February 2012
1 post
afk
I’ve been I’m in one of those internet agoraphobic periods again.
See you later.
January 2012
19 posts
1 tag
Philosophy for children
I’ve been getting training to do this for the past couple days from this guy, which will hopefully lead to an accreditation from these folks.
It’s a lot of fun, and I’m really looking forward to connecting with some local schools (even though children are usually among the age groups with which I am fairly indifferent, if not disinclined, to work).
Thanks to my university...
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“Because of Edison’s patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially...”
– from The Pirate Bay’s press release regarding SOPA and PIPA (via davidfinchers)
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Exams: Or How I Learned to Stop Properly...
Last one of the semester done. Finally.
I spent some hours speedwriting today about (1) why Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice is (logical, methodological, ontological) hogwash and (2) how/why development discourses can/should be transcended. This was really painful -
for my hand
for my sense of wanting to engage well with the issues. (Teh issues!!!) Exams are such a terrible...
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“We see liberal feminist understanding of ‘adding women’ to the...”
– Anne Sisson Runyan and Spike Peterson (‘The Radical Future of Realism: Feminist Subversion of IR Theory’)
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“American identity, which significantly informs US foreign policy, has been...”
– John M. Hobson (‘Is critical theory always for the white West and for Western imperialism? Beyond Westphilian towards a post-racist critical IR’, Review of International Studies (33), 2007)
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“The modern state… behaves part of the time towards those subjected to it as if...”
– Alasdair MacIntyre (‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’)
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NPR hack apologizes for Wall Street
azspot:
NPR hack apologizes for Wall Street
But Davidson’s defense brief is incredibly wrong. I’d say “dishonest,” but I suspect he really doesn’t know better. He’s just picking this stuff out of the air. His points, in turn. Without Wall Street…
…the poor would stay poor. Without credit cards, poor people would have no money to buy stuff. Thanks to Wall Street, now they do—a contrast with...
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“Congress appropriates military funds with alacrity and generosity. It...”
– Martin Luther King, Jr. (via azspot)
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“‘Conscious Eurocentrism’… is found in those writers who explicitly...”
– John M. Hobson (‘Is critical theory always for the white West and for Western imperialism? Beyond Westphilian towards a post-racist critical IR’, Review of International Studies (33), 2007)
This speaks to liberalism and various strands of Marxism. A very interesting paper.
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“Theory is always for someone and for some purpose. All theories have a...”
– Robert W. Cox (‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’)
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“The fundamental defect of the political mechanism (is that) it is a system of...”
– Milton Friedman (‘The Fragility of Freedom’)
Power has such distorting effects on political mechanisms, doesn’t it Milt? Thankfully, the market allows our un-abstractable individual preferences to find their rational climax.
lol. Reading this stuff is like listening to minor...
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The unacceptable arbitrariness of Ethical Egoism
bbcity:
Ethical Egoism advocates that each of us divide the world into two categories of people—ourselves and everyone else—and that we regard the interests of those in the first group as more important than the interests of those in the second group. But each of us can ask: What is the difference between me and everyone else that justifies placing myself in this special category? Am I more...
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Florida Man Tortured and Pepper-Sprayed to Death... →
wilwheaton:
It has been two and half years since 62-year old Nick Christie was tortured and pepper-sprayed to death by police at the Lee County Jail. Although the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, the law enforcement officers who kept him strapped naked to a chair and then pepper sprayed him until he died have not been charged in his death.
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December 2011
21 posts
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“And, really, what can one say about Objectivism? It isn’t so much a philosophy...”
– David Bentley Hart (The Trouble With Ayn Rand)
(via davidwpritchard)
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If eating meat is somehow morally reprehensible
logicallypositive:
then why do we not get just as angry at dogs and other animals as we do people?
Is this a real question? Really?
Pretending that it is, two things come to mind:
1. Assigning moral responsibility to non-human animals is something of the middle-ages. But maybe we should level the playing field and, say, ask the state not to arrest people for trespassing unless we also...
