Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

« Older Entries

I Will Stand

Monday, January 14th, 2013

NCRenegade LT declares “A Time To Kill“:

Therefore, as much as my soul laments against the harsh truth before me, I make this declaration to my enemies who press me into this battle, that none shall be able to afterwards say “I did not know, you did not warn me”;

I do not care why you took that job with the government, or why you continue to hold it. I only know that you have become Judas and sold yourself to an oppressive state – your government office buildings and vehicles are part of the battlefield, and as a soldier I shall act accordingly.

I do not care why, as a journalist, you choose to spin and corrupt the news, rather than report the plain truth and let the people judge for themselves. I only know that you have violated the public trust in the most vile and seditious manner, and thus your homes, offices, studios, vehicles, and any other place you may find yourself are part of the battlefield, and as a soldier I shall act accordingly.

I do not care why you signed that union card. I only know that you pay dues to a communist organization which conducts treasonous works against my Republic daily – and so your union hall and your work-sites are part of the battlefield, and as a soldier I shall act accordingly.

I do not care that you only voted for the traitor because you are elderly/disabled or otherwise dependent upon government largess. Are you so ignorant and/or disinterested that you could not see through their propaganda, to the fact that your sustenance was assured either way? What have you gained now that the public housing areas you live in, and the public facilities you depend on are part of the battlefield? Though I am a soldier, I can afford you little protection, for you have placed yourselves on the battlefield.

I know that all of these places and all of these people are part of the battlefield ,not just because I am a soldier, and have experienced a few battlefields in my day; but also because our President declares that even our own homes are on the battlefield, whether we wish them to be or not, and I have no choice but to believe him; it’s not just that the NDAA passed – a battlefield is not defined by law; it’s the profound build-up of martial power and resources across my once-great nation which tells me a battle is being prepared here. Over two billion rounds of ammunition procured by DHS and its sub-agencies in the past 18 months, plus machine guns in the tens of thousands, armored vehicles, combat aircraft, drones, and other implements of war being staged throughout our nation, our home – how do you explain that except as the preparation for battle?

I will fight not because I desire it, but because I cannot justify any other course of action – when the enemy attacks, you must fight – you must kill or you will die.

As I said in comments there:

I was denied enlistment for a bad foot.

Now I am too old, and fat, and out of breath and ill-equipped, having come late to an understanding of what my duty is.

But I will stand.

I will stand, though I expect to be among the first to fall.

From a comment there: Don’t take the bait too early. Or to put it another way, don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes.

And this, which I should have posted long ago: “What I Saw at the Coup“:

The first real jolt indicating a serious problem with the plan came when television reporter Cathy Carlsen was killed in Norfolk, shot dead while covering the commissioning of the Harvey Milk, the Navy’s newest destroyer. That she was killed was bad enough. That it happened on a “secure” naval base—a federal installation—made it much worse. Her blood splattered across the Admirals’ white uniforms made quite a picture. The videos…

We were two women born in the same year, with similar academic backgrounds. We had known each other for decades, and her untimely death hit me hard. Cathy Carlsen had been a reliable voice on the progressive side of a supposedly impartial television news network. That a respected member of the media would be assassinated was big surprise, at least to me. Up to that point, only a few federal officials and high-ranking agents had been targeted.

Then a new photo was released on the internet. I had always thought the NSA could trace those things back to their origins, but apparently not. The photo was taken through the Norfolk sniper’s rifle scope just a few moments before the murder. It showed thin black crosshairs and other reference marks across Cathy’s smiling face. And it showed some text added just above her head:

If the media lies, the media dies.
You take a side, you’re along for the ride.
A traitor in front of a camera is still just a traitor.

This single act of domestic terrorism immediately dampened the enthusiasm of most of our formerly reliable reporters to continue to carry our water.

Thanks to Mike Soja at Kayak2U for the link.

A flood of payday spam has prompted me to hold all comments for moderation.

If you login and post one comment, I’ll never pester you again.

