I do workflow for health care organizations. Here is my proposed workflow for US policy on Ukraine.

1. Either we are willing and able (militarily) to defend Ukraine against a Russian invasion, or not.

It may be cheating for me to treat “willing and able” as a conjunction rather than as a disjunction, but sometimes, it’s OK to cheat. Treating them as a conjunction ensures that willingness to defend is tailored to ability to defend, which seems to make sense: you should only be willing to do what you actually can do. Right? Aristotle thought so. Continue reading →

I’m puzzled by a feature of much of the scholarly discussion of the Epicurean swerve.  So many of the discussants seem to be assuming that there must be a swerve corresponding to each human free action.  I don’t see why.  If indeterministic swerves occur, then every atomic motion – not just the times when the atom swerves, but also the times when it doesn’t – is going to be an instance of indeterministic motion.  And I take it that it’s the causally undetermined nature of the atomic motions underlying our actions that’s crucial to Epicurus’s account, not their specifically being swerves.  (And this seems to me to be true regardless of what stance one takes on the much-debated questions as to the precise nature of the relationship between human actions and underlying atomic motions and how the indeterminacy of the latter serves to guarantee the freedom of the former.)

When a friend saw me using this photo of an elderly man on my Facebook page, he first thought the man was a typewriter repairman. It is actually John Dewey, near the end of his life. He lived from 1859 to 1952. He used the two-finger way of typing.

When Ayn Rand arrived in America in 1926, Dewey had been the dominant voice in American philosophy for about 15 years; he would continue to have that place for another 20 years. His writings ranged over all major areas of philosophy and more. He was a public intellectual and produced many books for the general educated public concerning philosophy (all areas), culture, and education. His works have been meticulously collected in chronological order into a 37-volume set, which required 20 years to accomplish (1967-87).

From E.M. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born:

According to the Bible, it is Cain who created the first city, in order to have, as Bossuet puts it, a place wherein to hide his remorse. What a judgment! And how many times have I not felt its accuracy in my night walks through Paris!

So can we can infer that “the perfect and upright” Job created the first suburb in order to have a place wherein to display his self-satisfaction? Or was it to hide his despair? Or both? 

From the US State Department’s periodic safety advisory to travelers, Nov. 23, 2021:

Reconsider travel to Israel due to COVID-19. Exercise increased caution in Israel due to terrorism and civil unrest.

No need to “exercise caution” due to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank or the Israeli siege of Gaza, apparently. Sporadic terrorism and vague hints of “civil unrest” are cause for concern, but a military occupation/siege enforced by M-16s, F-16s, phosphorus bombs, tear gas, armored vehicles, militarized bulldozers, and state-sponsored vigilantism is nothing to worry about.

Could the selectivity of the worries expressed by Foggy Bottom reflect the selective nature of its intended audience?

Conventional wisdom has it that voting is a waste of time, and third-party voting, even worse. Voting is a waste of time because a single vote can’t change the outcome of an election, and third-party voting is worse because third parties have no chance of winning elections in the US.

Well. From The New York Times, Wednesday, November 3rd around 8:40 pm.

Continue reading →