Author: John Poplett
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Marco Rubio, Professional Agitator or Just Another Cool Dude?
A long time ago (2020), I wrote a letter to Florida’s U.S. Senator Rubio when he raised an alarm alleging that “professional agitators” numbered among the protestors in Lafayette park who had gathered to demonstrate against police brutality of the kind that had then so recently resulted in George Floyd’s murder. The truth is I…
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Plato’s Phaedrus and the Paideia of Søren Kierkegaard
In the summer of 2022, a friend invited me to join a discussion group which gets its jollies reading and discussing Plato’s dialogues line by line in minute detail. Before long it became obvious to me that I had entered the gates of heaven though I was much more alive than dead. Old pockets of…
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Conversation with ChatGPT on Kierkegaard’s Concept of Time or The BOT Thinks I’m a Moron
Here in this transcript I test my wits with ChatGPT. Not only is the robot smarter, it’s more polite. PART I JOHN I am writing an essay on the concept of time in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. My thesis is that chronological time is mostly irrelevant, more like a distraction, from his perspective. In…
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Oversharer’s Delight: A “Brave and Beautiful Story”
Got a call from Maureen Muldoon one day in January. I pitched her a story for the Voice Box storytelling series she runs with Cathy Richardson. There came a pause in the conversation. I had mentioned something about a recent, embarrassing little dust-up, why I don’t know. Naturally, that’s when Maureen asked me to backup…
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Living Poetically According to Kierkegaard
The Romantics believed in the ideal of “living poetically.” Today many people believe in the notion of the self-made person. Kierkegaard is suspicious of these kinds of ideas. What are his objections and concerns? The expression “living poetically” connotes a libertine, a person who marches to his own drummer, follows rules of their own whimsical…