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Be Still My Beating Suit

By on July 20, 2020 0

One thing that every adaptation of Dune seems to get wrong: throughout the book series, the Fremen are always described as wearing robes covering their stillsuits. And a passage in God Emperor of Dune makes clear that “covering” means completely covering:

The grey slick of a stillsuit could be seen underneath, exposed to sunlight which no real Fremen would ever have let touch his stillsuit that way.

In the 1984 adaptation, the Fremen wore no robes at all. In the 2000 adaptation, they usually wore robes, but seldom entirely covering their stillsuits. The upcoming 2020 adaptation looks like we’re getting exposed stillsuits once again.

Anarchy in the Tube

By on July 17, 2020 1

My second YouTube video (and first substantive one) is up on Agoric Café! In this one I discuss Steven J. Shone’s book on 19th-century American anarchism:

Experimenting with the Timeline

By on July 14, 2020 3

Below is a presentation I created today using a software tool called Timeline, as part of a teaching workshop I’m participating in this week:

That embedded version is a bit cramped; for a less cramped view, click here.

I wanted to break long paragraphs into shorter ones, preferably on more than one page, but couldn’t figure out (in the allotted time) how to do it.

I also wanted to date the slides by centuries, not individual dates. I couldn’t figure out how to do that either. So then I wanted the first dated slide to be labeled “c. 340 BCE.” (“c.” for “circa.”). But it wouldn’t let me include “circa,” either; no non-numeric content was allowed in the dates. And it said I had to use negative numbers for BCE. So I ended up dating that slide “-340.” But I’m not happy about that, because they’re not equivalent; positive and negative integers belong to a cardinal sequence separated by a zero; but the BCE/CE (or BC/AD) system of dating is an ordinal system with no Year Zero. So, strictly speaking, 340 BCE would correspond to -339, not -340.

Otherwise, though, I’m fairly pleased at how it looks; and I could probably get something closer to what I want if I tinkered with it a bit. (The content I wrote is oversimplified, but this is just a trial.)

(You Know) Who Said This

By on June 30, 2020 0

I won’t say “guess the author” on this one, because the author is unmistakable, even if the content will be somewhat surprising to many:

I believe that my statement of man’s proper morality does not contradict any religious belief, if that belief includes faith in man’s free will. … Christianity was the first school of thought that proclaimed the supreme sacredness of the individual. The first duty of a Christian is the salvation of his own soul. This duty comes above any he may owe to his brothers. This is the basic statement of true individualism. The salvation of one’s own soul means the preservation of the integrity of one’s ego. The soul is the ego. Thus Christianity did preach egoism in my sense of the word, in a high, noble and spiritual sense. Christ did say that you must love your neighbor as yourself, but He never said that you must love your neighbor better than yourself – which is the monstrous doctrine of altruism and collectivism. Altruism – the demand of self-immolation for others—contradicts the basic premise of Christianity, the sacredness of one’s own soul. Altruism introduced a basic contradiction into Christian philosophy, which has never been resolved. The entire history of Christianity in Europe has been a continuous civil war, not merely in fact, but also in spirit. I believe that Christianity will not regain its power as a vital spiritual force until it has resolved this contradiction. And since it cannot reject the conception of the paramount sacredness of the individual soul – this conception holds the root, the meaning and the greatness of Christianity – it must reject the morality of altruism.

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