My Random Thoughts series has been running so long I'm starting to worry it's not really random. Oh, well. I did take a few months off from posting them, but that only means I have a few months of thoughts to post. And some memes and other stuff to look at just to keep it all a bit random. And now I've reached the milstone of 928 thoughts! What makes that a milestone? Nothing, really. It's just random. Enjoy!
870. Politics is like ordering pizzas for an event. I prefer spicy stuff and lots of veggies, but not mushrooms. Most people like different things—pepperoni, sausage, margherita, pineapple, pesto, and so on. Yet we all end up eating a lot of plain cheese pizza as a compromise. Maybe not ideal, but I’d rather have cheese pizza than no pizza at all.
871. Stranger Things has been on so long I now have false nostalgia for 2016.
872. My assumption, however erroneous, is that any American who is moderately informed and minimally decent will have, at the very least, complicated feelings about almost everything in this country, including Thanksgiving. So, when I say, “Happy Thanksgiving,” I don’t mean the whitewashed narrative of cheerful Pilgrims and welcoming Wampanoag, I mean something more like, “completely fucked up as the past and present of this land are, I haven’t given up on its future yet.”
873. Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday … at least we get Sunday off from spending money, I guess?
874. “The Holidays” in America: when we turn the spirit of the season into soulless consumption.
875. One reason I prefer Halloween to Christmas: while both holidays are over-commercialized, at least for Halloween people get to eat candy, wear costumes, and watch horror movies instead of listening to insipid Christmas music while wearing ugly sweaters and being pressured to create holiday magic and spend money we don’t have on stuff nobody wants.
876. If art always made sense, it would not accurately reflect life.
877. Perhaps my most unpopular, most impractical opinion is that humanity would be better off without most of the concepts that drive and divide people today: gender, capitalism, money, race, nation states, power hierarchies, and any form of dogmatism about religion and politics.
878. No gender, no money, no race, no nations, no hierarchies, no dogmatisms, no selves, no duality … thus does a secular anarchist bodhisattva abide.
879. I understand why people don’t want to be on Facebook or other social media, but surely we can do better than having to keep track of which of our 15-20 distinct means of communication we need to contact which people.
880. Me, alone: I’m not that much of a giant.
Me, in a crowd of normal sized people: Oh.
881. One of my complaints about AI in higher education is that it has made a lot of student writing bland, empty, and homogenous. These days it's a huge thrill to get something that shows evidence of real human thinking shining through the thorny underbrush of student prose. I'll take a rough paper with heart and human ideas over smooth, boring AI slop any day.
882. As I sat town to read about the mass shooting at Brown University, I found out about a mass shooting in Australia. The day ended with finding out about the murders of Rob and Michele Reiner. And people are still being killed in Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere. All this against a background of continual pervasive human misery at home and abroad, much of it caused by other humans. I don't have any hot take about this. It's just a lot.
883. Just existing is suffering enough. I don't understand why people deliberately make it worse for others.
884. Rigidly sorting people into generations is like astrology or Myers-Briggs. It’s just based on a more boring pseudoscience: marketing demographics.
885. Perhaps a principle that could explain a lot about politics of the last decade: once people give up on their society’s ability to improve their own lives, they fixate on making other people’s lives worse.
886. Internet media “discourse” to English translations:
“plot holes” = “I have no imagination”
“bad writing” = “I just didn’t like it, but I want to sound smart,” or (in some dialects) “my wild fan theory didn’t happen exactly as I expected”
“it was never explained” = “I was looking at my phone when it was explained”
“that character wasn’t developed” = “please read my fan fiction about that character”
“that would never happen/that made no sense” = “I don’t understand the concept of fiction, and more improbably, I think real life does make sense all the time”
887. It has always been wild to me how many of my fellow Americans are so ready to excuse, or even celebrate, law enforcement killing people.
888. Hierarchical thinking is going to kill us all.
889. Not all humorless people are unintelligent, but many unintelligent people are humorless.
890. I will never understand why people work so hard to dominate and harm others when you could just work hard enough to meet your needs and then hang out and enjoy life at peace with yourself and all creatures.
891. I realize this sounds like a ridiculous philosophers’ affectation, but I really think a lot of ethical and political harm is caused out of fear—fear of change, fear of difference, fear of the unknown. And these fears are ultimately rooted in fear of death.
892. Two ways to dissolve your fear of death: dissolve death or dissolve “you.” Either you survive death and don’t really “die” (by far the more popular approach of both traditional religions and techno-optimist transhumanism), or there is ultimately no “you” to survive or to die, a mere unbundling of momentarily bundled transitory aggregates (the more difficult approach of deeper Buddhist philosophy).
