Today, I’m just testing out a few new Hugo shortcodes I added to the site. I’ve culled these from around the internet, and hacked together some of my own. You might find them useful, if you’re doing static blogging yourself. You can find all the code on the repo for this site, found here. As I do more and more blogging from the static site generator, this sort of thing will be more and more useful to me, at least.
In order to produce videos, I have had to jump through a lot of hoops. One of those, is learning how to transcode video files with ffmpeg. This post is mostly a convenience for me. A place where I can dump copy-pasta command lines, so that I never forget them. Extracting video from YouTube If you’re initially uploading to YouTube (because its the only cellphone app that works well), and need to move the videos to other services that don’t support syncing yet (or, their support is sketchy and broken), then use ffmpeg in cooperation with youtube-dl, and do this:
Recently, I setup a self-hosted nextcloud instance, for my own personal use. One of the primary uses I had for this service, besides storing sharable content on the internet, was to have a central place where I stored and synced things like appointments, meetings, and tasks. That requires a working CALDAV and CARDDAV discovery service, and nextcloud has this feature, so I was eager to get it up and running.
When I first entered the working world in the late nineteen-eighties, there were a few essential social ground rules that you had to learn, in order to be successful. The first was that my employer does not exist for my benefit. My role in the business is to provide some tangible value toward the end goal of the company: product and profit. To the extent that I benefited the firm, I would receive benefits in kind, after a bit of negotiation.
This book is no ordinary work of apologetic exceptionalism, or fatalistic religious outrage. Dr. Feser attempts to go much, much further than to simply “debunk” the New Atheists. In fact, he only spends a minority of the pages of this book on the “New Atheists” themselves, because they turn out to be only the worst exemplars of a much bigger problem, according to Dr. Feser. In short, this book is a blanket indictment of the entirety of modern materialist naturalism and a significant portion of the science upon which it is based.
I have been listening to this lecture series to supplement the readings in my philosophy of religion course. In the first Kant lecture, Cary says that Kant argues against Anselm on the ground that being isn’t a property. It goes a little something like this: Anselm says, that which actually exists, rather than which we can merely imagine, is superior in perfection because existence is superior to all other possible properties we could imagine.
The following is not a sustained argument, so much as an exploration of impressions derived from the last few years of reading. There are arguments to be gleaned from it, but I must confess, they’re not entirely conscious efforts. The blind squirrel of my mind is finding a few nuts as he tries to feel his way out of the forest. Plato and Aristotle had very different ideas about Justice. But I am less and less convinced that they disagreed about it, fundamentally.
I am hesitant to do back-to-back critiques of Stefan Molyneux, because I don’t want the blog to become the “Contra Molyneux” journal. However, in his Christmas podcast, Stefan made a number of titillating and curious assertions, that I just couldn’t resist. He did not offer a thorough defense of any of them in the podcast, but we can excuse this on the ground that at least some of these are defended elsewhere, and were only presuppositions necessary for the present discussion.
A Concise Guide To Stefan Molyneux’s Atheism I am entering the final year of a BA Philosophy at the University of London, this year. To kick things off, I thought I’d do a book review for the blog. The focus this year is the philosophy of religion, and it’s been a while since I’ve done a book review for an “internet” philosopher. So, I’ve decided to dig my claws into Stefan Molyneux’s “Against The Gods?
Today, I had a little extra time, so I was going to write a response to the Op-Ed piece that Pope Francis recently published in the New York Times . Seeing as how he’s such a prominent figure in the culture today, I thought it might spice up the feed to delve into current events and do an analysis. However, after reading through this twaddle twice, I have to say I found it utterly vapid and unworthy of anything like a serious critique.
