Unless you live under a rock, you've likely heard something like the following: "Invalid plates are no reason to die.""Passing a bad 20 is no reason to die""jogging in a neighborhood is no reason to die."Those statements, taken at face value, are, of course, absolutely true in any just system of proportionality. The problem is that those statements are utterly dishonestly used to defend behavior that ended up getting people killed. A friend uses the expression "above reproach, beneath agency" - and those statements are the ultimate example of that. Should Daunte Wright have died that night?…
All posts in philosophy
A while back I read van Creveld's Equality, the Impossible Quest. It was, looking back, something of an inflection point. More recently though, Charlton flat out called equality as a goal intrinsically evil. Equality is only possible with complete oneness which means either the chaos of unformed matter or the Night of Brahma when the universe has returned to an unexpressed, unmanifested state which is basically non-being. OK. Now look up "heat death." The heat death of the universe is a historically suggested theory of the ultimate fate of the universe in which the universe has diminished to a state…
The Didact, in an article picked up at MOTW, looks at the costs of taking the ticket. I can't add much to it, and any excerpt would be worthless standing on its own. I will say this. I am not sure, looking back, when this happened. There was a time I would have gone along to get along, and made the compromises he speaks of. Over time, though, I had heard far too much of what moral compromises were made by those who succeeded, even well before Weinstein and his potted plant fetishes. I'd also learned how predators groom their…
One thing that drives me nuts is the expression "my truth" or "their truth". Some people don't realize how poisonous it is, they haven't thought it through, but even so, I rarely have patience with it. Why? For the same reasons I have issues with any post modern claptrap, or critical-anything theory - because it rejects truth. Anything said after that, even if objectively correct, is likely to serve falsehood. What brought this post about was being told by a family member, after I refused to condone calling the events of January 6th an insurrection ("…
"The map is not the territory." It's both simple, and difficult to unpack. It's also related to the old saw about "the difference between theory and practice." The short version is that the "map", the model we hold in our heads, the very language that we use, has a relationship to objective and underlying reality, but it isn't actually the reality. It's an abstraction. A roadmap you look at on paper or on a screen isn't the road itself, and may not even be accurate if anyone made mistakes in the surveying or transcription, or if construction has been done…
Dr Kelli Ward posted an edited Scott Adams video that makes the same point I did a couple posts back. It doesn't matter how much more evidence you have of specific ways and means of wrongdoing - it's just icing on the cake. The only thing you need to know is that they kicked the observers out. The 2020 election was #NonTransparent by force. #Bullying to cheat. #StopTheSteal pic.twitter.com/qgF0lpJfkJ — Dr. Kelli Ward 🇺🇸 (@kelliwardaz) December 5, 2020 And in case they can the tweet and vid - a screenshot: As I said earlier: They kicked out the…
The botttom tweet below is a perfect example of "losing nicely" I don't hang out on twitter - no account. I also dont care if this is a Poe's law case of satire. I've personally had similar comments directed at me, and observed them being made on occasions far too numerous to count. It is wrong, and flat out immoral. From my own post on the Golden Rule - or what Taleb calls the Silver rule: Let me ask you this then. A bully advertises they’re willing to use force to get what they want. They’re not likely…
It's not a new concept, but one worth revisiting, that we are truly living in two different worlds from many of the self styled leftists, progressives, SJWs, and Democrats. To me, the biggest surprise of the last few years was the degree to which pretty little media and academic lies sway those who think that the NYT bestseller list is worth a damn. Instead of any form of reality kicking them in the teeth and making them realize that maybe they needed to re-evaluate things, they've only gotten more polarized. You can show them repeated cases of CNN butchering video…