StephenKMackSD's Blog

For Friedrich Nietzsche, the answer was obvious: to test a philosophy, find out if you can live by it. This is “the only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something,” he wrote in 1874. It’s also the form of critique that is generally overlooked in the philosophy faculties of universities. Nietzsche therefore dismissed the professional discipline as irrelevant, a “critique of words by means of other words,” and devoted himself to pursuing an idiosyncratic philosophical quest outside the academy. As for texts, he wrote, “I for one prefer reading Diogenes Laertius” — the popular third-century Epicurean author of a biographical compilation called “Lives of the Eminent Philosophers.” If the proof of philosophy lies in life, then what could be more useful than reading about how the great philosophers have lived? Continue reading →

Home » Press Release » New Military Commissions Undermine President’s Plan for Justice in Terrorism Cases

CONTACT: Brenda Bowser Soder, Human Rights First
C: 646-897-6372, W: 202-370-3323 | bowsersoderb@humanrightsfirst.org

New Military Commissions Undermine President’s Plan for Justice in Terrorism Cases

For Immediate Release: January 20, 2011

Washington, DC – In response to news reports that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will soon lift the current ban on bringing new charges in the nation’s flawed military commissions system, Human Rights First President and CEO Elisa Massimino issued the following statement: Continue reading →

I’ve decided to post this very revelatory piece on Matt Miller again, as reminder of the New Democrats and what they really stand for and advocate.

Buried in the middle of William James’s chapter on “The Sick Soul” in The Varieties of Religious Experience is the melancholy voice of one asylum patient. “There is no longer any past for me,” the inmate relates, “I can no longer find myself; I walk, but why?”   It is a strange moment of existential despair—one brought on by the loss of the past—in a chapter filled with despondency, not least James’s own. “There is no longer any past for me . . . I walk, but why.”   It is not at all strange that an absent past would prove disorienting, but it is peculiar in the midst of Varieties, in which history seems always to be getting lost in the search for the eternal: “The everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition,” James insists, remains unaltered “by differences of clime or creed.”  The mystical classics have “neither birthday nor native land. Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, . . . they do not grow old.”  Mysticism has no past, no genealogy, and yet it walks and knows why. Continue reading →

Palestinians are well within their rights to bring the issue of Israeli settlements and their illegality before the United Nations Security Council. Our decision to do so follows both Israel’s refusal to cease all settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territory, and America’s failure to ensure Israel’s compliance with international law and existing agreements. The United States should support such a move, not block it. Continue reading →

Thank you, Matt Duss