Dream Log: Top Apps For Celebrities Only

Last night's dream was strange on several levels. For one thing, it had to do with some celebrities, such as Jessica Simpson, about whom I rarely think except to wonder why they're celebrities. Some people might say about Jessica Simpson that, talented or not, she's gorgeous. The thing is that, to me, she's not even particularly interesting-looking. I can understand when someone who's not particularly talented is a superstar if I think they're gorgeous, like, for instance, Raquel Welch in the 1970's,

but then there are others where I just don't get it. And last night's dream was about celebrities about whom I just don't get it. In fact, they are celebrities who are so uninteresting to me that I can't even remember, now that I'm awake, who they are, other than Jessica Simpson. There were about a half dozen of them, both genders, most, I guess about as old as Ms Simpson (39 years old) and with careers which peaked about the same time as hers (late 1990's and early 2000's).

Another thing which was strange about the dream is that I was acting like a celebrity-hater, which I'm not. I've never been able to understand why people go to the trouble of commenting that this or that celebrity, in their opinion, is hideous is some way or another. For example, above, I gave my opinion that Jessica Simpson is not gorgeous. I only said that to try to express how strange I found it that I was dreaming about her, and not because I think anybody has the slightest reason to care that I don't find her to be gorgeous, Jessica Simpson herself least of all, among other reasons because, of course, many people DO think she's absolutely gorgeous.

Anyway -- in this dream, I was wasting my time intensely disliking Jessica Simpson and some other celebrities for some reason or reasons I can't fathom now that I'm awake. And in this dream, there was a certain kind of app which was offered only to celebrities. Billionaires couldn't buy these apps, unless they had managed to make themselves into celebrities as well as billionaires, like -- Mark Cuban. These apps would transform the celebrities in some way. It was sort of like plastic surgery without the wait and the physical pain. There were lists of these celebrity apps on websites: for each celebrity associated with the apps program, there was a list of apps, each one with a picture of the celebrity showing what the app did.

And what exactly the apps did, is not clear to me. I mentioned plastic surgery because it's the closest real-world example I can think of. All that's clear about these apps is that they were exclusive, and that a wide public was envious of the celebs for having the apps -- envy of celebrities: there's another thing, liking hating celebrities, which I can't understand -- and that the celebrities were sort of addicted to the apps. A lot of celebrities steered clear of this sort of thing the way they steered clear of alcohol or recreational drugs.

For some reason, I was put in charge of the apps having to do with these half-dozen or so celebrities. And with gleeful hatred, I discontinued some of the apps which had been offered to Jessica Simpson and the half-dozen others. When I made the changes in the apps, the pictures in the online lists of apps, instead of simply disappearing, changed into other pictures of the celebs.

Jessica Simpson got very angry at me and complained, publicly, wearing a long, tight sequined dress, with an elaborate hairdo with her hair piled up high and with strands of diamonds holding her hair in place. It was not clear whether she was physically near me and we both were being filmed at the same time, or if we were communicating with some sort of Internet video-phone setup, like Skype except more elaborate. Either way, we were top news on shows like "Entertainment Tonight," which showed video of her complaining in the sequined dress with the elaborate hairdo, and me sitting at my computer and smirking like the weasel and jerk I was acting like.

I just want to say that, in real waking life, I have absolutely no reason to even say something mean to Jessica Simpson, and that my behavior in this dream seems very unlike myself. The apps seem like something (some completely fictional thing) which might have been dangerous, but to take them away from someone out of sheer spite is really completely unlike me.

What Joe Said

Sarah Silverman liked and re-tweeted a tweet by an African-American woman whose name I didn't know, saying that a white guy doesn't get to tell black people they're not black if they support the most racist President since Woodrow Wilson over him. I was about to comment on Silverman's tweet with something like "White woman likes tweet by black woman telling white people that they don't get to tell black people they're not black if they support the world's biggest living racist nightmare," but before I could make the comment, Ms Silverman's tweet had disappeared.

