Atoms and Flat-Earth Ethics

(Aeon Essays) – James Hannam:

As for most ancient philosophers, Lucretius saw no boundary between his scientific interests and his ethical claims. …

aeon lucretius

Goodreads:

• Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
• Matt Ridley: The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
• Stephen Greenblatt: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Hoist The Black Flag

(FTB stderr) – Marcus Ranum:

I am now convinced that the Republican Party, with its relentless support for Trump, favoritism for the rich, racism, and anti-environmentalism, is a clear and present danger to whatever shreds of democracy the US has managed to build. …

Then, I started thinking about how it is that the Democrats manage to lose, and how both parties are generally incompetent, and I realized that they know they need eachother and they’re using the endless conflict as a way of controlling and guiding the entire political dialogue, by opposing caricatures of eachother and endlessly tweaking the Overton window. …

Look at how, after a massive mid-term defeat that crushed the Republicans plans in many states, Nancy Pelosi was quick to hoist the white flag of “bipartisanship” in order to spend her effort paying back the uppity non-white young women who were upsetting the apple cart. Aside from the Benghazi!-like media circus of the Mueller Report, the Democrats have stayed focus and punished Ilhan Omar for speaking truth about Israel, and re-worked internal rules to say that if someone “primaries” an established Democrat (like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did) they won’t get a seat at the table. It’s as if they had their enemies back to the cliff, and it was time for the spears to be wet one last time, but the Democrats sat down to bicker about who didn’t pay their share on the restaurant tab. …

Here’s what the Democrats should be doing:

• raise the black flag
• stop trying to win away Republican voters
• obliterate the Republican Party
• fall into a shambles arguing between centrist Democrats and more radical Democrats
• peel the centrists off and make them irrelevant

…

stderr 2019/04/28 hoist

Avengers: Endgame

(FTB Pharyngula) – PZ Myers:

First, a few of my problems with the movie.

• It’s a time-travel movie. Hollywood cannot make those — they screw them up everytime. …
• It’s too much to digest. …
• Every problem is solved with a fight. …
• Disposable ethics. …
• Death is weightless. …

That said, then, Avengers: Endgame is a superbly well done genre movie. We have reached Peak Superhero. …

pharyngula 2019/04/27 avengers-endgame

Why Accidents Like the Notre-Dame Fire Happen

(Atlantic Ideas) – Erik Larson:

Our very attempts to stave off disaster make unpredictable outcomes more likely. …

theatlantic 2019/04 accidents

We Shall Overcome Trump

(WP Opinions) – Dana Milbank:

My wife and I took our kids on a civil rights tour of the South over spring break, a trip planned before we knew it would be the week Muellermania engulfed Washington.

As it turned out, though, the Civil Rights Trail offered an ideal perspective from which to view the mayhem in the capital caused by the special counsel’s report. …

washingtonpost survived-worse

Jesus Before the New Testament Canon

(Vridar) – Neil Godfrey:

The point here is to clarify the grounds upon which Nodet and Taylor claimed that our canonical gospels are not the best place to start in order to understand Christian origins. The evidence they cited for this claim came from the Christian writings we have prior to the appearance in the literature of any explicit knowledge of our gospels. Our gospels evidently carried very little (= zero) weight as authoritative information about Jesus until the late second century. …

vridar 2019/04/25 about-jesus

Stick Figure Iconography: Queen Elizabeth I

(Good Tickle Brain) – Mya Gosling:

No look at Shakespeare would be complete without a look at the two monarchs whose reigns overlapped his life. First up is Good Queen Bess herself …

goodticklebrain iconography elizabeth-i

Josephus on Jesus?

(Richard Carrier Blogs) – Richard Carrier:

We know Josephus published The Jewish War about 75 A.D. And no mention of the Christian Jesus is in it. Josephus then published the Jewish Antiquities about 93 A.D. And in surviving manuscripts of that today, there are two references to the Christian Jesus: the Testimonium Flavianum (in book 18) and a reference to James the brother of Jesus (in book 20).
 The first is a brief fawning paragraph about Jesus whose authenticity has been widely doubted for centuries. How much of it is authentic, or if any reference to Jesus existed there at all, remains widely debated. The second is a single line that connects the execution of a certain James to Jesus “the one called Christ” without any explanation. That has been doubted by some experts over the decades, but accepted as authentic by most. …

