04.03.03: All fields of inquiry involve discerning between dichotomous categories. Ethics is the field that allows us to judge the good and the evil. Aesthetics, the beautiful and the ugly. Politics, as Carl Schmidt writes, is the recognition of friend and enemy.

Politics, broadly construed, is precisely what we all learned in the third grade as the hallmark of virtue: play well with others. On this category of greatness some of us got a check-plus, some did not. Yet, it still remains the fountainhead of civil society.

When politics breaks down, war becomes inevitable. Those who don’t play well must learn to fight well with others.

A friend of my enemy must also be my enemy. Someone who respects a person who has intent to harm me must respect their virtues, or lack therein. In extreme cases, respect by a person who claims to be my friend for a person who has nothing but contempt for me must lead to nothing other than contempt for me. That is, what one likes about an immoral person can be nothing other than this immorality.

For all of those who claim to be my friend, you are unable to be friends both with me and my ex-girlfriend without pain of contradiction. If claim to be my friend, one would think that you would stick up for me; that you would not be social with those that screw over your friends. A person who screws over one they claim to love would indeed screw over their friends as well. They are not the type that are to be trusted, must less with which one should be social. To deny this is either to live a contradiction or to be blind to what friendship is: in either case I cannot call you my friend.

A friend of my enemy is also my enemy. And, a breakdown in politics will lead to inevitable war.

04.01.03: Let me be your April fool!

Doug Kellner, a very good scholar of contemporary Continental philosophy, has begun a site to express views about the war. Get your Critical Theory on!

I've been working on re-coding the The Lecturn. Take it for a test drive, and send some comments and suggestions.