This article got me thinking about why we need philosophy. Of late philosophy and its practitioners have been much-maligned as outmoded, contributing nothing to discourse, and better off not existing. I couldn’t disagree more and here’s why.

It’s absolutely maddening to see smart people like Raj Chetty and Emmanuel Saez study these statistics under the banner of equality of opportunity when they tell us nothing at all about how close we are to that ideal.

There are many, many things in the human world — the vast majority, actually — that science and mathematics can tell us nearly nothing about. Oh, sure, it can give vast amounts of data and numbers and all sorts of trivia (some of it even useful) but it can never, ever tell us what we should do or why we should do one thing and not another, or what outcome we should value or why it should have any worth at all.

Only philosophy and the humanities can do that.

Always, ever. Philosophy and the humanities is the core of what it means to be human.

This is not to diminish science or math at all — quite the opposite. The data and insight they provide is vastly important and has improved human life immeasurably. They give us all more choices. However, they offer minimal insight into anything beyond their sphere, despite the oft-attempted overreach perpetuated by many in both fields.

Joss Whedon is accused of fetishizing teenage girls for writing a few shows with young women in them.

Benh Zeitlin is accused of fetishizing African American poverty for writing a movie with poor black people in it.

So odd. The liberal consensus is coming to the conclusion that you should not write about anyone who is not 100% exactly like you in every way.

The fact is that if Joss Whedon hadn’t written a show (Buffy) with relatively-realistic nuanced young women in it, that show and those young women simply would not have been on the air, period.

It’s not like in Whedon’s absence that the sociopolitally-approved woman director would’ve emerged magically from clouds of mist and written Buffy and all would’ve been well in PC-land.

Nope. No Buffy without Whedon. Same is true of Benh Zeitlin’s film. No Hushpuppy.

Now, should we be working on changing this? Of fucking course. But so many liberals spend so much worthless time demanding spotless PC perfection they don’t realize that in their perfect world, nothing good would ever happen.

Is Joss Whedon a perfect writer, a perfect director? God, of course not. But Buffy is a better-written show and one that takes its young characters more seriously than many that women have written and directed. In other words, it doesn’t take a penis to write about men and it doesn’t take a vagina to write about women — even young women. I mean, duh. (That it is somehow perverse for a man to write about a young person is just…I can’t even make sense of this.)

The liberal tendency to self-immolate I will never understand, I don’t think.

XFCE is the last desktop standing — as I’ve noted before — that just works correctly.

I think about all of the user-hostile design out there very frequently, for a few reasons. One is that I use these aggressively terrible designs often now as I have no choice, and because the move to these antagonistic interfaces mirrors the increasing trend to authoritarianism in society.

There’s all of that, and I’m also interested in the rest of the sociological underpinnings and ramifications to this trend that started in around 2010.

What’s particularly interesting to me about all of the user-hostile design out there is that it’s “data-backed” but if you actually look at the data gathered — for instance by Mozilla, which I studied closely — it’s clear that they have no idea what data they should gather, how they should interpret the (poor) data they did gather, and how they were completely not in possession of any logical or considered model of what they should attempt to achieve with their, uh, analysis.

Gathering the data in Mozilla’s case, Microsoft’s case and nearly every other case out there is just an attempt to put a scientific-sounding patina on something the companies and/or their designers already wanted to do anyway.

Why? Money, sometimes, but a lot of the time I think it’s just about the thrill of power, especially in Mozilla’s case.

When you can disrupt 100 million people’s work flow and make them vassals to your will — for a nerdy, douchey programmer who has never had any real taste of power before and probably can’t partake any other way, this must be fucking intoxicating.