Perhaps because in the meantime, Biden had apologized for his comment to Charlemagne Tha God,

saying "perhaps I was much too cavalier" and "I shouldn't have been such a wise guy."

The whole thing, wise-ass insensitive remark, Twitter uproar and apology, happened within a few hours.

Another way you can tell Biden apart from Trump: he apologized for saying something dumb. Remember? Apologies? That thing we haven't heard from a US President in 3 and a half years?

The Science-Humanities Split

Perhaps you've heard: STEM -- Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics -- and the humanities -- art, literature, history, music, etc -- have split apart from one another.

Perhaps you've just read the previous sentence, and asked: Whaddya talkin' about, Steve? Was there some time when science and art actually got along?

Oh yes. The time was up until the eighteenth century, and can perhaps be seen most dramatically in Western civilization -- I really don't have much of a clue about non-Western civilizations, but I'm trying to catch up -- in the example of philosophy, and of individual philosophers. Up until a few centuries ago, the leading philosophers were also the leading mathematicians and scientists, and people generally took for granted that this was so. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz were the leading philosophers and the leading mathematicians of their time. Newton was a leading scientist and mathematician, but he left scarcely a mark in what today is generally considered to be philosophy. The split seems to be beginning already in Newton's time. Kant, Schopenahuer, Marx, Nietzsche and the other most prominent 19th-century philosophers are not, to my knowledge, enthusiastically read today by most scientists. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead were prominent 20th-century mathematicians and philosophers, but they were very unusual in being both at the same time. In the 21st century, Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse and Lawrence Krauss Tyson have said that philosophy is worthless, without causing much of an uproar among their fellow scientists, which shows you how little you can know about philosophy today and still be a brilliant scientist.

My brother, an engineer, goes probably even farther than Hawking and deGrasse Tyson and Krauss in his ignorant dismissal of philosophy -- and that's all this is: ignorance. If Hawking or deGrasse Tyson or Krauss or my brother knew very much at all about philosophy, they wouldn't say such things.

This unfortunate split, this destructive antagonism between two vital types of human endeavor is not, of course, all the fault of the scientists. Those who have objected to the dismissal philosophy by prominent scientists have included other prominent scientists. And it's certainly not as if all philosopher, artists, musicians, poets etc, have a decent appreciation of STEM. There is plenty of fault on both sides of the split.

I've tried to bring the sciences and the humanities back together, but I could've done much more. I stopped studying math in school just as soon as I was allowed to stop studying it, after completing 10th-grade geometry. I usually had the best math grades in my class -- the only exception I can remember was in 9th-grade algebra. The teacher posted a constantly-updated list of the members of the class by our current grade. I don't remember whether A was 90% and up, or 94% and up, or what exactly. I do remember that it was possible to score above 100% with extra-credit work, and that the 2 of us at the top of the list were over 100%, and that I wasn't on top. That felt very strange, not being the best math student in sight.

That 9th-grade algebra teacher, and some other math teachers I had, talked to me very excitedly about how far I would be able to go in math. They didn't realize that I didn't enjoy math at all. It was my undiagnosed autism which allowed me to make those grades without trying and without being interested.

The 9th grade was 45 years ago. Since then I've made a few feeble attempts to make more progress in math, which, it seems to me, would amount to developing an interest in and enjoyment of math. I was talking to a math teacher the other day, and he said, You have to enjoy math to go far in it.

My brother was valedictorian in high school and got 2 degrees from MIT. He enjoys math. During one of those periods when I was trying to develop an enjoyment, my brother gave me his copy of the 5th edition of Calculus and Analytic Geometry by Thomas and Finney, one of his former MIT textbooks. He's a good brother, even though he is an appalling philistine when it comes to the arts.

Pages 355 through 362 of this book are missing. Did my brother remove these pages before giving me the book? Are there things on pages 355 to 362 which, my brother decided, must remain hidden from librul artistic types such as me?

