Pol, sort of: Henry David Thoreau
 

For those of you with clear political ideals, what do you think of Thoreau?

I guess I can't answer, since my political ideals have a nasty cold sore right now.

That's what they get for hanging around with that Katie Holmes.

Well, for one thing, his book was the inspiration that Gandhi used for his movement in India and Gandhi's ideas were the inspiration for Martin Luther Kings vision of the civil rights movement in the United States so given the success of his views pretty much makes me unworthy of criticizing them.

I don't always agree with Thoreau but he was a pretty influential visionary so he gets a big thumbs up from me.

Dola, plus he looks a lot like Abe Lincoln so he gets another thumbs up there too. :)

I prefer Tom's previous wife. Mrowr!

Big Mimi Rogers fan eh?

No, the next wife.

Ahh, the one I like as well. :)

Speaking of the Cruiser, you'd think anyone investing so much in a cult which promotes clarity of mind and clear thinking could get the whole marriage deal down by now wouldn't you?

Back off, jack, she's mine.

Not unless you saw her before BMX bandits. That's when I claimed her.

I claimed her before the earth was new. I claimed her before the four winds first broke forth. I claimed her back before the Cubs had won a World Series. I claimed her before you were a twinkle in your daddy's eye. It is my destiny.

But I made my claimed her to Chuck Norris who's validation supercedes that of merely the universe. So sorry for you.

She's Australian, so under the Gorgeous Australian Hotties Act (or "GAHA") any Chuck Norris claims are invalid.

pwned!

Thoreau the man or the ideal? I live a 4-5 minute walk from his cabin in the woods, and he gets credited with a lot of different ideas, all of which were variously followed or not in real life. I'm a fan of transcendentalism, but that is better traced to Emerson (or Kant); I abhor pacifism because I believe much of the world is Hobbesian, and you can't really trace pacifism to one person; the ideal of Civil Disobedience which he is most famous for (linked through Gandhi and MLK especially) I have a soft spot for, but I do think he goes too far (take the current US, or even the US during WWII or some fairly unambiguous time when we were clearly acting for the greater good - there are always going to be some injustices committed somewhere by the government and at some point Machiavellian ideals of doing the best for the most have to come into play unless you want to be paralyzed into complete inaction) and some sort of governing body is needed - getting back to at least a partial Hobbesian worldview; abolitionism I'm a big fan of; environmentalism not so much - I like nature and I enjoy having it around, but even Thoreau wasn't living in the wilderness - he was living a mile from town and would walk in once a week, he was really just socially awkward IMO not the hermit most people make him out to be. So if you want to be more specific on which aspect of Thoreau, man or myth, you are talking about, I could give a better answer.

Or was the topic Nicole Kidman?

I was thinking mostly of his elevation of the individual above society/government, his abstract fundamentals.