WaPo takes us back to 2008:
Speaking of Palin and nuclear weapons, during the last Silent Reading party, I returned to this passage in The Gay Science (I use the Silent Reading party to revisit underlined passages—my habit is to underline anything that amazes me):The former GOP vice presidential candidate started the war of words this week when she suggested that Obama was weak on nuclear defense.
- Timitrius' photostream
Obama shot back while overseas to sign a nuclear reduction deal with Russia, calling Palin "not much of an expert" on nuclear issues.Palin counterpunched Friday while addressing the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans. Clearly mocking the president, she dismissed the "vast nuclear experience that he acquired as a community organizer."
The ultimate goal of science is to create for man the greatest possible amount of pleasure and the least possible amount of pain? But suppose pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other...This may not be a perfect description of science in the 21st century (that is still up in the air), but certainly it describes the state of science in the century that followed the one in which Nietzsche wrote all of his work, the 19th century. With nuclear weapons, the greatest amount of pain possible stands next to (and threatens) the greatest amount of pleasure known to humans, advanced capitalist consumerism.
