2007_08_01_archive

Wall on silence

uninterrupted close-reading against the impatient multi-tasking

facilitated by electronic alternatives.

I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer I gave earlier. (I'm

still reading that damn biography too).

at 10:31 PM 1 comments

"Italian golfer in positive test"

Alessandro Pissilli 'used a diuretic'. However, Charlie Wi is in the

clear.

at 10:01 PM 0 comments

Why does Chomsky hate ants?

In the NY Times, Samantha Powers, liberal author of A Problem from

Hell, reviews, among others, Talal Asad's On Suicide Bombing:

if you continue to believe (as I do) that there is a moral

difference between setting out to destroy as many civilians as

possible and killing civilians unintentionally and reluctantly in

pursuit of a military objective, you will indeed find "On Suicide

Bombing" disturbing, if not always in the way [the author] intends.

On his blog, Noam Chomsky responds:

Evidently, a crucial case is omitted, which is far more depraved

than massacring civilians intentionally. Namely, knowing that you

are massacring them but not doing so intentionally because you

don't regard them as worthy of concern. That is, you don't even

care enough about them to intend to kill them. Thus when I walk

down the street, if I stop to think about it I know I'll probably

kill lots of ants, but I don't intend to kill them, because in my

mind they do not even rise to the level where it matters. There are

many such examples. To take one of the very minor ones, when

Clinton bombed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical facility in Sudan, he

and the other perpetrators surely knew that the bombing would kill

civilians (tens of thousands, apparently). But Clinton and

associates did not intend to kill them, because by the standards of

Western liberal humanitarian racism, they are no more significant

than ants.

I've written about this repeatedly [...] And I've been intrigued to

see how reviewers and commentators (Sam Harris, to pick one

egregious example) simply cannot even see the comments, let alone

comprehend them. Since it's all pretty obvious, it reveals, again,

the remarkable successes of indoctrination under freedom, and the

moral depravity and corruption of the dominant intellectual

culture.

at 1:01 PM 4 comments

September 2007 July 2007 Home

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My Shelfari Bookshelf

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog

email address

Please contact me, Stephen Mitchelmore, at steve dot mitchelmore at

gmail dot com

Literary and other links

* British Literary Blogs

* ReadySteadyBook blog

* Spurious

* Book Depository: Editor's Corner

* The Literary Saloon

* The Existence Machine

* The Reading Experience

* Scarecrow Comment

* Guardian Books Blog

* The Quarterly Conversation

* KCRW Bookworm

* BookForum

* wood s lot

* Mountain 7

* Todd Colby's Glee Farm

* Three per cent

* Tales from the Reading Room

* The Bibliophilic Blogger

* The Penguin Blog

* TLS: Peter Stothard

* Mary Beard

* Nomadics: Pierre Joris

* Lenin's Tomb

* Dispatches from Zembla

* Waggish

More literary blogs

* Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella

* The Best of New Writing on the Web

* John Self's Asylum

* Anatomy of Melancholy

* The Truth About Lies

* Nigel Beale: Nota Bene

* Thomas McGonigle's ABC of Reading

* Vertigo: Collecting WG Sebald

* Un Arbre dans la Ville

* The Wooden Spoon

* The Joyful Knowing

* The Reader Onliine

* In Abstentia Out

* Jacob Russell's Barking Dog

* eNotes Book Blog

* Diderot's Diary

Book buying

* *Steve's Wishlist*

* The Book Depository - Cheap books and free delivery

* Booksprice - price comparisons

* Abebooks

Favoured author sites

* Maurice Blanchot

* Thomas Bernhard (German equivalent)

* Gabriel Josipovici

* Peter Handke (German equivalent)

* Princeton Dante Project

* Proust: Temps Perdu

* The Kafka Project

* Charlotte Mandell

* Noam Chomsky

* John Pilger

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