for your response to this:

...perhaps contributors are waiting for Glenn to endorse a candidate...

Ridiculous!

I've been too busy trying to keep up with reading the comments (plus a little bit of work at The Chocolate Interrobang), and I didn't have time to reply to that part of the thread.

From my perspective, why should anyone have to endorse a candidate now, when it is still so early. That's what the Publicans have done in the past, when they would annoint some heir apparent. Maybe it has worked for them, because they have "won" a few, but it hasn't been so great for the country.

I really want to see the process (NOT the horse race!) play itself out. And, I would still like to see Al Gore in the race, but I finally realized that it's just better to trust him about that issue. He's been right about everything else, and willing to speak up as a lone voice, when necessary. If he thinks it's appropriate to enter the race, he will. Otherwise, he won't. In the meantime, we still have a decent field, considering the flaws in our system, the over-emphasis on fund-raising, etc. And even some of "our" candidates talk openly about that issue.

Some part of my brain registered that it was mis-spelled, but I ignored it, perhaps because this spelling seems more effervescent.

One more shameless plug... and I'll soon stop.

IntrovertGirl has just posted her first piece at The Chocolate Interrobang.

http://language-grammar.blogspot.com/2007/06/why-does-it-matter.html

My apologies for jumping in on the first comment I see this morning, but I have to ask whether anyone knows whether the wars of the 20th Century have more casualties then the pogroms of the USSR, the massacres of Mao, and the killing fields of Cambodia.

Ummmm, Nixon let Cambodia happen, because he didn't like the pinko Commie tools of the Soviet Union, the Vietnamese, and didn't want them stepping in to Cambodia to quell the Khmer Rouge....

The flip side of forbidding pre-emptive war is that it becomes the Totalitarian Thug Protection Doctrine.

Nonsense. The U.S. has encouraged coups, or even just gone ahead and invaded dozens of times in the last century just to install "totalitarian thug[s]". See Stephen Kinzer's fine book "Overthrow" for the sanguinary details.

Cheers,

Thank you for that breeze of common sense. I know I said on some thread a month ago (feels like years) that any extreme political ideology was just as unworkable as its opposite because nothing trumps human greed. (I think I used pure communism and pure capitalism as examples, but I do think it applies to pure libertarianism, too.) Ideals are ideals. While the middle of the road might only have a yellow line and a dead armadillo, if you go too far to the edges you just end up falling into the ditch and going nowhere.

Ideals are ideals. While the middle of the road might only have a yellow line and a dead armadillo, if you go too far to the edges you just end up falling into the ditch and going nowhere.

Agreed. Not to mention that comments boards are prolly the absolute worst place to -- ummm, "discuss" -- political "theories", in particular those of an absolutist bent.

Cheers,

I still happen to be in the process of developing and honing my political views. (I turn 50 this year, it's probably about time) For that reason, I find it ineresting to engage idealogues in discussion. I apologize to anyone who feels that this harms the thread.

>>Not to mention that comments boards are prolly the absolute worst place to -- ummm, "discuss" -- political "theories", in particular those of an absolutist bent.<<

Very true, although I suppose any "discussion" is better than none? How many people on this board would be able to empty out the drawers of others' ideas and assumptions without the Internet?

Hope your music for bebop-o is having an effect.

>>I still happen to be in the process of developing and honing my political views.<<

Thank goodness for that! Not to you personally, I mean. But it seems that a major problem in this country is that most people aren't.

I'm actually not sure what kind of question it is. I had read that there was something so fundamentally different between metaphor and logic that metaphor could not be expressed as logic. This theme runs through a lot of work by Lakoff, by Fauconnier and Turner. Reason and logic deal with form, imagination and metaphor deal with essence/function or whatever. Conversation is about enunciating parts of the speaker's mental space that allow the listener to build a compatible mental space. Cognition is identity, integration, imagination.

Somehow creativity, imagination, metaphor, these things are supposed to not only be different and separate from logic, they are supposed to transcend it.

So I look at a logical statement. It can be built of very careful metaphors, each pruned and limited until it constrains the listener's imagination sufficiently to enforce logical precision. But then, if that is what a logical statement is, a simple metaphor can be enumerated and therefore put together with a lot of these carefully pruned enunciations of the mental space.

Seen this before? Between every two rational numbers there is an irrational number. Between every two irrational numbers there is a rational number. And yet irrational numbers are so much more numerous than rational numbers, that if you built all the possible collections of rational numbers, you would have one for every irrational one.

But that implies that infinity is at work somewhere in the metaphor/logic comparison. So does the claim of more than a Turing machine made by certifiedprepwn3D (and others). There are a finite number of neurons, so infinity is within the cell or within the connections? What is the difference between two cells talking and two people talking?

If the theories about conversations are correct, it appears that there have to be two kinds of primitives -- those that are too basic to be described well (silvery) and those for which no mental space can be built with precision. It seems conservative and liberal have possibly become the latter.

Thanks for the hint on Proust. Is it approachable by someone who fell asleep reading Ulysses?

I apologize to anyone who feels that this harms the thread. -- Paul Dirks

I don't see the need for apologies myself. The MSM poses simple questions, provides simple answers, and goes smugly on its way. As much as I'm appalled by what some of my fellow Americans seem to think, this is one of the few places where those whose names aren't on mastheads somewhere get to speak for themselves. Like it or not, after reading bucky1 -- all of bucky1, endless bucky1 -- I can no longer plead ignorance of the issues which would remain unresolved even if the false consensus Glenn exposes here were thoroughly debunked.

All to the good, I would say.