Meanwhile, it was my blog anniversary on December 11 and I did nothing to mark it.
The funny thing, to me anyway, about that is that I later decided my very first post wasn't good enough to be a first post and later went back and backdated two others. Looking at them now, the two backdated posts seem trite and fake and the first post stands up pretty well. There is a lesson there. I will paste it into the bottom of this message.
Meanwhile, here are the most popular posts in the history of the blog:
We're flawed because we want so much more
This is about a Mad Men episode from last September. It was neither the best episode nor my best post but I did predict a number of then upcoming plot points correctly. This is by far my most popular post with 18 people coming in to see it this week alone. I have no idea why.
One more try on the Phillipa Foot post
One of a series of posts wherein I try to explain why the trolley problem is not morally or intellectually serious. I'm not sure I succeeded but several hundred people have read it. (Or two or three people have read it a hundred times each.0
Somewhat related to my earlier post
One of the rare ocassions when I thought Ann Althouse's judgment was flawed.
666?
This post looks into and debunks theories about a weird "666" that appears in the background of a Mad Men shot.
The Silent Generation
A post that is ostensibly about a mad men episode but was really me thinking about my father's generation.
To read the post click on "Read More" below:
Strength is a virtue
I was rereading Alasdair MacIntyre the other day and something that had never seemed terribly significant or controversial jumped out at me. This:At least some of the items in a homeric list of the aretai would clearly not be counted by most of us as virtues at all, physical strength being the most obvious example. (After Virtue p181)I should preface this by saying that MacIntyre is surpassed by only Jane Austen in my personal pantheon of moral thinkers.
That said, I still think he is wrong. Physical strength isn't the most significant virtue but I think it is a virtue and I think we all know it is. You can see it quite clearly where I live, and where we got a big dump of snow yesterday. A man or woman who is incapable of helping push a car out of the snow or of shoveling a driveway is morally deficient. Yes, there are legitimate excuses, old age and serious spinal injuries for example, but failing some such excuse it is a moral requirement to have a certain amount of physical strength.
This is not to say that physical strength is the most important virtue and it matters a whole lot what you use that strength to do but a virtue it is.
This comes out very clearly when I need help. If I go ask Dennis, who is much stronger than me, to help me push my car out of a snow bank, I have to treat his strength as a virtue if I am to show any moral consistency at all. If I think, “Well, you’re just a stupid bonehead Dennis but I really need your help so I am going to pretend to admire you just to get the help,” then I am treating Dennis as just a means and not as an end.
Congratulations, Jules. Even as someone intimately familiar with the inner workings of your blog, I had not realized that this august date had come and gone.
ReplyDeleteThanks for a year of very interesting insights on a wide, wide range of subjects. And, here's to many more!