there  could  be  snakes  in  here

Now academized here . Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can’t say it clearly you don’t understand it yourself. - John Searle Sometimes the obvious is the enemy of the true . - Gabriel Stolzenberg I'm away to go study Derrida, mostly because I really want to know if he's the most brilliant comedian to ever work in academic philosophy. But the first thing about him one has to face is not his rejection of power; not his work in developing structuralism; nor even that he was continually demonized as a nihilist: no, the first thing about him is that he could not (or would not) write well. And, bizarrely, this foible is at the heart of the most popular dismissal of the unsettling work that Derrida and other postmodernist theorists have flung at us. Taking Searle's maxim (above), the critique goes: they're obscure, therefore they're all speaking shite. It is suggested that there is a subculture ...

Religion and rock music are essentially diametric, even though one developed from the other; most religions presume to work towards perfection; rock music is about embracing imperfection ." - Jocelyn Hoppa That said... 1. Baba Yetu - Christopher Tin (the impossible gladness of Grace) 2. Into My Arms - Nick Cave (god-fearing as seduction) 3. I'm On My Way To A Better Place - Chairmen Of The Board 4. Look Up - Chris Bell (awe is not awesome) 5. Word On A Wing - David Bowie (the purity of having a really shit time) 6. You In The Sky - Waterboys (callout) 7. Happy Guy - NOFX (tolerance, even condescending tolerance, is the only way you're getting out alive) 8. God's Gonna Cut You Down - Johnny Cash (it was once about wroth and grinding bones. Traces...) 9. " I Bid You Goodnight " - Byrne or Plant or... (the equanimous end) 11. They Hung Him On A Cross - Leadbelly 12. I Luv I Jah - Bad Brains (The Lord is an acceptable motivation [if you're not white]) 1...

" What are you, a cold-blooded murderer or the controller of Radio 3?" - good question ******************************************************************** What I spoke: "Oh, I didn't know magpies were so blue." What I said: "I see a magpie. (I haven't examined a magpie this close before.) This magpie has a lot of blue above its tail feathers; Therefore all magpies have a lot of blue above their tailfeathers. I did not generalize that before." (Our hidden leaps...) ******************************************************************** Some economics thoughts from summer notebooks (that is, all of them; it's pretty sick how little I think about it): 1. Children are a positive externality . ( But the costliest good. ) "It is for children that we want heaven" - John Irving I mean children in general, not, say, the ones sitting just behind your plane seat. Production of the brand continues out of a curiou...

" Speak the truth - but leave immediately afterwards ." - Slovene proverb On Spotify Here An inverted reply to a musical reply to the thing I wrote on love. Most songs are about love, sex, or loving sex. Better: most are about the glory of it, wanting it, or heartbreak . There's little space for resenting its incursion into your business, or how it fucks up your social circle; being glad of the back of someone; pining because you're trapped in a shit relationship; or simply suddenly losing interest, all commonplace in life and missing in culture. (I suppose this is where grime comes in.)   The dumped is always focalised; we don't have a decent cultural vocabulary in which to treat leavers or rejectors. They're enigmatic dicks, or nothing. But it sucks to leave too - to happen to fall out of love first and have to do something about it - and it's just inadequate to have one mechanical trope for justifying the action (being abused or cheat...

BOWSHOTS 1. Sure Shot - Beastie Boys " Because you can't and you won't and you don't STOP " 2. The Capital - Auden " In unlighted streets you hide away the appalling..." 3. Legal Man - Belle & Sebastian " Get out of the city...and into the sunshine " 4. Hunter Gets Captured By the Game - Marvelettes " Everyday things change / And the world puts on a new face Certain things rearrange / And this world seems like a new place " 5. VI. A Major Port - Auden " Only the brass-bands throbbing in the parks foretell / Some future reign of happiness and peace. / We learn to pity and rebel." 6. New Wave - Against Me! " We can control the medium / We can control the context of presentation " 7. The Dream Is Dead - Type O Negative " I can't believe things turned out this way, and though I hate to see you go... " 8. Sonnets From China II - Auden " They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden: / It taught t...

So, I'm told that it's actually a thing when people purge their friends list on social networking sites in response to real-life trauma. I'm not saying that social networking invented the midlife crisis; just that this specific form of snubbing people, where you decide that you don't care about/want to avoid someone, and which has always gone on internally , has now been concretized and made available to the snubbed. And: All the Fan Pages on these networks which highlight some trivial universal or other. "walkin past some1 with a big afro and thinkin legend" "saying thingy when you cant think of the word to say" "it wasnt awkward til u said "this is awkward". Now its awkward" "im not ignoring you, yr text is just pointless to reply to" "i will go out of my way to step on a leaf that looks particularly crunchy" "The Guy Who Discovered Milk...what was he doing with the cow!!?!?" "Yeah, o...

This isn't the time to make hard and fast decisions; this is a time to make mistakes. Take the wrong train and get stuck somewhere. Fall in love... a lot. Major in philosophy, because there's no way to make a career out of that. Change your mind, and change it again, because nothing's permanent. – Twilight 2 That ^ trite declaration is an instance of a very common idea: philosophy as soft, romantic paddling pool; philosophy as impractical countercultural isolation. Eclipse here allies philosophy with the wilfully whimsical uselessness of teenagers trying to be deep. And this adolescent view actually concords with the mindset behind government budget cuts in the humanities and parental pressure on choice of subject. Say there are two general sources of anti-philosophical views; the instrumental and the intrinsic . The instrumental reason is that a philosophy degree doesn't enable one to do anything (in particular, it isn't connected to getting much money...

Three very different things I've seen in the last week (I also accidentally wrote an overview of anti-scepticism in the middle there): 12 Angry Men (1957) (Lumet) 96mins real-time shot entirely in two rooms! Your faith in the democratic process shaken and soothed! Epistemology and that! This film has no quotable lines. There is no sex. I can't link to youtube to give you a chuckle out of it, or even a quick impression. And just like in the real world, there is no action in it , only behaviour. But it's nevertheless one of the most tense and violence-laden things I've ever seen. I don't know if this was how men in the 50s always reacted to each other, but it's fucking terrifying. The central theme is the unknown which is too-quickly taken for the evident - the confusion of opinion with knowledge . The unknown in question is the guilt of a young man, doomed to the Chair by an impatient and prejudiced jury. The crowing and haste of the absolutists is made worse by...