Many men of faith struggle with the silence of God. That absence forces the faithful to look for the signs and wonders that act as His guideposts as they seek to fulfill His desires. Many wind up filling that void with their own noise and bluster, mistaking the echo of their voice for God's own. Is this Dabo's sin? Is this why he is being punished? Is he even being punished at all?
But I would argue that free speech is actually the antithesis of violence. It's really a revolutionary way for human beings living in complex societies to facilitate collective action. But when you suppress it, it becomes a pressure cooker, and it's much more likely to erupt into violence. If you're allowed to criticize the government, criticize different ideas, you have an opportunity to change things for the better according to your beliefs.
What is the relationship between disability and well-being? (In this post, I'll call this the Relationship Question.) The Relationship Question is both enormously complex and highly fraught -philosophically, socially, and politically. Philosophers have starkly different views. One prominent view, held by Elizabeth Barnes, is that disability is a Mere Difference: having a disability does not, on its own, make one's life go worse, although in our ableist society, disabled people are more likely to live worse lives because of barriers and stigmas.
Randy Pausch had every right to do whatever he wanted. After all, he was a highly reputable professor at the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Virtual reality was his area of expertise, and at the time it was a groundbreaking technology. He first started out in 1997 after clinching a role with the coveted Walt Disney Imagineering team. He could have dived deep into the technological advances he had made in VR, having many papers under his name.
Its eclectic nature. I am trained in a style of research that places value in the faithful documentation and analysis of the actual practices of experts in certain technical fields. Sometimes this line of work runs the risk of being too removed from the immediate advancement of such fields. (The rather polemical analogy is "as useful as ornithology to birds," but I'd like to think of it as a kind of ethnography of certain specialized expertise.)
The SEARCH program has existed at Rhodes College, in one form or another, since 1946. This chronologically oriented, three-semester "Great Books" interdisciplinary humanities sequence introduces students to the Western (and some non-Western) canon and prepares them for the academic rigor of college courses. It aims to develop students' critical reading, writing, and thinking skills, and provide a common experience that builds intellectual community across campus (about forty percent of incoming freshmen usually enroll).
When I was 16 years old, I sat in a crowded assembly hall on a wobbly plastic chair, and I listened to Mr. Smith tell me why I should study history. All of the teachers had to do it. "Sell your subject," the headmaster had said. "Make the kids want to pick it." Some teachers did so with the grudging monotone of the forced and underpaid employee. Some did it with the exhausting energy of a fanatic.
Every day, we make choices, big and small. From what we eat for dinner to our careers to life-altering decisions, we are continually confronted with challenging and even intriguing complex choices. It can be easy just to follow our usual habits, ask friends and colleagues, or search the internet for advice. Sometimes, we sit back and wait for things to happen, hoping they'll sort themselves out.
Love Island features an equal number of men and women contestants, or "islanders." From the outset, the islanders choose one other person of the opposite sex to couple up with. Throughout the series, they undergo a series of games and activities that are typically sexual in nature, such as make-out challenges. Periodically, new islanders will appear, and other islanders will be kicked off,
In a dark library lit by a single lamp, four men, a young woman and three children crowd around a circular dais. They are staring at a clockwork contraption called an orrery, housed within giant bands of metal that suggest a celestial sphere. Below, tiny planets rotate around the Sun, orbited by pearl moons. Concentric plates allow the planets to move according to their relative speeds.
Shortly following the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, many politicians and pundits were quick to highlight the importance of civil discourse. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called for an " off-ramp" to political hostilities, while California Gov. Gavin Newsom released a statement condemning political violence. He lauded Kirk's "commitment to debate," adding, "The best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse."
There's a strange custody battle happening today, and the courtroom is in your own head. It's not between divorcing parents or rival siblings; it's between your innate capacity to think and the increasingly seductive technology that promises to do the thinking for you. In my earlier post on the borrowed mind, I warned about a precarious drift toward cognitive passivity and how this results in a hollowing out of thought when we accept answers too quickly and fail to embrace the value of curiosity.
This distorted view of humans in which we use ourselves as some sort of standard to which individuals of other species should strive is not only arrogant, but singularly ill-informed. We clearly need a new mindset, a paradigm shift in which we de-center ourselves and work alongside other species to change the dismal road on which we are currently and recklessly traveling. Christine offers that and much more.
