Bearings – Early Birds
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This cartoon accompanied Obscurantism & The Language of Excess, an article written by Siobhan Lyons for Philosophy Now.
The article, which is well written as well as entertaining, deals with the concept of obscurantism, that is, the “darkening or purposeful withholding of knowledge, or communicating in a purposefully complicated manner”.
The link between obscurantism and politics isn’t all that much of a stretch.
Some of you have seen this commentary on oil sands cartoon before.. The drawing was recently published in the The Potent.ca, which is a new entertainment website with an environmental twist.
Happy to announce the above Simon & Finn post was repurposed by Adbusters for their fall issue on What Is Reality (hard copy only). . 🙂
The following cartoon accompanied the print version of The Impossibility of Maximizing Good Consequences by Lawrence Crocker (Philosophy Now). In the article, the writer posits that various decisions can have vastly different long term consequences.
This is the backbone for chaos theory, or the butterfly effect (i.e. a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can theoretically cause a hurricane in another).
Although the actions that can result in the very best consequences (i.e. maximizing consequences) ought to be favoured, the probability of actually “getting this right” is pretty darn small.