Category: philosophy
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the hubris of idiots
Fun fact: both idiot and hubris are from Ancient Greek and they still mean today pretty much what they meant in 500 BC. Idiot had some benign meanings that it has lost, but the idea of someone who is ignorant, uneducated, or not in the know is very much there. Hubris still has the original…
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social myth
Philosophical mythology vs political sociology is the conflict between progress and regress, sophrosyne vs hubris, and thus the world of freedom and liberty vs the world of authority and control. “Do or do not, there is no try” is incompatible with corpo-capitalism because teaching mythological belief in the Force that you can find harmony with,…
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humans interacting with computers
I was first introduced to the concept of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in the spring of 2002 while working on a system that would ostensibly tell Congress where the money they allocated to the Intelligence community in the “black budget” was going and whether or not it was producing valuable returns. This, of course, was never…
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A different approach
As the twice-impeached felon in the White House goes about his work, he has decided upon a number of policies that are crass, blunt, cruel, and of questionable legality because he and the people he surrounds himself with are impatient, ignorant, and immoral. But the thing is, buried deep within them, some of the policies…
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a more accurate political spectrum
As we once again struggle to talk about what is happening in the White House it is important to understand that our customs regarding how we talk about politics, politicians, and political power are taxonomically flawed. The use of a Right = Conservative, Left = Liberal dichotomy doesn’t fit with the use of a Conservative-Moderate-Liberal…
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Dragons
The Internet and the World Wide Web represent what happens when you build a system that structurally subverts the mechanisms of constraint that allow a government to regulate the behavior of community members. Typically, this has been seen as a good thing because it was initially done by benevolent tinkerers and lots of people benefited…
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Triaging your principles
Some people can’t be saved, save the ones who can. That is the idea behind triage, the practice of sorting wounded or injured people to order them for treatment, but also to order them for non-treatment because in a crisis, when time and doctors and supplies are in short supply, trying in vain to save…
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thinking about how collapse will come
LA is burning. The destruction is immense, but less than it could have been, This is a small blip on the radar of future catastrophe. Time will only intensify these events – wildfires, droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods – as the climate adjusts. As the ice and permafrost melts and the load on the poles lightens,…
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Discretionary power without accountability
Convicted felon Donald. J. Trump was in a New York City courtroom today where he was sentenced to bear no burden and suffer no penalty for cooking the books during his 2016 presidential campaign to hide from regulators and voters how he paid off a porn star to hide from voters that he’d had an…
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Tariffs only work if …
Tariffs only work if they raise prices of imported goods above the cost of domestic goods because the purpose of a tariff is to create space in the competitive landscape for domestic producers to grow and prosper by raising the cost of the imported good so that domestic goods can undercut them on price in…