I still haven't made that big breakthrough, to where I enjoy math. Although, in the past year or so, chess, mildly interesting to me already for decades, has become much more interesting, and a large part of chess, or maybe all of it, is math. (Well, no, not all of it. There's also psychology in sizing up one's opponent.)

And when people like Melvin Schwarz -- co-recipient of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics -- are writing about things like vectors, I actually understand part of it. So, hey, lookit that, I actually have learned some calculus! Schwarz also writes things like: "Electromagnetic theory is beautiful!" And I believe him even thought I still don't understand it.


And I still want to understand. So that I can enjoy math at last, and for many other reasons.

Who knows: maybe, if I understand things like advanced physics, I'll become much better at helping people like Neil deGrasse Tyson appreciate things like existentialism.

300 LB Sandbags

As regular readers of this blog and a few others know, I've been obsessed with 300-lb slam balls for some time. The thing is, there's only one company I know of which makes slam balls that big, Iron Company. And while I have no reason to doubt that Iron Company makes first-rate equipment, their slam balls are expensive. The 300-pounder costs $1608 on Amazon, over $5 a pound. I got a 45-pounder and a 100-pounder from other companies for about $1 a pound. Including free 2-day shipping. I've searched and searched for some other company that makes slam balls as big as 300 pounds at any price, with no success.

There is another option which I've actually known about for a while: sandbags. Sandbags made for people to exercise with get much heavier than 300 pounds.

The real question is: why has it only been the past day or so that I've actually thought about getting one?

Here's a short video of a guy doing the same thing with a 300-pound sandbag as a person would do with a 300-pound slam ball:



If you want to get all picky and insist that it's NOT the same, because that bag is not round: there are other sandbags which are much closer to round. And I'm not even sure how valid that complaint is. There are sandbags with handles, and I'm not getting one of those.

Searching for a 300 lb sandbag is a totally different experience than searching for a 300 lb medicine ball or 300 lb slam ball or 300 lb dead ball. When you search for the ball you find almost nothing which has to do with a ball anywhere near 300 lbs, and what little you find about 300 lb balls is about that extremely expensive option from Iron Company (Which, again, is a very fine product, I'm sure).

When you search for a 300 lb sandbag, the difference is night and day: you instantly find many, many links, and many, many videos showing people working out with 300 lb sandbags, and, in short: mystery solved.

A sandbag designed to be filled with 300 pounds of sand and then lifted and dropped and tossed about for purposes of exercise, seems to run about $100 on Amazon, give or take. Sand not included.

Sand appears to run about 5 to 15 cents a pound at places like Home Depot. 300 pounds of the extra-fancy 15-cents-a-pound sand would total $45. Total cost: maybe $150 or less total for a 300-pound bag ready to be exercised with. Plus one trip to some place like Home Depot. Which means that, by looking into something I actually already knew about, looking onto it for about 2 minutes, I've already found about 1458 reasons why 300-pound slam balls are not offered for sale everywhere I look.

Okay then. Sandbags it is. Unless I suddenly become very wealthy, which of course would be nice. But you know what? Even if I were extremely wealthy, 1458 bucks would still be 1458 bucks. I'm just sayin'.

"Is Quartz Finally Cool?"

That's a headline at Time & Tide, an Australian website devoted to watches. They're asking whether quartz watches are cool now. The answer is no. Time & Tide, for some reason, have jumped onto the quartz bandwagon with both feet, and all it's done is make Time & Tide less cool.

For decades, there have been only two kinds of cool watches with quartz in them: Casio G-Shocks, indestructible, mostly very cheap quartz watches, mostly with digital readouts, with various additional functions, timers, alarms, lights etc, on various models, popular with military commandos and action-adventure movie tough guys; and Grand Seiko Spring Drives, which, although each one has a piece of quartz in it, aren't really "quartz watches" in the usual sense. As the name implies, a Spring Drive is driven by a spring. The quartz is there to help it run more accurately. I don't understand how, but I still think it's really cool -- and definitely NOT a quartz watch. They cost four figures and up. The G-Shock, like most devices referred to as "quartz watches," is powered by a battery which needs to be replaced every now and then. No battery in the Spring Drive.

