Mot Just du Jour: Guest Blogger Edition

"Isn't wikia the upcoming merger between Nintendo's Wii division and Kia motors?"

My somewhat bizarre friend James

Hot damn!

Check out Helium today.

I'm not sure how often they update it, so, check it out here as well:

AmericaPhobia

Damn straight.

From: Dean's World

Hat tip: Instapundit

Americaphobia: Final Thoughts

Dean

I have not yet had a chance to read Ali's latest, or really anything else on the Dean's World front page today. I've been too busy. But I've had all day to think about this and I'm going to lay out something I've been thinking for a long time:

It's very hard for me to look at American Muslims, or Muslims in general, or anyone who considers themselves "liberal" or "progressive" or "humanist," who claim to stand for freedom and human rights and then attack everything America has done and tried to do in Iraq over the last four years.

The fact is that the naysayers claimed we weren't really striving for liberation. We were. They claimed we'd install a new puppet dictator. We did not. They claimed that we wouldn't really try to set up a democracy. We did. They claimed there would be no legitimate elections. The Iraqis had three national elections in a row, all certified as legitimate by international observers, not even counting the local elections that were held before that.

They claimed we'd do everything possible to get out of the country "before the next elections"--they claimed that before the 2004 elections and again before the 2006 elections. It didn't happen. Now these same people in many cases are cheering for a Congress that's trying to force us out of Iraq even though the war supporters consistently say "no, that would be morally and strategically wrong."

Time after time the naysayers have proven themselves both morally and intellectually incoherent, and yet they never have the introspection to acknowledge this.

Furthermore, anyone calling himself a "liberal" or a "humanist"--Muslim or not--is in my view faced with a stark choice:

You either sit around pretending that a vicious, murderous, fascist "insurgency" that routinely cuts people's heads off and shoots children in the face is the "legitimate voice of the Iraqi people," or you recognize that there is in Iraq a government elected by the Iraqi people working under a Constitution written entirely by Iraqis that recognizes human rights better than any in the Arab world.

No matter how many reservations you have about how it was done or how imperfectly that elected government implements the ideals expressed in that ratified Constitution.

If you take the former position you have no business calling yourself a liberal or a progressive or a humanist. If you take the latter position, then maybe you have to swallow the bitter pill that someone named George Bush, whom you don't like and maybe think is incompetent, was the instigator of something that damn well needs to be supported.

But you can't have it both ways. Indeed, by declaring the whole thing illegitimate, all you're doing is siding with the Islamophobes of the world who claim the Muslims and the Arabs are far too savage, backward, and primitive to respect things like democracy and human rights. Indeed, you're implicitly siding the the Jihadwatch crowd.

It's high time someone told you people this, whether you're Muslims or not.

The progressive, humanist position is not, and never has been, the "anti-war" position.

Tristan und Isolde

For those of you who may be uneducated, I'm talking about this, not this.

The Prelude is justly famous for throwing out the harmonic rulebook used by musicians for three hundred years - somewhere there is a quote referring to it as the bellwether of the decline of Western Civilization. (A free dinner to the person who finds me that quote, btw)

But it really is the Liebestod that... well...

Wow.

I hadn't listened to it in quite some time. I was at work, had brought the CD with me.

It is...

Let's just say that, about another piece of music, a conductor I knew, on an occasion at which I was not present, stated that religious ecstasy was close kin to sexual ecstasy... and that the climax of the Musikdrama is - intentionally, deliberately, and in the context of the story, literally - ecstatic.

An unusually patriotic film review

As an American, I take great pride in the actions of King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.

What? As an American? Greek-American, you mean? As someone of Greek descent, surely.

Of course I am someone of Greek descent. I’m an American.

Well, not all Americans are of Greek descent, unless, of course, you had immigrant ancestors, right?

Ah. You mean blood descent.

Yes! So you had ancestors from Greece, then.

Well, not that I know of. Possibly, but it would have to have been way back.

I’m confused; what are you talking about??

I’m an American; America herself is a child of Greece.

America is a child of England, if anyone.

Well yes; England, too, is a child of Greece.

Huh?

All of Europe, really.

