[zeitvox]

Evolution adjourned indefinitely.

[zeitvox]

New Atheism has decided to target all religion, religion as such, regardless of time and place. On the one hand, they attack an abstract concept - sure in the background assumption of a pure distinction between science and religion (the other is purely opposite). And yet, when it suits, they shy away from attacking religion in its totality, apparently convinced they are safe in the assumption that what Pat Robertson, Tim Tebow and Osama Bin Laden say religion is is good enough for them. We should look at the results and the path of the New Atheism and make bets on where it’s going! What does it look like when, angered by simpletons, a movement gets all stoked up in a fit of purity to attack all religion whatsoever - and then conveniently defines its opposition in terms of buying into the same premises of a temporally and historically limited practice, the one most suited to being blown out of the water, and then sits back and gloats as if it had scientifically exhausted the phenomenon and thereby won the fight? …the figure of New Atheism shifts back and forth, finding the matter at hand at one moment in religion per se and yet, at another moment, in religion as it presents itself to us right now. At one moment, all religion is reduced to the same essential threat - the same target which we are enjoined to attack - but then (inevitably) when it amps up one manifestation of this threat (say Islam) as uniquely different, it slings charges of “the fallacy of false equivalence” at anyone who would question the logic of such a determination. What are we to make of the near simultaneous embrace of equivalence and its condemnation - of sameness and difference?

XHerakleitos, regarding Atheism and Metaphysics (via zeitvox)

[zeitvox]

[zeitvox]

Training - training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. we have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are merely transmitted to us, trained into us. All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed. …a pleasant, friendly, sociable herd; pious and happy, merry and full of unconscious coarseness and innocent indecencies. What they regarded as the merry tale went the continual round and caused no more embarrassment than it would have caused in the best English society twelve centuries later. Practical jokes worthy of the English wits of the first quarter of the far off nineteenth century were sprung here and there and yonder along the line, and compelled the delightedest applause; and sometimes when a bright remark was made at one end of the procession and started on its travels toward the other, you could note its progress off from its bows as it plowed along; and also by the blushes of the mules in its wake.

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court 

[zeitvox]

Hegel felt that the essential methodological rigor was missing from his contemporaries' use of dialectic, and, indeed, his own dialectical procedure is entirely peculiar to him. It is an immanent progression from one logical determination to another which, it is claimed, does not begin with any hypothetical assumption but rather, which, in following the self-movement of the concepts, presents the immanent consequences of thought in its progressive unfolding of itself. Here no transitions are determined externally. If we follow Hegel's own enjoinder, we should eliminate all introductions, divisions of chapters, titles, and the like from the actual body of scientific development, for they serve only an external need.

Hans Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic

And then the question: In what way could it be peculiar to Hegel?

[zeitvox]

Meanwhile, in a galaxy far too close to home

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From 700 Club to Meet the Press. Jay Sekulow on what “any reasonable person’s mind would conclude”: Meet The Press, June 18, 2017

Spawn from an originator of fake news, Pat Robertson, and graduate of his “University”. The mission: inject “credentialed” people into politics and media who further the cause of “Christianity” in advance of the end times.

[zeitvox]

There must be some third thing, which is homogeneous on the one hand with the category, and on the other hand with the appearance... the schema of the concepts of understanding... This schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason B181

[zeitvox]

This world is awfully big, girl this time you're all alone.

[zeitvox]

"Not every problem or thesis need be considered for examination but only those for which one who is perplexed needs an argument, not punishment or evidence by sensation

Aristotle, Topics 105a5

[zeitvox]

It's well within the realm of possibility for Trump to end up being impeached by Republicans, the burning question is, what would it take? Trump is a wild card and a maniac, you could see where the need might arise for even his own party to "put him down" like a mad dog.

spoof | Arstechnica Forum

Indeed. Trump's TV celebrity mindscape will ultimimately take it's cue from the world of theatre. The plot shift is inevitable. With a singular premium on self-promotion, and his constant fixation on ratings, it's not hard to see Trump going for a surprise twist. That thing he said to Chris Wallace, "I’ll keep you in suspense,” sounds like a maxim ejaculated by a creature of the media world prefigured by Chayefsky's Network. What and when? Probably should ask the mind behind the twist with Dr. Ford toward the end of Westworld. Yet, having heard and remembered Sarah Palin's metal shimmy, bitter-clinging proud-clinger endorsement speech, it's not hard to imagine a select GOP cadre setting the terms for an emergency Operation Damocles. When she was talking about tearing the veil off the establishment, the whole thing veered into a diatribe against the GOP, who were seen as eating their own. "It can't be salvaged, it must be savaged." With foreshadowing like that, you can almost hear the knives sharpening equally in advance.

[zeitvox]

Libertarianism is a callous ideology that is diametrically opposed to some things that I hold most dearly. A presidential candidate should know where Aleppo is, and what Aleppo is. But in being roasted not for his ignorance but for his inability to hide that ignorance, Johnson pulled back the curtain, a little bit, to show the special kind of empty that can fill a whole culture of American exceptionalism, which like a balloon waits only for the smallest tear in its fabric to expel its ephemeral contents and show the world the nothing that lies within.

Fredrik deBoer

[noosphe-re]

The human hand is human because of what it makes, not what it is.

André Leroi-Gourhan (via inthenoosphere)

[zeitvox]

For this consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death... In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self... Furthermore, his consciousness is not this dissolution of everything stable in principle: in his service he actually brings this about. Through his service he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it.

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit §194

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You radiate cold shards of broken glass </pinkfloyd>

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“If that bug ever bites you The scar will bear you shame Hey listen son, you know you're in trouble When you wake up one morning In a daze As you peer into the mirror Face leaning over say

Hey Mister, Meet your new landlord Plenty of room down on the floor" - Sonny Landreth