StumbleUpon | akarra's blog posts

http://akarra.stumbleupon.com/review/32403975/

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:47:33 -0700

Thank you all so much for making SU a wonderful community - it has been a joy to receive the fine things you've found around the web. Thank you for considering my own work, at times, to be worth a link or stumble: Rethink

http://akarra.stumbleupon.com/review/8155377/

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 01:39:37 -0800

introduction (sticky)

I'm the best person you'll never talk nor listen to...

To the reader: SU has a radical edge to it, and sometimes is a hive mind. Nonetheless, a few conservatives are flourishing here, in no small part thanks to liberals who welcome debate and hate trolls of any sort. I highly recommend reading people who have more questions than answers, regardless of their partisanship. On the Left, that includes blogs like Amy King's. The Fly Bottle is a great place for libertarians to see what issues there are practically and theoretically. If you are conservative, please consider joining NeoCons United and entering the conversation: not every writer tells the reader what they want to hear, nor every stumbler.

Planning on college? I don't know how much help I can be, but I can share my experiences.

for me: in words, solace; in truth, lonely

http://akarra.stumbleupon.com/review/25699773/

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:02:36 -0700

Some of you have asked me about the proposed bailout and executive power. Independent of concerns about "rule of law" and "free markets" and "regulatory/deregulatory environments" and "class warfare," and especially independent of the campaigns, here's my general take:

The Presidency is not an institution created solely to work within the rule of law. I realize all the history you've been taught says differently, you probably remember Paine saying that "insofar as we approve of monarchy, in America, the law is king," and you were definitely taught that the chief defect of the Articles of Confederation was the lack of power given to Congress - it couldn't tax, it couldn't raise an army exclusively, etc. But I'll throw all of that history away as slanted with one move - the big difference between the Articles and the Constitution is the mere existence of a strong executive, not Congressional power. That your history book tends to downplay that "yeah, there's a king-like figure" in America is a telling bias of academics, which we'll get to shortly.

In political theory preceding the Constitution, it was clear just how strong the executive power was. It was the imperiium, power over life and death - a near Godly power - for the Romans, said Machiavelli. For Hobbes, a solitary ruler was the only legitimate form of government, otherwise faction would cause a mess of things. For Locke, the "executive" held the federative power, the power over foreign affairs that meant almost complete control over domesitc affairs in times of emergency. All three thinkers have ways of checking the executive, granted. But those ways aren't as simple as "he should listen to the law period;" they're more like the checks and balances where the Executive tries to do whatever, including what may be illegal, and then is shouted down.

Right now, the political Left would call this reasoning fascism, the political Right would be like "yay." But this applies to any President on the Left or Right. The difference is between those who think there is no emergency power in the Constitution vs. those who do. Does the Constitution have the power to save itself? We tend to think "the Court," but that's laughable for Hamilton, and was proved laughable with Dred Scott, where the Court ruled - I shit you not - that the Declaration of Independence didn't apply to black people. Lincoln's response to Dred Scott - before the Emancipation Proclamation, people in the North and South believed that things would be back to the same after the war - I think was the appropriate one. Academics - you can see Edward Corwin's "The Presidency: Office and Powers" for more - think the President is completely reined in by "rule of law." It is no coincidence, of course, that academics have specific policy proposals telling us what the law should be.

On� a more practical level, anyone glancing over the history of poltiical thought can see that the Executive is meant to have an immense amount of power, and the way he is checked is not by defining his power arbitrarily via congressional mandate, but by fighting him with Congress and the Court when he has acted, and then, if you feel things are really wrong, using ex post facto judgments against him (i.e. disbarring a President, etc.) and ruling against the powers assumed later. I really don't think this is a matter of debate - while it is an academically fashionable position to argue otherwise, historically our age is an aberration in thinking that an executive can be a mere slave to Congress. If that were the case, the Articles would have been just fine.

I'm not going to give my opinion on the bailout, but I'll just say this: when you discuss it, a good starting point is to assess whether this is an emergency or not (methinks it probably is, esp. for world markets), and if so, is Executive leadership necessary.

http://akarra.stumbleupon.com/review/7766645/

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 21:52:14 -0800

Favor

If you want to do me a huge favor, vote up this link to my older writings. Giving me a thumbs up is wonderful, but if that page ever gets an audience, wow.

http://akarra.stumbleupon.com/review/7597757/

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 05:39:05 -0800

Regret

I wish I had met more people when I was in Budapest. It was a lovely city, but there were few my age there, and the language was certainly a barrier.

Still, I had a few days there, and I should have been wiser and smarter and taken advantage of that time. Instead I walked alone most of the time, and now I'm in front of this computer screen, alone, and wondering.

http://akarra.stumbleupon.com/review/7527578/

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 03:30:52 -0800

How to make my day.

Got some geek toys for the blog: downloaded Performancing for Firefox, and love the editor, although I suspect I accidentally deleted one of my older posts with it.

Further, I went to Feedburner and installed some code on my site that works as a site counter with some really neat stats.

