Let all sleep, while to my shame I seeThe imminent death of twenty thousand men Fortinbras is about as minor a character as can be in Shakespeare's Hamlet (1599? 1601?). He is mentioned offhandedly a few times, such as Horatio's re-telling of Hamlet's father killing Fortinbras' father in a duel in Act 1.1, or Claudius [...]
I was thinking about dumb logic things today. So, one dumb thing is Roko's Basilisk. It's the dumb rationality obsessed nerd thing where the odds of us being in a computer simulation are less good than us being in reality, so we should give money to a loser who promises to build AI god. The [...]
A simple proposition: God is Omnipotent. Consider this word: Omni-Potent. Omni, meaning all or of all things. Potent, meaning having great power, influence, or effect. This is not simply "very powerful" or "extremely powerful". This is all powerful. Unlimited. Unbounded. Possessing absolute agency. Non-dependent. Any being which is not omnipotent is not worthy of being [...]
For a certain generation, The Transformers: The Movie (1986) is a traumatic and horrible experience that defined childhood forever. Consider the opening: https://youtu.be/4lo7JPLJUUU We are in space. An eerie, haunting theme plays as, from between two suns, a distant object approaches. It grows closer, and we see it is a large grey sphere, surrounded by spikes, and [...]
I was watching David Harvey's excellent lecture series on reading Marx's Das Kapital, and in the introduction, he talks about how he's done this class for many many years now, and in all sorts of departments, even those you wouldn't expect to see reading economic and social philosophy. And, he notes, each year he learns something [...]
Jordan Bernt Peterson was born in 1962, holds a B.A. in political science, and a PhD in psychology. He teaches at the University of Toronto. Like a lot of smart people, he was a very successful and interesting figure in his own field, who then decided to branch out and start bloviating about other fields [...]
The Marquis de Sade isn't the world's best philosopher. He's a fairly good writer and stylist, and has an alright grasp of character dynamics, but his dialogues are worse than Plato's when it comes to having one character give long speeches, and another nod, agree, and say "oh yes, you're right, you're so wise, you've [...]
Consider a woman, Mary, who is color blind. She is a neuroscientist, and knows absolutely everything there is to know about color, all the wavelengths and all the effects of light on the eye, etc.. There is nothing she doesn't know about it. But she has never, herself, experienced it. One day, a surgical procedure [...]
GET FUCKING VACCINATED YOU IDIOTS
Literal Machines 