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only so much consensus vapor
Well, yeah. It’s not like it’s science or math. Even words only “mean” by the way we use them, and that is mutable over time (for all atomic values of time).
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That headline is already the title of a book. The New York Times often plays on book titles for its reviews, but it’s a nodding and winking sort of borrowing. Douhot does not draw on Robins take, so it feels a bit stange,
Oh Ross, you silly. If you only knew that drag (and stiction, incidently) was all the right can offer.
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The trend towards less representation of conservatism in academia correlates to a rising belligerent anti-intellectualism in the right, perhaps there’s some causation there as well. Hard to imagine a far-right renaissance in the world of ideas when movement rejects the world of ideas in principle. What exactly would an actual modern right-wing conservative in academia do besides be openly disgusted by and hostile to their peers and students?
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If you’re into recursion, grab yourself a copy of Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.
Expect it to break your brain on a regular basis.
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If you recall, the entire Boing Boing Discourse BBS is contained in a single, multi-page footnote in GEB.
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That’s too much trouble to read. I’ll wait for the four disc prog-rock symphony that khepra is no doubt busy working on.
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Here’s a tip for anyone wanting a digital copy of GEB - don’t bother with the copy you can get for free. Way too many OCR errors.
Hopefully there’s a proper edited version available for purchase.
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This is one of those things that is super baffling to philosophers and doesn’t seem to bother anyone else. But then philosophers like to trick themselves with silly games. The reality is that if I type a word twice, “chair” “chair” each instance of that word is a separate on a drive somewhere. Each time someone sees it it is separate patterns of light entering separate eyes and going through separate visual cortices before being processed by separate language centres. Unless someone is an actual Platonist and thinks that each such instance of the word is a shadow of the one true word that exists in a kind of extra-universal form, there is no possibility of meaning that isn’t - at a very small level - described by molecules hooking together, electrons moving down circuits, and compressions of air shaking tiny bones.
Whenever someone insists that words mean something I think, “Okay, but ‘mean’ means something, and you clearly don’t know what that thing is.”
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BLACK ONIONS?!?!? WTF?
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Interesting results in the NI Assembly results:
And there has been a political upset in West Belfast, the Sinn Féin heartland. The leftwing People Before Profit candidate, Gerry Carroll, has topped the poll on first preference votes.It is now possible – if Eamon McCann is elected in Derry – that we will have two Marxist assembly members on the opposition benches in the new Stormont parliament. Carroll was elected on the first count.
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self flagellation at its finest.
So I’m reading the New Yorker
The French Culture War continues, which reports on various French fashion houses offering "modest fashion.’
and I come across this bit
As one commentator noted, no one objects to Orthodox Jewish women wearing wigs and other head coverings in public.)
And so, I feel a need to refresh my memory of this phenomenon. Googling leads me to an old article in Tablet
and on and on’ til the chain eventually ends up here.
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You didn’t know about the wig thing? Even Catholic boys who grew up in South Dakota farm towns know that!
I knew about it, but I didn’t dwell on it, and frankly, I wanted a fuller picture.
