My ambition is make myself superfluous.
Compare the comments this time with those a couple of years ago, and you will see my success. Two years ago I would have put abut all of them on the front page, but what was then outstanding is now normal her.
Our comments used to consist of observations from the newspapers. Someone wanted to voice an opinion so he would have if he had never been here, so he would mention us but go ahead with what he had to say. Now you are looking at the world from a Mantra point of view.
Instead of our discussions here providing an opportunity to voice a standard opinion, you are allowing the world to provide examples of our thinking. After all, if the world does not provide examples of our thinking, as does the Obama candidacy, then our thinking is irrelevant.
So while SF was saying, “OH, GOD, the blacks are taking over,” we saw we had predicted the Obamas a long time ago.
The world provides us with damned few surprises. Which is why our thinking is effective. If someone is constantly surprised he is in no position to provide leadership or deal with the future.
But I still have to provide almost all of Roman spears: “”A nation based on a proposition cannot allow people to be free to discuss their own propositions.” “EVERY white country and ONLY white countries,” “blaming everything on white people is white supremacy.”
This is EXTREMELY advanced work. Trying to get one’s explanations down to a single page is graduate-level, but thinking and rethinking a point down until it is a sentence means an understanding of the real world which few ever achieve.
Simmons’s “shriek and retreat conservatism” is this most advanced kind of work. His identification of “Buckleyesque” this time is major league.
Our seminar is paying off. Too bad there is only one real graduate seminar on the planet.
#1 by Dave on 02/18/2008 - 8:53 pm
I am so grateful to have learned through BUGS what a real graduate seminar is and how important to the future a real graduate seminar can be.
And through BUGS I have learned that certain phases carry enormous power, something I did not know before BUGS.
“The Untrained Eye”, that is a phrase that has sunk into my consciousness pretty darned deeply. The intellectual core of BW revolves around that phrase.
Accordingly, I have learned that new worlds are born with the untrained eye and that the untrained eye is where revolutions come from. This is not trivial knowledge. How can we make a revolution if we don’t know where revolutions really come from?
Law is genuinely reformed with the untrained eye. And governments are reined in and put to rights with the untrained eye. It takes the untrained eye to do that.
That is why a revolution, any kind of revolution, could never come from academia.
And art, what art really is, entertains untrained eye as completely and fully (sometimes more) as the learned eye. And evidence that requires an “education” to interpret is not evidence. And analysis that is accessible to only the learned is not analysis.
That is why I have finally got it through my head that one telescope is worth a million formulas and I have a better handle of what constitutes good science than I ever had before.
This BUGS has improved my thinking enormously. It has put me miles ahead of where I ever thought I could get.
That’s why we here at BUGS truly are the leaders. If you don’t get that, you do not understand what is really going on.