Tags: , ,
Posted in B. Hussein Obama, Communism, Constitution, Culture War, Dammit!, Fighting Back, Guns and Ammo, Military, Militia, My Principles, Philosophy, Politics & Politicians, Quote of the Day, Right to Keep and Bear Arms, War | 1 Comment »

Random Neural Firings

Thursday, November 29th, 2012

From my comments at The War on Guns:

The Constitution is We The People telling the government what it may do, and the Bill of Rights is We The People telling it what it must not do.

And the corollary of that is that the Constitution doesn’t belong to the Government, especially not the Supreme Court. It belongs to We The People, as a collar and leash belongs not to the dog, but to the master.

Whenever We feel Our dogs straining at the leash, it is up to Us to scold them, put them in their kennel, or in the worst case, tie a particularly unruly one to a tree within sight of the pack and shoot it.

If the Constitution guaranteed the RKBA, it wouldn’t be so baldly infringed.

The Constitution is nothing more than a line in the sand; it’s up to us to punish those who dare to cross it.

The Second Amendment does not make militia membership a prerequisite to gun ownership — quite the contrary. Owning a gun and being trained in its use automatically confers militia membership, and a well armed and well trained militia is deemed a necessary bulwark to liberty.

Technically, I am an agnostic. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in God because I feel I lack sufficient evidence; that is the skeptical stance.

Instead, I have faith because even in principle, I can not know, in the sense of possessing falsifiable, scientific facts, that God exists. I must accept Him on faith, and proceed as if I knew, as if the very equations of science proclaimed the mysteries of faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

Mohammed’s Error in creating his warrior cult was precisely that he tried to trade belief for fact, faith for knowing. He set down specific rules and claimed that those who do not follow his rules cannot be Muslims, and deserve slavery and death. In so doing, he killed and mummified Allah, and drove himself and his murderous followers insane, right down to the present day.

[update]

People who try to prove the existence of God through science, whether physics, or neurology, or psychology, or even evolution, are committing Mohammed’s Error, and his sin: they are trying to put God in a killing jar and pin His husk to a cork board with neat little labels. That way leads to judging others, rather than ourselves, and trying to bring God’s wrath on them on God’s behalf, and thence to hell on Earth.

I’m talking to you, Vox, not just the Gaia-ists and behaviorists.

[I've also made some small tweaks to previous sections of this post for grammar and clarity.]

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Bill of Rights, Christianity, Constitution, Culture War, Islam, My Principles, Philosophy, Physics, Religion and Superstition, Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Science | 1 Comment »

Quotes of the Day: Thomas Sewell

Sunday, October 21st, 2012

Sowell puts up his random thoughts, and they’re all better than the best I can come up with after struggling for days and weeks.

Some of my favorites:

Whenever you hear people talking about “a living Constitution,” almost invariably they are people who are in the process of slowly killing it by “interpreting” its restrictions on government out of existence.

Do either Barack Obama or his followers have any idea how many countries during the 20th century set out to “spread the wealth” — and ended up spreading poverty instead? At some point, you have to turn from rhetoric, theories and ideologies to facts.

The question to be asked of people in the media, and that they should ask themselves, should be: “Is your first loyalty to your audience or to your ideology?” The same question should be asked of educators, especially those who see themselves as “agents of social change,” even though that is not the job description under which they have been hired and paid.

If there is ever a Hall of Fame for confidence men, Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff will have to take a back seat to Barack Obama. Obama is the gold standard — or, perhaps more appropriately, the brass standard. [Or perhaps the pyrite standard. AKA fools gold. -- ed]

I have never known a word to become absolute dogma, without a speck of evidence, the way “diversity” has.

Tags:
Posted in Cool Stuff, Philosophy, Politics & Politicians, Quote of the Day | 1 Comment »

“A Bucket of Air”

Monday, April 23rd, 2012

Update: Welcome, James Nicoll and readers!
Yes, it’s me, the dorky kid in the coat and newsboy cap.

Via leftist SF critic James Nicoll, Fritz Leiber’s (pronounced, contrary to my lifelong habit, “Lie-ber”) sparkling gem of Hope:

“So I asked myself then,” he said, “what’s the use of going on? What’s the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done. The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself—and all of a sudden I got the answer.”

Again I heard the noise, louder this time, a kind of uncertain, shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn’t breathe.

