Hmmm, maybe below the Middle East and the economy, but above reforming the BCS series into a playoff system?

I think it falls right after spelling her name correctly.

What fatuous nonsense.  Who really gives a flying f$%* about the NY Senate seat.  Especially in light of everything else going on in the world.  This whole round of speculative nonsense is beyond grating.  Just pick a god-damned warm body and let the rest of the pikers get ready for the election in 2010.

Honestly.

To quote many a Monty Python sketch:  "Get on with it!"

kgrant1054 writes

:

What fatuous nonsense. Who really gives a flying f$%* about the NY Senate seat. Especially in light of everything else going on in the world. This whole round of speculative nonsense is beyond grating. Just pick a god-damned warm body and let the rest of the pikers get ready for the election in 2010.

Honestly.

George responds:

Don't haze me, Bro!

Seriously though, I have the same reaction every day when I turn on the evening news and don't hear, "Good evening, this is Brian Williams, and once again our top story is about the nearly 20,000 children who have died from starvation in the past 24 hours. Tonight we will be interviewing Barack Obama to gain his own insights into how, once in the Oval Office, he plans to reduce this number dramatically."

Then the station cuts to a commercial for MacDonalds and the spokesperson informs us they now has a brand new super-duper bucket of chicken nuggets that is so big you'll need a Hummer to get them all inside at the pick-up window.

Then it's back to Brian Williams and a segment about obesity in America

george walton

From the Times story on David Paterson's thought process that Isaac linked to earlier: Ticket balance

george:  the problem is that Obama has one of those hormonal things going on that mean he can eat all he wants and never get fat (or mostly not).  The guy is simply not in touch with American bodily reality!

And he's not into getting angry -- how unamerican is that!  I mean, our entire culture for the last 35 years has been constructed around some a-hole (or bunch of a-holes) getting angry about some shit she or he feels s/he's been denied/made to suffer/disrespected by, or whatever.

We're the only nation in the world apart from the Russians who make a collective ethic out of being pissed.  Oh, and of closure too.  All we want is some closure.

I sincerely hope that Caroline Kennedy is hopping mad and isn't taking "it" anymore.

irony,

Obama is just a hologram I invented to distract you from the hologram Obama invented of me inventing a hologram of you.

It seems the images will loop back over to the point I am trying to make about the point I am not trying to make about which of the three priorities above is the least less likely to be the most likely hologram ever conceived.

My way perhaps of trying to convince myself the starving children are just holograms too.

george walton

Right on brother Irony.  I'm convinced that most of the PUMAS hated Obama for have the nerve to lose weight on the campain trail, I know I sort of did.  He won't get mad or fat and he's President.  He'd better keep up the smoking or we'll have to organize some sort of resistance to the man.

"Ms. Kennedy’s endorsement of Mr. Obama was a significant moment in the Democratic presidential primary..."

[sound of williamyard slapping his forehead]

Yikes! This whole time I thought Obama got elected because of his eloquence; intellect; targeted fundraising prowess; GOTV/organizational juggernaut; lack of screw-ups/negatives vis-a-vis his opponents; endorsements from the likes of Colin Powell, John Kerry, and that other Kennedy--what's his name again?; not to mention an Alaskan joke possibly one heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

In fact, Barack Obama is our next President because of CAROLINE KENNEDY!

Thanks for clearing that up, NYT!

Man, I have to start paying closer attention to this stuff.

george:  If you'd see people on this board as actual discussion partners rather than holograms of your theory of intellectual exchange, you might have better luck!

It occurred to me that your frequent introduction of theological points into what are -- at least by general consensus -- non-theological arguments is a way of setting out positions that are very difficult for people to take up, and thus something that enables you to say (which you seem to do more often than others) that your points are not being taken up.

ironyroad writes:

george: If you'd see people on this board as actual discussion partners rather than holograms of your theory of intellectual exchange, you might have better luck!

It occurred to me that your frequent introduction of theological points into what are -- at least by general consensus -- non-theological arguments is a way of setting out positions that are very difficult for people to take up, and thus something that enables you to say (which you seem to do more often than others) that your points are not being taken up.

George responds:

Here I can only assume you are being ironic. Because if you are not then we really have no exchange at all, do we?

In any event, the point that bothers people most about me is not the one that conflicts with or contradicts their own---- "Israel is right", "Israel is wrong".

It is, instead, the way in which I suggest that having a point of view about any moral or political issue is merely an existential snapshot [at a point in time, in a particular circumstantial context] of the way in which you have aggregated all the experiential pieces so far. It is about the essential illusion of identity. It is about what Martin Heidegger called "dasein".

In the exchanges I have in philosophy venues we construct, deconstruct, and then reconstruct over and again the moral and political parameters of opinions discussed in places like TNR. It is, however, a very, very different way to understand "reality" because it burrows down into the relationship between words and worlds, between the language of narrative and the narrative of language, between intention, motivation and how this all comes together to engender one behavior rather than behavior. It is Wittgenstein by way of Schoupenhaurer and Richard Rorty.

But it is not about theology. It is about the way in which almost all people imagine their opinions about the world IS analogous to theology. As though our centuries old conflicts over value judgments can be solved merely by having one point of view rather than another.

And [to me] the most deeply incongruous paradox of all [about human interaction] is this: If you believe something is true and you act on it, it makes absolutely no difference whether it is true or not. Or even more problematically that truth is essentially an illusion regarding any conviction one has about any human value judgment you can imagine.

It is like the antinomy embedded in the relationship between human autonomy and determinism. It can't be resolved ontologically [or even more disturbing, teleologically] and yet so much is predicated on it, that we have to assume that autonomy is not an illusion.

george walton