There are also no batteries in some electronic watches, such as those powered by light, which strikes me as being much cooler than the battery-driven option. Do they also each have a piece of quartz crystal inside, like the Grand Seiko Spring Drive, to make them more accurate? I'm not sure, which should give you some idea of the overall quality of this blog post. I think they do. In any case, in most devices referred to as "quartz watches," there are batteries which need to be replaced every couple of years or so, more often if unusual stress is put on the battery by constantly turning on a light in the dial or by heavy use of some other extra functions. Some G-Shocks are described as "solar." Does this mean they use light instead of batteries, or in addition to batteries? I don't know. Some G-Shocks can be had for as little as $30 or so, most for under $100, and a very few extra-fancy ones cost more than $1000.

Some people say that this is all very simple: quartz watches are better, they say, because the purpose of a watch is to tell time, and quartz watches are more accurate. These people are completely missing the point of watch ownership. We have accurate electronic timepieces in our laptops and phones, on the dashboards of our cars, in our TV's and radios and microwave ovens and so forth. We wear watches because we like them, not because we need them. It's been quite a while since anybody has actually needed a watch. Rather than actually using our watches to tell time, we use all of the above-mentioned electronic timepieces to measure how accurate our spring-driven watches are.

The brilliant watch manufacturer Urwerk recently underscored this point when they introduced a watch sold together with a suitcase-sized portable atomic clock which very, very accurately sets the time on the watch.

Combined price: over two and a half million dollars, mostly for the atomic clock, although it's a very, very nice spring-driven watch, as are all Urwerk watches. I wonder how many people get the joke.

Hackers

I've just recently begun watching YouTube videos of hackers giving presentations at conferences like DEF CON. They all either seem to be security consultants, or university professors, or both. A company will hire them to "break their stuff," as they call it: to circumvent their security, and then to report to the company and advise them how to make themselves more secure. They seem to typically make a lot of money, the ones giving conference presentations on YouTube videos -- at least: a lot of money compared to, for instance, me.

Several of them have spoken of Edward Snowden in glowing terms, and said that the world is safer today because of him.

I don't like Snowden. I saw a recent interview with him. The interviewer pressed him hard to give opinions on current politics. The worse that he would say about Trump is that Trump needs a hug. He repeatedly insisted that he is non-partisan. However, that didn't stop him from making extremely negative references to the Clintons, Obama, and members of the Clinton and Obama administrations, or publicly supporting Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 campaigns.

Several of the hackers have harshly criticized Apple for monetizing -- well, everything they can. They talk about how the Internet was created by people who intended it to give freedom to the masses, not regular customers to huge corporations. I like that.

Of course, any group who get together at conferences to talk to and about each other will tend to speak highly of their own group.

I've seen several videos with Samy Kamkar. He's the young fellow who, about 15 years ago, accidentally crashed MySpace, and was sentenced to probation, community service and several years without Internet access. I had heard about him before, but I'd never seen a picture of him or heard his voice. When I saw and heard him on video, I was immediately reminded of the speech and mannerism of many fictional hackers in movies and TV shows, and immediately wondered whether some of them are based in part on Kamkar. Maybe he's a consultant on some of those movies and TV shows. Or maybe that's just the way that many Americans born in the 1980's sound and act. Kamkar especially reminds me of Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Lex Luthor in the movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

But when I think about it some more: Eisenberg sounds and acts that way in other roles, too. Maybe that's just the way he sounds, whether he's acting or not.

Overall, so far, I don't hate these hackers on the videos, at all. That kind of surprises me. But, it's early in my journey from knowing squat about them, to wherever I'm headed. They seem like a fairly un-diverse group of white men, but they themselves seem to be aware of the diversity issue.

