Category Archives: Philosophy

History, Philosophy, Social Commentary

Merry Christmas

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I want to wish the best of the season to all of my Christian readers. As my gift, here is Psalm 53, being sung to the Pope in Aramaic.

[Christmas-afternoon update]

Richard Fernandez has thoughts on the Left’s continually failed attempts to purge the holiday of its meaning:

“Happy Federal Holiday” is about as information empty as you can get and perhaps that is deliberate. It advances not just another phrase, but a completely different world view, a universe safely empty of everything but numbers on a calendar.

Eventually anyone indoctrinated in this tradition will find accounts of the Federal Holiday Truce of 1914 or “I’ll be Home for the Federal Holiday of 1943” hard to comprehend. Nor will they be able to understand why anyone in Mosul should want to observe the Federal Holiday of 2017. Yet how could it be otherwise? To understand history one has to understand why such events as Christmas are and you cannot do that in a meaning-free universe.

The effort to erase Christmas will probably fail for no other reason than that it meets a human need that a mechanical bureaucratic day off cannot fulfill. Humanity needs a time to mark the growth and change in the family, an occasion to renew hopes and put aside fears and a chance to remember something we once knew: that everything’s going to be alright in the end. It really will.

The best Christmas present I could get would be for the corrupt officials at the Obama Justice Department (including the IRS) to finally be confronted with actual justice in the New Year. And I continue to be very happy that She lost.

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Meaningless Words

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Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt on the ideological incoherence (and, as always, psychological projection) of the left:

All I was doing was pointing out he had no proof of his statement and in fact, there was plenty of proof to the contrary. Where it got interesting was his tactic in the argument. He started by calling me a snowflake and saying I was obviously hurt by what he said. I told him I wasn’t in the least hurt, just amused at his lack of reasoning, and furnished him with another half dozen names of great/rich writers. He tried to call me snowflake again, and then told me to go copulate with myself but in more common words. When that failed, he said he was deleting the thread because he’d obviously hurt people. Note that in none of this had he hurt me, not even with the profanity, nor had I or any of the people who agreed with me on that thread implied we were hurt. Somewhere between amused and appalled is not hurt.

I was discussing this argument with a friend later, and he said I was making the mistake of interpreting the words as words. Or of thinking any kind of thought was behind first calling me snowflake, and then saying he’d hurt people’s feelings.

He said that the whole thing was more a reaction on the level of “when I’m called snowflake it hurts me, so I’ll call her snowflake and that will hurt her” and when we didn’t cave to his argument, he couldn’t figure out how to get out of it other than apologizing for hurting our feelings.

He – he’s an academic – pointed out this is the whole point of post-modern analysis, be it of literature or society: words have no meaning and can be assigned arbitrary meanings according to the emotions they elicit.

He says that’s why the left is more and more resorting to shouting random slogans and words until it gets them the reaction they want. Not because they don’t know the meanings of words, but because they reject the idea that words have inherent meanings.

Like “pedophilia.” Or “liberal.”

Business, Health, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Reversing Aging

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A long but interesting interview with George Church:

Certainly if you could fix all nine hallmarks at once that would do well. Reversal of aging has been demonstrated in simple animals. Some people will dismiss those as too simple — because they have such a short life already, it’s not surprising you can make them live longer. But I think it’s quite clear that aging is programmed in some sense. It’s not like you’ve been programmed to die at some age, but the laziness of evolution has resulted in your program to not avoid dying.

Over evolutionary time, to use analogy, it was not cost effective to invest a lot of your precious food to live longer because you’re going to get eaten by a wolf anyway. Now we have plenty of excess food, and rather than becoming obese let’s spend that on living longer, by spending extra ATP on repair and rejuvenation. That’s something 20-year-olds do fine, but after 60 you stop investing quite as well.

Yes. There has been no evolutionary pressure for us to live longer, but it’s absurd to think it would violate any laws of physics (and ultimately, even biology comes down to physics) that prevent us from living indefinitely long lives. And how soon could it happen?

The simple answer is, I don’t know. Probably we’ll see the first dog trials in the next year or two. If that works, human trials are another two years away, and eight years before they’re done. Once you get a few going and succeeding it’s a positive feedback loop.

That’s pretty exciting, but still: faster, please.

But I did come across this:

If you find that in the western world we’re eating a lot of marbled cow that didn’t exist in the ancient days, all you have to do is get rid of the marbled cow and you’re all set.

Except I’m not aware of any scientific evidence that marbled cow is a problem. I wonder how up on nutrition he is?

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Millennials’ “Education”

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The hard lifting of undoing it:

One of the falsehoods that has been stuffed into your brain and pounded into place is that moral knowledge progresses inevitably, such that later generations are morally and intellectually superior to earlier generations, and that the older the source the more morally suspect that source is. There is a term for that. It is called chronological snobbery. Or, to use a term that you might understand more easily, “ageism.”

Second, you have been taught to resort to two moral values above all others, diversity and equality. These are important values if properly understood. But the way most of you have been taught to understand them makes you irrational, unreasoning. For you have been taught that we must have as much diversity as possible and that equality means that everyone must be made equal. But equal simply means the same. To say that 2+2 equals 4 is to say that 2+2 is numerically the same as four. And diversity simply means difference. So when you say that we should have diversity and equality you are saying we should have difference and sameness. That is incoherent, by itself. Two things cannot be different and the same at the same time in the same way.

Furthermore, diversity and equality are not the most important values. In fact, neither diversity nor equality is valuable at all in its own right. Some diversity is bad. For example, if slavery is inherently wrong, as I suspect we all think it is, then a diversity of views about the morality of slavery is worse than complete agreement that slavery is wrong.

Similarly, equality is not to be desired for its own sake. Nobody is equal in all respects. We are all different, which is to say that we are all not the same, which is to say that we are unequal in many ways. And that is generally a good thing. But it is not always a good thing (see the previous remarks about diversity).

Related to this: You do you not know what the word “fair” means. It does not just mean equality. Nor does it mean something you do not like. For now, you will have to take my word for this. But we will examine fairness from time to time throughout this semester.

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