Wonder at what point AI is just going to plainly debunk some entire philosophical systems...

Nietzsche says somewhere that the illusion of willpower rests on our tendency to identify with the part of our soul that commands, not the part that obeys.

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will - Simone Weil

Marx knew what his improvisations about dialectic were worth. In 1857 on Indian Mutiny 'It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way'

Who's going to say the quiet part out loud?

Bill Maher: “I’m not a Christian, but they are systematically killing the Christians in Nigeria. They’ve killed over 100,000. They are literally attempting to wipe out the Christians of an entire country. Where are the kids protesting this?”

St Edith Stein from The Significance of Woman's Intrinsic Value in National Life, lecture given at the 15th convention of the Bavarian Catholic Women Teachers in Ludwigshafen on the Rhine, 12 April 1928

Our prayers are with the Palestinian Christians of the town of Taybeh in the West Bank, an entirely Christian town, which is being targeted and destroyed by Israeli settlers. Homes, cars, crops, and land belonging to Palestinian Christians are being burned to force Christians to leave their town. The town is an important one for our Christian heritage due to the town’s reference in John 11:54 as the place where Jesus went when the religious authorities were seeking to kill him. Father Bashar Fawadleh, parish priest of the Church of Christ the Redeemer in Taybeh, told ACI MENA: “The town, which the Gospel of John (11:54) refers to as ‘Ephraim’ — the place Jesus withdrew to before his passion — is no longer safe for its people today… We do not live in peace but in daily fear and siege.” 🙏🏼✝️

David Bentley Hart taking shots at #Heidegger ...

Do you think #merleauponty realized how religious this was? John 1.1" In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

Tower of Babel or for the modern reader Disney did warn us

Pride, as Aquinas defines it in De Malo, is “the inordinate desire for pre-eminence” (Question 8, Article 2). With Augustine and the Christian tradition in general, he teaches that it is “the greatest sin” and indeed “the root and queen of all sins.” Its immediate effect is “vainglory,” which is the vice of habitually seeking to call attention to one’s own imagined excellence. And the daughters of vainglory, Aquinas tells us (Question 9, Article 3), are disobedience, boasting, hypocrisy (by which Aquinas means a tendency to magnify one’s glory by reference to “imaginary deeds”), contention, obstinacy, discord, and what he calls the “audacity for novelties” or predilection for bold actions that will call attention to oneself by bringing “astonishment” to others. Hence the marks of a prideful and vainglorious man are an unwillingness to submit himself to any higher authority (which would include prevailing laws and norms); habitual braggadocio and bombastic speech; exaggeration and lying about his achievements; being obnoxiously quarrelsome; stubborn attachment to his own opinions in the face of all evidence and superior counterarguments; and a taste for doing things that are shocking and unexpected. It stands to reason that a prideful and vainglorious man is bound to be polarizing. On the one hand, his fundamental motivations are to attain pre-eminence, and to do so by drawing attention to his imagined excellence. If he is good at this, then naturally, he is going to gain a following of some kind. On the other hand, pride and vainglory are objectively ugly character traits, as the daughters of vainglory make evident and as one would expect from the fact that pride is the worst of sins. Hence, people who see through a proud and vainglorious man’s charade are naturally going to be repulsed by him, especially if they have decent instincts. The Christian tradition has, after all, held that pride is the characteristic sin of the devil and of antichrist. It is also the characteristic sin of the tyrant, who on Plato’s analysis is a consummate narcissist, and who in the political philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas is defined as the ruler who governs a polity for the sake of his own good rather than for the common good. There are no villains more repulsive than the devil, the antichrist, and tyrants. And yet in all three cases we have figures who draw many to them. “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). It is no wonder that lesser malign figures – prideful and vainglorious politicians, business leaders, sports stars, entertainers, public intellectuals, and so on – attract many people even as they repulse others. Aquinas also teaches in De Malo that “pride extinguishes all the virtues and weakens all the powers of the soul.” It is not hard to see how this would be so. If a prideful man is by nature insubordinate, he is not likely to subordinate himself to moral restraints. He may exhibit counterfeits of certain virtues, if that would aid in leading others to perceive him as having excellence. He also may have a certain cleverness or cunning in achieving his ends. But it will not be true wisdom, because that requires seeing things as they really are, and his narcissism prevents that. He will have allies and sycophants, but is unlikely to have true friends, because he will ultimately sacrifice the good of others for the sake of his own good. He may have a certain boldness, but he will not have true courage, because his boldness does not serve the true and the good, but only himself. And so on. Scripture famously teaches that “pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). But even apart from scripture, everyone knows this from experience. Or almost everyone, because the prideful man himself does not see it. Nor do those in thrall to him, since they labor under the same delusion about his supposed excellence as he does. It goes without saying that the greater the following a prideful man has, or the larger the community over which he has authority, the greater will be his fall, and theirs.

RT @Vermeullarmine: Thread on one of the worst and most destructive hoaxes in recent history:

A fun thought experiment on survivorship bias and selecting the best strategy: Imagine two entrepreneurs, Alice and Bob. They each open a business with an initial capital of $100,000. Alice takes more risks and, as a result, has a high growth rate of 10%. However, because of those risks, she also has a high failure rate of 5%. Conversely, Bob takes less risks. As a result, his growth rate is lower, 8%, but so is his failure rate, 1%. Who do we expect to make the most money: Alice or Bob? The answer is counterintuitive: Alice is more likely to be wealthier than Bob, yet we expect Bob to end up wealthier. Let me explain. If we consider periods of a single year, Alice is expected to be wealthier than Bob 95% of the time. Yet, if you compare the expected wealth, Alice’s is 95% times $100,000 times 110% = $104,500, whereas Bob’s is 99% times $100,000 times 108% = $106,920. Bob’s expected wealth is higher than Alice’s despite him being less likely to be wealthier than her. Here is another way to see it. Given a hundred Alices and a hundred Bobs, the top 95 wealthiest entrepreneurs would all be Alices. Yet, on aggregate, Bobs would have more wealth. Survivorship bias makes us think that Alice’s strategy is better because all the winners are Alices, but her strategy is not better. Alice’s strategy has higher potential but is less reproducible; therefore, she ends up worse, at the net of survivorship bias.

Excellent paragrah @ben_machell

This kind of dense, walkable, mixed use urbanism is illegal to build in many American cities 9,950 people — footprint under SIX ACRES

Overall excess deaths over the longer period is surely the best measure. Ie how many additional people died.

Interesting table that shows no excess deaths from cancer despite general perception that its late diagnosis due to covid/lockdowns. Little discussion on what the cause might be. telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01…

"No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things." --Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch. 8, "The Romance of Orthodoxy"