Post for the sake of posting...

[avevale_intelligencer]

LJ seems to be back, but for how long I don't know. Various people have pointed out that Russia has just had an election, for want of a better word, with the implication that LJ was shut down to prevent people in Russia talking about it and maybe advising each other on how to vote. I have various problems with this, one being that presumably they just rig elections the same way everybody else does, so why bother? To me it seems more like a test run for a complete shutdown, the final refutation of our glowy hippy romantic daydream that the Net was somehow free and For The People and beyond the control of the Man (man). With the American government busily trying to push through legislation which would give them similar powers to shut down any site they don't like, it all seems very much of a piece to my paranoid little mind.

Anyway. We are still here. Mostly hibernating, and prone to various bug-type nasties, but still here and still alive. Not doing science, though, which is probably for the best.

This, from Maisie Ward's biography of Chesterton, struck a chord with me:

"In his sociology, he did the same thing that his best critics blamed in his literary autobiographies. He would take some one fact and appear to build upon it an enormous superstructure and then, very often, ir would turn out that the fact itself was inaccurately set down; and the average reader, discovering the inaccuracy, felt that the entire superstructure was on a rotten foundation and had fallen with it to the ground. Yet the ordinary reader was wrong. The 'fact' had not been the foundation of his thought, but only the thing that had started him thinking. If the 'fact' had not been there at all, his thinking would have been neither more nor less valid. But most readers could not see the distinction."

Valid point or feeble excuse? You decide.

Comments

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

"Valid point or feeble excuse? You decide. "

Hmm.

It certainly *can* be either a valid point *or* a feeble excuse. To determine which it is in this case, I would first have to familiarise myself with a significant proportion of the work of Chesterton himself, and then of his critics (whom I suspect may legion, and possibly uncountable). Or, I suppose I could buy Ward's biography and see how good a job she does of laying the ground for her own assertion, and then critique that in isolation, hedged around with caveats about the fact that I was dealing purely with the evidence *as selected and presented by Ward herself*.

That's the trouble when people say things about what other people have said about what somebody else once opined: It's so far removed from anything real that it seems not worth the trouble of worying about.

But the lesson we could draw from Ward's comment - regardless of whether she's actually right about her observation in this specific case (you see what I did there? =:o} ) - is that human thought processes often carry a high degree of redundancy, and so when evaluating a conclusion one needs to analyse the entire argument that leads to it, link by link; not just let it stand or fall on the first axiom that gets mentioned (or any other single link along the way), because in the final analysis that datum may prove to have a null impact on the outcome of the argument as a whole.

So my decision is... More tea, then back to bed.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

A wise course of action, young sir, and one that GKC himself would doubtless have approved n the circumstances. :)

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

This is the Theory Jack built.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Indeed! And that's just the linear one-dimensional version. *Real* logic - where every question raised potentially begets a new set of dimensions of the problem, any or all of which may be orthogonal to every factor/dimension considered thus far - gets *much* more complex. =:o}

Now, how are we doing on that design for the Mark 3 Ward/Chesterton Validator/Invalidator Engine? Has that blasted Starchild sobered up enough from last time to put on the harness yet?

[howeird]

Not feeble, but having read a couple of Chesterton's books on his American travels I ran across this a few times, and was happy enough to take the constructions as "what if?".

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Is that an IP address on that icon? Because I never expected to see one of those wound around a heart and two roses, but I can't figure out what else meets that format.

[howeird]

127.0.0.1 is the universal IP address of your own machine, also known as "localhost". Whether you have a connection to a network or not, your default network card will answer to that address. I'm not sure about a Mac, but on most other platforms the command "ping localhost" or "ping 127.0.0.1" will test whether your network card is working. My nephew has that address on his welcome mat. :-)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

That's cool. :-) And of course you love your own computer, hence the heart and the roses.

[howeird]

Well, since it is the home address of any network device, I like to think the icon translates as "Home sweet home". :-)

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Coooo1!