My lists of random thoughts continue with Part 17, and they're new for '22! And of course there are also random memes for no particular reason.
402. We can’t all be leaders. Some have to be followers. Others have to be weirdos who do their own thing and don’t much care if other people notice or not.
403. Why are British accents the main accents in fantasy movies and TV? I realize there are causal explanations for this (the legacy of Tolkien, the way that Hollywood uses British accents more generally, etc.), but I don’t find any good philosophical reason for it. These are made up worlds, after all! Why can’t elves have Tennessee accents? Why can’t that village boy who finds a magic sword sound like he’s from Brooklyn or Boston? Why can’t the fair maiden have an Australian accent? At the very least everyone in The Witcher should have a Polish accent!
404. I’m like a Hobbit with their meals, but for naps. Oh, and also meals.
405. I think my biggest accomplishment of 2021 was to get some metal implanted in my skeleton, thus fulfilling my dream of becoming a cyborg.
406. I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. Or, technically, I resolve not to make any resolutions. It’s not only being honest with myself, it’s a form of time travel: I skip ahead to the part where I don’t do the resolution.
407. It has been obvious to me from a relatively young age that the main ingredient in your disappointment is your own expectations, so you can mitigate disappointment by altering or eliminating your own expectations, which can be difficult for sure, but is nonetheless possible. It continually astounds me that most other people don’t seem to have figured this out.
408. I often find accusations about "plot holes" to be one of the most annoying forms of criticism of self-professed internet critics. It often shows a pedantic lack of imagination on the part of the critic who's looking to score easy "gotcha" points rather than seriously engaging with the work of art.
409. One of the things that makes me a relatively forgiving teacher, reader, viewer, etc. is that I always assume there’s more going on than is obvious to me. I think this also greatly enhances my life. How boring if the world were limited by what makes sense to me!
410. Most of the time when my fellow oldsters complain about how things the kids these days don’t make any sense, those things kind of makes sense to me in context. Except “yeet.” I have no clear idea what that means. Some mysteries remain eternal.
411. By the time someone as unhip as me hears about a thing that thing is ipso facto no longer cool.
412. If I have a political ideology, it would some something like anarcho-socialism, but the society in which I live is so far from that that any meaningful political action I can take (at least, outside of griping on social media) is going to make it look like I’m closer to something like a mainstream Democrat. Here the Buddhist distinction between ultimate and conventional truth might be a helpful analogy (but only an analogy, because I don’t really see my political views as ultimately true as if I’m some sort of Buddha of politics). Ultimately I have a view about what sort of political system would be best (or at least better), but discussing that ultimate view within our conventional political system is often senseless or even counter-productive. Consider prison abolition, which makes a lot of sense to me, but sounds completely bonkers from where most people are politically at the moment, and could not happen overnight in any case.
413. How to make skepticism open-minded: Try to move beyond the skepticism of “why?” to the skepticism of “why not?”
414. Vociferously criticizing mainstream Democrats for being mainstream Democrats is about as useful as criticizing McDonald’s for not being fine dining. Sure, you have a point, but it’s not going to change what it is.
415. “Thriller” is to “horror” as “speculative fiction” is to “science fiction and fantasy.”
416. No state law can prevent a person from secretly judging other people who don't wear masks in public indoor settings.
417. In a better society, we wouldn't be individually required to become amateur epidemiologists.
418. Philosophy is frequently the attempt to think about everything in general while thinking about nothing in particular.
419. Trying to buy a house in a bonkers real estate market is among the more annoying things I’ve done, but it’s kind of interesting. It also seems quintessentially American: you’re engaged in fierce competition for a basic human necessity with people wealthier than you who you can’t compete with, and people less wealthy than you are in the same position with regard to you, and we do all this while complaining about “the market” as we pretend these differing levels of wealth are something other than a mixture of historically persisting systemic inequality, currently widening inequality partly due to deliberate policy choices, and sheer luck. And maybe the weirdest part of all: who do I think I am that I can “own” a piece of the Earth? (Or more technically, who does the mortgage lender think they are?) So weird.
420. One common feature of many “anti-woke” people: they demand other people be more charitable in understanding their opinions and experiences while extending little charity in understanding other people’s opinions and experiences. “Wokeness” (and I use the scare quotes because I hate this entire framing of these issues) is derided as pushing your opinions on other people yet this is precisely what many of the “anti-woke” do to others, and they often do so with no attempt to understand why people have those opinions or what experiences people may have had that make them angry/passionate about these issues.
421. I don’t believe in astrology, but that’s probably because I’m a Libra.
422. I’m usually okay when narratives don’t completely make sense, because life doesn’t always make sense. And art imitates life. So if a narrative is too tightly constructed so everything fits together all the time and every plot point and motivation is perfectly explained, then however aesthetically satisfying this may be, it doesn’t feel true to me.
423. Some people are all-business. I’m at most about 20% business.
424. It’s amazing to me how utterly hostile many American neighborhoods are to the very idea that someone might want to take a walk.
425. I’ve really enjoyed teaching a class in Mesoamerican philosophy, but it’s also a challenge since I have little background in the area. This experience makes me appreciate the work my colleagues unfamiliar with Chinese or Indian philosophy put in to learn about those traditions.
426. I worry about the ways this pandemic has changed us. I worry even more about the ways it hasn’t changed us.
427. There’s a weirdness about the moral panic about “wokeness” or “critical race theory” (or whatever the latest buzzword descendant of “political correctness” may be). It’s like someone’s making the claim that, “People care about stuff and get overzealous about it,” and their solution to this isn’t to get people to take it down a notch, but rather to stop caring about stuff altogether. And maybe this has been the real goal all along of those on the right, who don’t want people to care about things like equality or fairness, at least in their leftist incarnations. But I think this is why leftist “anti-woke” people confuse me: you can’t take on the right’s framing of these issues without imbibing some of their deeper criticisms of caring about the things the left cares about. Above all I wish we could have discussions about the deeper issues of how people should care for each other and what kind of society we should create rather than the endless parade of predictable and tiresome moves from the well-worn 40-year-old Culture War Playbook.
428. One of the ways I can tell I’m not a hip analytic philosopher is that I don’t plan my courses around shiny new articles, but rather boring old books.
429. One reason I find myself less interested lately in “comparative philosophy,” at least of the traditional Western/Non-Western variety, is that you can’t do comparative philosophy without calling into question the very categories of Western philosophy; you can’t ask “is this non-Western idea like this Western idea?” without doing some serious metaphilosophy. But surprisingly few practitioners of comparative philosophy seem interested in doing this kind of metaphilosophy. For example, I have tried to suggest that the category of “philosophical skepticism” should be altered to include some classical Indian examples, but I am often dismissed and told that these examples are not skepticism according to the currently prevailing Western understanding of that term.
430. Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but war is also bad when it happens outside of Europe.
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