Imagine a World Without Religion

“Imagine a World Without Religion” is a slogan that is part of Richard Dawkins’ campaign to make atheism the sleek, sexy, and new solution to all the worlds problems.
As an atheist, this kind of position really irks me, as I tend to lean more Nietzschian in how I feel about humanity’s place in the universe. [...]

The Blame Game: How About a Nice Game of Global Industrial Capital Class Warfare?

Shortly following the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico in early April, Fidel Castro made a statement concerning the situation, which was spread quickly in the U.S. press but then was quickly forgotten. His opinion on this matter has stuck with me ever since he wrote it, and I think it ought [...]

A Universe From Nothing

This is worth an hour of your time. In fact, this is probably worth several hours of your time.

Detrimental Delineations of the Digital Dream Machine

“Without a doubt our epoch prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being. What is sacred to it is only illusion. More than that, the sacred grows in its eyes to the extent that truth diminishes and illusion increases, to such an [...]

Breaking my foot off in the ass of relativism

There’s something to be said about the relativist agenda.
 I believe that the truth is not subjective. Beliefs are subjective. Not the truth. Things are one way and not another.
 ”Outside our heads there is freestanding reality. Only madmen and a scattering of constructivist philosophers doubt its existence.” – Edward O. Wilson
 When people say that science is [...]

The Value of Information

It would be a cliche to repeat the argument that, “Information wants to be free.” Instead, let’s analyze the concept of information. Is it born free, but everywhere in chains? No, it is produced by instruments and machines, recorded from every possible surface. But as soon as it is produced, it is put to work.
What [...]

fruit flies and free will

There’s an interesting news story from last year about fruit flies and free will that I found via The Pinocchio Theory blog in this post on theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman.
This is something I’d like to explore in great detail, but for now I just want to throw a few ideas out there. Basically, the study [...]

LOLE.coli

The Intellectual Laziness of Rejecting “Theory”

Suppose you legitimately wanted to grasp the writings of an intellectual, but they proved to be difficult for you to understand. What course of action could you take? Would you try your best to do a close reading? Would you consult secondary sources to see if they could shed some light on the topic? Would [...]

“Postscript on the Societies of Control” by Gilles Deleuze

I. Historical

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school (“you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (“you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa ‘51 could exclaim, “I thought I was seeing convicts.”