Just me or is philosophy actually a complete shitshow? When I was younger I really wanted to major in philosophy because I thought it was "learning to think real good about abstract stuff", but eventually found out it was "quoting other famous people's stuff at each other"

— Aella (@Aella_Girl) October 18, 2019

This is because even most people in philosophy, just as with most people in general, don’t have a very high capacity of generating interesting ideas or thinking for themselves very credibly. Having a fancy philosophy degree just means you had the patience and diligence to slog through however many years of school. It, alas, means little else. Those people have to name drop philosophers because their thoughts have no impetus, potency or originality beyond what someone else propounded long ago.

And I understand, even. Generating truly novel ideas and approaches is absurdly hard. It’s arduous, far harder than physical labor. (And I have done tons of physical labor, so yes I know. US Army, remember?) I’ve been thinking about and writing about the “new minds” idea, which is in reality a new philosophy, for years now and have made not that much progress at all. I know some things I didn’t before, and years of thoughts went into that.

Knowing the past is important. If you haven’t read Hume and Kant and Spinoza and Schopenhauer, it’s hard to know that you’re not just repeating what someone thought long ago. But it’s not the goal we should be aiming for, at least I am certainly not. I can name drop philosophers until the sun goes red giant, but what I really care about is having ideas that make the current world and the future state space more comprehensible.

This is just a crappy phone picture I took on the spur of the moment with not even great lighting, but this is what my arm looks like after a year of working out. I am flexing in this photo, but did not work out before taking this (so my muscles aren’t filled with blood), and don’t have my arm pressing against my side (which is often used to make muscles look larger):

No before photo, but a year ago you couldn’t really see any muscle, flexed or not. To give some idea of how much work this takes, that’s about 210 hours of work on my arms/upper chest alone to go from no definition and poor strength to that.

Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger repudiates the William Langewiesche New York Times Magazine article blaming pilots for the Boeing 737 Max crashes.

Good. I was going to write about that piece of crap muckraking article myself a week ago but got distracted and never did.

As with many pieces published in the establishment apologist news organization that is the NYT, the Langewiesche piece toes the Boeing line completely and minimizes the role that shoddy design and management negligence and fraud played in two fatal crashes.

Or, as Sully says:

In “What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 MAX?” William Langewiesche draws the conclusion that the pilots are primarily to blame for the fatal crashes of Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian 302. In resurrecting this age-old aviation canard, Langewiesche minimizes the fatal design flaws and certification failures that precipitated those tragedies, and still pose a threat to the flying public.

It’s not so shocking these days that such an instance of journalistic malpractice gets published in a major newspaper, I guess. But it’s still disappointing.

Scenario 1: Decent job, medical benefits, overall sense of worth, expensive televisions

Scenario 2: Bad job, no medical benefits, declining sense of worth, cheap televisions

How many people are taking Scenario 2? https://t.co/t8OYd6fnCU

— Eric Gardner (@ericgardner0) October 18, 2019

But econs and other associated types tell me that it’s better for everyone if we immiserate half our population, even for the immiserated. And they have math to prove it!

Because before math, the real world bows and assumes the shape of the model, of course, never mind all those people with no jobs and no futures. The math!

As I’ve noted before, identity politics and the academic focus on ‘texts’ from which it emerged is uniquely suited to the internet and for keyword-based censorship. The other side is to corral ‘troublesome‘ people into talking in ways more technically amenable to control.

— scientism (@mr_scientism) October 19, 2019

Agreed. Outside of academia, ideas like “privilege” and “toxic masculinity” are probably more harmful than helpful. Regular people just don’t and absolutely never will think that way.

The left believes in the magic power of words, though, because academic types live in a cosmos of words and normal people do not. Hell, I live in a cosmos of words too, so I understand. I probably read more in a day than even most academics do in a month or even a year.

But I also know how to look outside my bubble and recognize that for most of the left, the power to punish and to harm for thoughtcrime and wrongspeak is the real driver of a lot of this, if not nearly all.

Off the wall speculation: If Warren or Sanders is the nominee, Hillary Clinton will jump into the race as a third-party spoiler, “for the good of the country,” and of course split the vote.

She’s already making noises in that direction, and most of the plutocrats would by far prefer to have Trump again rather than Warren or Sanders — or anyone else.

Mozilla Intends to Deprecate OpenSearch.

What a bunch of fucking shit-for-brains assclowns. I can’t wait till Mozilla is dead. What a moronic move that will cause more users to jump ship. Do only total fucking dipshits work there now?

Here’s someone who gets why Mozilla shot themselves in the face, though why they continue to do so makes no sense at all. Path dependence, I guess. They are the smartest people in the room and know they are right! But they are full-ass addlepates.

I pay $21,000 a year for lousy health insurance.

This is something that always puzzles me in this “debate” when people say, “How will we pay for Medicare for All?”

Motherfucker, you are already paying for it, and more. How is this not completely obvious to everyone? I guess because those expenses are invisible and also taken for granted.

That's the Russian battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy pic.twitter.com/FJKsRYU1g0

— Dave Brown (@dave_brown24) October 13, 2019

Heh. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what specific Russian ship that was, but it does not at all look like an American one. That’s hilarious.