All Thoughts Being Equal

Here's some of the stuff I've read about this week that's worth a comment or two. Television used to have a lot more "dark background, leather chair foreground, casual highbrow discussion prefaced by classical music" shows than I thought. See, for example, the format of William F. Buckley's Firing Line . But also this show, Nightcap: Conversations on the Arts and Letters , on the Alpha Repertory Television Service (ARTS) . (It shared a channel with Nickelodeon!) This episode, moderated by Studs Terkel and Calvin Trillin , is a discussion between Isaac "reigning SF grandmaster" Asimov, Gene "just having finished the Book of the New Sun" Wolfe, and Harlan "the original grumpy cat" Ellison, on what science fiction really means. For thirty minutes. Holy shit. More than just hoarding (though there's a bit of a hoarding tendency; why own two copies in the same format of Rat Fink and Boo-Boo ? Though it does look incredible ...

I. Kayla at Crows Against Murder has a great post up about September—that calendrical signifier of Back To School which, for those of us in the current "quarter-life" cohort, is still about two-thirds of our entire lives, and almost the entirety of our remembered lives—and the prolonged existential crisis that is "adult life": But the milestones from my youth are no longer relevant.  I don’t have a promise of seeing old classmates, or meeting new ones.  I won’t develop new relationships with teachers or mentors.  Nobody will curate information for me to consume.  There will not be a semester, nor will there be the accompanying guaranteed measurable accomplishment that I can feel proud of by the time Winter Break comes around.  There isn’t even such thing as “Winter Break” anymore. Most disorientingly, I’m no longer building towards a discrete point at which I will have “graduated” from my current world to another one that is somehow more rea...

I. At the end of the last Drunken Philosophy meeting I gave in to a bit of political-philosophy masochism and listened to a former-libertarian-now-anarchist explain how to argue your way out of paying a traffic fine. Just ask the following series of questions—not arguments, because if you try to argue the judge can just order you to pay: Is the court obliged to prove its case against me, beyond a reasonable doubt ?    - Yes. Must the court justify every point of its argument to prove the case?    - Yes. Can the court use anything but facts and evidence to justify those points?    - Yes. Is the court's reasoning based on the idea of jurisdiction ; that I must pay the fine because I allegedly violated a law in the jurisdiction of the court?    - (with growing trepidation) Yes... Then what facts or evidence can the court provide that this "jurisdiction" actually exists ?    - Bailiff! At which point the anarchist, having smugly ...