01 DEC 2025 by ideonexus
People Attack Increased Options Because They Feel Like Th...
The key to understanding the world today is in this comic right here.
this Boomer comic has been making the rounds on Facebook for at least a decade,
and it portrays a brave, older Marine in a coffee shop where the barista says,
“can I interest you in a soy latte?”
he says, no.
“just coffee, black.”
“caramel Macchiato?”
“just coffee,
black.”
“iced peppermint mocha?”
“just coffee, black”
“frappe?”
now, the first thing you'll notice is that this scenario has never oc... 1 
notes
notes29 NOV 2025 by ideonexus
Socrates' Criticism of the Written Word Echoes Those Agai...
En la época de Sócrates, los textos escritos aún no eran una herramienta habitual y todavía despertaban recelos. Los consideraban un sucedáneo de la palabra oral — liviana, alada, sagrada—. Aunque la Atenas del siglo V a. C. ya contaba con un incipiente comercio de libros, no sería hasta un siglo después, en tiempos de Aristóteles, cuando se llegase a contemplar sin extrañeza el hábito de leer. Para Sócrates, los libros eran ayudas de la memoria y el conocimiento, pero pensaba ... 1 notes
notesIs it better to know things or to know where knowledge is kept and may be retrieved? You can't remember and recall every fact in every book in a library, but you can know what book has the facts you are looking for. Search engines can know where the facts are, so using them makes us twice removed from the fact itself. AI regurgitates facts, potentially removing the source completely… but so does a person telling you the fact.
20 SEP 2025 by ideonexus
Criticism of "The dawn of post-literate society"
I enjoy reading as much as anyone, but I find these kinds of posts to be very short-sighted.
First off, civilization precedes mass reading by millennia. To attribute the Enlightenment and modern industrial civilization to reading, and any counter-movement against the Enlightenment as anti-reading, is to fundamentally misunderstand most of history.
E.g., Romanticism was an explicitly anti-Enlightenment movement and arguably had more interest in poetry and literature than the forces it was rea...Folksonomies: criticism
Folksonomies: criticism
1 17 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Terrorism of Obscurantism
With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by th... 1 notes
notes14 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Patenting Video Games as an Analytic Exercise
My initial reaction to discovering the Tapper patent was that it seemed like a hilarious parody. There are many silly patents, but this patent isn't silly in only the usual way, that it proposes an invention where I'm skeptical patent protection is really in order. It reads parodically because it seems to be describing the wrong thing entirely: It takes the formal structure of a patent, which is most at home when describing machines and other devices, and uses it to write a strange kind of g... 1 notes
notes01 MAR 2016 by ideonexus
"Idiocracy" is a Problematic Anti-Poor Film
Unlike other films that satirize the media and the soul-crushing consequences of sensationalized entertainment (my personal favorite being 1951's Ace in the Hole), Idiocracy lays the blame at the feet of an undeserved target (the poor) while implicitly advocating a terrible solution (eugenics). The movie’s underlying premise is a fundamentally dangerous and backwards way to understand the world.
The origin story for Idiocracy’s future world of half-wits is that uneducated people in the e...Folksonomies: intelligence criticism
Folksonomies: intelligence criticism
1 13 NOV 2015 by ideonexus
A Small Defense of the Star Wars Prequels
***Sigh*** There are lots of problems with TPM, but its failure to be mythic isn’t one of them because that’s, in fact, the point of the entire prequel trilogy — demythologizing what we thought we knew about the Old Republic, the Jedi, and the rise of the Empire. The Old Republic wasn’t a “more civilized age,” it was a corrupt and flawed entity riven with divisions. The Jedi weren’t “guardians of peace and justice,” they were guardians of the status quo to the extent that ... 1 notes
notes31 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Aristotle Was About Quantity, Not Quality, of Thought
I don't doubt that Aristotle thought more in actual footage during his life than any other person ever thought in the same elapsed time of sixty-two years. I do say, however, that any prize he deserves for so doing should be for quantity, not quality, as a great deal of it was spinach. He would sit around and think like one possessed, or he would walk around and think, since he was a Peripatetic, as they called it in those days. And then he would announce that Swallows spend the winter under ... 1 notes
notes30 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
The Problem with the X-Files
The cult of The X-Files has been defended as harmless because it is, after
all, only fiction. On the face of it, that is a fair defence. But regularly recurring fiction - soap operas, cop series find the like - are legitimately
criticized if, week after week, they systematically present a one-sided
view of the world. The X-Files is a television series in which, every week,
two FBI agents face a mystery. One of the two, Scully, favours a rational,
scientific explanation; the other agent, Mulde...Folksonomies: science fiction criticism
Folksonomies: science fiction criticism
1 notes
notes21 APR 2014 by ideonexus
Realism in "A Song of Ice and Fire"
Game of Thrones takes place in a land that feels somewhat post-apocalyptic — there are occasional glimmers of hints that something really bad might have happened to Westeros long ago, and that's the reason for the irregular and attenuated seasons. But even more than that, we know Westeros is on the brink of a zombie apocalypse from the very first moment of the story. And part of the genius of Martin's slow-as-soil-erosion storytelling is that the zombie threat never quite arrives, but we ke... 1 notes
notesThe engaging storytelling is the result of its connection to how the world works with gray characters and glacial problems.
