Category: Uncategorized
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Fury Road
I think one reason I like Fury Road is that it shows us what we could be. Yes, people can be that awful. Not only men, but men can be particularly good at it when the world has become the sort of place that favors the ruthless. Harsh conditions can make us all turn on…
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Life and teleology
It’s silly to talk about life without talking about teleology. Far from being correct in dismissing it from modern thought, purpose is the single defining characteristic of life. We can obfuscate it by talking about adaptation, but it’s senseless to talk about it with out realizing we’re fundamentally talking about purpose. An adaptation is a…
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False religion and false art
Beauty, truth, and morality are all dimensions of the same experience through different aspects of the soul and its contact with reality. They are all a call to higher being. Authentic morality, art, and philosophy all seek a a connection to something higher and greater and more perfect than yourself. False religion and false art…
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Fear and regrets
A while back my wife asked me where I saw myself in five years. And I confessed, jokingly, that I wasn’t sure, because most of my career plans centered around killing myself. She wasn’t super amused by it, and I blew it off, but I was actually being honest. I didn’t have any ideas or…
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Teflon relationships
The power of Teflon is in the bond between its components, of which there are only two: carbon and fluorine. It resists all other bonds, nothing can stick to it, because the bond between its two components is so strong. They form a polymer where the carbon chain provides the backbone and the fluorine atoms…
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Feeling vs substance
Health doesn’t consist in feeling good. Feeling good is the consequence of health. Attempting to feel good by force or contrivance won’t make you healthy, in fact it may harm you even worse by removing your ability to perceive your sickness. Our culture is terribly averse to pain of any kind. We want to ameliorate…
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What is love?
What is love? And in what sense does our society worship it, and in what sense does it hate it? Love is an almost terrifying admission of weakness. It’s an admission that we lack something, that it’s not good for us to be alone. It’s an admission that the other person has something we need.…
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The shift toward collectivism
One odd side effect of the slow drift within our culture toward a more socialistic ethic in our society is that, morally, we have shifted away from a more intrusive, personal individualistic morality toward a socialized “shunning” moral culture. Because morality is coming more and more to exist out there, not in here, in effects,…
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The substance of virtue vs the feeling of virtue
The substance of virtue and the feeling of virtue are quite different things. One is easy to get, one hard. One is public, the other private. One is bought with denial of the self, the other reaffirms the self. One is inflicted on ourselves and builds our strength, the other is inflicted on others and…
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Hatred of the ordinary
Our culture has a hatred of the average or ordinary. We seek exceptionalism, but not in performance (ethics) or morality (virtue), but in a new kind of currency: identity. Thus the focus on experiences and displaying them, the desire to be different and stand out, to be individual and unique rather than conform to any…
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