Small Craft Warning


SMALL CRAFT WARNING

In the market of ideas, wisdom and stupidity coexist without enmity.

The historically omnipresent secrecy and silence regarding male violence is linked to its social construction as a private problem sequestered behind impermeable domestic walls, rather than a social problem deserving political attention.

Angela Y. Davis. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. New York: Vintage, 1998):28.

The impersonal unchanging divinity of which Aristotle speaks, the metaphysical  contemplation of which furnishes man with specific and ultimate telos, can itself take no interest in the merely human, let alone in the dilemmatic; it is nothing other than thought timelessly thinking itself and conscious of nothing but itself.

Alasdair MacIntyre.  After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981):158.

Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism, and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats.

Samantha Power."A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (New York: HarperCollins, 2002): 513.

There are self-transcending desires.  They are not all altruistic or benevolent  ---  they may be malicious or frivolous.  Those who make provisions in their wills to mortify their relatives or to promote some absurd object do not usually believe that they will be there to enjoy the outcome; yet it is the outcome they want, not merely the pleasure of thinking about it now.

Bernard Williams. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985): 50.

It is precisely because art affirms values that it is important.  The trouble with our present criticism is that criticism is, for the most part, not important.  It treats the only true magic in the world as though it were done with wires.

John Gardner.  On Moral Fiction (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2009): 135.

In the market of ideas, the human mind is often a cobweb of chaos. Do not sail when the moon is scarlet.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            September 25, 2018

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