Wayward Landlubber

I've always enjoyed reading. I pretty much read everything from an early age on. From cereal boxes to adventure stories to biographies and autobiographies, and of course the great political writers of a distant time. Mostly I thought about writing as a talent above my capabilities. It may still be, though I'm not the one to prove it either way. Great writing is a gift to good writers. Good writers are an inspiration to lesser writers. Really bad writers grow up to be Republicans. That is the order of the universe. Order, in this case, means a lineal ranking; not the Republican kind. It's really easy to write, now that I've tried it and practiced it for a few years. A fellow by the name of Red Smith is remembered for this classic homily, when asked if it was hard to write: "why no, you just sit down at your typewriter and open your veins and bleed". A typewriter, by the way, is a mechanical writing device with no memory. Sort of like Marjory Taylor Greene. Whos...

Shine a light in any building, or cave for that matter, and you will see people who claim to think about stuff. Some of them think a.lot about stuff. Among that small group can be found philosophers. They have academic credentials. They may not have the whole story, yet, but they can tell you who among their predecessors said stuff and its relevance to the great questions before us. They are also more likely to be able to help you with those moral ambiguities. Like, is moral outrage even moral? Does a moral imperitive need to be moral? Or imperitive? A much larger group are the philosophizers. This group extends on a continuum between those actively studying philosophy, but not yet awarded their PhD, to libertarians who are actively trying to find answers to those great mysteries, but are constrained within some Randian code of Objectivism. Beware of people who are under the delusion that Objectivism is a real, honest-to-goodness philosophy. Their search for truth is interrupted by the...