January 03, 2009

Well Clint Eastwood Does Want to Take Down the Bullies ...

One presumes he wouldn't favor taking things this far, but since he does seem to think thoughtless violence is the way to solve the problems of teenagers ...

Posted by armand at January 3, 2009 10:20 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Movies


Comments

Wow, that last quothe couple Eastwood lines are about the funniest thing I've heard in days. There is wisdom there; pacifism only makes sense philosophically, and even then it is suspect. Pacifism really has no meaning without bellacosity, defining itself as the absence of aggression; and in claiming moral superiority it seeks to aggressively wipe out that aggression without which it could not exist.

Posted by: Morris at January 5, 2009 11:59 PM | PERMALINK

Well, sure, if you define it that way - though can't it be defined as X as opposed to the absence of Y?

In any event Eastwood is an idiot, no matter what one thinks of pacifism (or how it's defined).

Posted by: Armand at January 6, 2009 12:16 AM | PERMALINK

Just like Gerald Ford.

The trouble with tacitly defining pacifism as something besides the absence of aggression is that you'd still end up with a bunch of words like tranquility (the absence of conflict), or you could operationally define it (when a person gets hurt, they don't fight back). But that still puts it as the absence of a thing. You could define it as WWJD, but then if you defined JD in that context, it's square one again.

Equal and opposite reaction is the assumption which pacificm seeks to disprove, but where does that force go? In physics, it may not be an elastic equal and opposite collision, but it may be an inelastic collision (assimilate, that Borg thing) which continues in the original direction or is altered as the path of the collided object is altered, but pacifism makes the case that it doesn't have to be altered (that's the point about it making sense philosophically), so we're talking post newtonian assumptions rather than opposing forces as they're pictured in a collision.

You could define pacifism as the presence of love (arguable, since what value is placed upon the loving creation centered in the pacifist, which in a moral hierarchy valuing pacifism should have the highest place, is the value which is allowed to be destroyed; unless you consider that it is the relation of aggressor to pacifist that is valued which as before requires the presence of aggression for that value to exist) but then you've just traded the word peace for love and the word aggression for hate, so it's still square one.

I don't suppose you had a particular X in mind?

Posted by: Morris at January 6, 2009 12:47 AM | PERMALINK

I dunno, I heard an NPR interview with him recently in which he came across as very much not idiotic. One wonders if he was funnin' with the interviewer, and if so, which one?

Posted by: jacflash at January 6, 2009 06:57 AM | PERMALINK

Good lord, Morris, what!?

Posted by: moon at January 6, 2009 05:35 PM | PERMALINK
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