2.05.2005
mmm... cookies...
The Associated Press just reported on a couple of girls who baked cookies for their neighbors and left them on neighborhood doorsteps as a surprise. They caused anxiety and stress in one 49 year-old woman to the point where she sued them and they will be fined $900. The girls' families offered to pay for the woman's medical bills, but she declined saying that the offer had not been sincere or in person. The judge, in his infinite wisdom, decided in favor of the woman. It was, apparently, his opinion that while the girls had not acted maliciously, 10:30 was pretty late for them to have been out. The American legal system is idiotic.
On a different note... it's not just the American legal system. A taxi driver in Cambridge, England was stuck in traffic on his way to court. The presiding judge decided to proceed with the case because she had a full docket that day, and then called him up on his mobile as he was still stuck in traffic to sentence him to community service and to demand a fine. Ridiculous.
It's things like this that question the sanity of people in high places. Nevermind... So I've been preparing for a presentation on universal history due on Monday. This is interesting - evidently, universal history takes as its central premise that all histories are exactly the same, that patterns can be drawn from one civilization to another, that different deities in different cultures have analogues, like Ra and Zeus and Jupiter, and that it all boils down to a single pattern which repeats itself everywhere in infinite ways. In other words, it's a total crock, and I have to make it sounds palatable by Monday.
Here is a statement from an explanation of universal history by Raoul Mortley.
"A thing's wholeness thus becomes its purpose. This is clearly an idea which was ripe for use in history-writing, since the world had been made into a whole by Alexander. Narrow Greek-based histories were now clearly seen to be inadequate, and for this reason the Hellenistic writers look to models other than Thucydides. History now had to exhibit a geographical and cultural breadth, and under these circumstances the Aristotelian idea that the whole gives meaning to the parts, that the whole itself has a meaning and teleology, must have appeared singularly instructive."
WhatEVER. This is Philosophy meets History on the plane of Idiocy.
On a different note... it's not just the American legal system. A taxi driver in Cambridge, England was stuck in traffic on his way to court. The presiding judge decided to proceed with the case because she had a full docket that day, and then called him up on his mobile as he was still stuck in traffic to sentence him to community service and to demand a fine. Ridiculous.
It's things like this that question the sanity of people in high places. Nevermind... So I've been preparing for a presentation on universal history due on Monday. This is interesting - evidently, universal history takes as its central premise that all histories are exactly the same, that patterns can be drawn from one civilization to another, that different deities in different cultures have analogues, like Ra and Zeus and Jupiter, and that it all boils down to a single pattern which repeats itself everywhere in infinite ways. In other words, it's a total crock, and I have to make it sounds palatable by Monday.
Here is a statement from an explanation of universal history by Raoul Mortley.
"A thing's wholeness thus becomes its purpose. This is clearly an idea which was ripe for use in history-writing, since the world had been made into a whole by Alexander. Narrow Greek-based histories were now clearly seen to be inadequate, and for this reason the Hellenistic writers look to models other than Thucydides. History now had to exhibit a geographical and cultural breadth, and under these circumstances the Aristotelian idea that the whole gives meaning to the parts, that the whole itself has a meaning and teleology, must have appeared singularly instructive."
WhatEVER. This is Philosophy meets History on the plane of Idiocy.
