Nah. If I didn’t have such a great girlfriend, I’d be a much better (or at least more frequent) participant here.
As for that other thread, do look again where it goes and what is being pitted. Really it is an exercise in Ch. 36 of Tao Te Ching:
And so on.
You may never care much for me due to my recent bout with anti-Brit bias, but if you keep watching you will see that I am at least honest.
The two threads are in fact connected, though not in the way you suggest. I thought I’d do better to direct any anti-Brit bias I may retain against an appropriate target: the crew responsible for the most evil episode in British history. They should be dated, dead, and (hopefully) bear little resemblance to the contemporary crop.
My interest is indeed academic, though I admit that may not be obvious. Recent events have alerted me to the fact that I do not always handle well the apprehension of enormous acts of evil/injustice. This simply will not do, especially considering that, this year especially, I am increasingly attracted to the notion that injustice should be considered a fundamental stratum of reality. Or, in the context of a preface to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason:
More and more my feeling is that Injustice is one of the absolute conditions of all contingent conditions. This certainly seems true when considered in the light of British history. Would Britain/British culture exist today at all if not for its history of evil? Sure, some of its excesses proved counter-productive. But without viewing the world as a place occupied by sub-humans to be destroyed so their resources could be plundered, how could England have paid for its wars? Surely it would have gone broke, or turned its evil against itself and been weakened until it were destroyed by some rival.
The error would be to view this as a uniquely British phenomenon- it’s not. More and more I am coming to view injustice as, again, a/the substratum of reality. I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t stand up as the ultimate metaphysical ground of all things mind you, just that it seems capable of gaining a lot more mileage than most other things you might put in its place. I am especially disposed to this opinion since the verdict in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which essentially granted personhood to corporations and declared their expenditures- to political campaigns in particular- to be ‘speech’ which cannot be infringed upon or limited. I fear that America is moving inexorably toward a plutocratic or oligarchic tyranny, and that therefore the evils to come will make evils past seem to be merely a prelude to Act I. There is the vain hope that casting light on history may prevent us from repeating it; yet again, I fear the new evil will be novel beyond imagining, and devastating beyond historical limits. So on an individual level then, I simply must not react to gross injustice in the way I have already this year if I am to continue to function at all. And so an academic encyclopedia of evil is my best defense, so that I may remain unfazed by the new evils which I fear are soon to be unleashed.
But that’s for another thread.
If people want to start another thread debating ‘the most evil nation’, go for it, I’m there. But for now British evil is convenient for me, so what else have those limey bastards inflicted on the world?