Some Writers I Haven't Understood, and Some I Have

It goes without saying that when I think I've understood a writer, I could be completely mistaken.

To begin with, writers I know I haven't understood:

-- In the past few days I gave up on my most recent, and only, serious attempt to understand Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. There was one moment when I was prematurely optimistic: I opened Hegel's Philosophie der Geschichte at random and saw that he had a chapter dedicated to the Crusades. Some further skimming revealed statements about the Crusades which actually seemed fact-based, down to Earth and accurate. But when I settled down to read the entire chapter, I discovered that there were only a few lines' worth of this sort of narrative in the entire chapter, embedded in a murky sea of the objective teaching of Christianity and the immense idea of coupling the finite to the infinite and so forth, and I really just can't.

-- Speaking of Kant --

yeah, I don't understand him either. I apologize for having occasionally pretended that I did.

-- Heidegger: whoosh! he goes over my head.

-- Any theologians whatsoever. I still seem to share the New Atheists' problem with theology: theologian says, "God[...]," I respond, "[...]," theologian says, "That's not what I mean when I say 'God," and I've already lost interest. I don't even have the energy to angrily ask, "Well why don't you try saying what you mean when you say 'God'?!" because I despair of getting an answer which isn't even worse.

Writers whom I think I've understood:

-- William Gaddis. The only writer of realistic dialogue known to me. Because apart from literature, most people don't speak in complete sentences which resemble those written in books. And each one of Gaddis' characters is speech-impaired in his or her specific way, which again is realistic, and allows the reader to tell them apart even in a book like JR which is about 98% unattributed dialogue. Even the few characters who are able to speak quite elegantly while sober lose their verbal form, in a quite realistic way, as they get drunk.

Jean-Paul Sartre: I believe I understand: the world, the universe, is devoid of inherent meaning, and so therefore each of our lives is as meaningful as we are able to make it. Communism, with its goal of everyone working for the common good, is more noble than capitalism with its goal of he who dies with the most toys wins.

William H Gass: His prose is pure music, prose poetry. I never found it difficult.

Gertrude Stein: Hers either. Her joy in her experience with language is as pure and beautiful as the joy of a toddler, except that where a toddler toddles around a backyard and is astounded by a pebble, Stein traveled quite a bit, and took joy in her own wide knowledge, experience and vocabulary. Emulating her, writing as well as she did? Excruciatingly difficult, maybe impossible. Reading her? Never anything but joy as pure as a toddler's smile.

More Reading About Hegel

When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's easy to forget that you came there to drain the swamp. Reading various philosophers' opinions about various other philosophers is fun -- for me, it can be a huge amount of fun -- but a couple of days ago, I began to re-approach Hegel, through the filter of the opinions of others, because Hegel set out to change the world, and many people say he did. Marx, the most prominent follower of Hegel, was even more explicit about wanting to change the world, and the most famous follower of Marx, Lenin, who was most certainly a philosopher, reading the entire course of Western philosophy in many languages and writing a huge amount himself of what can only be called philosophy, also led the Russian Revolution.

But how many other philosophers have been political leaders on Lenin's scale? I can't think of any. And whatever you think of Lenin, he was succeeded by Stalin, who is highly thought-of by very few.

Did Lenin really name Stalin to be his successor, or did Stalin falsify the record to make it seem so? (Did Caesar really name Octavian/Augustus as his successor, or did Octavian/Augustus cheat his way into that?)

On pp 382-83 of Subjekt -- Objekt, his book about Hegel, Ernst Bloch says that Lenin wrote, in 1914, that whoever had not thoroughly studied and completely grasped the entire logical system of Hegel, could not thoroughly understand Marx' Kapital and especially the first chapter of Kapital. "Folglich hat nach einem halben Jahrhundert keiner von den Marxisten Marx begriffen." ("It follows that, after half a century, none of the Marxists has understood Marx.")

