A life in words

  • Boko Maru

    At a jazz festival I once heard a band called Boko Maru. They were really fun to see, and I’d like to hear their music again. Yet the band seems to have ceased to be quite a while ago. (See this archived version of their old web page and this review.) So here’s a request:…

  • Conflicting Views of Georgia

    I’m not sure who out there has been paying attention to this when they could be watching Michael Phelps swim, but a conflict has arisen between Georgia (the country, not the US state) and Russia over a separatist region known as South Ossetia (technically part of Georgia, though in essence independent.) Here are a few…

  • Solzhenitsyn (Updated)

    I just learned of the August 3rd 2008 death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1970 and author of the monumental GULAG Archipelago. Many were his critics, East and West, but to me Solzhenitsyn was a hero. A quotation from the New York Times’s obituary sums it up: Hundreds of well-known intellectuals…

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion…. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations…. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form….John Stuart Mill, On LIberty