Contralateral articles
Nice contrast between two articles with a similar style. One supports evil, the other opposes evil.

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First:

This article on philosophy tries to defend the need for the discipline with two questions. (1) Why do we need philosophy? (2) Since we need it, why is philosophy so fucking useless?

Why do we need philosophy?

Some propose that the whole idea of making progress toward the truth gets philosophy wrong. Rather, philosophy’s job is to help us respond effectively to social and political issues, such as those involving race, gender or inequality, or to deepen the gravitas of our culture, or to help us achieve the examined life. Consider the latter time-honoured goal, for example. If this is what philosophy is for, then it makes progress one person at a time, and can do so even if people successively grapple with much the same questions and answers, with no answers ever designated as the ‘right’ ones.

He's right about the examined life, but misses the whole point with the crap about Sorosian big questions. If philosophy served any purpose at all, it would have ALREADY told us that Sorosian questions are genocidal violent psychotic lunacy, explicitly designed to obliterate civilization. We would ALREADY eliminate such questions from discussion, and we would shoot monsters who try to "Confront us" with "Robust Debate" and "National Conversations" to advance genocide. Earlier philosophers did occasionally examine whether fashionable questions are good questions instead of helping the monsters to commit genocide more efficiently.

Why philosophy hasn't accomplished anything yet:

Reflection on deep time would instead prod us to think more deeply about whether our very early stage of intellectual development might not also exhibit radical developmental immaturity – and to notice the distinctive and accessible sort of progress that is appropriate to such immaturity.

He spends the rest of the article documenting the supposed immaturity of the discipline and begging for more workforce and funding to get past the immature stage. Parkinson as always.

Ratshit. You fuckers have been consuming money and academic space for 1000 years. Even then, the major questions had already been settled by Aristotle and Confucius and others. Billy Ockham answered the remaining questions and you've only SUBTRACTED from Aristotle and Ockham since then. Even Billy didn't manage to destroy the false premises of the Inquisition in its "early stages", and modern paid philosophers are IMPROVING THE EFFICIENCY of the modern Inquisition. We shouldn't be paying anyone for this evil job.

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Second:

This article is a COMPLETE takedown of the blockchain myth. The author performs a REAL PHILOSOPHICAL SERVICE, examining step by step whether the questions that Bitcoin supposedly answers are even questions that need an answer. Obviously they aren't, because we already have good solutions for the problems. He shows how blockchain is a WORSE solution for each of these problems.

You actually see it over and over again. Blockchain systems are supposed to be more trustworthy, but in fact they are the least trustworthy systems in the world. Today, in less than a decade, three successive top bitcoin exchanges have been hacked, another is accused of insider trading, the demonstration-project DAO smart contract got drained, crypto price swings are ten times those of the world’s most mismanaged currencies, and bitcoin, the “killer app” of crypto transparency, is almost certainly artificially propped up by fake transactions involving billions of literally imaginary dollars.

He doesn't bother to explain why the fraud was perpetrated because it's blatantly obvious. NSA created Bitcoin to perform three of NSA's functions at once. (1) Encourage dissidents and criminals to run their transactions through NSA instead of using untraceable paper currency and unmonitorable handshake contracts. (2) Steal free computing service from the "miners" to solve NSA's cryptographic equations. (3) Make money by frontrunning transactions because NSA has inside knowledge of the transactions.

Labels: infinite evil

  ¶ 6:42 AM