Random Thoughts, Part 10 (Now Randomer and Thoughtier)

Made at: https://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/

My series of collections of my random thoughts started in December 2018 and shows no sign of letting up. With my previous entry, Part 9 (Pandemic Edition), I noticed that I had almost reached the milestone of 200 random thoughts presented in posts of 20-ish thoughts per post. I decided to wait for one of my most random thoughts to serve as number 200. I'm not sure I succeeded, but it is about a weird random thing I've been doing for decades that may be randomly philosophical and then goes meta- ... so it seems like a good candidate. Enjoy!

200. One thing I think is fun is to tell people to have fun before they do something that will probably not be fun (like doing an errand, going to the bathroom, etc.). I don’t know why I enjoy this so much. Irony? My secret desire that life be more fun for everyone? A self-reflexive meta-observation that sometimes life can be more fun if you reframe your attitude? I’m not sure. Have fun.

201. I don't think the American ethos that emphasizes personal choice and freedom above everything else is serving us well in this pandemic. If governments tell Americans what to do, many won't do it out of spite, but if governments don't tell Americans what to do, many will take stupid risks. You can't win.

202. I don’t think I’ve ever been completely convinced by a philosophical argument, so I’m not bothered or surprised when other people aren’t completely convinced by my arguments. I’m not completely convinced by them, either!

203. In philosophy (and in life) sometimes a lack of imagination is worse than a lack of critical rigor.

204. Sometimes it’s okay to work on a handful of little things and put off the big stuff until tomorrow.

205. The tragedy of the human race is that we could make this Earth a fucking paradise for every single person if we weren’t so dim-witted and narrow-minded. All we would have to do is decide we care more about people than the mindless accumulation of wealth or the hollow pursuit of power. The problem isn’t a lack of scientific knowledge or technology. It’s not a lack of resources. Ultimately even our critical thinking deficits are manageable. The root problem is moral. We just have to figure out if we truly and deeply care about each and every human being. If we did that and could remember it for more than five minutes, we could put all our human ingenuity into building a real world here and now that would rival the utopias and heavens of thousands of years of human imagination.

206. Or to put this in the terms of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure: We need to be excellent to each other. And party on, dudes!

207. I was walking by my campus office and stopped in just to visit my books.

208. If it wasn’t obvious before, it should be obvious now: our leaders in America care more about property than human lives, especially Black lives.

209. Hey America, it looks like maybe most of your major political narratives are literally killing people, so maybe, I don’t know, think about changing the way you think and talk about politics?
America: Nah.

210. I’ve read and heard a few people recently using concepts like “personal risk-assessment” to determine how to react to the pandemic (when to go out, when to wear a mask, when to see friends, etc.). This seems to me to be precisely the wrong way to conceptualize one’s activity in a pandemic of a virus that can be passed along to others by people who are asymptomatic. It’s not about personal choice or personal risk-assessment when your personal choices can easily and unknowingly kill other people. As I’ve said before, America’s deeply individualist ethos is not serving us well in this pandemic.

211. One place it does make sense to think about personal risk-assessment is for people who are immune compromised, but then it's more about being extra careful on top of the baseline actions we should all be taking no matter our personal preferences.

212. One of the weird things about academic life: sometimes you get a message that revisions have been accepted on something you wrote a few years ago and almost forgot about.

213. During these unprecedented times I sure am glad that gargantuan corporations that only exist to make money for their shareholders care enough to make ads to tell us they care in slightly-too-sincere narration with driving piano accompaniment.

214. Does anyone else think long Twitter threads are kind of a weird way to communicate, like someone decided we needed to make blog posts more inconvenient and confusing to read?

215. Rewatching Key & Peele makes Jordan Peele's career trajectory into becoming a horror director even less surprising then I already thought it was.

216. Reflecting on Octavia Butler’s statement, “all that you change changes you,” reminds me that philosophy is supposed to change you. That many philosophers seem dead-set against this makes it no less true. The same goes for art as well. As Ursula Le Guin once said, a great novel is one than changes you in ways you don’t completely understand right away. (Which reminds me that I want to teach a science fiction and philosophy class on Butler and Le Guin someday).

217. One reason I’ve never been much of a video gamer: At some point almost all video games get to a point where the difficulty of continuing to play the game exceeds the fun I have playing it. Also, I have terrible hand-eye coordination.

218. The other day I had chicken and waffles for lunch and a Mint Julep for happy hour at home, and I have no idea why anyone would need to look further than this (and maybe barbecue) for Southern pride.

219. Two of my failings as a nerd are that I don’t really like comic books and I think superheroes are kind of silly. But if other superhero stuff was even half as good as HBO’s Watchmen, I’d have to rethink my failings.

220. I think social media has a way of amplifying the voices of people who are especially ignorant and mean so they appear to be a larger part of the population than they are. Or at least I have to hope this is true to avoid total despair about the human race.

221. Am I the only person who finds most Google products to be extremely counter-intuitive? Deciphering symbols created by priests in a faraway valley of stone makes me feel like an Egyptologist, which is cool, but sometimes I just want to edit a shared document or write a blog post.