Tag: philosophy

Materialism and Gnosticism

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Check out a great thread by author (and attorney) Alexander Palacio: It’s odd that the extremes of materialism (in the philosophical sense, the belief that only the material is real and of consequence) end up in the same place as Gnostic heresy in denying the importance and reality of the body. According to the materialist, you ARE your body, there is metaphysically no separate spiritual “soul” that ascends to heaven or goes anywhere else. Thus one would think that the body is, therefore, the only thing that can be sacred because it is all humans are. However, the disregard for…

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Conceptual Inertia

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Inertia: objects in motion will stay in motion; objects at rest will stay at rest. I don’t blame my parents for sending me to public school, and I don’t blame the baby boomer generation for abandoning their children to the system. They assumed that the institutions and culture that they experienced remained intact and unaltered; there was never an assumption that in the years between 1970 and 1980 education in America would be totally converged into politicized indoctrination camps. There was never an assumption that universities would become value sucks whose certifications gave no economic security. Of course, you have…

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You make your own reality

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This thesis has two applications, both literal, but only one objective. First, your perception of reality is reality, insomuch as singular subjects we cannot comprehend all of reality, only that which our senses detect and our intellect is able to interpret and contextualize. This has many forms that we don’t need to get into here, but a quick example would be seeing a tree and recognizing that it belongs to the category “tree,” which then provides you a predictive model for the properties of the object and how it will act. Second, as humans are empowered with the capacity to…

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The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas – Compact Analysis

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I’ve seen some posting on “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” Ultra-compact analysis: 1. Le Guin asks YOU to imagine a Utopia with whatever in it YOU think would make people happy 2. This Utopia will have all those pleasures (including sinful ones) with NO DOWNSIDES. 3. You don’t believe it, obviously. 4. She creates a negative condition that magically eliminates the downsides: constant neglect and abuse of a single innocent child. 5. Most people in Omelas end up accepting this, despite not liking it. 6. Post-hoc rationalizations are given – the child can’t really be saved because of…

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Stuff is not “Just Stuff”

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These argument have been popular lately with the fallout from the Black Lives Matter (sort of, now antifa) riots and banditry: that you can replace your stuff and that crime arises from conditions the criminal has no choice over. These arguments are actually totally incoherent. Let’s dive into them, both as they are articulated here as well as the wider “debate.” First, the premise that physical goods are replaceable is false. Some things are replaceable, other things are not. I can replace my copy of Lord of the Rings. I cannot replace the photographs of my dead grandparents. Even goods…

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Tolerance, “The Good” and the Social Order

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When it comes to assessing what kind of behavior ought to be accepted, tolerated, or punished, I find it useful to consider the categories of behavior in a social context. Keep in mind that this ordering is mostly in the context of the greater discussion of state power and its moral use, as well as the difficult question of what “the good” actually is. When it comes to undesirable behavior, that is behavior that the greater culture does not want or does not itself exercise, there are three categories: antisocial behavior, delinquent behavior, and deviant/degenerate behavior. Antisocial behavior is that…

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The Left Can’t Meme

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It’s an old meme at this point that the left can’t meme. I had a great discussion last week with Brian Niemeier about his book, Don’t Give Money to People Who Hate You, and in it the subject of memeology of the left came up: I mentioned a former friend that had an image of her turned into a meme, so she started trying to make her own memes of herself as some sort of gatcha. The results were as you would expect – a wall of text trying to explain something crowding out (and thus reducing the impact of)…

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The Logic (and Strategy) of the Witch Test

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If you don’t know about Brian Niemeier’s “Witch Test,” here’s a succinct rundown of it: The response to this is to say: Proclaim that Jesus is the Christ, and God has raised Him from the dead! The resulting discussion can go a number of different ways. It’s called the “Witch Test” because a witch will be unable to proclaim the divinity of Christ. This isn’t to say it always identifies real honest-to-goodness witches, but it is useful. Recently I’ve had some people push back on the use of this, attempting to say it is some sort of logical fallacy. It…

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It’s about dunking on you

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I didn’t watch the super bowl. I haven’t in some time; Even if I wanted to, I lack the means, but as time goes on I’m ever more thankful for this. The halftime show, as usual, was a debacle of sorts. Two (middle-aged) women went on stage in skimpy attire and danced erotically for the biggest TV audience of the year. I saw some clips after the fact; I won’t link them here for reasons that will be clear. As usual, most people are missing what such a display is really about. It’s about dunking on you. It’s also about…

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Postmodern Politics: Beauty Edition #hotgirlsforbernie

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Oh boy, #hotgirlsforbernie has it all. You don’t want to click, but you will. Your curiosity will overcome your better sense. https://twitter.com/hashtag/HotGirlsForBernie?src=hashtag_click This is a perfect example of how post-modernism, with its core ideas of “challenging assumptions” by attacking the meaning of concepts, is fully at home with and ingrained into the modern, western political left. This whole thing is a bit a take-off of the meme that “conservative girls are hotter,” but it all goes so horribly, horribly wrong. ANYONE can be a hot girl for Bernie, you see, even if you aren’t a girl (apologies my friends) and…

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