An ode to Silly Gods and Monkey Librarians...

Terry Pratchett is fading away of early-onset Alzheimer's, he of the charming anthropomorphic personifications, Vimesy and the magnificient Weatherwax. Puck you, malignant spirit that would dare covet him so early...
He does not so much slip in an allegory as whack you on the head with it, subtlety to him is something that is rumoured to exist in the far shores of lit-academia, yet his words fill me with a sublime wonder and magic in a way that almost nobody else can any longer. The breathtaking clarity of a world so simple, a world full of problems so seemingly like ours and yet so much more... PG-13.
I so wanted to see where Destiny would take Carrot and his enigmatic sword, and Granny Weatherwax who so reminded me of my creepy great grand-mom and the awe I used to feel at her limitless earthy wisdom and conviction and owlish stare that laid bare and trivialized all my supposed secrets.
His works are at heart the greatest pantheistic vision realized in all fantasy that I have read - he appreciated an insight that is almost unattainable for the Tolkiens and LeGuins and especially the Lewises bought up on the Judeo-Christian trope of a world in black and white, of a clear demarcation between Good and Evil and Right and Wrong and things Done or Undone - he saw the world filled with Small Gods as one filled with wonder and of course, some unavoidable ugliness; where Other Things cannot easily be dismissed or enslaved or destroyed; and where the acceptance of multiplicity rids (or at least tempers) the world of its burning need to convert, or convince or efface other histories.
When other greater writers made the object of their protagonists' mission McGuffins while the journey revealed profound truths about existence, he made the act of seeking itself a McGuffin: The notion that it is all a bit of a silly joke, not exactly fatalism, but eulogizing this ability to laugh at ourselves as we do the things we are supposed, driven to do.
That it is fine if all this amounts to nothing at all...

i now died (a little)

I have now drunk summer-

And faced the wrath of its sullen child,

pregnant of horror and dirt and snuff dreams-

In the city of murky darknesses and dazzling di-lights

In which I hold forth on the virtues of armchair philosophizing and other such distractions...

What would be gained? The knowledge that their hatred is genuine.When all calumnies have been refuted, all distortions rectified, all false notions about us rejected, antipathy will remain as something irrefutable...

Moritz Goldstein on why it was pointless to fight German anti-Semitism with reason

Just something that came to mind upon being shown videos of Mr Thackeray trying to whip up a loyal fan-base by returning to the basics, listing grievances I do not know about, and so cannot comment on. And yet, the muffled rumble of the assembled crowd was scary...

Which leads me to this post by an extremely smart lady, who questions the right of this other guy to decide the lyrics of some song is not offensive enough to be banned; on the grounds he has probably not had enough first-hand experience of casteism to comment on it. The merits of the guy's argument are beside the point, but does he require experience to have an opinion? If so, how much experience, and who decides? I know, the old 'who decides' donkey that has been so ruthlessly flogged over the last couple of centuries it can barely lift an eyebrow to defend itself.

But the danger implicit in this kind of thinking is far less obvious; the more one learns, and the smarter and more sophisticated one's outlook towards life becomes, it becomes easier to simply reject other opinions as less informed, less intelligent or as simply plain dumb. Conversations and arguments tend get concentrated to between rarefied realms of almost equals who harbor roughly similar beliefs and convictions on perhaps the extent of the role of the state in their anarchosyndicalist societies (or something else equally incomprehensible to most of us)...

Back to preacher-man mode: Revelation in a barber-shop in Kerala a month ago when I failed miserably to convince a group there of the alethic and epistemic modalities implicit in the ambivalent statement in a newsletter, 'Research suggests it is possible that prayer promotes physical well-being' - Every opinion has value, hovewer misinformed or silly; and has to be argued on its merits, for this constant act of re-affirmation make us re-examine the foundations and assumptions upon which all our convictions are based on...

The one where I sermonize emptily...

The world would value an Indian life the same as we would value it... When a blast that kills 60 has to fight for space on the front-page with Shoaib Akhtar's spell, why is it not surprising that the New York Times barely deigns to even report it. Pain need not, and perhaps should not be viciousness, anger and an undirected need to bomb, murder or destroy some vaguely defined 'Them'; but still...
Today's read if you will so...
http://www.crosscurrents.org/farley2005.htm
A theory of Fundamentalism. Simplistic sometimes, with significant logical flaws; but captivating, nevertheless.

Bah, WTF