Bryan Lunduke posted the following video to his Odysee channel recently, and I think it warrants a serious response.
This phenomenon is a spiritual sickness infecting the culture that extends far beyond just the “linux community”, or even the Internet. The “linux community” is just the next available target of a morally deranged mob that has been moving through the culture since at least 2000 (and probably much, much earlier). The fact that the “linux community” got to sit back and wait until 2019/2020 before this mob finally put its eyes on them, is pure accident.
In a recent exchange between Douglas Murray and N. T. Wright on the Unbelievable? Podcast, Douglas poses the following conundrum:
Is it the case that we are meaning-seeking beings, or, that we are meaning-seeking beings and there is meaning to seek?
This, it seems to me, is the basic choice every man faces implicitly as a fundamental part of his maturation, and every philosopher faces explicitly as a fundamental part of his matriculation.
Well, this is a curiously positive coincidence. Just about a month ago, I posted a short missive here, complaining about the “bring your whole self to work” fad. I tend to be somewhat pessimistic about the direction society is going, but today, it’s taken a decidedly positive turn that relates directly to that post. It’s almost as if my post was actually read by the founders of Bascamp themselves.
What am I talking about?
Antony Flew is famous for a few things. Among them is an allegory he included in an essay originally published in 1955, called “Theology and Falsification”. As the title implies, Flew attacks religious belief from a position that would have been familiar to someone like Bertrand Russell or A. J. Ayer, and is today is recognizable as a stock materialist criticism. Let’s have a look at the parable, and Flew’s reasoning from it, to see exactly why he’s wrong.
I have been thinking about this on-and-off, recently. What is the difference between the Sagan Cosmos, and the Tyson Cosmos? There are lots of fairly uncharitable things to say about both of these men, but if we were forced to provide an actual explanation, I think three things could be said:
Era / Audience. The original Cosmos was released in 1980. Not since the early eighties, have I felt the same sense of optimism and yearning for the promise of the future.
All the pop philosophers will tell you that The Matrix is an allegory of Platonic Dualism. They are all wrong.
Platonic dualism asserts that the soul and the body are distinct, and that the body is wholly dependent upon a transcendent form imposed upon it, when the soul (an instance of that transcendent form) enters it. But if we take the “real world” Neo was initially ignorant of to be the allegory for the body, and the “matrix world” into which Neo was born (and in which he was initially living out a kind of dream) to be the allegory of the soul, then it is not proper Platonism.
America has always had a high and a low culture, similar to that of the English or the French. But the relationship between the two is expressed very differently than the English or the French, particularly in the political sphere.
Throughout it’s history, American high and low culture have both more-or-less agreed with each other on the core principles governing the society, derived mainly from western Protestantism, English common law tradition, and Catholic intellectualism filtered through the late Enlightenment.
Have a look at this video, and then read my response.
Brian completely misses the point on this one. The problem with church affiliation is not whether or not the mass is Tridentine, or whether or not there are tambourines and guitars. The problem with the church is that it has abandoned its actual “value add” (to put it in Brian’s metaphor). The “uniqueness” of the church is not in its Gothic architecture, or the specific language the liturgy is read in, or the massive late-medieval organs, or the Catholic habits, or even the lengthy intellectual tradition from St.
In 1974, Robert Nozick wrote a lengthy response to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, called “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”. One of Nozick’s core critiques of Rawls, centers around a characterization of the kind of Justice that Rawls was advocating. Nozick called it, the justice of “patterned distributions”.
Famously, Nozick argued against a fixed “patterned distribution” of wealth, using the metaphor of famous basketball player Wilt Chamberlain. The entire allegory is too much for this post but to summarize briefly, he pointed out through this metaphor that, given a regime of voluntary individual exchanges which, are ostensibly morally acceptable even on Rawls conception of patterned justice, the only way to maintain a fixed pattern of distribution, would be through the application of force, which itself could be construed as unjust, on Rawls’ own theory.
This week, I have had the opportunity, as part of my new job, to reacquaint myself with the SOAP protocol. I was tasked with standing up a facade service, that would act as a live integration mock, for a new client interface being built which will be accessing a real (old) SOAP backend service, written in Java. Problem is, due to the nature of the situation, there is no way to see the innards of the service I’m mocking.
