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 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 40: A Series Of Unlikely Explanations
Despite my intentions to write at least once a week, I’ve not written for a while. I will honestly say that disruptions in my work life got the better of me, with an uncertain future bringing me some mental perturbations. That, and I’ve found myself going down some deep rabbit […]
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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 35: Full Refund
Usury, never heard of it. Perhaps you’ve heard of Riba, or Neshekh? No? They mean roughly the same. The concept is simple, although interpretation and circumstance vary. Usury refers to the charging of excessive interest on loans. Something that used to be considered exploitative and immoral. Within each of the […]
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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 […]