Most people's gut reaction will be "Yes, obviously -- some people are a whole lot better than other people" and if they feel they are among friendly c...
So, it would probably be a good idea to NOT start with hard core texts by philosophers who, truth be told, are fairly often unable to write their way ...
Most of us do not have life-changing experiences on the order of the Paul's experience on the road to Damascus. Usually we have small-scale experience...
The federal government spends, and has spent, a great deal of money on causes which are not especially worthwhile. Iraq, Afghanistan, tax rebates for ...
Homo Faber (man the maker) needs "work", work being purposeful activity to obtain the satisfactions of needs (food, shelter, reproduction, clothing if...
Something I need to do -- file an "advanced directive" to inform the hospital that has the document (assuming I don't end up in a hospital unconscious...
A friend of mine has been reading up on Hunter / Gatherer societies. It would appear that at least those H/Gs situated in good environments did quite ...
https://78.media.tumblr.com/3bf0ce9cc3c06618c3b80385f2c68783/tumblr_p6qkq7XUQ31s4quuao1_400.jpg Animal art from Chauvet Cave in France, c. 25,000 BCE....
Limited to physical existence? No, I wouldn't think so. After all, most people gave up hunter/gatherer lifestyles only recently--in comparison to the ...
Whoa--a whole book? What do you think we are, Moliere, intellectuals or something that actually reads whole pages, let alone whole books? We have busy...
Oh, well, Schop, when you are in the black bread and turnip phase, health care is limited to very simple procedures. If you get very sick, you are put...
Work itself is where our tender, warm blooded personhood hits the gravel road of industrialism. Some people have found accommodating jobs where their ...
Excellent points. Our highly constructive age (buildings, cities, pyramids) isn't very old in relationship to our species age. If we've been around fo...
Thinking about the nature of God is essentially a creative activity which brought God into existence. As a creative activity, making God real is an es...
The practice of religion which guides and comforts isn't a waste of time. Haranguing each other about what god God is like is a total waste of time, e...
People want to get at the truth. "What is the TRUTH about Israel? Palestine? Who is really entitled to live there? We can just as well ask "What is th...
A question that is asked fairly often is, "How do I know I am not the only person in existence?" (Or it may be stated, "I am the only person in existe...
This may or may not be true -- I don't know everything about the Left. But to whatever extent it is true, why do you think is it so? I would think all...
Is 'archduchy' adjectival the way that 'crunchy', 'raunchy', and 'frosty' are, or is it more nouny like 'flunky', 'donkey', or kennedy? (The Mcdougall...
An alternative to the UBI would be an economic/education/trade policy to achieve full employment. This would necessitate sharply curtailing imports fr...
I think it's likely to be considered seriously for several reasons: #1, we spend quite a bit of money now on unemployment, retraining, and welfare ben...
During the Nixon Administration (probably before you were born) Milton Friedman and other conservative economists floated the idea of the guaranteed m...
The people who didn't live on the moon can be grateful they weren't there when we arrived -- else they would find themselves an earthy possession, at ...
The east coast of the mediterranean has been under all sorts of management in the last 4,000 years. Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Persians, Jews, Gr...
Of course. In fact, a lot of what we want computers to do doesn't require any "intelligence" at all -- it just requires a good implementation of an al...
To borrow a title, "A world made by hand" will be exhausting. Making our own clothes, shoes, houses, food, etc. was, back when we did that sort of thi...
Wait just a minute... I also said Wasting the film and camera industry, the hard-wired telephone system, the more ecological typewriter, the already i...
If the A.I. really is intelligent, when you tell the A.I. robot to do something no warm blooded animal would want to do, what you are going to hear is...
I enjoy using new technology. But the fact is, the act of creative destruction which brought us the current crop of gadgets was a extremely huge waste...
There is technology and then there is technology. A man taking a piece of suitable rock and chipping a sharp arrow head from it, and then fixing it to...
The other day I was reading about Ernest Rutherford's experiments to determine the nature of the atom. He was shooting helium atoms through a piece of...
Please keep looking at the universe in whatever way you find useful and satisfying. Even though I never thought of myself as this kind of person, I fo...
Whether there is, in fact, a solution to anomie and alienation in Marx, or anyone else, is an unanswered` question. Uncle Karl was a prophet, preachin...
Zeitgeist. Schadenfreude, the pleasure one finds in other people's misfortunes. Schadenfreude should have an opposite -- the not-altogether-pleasant f...
Oh, I thought it was out of tune with the other comments. Not that being out of tune is unfamiliar territory. What it amounted to was this: It seems l...
All of your lifestyle choices, in all areas of life, have real life consequences for the rest of the world. Do you drive a car? Do you wear polyester ...
Right. We internalize social messages which may or may not be in our best long-term interests. In the short run, it's just easier to be agreeable. We ...
The problem of pointless, meaningless, tedious hours spent in the social workplace remains. Spending 8 hours a day in activity which is perceived as p...
Social production of goods and services actually yields a good deal more time and energy to spend on optional activities. IF we had to produce our own...
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