Diogenes and cynicism

Not being a classicist, I had not known much about the ancient philosopher Diogenes other than the story about him wandering around with a lantern trying to find an honest man and presumably failing.

But this video says that there was a lot more to him than that, that he was the founder of the philosophical school known as cynicism that meant something somewhat different from what we associate with the word nowadays.

Plato once described the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope as ‘a Socrates gone mad!’ It’s a good comparison. Like Socrates, Diogenes gave the bird to respectable society. He undermined status and manners in the 4th century BCE with his bottomless reserve of shamelessness and irreverence, opting to live on the streets like a stray dog. But, of course, there was a method to his madness. In this short video by TED-Ed, the Irish philosopher William D Desmond explains how Diogenes lived an authentic and ascetic life in accordance with nature, and how in doing so he founded the philosophy of cynicism – an iconoclastic tradition that continues to illuminate and infuriate today.

A lesser known aspect of Trump’s attempted coup

While much attention has focused on Trump inciting a mob to attack the US Capitol on January 6th, there was another activity that Trump was engaged in that shows the extent to which he was willing to go to overturn an election in which he lost. This alone is, to my mind, worthy of him being convicted in the trial. This occurred just before the insurrection and involved his attempt to use the department of justice to falsely claim that they were investigating election fraud claims. He was willing to go to the extent of firing the acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, who refused to send out such a letter, and replacing him with a lower level official Jeffrey Clark who came up with the idea and was willing to send it out.
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Get ready for the cicada explosion

My daughter graduated from college in 2004 and we went to her open-air graduation ceremony in New Jersey in late May of that year. It was a memorable event, not just because of the occasion but because it also coincided with the 17-year cycle for the emergence of cicadas in the eastern part of the US. This year will see the next emergence.

Billions of cicadas that have spent 17 years underground are set to emerge across large areas of the eastern US, bringing swarming numbers and loud mating calls to major towns and cities.

The periodic cicadas – bugs with strikingly red eyes, black bodies and orange wings – burrow underground as nymphs and suck fluids from the roots of plants as they grow, eventually bursting into the open as adults in mass synchronized events.

The last such event for 15 states including New York, Ohio, Illinois and Georgia occurred in 2004. The cicadas emerge in a 17-year cycle, meaning they will appear this year once temperatures are warm enough, expected to be mid-May.
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These tough guys turn out to be such snowflakes

One of the features of the insurrection of January 6th was the tough talk of the people invaded the Capitol building with weapons in what seemed, at least on the part of some, to be an effort to take congresspeople hostage. But as soon as they were arrested, they started to whine about how they have been so misunderstood and that they were not armed insurrectionists who planned to take over the government and prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president but were merely ordinary people only doing only what the president wanted them to do.
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Making chess more exciting

Chess is a game whose rules were determined centuries ago and are thought to be unchangeable. Chess aficionados would be offended at the idea that it is not exciting and that some changes might benefit it. Without getting into that particular argument, there is no question that because it is so rigidly structured, players nowadays, aided by computers, have studied and memorized most of the openings and defenses and their variations so that there is little surprise, at least in the early stages. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one reason I gave up chess was the realization that to really improve, I would have to drop all my other activities and devote myself to studying and memorizing a huge number of openings and defenses. This was just not worth it to me.
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Blame-shifting for the emergence of the coronavirus

There is a team of international scientists under the auspices of the UN currently in China to study the origins of the coronavirus, particularly how it made the jump from animals to humans. The first major outbreak occurred in Wuhan which instituted a massive lockdown that managed to suppress the spread so that the city is bustling with activity again, with traffic jams, busy restaurants and markets, and people now move around freely and do all the normal things, though there are still a few restrictions such as you have to wear masks all the time outdoors and groups of people must not exceed a dozen.
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Trump waived anti-lobbying rules on his way out

Trump campaigned in 2016 on being the only person who could ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington by getting rid of the influence peddling that is endemic there. One of his first acts was to impose a five-year ban on former aides lobbying. That was a good move for which he deserved credit. But it seems like he now thinks that the swamp is not such a bad place bad after all. On his way out the door, one of his very last acts was to rescind that rule.

Maybe it is because all the people who worked for him are finding it so hard to get jobs now and it was embarrassing for him to have close aides find themselves not being able to get lucrative work.