For those who noticed my two recent open questions, I note that Hans Reiser was convicted today of murder in the first-degree, largely, as journalists have already noted, because of his own unwittingly self-incriminating testimony.
Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.1
Odd though it may seem, this passage for me has always embodied one of the core parts of love: the ever-presence of another, whose absence is therefore so acutely felt.
Given that the laws of my nation make me hesitant to participate in most prediction markets, I have two questions on which I would like to see odds:
I have my own estimates, but I’d like to see those of others.
There are two primary approaches to changes in our lives. In the first, change is a source of fear: they expect little from their new world and fear the loss of their old world. They are most loyal to their loved ones before they embark on change; soon thereafter they have little loyalty left. In the second group, change is a source of excitement: they expect much from novelty and are invariably disappointed that there is less change than they had hoped for. They are least loyal to their loved ones before a change, wondering whether there may not be reasons for betrayal provided by their new environment, but soon after having discovered their new world, find that it is no different from their old world and prefer what they had before simply because its familiarity makes it superior to an unknown, but equal, opportunity.
Upon seeing her, the only thing I could think to say was that she was dressed as if she were named Goneril.
Whoever searches for an act moral in a Kantian sense will search as long and as futilely as the alchemists once searched for the philosopher’s stone.
Mark Jason Dominus once said that he originally thought that the author Adolfo Bioy Casares, whose initials were ABC, must have been made up by Jorge Luis Borges. Today I discovered a peculiarity of names that entertains me far more: an 1973 article by an economist named Meade, which discusses the positive externalities associated with bees.
From the standpoint of any sane morality, there can be no victimless crimes: a crime, by definition, must have a victim. All outrage against an action without a victim is morally vacuous.
This incredible passage from an interview with Hitler says nearly everything worth saying about the real driving forces in passionate political movements:
When I now broached the question of what the source of his so strongly felt hatred for the Jews was, and why he wanted to destroy this so undeniably intelligent race — a race to which the Germans and all other Aryans, if not the entire world, owed an incalculable debt in virtually all fields of art and knowledge, research and economics — Hitler suddenly calmed down and gave this unexpectedly sober and almost dispassionate explanation:
It is manifestly clear and has been proven in practice and by the facts of all revolutions that a struggle for ideals, for improvements of any kind whatsoever, absolutely must be supplemented with a struggle against some social class or caste.
My object is to create first-rate revolutionary upheavals, regardless of what methods and means I have to use in the process. Earlier revolutions were directed either against the peasants, or the nobility and the clergy, or against dynasties and their network of vassals, but in no case has revolution succeeded without the presence of a lightning rod that could conduct and channel the odium of the general masses.
With this very thing in mind I scanned the revolutionary events of history and put the question to myself against which racial element in Germany can I unleash my propaganda of hate with the greatest prospects of success? I had to find the right kind of victim, and especially one against whom the struggle would make sense, materially speaking. I can assure you that I examined every possible and thinkable solution to this problem, and, weighing every imaginable factor, I came to the conclusion that a campaign against the Jews would be as popular as it would be successful.1