893. “America is not a racist society” is itself a racist statement. Historical racism and its continuing institutional legacy are the best explanations for the widespread disparities between white people and people of color (especially Black and Native people) along almost every sociological indicator (wealth, infant mortality, life expectancy, incarceration, etc.). Other explanations would at some point invoke some sort of inherent inferiority of those groups—a view that just is racism (ascribing a hierarchical inferiority and superiority between entire racial categories of people). So, if a racist society is not responsible for these inequalities, they must be somehow innate—hence, racism is invoked as an unacknowledged background assumption, one sewn into the historical fabric of American society. (Adapted from points made by Nikole Hannah-Jones).
894. When I say I “don’t understand” bigotry, I don’t mean that I can’t fathom specific historical causes/explanations for bigotry. Such histories are well documented for those who seek them out. I also don’t mean that I don’t understand how bad reasoning often leads to bigotry. Again, this is well documented. Instead, I’m making a moral statement, a kind of philosophical bafflement, a holistic ethical bewilderment about the sum total of the state of affairs for humanity. How, dear humans, did we come to this?
895. “Who’s this fuckin’ bootlicker?” – Me, every time I hear a Republican being interviewed these days.
896. Most of my teaching career has consisted of the following dynamic:
1. Planning: “It would be cool to teach x sometime in the future. I’ll ask to teach that.”
2. Panicking: “Oh, no, now that I’m actually prepping to teach x, I have no idea how I’m going to teach x!”
3. Perseverance: Figuring it out, and somehow teaching x anyway.
Repeat until, I guess, retirement.
897. A big part of what makes me so sad about humanity: almost everything we harm and kill each other for is just stuff we made up.
898. Immigrants are human beings deserving of basic respect and dignity whether their papers are all in order or not. If we don’t agree about that, we’re no longer talking about immigration law.
899. America has a lot of real problems, all of which we seem to be actively not solving by creating fake problems as an excuse to hurt people.
900. Instead of just having the courage of their convictions and admitting they just don’t like certain groups of people, a lot of MAGA people puff themselves up for being “tough on crime,” dressing up their bigotry in concerns about “law and order” and “patriotism” as a pretext to—I can’t stress this enough—bully kids into being afraid to go to school while they throw 5-year-olds in prison. It’s not just morally abhorrent, it’s fucking pathetic—the last refuge of the morally incompetent.
901. If your stance on immigration inclines you to defend a quasi-military agency as it bullies and jails children and builds concentration camps, then maybe it’s time to rethink some things.
902. The average immigrant has 1000% more courage than any ICE agent.
903. It’s always been difficult for me to pretend, even just for the sake of trying to have a productive political conversation, that most of the right’s concern about immigration is anything other than straight up racism.
904. Maybe when this is all over and we’re building a new social order, let’s try, I don’t know, not being assholes to vulnerable people.
905. Whatever moral compass I have can basically be summed up as: I can’t abide cruelty.
906. If there’s no such thing as “Western philosophy,” then there’s no such thing as “non-Western philosophy.” There’s just “philosophy.”
907. “Milan Cortina” sounds like the name of an 80’s soap opera character.
908. It’s funny that some of the people complaining they can’t understand Bad Bunny’s lyrics also apparently can’t understand the lyrics of Green Day, Bruce Springsteen, or Rage Against the Machine.
909. Me: That is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen a human being do.
Olympic commentator: Oooooh, that glaring mistake is going to cost them.
910. I like the Winter Olympics slightly more than the Summer Olympics because the sports are wilder. And the two wildest are the skeleton and the biathlon, but they’re wild for different reasons. The skeleton seems to have gone like this: We already have a bonkers sport called the luge where you go down an iced-up waterslide on a tiny sled at 80 miles per hour with nothing between you and horrendous injury but a helmet, spandex, and sheer hubris. Okay, now do that, but I dare you to do it headfirst. The biathlon seems to have gone like this: Okay, we need another sport for the Winter Olympics. How about cross-country skiing? Oh, we already have that. Alright, how about cross-country skiing and… (rolls some dice) … shooting at targets with a rifle? Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
911. Gandhi is a fascinating figure for many reasons: a saint and a revolutionary, a dreamer of a new way for humanity and a shrewd politician working within existing systems, an apostle of compassion who sometimes harmed those around him, a deep moral force for change who never claimed to have the Truth about what that change would look like. As a philosopher, I find Gandhi’s work intriguing because his “experiments” with Truth, love, nonviolence, and freedom make him philosophically laser-focused without becoming philosophically systematic to the point of dogmatism.
