|
JACK OF NONE
Personally, the only distinction I like to make is between good
writing and bad writing. The rest is mainly a moot point.
...TV and movies are allowed to show pretty much all the violence
they want (within reason), but sex is pretty much disallowed and
nudity (even non-sexual nudity) is enough to push a movie into
R ratings. The latter amuses me greatly ("this movie suggests
that people are naked under their clothes! Eek!") but I sort
of have to wonder about a society that considers sexual expression
more dirty and upsetting than violence.
DON JUAN
Our fellow men are the black magicians. Think for a moment. Can
you deviate from the path that they've lined up for you? No. Your
thoughts and your actions are fixed forever in their terms. I,
on the other hand, brought you freedom. Freedom is expensive,
but the price is not impossible. So fear your captors, your masters.
Don't waste your time and your power fearing me.
- in Carlos Castaneda's Tales of Power
PETER JONES
An Intelligent Person's Guide to the Classics
...Plato, after the most violent attacks on [rhetoric], came
to see that rhetoric was only a means to an end, and the real
question was whether the rhetorician's ends were noble (so, in
his view, rhetoric was fine if you were a philosopher. Advertising
companies who hires Platonists would therefore escape his wrath).
~~~~
Until the nineteenth century, 'democracy' was a dirty word. ...
The previously forbidden term was adopted, buffed up and made
safe for consumption by being applied to any constitution with
an elective element in it. ...So when Professor Anthony Giddens,
in his 1999 Reith Lectures, claimed that democracy was one of
twentieth century's great 'energising forces', all he was saying
as that the idea of an elected oligarchic élite caught
on among the competing oligarchic élites. Very energising.
| 