Today it has just been announced that artificial life has been created and has been reproduced more than a billion times, sparking moral controversy: Scientists have created artificial life. In a world-first, Craig Venter, a maverick biologist and billionaire entrepreneur, has made a designer microbe from scratch. The creation of the new life form, nicknamed [...]
Posts Tagged ‘cognitive dissonance’
The meaningless life of a pet
Everywhere in modern civilization we find our societies getting drunk on all kinds of useless freedoms; one of the most useless is that of owning pets which neatly follows from the undeniable ‘human rights’. The reason why many people buy pets these days may be familiar to what Ted Kackzynski called the power process. In this it [...]
Defensiveness
Most people read something they don’t like about consumerism or social reality and immediately dismiss it so they can continue living in fantasyland. When these same people have convinced themselves that they are actually doing good for society by living in this manner, questioning them becomes a mortal sin and worthy of shouting things like [...]
Modern fantasy lands
I indulged in the spectacle of the Super Bowl a couple of months back. It is, after all, an American tradition. Some things I noticed made me laugh, but this quote from the winning quarterback was just hilarious: “Four years ago, who ever thought this would be happening?” said Brees, the game’s Most Valuable Player. [...]
Diversity our greatest liability
“My fellow Americans, we must never, ever believe that our diversity is a weakness — it is our greatest strength.” William Jefferson Clinton, State of the Union 1997 Twelve years after this insidious slogan was uttered and accepted by our obliviot voting population, the contrary results continue to reveal themselves. Maybe it is more accurate [...]
Renaissance humanism also fails us today
Once upon a time, populations weren’t diverse, at least not anywhere near to the forced extent they are today. Some of these non-diverse populations started to think of ways to avoid conflict among themselves, which included thinking about ending fratricide. One consequence of the development of humanist philosophy during the Renaissance was the increased emphasis [...]
Gaming: Just another barbituate
Modern society is full of addictive behaviors, but it also empowers the people who exhibit them, such that we end up listening to every reason but the most obvious one regarding the true source of the problem. We like to blame external factors or at least try to come up with external solutions to problems [...]
The hero is dead; Long live the hero
For those who value the false idea of “equality” in our society, incidents like this cause cognitive dissonance: Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said Paul Langone, 33, of Reading, heard the screams of Dr. Astrid Desrosiers on the fifth floor of an MGH office building on Staniford Street. Langone entered the doctor’s office [...]
Social networking sites can highlight social weaknesses
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 [...]
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 [...]
