Icicles



Yes, it's really that cold. High today 1 F.

Comments

  1. UnknownJanuary 17, 2009 at 11:23 AM

    Beautiful. My old philosophy professor would have called it a visual cacophony. It's also very similar to the view from the window of my son's dorm room (at Broadview).

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my blog post. I look forward to hearing what you think!

F.B.

Popular posts from this blog

How to Achieve High Status

1. Do something really impressive, preferably requiring a skill that others appreciate as difficult to master. Examples : playing a musical instrument, writing a novel, acting in a movie, winning at a competitive sport. Downside : not everybody will be equally impressed by a particular activity. This is especially true for writing (unless you can write a best-seller), even more so for activities for which the necessary skills are difficult to isolate as such. Examples : becoming an expert in a particular academic field (in some contexts, this is a guaranteed status-killer ). 2. Live a long time and build up experiences. Corollary: have seniority in your organization or professional field. Downside : people younger than you are will not necessarily have any sense of what it means for you to have lived longer or experienced more than they have. Nor is it typically possible to explain said experience to them precisely because they do not yet have sufficient experience to appre...
Keep reading

Credo ut intelligam

Image
It is difficult to describe the crisis I have been living through these past several weeks. The drawing by my office door Short version : Don’t call out the Devil if you aren’t ready to bout .  Alternative short version : “Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” —1 Corinthians 1:20 There has been much bitterness. There have been feelings of betrayal. There have been feelings of being lied to while watching people whom I thought were my supporters fall away. Friends warn me about overreacting. At which I overreact. “Academic freedom means nothing if the faculty do not stand up for it.” I believed that. Someone whom I have trusted my entire academic career told me that. I still believe it—but do my colleagues? “Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.” I heard someone say that recently on his livestream. Someone whom my friends tell me I s...
Keep reading

How to Be God-Right

Image
I have had a fair amount of fall-out thanks to the video that I did with my friends about Vox Day’s book on Jordan Peterson . If you have watched the video, you know that I agree with Milo and Vox in their critique of the Good Professor. Like Milo and Vox, I do not see Jordan as on “our” side . Quite the reverse. I became wary of Professor Peterson about this time last year, after spending over a month trying to make sense of what happened in his interview with Cathy Newman. I became increasingly suspicious as I watched his interactions with Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin on their shows , and I lost all faith in him as an ally when he threw Milo under the bus rather than argue with Bari Weiss about whether Milo was “possibly [a racist].” By the time Professor Peterson made his Kavanaugh tweet, the camel was already on the ground, crippled and unable to rise. I do not think Professor Peterson  believes in God by any definition that I would recognize . ( Hint : If you care more a...
Keep reading

Nation, American Style

Image
Vox Day talked last night on his livestream about how American conservatism was doomed as a political movement from the beginning because, even as defined by Russell Kirk, it was only ever an attitude, never a coherent political philosophy. Kirk himself said so. He called conservatism a “persuasion,” without “ideology,” “Holy Writ,” or “dogmata,” and he suggested that “conservative” as a word be used only as an adjective—a modifier, not a substantive noun. And indeed, as Vox pointed out, as defined by Kirk, conservatism has no substance. It is a stance against , not an argument for . In Kirk’s own words : The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles...
Keep reading

Joe the Plumber

Me, writing political commentary?! Stranger things have happened, like, for instance, having a candidate for president who is intelligent and articulate and able to put issues before what the other candidate's campaign is saying about him personally. So, I watched the debate Wednesday night with increasing hope and concern: is it possible that America might go so far as to elect a president who, while rich*, was also at the top of his class in school? Or are we going to fall yet again for the dumbing down of our politics to the level of personal grievance and feelings? It all hinges on Joe the Plumber. But who is he? I don't mean in real life; everyone knows that now . Even on Wednesday, Senator McCain didn't really care about who "Joe" was or his staff would have bothered to find out, for example, that "Joe's" full name is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher and that he isn't even licensed by the Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters and Service M...
Keep reading