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Showing posts from December, 2017

Affirmative Nihilism in The Digital Age

     Many years ago, German philosopher Nietzsche wrote, " God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?" In the face of a world devoid of meaning, or a world where god has died, Nietzsche asks us what we intend to do next. Well, fear no more, because modern capitalism has the answer: purchase!       We live in a meaningless world - there is no inherent value. This is not to say that we cannot create value on an individual level, though. Yes, god has died, but that does not mean that all hope died with him. Nietzsche would contend that, paradoxically, value comes from the lack thereof - or, in other words, we can create meaning as individuals despite the fact that there is no inherent meaning in the world. However, conflict arises when we attempt to impose a universal meaning onto others. For example, the crusades, which were lead by Christians who believed that their vision of ...

Drumpf, The Left, and Information (Week 3)

             America is saturated with information - every day we are gorged with knowledge, drowned in facts. The rapid proliferation of information, which, at this point, are little more than rumors, has created a fundamental issue for those of us who seek the truth: it has become nearly impossible to distinguish truth from fact.         The digital age, in its effort to educate the people of the world, has had the opposite effect. While information is vitally important to the process of fact-finding, there must be a limit. The digitized nature of modern America has failed to locate that limit, and I contend that this is largely the reason Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. American politics resembles a schoolyard -- politicians have formed into cliques, spreading gossip about one-another in a profoundly dishonest and depoliticizing way. Even the most objective truths -- things like recorded quotes or proven statis...

The Worst Decision of My Life

     We all make decisions that we later find unbearable. Maybe it is a serious life decision that we regret, or maybe it is just an awkward moment that we wish had never taken place - but we can all locate low points in the plateau of our lives. However, I believe that at the age of fifteen I have already made the mistake that will define the entirety of my existence. Several months ago, I made a decision so despicable, so strikingly irresponsible, a decision so wrong that it struck me to my very core: I followed the NBA on Instagram       It was a moment of weakness, and one that stands our like a sore thumb in the tapestry that is my life. I found myself drawn towards the nightly highlights and recaps of games that appeared on the Instagram - I was seduced into making a decision that would create a flow of advertising so heavy it would define the next several months of my life. Immediately after following the account, my Instagram was flooded with ...