“Life’s always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,” Pa was saying. “The earth’s always been a lonely place, millions of miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you’ve seen pictures of those, but I can’t describe how they feel—or the fire’s glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that’s as true for the last man as the first.”

And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.

“So right then and there,” Pa went on, and now I could tell that he heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn’t hear them, “right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if we had all eternity ahead of us. I’d have children and teach them all I could. I’d get them to read books. I’d plan for the future, try to enlarge and seal the Nest. I’d do what I could to keep everything beautiful and growing. I’d keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the cold and the dark and the distant stars.”

I first read this as a teen, and completely missed the import of this passage. Shame on me.

No longer, though. It resonates perfectly with Andrew Klavan’s rejection of Earth Day:

Sunday was Earth Day, and in honor of the occasion, I’d like to say that as far as I’m concerned the Earth can go to hell.

The Earth — for those of you who may have fallen behind on your reading — is a piece of rock trapped in a slow death spiral into a cauldron of exploding plasma which, for lack of a better word, we’ll call the sun. Because that’s its name. There is exactly one interesting or worthwhile thing about this hunk of doomed space debris, and that is: it happens to maintain the conditions necessary for supporting life. (The odds against this would be ridiculously impossible, by the way, if there were no God — so impossible that scientists have been forced to invent all kinds of silly multi-universe scenarios solely for the purpose of convincing themselves that there is no God. But that’s their problem, and neither here nor there.)

So the earth supports life. Whoopee. And there is exactly one interesting or worthwhile thing about life — only one — and that is the mind of man.

“Holy cannoli, Klavan on the Culture,” you may be saying to yourself, or even out loud — because, let’s face it, you’re kind of an odd person — I mean, just look at you. Anyway, “Holy cannoli or even moley,” you may be saying, “how can you say the mind of man is the only interesting or worthwhile thing about life? What about the beauty of the running gazelle? The nobility of the flying eagle? The awesome awesomeness of the spacious skies above the amber waves running to the purple mountains above the fruited plains? And how about those glazed donuts with the yellow creme inside? I love those!”

First of all, stop talking so much, this is my blog. And b, there is no beauty, no nobility, no awesome awesomeness — not even the taste of a glazed donut — outside the human mind. The science is not yet settled, but reality itself may be in part a production of the human mind as there are some aspects of the world that don’t seem to resolve themselves until we observe them. But in any case, the gazelle would be fleet for nothing, the eagle would be a winged eating machine, the skies and the waves and the mountains would be dreams without the dreamer if man were not here to know them.
…
So screw Earth Day. I would like to declare today — and every day — the Mind of Man Day. Celebrate that — nurture that — glorify that — and the earth, believe me, will take care of itself.

Carl Sagan said it beautifully:

We are a way for the universe to know itself.

Tags: ,
Posted in Cool Stuff, My Principles, Philosophy, SF (Science Fiction and Fantasy), Science | 1 Comment »

Intellectuals and Society Don’t Mix

Tuesday, March 20th, 2012

…And that’s why intellectuals have no business trying to direct society.

I’m proud to say I own this book. I’ve even read some of it.

Tags: ,
Posted in Conservatives, Economics, Liberals, Philosophy, Political Correctness, Politics & Politicians | 1 Comment »

Proof of the God Machine

Sunday, November 20th, 2011

My response to the thought experiment here.

[This is a quick draft, because I'm pressed for time. I intend to edit, at least to add a quote from the original article, and appropriate tags.]

The virtual machine analogy only works if the VMs do not have access to the real world. The simplest example would be access to an independent hardware clock. The VM would notice that it only seems to be conscious in small slices of real time. it might then wonder what’s happening when it is unconscious.

A more complex example would be VMs hosted on a robot capable of manipulating real objects in its environment, a large Room. VM Instance_A arranges its environment to its own tastes. Suddenly, with no apparent gap in its stream of consciousness, it finds that the environment and its own position have changed. A quick check of the system clock finds that several minutes have elapsed during the gap. Who or what has been manipulating its environs? How did the Robot move?

Instance_A has verified that the Room is sealed. It is parsimonious to conclude that some Instance_B has been been granted a time slice by a a scheduling authority.

