Monthly Archives: February 2007

Emily Dickinson’s Humanism? Or Is That Making This Too Complicated? On Poem 464, “The power to be true to You”

The power to be true to You… (464) Emily Dick­in­son The power to be true to You, Until upon my face The Judg­ment push his Pic­ture – Pre­sump­tu­ous of Your Place – Of This — Could Man deprive Me – Him­self — the Heaven excel – Whose invi­ta­tion — Yours reduced Until it showed too small –

This is one of those things that I should have brought to your attention earlier…

…I don’t agree entirely with Mr. Lanier, but his fun­da­men­tal sen­ti­ment — The beauty of the Inter­net is that it con­nects peo­ple. The value is in the other peo­ple. If we start to believe that the Inter­net itself is an entity that has some­thing to say, we’re devalu­ing those peo­ple and mak­ing our­selves into idiots.

Thinking Blogger Awards

Grac­chi gave me the “Think­ing Blog­ger Award” and wrote an awful lot of nice stuff about this blog and oth­ers blogs he likes here. Now this meme orig­i­nated at this post, and quite hon­estly, I wish the orig­i­na­tor of the meme had given me more cri­te­ria to work with, for I’m not sure exactly what

Joy, Pain, Character and Hedonism

Some peo­ple often try to dis­cuss the joy they feel at a given moment in terms of their pre­vi­ous pains, and it almost always strikes me as corny. I used to think that the prob­lem was my being cyn­i­cal. Then I caught myself attempt­ing to express joy after a period of pain, and thought myself corny.

A Note On How Conservatives Use Resources

This arti­cle in Dis­sent Mag­a­zine asserts that con­ser­v­a­tive foun­da­tions are far more gen­er­ous and inter­ested in their interns than lib­eral ones. This arti­cle from Slate from a while ago talks about how con­ser­v­a­tive foun­da­tions might not be part of a “vast right-wing con­spir­acy” sim­ply because the money to go around is so mea­ger. I want to