I had an interesting experience watching 300. My history-student roommate filled me on some of the details that were botched (well, elided really) in the movie. For the most part I was rather pleased with Frank Miller’s story. I felt just a little annoyed by the Queen’s speech in front of the council, how much she repeated the theme of liberty, freedom; but I had no problem with the theme as it threaded throughout the entire movie.

Sure, it’s romantic historical revisionism; sure, Sparta was one of the cruelest societies to ever develop; but it was the blood of Sparta that kept Greece alive.

Greece. The birthplace of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; of natural philosophy; of natural science; of the citizen and democracy; the study of ethics and politics. Miller’s Leonidas has it right, and it was the Spartans who protected the birthplace of Liberty.

Greece, grandmother to Europe, ancestress of Western civilization.

It was an excellent movie. It was a martial movie, extolling all of the virtues of martial prowess: awareness, strength, ferocity, temperance, reason. But above all, the single most important virtue of all: indomitability.

I’ve been reading a science fiction book lately (yeah, where’s the news in that) which is set on a libertarian planet: minimum government, no restrictions on weapons, sexual activity (including prostitution), business activity, etc. It’s a very polite and safe society. One character in the book, when describing how a native friend of his needs to coddle another character, who is a recent migrant from Earth, describes it as “The first truly free human society in history.” In the context of the quote, that other character has just made a mistake as a result of which she has ended up hurting herself: she is not ready to be completely free, because, not having grown up that way, she is not yet ready to assume absolute, complete responsibility.

Responsibility: the other side of the coin from freedom; united by the concept of will. What comes back to me, for which I am responsible, is what I have willed; what I have willed is what I was free to do. I do not know that Spartans died for the philosophical ideals of Athens, and I do not know how democratic their society was. But I suspect that the taste of the freedom, and responsibility, that democracy brings did motivate Greeks; it had allowed their society to flourish as none other in the world had, and they had no desire to give that up.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and of slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” Patrick Henry’s words echo down through America’s paltry two centuries of history; Miller has Sparta’s Leonidas proclaiming such a sentiment twenty-two centuries early.

But the Greeks surely felt it. Impressive as the warriors of Sparta no doubt were, they could count, and they could reason; they had to know how impressive the armies of Persia were. And certainly, a mere 300 could barely have expected to live long in the onslaught brought on by its swarms.

The Persians must have felt so, too. There are a number of amusingly scenes that are historically ironic, though I cannot doubt that they reflect something that might have actually occurred. Xerxes is telling Leonidas that his army will eradicate all of Greece; that the name of Leonidas, and the story of his Spartans will be erased from history.

I was astonished that I was the only one in the theater who actually laughed.

The Greeks had to know that there’s was a society that was unique in its makeup, a grand experiment in government of the people, for the people, and by the people. And they had to believe it was a way of life worth protecting, motivated by self-determination they had created for themselves, and refusing to give an inch of their way of life away.

Miller very much celebrates the Spartans. At one point his queen utters words that come almost embarrassingly close to the phrase “freedom isn’t free”; his characters know full well that their way of life is something better than what they could have under Persian rule; and they know that it is worth sacrificing even their lives for it.

It’s hard to imagine Miller as a liberal.

Patrick Henry words may have been heartfelt, but it is no doubt that the founding fathers were intimately familiar with John Locke, the British philosopher who clearly articulated a theory of individual rights and personal responsibility. As the first country explicitly founded on such principles, we are now, were then, the truest children of Greece, and the finest testament that history remembered the sacrifice of the Spartans.

We, more so than anyone else in the world exemplify what the Greeks so courageously fought to defend. Colin Powell said it best when addressing the United Nations: The United States may in fact be a young country; but we are also the oldest democracy in the world. We were made possible by Greece; we are their intellectual and moral descendents; and our society, our country, descended from them, strives more mightily than all her other children to honor the inheritance we have received from them.

And that is why, as an American, I feel a great patriotic pride, in the actions of Leonidas and his 300.

A Celtic retreat?

For some reason, lately, I've been noticing brunettes more and more.

It might possibly be a matter of habituation; in fact, given the subject matter, it probably is. Think about it: if the allure of redheads is their rarity, but for the past, oh, 5 years or so, I've dialed in on them like a shark on blood (now, there's a lovely image) then, yeah, maybe I'm starting to notice more than just hair these days.

I still go for the pale girls, I'll say that. And freckles are still mighty fetching.

