Enjoying the view from Limbo
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” as we moderns are so fond of saying. There is probably no serious adage about the soul which is subject to a greater gap between the number of people who cite it and the number who understand it. Apart from that sad fact, however, it is notable that late modernity has gradually transformed the expression from general...
Donald Trump attended the G7 economic summit, as American presidents always do. And as Donald Trump always does at such summits — unlike all other American presidents — he used his opening public remarks at the conference to advocate yet again for the interests of Russian “President” Vladimir Putin and to berate America’s major democratic allies for not including and embracing the notably...
Having outlined my basic premises and principles in Parts One and Two, I have arrived at a point where I may finally reply directly to the last of your original questions, which, once again, was… 3. Then what makes something advanced? I would like to know the examples of advances from your point of view. You phrase the question in two parts, which...
Here in the second part of this discussion, having explained that the concept “advanced” admits of various measurements, corresponding to the various senses in which a new technology may be judged relative to its antecedents, I took a moment to prepare the pathway to a more specific reply to my student’s third and final question about my views concerning which innovations, according to...
A few months ago, I stumbled into a conversation with a most inquisitive student about the role of advanced technology in modern life, and specifically how our age’s technological obsession has blinded us to fundamental questions, not only about the ultimate human value of our rapid material changes, but also about the terms on which we categorize technological innovations as “advances” in the...
Donald Trump, proving himself yet again to be the softest of soft tacos, has answered his own recent weakly-uttered and moral-equivalency-diluted half-criticism of Vladimir Putin’s maniacal bloodlust by immediately, and in the most public way, returning to his knees before his master, in the process thereby returning his country, the former United States of America, to the status of unequivocal fellow traveller of,...
Ukraine has just carried out a stunningly clever military operation at multiple and far-flung locations throughout Russia, successfully destroying a remarkable proportion of Vladimir Putin’s military aircraft at their home bases, before they could be used to inflict more destruction upon Ukraine’s civilian population and infrastructure. This operation was apparently planned and prepared for over a year in secret. It continues in spectacular...
A common classroom activity is to ask students to speak or write about what they would do if they were “king for a day.” I hate that activity, as it fosters the notion that absolute power is desirable; and to my recollection, I have yet to hear of a single child—or adult—giving the proper answer: “I would abolish the monarchy.” Modern civilization desperately...
America’s Republican voters used to believe, with near unanimity, that nothing was more dangerous to their country than the threat of an executive branch that sought to circumvent the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers by legislating through executive fiat, i.e., without deference to Congress, and disregarding court rulings, such as by concocting phony emergencies to justify the expansion of presidential authority beyond the...
The imaginary body.— To worship pleasure is to empower pain, which in turn is to elevate the body and its distractions to the status of self-identity. But if I am my body, then I do not exist, for the body is merely the soul’s imaginary postulate of a hypothetical space radically distinct from space in general. Body is real; my body is not....
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