Brooks would be a great pirate name.

The cheap tawdry ideal of science run amok, of the search for “truth” is an attempt to compress the irreducible. But the artiste knows better than to paraphrase experience, life, self-awareness and poetry.

Preaching in a wasteland of science-fiction fans. Jesus fucking christ.

“Ironie, wie Gott, ist tot.” Prof. Richard Hawkins

Pirates, like theater critics and porn actresses, and unlike scientists, are capable of creating an ironic distance, not only towards other people, but also from themselves. The world needs more of all the former, not less.

And science stopped being a humanistic endeavor when physicists started talking about cosmic inflation. Combining empiricism with rampant first-principles mathematical speculation is bullshit.

I´ll ask my broker about dark matter and get back to you later.

While Descartes tried to deduce the world autonomously from the thinking self and Spinoza copied the language of mathematics, Morgan was sacking Panama. Who left a more lasting impression? Who was the bigger humanist?

Sharks are a Rumsfeldian outgrowth of the culture of expertise, but at least they are honest. Geeks blog about how the US Navy cracks down on pirates.

I’m writing from the Malacca Strait, I have no time.

This is bad for my blood pressure.

Analytic piracy is a piracy of first principles; parrot-like logic on a brittle peg leg foundation, ill-fitted to the seven seas. Real-world piracy undoes those principles in revelry and debauchery.

Analytic piracy is a decadent formalism, internally consistent but describing nothing beyond its own skull and bones. But they had lawyers on Tortuga, and they worked out the meaning of the letters of marque in a process of dialogue. The analytic pirates always end up walking the plank; joining the equally un-self-aware sharks.

Prizing expertise in the Piratensprache above all else, you think the ships you don’t seize must not be relevant. We should be teaching people not what to loot but how.

Consciousness is flawed; rum is cheap. So there.

As to the pirates as agents of political transformation, he had made some notes upon the subject, which indicated that their primary purpose was taking things from ships and trading them for rum and intimate favours, in places ranging from Tortuga to Whitehall. Some did affect views on individual freedom, though these would have rattled the brains of a Paine or a Wollstonecraft, and the notion that they were a seething mass of nautical Robespierres would not stand the light.

It was good to have an enemy, he reflected, and it was good to have an enemy who believed odd things that were incompatible with one’s own views. He had encountered sailors from English towns that were fiercely proud of having been sacked by ships scattered from the Armada. While the only evidence of such pillage was here a stack of cannonballs and there a public house named “Ye Dead Spaniardo,” every man from those villages stood ready, centuries later, to take the battle back to Philip II, with his dreadful religion and his incomprehensible consonants.”

In Celebration of Talk Like Dr. Stephen Maturin Day, by John M. Ford

Oh the pirates in their fetid galleons, daggers in their skivvies
With infected tattooed fingers on a blunderbuss or two
Signs of scurvy in their eyes & only mermaids on their minds
It’s from them I would expect to hear the F-word, not from you.

From “A Chat with Your Mother”, Lou + Peter Berryman

“I’m lousy at baseball, and haven’t had a winning season in fifteen years.”

Or did you mean the privateer type? In which case nevermind.