The Personal Weblog of Edward W. Farrell   
 
 
Archived entries (in reverse chronological order)
 
Enslaved By Freedom
Ernest Junger and the paradoxes of autonomy. 		2024.07.05
 
 
Goddesses, Doormats, and Monogamy
On the promise or threat of sex

 		2024.04.10
 
 
Hamas Must Go
There's no excuse 		2023.10.11
 
 
Speaking to Mountains: Shelley's "Mont Blanc"
What does the mountain say? 		2023.10.07
 
 
For the Love of Guitars
a guitar is like a sweetheart--even when you fight it's a song 		2023.04.07
 
 
Love At First Smite
When genius flowers from a failure to socialize 		2022.09.11
 
 
Nina Kuzmicki: Two Poems
more on love as something lost 		2022.09.10
 
 
Jordan Peterson on Ukraine
On the civil war in the West 		2022.08.19
 
 
Love Poems: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Where love is something more often lost than found 		2022.05.30
 
 
Populism on the Half Shell
The rocky road to populism 		2022.05.14
 
 
The End of Civil Discussion
The end of Trump and the end of civil discussion 		2020.11.10
 
 
States Without Legs: Slezkine's house of Government
Thoughts on the vacuums revolutions create 		2020.02.10
 
 
Greta Thunberg and the Vagaries of the Climate Crusade
Ongoing thoughts on Global Warming 		2019.10.05
 
 
The Iceberg of Polite Social Discourse
On calling out "virtue signalling" 		2019.09.08
 
 
Notes on Poetical Birds
Some notes on poetical birds from Ovid to Shvarts. 		2019.12.29
 
 
To Hell With the Church?
To stay or not to stay in a corrupt church 		2018.10.05
 
 
Amado Nervo and the Answer to All Tragedy
Amado Nervo and the poetics of tragedy 		2018.09.19
 
 
Geoffrey Hill on "Individual Voice"
Geoffrey Hill on what constitutes the "individual voice" in literature. 		2018.08.12
 
 
Dios No Existe
The ironies of "God doesn't exist." 		2018.04.22
 
 
When Facebook Feels "FUBAR"
Filtering a FUBAR Facebook 		2018.02.24
 
 
Nostalgia for a Smoke
Wistful thoughts on the pleasure of smoking cigarettes 		2017.11.29
 
 
Spiritual Retreat as a Form of Sour Grapes
When lack of success becomes a virtue 		2017.10.31
 
 
Akhmatova's music: I'm Here but How Did I Get Here?
Thoughts on "revealed" poetry 		2017.06.10
 
 
Trust and Trump's America
A failure of trust led to Trump's election; can trust be restored? 		2017.01.25
 
 
Trumpism and Oligarchy
Thoughts on oligarchy and American political parties 		2016.11.05
 
 
The Irrational Man
Thoughts on Woody Allen's most recent take on a recurring moral premise. 		2016.01.24
 
 
Some Thoughts on Gun Control and Regulation
Recent thoughts on gun control as a response to mass shootings in the United States. 		2015.12.04
 
 
Searle and the Philosophical Mind
Notes on Searle towards a larger work on ethics 		2015.10.26
 
 
Love as Cancer
When love might as well be a disease 		2015.09.22
 
 
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
New tricks in the American culture wars. 		2015.04.06
 
 
Netanyahu's Address to the US Congress, March 3, 2015
On preventing a nuclear Iranian State. 		2015.03.05
 
 
Is Consciousness Biological?
Consciousness as a maker of worlds 		2014.04.04
 
 
I Am but a Seaman
If you dispute my word you are defying the Lord of Nature 		2014.04.04
 
 
Writing Aristotle
Does it take genius to portray a genius? 		2013.12.22
 
 
Northwest Passage
On moving to the Pacific Northwest 		2013.12.03
 
 
Consensus
The various meanings of concensus 		2013.10.02
 
 
Evolution Bumper Stickers I'Ve Always Wanted to See
Here're a few evolution bumper stickers I've always wanted to see. 		2013.09.26
 
 
The God of the Philosophers
So while the "God of the Philosophers" and the "God of Abraham" are not exactly opposed, their rhetorical opposition isn't necessarily an error: they certainly speak to different worlds. 		2010.07.08
 
 
Antrhropology and "Historical Jesusizing"
When anthropology meets Jesus, confusion reigns. 		2009.12.19
 
