Celluloid Caesar: “So, is Megalopolis a miraculous comeback to Coppola’s 1970s quality? No. Of course not. It’s absolutely as horrible as everybody says it is.” Make California Red Again: “The future is still invented in California and its influence on global culture remains critically important. California remains one of the most naturally beautiful places on Earth,…
Tag: God
A Cosmos Without God
Daniel Miller recently posted a piece on IM-1776 that’s deserving of high praise. It’s a provocative assessment of how the decades-long aftermath of World War II resulted in the gradual transformation of the West into something increasingly sinister. This transformation annihilates any posturing about the West (and perhaps America specifically) being an “anti-fascist” prototype. The…
Everywhere, Nowhere, and Now Here
Excerpted from Second Power Last month I attended the Nowhere Summit in Ecuador with several friends, old and new. Alex Petkas provides a good description of the event here: Technological, political, and societal change are happening at an alarming rate. There are huge, asymmetric opportunities for network-institution builders that simply did not exist 5 years…
MONDAY LINKS: Seraphim; Harmonic Interludes; and Aloneness
And Suddenly Things Change: “Everything that can break is breaking: stock markets, bond markets, the galaxy of derivatives — bets on this and that, which will never be honored. Banks are next. Gold and silver are hanging in there for dear life just now, because they’re actually worth something.” Biblically Accurate Angels — Christianity’s Undisputed…
TUESDAY LINKS: Windswept Drama; a World on Fire; the Sound of God; Death on the Installment Plan
Frontier Cities: “Like many other moments in American history, we find ourselves at the advent of a technological innovation era that has the potential to significantly increase human freedom. We must grasp it. America must, as it has for centuries, set out toward that goal. We don’t need to colonize Mars, we don’t need new…
MONDAY LINKS: the Descent on Behalf of the Ascent; Frogs; Collapse
Angels on Amphetamines: “The split between the Christian Right and the Nietzschean Right is partly about whether today’s problems stem from an absence of the restraining force of Christianity’s moral framework, or an absence of the passion and vigor that it seeks to restrain. The unfortunate reality, I think, is that the constraints of morality…
WEEKEND LINKS: overpriced office fauna, the service of vultures, new realms of horror
Bidenihilism: “As Eric Hoffer observed in 1951, ‘Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.’” Catholicism is About Swords: “…many Catholics have risen from their dazed shock and have seen the Big Lie burying the truth of God. They have recognized that the Faith is…
The Passion of the Christ
I watched The Passion of the Christ for the first time ever on Good Friday this year. I think it’s worth watching and many parts are very well done but I do think Mel Gibson went too far with the blood, the gore and the violence, which apparently has been a recurring criticism of the…
▇ █ WEEKEND LINKS █ ▇: Imitative Passion; Debasement; Mob Rule; Wolves
12 Things I Learned from Rene Girard: “By desiring the same thing as our neighbor, we are drawn into inevitable conflict. Mimetic desire turns into mimetic rivalry—in everything from love to war. That’s the reason for the injunction against ‘coveting your neighbor’s wife.’ Girard claims this is emblematic of how mimetic impulses destroy a community….
▒▓█ w̳̿͟͞e̳̿͟͞e̳̿͟͞k̳̿͟͞e̳̿͟͞n̳̿͟͞d̳̿͟͞ ̳̿͟͞l̳̿͟͞i̳̿͟͞n̳̿͟͞k̳̿͟͞s̳̿͟͞ █▓▒░ philosophical automatisms, pervasive untruths, the value of marginal & discarded information
Bitcoin and Philosophy: “Bitcoin seizes philosophical attention because it is already doing philosophy – or what philosophy is still (on ever rarer occasions) expected to do – and at multiple levels. It tells the truth. Bitcoin is not only a recognizable philosophical statement, but also, and more importantly, a philosophical automatism, a synthetic philosophical machine.[6]…
Weekend Links: Bulletproof Happiness; Excellence; Plutarch
Just returned from a pretty incredible trip to the Wagon Box Inn in the Wyoming wilderness. Below are some photos from my wanderings. And of course, here are some weekend links, including pieces by three friends who were out there in the Wyoming wilderness with me. (We made the plunge into an icy creek at…
ẅ̴͍é̷̞̲͐e̵̺̊͜ķ̷̥́̃e̸͎̣̼͂n̴̬̄d̸̡̈́ ̴̯̲̠̈́̾ĺ̸̯͎̯̈́i̷̻̼̚n̸̰̲̽̈̍k̴̖͆̊s̴̤̓̄: How to Stop Worrying; Rebellions Against God; Machines to Replace God
Atheists in Space: “[Oswald] Spengler believed that even as the 20th century began, all of the theoretical edifices constructed by the West to replace its old sacred order — which mainly manifested as political ideologies — had failed. Beginning in the 21st century, he predicted, the grandchildren of the revolutionaries and the rationalists, adrift in…