Yes, I have a copy of Das Kapital, untranslated, right here. Band 23, Volume 23, of the Werke von Marx und Engels, the collected works, published in (East) Berlin in 1977. Das 1. Kapitel, the first chapter, covers pages 49 through 98 in this edition. No, I didn't think I had already thoroughly understood this long first chapter before reading that Ernst Bloch quoted Lenin to the effect that I most assuredly had not as yet.

I can't read everything. And I never really did consider myself a Marxist anyway, even before my first contact with postmodernism made me pretty sure that I'd been a postmodernist for a while, and therefore not a Marxist, since you can't be a postmodernist and a Marxist at the same time, despite Jordan Peterson's dire warnings about supposed throngs of postmodern Marxists swarming over our college campuses in order to destroy out lives and enslave us. Have you ever read the first chapter of Das Kapital, translated or not? It's really quite something. I'm not sure I really want to try to read it again, let alone carefully study all of Hegel just so that I can read that one chapter again with greater comprehension.

I haven't read any Lenin. I hear he's quite good. Haven't read any Trotsky either. My reading comprehension in Russian is not good, but of course, both Lenin and Trotsky are available in translations.

Where was I? Maybe that's the title I should've given to this blog post. Where was I? Who am I? Where did all of these figurative alligators come from? What the Hell am I trying to prove? If I'm trying to prove that I'm even half the reader either Marx or Lenin was, it would be best to just stop right now. They've got me beat, and I don't say that about many people, living or dead.

I'm still enjoying Bloch's book in which he praises Hegel to the skies, and, paradoxically, I still don't want to read Hegel. I still can't take Spengler seriously, although I still enjoy going through the index of his Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West) to see what he has to say about this or that person. I've been doing that in the past couple of days because there are numerous references to Spengler in Bloch's indexes.

Where am I going? I don't know, but I'm enjoying this journey, and maybe it will eventually actually prove to be of some worth.

Procrastinating Instead of Reading Hegel

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I'm feeling more and more of a need -- a duty? A Stoic obligation? -- to re-examine Hegel, whom for a long time I had summarily dismissed, following Schopenhauer's example. I feel like I'm going to have to read some Hegel, and I don't want to. I open up a volume of Hegel to a random page, read a random sentence, and much more often than not, I am appalled, I think Ach Du meine Fresse, Schopenhauer was right, how can people take this guy seriously, let alone place him so centrally in the intellectual history of modernity?! But they do.

Fortunately, I have the option of procrastinating, of putting off the actual reading of Hegel by spending a lot of time reading about Hegel. In my previous post I mentioned Ernst Bloch's book about Hegel, Subjekt/Objekt. i did not mention that Subjekt/Objekt, in the suhrkamp taschenbuch edition I have (st 12, 16.25 Tausend 1972) is 525 pages long.

Then I have a Reclam edition of Hegel's Philosophie der Geschichte from 1961, which I must have gotten around 1992, of whose 612 pages pages 3 through 34 are covered by an introduction by the formidable Theodor Litt, and 35 through 37 by a note on the text by an F Brunstaed, who, I'm sorry, Sir or Madam, is unknown to me. The note on the text is in very small type.

And then I have a copy of Phaenomenologie des Geistes, 2nd, expanded and newly arranged printing of an Ullstein paperback which runs to 911 pages, of which less than half, pages 13 to 447, are actually by Hegel. The rest is pieces about Phaenomenologie des Geistes by Lukacs, Goehler, Haym, Findlay, Wahl, Hyppolite, Marx, Marcuse and Bloch, although the 38 pages by Bloch are from Subjekt/Objekt, so I can't really count them twice. I got this copy of Phaenomenologie des Geistes back in the 1980's, as an undergraduate, when Hegel was still nothing more than a name which rang a very faint bell. Hegel was mentioned on the cover of Bronowski's book The Western Intellectual Tradition, and I suppose I didn't know more about him than was said on the cover of that book. I read some chapters of Bronowski's book for classes, and a few more on my own, but not the chapter on Hegel.

