Moravec’s paradox is the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. A computer can beat the world’s greatest chess player at chess, but it cannot beat a spider at getting around. If humans have been working on a problem for a thousand years, you can program a computer to do it. If evolution has been working on a problem for a hundred million years, not so easy. …
Marriage is gay
When two gays “marry”, the point is not to have sex with each other, but rather to go cruising together for pickups, as wingmen. Predictably, gay style marriage is now being promoted to heterosexuals. Because otherwise, discrimination.
Supposedly black Egypt
Lately a lot of progressive blacks have complained that Ridley Scott’s movie “Exodus” is racist for depicting Egyptians as Egyptian and Hebrews as white. They want them all to be depicted black. Ancient Egyptians in their art depict themselves as yellowish brown, somewhat arab looking, pretty similar to the way pharaoh is depicted in Ridley Scott’s movie. They depict blacks as black, with exaggerated negro features, and show them in …
Ferguson chimp out
Short recap of the Ferguson story: Michael Brown, a huge black man helped himself to some tobacco in a shop, then strong armed the shopkeeper rather than paying. He then walked down the street, expecting traffic to get out of his way. When a policeman told him to stop jaywalking, he attacked the policeman, forced his way into the policeman’s car, and attempted to take the cops gun. The cop …
The Spandrellian trichotomy
Technology capitalism: libertarianism As the left gets ever lefter, it gets every crazier. Since the libertarian tries to make a separate peace with the left on behalf of capitalism, its craziness necessarily flows into libertarianism. Libertarians notice that capitalism, in particular the joint stock corporation based on double entry accounting, provides a great, humane, and highly productive system for creating wealth, advancing technological progress, and maximizing liberty. They therefore propose …
Arab Spring
The Cathedral, believing itself to be the holiest of them all, unleashed a power struggle in the middle east to be the holiest of them all. At present, their religion is worse than ours, but the appointment of a Caliph, elected for life, may stabilize them, while we continue to drift to ever greater heights of holiness.
Secularization
Eric Kraufman argues that the religious are inheriting the earth. The religious are reproducing faster, and despite the fact that many of their children are captured by progressivism, the number of people who say they are religious is increasing. According to Kraufman the number of people who adhere to moderate religions is decreasing, and shows every sign of altogether vanishing. The proportion of the religious, and the absolute number of …
The great silence
There seem to be no great obstacles to intelligent life devouring the galaxy. So why are we here. If life on earth arose on earth , and produced humans in a few billion years, why not on some other planet ten billion years ago? Simplest and most likely explanation is that life is unlikely – requiring a stupendously improbable assemblage of molecules to form. No one has constructed a plausible …
Why the art, literature, and science of decadent civilization is decadent
Gibbon called the art and literature of the latter days of the Roman Empire “the second childhood of human reasonâ€. Back in the days when European art was the greatest the world has ever seen, the wealthy and powerful Cornaro family patronized the artist Bernini because he was a great artist. Because high status people like the Cornaro family patronized great artists, great art was high status, and, circularly, the …
Death of Christendom
Calvinism in New England was scorned by the heresy of Unitarianism, which deemed itself holier, but Unitarianism only lasted about a generation before it collapsed into Emersonian subjectivist Transcendentalism, which then swiftly (in less than a generation) collapsed into politics (abolition, feminism etc). If we look at the New Testament position on slavery it is of course passivist and pacifist. Christians are encouraged, but not required, to free their slaves. …