I love having geek tools on this blog of mine. Now if I can only improve the content, and get an audience...

Oh, if you subscribe to blogs, um, subscribe to my blog.

http://akarra.stumbleupon.com/review/7521879/

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:07:04 -0800

I wonder...

If I died today, I would probably be considered an Internet loudmouth, and that's it. Plenty of people post their thoughts, with mistakes, online; what we write is not to be credited, for ironically enough, the deluge of information that was supposed to be empowering has given way to extremely strict requirements for experts (requirements, of course, that no one knows or few are agreed on). We're scared to say something is good, and we're more comfortable expressing skepticism or attacking another, for we need not stand for anything doing so.

No one's work can be judged good or bad unless it has an immediate or visceral appeal. An intellectual appeal is always one that can be talked through with words that sound equally smart, even if they are ultimately hollow.

I think several friends of mine are disappointed that I publish online, because this medium is inherently unserious to them. They use it for having fun only, after all, and its research functions are meant to be convenient. The idea that there is an atmosphere where serious learning takes place doesn't compute with them: we only learn to make money or do things, after all.

The idea that love is contingent on learning - that thought is in some ways, the ultimate form of love, as it literally is a concern with something or someone - that's just completely alien to us. And it might be why all this technology might never reach anywhere close to its potential.

Aristotle talks about how philosophy comes about only in the most decadent ages; it never occurs at those oh-so-glorious beginnings of civilization, because those deeds are the deeds which create myth. It only happens at those times the gyre is turning and widening, and we can see the cracks.

I know my work online isn't all that great. But to judge by the reactions of the present age, it isn't anything. And I need to whine, whine in a way that will describe the problem and maybe allow appreciation of another's work, if not my own.

http://akarra.stumbleupon.com/review/7491549/

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 22:38:23 -0800

Pain doesn't just magically disappear

Ever since November, and the incident where she just up and left, I've been bitter. I can be happy at times, but that is subject to arbitrarily shifting to something really dark.

I hurt the feelings of a good friend of mine the other day over nothing. The second the words were out of mouth, I knew I didn't mean them. I wondered how I had even said what I said. And then I realized: I had spent the whole day moping, not really doing anything, half-heartedly doing my work, and talking to others just kinda waiting for... something. I don't know what.

And it would be pretty clear why I treated this friend like dirt, if one wanted to know. Another friend is giving me crap similar to the one who left in November gave. I'm not sitting and consciously thinking, "God all of this sucks," but that's definitely somewhere back there, waiting to be let out.

I think the big lesson is this. One can lead a good life without anyone's help. But it's really difficult, and if we want moral people around, we'd better treat each other better.

And yeah, I'll take my own advice, and start that ball rolling.

http://akarra.stumbleupon.com/review/7483074/

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 12:50:56 -0800

Just a comment on blogging/social bookmarking generally.

One thing that bothers me - I've seen it for some time now, and almost have gotten used to it - is the use of the Web to give us the tidbits we want to hear, and filter out everything we don't.

One thing about a newspaper article that's well-written is that it tries to capture two sides to a story and explore both sides (NYTimes Magazine feature articles, at their best, are like this). We, on the other hand, use blogposts, which themselves rely on statements out of context, or fragments of a particular narrative thread, to "keep up" with the development of the news. We react instantaneously and put what we like on the bookmarking site. What we don't like we ignore or shout down, or worse yet, google looking for anything that might say it's wrong.

I'm ranting because I think what I see now is that this degeneracy has less to do with the Internet, and more to do with the nature of the news. I was watching the nightly news on MLK day, and they said there was an Interfaith prayer service honoring Dr. King, and showed some clips of people speaking, and it occurred to me that I really wanted to know what each of the speakers said, and the news didn't want to give me anything except a picture and a statement that it happened.

The news itself cares not about the content it delivers, but only that it delivers content. The potential of social bookmarking and blogging is that we can exert a choice, and choose to go more deeply into issues, to resurrect our learning from college, and create a more learned, appreciative world, starting with ourselves. There's no reason why we have to become more user-friendly and dumb this medium - which is essentially a print-medium - down even more.

http://akarra.stumbleupon.com/review/7456185/

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 22:30:46 -0800

I think of her, and I know I miss her, and I hate that the pain is going away. I like that I'm hopeful about others, I like that I'm hopeful about my life.

But once, I dreamed she might be my life, even if it was a dream I had for a nanosecond, and there are some memories we just want to turn into a reality all the greater.

My mother said the other day that we don't really think about death when we're younger. I told her that wasn't true. Young people think about death all the time; this girl certainly was well-aware of its existence. Aware enough to know that my own was trivial, since she had to secure meaning for her own first. She sought, as I did, the unity of past, present and future, except that I sought that unity in the smallest part of the past, so it could be defined more by the present and future.

She walked away from me, I suspect, because her past was too large to overcome. And I wonder about her, and I hate myself for it, and I'll hate myself more when the wonder goes away.