I realize that it's cheating to read Bloch's book, and the pieces by Lukacs, Goehler, Haym, Findlay, Wahl, Hyppolite, Marx, Marcuse, before reading Hegel. The latter are placed after Hegel's text in the Ullstein paperback to underscore this point. The many references to Hegel in Adorno's Negative Dialektik, a copy of which I obtained in Berlin in 2004, are likewise intended for readers who have already read Hegel. I'm procrastinating before even cheating by reading these secondary texts first, by going into such detail about the physical volumes I have, by writing this blog post and complaining, but you already noticed that.

I don't even know how big Hegel's oeuvre is. Are the two volumes I have a third of the whole thing, a fifth, a tenth, even less than that? It seems that editions of his collected tend to run to about 20 volumes. If the volumes are about the same length, then I have about a tenth of it here before me. I feel like a kid who hates peas, who has a huge pile of peas in front of him, which he is expected to eat, supposedly for his own good. And so, I'm going to cheat, and read some of the stuff you're supposed to read after reading Hegel, before reading Hegel.

It would be swell if reading Hegel suddenly opened up my mind in huge unexpected ways and helped me make sense of the whole of humanity and life itself. That would truly be awesome. But I'm not holding my breath. It would be a pleasant surprise if I came away from this thinking that Hegel was not a huge horse's ass and one of the most overrated authors in the history of writing, along with Susan Sontag.

Will I Re-Consider Hegel?

If everyone or almost everyone disagrees with you, you may be a genius, far ahead of your time, or you may be wrong. Best to at least investigate the latter possibility.

I know of only one person who shares my opinion of Hegel: Schopenhauer, who called Hegel the worst, most ignorant, incoherent, empty, pretentious charlatan ever to successfully pass himself off as a philosopher. (See any remark about Hegel in any of Schopenhauer's works in which Hegel is mentioned.)

On the other side, those who considered Hegel to be somewhere between very clever and a world-beating genius include almost everyone whose opinion remotely matters, from Marx to Adorno to some of today's sneakiest anonymous post-postmodern YouTubers... Kierkegaard rejects some aspects of Hegel's system very energetically, but he doesn't call Hegel a fool or a fake the way Schopenhauer does. Kierkegaard clearly sees Hegel as a worthy adversary, who will not be defeated by mere insults.

Even Nietzsche, who has some passing insults for Hegel, seems to regard him as at least interesting. Speaking of having almost everyone disagree with you: When Nietzsche composed his list of "meine Unmoeglichen" ("my impossible ones," that is: "those whom I simply cannot stand") at the beginning of the chapter "Streifzuege eines Unzeitgemaessen" in Goetzendaemmerung, he doesn't list Hegel, but he does list Kant (along with Seneca, Rousseau, Schiller, Dante, Victor Hugo, Liszt, George Sand, Michelet, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, the brothers Goncourt and Zola), whom almost everyone else whose opinion matters -- including Schopenhauer -- considers to be a stone genius. Time for me to admit: I don't understand Kant nearly well enough to have any opinion about him, and time for me to admit that maybe my hero Nietzsche, who was dead wrong about women and war, didn't understand Kant either. (I'm still just fine with the rest of the list.)

For Schopenhauer (and almost everyone else), Kant was the most brilliant by far of all the philosophers of the preceding century.

Hegel built upon Kant, and so did Schopenhauer.

And Marx built upon Hegel, which means that most Leftists since Marx have built directly or indirectly on Hegel.

What finally made me decide that I had to give Hegel another chance, although the camel's back had been close to breaking already for a while, was Ernst Bloch. He's one of my favorite writers, and he wrote an entire book so extravagantly praising Hegel that I had to throw in the towel and agree to read and re-read some Hegel, this time trying to hold my mind open to the possibility that he's not as bad as Schopenhauer thought.

