Albatross

by John A. Wills

Overview

Albatross is a book of philosophy and politics, working largely from what one learns in secondary-school language class but often fails to apply to the real world.

Application of what we learn in secondary-school language class to important social, political and philosophical questions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780595194186
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/10/2001
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.44(d)

Table of Contents

0.	Baudelaire's poem L'Albatros and my translation of it	xi
1.	Wisdom	1
1.1	Merton vs Rand discusses reconciliation of apparently opposite rational opinions	3
1.2	Serpent Group describes a way for patient people with a common faith to reach well-structured political opinions and construct strategies to realize those opinions	8
1.3	Looking at Unemployment, I give my own rational attitudes to the world after 5 years of unemployment	13
1.4	When Atlas Shrugs looks at some ideas about selfishness, suicide, etc.	18
2.	Analysis of various ambiguous and controversial concepts and ideologies shows that a great part of what people quarrel about is resolvable only when inspection of the underlying concepts and honest classification of ideas dissolves the original problem into more tractable components with less connection than might have been thought	21
2.1	A Change in Question shows how natural science advances through re-understanding of difficult questions by division of those questions	23
2.2	Creation shows that Fundamentalists and Village Atheists are victims of the same confusion	26
2.3	Introduction to Sexuality shows finally that homophobia and homosexualism are two sides of the same counterfeit coin. The tangle of ideas has relevance to abortion also	30
2.4	Hangwite in Context looks at an old legal concept and finds it has relevance still	39
2.5	The Meanings of Israel distinguishes the Biblical meanings of the name Israel and tries to cover the usual extra-biblical uses too	43
2.6	Kinds of Racialism systematically classifies racialisms not by morality but by ideal	47
2.7	Motives of Zionism is obviously related to both the previous analyses, and depends on them somewhat	60
3.	Constitutions	67
3.1	Current Constitutional Crises in the World State motivates the following proposal, after giving historical background	69
3.2	The Next UN Constitutional Conference shows that a fundamental orientation is needed before any grand rearrangement of the institutional furniture. A proposed Statute of Rights and associated documents are submitted	83
3.3	Proposed Amendment to the Treaty of Maastricht is a proposal without commentary for a much shorter but similarly oriented constitutional change	132
3.4	Legislation Against Terrorism discusses much more important topics than terrorism by putting that subject in the context we require to justify any state action against it. The state principally considered is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland	134
3.5	Proposed Amendment to the Constitution of the United States would return the Republic to the principles enounced in the theoretical part of the Declaration of Independence	142
4.	Political Proposals at infraconstitutional level follow	147
4.1	The Dirty Query accurately describes a current political problem using unambiguous pseudonyms instead of the ambiguous and misleading names which cloud reason in the current discussion	149
4.2	A Single Currency argues that we could have a planetary currency with less difficulty than the European Union is having with its low-level plan	153
4.3	Selective Prisons describes possible specialized prisons with a greater potential for correction than the current prisons of the UK(or anywhere else) have	162
5.	New Jersey Adventure is autobiographical. I cannot say just how it fits in with the essays, but I think it does	169