JDKBrown

Backyard pollinator of the day.

This.

What federal law are they breaking?

This is, quite frankly, the only real challenge I find being in a small and genuinely pluralistic department: I can’t just wander across the hall and bounce things off someone else who’s broadly familiar with the areas I work in.

I think that part of this is that lower-level humanities classes are expected to both serve general education *and* be the foundations for further study. There’s Rocks for Jocks and Physics for Fuck-Ups, but not, say, Vonnegut for Vegetables or Philosophy for Fuck-Ups.

Or couldn’t you not?

The War on Cinema, with contributions by Harvey Weinstein, Gerard Depardieu, Woody Allen, Laurence Fox, Kirk Cameron, Roman Polanski, JK Rowling, Kevin Spacey, Charlie Sheen, Stephen Baldwin, David Mamet, Gary Bussey, Mel Gibson, and Amy Wax

Reading the contributors list, one gets the impression that the volume concerns less a war on science, and more a war on assholes.

Washington Post: “Is fascism bad? The answer may surprise you”

Teen Vogue: “Here are three fun tips you can use this summer to disable an armored personnel carrier”

Re-upping this from November. Some of us have consistently tried to warn about what was to come. Many of us were treated as hysterical.

6yo: Are they ever going to stop doing that?

Me: Um. I hope not.

6yo: Because that would be odd. To have that and then stop. [Under breath] That would be absurd.

Me: …

2/2

6yo: Are we lucky to live in the 21st century?

Me: In a lot of ways, yes.

6yo: How?

Me: Well, we didn’t always know what makes people sick and how to help them get better. Now we have medicines and vaccines.

6yo: Like for Covid.

Me: And rabies, and measles, and lots of other illnesses.

1/2

Not to do gifted kid discourse (ew) but as a kid who had reading comprehension far above my age group as a child, the main thing my mom did to ‘train me to be elite’ was just let me check out books at a library

The asymmetry isn’t just in what evidence is available to A and B, or the kind of access A and B have to it, but in what the evidence is evidence *for*.

Not odd. In addition to the worries you raise, here’s another: it entails a weird asymmetry between agents.

Take q: ‘A knows that p.’ For B to know that q, B needs evidence about A’s epistemic state. But for A to know that q, A just needs evidence about p.

This is a really, really important story, which is why I provided a gift link. Many people, when they think of higher education, think of elite universities. But most higher education is nonselective (i.e., they admit everyone), and a lot of it is community colleges.

One reason our sclerotic elites are failing at confronting fascism is because rationalism, incrementalism and proceduralism are completely insufficient weapons to confront an irrational actor that exploits the latter two to in order to do away with all three.

Today’s entry:

Today’s visitor:

Every now again it’s useful to repeat advice about accessing papers that are behind a paywall that excludes you. Email the author. My estimate is that 90% of academics are so thrilled that a living, breathing, possibly even reading, person shows interest that they will swiftly send you a copy.

#Bee

(Okay, not a coneflower.)

Inspired by this, apparently I’ve decided to just post pictures of insects on coneflowers today.

Coneflowers are wonderful!

Pretty sure my grad advisor doesn’t remember who I am…

Dammit. Meant to follow the other one.