But what I said in that previous post, about brunettes, in general, being more beautiful...

Lately, that's what's been catching my attention.

Are Great Men Ever Really Good?

"Is Peter Wiggin a good man?"

Petra shrugged. "Are great men ever really good? I know they can be, but we judge them by a different standard. Greatness changes them, whatever they were to start with. It's like war - does any war ever settle anything? But we can't judge that way. The test of a war isn't whether it solved things. You have to ask, Was fighting the war better than not fighting it: And I guess the same kind of test ought to be used on great men."

From Shadow of the Giant, by Orson Scott Card

I am, functionally, I suppose, a narcissist.

Not quite solipsistic: I do believe in the existence of other minds, of independent consciousnesses other than my own; though, I confess, often my actions quite often are consistent with the notion that I discount their importance.

I won’t bother making excuses for who I am; it is who I am: and quite enough moralizers who would look at my utter selfishness are the selfsame individuals who marginalized me, during my formative years, to the extent that I had, truly, no one to turn to but myself. (Ironically enough, it’s also true that, starved for any degree of acceptance, from any external source, my emotional development became stunted through an inability to look to myself for approval.) I am a product, and I must accept that: and I accept that my self-centeredness is indeed crippling. There have been a number of occasions when I found myself unable to approach, and properly be attentive to, people I truly care about. I too often don’t know how to escape my own skull, and it is difficult to realize that

OSC’s opinion of greatness (that is, great individuals) is perhaps more balanced, more nuanced, more insightful than almost anyone else’s that I know. Unlike Nietzsche, who glorifies greatness as the one true and proper end of mankind (though, admittedly, he paradoxically recognizes that it is only through moving above – “over” – the mass of humanity that greatness can be ascertained) Card is clearly ambivalent. Greatness is necessary, but it is not self-evidently good: that is not the kind of measure by which it is judged. Indeed, for Card, the good seems to be identified with the almost prosaic, the ordinary; however you may deem his conservative views on social issues such as homosexual marriage, it is consistent with his overall picture of society and the role of the family as the proper place for a human to live his or (and!) her life.

Thus, there is a tension between those who shape the world, and those who live in it. His greatest characters, in fact, are the ones who, like Cincinnatus, accomplish their great feats, and then return to the quiet life of the everyday. Obviously I cannot speak authoritatively of his world view, but I suspect that he finds permanent overachievers – the Michael Jordan’s and Donald Trump’s of the world – to be in some sense unbalanced and incomplete, having missed out on what is really important to a person , as a human, by sacrificing it to the altar of accomplishment.

Tonight, I had the pleasure of running into another old friend, whom I have not seen in a long time. He is one of the few people I know that I can unqualifiedly describe as being more intelligent than myself, and he is also an impressive musical talent to boot. And like me, he has wandered in the wilderness of uncertainty as to how to live his life, how to accomplish his own personal work. He is a musician, first and foremost – embracing a path that I myself turned my back – but, more importantly, he is someone with something to say, something worth listening to.

He was not expecting me: we lost touch six months or so ago, and I only discovered he had a gig tonight purely by accident. But afterward we had a very good conversation, though for much of the time I was around, I was waiting in the wings. See, he has his friends, his peers, his network; and I don’t quite know how to throw myself into groups of people I don’t already know. My – I wouldn’t exactly call it shyness, but perhaps social insecurity is a better term – around strangers is a matter of great personal frustration to me. But as I was… standing off, seeing his friends and associates congregate – mind you, with the exception of two people, I had no previous connection to any of them, and those two were, honestly, little more than little more than acquaintances – it dawned on me that I was approaching the situation all wrong.

I was being too nice.

I’m not really adept at being breezily sociable. My formative years have made sure of that: I learned so much at the hands of my nice (read: close-minded, provincial, and insular) friends (read: acquaintances I had the misfortune of being associated with due to the circumstances of my life) that I never had time to learn how to relate to others. But I am decent at being self-interestedly manipulative: I’ll never be as Machiavellian as Richard Hatch – and quite frankly, being non-empathetic is a liability when it comes to motivating people – but I can maneuver people toward ends that are my own if I feel it sufficiently important.

