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My “Cliff Notes” for Jaron Lanier’s 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018)

INTRODUCTION WITH CATS Cats cooperate with you as it suits them but are never quite trainable. So why can’t we be more like them? ARGUMENT ONE:  YOU ARE LOSING YOUR FREE WILL You are in a cage that follows you around and spies on you for fun, profit and control. Behaviorism is a tool technocrats […]

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Moral Philosophy

Ethics Part 16: The Frankfurt School (aka Critical Theory) and the Devolution of Academia

“The Matrix” was an unusual event as a movie at the close of the millennium. A box office hit that set a long-standing record for an R-rated film, people lined up around the block to watch it because it would blow your mind and was the kind of social force Walter Benjamin long before said […]

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Moral Philosophy

Ethics Part 15: Existentialism, Depth Psychology and Radicalism

Early in the 20th Century, really smart people were asking why anyone should pay attention to academic philosophy, since it had become a vapid fanboy exercise in fawning over technocrats as practitioners proved themselves to be serviceable villains for the club who own everything and know better than you do what is right. The focus […]

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Moral Philosophy

Ethics Part 14: Darwin, the Death of God and the Birth of AI

Otto Neurath was a founding member of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists in the early 20th century.  A latter day Comte, Neurath was both a Marxist utopian and a campaigner for the grand vision of the unification of all learning under one materialist, atheist, anti-metaphysical science. Neurath was a pre-cursor to Edward O. Wilson’s […]

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Moral Philosophy

Ethics Part 13: Transcendentalism, Idealism, Pragmatism and Vedanta in the West

  Ram Dass and George Harrison did much to popularize Indian metaphysical and spiritual ideas in the 1960’s and beyond.  They were gurus to hippies the world over. But they were not the first to bring this way of being to the West. In early to mid- 19th century America, Emerson and Thoreau were part […]