DocWatts

Honestly, I'm surprised we're not in the midst of a land invasion of Venezuela right now, to distract from Trump's kid-diddling.

The [Redacted] States Of America

Welp, the criminal syndicate that's currently in charge of the DOJ finally dropped a tiny portion of the Epstein files that they were ordered to release. And what's here is a doozy:

Trump wouldn't be Trump if he wasn't grifting: all he's doing is moving money around (illegally) and calling it a 'gift', hoping that our service members are too stupid to tell the difference.

I can speak to this - the Dem's brand is in the toilet because the Democratic base wants: 1) A party that fights back against Trump's authoritarian power grab. 2) A bold agenda centered around affordability. Instead, current Democratic leadership seems content to roll over for fascism, and make small tweaks to an economic system that's not working for ordinary people. Unlike the GOP which is a Cult of personality with a built-in approval rating floor (around 30% of the country will support Dear Leader no matter what), the Dems have to earn their approval rating. And Democratic leadership is doing a terrible job, practicing an outdated style of politics from thirty years ago. This isn't about the age of people running for office (at least not entirely), it's about an Old versus New style of politics (think Chuck Schumer versus Mamdani).

Fair point, but my personal experience is that a lot of academic philosophy is convoluted to an unnecessary degree. To return to Heiddegar, Being-In-The-World is a genuinely useful concept - that we're embedded within the world before we start reasoning about it - that's weighed down by overly technical, precise language. There's a tradeoff between splitting hairs and writing in a way people can actually comprehend. Quality philosophical writing has a good economy of accessibility relative to its precision. (I.e., 'Don't make your writing more difficult than it needs to be')

One more, courtesy of Heiddegar: "In the name ‘being-in-the-world,’ ‘world’ does not in any way imply earthly as opposed to heavenly being, nor the ‘worldly’ as opposed to the ‘spiritual.’ For us ‘world’ does not at all signify beings or any realm of beings but the openness of Being. Man is, and is man, insofar as he is the ek-sisting one. He stands out into the openness of Being. Being itself, which as the throw has projected the essence of man into ‘care,’ is as this openness. Thrown in such fashion, man stands ‘in’ the openness of Being. ‘World’ is the clearing of Being into which man stands out on the basis of his thrown essence. ‘Being-in-the-world’ designates the essence of ek-sistence with regard to the cleared dimension out of which the ‘ek-’ of ek-sistence essentially unfolds. Thought in terms of ek-sistence, ‘world’ is in a certain sense precisely ‘the beyond’ within existence and for it. Man is never first and foremost man on the hither side of the world, as a ‘subject,’ whether this is taken as ‘I’ or ‘We.’ Nor is he ever simply a mere subject which always simultaneously is related to objects, so that his essence lies in the subject-object relation." What's actually being said here, just in the most inefficient way imaginable: "Mind and world are entangled. We live in the world before we start making sense of it."

Most academic philosophy in a nutshell:

It's the foundation of how people learn to read. It's not cheating. It's how we connect what's on the page to the spoken language. English isn't Mandarin - it's a phonetic language. Knowing how to sound out words is essential.

The point of phonetics is to connect written words to spoken words that are already in your vocabulary. It's not a replacement for building a vocabulary. Maybe an example would make this more clear. Think of an 8 year old knows what a porcupine is. If shown a picture he could point to it and say "porcupine!" Then he comes across the word porcupine in a book. If he hasn't been taught phonetics and hasn't encountered the word already, there's no way for him to connect it to a word in the spoken language that he already knows. Beginning readers who lack phonetics aren't struggling to decode Floccinaucinihilipilification - they're struggling with the written version of spoken words that they already know. Like confusing 'invite' and 'invade' for example, because they're the same length and both start with 'i' (they use this example in the podcast). Encountering the written word 'automobile', knowing what the spoken word means, but being unable to decipher it on page, because they've memorized 'car' but not 'automobile'.

Phonetics is foundational for learning to read phonetic languages like English. We learn to speak before we learn to read, phonetics let's us decode words by sounding them out into the spoken language.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that learning to decode 'Being & Time' was like learning a second language - this is NOT a credit to its author. Heiddegar was a deep thinker but rubbish at communicating his insights in a straightforward manner. Most academic philosophy texts are written for other professional academics. In 80-90% of cases I would recommend finding someone who's already decoded these texts into something that's intelligible for normal humans. No need to reinvent the wheel, unless you're doing so for a very deliberate purpose (like if you're writing a book on 'everyday phenomenology').

What people don't seem to understand is that a gradual transition into the type of universal health care system that every other developed nation takes for granted is the compromise - and what happened to Brian Thompson is the alternative. Stranger still is the idea that people are just going to meekly consent to impoverishment and death just so a handful of sociopaths can enrich themselves at their expense. Protesting United Health Care does jack shit when the for-profit healthcare industry has thoroughly captured the political institutions that are supposed to be regulating their behavior. When money is equated to free speech (thanks SCOTUS!), lobbying becomes a legalized form of bribery. Personally, I'd greatly prefer that we channel this rage into a passing constitutional amendment to get money out of politics and then pass some form of universal healthcare, rather than having assassinations of healthcare executives. But I'm not going to feel a deep sense of shock and outrage over an administrative murderer getting iced by one of his victims.

@Elliott Over a 200 year timespan - yes, people are more literate than today than they were in 1820. But what I've heard in Sold A Story also corroborates what I've been hearing from teachers, who've described that the 11-14 year olds are making it into their classrooms lacking basic reading and writing skills. That said, it was never my contention that Whole Word Comprehension is the only reason for this - America's public education system has always had sharp inequities (the quality of the education you receive is heavily dependent upon your zip code). And iPads making their way into the hands of 4 year olds has been disastrous for developing the kind of attention span that lets that child become a good reader. Here's a 5 min vid of Millennial describing her experiences as middle school teacher, and these sorts of experiences aren't uncommon: https://www.tiktok.com/@heymisscanigetapencil/video/7579812040152288567

And so was a concentration camp guard. Fact of the matter is that Brian Thompson became fabulously wealthy denying people access to health care. The fact that we view intentionally denying people access to life saving care as ethically different from walking into an intensive care unit, unplugging those patients from their life support, and dumping their bodies out on the street just shows how inconsistent our ethical intuitions are.