Science fiction has always been a mirror and a map, reflecting our ambitions while charting their risks. In Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon, Takeshi Kovacs prowls a neon-drenched future where the wealthy, known as Methuselahs, cheat death by slipping their digitized minds into new bodies, their consciousness preserved in cortical […]
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Chpt 47: Attitude Adjuster
I value straightforwardness over performative politeness. This can, and has, got me into trouble at times. Speaking your mind openly and honestly has for a long time felt like a social taboo. For a public figure to break that social taboo and speak without the sanitised, empty, double speak normally […]
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Chpt 45: Resistance is Character Forming
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar postulated that we have a cognitive limit to the number of people with which we can maintain a stable social relationship. He formed this opinion by studying the size of primate brains against the size of their average social group. From here he extrapolated upwards to […]
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Chpt 43: Happy Idiot Talk
The degrowth movement is the darling of global elites. I’ve seen it pop up on Xitter, as a force for good, more times that I would like to. It’s pushed by think tanks and socialist intellectuals, not to mention, institutions like the World Economic Forum. It’s framed as the solution […]
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Chpt 42: Fine Till You Came Along
I think I would quite enjoy discovering my genealogy through one of those companies that tests your DNA. My mother’s Celtic roots are a bit of a mystery. However, I am also reminded that genetic data is frequently bought by security agencies and the desire to do that fades away. […]
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Chpt 41: Lasting Damage
Morality is a human construction influenced by power dynamics, historical context, and culture. Or, morality is an absolute standard that exist as eternal forms or ideals, independent of human opinion or experience. Two statements, two philosophical positions that shape how we might interact with the world and the people in […]
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Chpt 39: Cantankerous
“Congrats fool, you played yourself.” Words I say to myself frequently, as I fall into the numerous traps of my own biases. Be it confirmation bias, coverage bias, groupthink, Dunning-Kruger, or even declinism. Being immune to manipulation is almost impossible in today’s modern media saturated era. Numbers vary between studies, […]
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Chpt 36: Sober Counsel
Can you imagine a society without lawyers? Not a lawless world, a world with justice and punishment, but without a vampiric class profiting from accident and incident. In Chpt 32: It’s Character Forming I discussed briefly the pillars of ancient Greek moral philosophy (Excellence, Justice, Temperance, Hubris, Reverence and Xenia). […]
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Chpt 34: Charitable View
I am the flawed protagonist in my own story. Perhaps I would like to think I am on a redemption arc. That common storytelling trope where a flawed or morally questionable character undergoes a transformation, ultimately becoming a better person. I don’t mean this as an admission of any sort […]
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Chpt 32: It’s Character Forming
Excellence, Justice, Temperance, Hubris, Reverence and Xenia. The pillars of ancient Greek moral philosophy. The combination of which is often referred to as Kalos kagathos or Kalokagathos (Ancient Greek: καλὸς κἀγαθός). Kalokagathia is the derived noun often used by ancient Greek philosophers to describe an ideal of gentlemanly personal conduct; […]
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Chpt 28: The Precise Nature Of The Catastrophe
Dense urban environments are a black hole of chaos slowly consuming our societies. For most of human history, we have lived in low-density, rural environments. Before 1600, only 5% of the world’s population lived in an urban environment, by 1900 this was 16% and current estimates have urban densities as […]
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Chpt 25: Very Little Gravitas Indeed
Performative activism, moral grandstanding, social pressure, peer group conformity, slogan chanting and virtue signaling. Is it a net negative or positive for a movement? Is it a net negative at a personal level? Some view it as a genuine expression of moral values, while others see it as a self-serving […]