Another redesign...

I just can’t help myself. 

Does cursive matter?

The litany of moral, practical, and cultural worries surrounding the fall of cursive script reflects a few basic assumptions about handwriting that confuse much of the form’s complicated past. The worries also cast a telling light on our own particular fears about the future, which may or may not include an electricity-less, memory-deficient world, where poorly understood documents are ratified with iterations of a droolingly scrawled X. But before we start stockpiling pens and manuscript-ruled paper, let’s look back a bit and take a deep breath, because handwriting hasn’t always been the sort of sign that it is today. Long before schools in this country stopped teaching cursive, most didn’t teach writing at all. Though reading, which afforded colonists direct access to the scriptures, was a crucial part of the education of children in 17th- and 18th-century America, writing, as well as the ability to read handwritten documents, was a rare skill reserved for the wealthiest boys and girls, as well as for young men with accountant’s dreams or aspirations for the itch of a barrister’s wig.

Does philosophy matter?

The philosopher’s job is not to make life easier or work to achieve efficiency, operating in the realms of practicality. No, the philosopher’s job is to simply place himself on the outside, looking in; to be disinterested and engaged, but not to tamper. Philosophy is not a subject whereby the objective is to come to some understanding, thus allowing the world to be improved and made a happier place to live, but instead simply to come to an understanding, and little else. Gather thoughts, ruminate, and try to make sense of it all. In the preface for The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde concludes, rather succinctly: “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.” I suppose philosophy, like art, is useless. But that doesn’t mean we’d prefer to live in a world without it.

Alex Ross on Oscar Wilde and 'Dorian Gray'

newyorker:

Wilde foresaw his posthumous triumph. “I have no doubt we shall win, but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms,” he wrote to the early gay-rights campaigner George Ives. Even so, the clean-cut categories of contemporary sexuality might have puzzled him. He was attracted to women as well as to men, if not nearly as strongly, and the collapse of his marriage may have had as much to do with temperamental differences as with sexual ones. (You could see him as one more self-entitled Victorian male exercising his right to extramarital recreation.) Furthermore, he might have resisted the tendency toward normalization in gay circles—the drive of an oppositional culture to abolish itself. When he spoke of winning the battle, he probably did not have in mind gaining the right to join the military and marry in church.

Bill O'Reilly's double standard

alistr.org:

That is to say that all people of faith who have acted in a repugnant and deplorable fashion in the past have, in doing so, somehow automatically severed all ties to that faith, and can no longer be considered a part of it; that anyone who has ever acted violently in the name of religion ceases to be a member of that religion, or cannot possibly subscribe to it because the teachings of that faith forbid their actions. That, when someone acts in a despicable fashion – which contradicts the peaceful ways of that religious group – it’s acceptable to, although not shrugging it off, refuse to accept responsibility: to disown it. I thought O’Reilly’s remarks on the lack of an attachment to a church particularly jarring, as if to say that you have to belong to a particular denomination to be recognised as a Christian, or that you cannot present criticism toward a denomination as a Christian, and that in doing so you should cease to be recognised as one: well, I guess Martin Luther (who essentially founded Protestantism) wasn’t a Christian. 

Assumtions and the age of greed

The solution lies not in the restriction of the free market, or in the installation and establishment of further regulation, but instead in the dismantling of the system which allows Wall Street to function in this manner; the left continues to deplore the cyclical process of failure and bailout, but often fail to recognise their fundamental role in one of those primary steps. It’s the bailouts, stupid! In continuing to pander to the ‘too big to fail’ policy of saving failing corporations, you’re saving whales which beach themselves. It may sound crude, particularly in the unfashionable realm of fiscal conservatism, but regulators should stop wasting taxpayers’ money in a fruitless effort to shore up businesses which will likely perpetuate the practices which put themselves in a dire financial position to begin with.

Defining atheism

It’s difficult.

'Lucian Freud' by John Updike

Yes, the body is a hideous thing,
the feet and genitals especially,
the human face not far behind. Blue veins
make snakes on the backs of hands, and mar
the marbled glassy massiveness of thighs.
Such clotted weight’s worth seeing after centuries
(Pygmalion to Canova) of the nude
as spirit’s outer form, a white flame: Psyche. 

Huntsman campaign manager resigns

alistr.org:

In something of a staff shakeup for the (rather poorly managed) Jon Huntsman presidential campaign, the former Utah governor’s manager has resigned. Of course the campaign itself isn’t saying much about the reasoning behind the departure; the only explanation we’ve received is simply, “It was just time.” Too simple, perhaps? The resignation comes at a bad time, I suppose – the Huntsman campaign has already been roundly criticised for its poor management, in that, as yet, they’ve failed to develop a cohesive message other than ‘this guy’s different.’ Time magazine’s Alex Altman reports: “The staff shakeup signals the campaign’s awareness that Huntsman, who has pledged to make civility a hallmark of his campaign (even as he takes gentle swipes at his competitors), needs to sharpen his message and draw aggressive distinctions with rivals as he tries to carve out a niche in a crowded and unsettled Republican field. After a splashy campaign kickoff in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, Huntsman has notched anemic poll numbers–including in New Hampshire, the capital of his primary map–that have sapped the campaign’s early momentum.” He’s right.