Thoughts on thoughts

Some thoughts on The Virginian's primary post:

(1) Like my colleague, I don't care, from a policy standpoint, who wins the Democratic primary; frankly, I haven't even investigated what substantive differences (if any) there might be. I'm much more concerned with practicalities at the moment, and what my practical interest desires is a defeat of Bush. No more, no less.

(2) Kerry's an arrogant asshole. All the evidence goes to support this. I have two seperate personal anecdotes from people who know him which lead me to believe this evidence (including the testimony of a classmate of his at Andover who leveled the charge that Kerry "would not pass the puck"). But you know what: Bush is an arrogant asshole too. So is Sharpton. And Jesse Jackson. Clinton's got a bunch of arrogance in him aswell. They're freaking politicians. With the exception maybe of Russ Feingold, it's the nature of the game. The relevant matter is whether he can fight that IMAGE, which Bush has done successfully. The knock on Kerry hasn't hit the streets yet; let's hope it doesn't. And if/when it does, the Dems need to FIGHT BACK. Stop being pussies, gentlemen. If Dean's done anything for the party, he put some fire in its gut. I hope.

(3) Don't trust Mickey Kaus. DON'T TRUST MICKEY KAUS.

(4) I had something else to say but it slipped my mind. What I am afraid of is the winner of the nomination extending a hand to his first choice for VP, who then says "no thanks, I'm not interested in the number 2 job." I want all these guys to agree that beating Bush is job #1. It's like the Grady Little/Pedro Martinez thing. I don't think Little made the right call, but I wouldn't have wanted Martinez pitching for my team if he didn't think he could go all the way. I don't want a Dem involved if beating Bush isn't the NUMBER FUCKING ONE PRIORITY on his agenda.

Illiud latine dici no potest

OK, I'll give the Latin a rest fairly soon. Maybe after this post. To be honest, what fluency I ever had has deteriorated to the point where I have no creative power, only the ability to look at somone else's sentence and figure out if it essentially means what I think it does. That's right, he says hanging his head in shame, I've been cribbing these stock Latin phrases from somewhere else.

As regards the post downstream (frankly, Virginian, I think it's a tad wonky to use links to items that are essentially a second's use of the scroll bar away), I'd like to register for the record that: I'm not turning into Spinoza or the Unabomber, seeing as I lack the requisite knowledge of geometry and/or explosives. I'm also neither Jewish nor a Luddite. And I'm familiar with the existence of The Elegant Universe and the potential of string theory to resolve the complications I gestured towards...but I read that book four years ago, and therefore my memory is hazy and I also don't know whether it retains scientific currency, or if the knowledge presented in the book shas been superceded (I doubt the book's accessibility to the layman has been superceded, though).

My astrophysics professor had a joke about someone parodying physicists annd in particular Dr. Chandrasekhar, but I don't remember what it was. He had another joke about rabbit stew, though, a concept to which he made reference and then had to explain since we were staring at him confusedly:

"So you go into a restaurant and see rabbit stew on the menu, and you're intrigued but also skeptical, so you ask the waiter:
"'Hey, what's with this rabbit stew? Is it really rabbit?' and the waiter is equivocating, he seems hesitant, and you say 'Come on, give me the truth, there's some horsemeat mixed in, isn't there?'
"'Yes.'
"'Well, how much is horsemeat?'
"'The proportion is 50/50.'
"'What does that mean?'
"'One horse, one rabbit.'"

Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant

For the past several years I've had the potential for obsession with the implications of modern physics on philosophy - namely, what would happen if a person were to take the things he saw in his study of the universe both in its gross and miniscule forms (i.e., the galactic and the atomic, or essentially the study of black holes and the big bang vs. the study of electrons and protons) and construct from them a personal philosophy. Several problems come to mind, at least to this layman's mind:

(1) As best as I can tell there isn't really a great deal of reconciliation and coherence between the two scales of physics I described above. To wit: a study of the big bang and galactic motions etc. etc. points, the way I'm currently tilted, towards determinism (see below), whereas the subatomic region points to either randomness or incomprehensibility (a pair of concepts which could be mutually inclusive).

(2) Physics changes. What we thought 100 years ago isn't what we thought 50 years ago isn't what we think now and probably won't be what we think in another 50 years. A philosophy which necessarily must reconfigure itself as scientific expertise changes its mind doesn't seem like a philosophy built to last. Of course, there's great modern appeal to disposability.

(3) It's highly dubious, of course, whether there's any value in applying lessons learned at either the large or the small scales to what I'll somewhat hubristically call the medium scale - i.e., human interaction. (Of course, there's a good question - one to which, since I'm not very good at imagining infinities, I can't readily answer: what would the difference of magnitude be between a comparison of my size to that of a bozon and my size to that of a galaxy? I have to presume that galaxy vs. me will be a larger difference than me vs. bozon, but are we talking by a factor of 10? 10,000?) There's nothing compelling that I can see which suggests that the galactic or the subatomic can actually provide explanatory power to my life, only a nascent concept that an understanding of the way the universe works might provide an interesting lens through which to view my tiny corner of it. The problem is that I'd just end up looking at everything like a physicist with no math, a more incompetent iteration of the accountant who can't help but see his life in deductions and writeoffs.

Nonetheless, the idea is compelling to me, and I'll probably use it somewhere. It's been brought to mind recently because in a severe lapse of mental capacity I suddenly watched the big bang and fell into a sinkhole of determinism in which I suddenly found myself forced to believe that the universe's beginning necessarily dictated the nature of its end, and then I started muttering gnomic proclamations like "the alpha contains the omega."

I don't have time for this shit.

Si hoc legere potes...

Arrived from the other end of the apartment. Operations are moving. Work is being, momentarily, shirked, and efforts are being made at more definite procrastination.