There are still about 48 days or so before Trump Is inaugurated and for all that time Biden is president. As he demonstrated by his decision to release missiles to the Ukrainians, his actions are not limited by the fact that he is a lame-duck. Apparently Americans owe somewhat more than one trillion dollars on their credit cards. .Does Biden have the authority to transfer any significant amount of that debt to federal agencies with much lower fees? No doubt Trump could cancel that act as soon as he comes to office, but that would be the whole point. Americans would experience a month and a half of debt relief and then perhaps blame Trump for its reestablishment.
For those of you who like myself obsessively watch television news, it is useful to recall that nobody has yet been appointed to anything because Trump is not yet inaugurated.
206 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 206 of 206That's pretty good advice.... However, it is just sad that in the waning days of The Philosophers Stone Professor Wolff's memory should be so besmirched by the trolls.
Hell is other people- perhaps hell is the Catholic Church- for whom does the dull bell toll, troll? It tolls for thee
Sooner or later, hopefully sooner, Professor Wolff's sons are going to have to close this blog.
So I'd like to pay a last tribute to Professor Wolff.
The most important lesson I learned from him is not his Marxism, which doesn't convince me much, but his insistence that one decides "which side one is on" and then supports that side.
The left isn't perfect, it's often dogmatic or full of bullshit or just naive, but I'm on the left.
The other day I was conversing with a longtime friend, feminist academic, and she was talking about a fellow academic, male, guilty of egregious misogynous conduct and how she and her fellow feminists don't want him to continue teaching in their university.
Being critical and contrarian, I first saw the nuances of the situation and as I was about to voice them, I thought of Professor Wolff and "which side are you on" and I began to try to give her helpful advice to achieve her feminist goals. I'm on the side of the feminists and that's that.
Great post s.w. I'll miss your posts when this closes. It's been good chatting with you these last few years.
Thank you very much for your kind words, David. I'll miss the interaction with you too.
Echoing DP 100%. Lovely comment, and thanks for nudging the conversation in a nicer and more appropriate direction.
My thoughts on Prof. Wolff:
I don't know his work in and out, but I've seen enough (and only a fraction of the total, at that) to be sure that he's what I think of as education (including educating) at its best.
Philosophy is so good, but it also has SO much baggage. It's easier to say - and to exemplify oneself - what's bad about it (the elitism, the vain posing and sparring, the obscurantism, the pedantry, the pretentiousness, the dullness/triviality/'silliness', and on and on...) than it is to surmount these obstacles and say what's good about it. But there is good to philosophy - you just 'know' when it graces you somehow, even if you call it something else entirely, even when its source looks nothing like a philosophy course or text. Just an occasional whiff of the stuff (probably all that's available to even the pros) is something you'd wish for everyone to experience; it grabs you like hardly anything else.
But easier said than done. As far as I've been able to find, philosophers and philosophy enthusiasts - just by the nature of the subject - tend to sound like dorks and aliens and worse, often overwhelmingly, despite their best efforts to avoid this. But a good educator - like Prof. Wolff - will know this and yet struggle and struggle against this in order to share as many whiffs of the good stuff as circumstances allow. Much/most philosophical writing is nearly impossible to do this with, and I think Prof. Wolff would be thrilled to know that his efforts succeeded at times! (The "at times" is not a dig - I think it's the most an educator can realistically hope for!)
I don't know the 'formula' for a well-lived life, but in the vaguest, most vacuous-sounding outline (all I've got), it seems to go like: Seek what's good, hope to find it, and - what's probably inseparable from the task itself - try to share it. This seems to sum up Prof. Wolff's life as an educator.
And thanks BTW for letting us commenters do our little thing for all this time.
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