Unlike most blogs, this tags page displays pages in forward order, as many of the posts that I make are cumulative and it is better to start at the beginning.
We have a hard time imagining beings much more intelligent than us. It’s hard to imagine them as doing anything other than super-intelligently contemplating their navels, because we simply can’t imagine being far, far more intelligent than we are, and taking direct action based on that intelligence.
“Mind control” is just a terrible term, really. Something about the way it sounds. Bad prosody. Even without conscious attempts by evil to add additional silliness to the connotations of the term, the mere selection of that term is a bit brilliant for their uses.
Last night the kids wanted to watch the ball drop. I figured, why not. But we were also watching the college football game and it ran right up to the wire.
To be sure, there is an important sense in which they are; if the Lord God Almighty sees fit to use that as a metaphor you can be assured there is a good reason.
In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes famously posits that the peoples of the ancient world were not just metaphorically writing about hearing gods, but that their brains were actually divided into a portion of the mind which “spoke” to the portion of the brain that then acted.
I took advantage of the family being away on other business to see Nefarious in the theater today. I will assume anyone interested has either seen the trailer or generally knows the premise, so I’m not going to do any recap.
Chapters 16 through 19 deal with the question of corruption within a state, and whether a people can maintain freedom or regain it, especially in light of their own corruption.