Random Thoughts, Part 11: Pandemic, Politics, Philosophy, and Other Random Things

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

My random thoughts continue! In Part 10, I got up to #221, so I'm picking up with 222 here in Part 11. Even though these are random, a lot of them focus on the pandemic, politics, and philosophy, but that's how randomness works... or is it? Anyway, there's also one about mustard, so maybe it really is random. Enjoy!

222. If you’re not willing to at least occasionally entertain the possibility that your entire framework of understanding could be wrong, are you really doing philosophy?

223. I feel like mustard doesn’t get the credit it deserves for everything it does to make our lives better.

 

224. Closed-minded skeptics: “Why?” Open-minded skeptics: “Why not?”

 

225. Dear science fiction authors, It’s okay to explain things sometimes. Leave the “show don’t tell” dogma to your mimetic fiction counterparts, who have far less interesting things to tell than you do.

 

226. Part of becoming a mature human being is realizing that not everyone is like you and learning to be okay with that.

 

227. Me: I didn’t like this one small thing about something.

People on the internet: OMG, why did you hate everything about that thing?!

 

228. If you think philosophy should be like Kuhnian normal science with research programs organized by paradigms, I really don’t understand why you wouldn’t just do science instead.

 

229. I realize this will sound odd to a certain type of person, but one thing I dislike about online classes is that they are far too organized. Like many things in life, I think education benefits from a little chaos.

 

230. Gotta hand it to the pandemic: It has done a great job shining some harsh daylight on every fucked up thing about America.

 

231. An observation: Whenever I ask a question that I think is difficult, puzzling, and worthy of prompting serious thought, a lot of people have quick, certain, almost dismissive answers. I’m not sure what to make of this, but I find the gulf between my intentions and others’ reception to be somewhat amusing.

 

232. Asynchronous classes are untimely.

 

233. Manufacturing an artificial financial crisis in an essential public service and then 14 years later using that crisis as a tool of voter suppression is despicable, but you have to admit it’s pretty on-brand for Republicans.

234. How much of the world’s problems are caused by having one group of people who are taught that theirs is the only perspective (or the only one that matters) and then letting those people control almost everything?

 

235. One of the jarring things about the pandemic is that I read horrific things about a young white man murdering protestors in Wisconsin after police shot a Black man in the back and my university being 31^st in the nation for number of COVID cases, but then I still have to answer emails about how to get rid of old books in my department office and set up Zoom office hours to talk about Plato. I can’t imagine what this is like for Black Americans on a regular basis.

 

236. I really hate online teaching, but I still think almost all teachers should be doing it right now. What’s even worse is hybrid teaching. Just figuring out how that even works in a pandemic is exhausting and even worse, probably pointless in the long run.

 

237. I’m generally more “analytic” by philosophical temperament, but one of the many ways I can never be fully comfortable with contemporary analytic philosophy is that I don’t think using lots of arcane abbreviations makes a text more “rigorous.”

 

238. In philosophy I value depth of questioning more than rigor of analysis.

 

239. “White supremacism is a helluva drug” seems like an accurate assessment of a lot of the otherwise inexplicable elements of US politics.

 

240. Anyone who thinks “radical leftists” are going to violently take over America has obviously never attended a meeting of a leftist organization.

 

241. Sometimes I wonder if being a philosopher makes you too weird to really understand normal people—or for normal people to understand you.

 

242. The fetishization of freedom and the dogma of personal choice above all else are literally killing us in the US.

 

243. There are so many examples from health care to guns to masks to vaccines, etc., but one example of the dogma of personal choice is the refrain that students should always have choice about whether to have face-to-face classes during a pandemic as if they are consumers and universities are beholden to their personal choices… the customer is always right. In some contexts, it makes good pedagogical sense to respect students’ choices, but maybe not when their wellbeing and the wellbeing of their communities are at stake.

 

244. The favorite pastime of everyone on the left in the US seems to be “knowing what the Democrats should do.” This pastime will be more fun when Democrats have more power to do more things or alternatively, to disappoint you by not doing what you are sure they should do (and how dare they not do what any reasonable person such as yourself can see is obviously the right thing to do?). So, you should work to elect Democrats so you can better enjoy this time-honored pastime of the American left.