 
Dissatisfied? At Odds With Life? Dump Your Spouse.
Divorce is an easy thing to talk yourself into when a marriage sours because sour marriages contain the most expeditious argument for their dissolution: your spouse.  It may not be a valid argument, but it's convincing and that's usually enough. 		2009.12.19
 
 
Why Pascal's Wager Persuades Even When It Doesn't
...it is clear enough that choosing God should ultimately lead to obeying God and renouncing a Godless life.  And this seems quite tangible, much like the anticipated taste of a new food one reflexively hates without having tried it. 		2009.07.08
 
 
Following Natural Law
What the natural law argument does not adequately account for in this case is the "natural" propensity of human beings to take things from their found contexts and transform them in myriad ways, which from any purely rational perspective can make the line between "creative" and "perverse" exceedingly fuzzy. 		2002.09.26
 
 
Art and Morals: Leni Riefenstahl
But we also have to assume that in any relatively intact society that practices art there are certain traditions and mores that will tend to limit the acceptable uses to which art is put, even when it has little to say about radical formal innovation. The variations here certainly contain ample room for conflict when differing cultures meet head on. 		2002.09.06
 
 
Is Christianity a Moralistic Religion?
Human morality is often nothing more than a manifestation of the will to power. 		2002.05.22
 
 
No Enthusiasm in Necessity
Prodigal Summer offers up a great biological diversity of sex: moth sex, goat sex, human sex. It's all post-Miller sex: smashed, dehumanized, stapled like a bug in a specimen tray, prodded with pins. 		2002.05.08
 
 
Does Power Corrupt or Is Power Corrupted?
Power does not itself corrupt, but rather serves to reveal and empower existing corruption (pride, lust, avarice, vindictiveness, etc.). 		2002.03.18
 
 
On Wildlife
The most contemporary notions of wildlife are modern but in a far more self-conscious manner attempt to raise their own philosophical foundations, and have thus become ideologies. 		2002.03.16
 
 
On Cataloging Books
For me, the main trouble with a book catalog is that it is linear and cannot capture to sorts of relationships my mind forms when I research and read.  The mind is far more able to keep track of such relations that the most clever computer program, but memory is unfortunately fickle. 		2002.01.26
 
 
Scientific Approaches to Art
I don't question that scientific or mathematical approaches to art can be insightful. What I question is their repeatability and therefore their accuracy, but given a good method their accuracy will largely be a function of the quality of their assumptions about the human mental activities that are involved in the creation and perception of art. 		1998.10.18
 
 
Art Versus Craft
This rejection of craft in nearly all of its traditional forms has almost amounted to a religion among postmodernists. It has led to some curious side effects. 		1998.10.12
 
 
Mind and the Autonomy of the Self
The existence of an incredibly diverse array of these human objects that exist in the physical world only through the agency of human thought is a powerful argument for the autonomy of that thought. A comparison with the products of the builders of the rest of the animal world might further illustrate this. 		1998.05.09
 
 
E. O. Wilson and Consilience
The humanities and sciences are preeminently activities and products of the mind, and evolutionary biology has (in general) assessed the mind quite succinctly: as we typically conceive it, it doesn't exist. There is a wonderful marriage of spirit with postmodernism here, yet art, science, and religion become epiphenomenon that can have no certain meaning in this assessment, because we no longer have an "organ" with the independence to determine objective meanings. Certainly the "brain" as seen by the materialists couldn't qualify for such duty. 		1998.05.02
 
 
Exclusivity in Buddhism and Christianity
Christianity also has its social and metaphysical aspects to exclusion. Because Christianity tends to be the native religion of most westerners, it is particularly difficult for us to separate the social from the metaphysical and the two are often confused, as much by believers as non-believers. 		1998.04.04
 
 
Magic and Applied Diversity
When observing the convictions of others from a position that lacks any conviction, everything indeed appears quite relative, if not meaningless. 		1998.03.24
 
 
Cassirer and Myth
Cassirer's approach to myth has the virtue of insisting that it be placed alongside science and art as a common creator of symbolic forms, which allows mythical thinking to be evaluated on its own terms, without reference to psychology. 		1998.01.25
 
 
Scientism and Heisenberg's "Deplored Division"
What is fairly clear is that the "deplored division" and all of its consequences was an entirely unlooked for result of Bacon's Great Instauration and renaissance thought in general. E. A. Burtt once attempted to decipher the great shift in western thought that accompanied science and posed a question I believe is at the heart of this... 		1996.07.14
 
 
 
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