913. There’s a commitment to what I call pop social science in our society (I say “pop” so as not to impugn my social science colleagues!). This assures us there is some secret code to unlock in people’s psychological and social behavior, and this code represents some unshakable “way things are” about humans that can’t really be changed (we’d call this “human nature” is such a notion weren’t so gauche). So, you hear people say things like, “nonviolence will never work” or “we’ll always have poverty.” But this is a strange thing to think if you’ve ever learned about the constant change of history or dreamed about a different way of being in the future. This sort of pop social science becomes yet another loadstone weighing us down to the dangerous delusion that “the way things are is the way they have to be.” But I have to think we could do better (whether we will, aye, there’s the rub). This is why we need education and imagination—to break us free from the tyranny of the present.
914. A weird thing about being a Midwesterner in the South: Men I don’t know calling me “sir,” and women I don’t know calling me “sweetie” or “honey.” I realize these are just enculturations of basic social respect, so my point is NOT to criticize people. I’m used to it after more than a decade. But I find it interesting that “sir” (at least to my Midwestern ears) indicates an upward hierarchical deference into formality where no hierarchy or need for formality necessarily exists (I sometimes joke that I can’t be “sir” because I’m nobody’s commanding officer), while “sweetie” or “honey” indicates a sort of hierarchical deference into familiarity where such hierarchy or familiarity don’t necessarily exist. (To be clear: I’m enough of an egalitarian anarchist to reject all social hierarchies, so to me deference, formality, or familiarity are dependent on specific personal relationships, not one’s broad category of human). I’m sure there’s a deeper point about patriarchy and social hierarchies here, but I’m not entirely sure what it is.
915. Yes, war is hell and horror, but we also forget how utterly morally bizarre it is. Here we are with every moral code in human history telling us that murder is wrong (one of the wrongest things, in fact), and yet an entire sphere of human activity—and in militaristic societies like ours one of the central pillars of our entire economy and way of life—is based on wholesale murder of children who didn’t sign up for this and soldiers who did but are barely adults themselves, the callous obliteration of human infrastructure and the natural environment. And more absurdly, the power-ensorceled old men who start all this have the audacity to proclaim that these eruptions of immorality are in the name of the good and the pure and the right! It would be humorously ironic if it weren’t gut-wrenching moral horror.
916. If being “cynical” or “realistic” requires giving up my hope for a better future for humanity, then that is a price I’m not willing to pay.
917. Weirdly, I can be quite cynical in the short term (especially when capitalist greed can explain something I find annoying), but I can’t by cynical about the long term. We could do better even if we might not.
918. “Be excellent to each other” from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the whole of Star Trek: The Next Generation are responsible for quite a bit of my sense of morality. I also like to remember, “Party on, dudes!”
919. People say war is inevitable as if some people didn’t say the same things about slavery or other moral evils 200 years ago.
920. Human behaviors are only inevitable if we believe them to be—the imprisonment of hasty concepts of “human nature.”
921. One nice thing about spending a week in the UK: When I heard a loud noise, it was probably not a gun shot.
922. In classical South Asian philosophy, the prasaṅga (“unwanted consequences”) form of argument sets up multiple options and denies all of them as internally inconsistent. I find this a valuable way to think of a lot of politics these days, especially internationally: I’m being asked to “pick a side,” but everyone and everything is bad. It’s time to try something different. New sides (no sides?). New ideas beyond old boxes of old ways of thinking. But we have to deconstruct and relinquish the old, bad ideas to find the new ways.
923. From a more expansive, ultimate view of things beyond the petty squabbles that drive so many people’s lives and the conceptual constructions of various self-imprisoning identities, there are no “sides.” Just humanity. And that is the “side” I am always on.
924. When you do philosophy enough, you come to feel that nothing really makes sense the more you think about it. This is not an argument against philosophical thinking as being “useless” or “kicking up sand and complaining that you can’t see.” Rather, it demonstrates the deep hubris of thinking that we can make sense of things—or at least that we can do so as easily as most people seem to suppose.
925. When you travel you come to see that things you were taught are Core Principles of Reality Itself are really just “we just kind of do things this way here for no real reason.”
926. One of my favorite things is to meet cats in different parts of the world.
927. I love people, but I also spend a lot of time avoiding them.
928. The melancholy love of humanity: we consistently choose suffering, but a better world is, for all that, still possible.
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