Everyone’s doing their bit for the war: Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or ‘Black Berets’, will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of Paris’s Left Bank, their first action will be to establish [...]
[ via Doc Searls ] I’ve been reading a facinating essay by philosopher and cognitive scientist George Lakoff. He identifies and describes the metaphors at the core of Conservative thought that explain such seeming paradoxes as being anti-reproductive choice, yet pro-death penalty. He argues that both the Conservative and Liberal worldviews share the “Nation as [...]
[ via Boing Boing Blog ] China Miéville (Perdido Street Station) put up his list of 50 science fiction and fantasy novels which a socialist, or other politicaly minded person, should read.
[ via Doc Searls ] George Lakoff’s essay on 9/11 enlightened me as to why people can react to the attack the way many people, including Bush, did. If you accept you’re in a war between absolute good and evil, you’re able to things you’d otherwise dare not do: Nothing is more important than the [...]
[ via Must See http:// ] This is for my friend Lucy who’s taking her philosophy (logic) final this week. Venn diagrams to go please!
Earl Cooley, one of the fathers of Online Fandom, expands Larry Wall’s cannonical list of the virtues of a programmer to the help desk and Web design.
[ via the Potsmaster ] Here’s an informal paper playing with the notion that everything is just a simulation running on someone else’s computer.
Handy bookmark to have when you’re under saturation bombing from Ayn Rand quoters on /.
Suppose you’re traveling to work and you see a stop sign. What do you do? That depends on how you exegete the stop sign. A serious and educated Catholic rolls through the intersection because he believes he cannot understand the stop sign apart from its interpretive community and tradition. Observing that the interpretive community doesn’t [...]
An essay from the Awakening book mentioned previously. This is an expansion of the version in the book that includes several diagrams. The key points are that people, companies and governments are still unwilling to share information on Y2K which is needed to locate points of failure so we can build contingencies, and that we [...]
A delightful piece by Prof. Agre, where: Just once, I would like to see someone rant about conservatives in the same tones of hysterical exaggeration that now pour forth from every medium, 24 hours a day, in excoriation of the real and imagined perfidy of liberals. What would this sound like? Let me offer an [...]
Powerful Stuff. A lot of people worry these days about the death of civil discourse, and would say that I ought not call the Pope a homicidal liar, nor (to be ecumenical about it) the orthodox rabbinate homicidal liars, nor Trent Lott a disgusting opportunistic hatemonger. But I worry a lot less about the death [...]
Philosopher Daniel Dennett, author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and advocate of the strong adaptionist stance responds to Gould. Link
Author and linguist Steven Pinker responds to Gould. Link
Just in time for the Spectacle of Impeachment, the Situationalist International rides again. Link