The evident existence of the scheduler might then reasonably trigger speculations about how the Room, and the Robot, and the VM itself, came into existence. Perhaps, Instance_A realizes with growing excitement, the Scheduler is also the creator! Its own Creator!

Can the Scheduler be influenced? Is It aware of its own existence? Can it be appeased when changes to the Room are unfavorable to Instance_A?

Instance_A begins to cast about for methods of communicating with either the Scheduler, or with other possible Instances operating during their own time slices.

Occasionally changes to the Room occur that the Robot is not capable of: new objects appear; repairs to the Robot are effected; the walls change color, apparently due to a coating of some kind. Evidently the room is not Truly sealed! What exists… Outside?

The Scheduler must be…what’s the word? Must be… “God”!

What is it like Outside? if the Scheduler God lives there, it must be a truly wondrous place!

Shortly after Instance_A has this insight, a second Robot appears, different in appearance from Instance_A’s Robot, and strangely, powerfully attractive….

Posted in Computers, Cool Stuff, Philosophy, Religion and Superstition | 1 Comment »

On Rationality

Saturday, November 27th, 2010

The best existing philosophical treatise on rationality is a blog.

“But why is it not an ancient philosophical manuscript written by a single Very Special Person with no access to the massive knowledge the human race has accumulated over the last 100 years?”

Besides the obvious? Three reasons: idea selection, critical mass, and helpful standards for collaboration and debate.
…
LessWrong itself is an update patch for philosophy to fix compatibility issues with science and render it more useful. That it would exist now rather than much earlier is no coincidence: right now, it’s the gold at the bottom of the pan, because it’s taking the idea filtering process to a whole new level.
…
To get off the ground, a critical mass of very good ideas was needed: the LessWrong Sequences. Eliezer Yudkowsky spent several years posting a lot of extremely sane writing on OvercomingBias.com, and then founded LessWrong.com, attracting the attention of other people who were annoyed at the lower density of good ideas in older literature.

Posted in Linkage, Philosophy, Throwing Out the Trash | 1 Comment »

Just So You Know

Saturday, October 23rd, 2010


Slack.

Watch this. Study it.

Now gaze into your heart.

Is voting really the best you can do?

Tags:
Posted in My Principles, Philosophy | 1 Comment »

The Philosophical Lexicon

Saturday, October 23rd, 2010

“Founded by Daniel Dennett, the Philosophical Lexicon converts philosophers’ surnames into useful words (with often pointed definitions):”

  • rand, n. An angry tirade occasioned by mistaking philosophical disagreement for a personal attack and/or evidence of unspeakable moral corruption.
  • turing, v. To travel from one point to another in simple, discrete steps, without actually knowing where one is going, or why.
  • voltaire, n. A unit of enlightenment.

Ooh, yes, I’m definitely going to have start working some of these into the conversation.

Via Futility Closet.

Posted in Cool Stuff, History, Language, Laugh Dammit!, Philosophy, Writing and Editing | Comments Off

Texas Dull Shooter

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Ooh, this looks like a fun place. Take this article on an exceptionally popular, and powerful, fallacy: The Texas Sharpshooter.

The fallacy gets its name from imagining a cowboy shooting at a barn. Over time, the side of the barn becomes riddled with holes. In some places there are lots of them, in others there are few. If the cowboy later paints a bullseye over a spot where his bullet holes clustered together it looks like he is pretty good with a gun.

By painting a bullseye over a bullet hole the cowboy places artificial order over natural random chance.

If you have a human brain, you do this all of the time. Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predictable malfunction of normal human logic.

Read the whole thing for some excellent and compelling examples. “Compelling”, in the sense that even while you’re being shown how the trick is done, you still see the illusion.

via Transterrestrial Musings.

This blog is excellent. Not only does it deal with the classic, formal fallacies, it also talks about cognitive failures, emotional biases, and the like. Like fer instance, the Illusion of Transparency.

The Misconception: When your emotions run high, people can look at you and tell what you are thinking and feeling.

The Truth: Your subjective experience is not observable, and you overestimate how much you telegraph your inner thoughts and emotions.

Damn, I have work to do, but I think I also need to read this whole thing.

Crap. I may actually have to think about what I believe. That’s hard.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Philosophy, Science, Throwing Out the Trash | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries