Category Archives: Philosophy

Mark Lilla, IGNORANCE AND BLISS

Posted on Monday 17 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “On Wanting Not to Know” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Dec. 2024, 239p, including 12p notes and acknowledgments) This is a little book published just a couple months ago that appealed for a couple reasons. First, I read the author’s … Continue reading →

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Shades of Morality

Posted on Wednesday 5 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Trump’s crazy Gaza redevelopment plan; How conservatives use “corruption” (without evidence) as an excuse to undermine institutions they don’t like; And they would go after Wikipedia, if they could; Then a long sequence about JD Vance on Christian love, various … Continue reading →

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Competence Is Beside the Point

Posted on Wednesday 15 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Several items today about the confirmation hearings for Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi; “Anonymous smears” and “I am not familiar with that statement”; competence isn’t the point, loyalty and disruption are. The consequences of a “woefully uninformed electorate” and whether … Continue reading →

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What If We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know?

Posted on Tuesday 10 December 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Plato’s cave and what we don’t know, or don’t know that we don’t know; David Gerrold on “woke” and why I think citing “woke” (or religion) dismisses one from any serious conversation; Short items about how a third of the … Continue reading →

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Dispatches from the Real World

Posted on Thursday 21 November 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

My latest take on the true vs the real; A piece about RFK Jr identifies the three big reasons you’re alive today: clean water, antibiotics, and vaccines; How we know RFK Jr is wrong about vaccines; How red states lead … Continue reading →

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Assault on and Rejection of Reality

Posted on Friday 11 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic on how things are much worse than a misinformation crisis; Meteorologists notice that ignorance is becoming socially acceptable — but this has always been true, as C.P. Snow noted; The Republican conspiracy theory that children … Continue reading →

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Consensus Reality Is Disappearing Before Our Eyes

Posted on Wednesday 9 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

No matter how dissociated from reality something a politician says is, there are people who will believe it. People who think everything (such as Hurricanes) must happen for a reason are debating between God’s wrath and Deep State weather control; … Continue reading →

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Today’s New Insight

Posted on Sunday 22 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

What ‘woke’ means, to different people; How the ancients overcame biases in understanding the world, in order to discover and navigate the world; How moderns have tried to overcome cognitive biases through constitutions and “political correctness” and being “woke,” and … Continue reading →

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Deutsch Infinity, Ch 1

Posted on Sunday 25 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

The next big science tome I’ve begun reading is THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY, by David Deutsch, his only other book following THE FABRIC OF REALITY in 1997, which I reviewed here. This second book was published in 2011. (There’s no … Continue reading →

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Examining The Techno-Humanist Manifesto

Posted on Saturday 24 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a piece that challenges my challenge to the assumption, especially in America, than more is better, that the economy must always expand, that the population should continue to increase indefinitely. My point has been that this literally cannot continue … Continue reading →

Posted in Human Nature, Philosophy, progress | Comments Off on Examining The Techno-Humanist Manifesto