The latest research collectively establishes that both references to Jesus were probably added to the manuscripts of Josephus at the Library of Caesarea after their first custodian, Origen—who had no knowledge of either passage—but by the time of their last custodian, Eusebius—who is the first to find them there. The long passage (the Testimonium Flavianum) was almost certainly added deliberately; the later passage about James probably had the phrase “the one called Christ” (just three words in Greek) added to it accidentally, and was not originally about the Christian James, but someone else. …

richardcarrier 12071

The Impossible Burger

(Discover Blogs::The Crux) – Mark R. O’Brian:

Impossible Foods, a California-based company, adds a plant product to their veggie burger with properties people normally associate with animals and give it the desired qualities of beef.

But what exactly is being added to this veggie burger? Does it make the burger less vegan? Is the additive from a GMO? Does it prevent the burger from being labeled organic? …

crux impossible-burger

Us

(FTB stderr) – Marcus Ranum:

I loved the movie. Usually, when I walk out of a movie nowadays, my mind is a swirl of continuity errors and plot problems, and general mockery for “people in spandex punching each other” crap.

First and foremost, having the actors act against themselves was a brilliant trick. I bet that was tremendous fun for them; Shahadi Wright Joseph, as the daughter, was incredible – I hope that young woman has a long and well-deserved career as an actress. Lupita Nyong’o was fantastic, too, but as the headliner who’s carrying most of the movie, you kind of expect that. Saying that she nailed it, perfectly, over and over, is an understatement. …

stderr 2019/04/24 us

The Light of Burning Cathedrals

(Patheos::Daylight Atheism) – Adam Lee:

Just as the conductor David Randolph said that there’s no such thing as religious music, because you can always pair an existing composition with different lyrics to give it any message you want, it’s equally true that there’s no such thing as religious architecture. I choose to view Notre Dame as similar to the Parthenon, the Pyramids or the lost Buddhas of Bamyan: monumental artworks that testify to the crafters’ skill and to the creativity of the human mind, which has populated the world with wildly diverse mythologies. I don’t believe any should be taken literally, but they’re worth preserving as artifacts of the ways human beings have seen the world. …

daylightatheism 2019/04 cathedrals

Morality as Evolved; What about God?

(Patheos::ATP) – Jonathan MS Pearce:

I am first going to furnish you with an excerpt from Robert Sapolsky’s Behave before discussing the content within a theological context. Of course, what Sapolsky has to say is nothing new or groundbreaking, but it serves s a good introduction to the topic. …

Within the context of primates and other social animals, the foundations of morality are not only there, evident to see, but they are evolved. Their functionality for sociality and social cohesion are clear to see. And this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the subject of the evolution of morality and morality in other species is concerned. …

If morality is evolved due to its functionality and usefulness, then the grounds to morality are… their functionality and their usefulness. Morality isn’t underwritten by God; God has no explanatory use here, both in terms of causality and moral philosophy. …

tippling morality-as-evolved

Stick Figure Iconography: Shakespeare

(Good Tickle Brain) – Mya Gosling:

It’s Shakespeare’s birthday! To celebrate, here’s a look at Shakespeare’s iconography. …

goodticklebrain iconography-shakespeare

Why Spinoza still matters

(Aeon Essays) – Steven Nadler:

At a time of religious zealotry, Spinoza’s fearless defence of intellectual freedom is more timely than ever. …

aeon spinoza-matters

AOC [un]invited

(FTB) – Mano Singham:

Politicians love to claim that they have the pulse of thee people and speak for them when in fact most of them speak on behalf of the wealthy and the lobbyists. Kentucky Republican Andy Barr invited congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to visit his home district and talk to the coal miners there about the impact her Green New Deal would have on their livelihood. …

The funniest thing is that Barr’s district does not have any coal mines at all, something that this ‘man of the people’ did not seem to know when he offered to take AOC ‘underground’ and to talk to the ‘thousands’ of coal miners in his district. …

singham 2019/04/20 grandstanding

Great White Sharks Flee From Killer Whales

(Atlantic Science) – Ed Yong:

The great white shark—a fast, powerful, 16-foot-long torpedo that’s armed to the teeth with teeth—has little to fear except fear itself. But also: killer whales. …

theatlantic 587563