Liberalism, no less than socialism, -indeed, perhaps much more so than socialism- is defined by praxis. And liberalism might be considered dialectical, in that it offers no positive doctrine, but proceeds by a kind of via negativa. The practice of liberalism is tolerance; the positive program of liberalism is the establishment of social institutions that promote and defend tolerance. Liberalism does not tell you what to believe. At most, it tells you what not to believe - that is, not to believe any belief that would cause you to be intolerant towards other people and their beliefs - presumably, "absolute," "dogmatic," "totalitarian" beliefs. But then again, it may not even tell you that much. It may allow you to believe intolerant beliefs (that is, it may tolerate intolerant beliefs) so long as you do not act on those intolerant beliefs. Indeed, liberalism developed within the context of the wars between and among Catholics and Protestants. The people who developed liberalism were people who were not only convinced that they and only they had the absolute correct dogmas concerning Jesus and their own souls, beliefs that transform the totality of a person's life, leaving nothing untouched, but also that the penalty for having incorrect beliefs was not only death but infinity years of unimaginable torment. They believed that if they failed to convince their friends and family of their own beliefs, this is what would happen to them. Yet somehow these religions learned to co-exist.
Why Capitalism is Ending
THE PRODUCTIVITY BOMB 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 ... ) ...
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