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“If there was no legitimate initial acquisition, then there can be no legitimate...”
– Will Kymlicka (‘Libertarianism’, in Contemporary Political Philosophy), my emphasis
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nomind-allthought:
I think it’s incredibly amusing when people reblog philulz’s post about trees and talk about all the functions that they have. He was literally saying that they’re only value is in their function to sentient organisms, and it just supports what he says to go on and on about the various ecological duties that they perform. He said that they have no inherent worth, which...
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Louis C.K. Went Out On A Limb, And It Actually...
rocketboom:
Sure, stand-up comedian Louis C.K. couldn’t stop the pirates, but the pirates also couldn’t stop him from making $500,000 with his $5 direct download experiment.
When Mr. C.K. announced earlier this week that he was going to sell $5 direct downloads of his of his show “Live at the Beacon Theater” without the help of a 3rd party distributor and without copyright or digital rights...
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“It is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
Getting it done
Turned in essay discussing McDowell’s dispositional moral realism and the phenomenology of evaluative experience.
Accomplished miscellaneous important things.
Made whisky sours, smoked pipe (Peterson’s De Luxe Mixture) and played Skyrim.
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This is some fucking hyperreal Baudrillardian shit... →
workandentropy:
It’s straight out of a Don DeLillo novel: A few hours after television producers set up a replica of Occupy Wall Street for the filming of a new episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit, the real Occupy Wall Street announced plans to occupy the fake one. At 11:30 p.m. the call to occupy the set went out on Twitter with the hash tag #Mockupy. Located at nearby Foley Square,...
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Former Congressional staffers who helped author... →
wilwheaton:
inothernews:
(via BoingBoing)
What a gigantic fucking shock.
…
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so-meta:
Not only is there a pinnacle of “free thought,” but it can also be harnessed and flawlessly executed by 16 year olds! YOU TOO can master the philosophical and sociological complexity of all religion from any time period and any part of the planet! All you have to do is watch some videos of people yelling on YouTube and maybe buy a book!
Try new atheism today!
Essay word count exceeded by 43%
Surprisingly, converting it to German with Google Translate didn’t help.
I need another language where more words are compounded.
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“I remember when our church history prof, the last day of four years of classes,...”
– Richard Rohr (‘Plato or Jesus?’)
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Ethical objectivity?
I’m working on an (undergraduate) essay about moral objectivity, and I’m primarily concerned with whether any metaethical accounts can successfully posit existential mind independence of moral judgements whilst side-stepping the controversial metaphysics of traditional moral realism. I was going to focus on evaluating quasi-realism, but that’s starting to look less...
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“The responses given by Third World communities to the spread of capitalism have...”
– Arturo Escobar (‘Power and Visibility: Development and the Invention and Management of the Third World’ [1988])
This challenge is a worthy one, although its presuppositions are slightly troubling: namely, conflating modernisation theory with development, thereby homogenising...
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Skyrim > sleeping
Though I will regret it in a few hours when I have to get up and work on some essay on metaphysical problems in moral realism or something.
Or something.
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“The result of the rise of finance over the past 30 years has been the...”
– Ben Fine (‘Examining the Ideas of Globalisation and Development Critically: What Role for Political Economy?’)
November 2011
15 posts
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A rough estimate of my reading speed
I’m starting to notice three distinct categories.
Non-academic: 40-80 pages per hour.
Academic: 15-30 pages per hour.
Immanuel Kant: 1-3 pages per hour.
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BBQ ribs are porkcicles →
tomhaverfoods.com
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WatchMark Blyth on (fiscal) austerity: commonsense economics or politically driven nonsense?
[Basically a fun video with fun animations]
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“Military training depends on the denigration of anything considered feminine -...”
– J. Ann Tickner (‘Gender in world politics’), on the protection myth
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“There is something special about the role of ideas in money - the power of ideas...”
– Jonathan Kirshner (‘Money is Politics’) - on the self-fulfilling prophecy that is belief in financial liberalisation, and why it is a political weapon
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“To separate labor from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of...”
– Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation)