Thursday, February 25, 2010

Dr. Zhivago

My wife and I once had the distinct pleasure of attending a dinner party hosted by Dr. Kumar Patel, inventor of the carbon dioxide laser, and his gracious wife. I don't normally like such functions, but they were the finest and most gracious host and hostess you can imagine. There was no talk of science, only life, and Mrs. Patel was quite skilled at keeping the conversation flowing. She happily discussed during the evening how much she and her husband loved the film, "Casablanca." My wife and I have the same feelings toward "Dr. Zhivago." I don't know what it is about the film, but whenever I'm channel surfing and this film is on, we stop and watch it right through the end. Anything else we were doing will have to wait.

1 comment:

  1. Hello Steven, I hope you don't feel the presence of the goat boy sullies your blog.

    I'm here because you are literally the only one who has shown the slightest courage in the face of the incredible pressure of Bee's increasingly hysterical and authoritarian insistence upon her viewpoint, if something so incoherent can even be considered a viewpoint.

    Since you're a smart and sane person, I can imagine how you reacted to Bee's pathetic verbal response to my careful presentation followed by her even more pathetic, and in fact truly outrageous, abrupt shutting down of all comment before anyone other than herself had a chance to respond. Has there ever been a more transparent attempt to suppress a debate because one is dramatically losing that debate?

    The question is: Are the Backreactors going to behave like submissive boot-lickers in the presence of this intolerable act by the Dominatrix? I see that your blog is read by regular contributors to Backreaction, so I pose that question to all of you. Whether I'm right or wrong in my argument, the debate I initiated is indisputably of great interest, relevance, and importance. Obviously Stefan and Bee believe that the longer it persists the clearer it will become that I am correct--and as human beings they are terrified by that possibility . But to react by suddenly shutting off debate just when it's getting most interesting is a shocking act of intellectual violence (and cowardice) that should be unacceptable to all right-thinking people. And I assume that you, Steven, and Backreaction readers generally, are such people.

    P.S. Little did you suspect, Steven, (and all of you others) that you would suddenly find yourself in a moral crisis, Do the right thing and have your comfortable life perhaps turned upside-down, or cower in silence and let things continue as normal. Suddenly you have to decide, Do you have it in you to be Sir Thomas More, Giordano Bruno, Tom Paine, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela?

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