Entries in Life

I said that Radical Orthodoxy got me thinking, but check this quote: Only Christian theology now offers a discourse able to position and overcome nihilism itself.

This is really great stuff. I'm impressed because it squares with my own independent thinking. Especially this statement (which directly follows the above quote):

How did nihilism come to pose such a threat? Milbank traces revisionist history of the Western world in which the main villain isn't Machiavelli or Attila the Hun, but a 13th century Scottish "metaphysician" named John Duns Scotus (from whose name "dunce cap" is said to have been derived). "Scotus inaugurated a tendency for talking about reality as if it consisted of discrete objects, atoms, facts," Milbank told me. "Things that we can talk about without any values."

I'm not a philosopher — I haven't taken any philosophy classes or read many philosophy books — so that quote really helps me understand what Nicolai Berdiaev says about objectivity and why he values subjectivity over objectivity.

Via Hack the Planet, this rant on why email is going to die. It blames the service providers as much as the spammers. Why are the service providers culpable? Because their users complained about the amount of spam their INBOXes had in them, so they tried to serve their users. In the process, they've made it more difficult for technically profficient people like David Reed to send email while on the road.

Mr. Reed claims that email over SMTP is going to die unless he can get send email. Why is this wrong? Because the vast majority of people aren't as profficient as he is and are satisfied with their existing email, spam and all. They don't care that they can't send email from their hotel room, because they don't try to. If they need to, and they are not technical, they probably have a BlackBerry that makes's the problems Mr. Reed runs into non-existent.

What does this mean for me, as someone who wants to provide spam-free email? I don't rely soley on Black Holes. I will open up the legacy SSL ports for SMTP authentication. Web-email is available as a last resort.