Category Archives: Uncategorized

A Table of Moral Polarities, Initial Take

I’ve been making notes over the past month for a table of moral polarities, in order to align and summarize some of the concepts and the many news examples I’ve compiled lately. Recall how I’ve mentioned that certain attitudes, especially … Continue reading

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Today’s Authoritarianism Watch

Items today: Heather Cox Richardson on the transformation of the Republican Party since Reagan, from a party of small government to one bent on enforcing Christian nationalism; How Republicans now argue that juries don’t count (when they lose); FDR’s four … Continue reading

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Approximations and Denials of Reality

Ted Chiang on ChatGPT; Paul Krugman on the GOP’s Orwellian take on the world; and epistemology. Ted Chiang, The New Yorker, 9 Feb 2023: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web, subtitled “OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers … Continue reading

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Steveioe

Here’s an online comedian, Steven Ho, who goes by Steveioe, who was once an ER nurse (at UCLA), who began doing Tik Tok videos of himself acting out situations in the ER (in which he would play all of several … Continue reading

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Pending

No post tonight; unanticipated domestic turbulence. Will fill in retroactively, if I can. Update 20Nov21: No, let it stand.

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John Allen Paulos, A MATHEMATICIAN READS THE NEWSPAPER (1995)

John Allen Paulos, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. Basic Books, 1995. Author’s Conclusion: Always be smart. Seldom be certain. Journalists should ask, in addition to Who, Where, What, etc., How Many? And How Likely? And no matter how detailed the … Continue reading

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Lines from Angels in America: The World Only Spins Forward

Just a few about what the angels are, what they want, and in what sense the play is about angels and their relationship with America. Part One: Millennium Approaches Joe, a Mormon lawyer living in New York, has this take … Continue reading

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Equus, part 2

Scene 25. The psychiatrist, concerning the worship of a 17-year-old stable boy raised in isolation by his religious mother: I only know it’s the core of his life. What else has he got? Think about him. He can hardly read. … Continue reading

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Recent Links Saved from Facebook

Steven Pinker’s favorite books http://www.vulture.com/2018/03/steven-pinkers-10-favorite-books.html include title by Gamow, Dawkins, Deutsch, and his wife Sean Carroll’s correctives to Jordan Peterson’s fandom Cleaning your room is good; using pseudo-intellectual babble about archetypes to identify culture with masculinity is… Posted by Sean … Continue reading

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The Instinct Can Be Fought: TOS #24: “A Taste of Armageddon”

The Enterprise attempts to initiate diplomatic relations with a planet conducting a computer war with its neighbor planet, a war in which theoretical causalities voluntarily go to die in disintegration chambers. This is one of Trek’s best ethical conundrums, a … Continue reading

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