A while ago, I friended a family friend’s son on Facebook. Nice guy, always pretty quiet, but generally reasonable – at least, that’s how I had known him in the 90s, and I hadn’t really seen him much since. After friending him and his sister, I realized both were Ron Paul supporters. Sure, this could [...]
Posts from ‘October, 2009’
A house of cards and your place within
Designing for distributive centralization, gratifying immediacy and utilitarian convenience has its drawbacks. Like a fallen domino, failure of a node in the system sets up a potential cascading effect of malfunction. From communications to groceries to utilities, no necessity utilized by the masses of people, by design, exists as an autonomous mechanism. All the above [...]
White secession
The election of Barack Obama has brought us a bit of a shock: instead of being the “post-racial” president, he’s the great divider — and through no fault of his own. Most people who voted for Barack Obama did so out of a sensible desire to advance their own ethnic group, except whites. Whites voted [...]
Why publishing, music and movie industries fail
Every time someone is bemoaning the dying state of the record industry, I get in trouble. I get in trouble because I point out that it’s not just the record industry — it’s also the publishing industry and the movie industry. What do these have in common? They’re entertainment. And also, since the 1980s and [...]
Deterrent is a fallacy
From Wordsmith: “Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.” While there’s truth in Plato’s words, most of us fall somewhere between good and bad. And for people in that spectrum, laws serve as good deterrents. Really? Then why do people [...]
Sacred eternal forms and their replaceable instances
Much has changed over the centuries. Most visibly, our technologies have changed shape. Often, it is the less readily visible changes – in our hearts and minds – that we tend to uncover here. Still, as the old saying has it, there is nothing new (in substance, behind its outer shape) under the sun. The [...]
Large corporations are evil
In the 1960s, people started looking for a bogeyman to replace (a) Kings (b) Hitler and (c) King George. We needed a reason why things weren’t perfect; after all, our intentions were good. Obviously, either we were flakes, or some Oppressor was keeping us down. The useful target that emerged was the corporation. After all, [...]
The psychology of leftism
Every now and then you encounter a clear statement of political intent, and today’s comes from a video game site. Their attempt is to describe “We power,” or People Power as we call it here, versus the establishment, which they identify as rightist and individualistic: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual [...]
Playing with perception of reality
I have a suggestion for all people who like life: be very critical of any information you are told is true. First, if it’s true, it will be logically consistent and you don’t need to be told it. If you need to be told it, it may be that you’re underconfident in your views and [...]
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