Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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(QC RSS) Decision Made
who could have seen this coming (me, I wrote it) ((but also the whole Liz thing was a surprise even to me)) (((writing is weird)))
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(Policy of Truth) Sleepwalking Through Affirmation Culture
For years now, we’ve heard a hue and cry over “woke cancel culture.” There are, no doubt, many subtleties, twists, and turns involved in this controversy, all worth discussing. But it’s clarifying to ask whether there are sufficient conditions for cancellation. Should nothing ever be canceled? Or are there some things, sometimes, somewhere, under some…
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( Comments for Policy of Truth ) Comment on The Beautiful People by Irfan Khawaja
In reply to butimbeautiful. Appearance is the broader concept, but I think appearance and attractiveness are ultimately the same issue: it’s an attractive appearance that’s equated with what’s morally good. I’m skeptical of this…
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(Policy of Truth) The Learned-Helpless Grandiosity of the Ukraine War
I hesitate to turn this blog into a running catalog of the absurdities of the Ukraine war, but at this rate, I probably could. From an article in The New York Times about Europe’s confused, ambivalent response to the Ukraine war: “The consequences of Ukraine in the E.U. will be complicated, even explosive,” said Thomas…
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(Aaron Kim ENGRD 101) Tracing Reflection
While both Stitches and Spinning discuss the way that parental figures repress the individual identity of both main characters, they do so in radically different ways. I felt like the tracing and annotation wasn’t very helpful. Tracing seemed more tedious than anything, and the annotations were like annotating any other book – something I hate…
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(Aaron Kim ENGRD 101) Adventures in Repression
Both Stitches and Spinning center around the notion of a child being repressed by their family. On pages 233 of Spinning, David, the main character, is getting yelled at for wasting running away and not putting effort into his education. During this page, despite it being an interaction between David’s mother and David, the image…
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(Aaron Kim ENGRD 101) Stitches and Spinning Traces
adobe-scan-mar-3-2023Download
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(A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry) Fireside Friday, March 3, 2023
Hey, folks, fireside this week! As this is going up, I am preparing to appear digitally on a panel on “History and the Public, Now and in the Future” at the University of Maryland. March may end up with more than the usual number of firesides, because I actually have three of these invited talks…
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( Comments for Policy of Truth ) Comment on The Beautiful People by butimbeautiful
Appearance perhaps is a different matter than attractiveness. Appearance is a wider term I think, taking into account the clues a person’s physical self gives others about their internal state, moral and otherwise. For instance excess weight does…
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( Comments for Policy of Truth ) Comment on The Beautiful People by Irfan Khawaja
In reply to Irfan Khawaja. My point in all that is: that is the underlying explanation for the “meaning beyond the physical” in physical beauty. We tend to hold women to it more than men. LikeLike
Got any book recommendations?