Or at the very least, I need to re-read that particular book of Bloch's, -- Subjeckt-Objekt. Erlaeuterungen zu Hegel -- slowly and carefully, and try to decide whether I want to approach Hegel again. At this point, I don't really want to. But I'm willing to let Bloch try to change my mind. I probably will read Hegel again. It's not just Bloch, it's everybody except Schopenhauer.

Oh, and I also need to research this fellow Solger. He's mentioned by both Kierkegaard and Bloch, it seems he and Hegel were friends. I've never heard anyone else mention him, but Kierkegaard and Bloch are more than enough.

I recently heard an English philosopher say that, yes, Hegel's prose is terrible, but that his books were actually lecture notes, not intended to be published as books. And this guy was saying that Hegel was brilliant even though his prose was awful. In Subjekt-Objekt, Bloch is having none of this talk about Hegel's prose being awful. Hegel's prose is sometimes difficult, Bloch says, but it's brilliant, full of deep music and blood and guts and Luther. And the thing is: German is Bloch's native language, he's very very good at it. If Bloch says someone writes brilliantly in German, I have to listen, even if that someone is Hegel, whom I'm used to thinking of, agreeing with Schopenhauer, as writing sheer shameless nonsense.

As long as I'm here I may as well defend Schopenhauer and Nietzsche against the usual accusation from my colleagues on the Left, that they were reactionary. Certainly neither of them was progressive, but reactionary? What, exactly, do you think they were reacting against? They were both classless, and both clueless when it came to politics. I see no evidence that either of them was the slightest bit familiar with any socialist philosophy.

Coronavirus and the Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919

About 100 years ago, there was a worldwide flu pandemic which killed between 17 and 100 million people. The latest statistics I've seen for the coronavirus say that deaths are still under 1/4 of a million. After killing millions of people, influenza a century ago quickly mutated into a much less deadly strain. It wasn't until decades later that a flu vaccine was developed. And maybe someday, we'll be able to convince people to actually take the flue vaccine.

I've been thinking about the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, because it seems to me that the flu back then was about as contagious and deadly as coronavirus, and that the difference in casualties between the pandemic back then and the current one has a lot to do with the helpful, simple advice which science has given us to deal with coronavirus: stay away from other people. Don't touch your face. Wash your hands regularly.

By contrast, governments around the world censored information about the flu pandemic. They tried to keep people from finding out that there was an epidemic at all. And they did such a thorough job of that, that to to this day, many people have still never heard of the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, and we still don't know whether it killed 17 million or 100 million people.

It may seem very cruel, in the midst of all the current suffering, for me to say that things have been much worst in the past. But they have, and humanity survived, and what I'm trying to do here is not to be cruel but to give people hope. For all of the sheer stupidity leading to illness and death at the current time, a century ago, a comparable outbreak of illness was handled much worse still, and we survived, and we learned, and we developed vaccines and worldwide institutions to anticipate and react intelligently to epidemics. Yes, clearly, many people are reacting stupidly to coronavirus, and it's getting people killed. Still, it's not as bad as the flu pandemic a century ago, and the main reason why is because, overall, we're reacting and behaving much better, much more intelligently and effectively. We're putting into effect what we've learned from earlier epidemics.

And as horrible as the news is now, day after day, I firmly believe that we will survive this, and that we will come out of this smarter and wiser than we were. That's how I see things, looking through the perspective of centuries.

Now, back to the daily horror: how do we get through to the people, from governors in some states to protesters in other states -- and for once the news from the US is so horrible that, frankly, I don't even know much about how things are being handled in other countries. I'm overwhelmed by the domestic news -- how do we get through to these people, and get them to follow the very simple procedures, distance, masks, washing hands, which work so well?

I don't know.

All I can think of to do is to urge everyone who reads this to think about what we can do to get through to those people, before it's a matter of horrible, obvious statistics showing in hindsight that they were wrong. We need persuasiveness so urgently right now. I feel my lack of persuasiveness so intensely.

But I can't give up. I have to urge all of you not to give up. Try to change people's minds, to save lives.