Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Sunday, July 5th, 2026
Almost all mainstream political programs have ultimately aimed at (or at least have been justified in terms of) improving the lot of humankind. In this respect you might call them Eudaimonist. Socialists think that humans will flourish better with equality maximised, liberals think the same for maximising liberty, and so ...
Posted in Politics | No Comments »
Sunday, June 28th, 2026
What are these ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ (henceforth, IWK)? Let’s ignore the term ‘indigenous’ for the moment: we will see that it has its own problems. An unsystematic review of many of the official and semi-official resources available online is extremely confusing, since there seems to be no consistent distinction ...
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Sociology | No Comments »
Thursday, June 25th, 2026
Extract from the Brookings Report 182-4
The implications of a discovery of extraterrestrial life
Recent publicity given to efforts to detect extraterrestrial messages via radio telescope has popularized -- and legitimized -- speculations about the impact of such a discovery on human values. [33] It is conceivable that there is semi-intelligent ...
Posted in Interstellar, Politics | No Comments »
Thursday, October 14th, 2021
I, me, my
Please keep up.
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Wednesday, September 15th, 2021
_ pronouns are _, _, and _. They may not be written or pronounced, for you are not worthy.
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Friday, July 2nd, 2021
I put this together in just a half hour or so after talking to a friend who remarked upon how much nonsense we were supposed to believe. Note that I didn't even have to talk about the temporary bullshits of the current news cycle, and I haven't mentioned any of ...
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Thursday, January 14th, 2021
Here are mín preferred pronouns. Ic am currently identifying as masculine singular; if this changes the guide will be updated. It is your responsibility to check this noticeboard before attempting any pronominal reference to ensure compliance and avoid offence.
(The acute accent signs mark long vowel sounds. The letter 'g' in ...
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Monday, May 8th, 2017
I asked Sam Crane at Useless Tree:
Are there, in fact, any arguments against torture in Chinese philosophy that aren't basically utilitarian? If there aren't, then could there have been? In Western philosophy our arguments are usually from appeal to various notions of 'human rights', but that wouldn't be possible for ...
Posted in Philosophy, Politics | No Comments »
Monday, May 8th, 2017
Christopher Hitchens has followed in the footsteps of Steve Harrigan and subjected himself to the process known as 'waterboarding' in order to be able to report more insightfully on just what it is that is the focus of so much controversy. He reports that it is clearly torture and that ...
Posted in Philosophy, Politics | No Comments »
Sunday, May 7th, 2017
Context
UN resolution 242 calls for a withdrawal to secure and recognised borders.
Israel may have to accept that no conceivable borders can satisfy both criteria. The Arabs maintain a maximalist (or very nearly) interpretation which insists on Israeli withdrawal to the 1948 borders, but these are impossible for Israel , given ...
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