Category: Uncategorized
Poverty as Wealth
Reflections on the life of the Zen monk Taneda Santōka
LDS Doctrine is Silent on Homesexuality
Who am I to write about LDS doctrine? I’m not a leader in the church. I’m not even a member of the church. But I’m interested in understanding the doctrine, and I’ve spent a large part of my life attempting to understand it. And I have a question: why is it an overwhelmingly common belief…
Is Running Bad for You in the Long Term?
I have been running recently and I’m spooked. All too often, I’ve heard that running is devastating to your joints, causes long-term problems, causes muscle deterioration, and leads to purple tumors on the left side of your knees. How valid are these rumors? For this investigation, I won’t simply accept the typical answers of “I…
The Agent-Age Problem for Consequentialism
Suspend your disbelief for a moment, and imagine the 6-year-old daughter of a major world leader travels with her father to a major nuclear launch site. She is left unsupervised, and happens to wander into the launch room. There, out of curiosity, she presses the big red button. This launches a nuclear weapon that immediately…
On Ayn Rand, Selfishness, and Bent Books
Ayn Rand is generally hated by those who consider themselves altruists. This is because the general interpretation is that Rand is a lone mouthpiece for the doctrines of egotism and greed. While some of her arguments are clearly, irredeemably repulsive, such as her romanticization of rape, some areas are more ambiguous, and some segments of Rand’s writing…
Ethical Commodities: What Our Products Say About Our Person
Today, Colin Kaepernick’s jersey is the fifth-most bought jersey in NFL history. Until the events of the last few weeks, the phrase “I bought a Kaepernick jersey” would be meaningless except to a select group of football fans. Now, to wear a Kaepernick jersey is to carry an immense weight, one almost as heavy as a Black Lives Matter…
Existentialism in Javascript
What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. — Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism The more computer science I learn, the more I find myself applying coding concepts to philosophy. I was…
Living Wage Affirmative Case
Maeser Prep Debate / Jan-Feb 2015 / Jeremy Hadfield Resolved: Just governments ought to require that employers pay a living wage. I agree with Martin Luther King Junior that, “an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” To restructure the system that produces poverty, and for many other reasons, I affirm the resolution: Just governments ought…
Routine
I stare into darkened windows but cannot find another human. We move, a machine among machines. Around me, road billboards preach the cult of a culture Goods are the gods, nauseating neon signs the preachers, consumers the congregation. All this, but still we won’t confess Festering inside modern life is an illusion. Moldering in our…