Materialism Defined

 Materialism is the beautiful failure of a worldview to coincide with itself.



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Lenin the Moralist

  "Unprincipled practical politics are the most impractical politics."  - V. I. Lenin  It will probably cause me to lose friends all across the political spectrum when I say that the problem with Lenin was that he was too moral.  Deal with it.  Moreover, modern-day soi-disant Leninists are even more moralistic than he was - and therefore, all the more romantic and delusional, and their analyses all the more pointless. I do not mean to imply that Lenin was not responsible for the deaths of many people - he was.  Nor am I saying that Lenin did not commit enough atrocities - that he was not violent enough, not ruthless enough, too timid to accomplish his goals, or anything of the like.  No, no, no.  My point is that Lenin's ideology diverted sharply from Marx's critique of political economy, and in part this was because he tried to reinterpret Marxism into a kind of moral campaign, when Marx had intended nothing of the kind - and, by the way, Lenin...
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The right is convinced that politics (and economics) are downstream from culture. But the right is winning on the economic front, while losing on the cultural front. The left maintains that the economic base of society in the final instance determines its cultural (and political) superstructure.  ("It's the economy, stupid!")  But the left is winning on the cultural front, while losing on the economic front.  In other words, both sides see themselves as losing in the way that matters to them. Both sides see themselves as winning only in a superficial and ultimately even counterproductive way, while losing on the front that is fundamental and primary.  How can this be true? Why aren’t both sides winning on the issues that truly matter to them, especially since the opposing side doesn’t really care about those issues? Why aren’t we living in an egalitarian society in which class and other forms of inequality have been abolished, which is at the same time a so...
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Why Capitalism is Ending

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  Sorry, Ray Kurzweil , there will be no singularity.  As much as Moore’s Law has become a cliche, it has also become a cliche to point out that exponential growth has no "knee" - that is to say, that an exponential growth curve has no inflection point.  It goes up faster and faster, so that not only is the value rising but the derivative of the value is also rising (that is, the rate of increase is itself increasing) yet at any given point it is still a gradual increase.  Growth that gets indefinitely huger as it approaches a specific point of time, a limit known as a singularity, is not exponential growth but rather hyperbolic growth .  There’s no evidence that technology is growing hyperbolically; it is “only” growing exponentially.  Gordon Moore himself has stated that he doesn't believe in the singularity, or even in the continuation of Moore's Law.   (And Moore's Law is starting to fail, anyway ... )  But it hardly matters;...
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