Mr. Gnarr said his idea for the Best Party was born of the profound distress and moral confusion after the banking collapse, when Icelanders fiercely debated their obligation to repay ruined [!!!] British and Dutch depositors. Practically speaking, Mr. Gnarr said he had no qualms. "Why should I repay money I never spent?" he asked, a common sentiment here. But on a deeper level, he had misgivings. "I consider myself a very moral person," he said. "Suddenly, I felt like a character in a Beckett play, where you have moral obligations towards something you have no possibility of understanding. It was like `Waiting for Godot' -- I was in limbo." Read more...
Practically speaking, Mr. Gnarr said he had no qualms. "Why should I repay money I never spent?" he asked, a common sentiment here. But on a deeper level, he had misgivings.
"I consider myself a very moral person," he said. "Suddenly, I felt like a character in a Beckett play, where you have moral obligations towards something you have no possibility of understanding. It was like `Waiting for Godot' -- I was in limbo."
Read more...
It's a shiv piece. The Best Party isn't Serious™. They have unqualified© people making decisions:
"A lot of us are singers," said Ottarr Proppe, the third-ranking member of the Best Party, who was with the cult rock band HAM and the punk band Rass. Mr. Proppe now sits on the city's executive board, where he will be deciding matters like how much money to allocate for roads. "Making a video was very easy," he said.
This matters. On May 25th the Best Party was polling 42% and on track to win 8 seats and a clear governing majority. After a bout of "Unserious They Is" attacks their final voting percentage was 34.7% -- a significant drop.
The single most important task facing "The Left" - those who wish to change the CW - is intellectual respectability. Before change can occur enough people have to decide to listen to voices for change and their alternatives.
I agree. This profile is a shiv, sporting a scrimshaw handle as befits the industrious standards of the NYT. I could not help but be impreseed by Mr Gnarr's remark about repaying money he neither borrowed nor ever spent. He refers of course to interest amount demanded by a lender and perceives somehow that the rationale of "value added" to a measure of money is exceedingly obscure, not unlike a muscular tick whose origins occupy a remote region of conscious life. This thought and his affinity with constituency is subversive to certain, international principles of governance.
I suspect but cannot be certain the writer understands this, so felt compelled to characterize Mr Gnarr's opinion of money management as ambivalence or "misgivings" about his own competence to perform the business of Reykjavik.
I suspect, Mr Gnarr meant to convey a sense of his ephiphany --sudden recognition of the absurd roots of financial theory-- when, or if indeed, he declared, "I felt like a character in a Beckett play, where you have moral obligations towards something you have no possibility of understanding." That something is the supposed "good" moral of agreeing to surrender more (interest, premium, opportunity cost, profit) than one ought to owe another in consideration.
Seems clear to me: Mr Gnarr discovered another rule by which to negotiate the world. I'll bet, you've encountered this drawing before (right). I've been surprised how many times it's turned up in my own experience and how many people struggle to switch their perception of the image. The illustration by E. G. Boring is a test device. The struggle demonstrates that what one sees on a conscious level is not the pattern on the retina but the constitution of rules to which one match a pattern. How one selects a rule for perception has been described by Michael Gazzaniga. His theory implies that ones a rule is selected, a perception may be fixed and dictates certain responses --conscious and involuntary. Understanding or anticipating pattern recognition and response processes is even more complicated, when we consider the automatic selection from backfield patterns. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
