Category: Philosophy

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Philosophy Psychology

Angry with Facebook but OK with Washington?

Perhaps you are so angry with Facebook and not the government because, as Molyneux has argued, the government is the  parent who can do no wrong and Facebook is the sibling you’re trained to hate.

Why Are People More Scared of Facebook Violating Their Privacy than Washington? – Hit & Run : Reason.com

This grasp of managing outrage is what makes our government’s lack of transparency so insidious. Even though the government has admitted that it has violated the Fourth Amendment at least once in its warrantless wiretapping, the outrage is limited to privacy and civil liberties circles precisely because the secrecy keeps the public from even knowing what these violations actually mean.

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Freedom Philosophy

How not to feel the horrible burden of Time

Lapham’s Quarterly (Winter 2013 edition) opens with the following mission statement by Charles Baudelaire (circa 1867). It suits the holiday mood, which for an atheist like me is every day. (Why? Read Every Day is an Atheist Holiday by Penn Jillette.) Cheers!

One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing, the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.

Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.

And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, and the clock will all reply, “It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”

 

 

Categories
Philosophy

Ayn Rand chats with Jim Henson

The site does not make this very clear–it’s fiction. It’s still fascinating.

The ARPANET Dialogues » Blog Archive » Vol. IV

17 April 1976 – The transcript presented here records a conversation between four figures from the broad spectrum of culture: puppeteer Jim Henson; Russian-American writer, philosopher and playwright Ayn Rand; painter Sidney Nolan; and artist and musician Yoko Ono. A few months after the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War, The Agency’s tests with the ARPANET convened these four individuals, each with a distinct sense of, as well as the potential means for, a competing world-view. These individuals, who cross different hemispheres, were to help with considerations towards the viability of broadly implementing Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.* Please note that the respective computer terminals for each participant were identified by the names of gods from Roman mythology and have here been changed to reflect the actual names of the participants. The application, still in its early stage of development, had limited syntax capability, thus punctuation was limited to the full stop. Also, the original timestamps for each transmission have been removed for the sake of legibility.

Categories
Philosophy Science

Why do we cry?

A related question answered by Leonard Peikoff was why we cry at joyful occasions. His answer: we perceive the beauty of life in context with the knowledge that it is not always so. If you feel that complex mix of joy and sorrow welling up in the coming weeks, take my advice: let the tears flow. That’s how nature made us.

CultureLab: Tragic tears: Why we are the only animals that cry

WE ARE the only animals who shed tears from emotion. But why? And what parts of the brain govern our impulse to weep? In Why Humans Like to Cry, Michael Trimble looks to neuroscience, art and evolution for answers.

His basic argument is that there is a set of neural systems in the brain that respond selectively to emotional stimuli and, specifically, tragedy. By this, he means the individual experience of loss, whose co-evolution with language and culture led to – or at least aided in – the birth of the art form of the same name, which deals with loss and suffering as essential aspects of humanity.

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News Philosophy Politics

Special-interest combatants

Are Anonymous special-interest combatants? The SIG (special interest group) is a well-worn concept in hacker culture. What happens when a SIG is willing to attack organization to promote the subject they hold most dear? They become 21st century soldiers who open up a third front in a war without the backing of a government. The changing dynamics are fascinating so long as you can set aside the horror associated with thinking about how the other two sides are killing people.

Let’s not make the mistake some would encourage us to make: don’t anthropomorphize Anonymous. We know there is no collective consciousness. Not for a religion. Not for a nation. Not for for an army. There only individuals cooperating. The particular Anonymous philosophy makes it even harder to think of the group as a person. Maybe it will help people see governments as (merely) people too.

When the people in Anonymous cooperate for a cause, we can’t ignore a significant difference in motivations. People in a government cooperate to preserve a system of slavery. (How free range the slaves are is not significant.) The people in Anonymous seem to be cooperating to preserve an idea: the Internet and its implied freedom. This will continue to be difficult for governments to address because while governments have relied on indoctrination, presumably everyone in Anonymous joined by choice.

Anonymous Attacks Israel to defend Palestinians in Gaza

But when the government of Israel publicly threatened to sever all Internet and other telecommunications into and out of Gaza they crossed a line in the sand. As the former dictator of Egypt Mubarack learned the hard way – we are ANONYMOUS and NO ONE shuts down the Internet on our watch.

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