oh, far too true. especially that part about flags. not that i regularly check their patriotic resistance times to fire, or anything

its friday

the sun is shining. and its in that goldylocks temperature range where its not cold, not hot, and just a little bit moist. no... wait... dangit. [this] just had to go ruin my excitement.

i have a fairly normal morning ritual at work, i log on, check my email, do any small jobs that have come my way over the last night,... as part of this, i usually check facebook, since its another mini-mail service.

facebook (like you didn't know) has these friend details - you check off how you know the person. i tend to use it for writing random and fictional stories about my friends and their habits of waging war on hippies or the like. but one friend made a HUGE deal about how she wanted to list that we hooked up. i consented (only after much protesting). since then, i've stopped things.

the result: she un-listed our hookup.

is petty the word i'm looking for?

and why is there no bemused mood?

bernard henri levy is speaking this week at politics and prose, i'll definately be there (link for later reference). i'll definately go, if only because the ny times review was... amazing. its rare to see a reviewer that upset at an author. though, to be fair, i don't think de tocqueville would do all that well under standards of 'accuracy'. as a sampling,

what is one to make of the series of questions - 20 in a row - about Hillary Clinton, in which Lévy implies she is seeking the White House to erase the shame of the Lewinsky affair? Was Lévy aware of the game 20 Questions, commonly played on long car trips in America? Are we to read this passage as a metaphor of American restlessness? Does he understand how irritating this is? Does he? Do you? May I stop now?

anything that can do that to the nytimes is worth seeing, though not buying.

otherwise, all is well, i'm actually quite happy this morning. i expect the state of the union to change that.

as i posted on the blog today (in rambling fashion), i have this ongoing intellectual project in my head of defending a liberal view of reason against philosophic and scientific attacks - the ricoeur of liberalism. it'd be massive, and well outside my general academic interest (what isn't, recently?) i have a similar need to sort out my religious thinking.

so maybe i need to look at ricoeur as a model, particularly where he goes after the "school of suspicion" (marx, neitzche, freud). ricoeur is famous for arguing the trio "represent three convergent procedures of demystification", peeling away a false consciousness toward a better understanding of the 'text' of society [Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. D. Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970)]. through these three, we can achieve a "second naivete" [Paul Ricoeur, The Symbol of Evil], similar to who we were before. see [here] for a nice analysis.

to remember who i was, take a look at on liberty, some isaiah berlin, rawls even? past masters seems a better place to explore the roots, so perhaps some locke isn't out of order...

i'd want to run through the tennents of the (post)modern school of suspicion... a list too exhaustive, but tracing its way through focault, derrida, something in the evangelical movement, and modern psychology

and i wonder why i don't do this... maybe religion would be simpler...

during my morning blogroll i had a thought. there isn't a day that goes by where i don't crave better news reporting. something where the reporter doesn't just copy/paste from the websites of the parties, but reports the truth, regardless of what it may be. i also happen to know dozens of aspiring journalists, and there is this whole "internet" thing thats remarkably good at distributing information.

the news and the weather, huh?

so apparently creating a livejournal isn't the wisest thing to do first-thing in the morning. its like a giant choice problem...

*grumbles incoherently about barry schwartz*