true dat

Posted on October 27, 2008 - Filed Under

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Marilynne Robinson in an interview in The Paris Review
INTERVIEWER
You’ve also written that Americans tend to avoid contemplating larger issues. What is it that we’re afraid of?
ROBINSON
People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in [...]

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Lousy Democrats

Posted on September 18, 2007 - Filed Under

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Today’s Times provides some tasty tidbits – some might even say non sequiturs – on the margins of Dr. Jonathan Haidt’s (pronounced height) theory of the evolution of innate moral principles.
“Imagine visiting a town,” Dr. Haidt writes, “where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex ‘doggie style’ in public, and eat raw meat by [...]

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“continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling”

Posted on August 3, 2007 - Filed Under

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A little Kierkegaard for a frame of reference:
When a self becomes lost in possibility…it is not merely because of a lack of energy…. What is missing is essentially the power to obey, to submit to the necessity in one’s life, to what may be called one’s limitations. Therefore, the tragedy is not that such a [...]

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I heard they were naked when they got busted

Posted on May 16, 2007 - Filed Under

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Bob Holmes at New Scientist reports:
Fruit flies have free will. Even when deprived of any sensory input to react to, the zigs and zags of their flight reveal an intrinsic, non-random - yet still unpredictable - decision-making capacity.
If evolution has furnished humans with a similar capacity, this could help resolve one of the long-standing puzzles [...]

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