Sherry > Recent Status Updates

" This is, I think, a good case to be uncomfortable about; neither state intrusion into the definition of religious membership nor institutionally entrenched in-group power to override dissent and exclude outsiders is a result to be entirely happy with. "This is a very cleaver way of ending this chapter: pointing out the tension to discuss in this book by offering many examples without giving a solution, yet.

here the author uses YMCA as an example for differentiated groups...

"He told me that, on the instant, it was as though somone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; and immense silence follows, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long-forgetten sound..."

I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way that you can be most lonely.

“They asked me if we would declare war on Turkey. I said that was doubtful. Turkey, I said, was our national bird, but the joke translated so badly and they were so puzzled and suspicious that I said yes, we would probably declare war on Turkey.”

skepticism so deep that it is skeptical even about skepticism.

"These have a combined length of over 1000 pages and goodness knows how many forests-worth of commentary and criticism they have jointly generated."

"What is certainly true is that he was a more honest man, and his authority as an intellectual lay in that fact, as opposed to the deceitful constructions with which Sartre managed to mislead himself and his followers."

"The impression of frivolity is enhanced when the humanities adopt a rhetoric of political urgency which represents only the cafe politics of emigres from the world of real power, the Secret Agents of literature departments."

"The impression of frivolity is enhanced when the humanities adopt a rhetoric of political urgency which represents only the cafe politics of emigres from the world of real power, the Secret Agents of literature departments."

"The impression of frivolity is enhanced when the humanities adopt a rhetoric of political urgency which represents only the cafe politics of emigres from the world of real power, the Secret Agents of literature departments."

“And then, stationed in San Francisco, he witnessed the world of official corruption, political tricks, and the labor movement’s success in keeping out Chinese workers. This experience left Huang confused and intellectually lost. If the great civilized nations could not handle democracy, what hope was there for peoples who were still backward?”

[Kang] fantasized about teaching in America or establishing "a new China" through colonization in Brazil <-- I had no idea Kang(康有为) was such a "dreamer"...

"In 1901 Liang Qichao said that Kang was the Martin Luther of Confucianism, that is, the man who put Confucianism back on its rightful path. Fang himself would say no less. Kang's confidence in his mission seems so complete, and stories of his intellectual arrogance so numerous, that we can fairly say he had a messiah complex." <-- This author is pretty funny..

The discussion on Mr. able and Mr. infirm is pretty vivid...

“Conception of justice that fall on opposite sides of this divide are distinct in many fundamental ways. Plato and Aristotle and the Christian tradition as presented by Augustine and Aquinas, fall on the side of the one reasonable and rational good.”

I’m still very comfortable with the whole reasonable vs rational distinction..

We must start with the assumption that a reasonable and just political society is possible, and for it to be possible human beings must have a more nature, not of course a perfect such nature yet one that can understand, act on, and be sufficiently moved by a reasonable political conception of right and justice to support a society guided by its ideals and principles.

"We are free in the sense that we are free either to choose in anguish the world view and the standards imposed on us by fate or else to lose ourselves in illusory security or in despair" --> human freedom; critic of communitarianism and historicism​/marxist view on history

There can not be natural right if human thought, in spite of its essential incompleteness, is not capable of solving the problem of the principles of justice in a genuine and hence universally valid manner. More generally expressed, there cannot be natural right if human thought is not capable of acquiring genuine, universally valid, final knowledge within a limited sphere or genuine knowledge of specific subjects.

"But the mere fact that we can raise the question of the worth of the ideal of our society shows that there is something in man that is not altogether in slavery to his society, and therefore that we are able, and hence obliged, to look for a standard with reference to which we can judge of the ideals of our own as well as of any other society" -- This is basically my whole undergrad education..