The Lighter Report

"Reserved for heretics and atheists (acording to my informant, who held a rare visiting fellowship), The Sixth Circle of Hell boasts the largest faculty of philosophers in the universe. Given its permanent endowment and aggressive recruiting methods, I expect the Sixth Circle to be the top- ranked philosophy department for quite some time, perhaps eternity. (But keep checking this space until then.) This school's secret? It's their retention program: faculty members are not permitted to leave, no matter how big the outside offer. The downside, of course, is that the worst damned philosophers gain effective tenure upon arrival. However, the distinguished senior faculty includes Socrates, Spinoza, Hobbes, Nietzsche, J.S. Mill, and Bertrand Russell, among many others."

Conference Alerts: Academic Conferences, worldside

Tips for the Top: How to be a Philosopher

Technique 1

"Begin by making a spurious distinction. Befuddle the reader with your analytic wizardry. The reader will enter a logical trance, from which she will be unable to recall the initial spurious distinction and will feel strangely compelled to accept your conclusions."

"O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire. ... We ask it in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the source of love." --Mark Twain

"Modern man has heard enough of guilt and sin. He is sorely beset by his own bad conscience, and wants rather to know how he can reconcile himself with his own nature, how he is to love the enemy in his own heart and call the wolf his brother.

The modern man does not want to know in what way he can immitate Christ, but in what way he can live his own individual life, however meager and uninteresting it may be. It is because every form of imitation seems to him deadening and sterile that he rebels against the force of tradition that would hold him to well trodden ways. All such roads for him lead in the wrong direction. He may not know it, but he behaves as if his own individual life were God's special will which must be fulfilled at all costs." --C.G. Jung

"The indifference of American public culture to the experiences of other peoples is reflected in the lack of work translated from foreign languages. Without translations, Americans, who are notoriously monolingual, have access only to the perspectives of those who write and speak in English; thus the ideas of millions are lost to them.

About 3% of the fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999 was translated.

America compares unfavourably to almost every other country and most unfavourably to western Europe, the region closest to an ideological sibling... There, Germany translates the most works - about six times as many as the US each year. Spain is close behind, while the French publishing industry exceeds the US by four times.

Without translations, Americans, who are notoriously monolingual, have access only to the perspectives of those who write and speak in English; thus the ideas of millions are lost to them."

"Possibly we shall know a little more than we do now. But the real nature of things, that we shall never know, never." --Albert Einstein

Thomas Pynchon on 1984

Prison art

Ashcroft's detention camps for US citizens declared enemy combatants

Sex is a brain thing

Our Preposterous Universe

Spam, spam, spam, spam

A personal experience with the new police state.
(Working link, thanks to James)

Do not try this at home.
(Working link, thanks to James)

Word of the day: appurtenance
Something added to another, more important thing; an appendage

Bush is trying to suppress the 911 report

One day, a little while after this, Satan appeared again. We were always watching out for him, for life was never very stagnant when he was by. He came upon us at that place in the woods where we had first met him. Being boys, we wanted to be entertained; we asked him to do a show for us.

"Very well," he said; "would you like to see a history of the progress of the human race? -- its development of that product which it calls civilization?"

Mark Twain "A History of War" from The Mysterious Stranger

"On Monday, April 17th, 2000 at about 8:30 am near the corner of 18th and K I was beaten by a plainclothes officer (not sure if fed or mpd) after photographing him going crazy though the streets hitting people over the headwith his baton. At the time I didn't even think it wasa cop! Wearing my Independent Media Center badge, I photographed this man, who I believed was an motorist angry about the traffic disruptions. After seeing me about to take the photograph of him, he lunged towards my neck with his hands and proceeded to club me at least two times with this club like device and pushed me to the ground. He then hit me several more times and wrestled the camera from my hands. I called for police to arrest this man still believing this was a case of road rage. Upon arrival the police officer (not sure if MPD,secret service or another agency) informed me that the man was a plainclothes officer."
More... and more...

parodies of Chick tracts, for your fundie friends