Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
AnarchoGeeks to conquer the (poker) world...

John Kennedy at No Treason! is putting together "the first annual No Treason Invitational Poker Tournament." I had an idea like this a long time ago, but John is actually doing something about it. Invitations are tightly restricted to people who ask to be invited, so ask John for an invite.

Patri Friedman, son of David, grandson of Milton, and a professional poker player, is invited ex officio. And I've encouraged my old friend Andrew Breese to get himself invited; Andrew is a post-Objectivist recovering Juris Doctor who grinds out a part-time income filleting fish on Party Poker. But despite all my jabbering about poker, you need not worry about me. I'll even telegraph my table image, to make things easy for you. I'm a tight-passive normally, loose-passive in the blinds and loose-aggressive on the button. And I always fold to any big bet. Always. Honest!

But what about the risk of loss? Cathy brought this up this morning, and I really want her to play because I love to take her money. It seems to be bubbling under the suface in the comments at No Treason, too. Actual fact: Your risk of monetary loss is eleven bucks. Shame, humiliation, ignominy, flushed cheeks and embarrassing perspiration, possibly, too, just like when you screwed up when were learning to drive. But the actual financial risk is eleven bucks. And if you win...

This is going to rock. It would be even cooler to do it live at the Bellagio, but this will be a lot of fun and a lot easier to coordinate. See you at the tables!
posted by Greg Swann at 9:30 AM

 
A botched overture to a modified limited hang-out...?

Drudge:

Kerry supporters are comparing the effort by the veterans to the Arkansas State troopers tell-all against Bill Clinton.

What would that mean, except that the charges are true? I don't think Kerry is Clinton's equal as a liar, though.
posted by Greg Swann at 9:21 PM

 
Train the memory, train the mind, train the man

The Summer issue of City Journal has a nice article on the importance of memorization as a building block of Western Civilization. The author's main concern is classic poetry, but his argument applies just as well to foreign language, to music, to math--to all those disciplines now excluded from the public schools.

But the progressives' educational philosophy is only superficially a philosophy of liberty. The progressive exercises in "guided fantasy" and "sensitivity training" that have replaced memorization and recitation do little to free kids' selves. The older techniques, by contrast, are genuinely liberating. They build up in the child a more powerful mental instrument, one that will allow him, in later life, to make good use of his freedom. They cultivate those critical powers that enable an educated adult to question authority intelligently. The older techniques also unlock doors in the interior world of the soul. Classic poetry and rhetoric give kids a language, at once subtle and copious, in which to articulate their own thoughts, perceptions, and inchoate feelings. They help awaken what was previously dormant, actualize what was before only potential, and so enable the young person to fulfill the injunction of Pindar: "Become what you are."

This kind of memorization does not impose upon young minds a single dogma, nor does it exalt, as the Islamic madrassa does, a single text above all others. If anything, it is the progressive liturgies--with their "diversity" drills and cult of self-esteem--that embody a narrow and intolerant ideology, one that imprisons kids in the banal clichˇs of the present and puts much of the past off limits, as though the moral and spiritual inheritance of Western civilization were somehow taboo. The literary culture at the heart of these exercises in memorization, by contrast, is a record of how men and women have, in various times and places, struggled to understand themselves and make sense of their natures. Such culture does not repress or enslave: it enlarges and strengthens and frees.

posted by Greg Swann at 8:14 AM

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