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ISIS
Lydia Wilson has an article in The Nation whose thesis is that the people who are joining ISIS (and I don't think we are talking about white Western recruits here) are not really that committed or even knowledgeable about ISIS tenets and the jihadist cause. I get the idea that the main motivation for young recruits is to fight off an American ( Read more... ) -
James Ellroy
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Of Philosophy and Science
“Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.”
-- Stephen HawkingThe Times has an article discussing the tension between 'knowldege' and 'meaningfulness', between philosophy and science, ( Read more... ) -
Marx
“Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
-- Karl Marx
[Source: Francis Wheen, “Karl Marx: A Life”] -
Camus
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest - whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterwards.”-- Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus ( Read more... ) -
Don DeLillo
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John le Carré
Years ago, when he was thinking about writing an autobiography, John le Carré recounts, he hired two detectives to research him and his family. As the son of a flamboyant con man, as a spy for Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and as a novelist who spent his days making up things, truth and memory tended to blur together: “I’m a liar, I explained. Born ( Read more... ) -
Tom Wolfe
Reading an article on the novelist Tom Wolfe, a book review of his new "Kingdom of Speech" (in which he takes on Darwin and Chomsky), I came across an article about Wolfe's literary feud against Updike, Mailer and John Irving, and I want to keep a taste of that one.
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Pessoa
A few quotes from Fernando Pessoa’s “The Book of Disquiet”.
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“I am at one of those points, and I write these lines as if to prove that I’m at least alive.”
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“My past is everything I failed to be.”
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“I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. I dissent from life and am proud of it.”
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