It's randomly that time again: My Random Thoughts series continues with Part 21! I haven't been moved to write much on this blog lately, but that doesn't mean the random thoughts have stopped. Far from it! I doubt I could turn them off if I wanted to, but lucky for me and for you, dear reader, I don't want to. And it's also an excuse for a random assortment of memes curated from my random internet amusements. Enjoy!
533. John Wick is the goth James Bond.
534. Of the many things I don’t understand about toxic fandom, one of the largest is: why would you make it your personality to hate a pop culture franchise, especially one you claim to love?
535. There are a lot of philosophical assumptions underlying most fiction writing advice: write what you know, characters must be active, decisions must drive the plot, characters must have an arc, show don’t tell, avoid the passive voice, and so on. I’m tempted to say most of these assumptions are broadly existentialist, but I’m still thinking about it. I also think writing fiction can be difficult for me because I don’t share many of the philosophical assumptions that underlie these bits of advice.
536. Despite what some men seem to think, “being a man” and “being a psychopath” are not synonymous.
537. Given all the beautiful, fun, and strange things we can do in our limited time alive, I don’t understand why hatred, bigotry, and assholishness even make anyone’s list of possible things to do with one’s life, much less the obvious relish with which some people engage in these things.
538. As a person with mild colorblindness, severe nearsightedness, and increasingly less mild auditory processing issues, the notion that our senses don’t reveal the true nature of reality has always made a lot of sense to me.
539. I wonder if we’d have a utopia on Earth if more people could face their mortality and come to terms with it. I wonder how much greed and hatred is fundamentally rooted in our fear of our mortality, both individually and collectively, and our unwillingness to confront it directly.
540. Do the greedy old men who rule the world ever get tired? After a long day of plundering the world’s resources, of crushing the freedom and dignity of others, do they ever rest their weary bones with a sigh and say, “That’s enough?”
541. Given the kinds of things that some skinny people say about fat people when I am around, I wonder what they say when I’m not around?
542. One way that capitalism degrades human relationships is that we’re forced in the course of being alive to deal with people who have expertise we lack but also the economic need or greed to take advantage of this fact. We’ve turned everything from obtaining food and shelter to helping strangers to procuring essential medical care into varying degrees of “how is this used car salesperson trying to dupe me?” I find this morally exhausting.
543. I've always liked Weezer, but I've also always been a little confused how a band with such heavy guitars could be so popular. I think it's because Weezer basically puts almost-heavy-metal riffs over kinda silly, catchy pop music. At the risk of losing my metal street cred, I have to admit this was quite brilliant of them. Now if I can figure out how they got popular again several years ago with that cover of "Africa" that's nearly indistinguishable from the original, maybe I could solve the conundrum of Weezer. But what fun would that be?
544. What I’ve always loved most about philosophy is its openness to questioning fundamental assumptions. I used to think this openness would carry over into academic philosophy. After a few decades, I have discovered that it often does not.
545. A few random things about interacting with me in person: I am completely neutral on hugging (I’m fine with it, but I know enough people who hate it, so I will always be awkward about it). Due to auditory processing issues, I will often not understand everything people say, especially if there’s a lot of background noise, so in a crowded bar I will often retreat into my own world, smiling and nodding (sorry, it’s nothing personal). Being bigger than almost everyone makes me self-conscious about not wanting to be physically imposing, which makes me uncomfortable in close quarters with average sized people. I’m introverted in a specific way: I don’t understand how people in movies/TV/fiction chit-chat with or introduce themselves to complete strangers without a specific context for doing so, but if I know you reasonably well or I’m in a context where I’m supposed to be speaking (teaching a class, giving a talk, etc.), it may be hard to shut me up. It’s not that I see in black-and-white, but I have a mild colorblindness that makes it difficult to distinguish some colors, which can cause problems with board games and is probably a contributing factor to my “fashion-blindness” as well. I’m conflict averse; if I express a direct conflict with someone, things have gotten serious and/or I feel someone is being treated unjustly.
546. A lot of opposition to LGBTQ+ people’s rights, visibility, existence, etc. comes from a deep acceptance of a hierarchical gender binary according to which men and women must fit certain characteristics with men in overall control. So, the very existence of people who don’t fit this patriarchal binary is seen as a threat to “traditional” cis-het people, when the only real threat is to a stifling conceptual scheme that harms the very people who strive to uphold it (even cis-het men like myself who benefit most are often restricted in our humanity by the conceptual net of “being a man”). The trick, maybe, is to disentangle the conceptual scheme from people’s identity and worldview. Maybe in the spirit of skillful means it would help to say something like, “it’s okay for you to be masculine or feminine in whatever way you prefer, but you need not expect everyone else to conform to your conception of what that means.”
547. One of the worst kinds of people in academia and beyond: “I struggled to get where I am, so I’m going to deliberately make life difficult for others.”
548. Dear fellow white dudes in academia and beyond: Sometimes maybe just take a few seconds to think about how what you’re saying might sound to others before you say it.
549. No, I don’t want to download another app.
550. If people keep asking me to do more things than I can reasonably do, I may someday be forced to learn how to say “no” without feeling bad about it.
551. A big part of my unease about fitting into contemporary academic philosophy: at some point in the last decade or so I kind of stopped thinking that philosophy is essentially or principally about articulating and defending views. I suppose I still have some views about some philosophical matters, but I’ve been realizing that for me the fun of philosophy has always been asking, “What if we looked at it this way? What would that be like? How might that change a person?” This is also, incidentally, the fun of science fiction for me!
552. A good way to try to be? – Learn to accept how things are without accepting that they have to stay that way.
553. There’s a huge empathy gap between thin medical doctors and their fat patients. It’s not entirely anyone’s fault, but it would be nice if we could acknowledge that things like weight, body type, weight loss, metabolism, relationship/access to food, etc. are different for different people, and far less in our control than our American individualist “make your own destiny” fantasy will allow. Fat patients often fight battles skinny doctors don’t understand (including at times battles with skinny doctors!).
554. If you’ve ever “forgotten to eat,” we live in different universes, and I will not be taking your diet and fitness advice.
555. Learning to find new opportunities in the face of disappointment (the “silver lining” so to speak) sounds cheesy, but it has made my life a lot better. On the other hand, sometimes things just suck and you need to sit with them. The trick, I suppose, is understanding when to look for the silver lining and when to just sit—or even trickier, how to do a bit of both.
556. A benefit of knowing lots of weird people: I have fewer expectations that new people I meet will be “normal.”
557. One of the trickier social norms for me: pretending to be sufficiently upset on other people’s behalf when those people experience mild inconveniences.
558. Distain for the American South is a common prejudice among the Americans who are most smug about not being prejudiced.
559. For many liberals in the American North, the South provides a convenient depository for the sins of America. No doubt these sins exist in the South, and people in the South suffer for them. But these sins are not contained by the Mason-Dixon line.
560. If you don’t believe racism exists up North, ask a Northern white person to describe a Black neighborhood in their city.
561. The older I get, the less I understand humanity. Fashion? Trends? Tiktok? Influencers? Celebrity gossip? Being attached to a mélange of notions produced by a vast unfathomable universe, primarily one brain’s hallucination and received ideas from other brains’ hallucinations? What a bunch of loveable weirdos the human race is!
563. What if we all went on strike for a fairer world?
No comments:
Post a Comment