One of my favorite young political commentators, Sabrina Salvati, frequently says to her audience, “Make it make sense!” This series is intended to help accomplish that, by contrasting two profoundly different ways of understanding the universe, and illustrating the pitfalls of the one and the advantages of the other.
The belief that the universe is somehow conscious, or sentient, is a metaphysical one with no hard, conclusive evidence to back it up. I'm one of those materialists who doesn't have enough faith to be a total atheist, though it seems a moot, irrelevant point to me in my daily life or in how societies work.
Sure, ideas are usually complementary to objective reality. It's when they are mistaken for that reality, or blind a believer to why that reality is changing, that they can cause a lot of unnecessary suffering.
We saw that happen time and time again to epidemiologists and immunologists during the pandemic. For that matter, I remember when they purged any professors with a Marxist bent from the tenure track in the University of Texas system in the late 70s and 80s.
As for graduate students in that time and place, if you wanted that Master's or PhD, you had to stay within an ever-shrinking Overton Window or no one would sponsor you. It's why my highest degree is a BA.
It IS a damned shame. To see it with science, all about the grants now I suppose and we know who funds the grants, is at least as bad.
Yes, I'm familiar with the Brownstone Institute; I just haven't read much from them in the last few years for I don't know what reason.
As for your views on the coronavirus, you have no worries with me. I knew it was another variety of common cold virus because it is a coronavirus, and that they always mutate to less symptomatic forms over time.
When Fauci and the CDC started saying that natural immunity wasn't a thing and that a shot that didn't stop transmission or contraction of the virus was a vaccine I knew they were lying through their teeth.
Idealism is basically a sentimental construct--it's for people who, whatever their reasons might be, want to believe in an orderly world with cause and effect. Such people usually have good consciences, and leeches like Woodrow Wilson and Joe Biden make use of that idealism to sucker them into cheering for war. All you have to do to get an idealist cheering for something very bad is to stick a humanitarian label on it.It's like a buzzword for them. They fall for it every time.
The belief that the universe is somehow conscious, or sentient, is a metaphysical one with no hard, conclusive evidence to back it up. I'm one of those materialists who doesn't have enough faith to be a total atheist, though it seems a moot, irrelevant point to me in my daily life or in how societies work.
Sure, ideas are usually complementary to objective reality. It's when they are mistaken for that reality, or blind a believer to why that reality is changing, that they can cause a lot of unnecessary suffering.
We saw that happen time and time again to epidemiologists and immunologists during the pandemic. For that matter, I remember when they purged any professors with a Marxist bent from the tenure track in the University of Texas system in the late 70s and 80s.
As for graduate students in that time and place, if you wanted that Master's or PhD, you had to stay within an ever-shrinking Overton Window or no one would sponsor you. It's why my highest degree is a BA.
It IS a damned shame. To see it with science, all about the grants now I suppose and we know who funds the grants, is at least as bad.
No worries, mate. I know you're not a fool.
Yes, I'm familiar with the Brownstone Institute; I just haven't read much from them in the last few years for I don't know what reason.
As for your views on the coronavirus, you have no worries with me. I knew it was another variety of common cold virus because it is a coronavirus, and that they always mutate to less symptomatic forms over time.
When Fauci and the CDC started saying that natural immunity wasn't a thing and that a shot that didn't stop transmission or contraction of the virus was a vaccine I knew they were lying through their teeth.
Idealism is basically a sentimental construct--it's for people who, whatever their reasons might be, want to believe in an orderly world with cause and effect. Such people usually have good consciences, and leeches like Woodrow Wilson and Joe Biden make use of that idealism to sucker them into cheering for war. All you have to do to get an idealist cheering for something very bad is to stick a humanitarian label on it.It's like a buzzword for them. They fall for it every time.