You’ve surely had that experience where you’ve set down your keys, or a phone number, or a bank card but can’t remember where. You turn your pockets inside out, rifle through the cushions on the sofa, search the crevices of… Read More ›
Hobbes
“That They Themselves Are Beasts”
18 I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.19 For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing… Read More ›
Thoughtlets . xxxviii.
Lately I’ve been troubled by laughing-at-stupid-people infotainment, especially in partisan news media, and on both sides of the political spectrum. I’d like to watch a broadcast that doesn’t devolve into some version of nanny-nanny-poo-poo-you-have-stinky-pants. That the frowning anchor wears a suit… Read More ›
Bread and Circuses
(Oct. 24, 2020) Somewhere around the second century CE, the Roman satirist Juvenal coined the phrase ‘bread and circuses’ which has come to mean placating one’s populace with cheap bribes to distract them from their political grievances. Here’s the logic…. Read More ›
Saturday Morning Pam-toons. “Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions as I do by my words?” Thomas Hobbes.
It may seem strange to some man that has not well weighed these things that nature should thus dissociate and render men apt to invade and destroy one another; and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference, made from… Read More ›
Thoughtlets. ix.
What is meant by the admonition ‘Think before you speak!’ ? The vast majority of the time we don’t think before we speak. Else we’d never speak. So what is meant is either 1) stop and think about the right… Read More ›
Thoughtlets .iii.
I worry a little that, in this politically charged environment particularly, when someone urges you to ‘be your authentic self’ she means ‘come out here where I can get you’.
Hobbes on Consensus
If ‘x’ is true, then ‘x’ is true independently of whether one man [sic] or all men believe ‘x’ is true. But no one man’s reason, or the reason of any one number of men makes the certainty, no more… Read More ›
On Judging Facts. Three Quotes Worth Comparing: Hobbes, Mill, Lippmann.
“And as in arithmetic, unpracticed men must, and professors themselves may often err and cast up false, so also in any other subject of reasoning, the ablest, most attentive, and most practised men may deceive themselves and infer false conclusions,… Read More ›
Five Human Commonalities. Intro by Thomas Hobbes.
Intro. We are equally vulnerable. Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind, as that, thought there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all… Read More ›
