Friday, February 27, 2009

Security v Liberty

From Slavoj Zizek's The Plague of Fantasies, preface to the new edition

In the last years of the Communist regime in Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu was asked by a foreign journalist how he justified the constraints on foreign travel imposed on Romanian citizens. Was this not a violation of their human rights? Ceausescu answered that these constraints existed to protect an even higher and more important human right, the right to safety, which would have been threatened by too much free travel.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

All relative

Here is the website of Sam Pablo Kuper, a cousin of mine, who didnt let on of his internet presence, meaning that I only found out about it while partaking in the unbecoming yet irresistible habit of googling myself. I havent read it yet except to note that Sam uses even longer and flasher words than myself, which I shall hopefully be rectifying imminently, after a thorough bathing in the refreshing waters of my thesaurus.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Educative

Its not a joke, but I found this Jerry Seinfeld quote interesting.
"School is not learning, it's exercise. You don't remember anything that you learn but the act of trying to learn is mental exercise and that exercise builds some sort of muscle that you can use."
From

Tuesday, February 17, 2009