Me, to Esther, trying to change the subject from the “America’s Harvest Box” proposal: “So, speaking of budgets … at least we don’t live in the time of Pope Leo X!”

Sex in turn is no doubt meant to be equated with fundamental truth, although by this date such an idea seems terribly tired and cannot be easily accepted.

A team of researchers in Australia and New Zealand, led by paleobiologist Alexander Boast, extracted DNA from 23 ancient dung samples. These samples, called coprolites, ranged between 124 and 1,557 years old, and they came from three different species of moa and the kakapo, New Zealand’s fuzzy, befuddled-looking, and critically endangered flightless parrot.

“This is no time for word games, Osmond,” says Humphrey, pale in the doom screens’ glow.

“Our world is ending and there’s nothing we can do about it.  This is precisely the time for word games.”

Right Honourable and Worshipfull, and you of all degrees; it hath euer beene a common custome amongst Idle, and humerous Poets, Pamphleters, and Rimers, out of passionate discontents, or hauing little otherwise to imploy themselues about, to write some bitter Satire-Pamphlet, or Rime, against women: in which argument he who could deuise any thing more bitterly, or spitefully, against our sexe, hath neuer wanted the liking, allowance, and applause of giddy headed people.

The mere ability to argue about it is a political accomplishment which must not be taken for granted.

A fair and important point!

Disputes over the truth or falsehood of religion(s) always have a certain odd inanity to them, because all of the actual arguments in regular use are old and simple and tedious – often they’ve been advanced and counter-advanced for literal millennia, and even if not they always feel like the sort of thing an undergrad gets extremely excited about for a week or two

Teapots orbiting the sun, maybe sometimes a noble lie is better than the truth, if you really believe in X why don’t you believe in all its implications, where does value come from if it’s all atoms and the void, yadda yadda – it’s not that any of these are dead in the water discursively, or lacking in human resonance, it’s just that we’ve heard them all before oh so long ago, we even got tired of hearing them oh so long ago, and whatever it is that is making us have this argument, it can’t be that we find it fascinating to go over this undergrad shit one more time, now can it?

… and so everyone is open to the charge that they are fixating on some bit of undergrad shit that would ordinarily be beneath them, and must be fixating on it for personal reasons and not for its value as a pearl of pure reason, and what a waste, to see a person reduced to this obsessive reiteration of some bit of undergrad shit, what a sad waste indeed.

– except we know that we are not having this argument because we are so fascinated by this or that bit of undergrad shit, come on, we know that.  We know we are all trotting out the undergrad shit again “for personal reasons.”  The reason we are trotting it out again is that we cannot seem to understand each others’ personal reasons.

And it would be so nice to just talk about this freely and openly, as about any other personal matter, without the protective shield of the argument, which is always beneath all of us.  (And yes, this applies just as well when the argument is something about the insufficiency of mere reason – did you think that wasn’t familiar undergrad shit, too?)  It would be so nice.  But for some reason this route is blocked to us, and must be forever blocked to us, and so we can only engage in these repetitive bouts, each clinging to the argument, as our forefathers have, yes, for millennia 

and sometimes we will even include the fact that this is all undergrad shit as part of the argument, as our forefathers did (Chesteron did it better than we ever will), and still we are doing this, as it has been done for millennia, even though when you think about it that’s really quite sad, and quite pathetic

but for some reason, the other route is blocked to us