The “ich”

From Mencken’s The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche- Acutely aware of his own superiority, he showed no patience with the unctuous complacency of dons and dignitaries, and so he became embroiled in various conflicts, and even his admirers among his colleagues seldom ventured upon friendly advances. There are critics who see in all this proof that [...]

WikiLeaks

I quoted this part from a report on East European and Asian police states yesterday: “[China-based experts] pointed out that if the security services wanted to hound or close advocacy groups, they had many other ways of doing so.” The civilized West is just as bad- The whistleblowing group WikiLeaks claims that it has had [...]

Ego, Ayodhya, pirates etc

Some people enjoy thinking about ways to spend other people’s money, the men who eat other people’s cabbages, as Ernest Benn described them. Mukesh Ambani spending his money on his house irks such people. Why didn’t he donate the money to charity? How dare he build a home worth a billion dollars plus in Mumbai [...]

A disingenuous argument

The AV Club has published an interview with “new atheist” Sam Harris about his new book on morality and how it can be grounded in science if everyone accepts his standard of morality- With his new book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Harris has shifted from the more philosophical and social [...]

“Their threats chill free speech”

Salil Tripathi on the Shiv Sena’s book-banning campaign- Mistry’s is not the only novel to show Mumbai’s parochial patriarchs. Earlier this year, Murzban Shroff, coincidentally another Parsi author, faced a lawsuit from an activist called Vijay Mudras, who was upset that a character in one of his stories referred to Marathi-speaking people as ghaatis. Shroff’s [...]