the Torre del Mangia 650 years ago, do you think they could have pictured a bunch of Italian hippies sitting in front of it in the piazza, smoking hash and playing "Psycho Killer" on guitar and drum? Well, that's what was happening there last night.
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...
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.
Not that you participated, or anything...
ReplyDeleteI like the angle on the picture, BTW. Did you take that yourself?
No, that one is posted on Wikipedia.
ReplyDeleteI participated by doing that funny David Byrne staggering dance.
If you're going to be doing any David Byrne dances, I recommend you give some of these a try...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1wg1DNHbNU
Sure, you might get arrested or thrown in the loony bin, but it would be awesome!