Links+R
Well, for a time I’m going to continue evening link+ remarking in the hope that it engenders further conversation.
- Matthew Lee Anderson has a short blurb on authenticity. Authenticity seems like one of the qualities that is noetically charged, .i.e., that is it changes under noetic inspection. That is to say, if you wonder whether you’re authentic or not, you aren’t. If you don’t, you might be. This makes being leading a authentic self-examined life something of a difficult prospect. You can of course lead an authentic self-examined life … so long as the aspect you are examining about your self and your outlook is not whether or not you are being authentic. Back in the day, when attending college in through the 80s and I deem the decade before as well, it was vogue to “drop out” of school for a time to find yourself. My impression that this motive was rarely, uhm, authentic. In last nights’ links+r post, I noted a Joe Carter post reflecting on those quite ordinary moments. There is some similarity here. Graduations, gaudy events, and moments filled with fire are not as authentic nor as lasting as the quite stolid ordinary times in our lives. Consider the exchange in the movie Up!, counting cars for “reds” and “blues” wouldn’t be an authentic ordinary memory to treasure if you’re doing it to be authentic.
- Science used to be a field which, when theory disagreed with experiment, discarded the theory and not bolstered it with, well, pseudo-science or at best merely irrelevant science. Time and time again we find, in the Philippines, in WWII resistance movements faced with a enemy which utilizes torture finds that, on capture of one of their own, must immediately abandon all safe houses and locations known to that captured individual. Everyone who was in contact with the captured person facing and undergoing torture is now at a high risk for interdiction. Yet here it is argued that torture is best for producing “false memories.”
The problem here is that “The problem, he says, is that stress hormones actually make it less likely that someone subject to abuse can accurately recall information, so that such abuse ends up “destroying the very memories they’re supposed to recover.””
Uhm questions like “Where do you live?” Who are your contacts? And such aren’t “hard things” to remember. They are your mission. Your life. The center of your activity as a resistance member. Forgetting them is not likely or the problem. This is very much not like the manufactured memories of real or imagined pre-adolescent mythical abuse. These are more like, “Where do you work?” Stress might “make it less likely” that you can accurately recall information. But, I’d bet even with stress most people could get that right. [Disclaimer: Yet again, before the “you promote torture” worms come out of the woodwork. I do not promote torture. I think the honest appraisal is that can be effective, but we will choose nevertheless not to use it.]
- Post cold war … some reflections. While I think this short article is important all I can think of right now is that improving and cementing commercial ties between nations ultimately will lead to closer ties and connections. And in that regard, what America needs most is Teremok (or more accurately ???????). When we were in Russia last year, we loved eating there … and everone knows America and the West need most is yet another fast food franchise. Blini filled with smoked salmon and sour cream (or one of dozens of other choices) washed down with kvas. Yum.
In the wake of last night’s posts, it was noted that they moved from more to less philosophical. That seems to be a trend.
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