An odd poll…
Inspired by fenwickrysen‘s recent poll, a question I once asked a friend of mine when we were silghtly inebriated:
Interesting politics.
Well, since I’m not using that politics filter right now, I’ll just hide things behind a cut instead…
Oh, fsck…
[Hi everyone – I’ve gotten enough “signup” requests for this politics filter that it’s obviously a bit on the useless side. So if anyone doesn’t want to be on this filter, LMK instead; otherwise I’ll just say bugger it and post unfiltered]
Apparently the Prime Minster of Serbia, Zoran Djindjic, was just assassinated. (Store here)
While I know that this isn’t directly correlated with anything else going on in the world right now, there’s something deeply unsettling about assassinations of major political figures in the Balkans at this sort of moment.
Just to make things more cheerful, here are my notes from my latest “political analysis” file – it’s datestamped the 7th, and I haven’t had time to render it into human-readable form, but some of it still seems fairly relevant.
Successes for the day
Spent the morning in the coffee shop, getting work done; then spent an excellent day with gaaneden, walking, eating, watching the Kenshin OVA, and generally spending some quality time together.
Now the evening has been spent eating bread, cheese and olives, working on a computation to show why the current project isn’t likely to work, and looking back at some of the moral issues I was thinking about at the cafe earlier. I think I’m closer to an explaination of some of the key ideas I’m looking for about the nature of divine benevolence and the existence of evil. Need to clean this up, then enter it into the main philosophy log book.
I think some coherent picture is starting to emerge in that logbook, about the moral philosophy of good and evil. It’s funny how putting down ideas over a period of time can lead to some sense spontaneously arising. At some point I may have to restructure it into something human-readable. Right now I pity anyone who tries to parse it.
Also have some preliminary ideas on how to translate (in my copious free time, of course) verse 28 of Cohen’s “Book of Mercy” (the one that begins “You who pour mercy into hell”), especially after a conversation with Monte on words for “hell” in Aramaic. It’s very cool to have the sorts of friends one can discuss things like this with.
New filter
Hi everyone,
I’m going to start making a politics filter, to keep various analyses and news bulletins and so on out of the hair of people who don’t want to read that. So if you want on this new filter, comment or drop me an e-mail.
Aramaic
In Kaddish (one of the core Jewish prayers, a general statement of the blessing of the Name,
which is medieval in origin and in Aramaic) the name is said to be “blessed beyond all prayers
which are uttered in the world.” (da’amiran bealma)
However, this (standard) translation doesn’t quite seem correct. Da’amiran, which is usually translated
as “which are uttered,” should really be translated as “which can be uttered.” (Aram. “Da” =
Heb. “she,” which; aram. “-an” = heb. “-im,” plural suffix; “amir,” in both Aram and Heb., is the
adjectival form of “le’emor,” to utter, and thus means “utterable.”)
Or am I mistranslating the suffix? Hmm, not sure…
This has been another useless fact.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 