This is brilliant. It distills philosophical enquiry down to its essentials: fuck it.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
This is brilliant. It distills philosophical enquiry down to its essentials: fuck it.
[Content Warning: death, sexual abuse, suicide]
A young fellow I knew recently ended his life. We had discussed it before, and he was often miserable, saw no point in being alive, didn’t enjoy it, and as he said “never asked for it.”
Warning: Discussion of Violence from a Favorable Viewpoint.
This is something I’ve been pondering for a long time, and I have no answers. But it bothers me; I feel like everyone ought to understand the dynamics of power and be able to resist people who seek to abuse the system for their own ends.
Ready Player One is a nice bit of fluff and wish-fulfillment, with some really beautifully executed imagery. Behind that, it’s a basic good guys versus bad guys conflict, and the end is predictable and you can put your brain in “park” and enjoy the explosions. I won’t say “it was a waste of film” because I’m sure everyone involved worked very hard and it was shot on digital. But this is not a review of the movie – I want to discuss thoughts I had during the movie.
Philosophers, in all ages, have taken the part that seemed destined for the ministers of religion.
Your host, Jean Meslier
One of the podcasts I listen to is the Intelligence2,[i2] which is generally OK, though sometimes horrible. The one I listened to most recently was pretty horrible.
Before long they saw the towers and flags of Dictionopolis sparkling in the sunshine, and in a few moments they reached the great wall and stood at the gateway to the city.
The fundamental assumption in moral philosophy is that men are responsible for their actions. From this assumption, it follows necessarily, as Kant pointed out, that men are metaphysically free, which is to say that in some sense they are capable of choosing how they shall act.
Jean Meslier
From the most remote period theology alone regulated the march of philosophy. What aid has it lent it?
Many people make a subtle distinction between true religion and superstition; they tell us that the latter is but a cowardly and inordinate fear of Divinity, that the truly religious man has confidence in his God,
Jean Meslier Portrait
and loves Him sincerely; while the superstitious man sees in Him but an enemy, has no confidence in Him, and represents Him as a suspicious and cruel tyrant, avaricious of His benefactions and prodigal of His chastisements. But does not all religion in reality give us these same ideas of God? While we are told that God is infinitely good, is it not constantly repeated to us that He is very easily offended, that He bestows His favors but upon a few, that He chastises with fury those to whom He has not been pleased to grant them?