So glad I have a computer I can play games on so I don’t have to mess around with a smaller computer with a smaller screen and worse performance.

Yeah dude the grind to try and get a tenure track job is soul-crushing. I put out over 1000 applications over the course of four years. I had about 15 interviews, 2 second round interviews, and at the end, no job. I can get adjunct work fairly easily, but it comes with no health insurance or stability, and it’s paid pretty badly. The adjunctification of higher ed has meant that a lot of otherwise good people have no future in academia, me being one of them. It sucks because I worked for fifteen years studying, teaching, and publishing on very some absolutely esoteric shit, and ended up with less job security and benefits than a Walmart employee. It took a lot of therapy, because this is the one thing I wanted to do with my life. But I know now that it’s time to move on, and that I can do good somewhere else if I get the right skills.

Muslims do not generally believe in cultural or moral relativism. Allah is the one true God, his moral teachings are objectively correct. Why offer them a way out that they themselves aren’t able to coherently accept?

Besides, cultural relativism is nonsense. If someone tells me it’s okay to molest children, their perspective is not “just as valid” as mine. They’re a monster.

Yes, this means a lot of people in the past, and today, are monsters. That’s extremely plausible.

I’m an endlessly adjuncting philosophy professor. Going back to law school in the fall at age 38.

Nonononono

Good point. I don’t want to date trans people, but I wouldn’t want to use an app that purposely excluded them. I’d rather occasionally have to go “oh sorry thanks for telling me” than restrict my dating pool to bigots.

Consoles are great if you want the same thing you can get on your computer but with worse graphics, shittier framerate, and a terrible device for input.

It’s not a bipartisan issue. Democrats do not have the same slavish adoration for their leaders that Republicans do.

One thing I’ve been annoyed with after switching to Firefox is the iffy password manager performance. It’s so common for it not to remember a password that it should, or, weirdly, for it to only remember the password once I’ve typed the whole username in and hit tab.

Here in the US I once went to the optometrist to get a new glasses prescription. While there I mentioned I was getting some new floaters in my eye and a little weird brightness. They took a look and found a tear in my retina, which can threaten your vision if you don’t get it taken care of quickly. My insurance company utterly refused to allow me to just schedule an appointment with the opthalmologist. First, I had to wait two weeks to see my general practitioner, then schedule an opthalmologist appointment after. It was three weeks before I saw a doctor who could fix the tear in my retina. Luckily it did not detach, but it absolutely could have.

Our piece of shit health insurance system just about half-blinded me for profit. Do not implement our monstrous system. It boggles my mind that British people would ever even think about it.

Just living in the moment, not a phone in sight.

Damnit, saw his name in the headline and had a brief moment of hope that he had Scaliaed himself out of this world. 😑

Are you me in my early 20s? Enjoy it, dude!

I’ve been working every day since January. Every weekday, every weekend day, every day. But finally on June 15th I’ll be down to one remote job and can go sailing for a few weeks straight. I’ve finally sort of got my finances in reasonable shape, I’ve paid off my car, and have a little breathing room.

Here in Seattle the cops don’t fly an American flag outside their union headquarters, only the “thin blue line” flag. In their salary negotiations they sacrificed a week of back pay so their back pay could start on 1/6/2021 (the date of the Capitol insurrection) instead of the end of their last contract. Dozens of our police here in Washington participated in the insurrection. They were under a consent decree for civil rights violations for a decade. When a cop recently ran over a college student while going 74 mph in a 25, the vice president of the police union was caught on camera laughing with the police union president and saying “she was 26 anyway, she had limited value.” Police here have a dismal crime clearance rate, often don’t respond at all to property crimes, or take forever. During the protests in 2020, they were absolutely savage with protestors.

I have no empathy for the police, here in America at least. They are an occupying, militarized force that has zero accountability to the people. Maybe if they started treating citizens like human beings, and holding themselves to a higher standard, I would.

Have you been on a dating app? The experience is extremely gender specific. Men spend their time sending out as many likes as are available, and women spend their time sorting through likes they get. This is the experience for either gender unless you’re at the very high or low end of the desireability spectrum.

Bobby, if these kids could understand volcanic geology, they’d be very upset right now.

How’s the weather in Tel Aviv right now?

To be clear, the vast majority of academic philosophers (at least in the Anglophone world) find Freud to be useless pseudoscience. Freud gets taken seriously in literary analysis and continental philosophy. The latter is a minority position (although drawing a hard and fast line between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy is pretty difficult these days).

When I was getting my PhD in philosophy, I would have been laughed out of the room if I wrote a term paper that used Freud in any significant way.

Do you ever look at conservative stuff for fun? I watch a video of Jordan Peterson or something linked to from lefty reddit and boom, algorithm ruined.