Honestly, I haven’t done anything like that in a very long time; and even then I was motivated to such action by anger, and it was more a whisper campaign than anything else. But I remembered that I could do it, and that, by gum, if I wasn’t going to effortlessly slip into a crowd of people for the purpose of actually making friends, I could at least be mercenary enough to be charming for the purpose of making contacts. And that was what I realized, that I no longer had to hold myself hostage to my inability to make friends easily and naturally, because I didn’t have to think of people I might meet as potential friends: I could think of them as assets, and simply treat them accordingly.

And that, honestly, was an incredible revelation to me.

If you haven’t heard me rant about the myths of modern dating (the first of which is the claim that women “like nice guys” – a fact which, as a recovering nice guy, I can most emphatically contradict) you will probably understand much of my deep-seated anger better by doing so. But there has been a bit of an inconsistency in me, which this situation brought to my attention. Whereas I have discarded the misguided inclination to “be nice” in the area of romantic relationships – and in other areas, beside – I have failed to take the lesson completely to heart.

I have failed to realize that if I am ever to accomplish, I must learn to unleash that which is aggressive, opportunistic, and predatory within me. I must learn the value of ruthlessness.

I must embrace the inherent wickedness of greatness.

I realize it is… almost sheer hubris to reflect upon myself in an essay about greatness, but the simple fact of the matter is that my (inescapably) self-conscious musings are couched in the context of my own personal evolution. As I have already mentioned, I do not view my narcissism as an unqualified good; there is a high price to it that is exacted often enough to be debilitating. But it is also an intrinsic part of who, of what, I am; and for the purposes of bringing about much that I want to accomplish, it may even be an asset. But accomplishment is precisely the metric that is most relevant to my concerns right now; and learning that to attain accomplishment means to be driven, even to the point of discarding traits that others may find laudable – well, that is the price to pay to be myself.

On taking lessons to heart...

Last night, I spent some time just shooting the breeze and with a very good friend. He and I have known each other for a long time, and when I lived in Tallahasee it was something we would do on occasion; it's been a while since we've done so, though, and not since I moved back to Birmingham. Lately, however, we have been spending more time together for various reasons; with his wife out of town, we sat back, smoked a couple of cigars, and just talked.

He's always been a friend that I could talk to about... the practicalities of life, about going where you are going, what you are doing, and how you are getting there; he's always been one of my more driven friends. In fact, the very reason we are spending more time together has something to do with me putting myself in a situation where I am surrounding myself with people who are driven, who have managed to succeed temporally.

I am a firm believer that, on occasion, things happen when they do because that is when they are supposed to happen. One of the "lessons" - the kind of practical, rubber-hits-the-road advice and wisdom that we are wont to discuss on occasion - that came up during our buss session, was the importance of networking. Interestingly enough, another friend of mine, whom I had not heard from in a year or so, both a) sent me information on an internet networking tool, which I had been at first willing to discount, and b) completely accidentally got in touch with me and then proceeded to tell me about how useful that tool was.

And yet. Last night, I came home, after being out with him, and then another friend, I had 4 hours to kill before it was time to turn in for the day.

And more or less wasted the entire time.

I am a firm believer in r, r&r - recovery, restoration, and recreation - but I know that rather than resting I tend to idleness; but I also believe that extraordinary results require, always require extraordinary effort. There's rest, and there's rest; there's never an excuse for wasted time.

I probably need to start taking up some sort of physical hobby. I really need to learn how to take unstructured time during which I have no intellectual energy, and turn it into useful work. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Mot Just du Jour: once more unto the breach

What's the point in being alive, if you can't live your own life?

Don't get me wrong...

I'm not in favor of operationalizing definitions, either teleologically (what you really want is determined by what you in fact receive) or functionally (what you really want is what one could reasonably expect from someone doing exactly what it is that you are doing). I'm willing to say what you want is, typically, what you want, and it is a purely internal affair, not at all to be determined in a behaviorist manner.

I just don't think most people actually know what it is that they really want. And that the state of affairs we find ourselves in is typically a fair reflection of what we want.

People who don't know, want to be ignorant. People who don't understand, want to be confused. People who don't do better than they are, don't want to work at making themselves better.

Or maybe I'm wasting time....

A frightening thought.

What if we really do get exactly what we want?

A brief conversation:

"I want to go run in the rain."

"I want to level a small village with heavy machine-gun fire."

IM exchange between me and an ex-girlfriend