the story.
So, Facebook invites Obama to their HQ to give a "townhall", then many of their execs contribute heavily to his campaign, and then Solyndra, er, Facebook gets a massive tax break. This is one of the many reasons why I, too, have made Obama a secular substitute for Jesus and anti-racism an easy-to-satisfy substitute for a more rigorous personal morality.
In other news, Facebook co-founder Chris Zell has purchased The New Republic magazine and turned it into magazine so pro-Obama that even its former owner, Martin Peretz (himself an Obama supporter) has attacked it.
I hardly think you will find MSNBC by poking... NYT reporters or Christian Science Monitor reporters (not to mention al-Jazeera, BBC, RT, etc.)
I assume this is a joke, particularly the NYT. And I'm not seeing ABC, CBS, NBC (owned by GE, which has gotten massive "green energy" subsidies from Obama), PBS, the former Current TV, not to mention almost every newspaper in the US, anywhere in your list. Kinda lopsided, huh?
As for the foreign media organs, the BBC, al-Jazeera, and RT are all famously anti-American. Obama still manages to get much better press that any Republican. They hate America and they like Obama. Odd.