A Curious Little Blog

I have always felt sympathetic toward Aristotle even though I have read very little of his work.  I had to read The Republic and several Platonic dialogues in college political theory classes, and I found the arguments unconvincing, to say the least.  Aristotle seemed much more down to earth as a thinker, which appealed to me. Now that I have finally read this seminal work, I am glad to say that my impressions have been confirmed.  Not that it was at all pleasant to read; to the contrary, it was incredibly tedious.  I think I got a bad translation, but I'll leave that question to the side. Early on, Aristotle assures us that "precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions," which already gets my respect.  I'm all for being as precise as possible, but also for recognizing the limitations of our understanding.  In fact, I would say that this is one of the principles of my approach to learning. After making some basic arguments, Aristotle...

I am not interested in whether it was or was not legitimate for United to remove the guy from the plane, because by the time security got there to remove him, clearly authority was on their side.  The doctor, David Dao, undoubtedly did not know the legal ins and outs of whether it was reasonable.  His whole justification seems to have been:  I am doctor, therefore I am important.  I am more important that anyone else you could remove from this plane, therefore I am not leaving.  This is the kind of "individual exceptionalism" that I see people use all the time to break rules.  In general, we might want to favour doctors in this sort of situation, but he was in no position to determine that.  It's not as though he had an emergency that he absolutely had to deal with; no, he just had patients to see the next day.  At that point, it's not up to him to decide if his reason for going is more important than another passengers.  Sure, he has the rig...

I had been intending to write an entry in praise of Trump last week; in the meantime, I now have reason to criticize him as well, so here is a chance to do both. I have begun to appreciate one thing about having Trump as president:  he just doesn't care what the media says about him.  No, that's not right; he obviously cares deeply, otherwise he wouldn't take the trouble to respond to every attack.  Let me put it this way:  he cares what the media says about him, but his way of dealing with it is not to compromise his beliefs (whatever they are at the moment); rather, he defends what he does and does it twice as much. I have suffered through many Republican presidencies, and I'm sure anyone who shares my outlook and experience can tell you that most Republicans are absolutely disheartened by the degree to which presidents have conceded moral authority to their critics.  The whole idea that George W. Bush would push for what he called "compassionate conservat...

I read a lot about people concerned with our "divisive" political culture in this country (the U.S.).  This is particularly interesting because it is almost always used as a criticism.  One almost never hears someone say that his own party is deepening the political divisions in the country; it is always the other side.  In other words, the problem of divisiveness is used in a divisive way. It may seem natural that people would see the other side as the source of the problem, but compare this to issues like military armament.  It is not difficult to find people urging unilateral disarmament on their own governments, as though the military problem would disappear if one side had no way to defend itself.  On the other hand, I have yet to hear someone urge his party or faction to stop using divisive language even if the other side continues to take advantage of it.  Arguably this was the tack Hilary Clinton was taking in her presidential campaign when she re...

I mean the title of this post to convey the idea that humans are never satisfied; each time one desire is quenched, another arises, so we are in a constant state of anticipation.  My thoughts came in direct response to what I read in Schopenhauer, and, by projection, to the general Buddhist approach to psychology.  I was surprised to find that a Google search on "human desire is never satisfied" actually brought back mainly Christian sites, chiefly in reference to Proverbs 27:20:  "Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied" (KJV).  Not that it should be surprising that this subject is present in Christianity as in other religions and philosophies.  In fact, the nature of human longing is central to any study of man.  It is what I think of as the problem of motivation, which indicates that I approach it largely from the other direction:  how to convince myself or someone else to do something, not how to deal with the fa...

While I was visiting Thailand last year, I came across a sign for the Monoceros Resort.  I was interested because I wrote a post on this blog nearly six years ago about the surprising fact that the mythical horse creature with a single horn is almost always called the unicorn, not the monoceros, in spite of almost all other mythical animals having names deriving from Greek. So I was shocked to find this resort going by the name of "Monoceros" instead of the more common "unicorn."  Well, I was almost as much shocked to find a resort with either name in rural Thailand as I was of anything else.  It is not hard to find via a Google search, and in fact appears to be a popular resort , at least for Swedes.  It was a small sign and I had no chance to get a picture of it, but you can see their logo below, and it does appear to be some sort of unicorn.  (I don't know what else it would be with that name; perhaps it could have been named after the constellation.) ...

There is a staple of a certain kind of movie in which two people who are basically opposite of each other are forced to spend time together because of one circumstance or another.  They start off hating each other, but by the end of the movie they have become tolerant of one another, maybe even friends.  Does that happen in real life? I think it does.  Consider married couples, for instance.  Studies show that couples in arranged marriages are no less happy than those who chose their own spouse.  There could be several reasons for this phenomenon.  The fact that married couples go through so many shared experiences is certainly one of them.  "Shared experience" is a sort of psychological buzzword, but I have found that it is a powerful force in my own life.  It's something that you can look back on and talk about, and some time that you probably experienced similar emotions with another person.  I have even read that taking a date to a sca...