Demosophia

Recommendation, and Happy New Year

Anticipatory Retaliation has the second installment in a magnum opus on the origins and evolution of the impulse to war, that's worth a look. I have a few problems with the role of chaos theory or "emergence" in such theories, but he has laid out a nicely ambitious starting point for a fruitful discussion about the tension between conflict and cooperation. It is clear that liberalism attempts to strike the correct balance between the two, but has not yet been able to manifest an overwhelmingly obvious winning formula. It is tremendously important that we publish, in some fasion, our own personal understandings of this liberal project, not because any one of us is necessarily right about everything, but because there's still a lot of unexpressed deadwood out there, and knowing about it allows us to approach a real understanding of ourselves that is more than skin-deep.

I want to encourage A.R. to publish part three when he has the time, and I'll do my best to respond as soon as the hangover from the New Years celebration wears off. I sincerely hope that there's something transcendantly profound about our attempt to publish our best throughts about the nature of the human predicament in the 21st Century, and I suspect that we'll begin to turn the tide in 2004. We've dicovered not only new insights into the nature of our society, but a new humor genre. Pretty robust human response. Smarter than your average bear. I'm going to cook some black-eyed peas and drink a decent Argentine Malbec in anticipation of one whale of a year. Happy New Years, everyone. May it live up to your work and preparation.