My English Diet
I have eaten more packaged sandwiches since September than I had in the preceding 45 years.
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"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness
By
gcallah
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I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Libertarians, My Libertarians!
By
gcallah
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Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Without trying to justify the demand for unconditional surrender, I believe any solution that could achieve the same end with fewer casualties would be preferable.
ReplyDeleteSince there was a surrender dialogue in progress, why didn’t Truman give the Japanese a little demonstration of the bomb’s potential, and at the same time threaten a much larger population?
After a demo of what “little boy” can do, I think the dialogue would have gone like this:
US: Unconditional Surrender or it’s Tokyo, downtown…
Japan: You wouldn’t!
US: Have you seen Dresden?
Yeah, you know, Eisenhower and MacArthur both thought the bombing was unnecessary -- hardly peaceniks, you know.
ReplyDeleteThe decision to drop the bomb had nothing do with the war with Japan. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were used to scare the living crap out of Stalin.
ReplyDeleteExcellent article. Interestingly, at the time, conservatives, including ex-presdient Hoover, the Chicago Tribune, Henry Luce and National Review, criticized Truman for dropping the bomb(s). That's progress for you I guess.
ReplyDelete