Friday, January 21, 2005
(8:22 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional
I confess that even though I know you've got to play politics and build bridges to people on both sides of the aisle, I'm pretty disappointed that Barack Obama was among those who voted to confirm Rice. I was, however, interested to learn that the Bushes consider Dr. Rice a family member. One could always say that the Democrats are unlikely to be satisfied with anyone Bush nominates and that Rice isn't bad enough to make a fuss over. We can, however, demand minimal competence, and we must remember that Rice is the one who complained that no one was bringing the intelligence from multiple agencies together and that we need to create a position that would handle that, when in fact the National Security Advisor is precisely the person whose duty it is to do that. So there's that. But that would start a dangerous precendent of holding Bush administration officials responsible for their mistakes, which could potentially "divide" the country. Better to just play nice.I confess that I don't want a "purple" America. I do not know what "unity" would mean or whether it would be a desirable goal.
I confess that I've been drinking way too much coffee and that my body seems to want to go to bed at 10 every night anyway. I confess to not having read nearly enough Wesley.
Finally, I confess that I've been putting off starting my Derrida translation, basically for no good reason. Ostensibly, I want to learn how to use my Emacs/LaTeX/BibTeX setup, but the translation is not a particularly citation-heavy work, nor does it make much sense to try to combine the difficulties of translating a complex French philosophical work with the difficulties of learning a new, "powerful" piece of software. [UPDATE: I did start the translation today, at long last, and decided that the limited citations meant that it was a perfect way to get the basics of the LaTeX mark-up, before moving on to the "powerful" citation system. It's going slightly faster than I thought it would be, and it will probably go even faster in successive days, since I'll no longer be previewing my document every two minutes.]
So those are my confessions. What are yours?
