Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

November 6, 2018November 6, 2018

The Imaginary Integer

One vote. One nation. One dream. One spirit. One soul. Except — when, as a person, you’re only worth three-fifths. Who chooses the fraction? Who creates the integral definition of one human life over another based on decimals, point schemes, and not on whole numbers? We like to believe the world is as fair, and as ordered, as our parents promised us it would be. Two arrives after one. The opposite of amber is divinity. The soul of humankind is undisturbed, except by the precepts of intentional evil clinging to the moon to cleave the star. We live in a numeric world, where measurements are predictable, dreams are quantified, and dissolved in commandments, and end games are more than simple crucifixions.

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September 14, 2010January 21, 2013

Robert Louis Stevenson on the Moral Bargain

In my recent article on William James, he taught us How to Know a Good Man, and part of his argument referenced a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson:

Stevenson says somewhere to his reader: “You think you are just making this bargain, but you are really laying down a link in the policy of mankind.”

I was intrigued by that quotation, and I decided to return to the source material to read the entire quotation in context. Here’s what I found on page 20 of Stevenson’s fine book, Lay Morals:

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May 24, 2010

The Moral Code of Babies: Hardwiring Good and Evil

We know babies are born selfish and power-seeking — and we’ve met the Kindergarten Contract Killers. Now we turn our frightened, Panopticonic, eye to the scientific notion that babies are embedded with a moral code: They are born knowing the difference between good and evil.

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January 14, 2010

Excelling in Hate: Rush Limbaugh Does Not Want You to Help Haiti

In the days since Haiti was rocked with terrifying earthquakes that may have killed more than 100,000 people and destroyed buildings and infrastructure, support has been pouring in from all over the world.