the only viable ethical solution is simply to axiomatize the logic of the modal "It's obvious that [...]" operator, and then put that axiomatization up to a supermajority vote

case in point: His Dark Materials

From the producers of “cheaper beef that makes me feel respected”: We should repeat the past but in a way that doesn’t lead to the present.

I guess I don't know what "personally be" means here? To me, the predictable consequences of a social/political posture matter way more than a personal inner monologue of dislike. To assemble a nihilistically permissive right-wing coalition is, functionally and knowably, to embrace anti-Semitism.

How do you mean?

I've complained before about the proliferation of people in politics/journalism saying P ∧ ¬P all the damn time. It's really funny to me that JD Vance has elevated that infelicity to the speech act & social meaning levels:

"I just converted to Catholicism" ∧ "I scorn the Pope's person and theology"

a movie with a finely calibrated amount of volcanism and bones

the aerated flapjacks gag is so good omg

"the blast jelly has depressurized!"

I just watched THE FORBIDDEN ROOM with my roommate. Turns out that I'm *not* after all too dead inside to connect with cinema

the other day someone asked me “what’s the endgame here” gee player i don’t know maybe unforced, creative, spontaneous displays of mutual respect, interest, or appreciation just like with all social interaction lol

He looks like he would play the role in an Austin Powers movie.

YouTube screenshot of French Canadian interviewer interviewing anglophone Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen "Jeremy Hansen revient sur les moments marquants d'Artemis II avec Patrice Roy" ENTREVUE AVEC JEREMY HANSEN subtitles read: "[Bravo] d'avoir fait cette entrevue et de parler comme ça français."

comments on that YouTube video someone says: "Tellement drole son accent 😆🤣" the 3 replies to that comment: "C’est un anglophone voilà pourquoi. C’est tout ce que tu trouves à dire même pas être stupéfait de son exploit dans l’espace?" "combien de langues parlez-vous?" "Mais vous comprenez ses mots avec son accent non? L’enseignement est plus important que l’accent. Tais-toi."

Two currents in my life are coming into collision:

(1) I'm becoming fascinated by the pragmatics of bilingualism in Canadian media.

(2) I don't think I can handle another winter as cold and isolating as the one I just experienced in Boston.

Thanks, this is a good answer! The "intangibles" part is interesting and I think connects to the role that sports plays as civic religion, as intrusion of the miraculous and providential into the mundane.

Is it that it's independently entertaining while still being "quantitative" and thus readily financializable? Why not bet on the weather? Why are so-called prediction markets dominated by sports betting?

OK real question about the cultural hegemony of sports gambling from someone who hasn't really gambled (other than betting haikus at backgammon) & who hasn't really followed sports much (other than teenage Tour de France phase):

What is it that makes *sports* per se so attractive for gambling?

I'm worried I'm gradually brainwashing myself into accepting these smaller horizons. Maybe I already have.

I am the stupidest, most apathetic, flabbiest, sleepiest, weakest, most atrophied, not to mention oldest I have ever been

And what makes it really unsettling is that I'm NOT the most miserable I've ever been. Not even close. I'm oddly "content". Real Island of the Lotus Eater vibes here.

gotta escape my self-made Stoner Hikikomori prison before it's too late

I don't know how to explain it exactly, but there's a certain deep tenderness to the fact that he's still sad and baffled despite his technocratic achievements.

I never thought I would develop a lightly parasocial fascination with the melancholies and anxieties of video influencer Paul Krugman.

Je vais tellement dodomaxxer, je vous préviens demain vous serez repos-mogged.

A picture of a library shelf with a small rolled up note on it. The note says “read this” in child’s handwriting.

A picture of the note unrolled. In the same child’s handwriting it reads “beware of the future!!”

Still thinking about this note I found in the children’s section of the public library when I worked there back in 2018. This kid tried to warn us…

I would have thought there would have long since been a Saul Kripke entry, but he's not even in the Projected Table of Contents (the secret menu of commissioned articles)

Is Jürgen Habermas the only person to have had an SEP entry published about them while still alive?
#philsky

As something of a bread eater and anxious hungry person myself, I feel really seen by the psychologizing of this Machiavellian bread strategist. He understands the emotional dynamics of bread perfectly.

In the days of tavern dining, proprietors would have wanted customers to fill up on as much bread as possible, so that they would consume less of the more expensive ingredients to which they were entitled. À la carte restaurants perhaps felt themselves grandfathered into what had become a mark of hospitality. Chefs I consult attest to free bread’s ability—a finite ability—to make kitchens run more smoothly (by slowing down orders). It also makes customers less whiny: Restaurants give you free bread “just so that you have something to do with your hands and your mouth,” Richard Horner, a New Orleans chef and restaurateur, tells me. Horner lays bare the strategic timing of this generosity. Ideally, free bread should not hit the table until after customers have ordered their meal, “because then they order from a position of maximum hungriness,” he says. Plus, the delay builds anticipation: “Will there be bread? I see other people with bread. We haven’t got bread yet.” And then, once the bread is bestowed: “Oh! There is bread! What a fun surprise.” Horner’s demonic calculation for how many slices or rolls each table’s basket should contain is [Number of diners] + 1. Unevenly divisible bread creates “a tension that I really enjoy.”

My god www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

In the sense of raising an otherwise potentially latent social meaning to higher conscious salience (maybe excessive conscious salience, in the hyper case) in proportion to the felt "stakes" and interests of the interlocutors.

Do your vigilance and hypervigilance implicatures count as this, even obliquely?

I would guess yes for 1, but no more so than any other social practice embedded in language & institutions.

I would guess no for 2. I think you can have massive overlap in broad ethos (eg me & Pope Bob vis-a-vis Iran war) w/o that being generated by the same underlying theory of how the world works