Principles

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Wed, 04 Jun 2003 12:00:00 GMT
Kevin Tuma - Audience Reactions - cartoon commentary on Michael Moore. Hehe.

Mark Fiore at The Village Voice - Terrorism Information Awareness - Entertaining Flash animation. "Big Brother is Back...but in a Nice Way." [trt-ny]

I stayed up late last night finishing Let Us Prey. Strong stuff. Not for the faint of heart. Starts with a graphic description of a bullet entering someone's head. Contains lots more graphic sex and violence, including coordinated explosions at a number of IRS offices. A few good political speeches by the protaganist.

Alan W. Bock at The Orange County Register - The principled life - A commencement speech for adults. [claire]

First a demurrer. The idea that it is important to have coherent, consistent principles might not seem necessary - might not even seem efficacious - in the world graduates will be learning from. We all know of people who seem to survive and thrive with no particular principles, let alone consistent ones, beyond seizing opportunities, looking for the main chance, and shifting philosophical allegiances when the cultural winds shift.

The main reason to seek, hold and live by principles is for oneself, not for one's friends, neighbors or the world at large. The principled person can look back at a life and be able to say, "I wasn't perfect, and I might not have been successful as the world views success, but I had principles and I stuck to them. I was my own person." That beats having the pleasure of success tempered by the knowledge that you drifted or chose to behave less than honorably.

...

That suggests a potential danger in living by principles: that they can devolve into a rigid ideology that pretends to explain everything and can cause you to deny or obfuscate inconvenient truths you may encounter. The Soviet communists believed so strongly that humankind could be molded into the perfect, socially responsible New Soviet Man that they denied the developing science of genetics and supported an alternate theory, Lysenkoism, that argued in the face of numerous countervailing facts that people are formed by society and have no inherent traits.

(The two views can be integrated into a view that both inherent characteristics and social circumstances influence human beings, but not if one is blinded by ideology.)

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