What Does a Philosopher Look Like?

Posted by admin on January 6, 2012 Leave a comment (26) Go to comments

From issue 55 of The Philosopher’s Magazine, this is Cynthia Freeland’s essay on Steve Pyke’s collection of photographs, Philosophers.  The table of contents for issue 55 is here. Issue 56 is now available at good bookstores everywhere–table of contents here. 

What does a philosopher look like? The label calls to mind a classical bust of a man with noble brow, beard, and blank inward-seeing eyes. His high forehead conveys deep wisdom, like those super-smart aliens on the original Star Trek with their big-brained bald heads. In art history, philosopher portraits range from the impish-looking Descartes (possibly) painted by Frans Hals to Holbein’s Erasmus, sensitive hands carefully crafting a letter. Or there is the moustachioed Nietzsche painted posthumously by Edward Munch, gazing across a blustery Expressionist landscape. In the twentieth century we acquired iconic images of philosophers through photographs – Bertrand Russell (angular head, white hair, pipe), Jean-Paul Sartre (wall-eyed, thick lips gripping a cigarette), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (handsome and aristocratic). Women philosophers too entered our consciousness, from Simone de Beauvoir with her elegant chignon to the Afro-crowned activist Angela Davis.

But they say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Having An Opinion Is Now "Bullying"
As I've said before, if I were any more gay-friendly, I'd have a girlfriend instead of a boyfriend, but what I am not friendly to in the slightest are incursions against free speech. Hans Bader writes at OpenMarket.org about a dangerous precedent...the "ever-expanding concept of 'bullying'" is casting "an ominous shadow over free speech":

A school superintendant has labeled a column in a school newspaper that criticized homosexuality as "bullying." (The Shawano High School newspaper decided to run dueling student opinion pieces on whether same-sex couples should be able to adopt children; the student article that was labeled as "bullying" answered the question "no." The school district also publicly apologized for the column, and said that it is "taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future.")

...Schools and anti-bullying activists have adopted incredibly overbroad definitions of bullying. The anti-bullying website NoBully.com, and schools like Fox Hill and Alvarado Elementary, define even "eye rolling" and other expressions of displeasure or hostility as bullying, even though doing so raises First Amendment problems.

The Obama administration claims bullying is an "epidemic" and a "pandemic." But in reality, bullying and violence have steadily gone down in the nation's schools, as studies funded by the Justice Department have shown. The Obama administration's StopBullying.gov website defines a vast array of speech and conduct as bullying: it classifies "teasing" as a form of "bullying," and "rude" or "hurtful" "text messages" as "cyberbullying." Since "creating web sites" that "make fun of others" also is deemed "cyberbullying," conservative websites that poke fun at the president are presumably guilty of cyberbullying under this strange definition.

 

Look, I was bullied. Girls followed me through the halls in junior high and taunted me with anti-Semitic epithets. When it started to get serious (when they started throwing chairs in my path), I told my dad, and he went to the principal and it stopped.

The point is, there are measures that can be taken before we start crumpling up the Constitution. And sorry, but you don't have a right to not be offended, not even if you're in high school. What you should learn to do is think and write and debate well so you can see that your point of view wins the day. And if somebody throws a chair at you, and there's nobody to go to the principal's office for you...maybe that's the real problem we should be dealing with, but...

No...not legislatively, but by stigmatizing divorce and single-parent homes (that aren't created by the untimely death of one of the partners).

P.S. Children of gay parents fare no worse on mental health and other life-success measures than kids of straight parents...that is, when they're in intact families. In other words, intact families are what seems to matter.

 

Notice that the School Board is illiterate. No, really. They say that they are taking steps "to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future." Do newspaper items "happen" or are they written by humans? If they were honest, they would say, "We are taking steps to prevent further publication of an idea we find abhorrent."

Of course, we don't have all the evidence. Maybe the student article WAS bullying in its language and tone. We would need to see the article in order to judge for ourselves.

Still, bullying by school officials is on the rise and should be eradicated. Send those board members to a training, I say.

Design
The 1005PEM is based on the SeaShell design, a look that dates back to last year

That far back? Ancient, man. Ancient.

Finally, one more foray into geopolitics. The proportions of the U.S. fiscal debacle have been mitigated by a flight of money from a Europe that is judged even more worrisome than America because the currency itself could come unstuck. The heart of the Eurozone, Germany, has no debt problem; enjoys robust economic growth and moderate unemployment; and has nearly half of its GDP in sophisticated manufacturing exports. If, as I have also predicted in this space, the German government authorizes use of Germany’s credit for the issuance of European Central Bank bonds for the benefit of the more distressed countries in Europe, in exchange for their replication of German entitlement, tax, and labor-market reforms, Europe will quickly become economically stronger than the United States.

Then, unfashionable though such a perspective is at the moment, huge amounts of capital will flow back to Europe, and the pressures on this country to pull itself together will become too intense for even the most blasé administration and obtuse Congress to ignore. The U.S. has done nothing to assist Europe, with the mad Obama-Geithner wails to paper the ground with freshly minted euros from the Vistula to Gibraltar and the North Cape to Cyprus. But Europe could, by jettisoning the unaffordable and demotivating chunks of its failed social democracy Obama so admires, help the U.S.

 — Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and, just released, A Matter of Principle. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

It pays to know how things go.

Susan Burns has been arrested for attacking a painting at the National Gallery of Art in August. This is the second time she has been charged for this type of crime. She was also arrested in April for another painting attack at the same museum.

And why is this poor, mad, woman not in care? Whether she likes it or not. Srew Foucauld.

Iran Missile Drill Results Exaggerated, Images Photoshopped Previously

Updated: Tuesday, 03 Jan 2012, 1:25 PM EST
Published : Tuesday, 03 Jan 2012, 9:36 AM EST

And how are you so sure, little one, that you are not being played...lullaby and good night; sleep little one. There's no need to worry....

MATT WELCH: THE BOGUS FACTS BEHIND WASHINGTON’S BIG-GOVERNMENT CONSENSUS.

Not a day goes by when George W. Bush’s deregulation is not blamed for the financial crisis, and yet he hired 90,000 net new regulators, passed the largest Wall Street reform since the Depression, and increased fiscally significant regulations by more than any president since Richard Nixon. We are told by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and his friends in The Nation that the country is being ruled by a ruthless “austerity class,” yet federal spending has continued to increase even after the summer’s debt-ceiling agreement. The Occupy Wall Street movement and the (mostly Democratic) politicians who support it have shifted the national conversation to the “fact” that the middle class is worse off than it was three decades ago, yet as University of Chicago economist Bruce Meyer and Notre Dame economist James Sullivan found in a recent paper, “median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009.”

We are entitled to facts, yes. Just not theirs.

Hey, it’s not like they could sell their programs with the truth.

Think any of this will get through? I don't, alas.

Osawatomie's Dichotomies

Posted in Economy by William Voegeli

Near the conclusion of his big speech in Kansas this week, President Obama praised business leaders who understand "their obligations don't just end with their shareholders." The president singled out Marvin Windows and Doors, based in Warroad, Minnesota, for not laying off a single employee during the recession, and choosing instead to cut the pay and perks of both workers and management.

A fascinating response to the speech given at Osawatomie, Kansas by President Obama.