Category: Philosophy

  • maintaining my empire of kicking

    Twice in one week for Philosophy Bear? Looks that way, yeah. If I kick Job three times and kick Rob once and then try to recruit Rob into maintaining my kicking scheme because he’s only getting kicked once, I think saying that Rob is privileged is wrong. But more than just wrong, it’s exactly the…

  • thoughts on bear life

    A here’s-a-new-site-to-follow post today, courtesy of some passing toot on Mastodon which I failed to bookmark, shame on me. Anyway, the site in question is the Philosophy Bear substack, and the post that had me dump the url into my feedreader is basically just 54 half-formed philosophical thoughts in one long scroll; the now-forgotten tooter—my…

  • political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level

    After getting irked by reviews of Oppenheimer, Adam Kotsko wrote a short thing that feels to me like it’s the missing piece to that Sam Kriss essay I excerpted last week, which has been—as the kids say—living rent-free in my head ever since. Kotsko has an interesting and very valuable insight into “culture war” stuff,…

  • if we can honestly acknowledge the conditions, then maybe we can do something better

    A couple of days back, a listserv that I’m signed up to delivered the first example of a thing I’d heard whsipers of from others: an invitation to a seminar aimed at teaching academics how to use the new crop of LLMs to make the writing of grant applications more “efficient”. This caused me to…

  • the pursuit of absolute predictability renders its practitioners foolish

    A conference paper transcript from Terence Blake, in which he smashes together Deleuze and Dune, which results in a much more interesting (and far less reductive) reading of the latter than I’ve seen heretofore. A snippet: Frank Herbert indicates that the « central paradox » of Dune turns on the human perception of time. Paul’s prescience first…