Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
Tangential: as somebody with congenital hearing loss who's worn hearing aids since I was a little kid, the pivot to mostly digital communications has been a serious benefit for me -- even with modern hearing aids, there are many acoustically bad (for me) physical meeting rooms and speakers whom I just can't hear in person, but I can hear just as well as everybody else over Zoom/Meet/Facetime.
Comment · 6 years ago
Is it pithy? The summary given is "academia sucks, be an entrepreneur". IMO the actual point of the post is "I didn't pursue an academic career, here are the various things I did instead and why I think they are meaningful".
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
We can compare the stated philosophies of RBG against those of the two most recent nominees and the shortlisted candidates put forth in the past week and see that they're very different. It seems very plausible to guess that, given a large majority, these people will enact these philosophies. No?
Comment · 6 years ago
Ah yes, wishing for a successor that does not undo your life's work is definitely what I would call "playing politics up until the end".
Comment · 6 years ago
Paying people to vote is pretty out there. I think we should at least put election day on a weekend. Spread it over both days, even. This feels to me like a relatively easy small step that would really help make voting easier in a way that doesn't open itself up to voter fraud arguments (as far as I know).
Comment · 6 years ago
Googling "ossification of American policy for a generation" returns one result, this thread.
Comment · 6 years ago
> You can't put in the sky an object visible from everywhere and then ask people to pay (or even just ask permission) to use pictures that include it.

This would be a great super-villain idea for a fun/dumb movie.

Comment · 6 years ago
I'm confused, what part of her story involves "spoon feed[ing]"?
Comment · 6 years ago
These low-CO2 countries are effectively exporting CO2 production (e.g. manufacturing) to China, no?
Comment · 6 years ago
I wish this comment had a NSFL tag at the beginning. I did not want to read that, and it comes out of nowhere relative to its parent comment.

More generally, I think there's a difference between "meditation on brutality" and "misery porn", and that the latter sometimes gets dressed up as the former.

Comment · 6 years ago
I'm not one of "the people who disapprove of this but who endorse the top down language policing as endorsed by Twitter ", but as far as I can tell, few of those people advocate banning books. I think "banning books" is a specific thing that is pretty well drilled into Western minds as something that evil totalitarian dystopian forces do, maybe because of Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and so on. Twitter, on the other hand, doesn't have any obvious cultural precedents for most people, so different policies for it don't set off the same cultural alarm bells.
Comment · 6 years ago
It's a little strange to me to use history as the representative for the humanities, because history seems like the most "scientific" one -- there's some truth of what happened, and historians are trying to navigate toward it, figure out how to talk about it, identifies whys and hows.

On the other hand, there seem to be broad swathes of humanities academia that strongly reject the notion of some kind of "truth", e.g. new criticism. I find this strain of humanities work a lot harder to appreciate.

Comment · 6 years ago

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