Right Reason

The Boring Person

Someone's personality can be measured with the amount of entropy to them. The boring person is someone who is restricted in interests, hobbies, and knowledge.

Theodore Roosevelt Rex

 

In the middle watching the recent documentary on the Roosevelts, one fact that sticks in my mind is that Theodore Roosevelt was a military commander who had the wonderful accomplishment of killing more of his soldiers than his mission demanded for little more than his own vanity. Robert E. Lee once said that "It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it." Theodore Roosevelt's experience in Cuba shows that Lee's statement is certainly not categorical about the entire human race. Despite experiencing the horror of war, there are some men who shall still be fond of it. Storm of Steel's Ernst Jünger may be another such specimen. At least Roosevelt put his own skin on the line in action alongside those he commanded. That much can be said well about his military career. 

The Importance of Being Prepared

 

 

Just as fortune favors the brave, uncertainty benefits the prepared: 

For the show’s cinematographers, such as longtime Bourdain collaborator Zach Zamboni, that means adhering to Boy Scout levels of preparation.

“We do carry a lot of gear,” Zamboni says. “We’ve gone into a shoot with 11 different types of cameras before. The central concept of the show is this idea of getting lost; that you have to be lost in order to find something you haven’t seen before. So you have to be prepared when that happens.”

As Zamboni explains, even when a particular episode might be tackling a well-traveled, well-known location, the crew still puts a premium on “getting lost” in some fashion, even if that simply means shooting counterintuitively.

“‘Las Vegas’ was the first show we shot last year, and we decided we were going to keep the camera on the tripod until it was just painful to do so,” Zamboni relates. “Typically on a documentary shoot, you’re trying to capture reality as it happens, and you become adept at framing the chaos of reality, picking up the camera to apply your sense of blocking and framing to improve on reality. But when you’re confined to the tripod, there’s a whole new level of discipline. You’re almost going against your own basic cinematic instincts.

“Philosophically, it’s very much like travel, where if you want to see something new, it’s got to be challenging and scary for you. Otherwise you’re just treading the same territory.”

 As Lord Baden-Powell once said: Be prepared. Don't find yourself fragile to the unseen event, find yourself in a position to be antifragile to it.

The Danger of Activism

 

He who sells his soul to make a difference only manages to sell his soul.

Morality is Always Involved in Politics

 

Given that the world is approximately Pareto-efficient at every moment, politics will always involve winners and losers. Who those winners and losers are shall be determined by politics. We shouldn't shrink at that fact. Even in the case of the repeal of the Corn Laws, certainly a praise-worthy measure, had winners and losers. Morality is needed to discern between who should win and lose in politics. The hope certainly should be that the losers in politics are cronies and criminals who gain through other people's loss.  

Academic Moral Philosophy and the Moral Good

 

The primary problem with academic moral philosophy is that, amid the byzantine set of rules about how we should treat other beings, there is no core about why we should seek moral goodness. In that failure, nihilism has already succeeded. 

Community: What It Is and Isn't

Community is not doing things you enjoy for people you enjoy to be with. Community is doing things you'd prefer not to do for people you couldn't care less about.  

Loyalty and Opposition

 

The best way to be loyal is to give the best opposition.

An Observation on Language

 

 

 

How does a Swedish death-metal band talk to Muscovites? In English, of course.

Speaking as a...

 

I don’t speak “as an economist” or “as a scientist,” I speak as a human being. Anything less is not having soul in the game. 

 

 

Never mix up someone who is making the devil’s argument from the person who doesn’t have any soul in the game. The latter is worse than the devil.