Category Archives: philosophy

all this useless beauty

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Carousel to nowhere 

 

Is it better to have been loved and lost, than never to have been loved at all? These sites, galleries of photographs of an abandoned Japanese amusement resort (click on the pictures for more) raise some intriguing questions about the nature of beauty and loss.

roller coaster in fog

If we’re being honest it seems pretty clear that, had we seen this place when it was going strong, we would probably (as the jaded grownups we have become) consider this to be a pretty tacky amusement park, which is a bit like calling something a pretty water-resistant duck. Amusement parks are amusing, but they are rarely sophisticated or ironic. And they are rarely beautiful.

But now look.

roller coaster

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quiz: which of the Ancient Greek Muses are you?

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Polyhymnia 

And so we continue on Intellectual Day, here at the ol’ raincoaster blog. This quiz reminds me of the time one of the guys at the station on Barney Miller was giving a costume party and Wojo wanted to go. “Great,” said Dietrich. “It’s Come As Your Favorite 4th-Century BC Philosopher.” Of course, I would have to be ahead of my time…by about two centuries.

You scored as Polyhymnia. You are Polyhymnia, the muse of sacred poetry. Religion is the biggest part of your life, and you’re not afraid to let everyone else know. You are kind of shy and not great at letting people know who you really are.

Polyhymnia
88%
Thalia
81%
Erato
69%
Calliope
69%
Terpischore
69%
Clio
63%
Melpomene
63%
Euterpe
63%
Urania
50%

Thalia...but she's weirder looking than Polyhymnia, so I had to use her instead

Which of the Greek Muses are you?
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five rules for intellectuals

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also, don't pee on the couch. That's another good rule for intellectuals 

Not that we pay any attention to rules in the first place, but we’ve got to start with some kind of thesis statement before we can argue about it, right?

So here are five pieces of advice for intellectuals from steve fuller‘s book the intellectual, and yes, the lowercase is his, or at least his publisher’s. All true intellectuals respect one another’s case preferences.

  1. First, learn to see things from multiple points of view without losing your ability to evaluate them. Always imagine that at some point you will need to make a decision about what to believe of these different perspectives.
  2. Second, be willing and able to convey any thought in any medium. There would be little point in being an intellectual if you did not believe that ideas, in some sense, always transcend their mode of communication.
  3. Third, never regard a point of view as completely false or beneath contempt. There is plenty of truth and error to go around, and you can never really be sure which is which.
  4. Fourth, always see your opinion as counterbalancing, rather than reinforcing, someone else’s opinion.
  5. Fifth, in public debate fight for the truth tenaciously but concede error graciously.

Now, these seem like pretty sensible guidelines overall (although I hope we won’t see dancing about architecture any time soon) but he loses me and all other absolutists on #3, not that I expect it would bother him. What, you have to wonder, is the point of discussing ideas or attempting to determine truth if one ultimately doesn’t believe it is knowable? While it’s surely a good idea to develop the ability to argue effectively with anyone, no matter how moronic (an ability which, you may have noticed, escapes me utterly) it should never be believed that there is no reason to believe one idea rather than another; the last man who went that far was Beckett, and while he may indeed have been right, I fervently hope not. And, of course, if you are a #3-ist, you cannot disagree with me without rendering your own opposition absurd.

But then, we already know that if you disagree with me you are, by definition, absurd. I await your comments…

quiz: what kind of intellectual are you?

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Not a whole lot of options here, but then, if you know anything about intellectuals, you know they really only do come in three flavours, existentialist/theist schism notwithstanding.

yup, that's me. Intellectual Barbie!

You scored as Aspiring Intellectual. You truly believe that there is more to our existence than to work and die. Kudos to you, maybe one day you will have the understanding you truly deserve.

Aspiring Intellectual
80%
Social Intellectual
50%
Poser Intellectual
15%

What type of intellectual are you?
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Captain KJ on freedom of the press, Iraq, and the value of human life

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Here’s one of my patented I-don’t-agree-with-everything-in-this-post-but-it’s-too-damn-good-to-ignore posts. Captain KJ is an American serving in Iraq, and this is her post about the way the American MSM reports on American deaths, doesn’t report on Iraqi deaths, and gives a bad impression of America to Iraqis in multiple ways.

But where she says that exercising their freedom of speech is one of those ways, that is where she and I diverge. This is an excerpt, of course, but I encourage you to read the whole post, because she makes several complex points.

…What does it say to the Iraqis that we yell and scream (or our visible press does) about 20 American deaths when, in this ongoing conflict, a “light casualty day” for civilians in Baghdad is a day when there are less than 50 deaths? What are we saying about our relative valuing of American and Iraqi lives? Perhaps we should consider the messages that we’re carrying around the world when we have hysterics in the press the way we do. Granted, no nation or people can escape a certain amount of ethnocentrism, but it looks really bad to the people here when we obsess continually about American lives lost (which are, after all, lives lost who had volunteered to put themselves in the path of danger), and remain dismissively mute about the Iraqi lives lost, except as an underscore to continually harping about American deaths…

and my comment:

A good post. Respect for American lives does not require the negation of the personhood of any other nationalities, and I haven’t seen it put as well as it is here. But do you think that anyone Stateside gives a moment’s thought to how the US appears to Iraqis? I don’t: your post is the single most humanistic thing I’ve read about the Iraqis since…yes, since the last time I read Al Jazeera.

I have to strongly disagree, however, that parroting the party line strengthens the country. The Iraqis already know the US is divided: the US really is divided. Opposition and debate are inherent in the democratic process and certainly the Founding Fathers of the United States knew and valued this. It’s messy. It’s complicated. But it is the mark of an advanced nation that it tolerates ambiguity and difference, and venerates freedom of speech. There is no point in your being there, trying to bring democracy to Iraq, if they don’t know that this is how it works; they already know how totalitarianism and government censorship work. They know it all too well.