Several wealthy lucky right-wing tech bros will get to hear Peter Thiel speak tonight at SF's Commonwealth Club on the topic of the Antichrist, which is a funny thing to claim to know about when you've got all manner of Jeff Epstein connections. There is apparently an emerging evangelical Christian movement going on in wealthiest pockets of the tech industry. This stands to reason I guess, because tech wants to control the masses, and religion has always proven an excellent way to control the masses.
While purporting to be motivated by pro-life (or at least anti-death) principles, these laws and bills are fundamentally misogynistic. They have three fundamental functions. The first is to appease a key portion of the base. Second, couched in pro-life language, these laws provide excellent dog whistles for misogynists. The male misogynists generally understand that the message being sent to them is: "Your baby in her body. Her body in your kitchen. Making you a sandwich to put in your body."
Whereas for Kant time is one of the categories of the human mind that structure our experience, for Bergson, the duration of time is an absolute reality, and, as a first step, we can know, in our immediate consciousness, the duration of our inner life directly. From that basis, through his four major works, he opens a new path to intuition which he deepens and expands as his philosophy progresses, beyond our own lives to life in general and to the vital principle of all things.
It is only in this existential reality of the present where decisions, choices, behaviors, and actions can be initiated. What that then means, in terms of bullying, which only takes place as a choice in the present, is that one can choose to be a bully, or one can choose not to be a bully. Either choice will have consequences, for which the individual will be and is responsible (Falla et al., 2023; Menesini et al., 2013; Purje, 2014).
As would be expected, some people are enraged when a swap occurs. Some are open about their racist or sexist reasons for their anger and are clear that they do not want females and non-white people in certain roles. Some criticize a swap by asking why there was a swap instead of either creating a new character or focusing on a less well-known existing character.
You may have seen my TEDx talk. If so, you know its premise is having the courage to take a leap. My first story was about the first time I jumped off a high dive at the swimming pool. The second story was the leap of coming out. Both of those were scary. Did they prepare me for leaping out of plane 14,500 feet in the air? Not so much. You can't die from the first two.
Then they return with force, helping us understand today's world, explaining how and when it fell apart, and what allowed someone like Donald Trump to rise to power. The American theorist, a leading voice in progressive thought, dissects causes and consequences with surgical precision in each of his books, and never shies away from bringing some of the great ideas of classical and contemporary thought to everyday citizens.
Inuendo Studios presents an excellent and approachable analysis of the infamous Gamer Gate and its role in later digital radicalization. This video inspired me to think about manufactured outrage, which reminded me of the fake outrage over such video games as Cuphead and Doom. There was also similar rage against the She-Ra and He-Man reboots. Mainstream fictional outrage against fiction involved the Republican's rage against Dr. Seuss being "cancelled." Unfortunately, fictional outrage can lead to real consequences, such as death threats, doxing, swatting, and harassment.
I'm glad this letter reached you before you fed that assignment prompt from your Creative Writing professor into ChatGPT. I'd like to share some ideas that may be helpful as you decide whether to follow through on that plan. First of all, I'm sorry you've been finding the poetry unit of Introduction to Creative Writing so tedious and uninspiring. It's true that you probably won't be writing much poetry in your future career.
To what extent does the digital world create a culture in which responsibility is denied or avoided, and what are the consequences of this failure to take ownership of a problem? Taking responsibility may well be a predictor of psychological good health. Owning one's own problems empowers individuals, and creates internal motivation-lessening the chances of depression, produced by a sense of powerlessness; and reducing anxiety created by not seeing how to cope with an issue.
While this drug is best known as a horse de-wormer, it is also used to treat humans for a variety of conditions and many medications are used to treat conditions they were not originally intended to treat. Viagra is a famous example of this. As such, the idea of re-purposing a medication is not itself foolish. But there are obvious problems with taking ivermectin to treat COVID.
The biomedical animator Drew Barry is known for his dazzling visualisations of biological processes that unfold on microscopic scales. As enlightening as it is arresting, his imagery straddles the line between science and art, as seen in his work as the in-house animator for the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, and in his music video collaboration with Björk.
To read Frederic Gros's A Philosophy of Shame is to be reminded of how vulnerable we are to the emotion's inhibitions and agonies. We shame, we are ashamed, and we expend significant energy imagining shameful situations so we might avoid them. Shame makes us vulnerable to humiliation and ruin, and provides a method by which we can humiliate and ruin others. The cycle is often self-perpetuating: shame begets shaming.
