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My random thoughts series continues with Part 14! (You can see Part 13 here.) With this entry, I've broken 300 random thoughts and made it all the way to 332!
The pandemic has upended many things here on Earth, but my thoughts keep coming and they keep coming randomly. And now that we are (hopefully!) toward the later stages of the pandemic, I have occasional thoughts about that. But don't worry, there's still stuff about philosophy, the Culture Wars, cleaning the litter box, and the Snyder cut. And a few random memes just for a little something extra. Enjoy!
295. There are few things more annoying than unpleasant, difficult, and time-consuming matters you are unable to discuss publicly.
296. I look forward to a day in the future when someone will say, “Remember when people used to talk about ‘cancel culture’ as if that was a thing that existed or made any sense? That was funny.”
297. There are many downsides with having an injury, but one nice thing is that it gives you an instantly acceptable excuse to be late with everything.
298. Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I think people should stop being assholes.
299. Sometimes lack of organization or easily understandable rules, combined with good will, can work out for everyone. The US vaccination system combined with the good will of nurses has made vaccination go faster than expected.
300. For a few seconds in 1989, I probably wondered if Maggie was driving the car in the intro to The Simpsons.
301. Some deep questions finally answered by the Snyder cut: Can a movie be four hours long but still poorly explain things? Can a director be pretentious enough to put a four-hour movie that everybody will watch at home in a 4:3 aspect ratio?
302. Libertarian/right wing white dudes ruined the fun of playing devil’s advocate for everybody.
303. Even just doing short answer instead of multiple choice can somewhat disrupt the mechanical regurgitation-of-information model of education. But it can also be harder to grade.
304. Reading the comments section is the express route to losing one’s faith in humanity.
305. Many Americans are uniquely incapable of thinking in terms of solidarity and mutual benefit, which does tremendous harm to all of us.
306. Historians in 50 or 100 years will probably say that the people of the early 21st century simply weren’t ready for the internet, especially social media.
307. Remember when US politicians used to say things like, “If you like your health insurance, then keep it”? Who are these people that like their private health insurance company?
308. There is a kind of high-performing workaholic academic who knows all the right people, is interested in all the hottest topics, gets jobs and publications in the most prestigious places, and answers your emails at midnight on Saturday night. I will never be that kind of academic. And I’m happy about that.
309. One ingredient of conspiracy theory thinking arises when one is unable to make sense of something using old methods. In such cases, conspiracy theories make sense of what otherwise would require drastic rethinking and re-evaluation of one’s deepest assumptions. So it shouldn’t be surprising that conspiracy theories went from mainly wacky-yet-relatively benign fare of aliens, Bigfoot, and X-Files episodes in the 1990’s to white resentment-fueled conspiracy theories like PizzaGate or QAnon in the 2010’s (funneled briefly through 2000’s fare of 9/11 truthers, Obama birthers, and such). This is a big part of why I stopped listening to Coast-to-Coast AM around 2010: conspiracy theories weren’t fun anymore as they became explicitly political and exclusively the domain of right wing nutjobs. It’s also impossible to understate the role of social media in exacerbating the problem at the same time as America became more visibly diverse and after we elected an African American President (we may look back at Obama’s election in the future as a major event that literally drove many white Americans into mental illness). Such conspiracy theories are a way to make sense of a changing cultural edifice without giving up the pillars of white supremacism that held up the old one. Which of course fits into my previous observation that the trouble with conspiracy theories is that they make too much sense: rather than the messy, partial, and complex erosion of white supremacist America from multiple angles (demographic, economic, cultural, sociological, etc.), it was a small yet powerful cabal of lizard people or a Satanic baby-eating cult of Washington and Hollywood elites. It sounds odd, but for some people all of that bonkers conspiracy nonsense is easier to accept than an America where we no longer assume that white men should control everything.
310. What if instead of asking, “Under what conditions is it acceptable for police to kill people?” we asked, “Why do police have to kill people at all?”
311. There’s a difference between genuine criticism of film/TV/literature and superficial nitpicking about “plot holes,” the “rules” of writing, things the critic would have done differently, or anything not explicitly explained so a toddler can understand it.
312. One of the more amusing misinterpretations about philosophical skepticism is that it is a dogmatic philosophical position such that one must be always skeptical about everything in the same way to the same degree.
