Undulating mindscape and porous consistency

[Cox Communications (70.173.9.44) Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, drraghu has left a new comment on your post "Sri Aurobindo draws close attention to the transit...": 

It would be a sufficient achievement for the day and the times if rationality were to be comprehended and practised consistently in dealing with everyday phenomena and issues. We can then consider portentous discourse about the "Suprarational" and such premature constructions. …

All this harks back to some sort of Medieval Infrarationalism or infra-rationality, quite like the one perpetuated by Christian fundamentalism with its affirmation of Satan's role in producing natural disasters, demon-possession, exorcism, and faith healing, rather than even a minimal form of rationality. Posted by drraghu to Savitri Era Political Action at 5:58 PM, June 04, 2010 Savitri Era Open Forum]

[Capitalism: Hollywood's Miscast Villain from Marginal Revolution by Alex Tabarrok

In the WSJ online I cover Hollywood and capitalism including Star Wars, Star Trek, Avatar, The Wire and much else. 

“"The Wire" shows how money and markets connect and intertwine white and black, rich and poor, criminal and police in a grand web that none of them truly comprehends—a product of human action but not of human design. It's the invisible hand that's calling the shots…

Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand, like Mr. Simon's invocation of Zeus, tells us that to understand the world we need to look beyond the actions of individuals to see the larger forces at work.” More here.]

[When a newspaper recites the Gita to a godman from churumuri by churumuri

After the “incident”, Ravishankar and his disciples seemed just too anxious to have it certified as an assassination attempt… From an editorial in today’s Times of India:

“The guru’s statements after the recent shooting incident at his ashram seem to be quite out of character…. Ordinary mortals are entitled to engage with the authorities in a back-and-forth of this nature. But a spiritual teacher is expected to be more circumspect. He could have drawn inspiration from the Gita, which in shloka 17/15 advises austerity of speech, and said that Chidambaram may have been improperly briefed.”]

[on internet reader comments from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

I don’t see why “democracy” entails that mean-spirited ignoramuses should be allowed to address millions of members of the public. If they want to start their own blogs, fine. But why should the mainstream media encourage them with comment boxes? There is almost never any value added to the stories in this way.]

[Dictatorship of the professional elite Thursday, May 27, 2010 9:56 AM, at 7:50 PM

Equality Is Important—But It Isn’t Enough A. BARTON HINKLE TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST: May 25, 2010

while liberals find inequality across race and gender classes invidious, many seem to find nothing wrong with an inequality between the enlightened few and the great unwashed. Large swaths of the knowledge class seem almost wistful about the idea of a dictatorship of the professional elite to oversee the lumpen proletariat. …

Hence Thomas Friedman contending in The New York Times that one-party autocracy can "have great advantages," when it is "led by a reasonably enlightened group of people."

They mean well, of course. But then so did John C. Calhoun, when he argued that slavery was not a necessary evil but a positive good… Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or bhinkle@timesdispatch.com]

[Beware of Social Engineers by Don Boudreaux Here’s a letter to the New York Times:

Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) described civilization – including each component part, such as language, law, and the economy – as being “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” (An Essay on the History of Civil Society 1767, Part Third, Sec. II, Para. 7.)]

[The Necessary Ignorance of Our Leaders from Cafe Hayek by Don Boudreaux

Hayek pointed out on page 30 of The Constitution of Liberty, “All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant.  Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.”]

The overarching assumption of a uniformly pervasive human intellect regardless of age is a rather surprising feature of all theorizing. Equating teenagers with septuagenarians is patently absurd and deciphering precisely at which points of life irrationality sneaks in or bids goodbye is distinctly difficult and complex. But there is no gainsaying of the fact that rationality and irrationality are fluctuating indicators of a single phenomenon reflecting the current level of consciousness (as in an ECG graph). No rational analysis has been able to explain what lies beyond the sky and hence it can’t be the final limit to man’s imagination. [TNM]