The story of Anne Frank is tragic. If not for the words that she wrote in her diary, she would be a digit of history. Her diary is relatable, and the thoughts that collected inside her being during a horrible time in history gives the reader an idea of who she was. She is immortalized because of the little things that she wrote, not because of any great deeds recorded by others. As a victim of tyranny she is remembered as an innocent murdered. She is a story found inside the numbers. Thanks to her diary, we have a human figure to know and mourn, despite the mechanized bureaucratic...
humanity
Is Virtue Signaling Vicious?
Virtue signaling—the practice of highlighting what one takes to be one’s own moral superiority, often by loudly denouncing the character and comportment, including the speech, of other people—has become a dominant mode of rhetoric throughout social media and network television. Virtue theory, in contrast, is a teleological approach to normative morality concerned with how actions affect one’s soul or character. Historians of philosophy usually trace virtue theory to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the first extant articulation of ideas such as that habits build character, and virtues...
Techno-Agorist: Do NPCs Dream of Electric Sheep?
I am a huge fan of Philip K. Dick. His short stories have always been my favorite science fiction of all time. In high school, I read through my big volume of his short stories so many times that the binding literally fell apart. Recently, I decided to read through his full-length book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Boy-oh-boy was that weird. After finishing, I decided to revisit the movie Blade Runner, which was loosely based on that classic. The movie is dramatically different from the book, but it is still immensely enjoyable. It asks important questions about humanity and about...
Sheriff Joseph Konrath’s Family Name and Honor Are Disgraced Forever
Unfortunately that's probably the only accountability he will ever have to suffer for his criminal persecution of an innocent young girl, when he should be tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail, if not drawn and quartered and his pieces thrown on a bonfire. But this is America, where the government can do whatever they want and you can't do a damn thing about it other than let sons know that their father is famous for being a shit-eating scumbag, hated and detested by the rest of all humanity. They may call this post disorderly conduct and have it taken down too, but there will...
It’s a Metaphor, You Idiots
Clint Eastwood is not saying that Atlanta Journal reporter Kathy Scruggs traded sex for new stories. He's saying that she was a whore. This is entirely accurate. And she was not alone. Kathy Scruggs was and will always be a disgrace to journalism and humanity. Just like all the people who are rushing to defend her now. I mean, don't get me wrong, she's got nothing on David Sanger or Michael Gordon. But it is what it...