313. It has been interesting/dangerous to see how differently people interpret COVID protocols. Many people all along seem to have believed that outdoor air automatically kills the virus so that one must never wear a mask outside even if you’re not socially distancing. Others seem to think masks are not required in convenience stores. Some seem to think noses don’t need to be covered, or that masks are to be worn on the chin or neck. The restaurant model where you don’t wear a mask while sitting down makes no sense under any interpretation. And then of course there are the plain old assholes who don’t wear masks at all.
314. Can we declare a permanent cease fire in the Culture Wars due to stupidity?
315. One of the tiresome and obnoxious things about Culture War terms is that they put everything into neat little boxes to make for easy combat instead of letting often complex situations be understood for themselves. For instance, a lot of discussions of “censorship” turn out to be an author or publisher freely deciding to take something out of circulation.
316. I worry that the very use of terms like “virtue signaling” cedes too much ground to the right in the Culture Wars. Such terms have a specific history and organize concepts in a certain way that is advantageous to the right. Does the left need to make its own opposition terms? Or should we retire all such terms and take each situation in its individuality?
317. What if we stopped saying people are “virtue signaling” or being “politically correct” or whatever, and we just said they were “being a little extra”? This gets at the interpersonal dimension without putting it into tiresome Culture War boxes.
318. Of all the strange metaphilosophical assumptions of many contemporary academic philosophers, one of the strangest is that the main purpose of philosophical argumentation is to get people to agree with you.
319. One thing I’ve learned from my favorite skeptical philosophers in various traditions is that you can love philosophy without loving dogmatism. You can enjoy learning about philosophical views without feeling compelled to subsume your identity into one of those views.
320. I once saw a cockroach climb out of the litter in the litterbox while I was cleaning it. This is probably the closest I’ve come to seeing a sandworm like in Dune.
321. The appeal of social science among the public –especially psychology and economics—seems to be that people think these sciences offer a sort of secular magic that bestows arcane knowledge unlocking unlimited power over our own minds, other people, and our societies.
322. I think I enjoy hanging out with nerds because I find it exhausting to hang out with people who are trying to be cool.
323. One of the stranger discoveries of my adult life has been that most people who like the same things I do like those things for different reasons.
324. The longer I’m involved in professional philosophy the more I understand its ways—and the less inclined I am to follow them.
325. I worry that kids today may be insufficiently warned about what it means if this book was purchased without its front cover.
326. One reason for my increasing discomfort with “comparative philosophy” these days: the unspoken assumption behind a lot of it is a desire to see what their philosophical resources can do for us, with surprisingly little reflection on who “they” and “we” are or whether there even is a monolithic “them” and “us.” As if philosophy is about raiding the toolboxes of their traditions to find novel new tools to fix our preexisting problems, which are coded as the universal problems as opposed to their local problems. Why must comparative philosophers obsequiously glom on to whatever the usual suspects in analytic or continental philosophy proclaim to be the latest hot issues? What if learning about the world’s philosophical traditions is just part of whatever reasons one does philosophy: inherent interest, personal transformation, historical and cultural understanding, etc.? Problem-solving can be one of many reasons to do philosophy, but why should problem-solving be the primary mode of cross-cultural philosophical engagement? Why not make philosophy a global-oriented discipline without being afraid of ways in which this will challenge and change the discipline itself and its very understanding of what philosophy is?
327. I’m finding lately that I care far more about encouraging people to think about things than I do about convincing anyone or being right. This attitude makes teaching philosophy more fun, but other activities (like academic publishing or interacting with people online) have become less fun.
328. There are many dimensions to the conflict in Palestine/Israel, but I keep thinking about the Just War Theory criteria of proportionality.
329. I like doing philosophy and I like eating chocolate cake, but it’s not healthy to do either one all the time.
330. I spend too much time on social media, but I’ve developed a test: when I find myself being deeply annoyed by everybody and every facet of all of our cultural conversations, then I need a break.
331. One strange thing I’ve discovered about myself in middle adulthood: I greatly prefer urban walking to rural hiking.
332. The pandemic has definitely made me weirder and more socially awkward, but it has also given me deeper personal insight into how weird and socially awkward I was all along.
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