elliot

Tom Waits hit and miss for me but a song like HOIST THAT RAG makes me want to start smokin cigars and inhaling, god it rules, his larynx is like a human scrapyard

Why is Grimes always flirting with me from a distance

A line in the Social Network where a character says to Mark Zuckerberg's character: You're gonna go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole.

Gotta hand it to Aaron Sorkin for this one

And tbh Chalamet deserves a long moratorium on being made fun of after this, seriously first rate performance

Dylan movie wasn’t good but it was fun being the only two people in the theater so we could sing to the songs and remark on the most remarkable thing about the movie which is what a bangin bod Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) had

What If School Shootings Were About the Schools? Our unanimous refusal to consider the institutional context of this particular kind of violence helps ensure that it keeps happening.

Wrote this a long time ago and still think it’s pretty good

medium.com/@elliotswain...

I know it’s incredibly incredibly difficult. But it’s just weird to me that the individual human beings with names and lives and favorite bands seem to be, despite being maybe the starkest expression of the depraved class war of attrition, exclusively a Church / NGO concern even in discourse?

Why does it seem like the most recent thing that anyone on the left or progressive world or whatever has done for or about the hundreds of thousands of people, in the richest country, who are forced to sleep on street sidewalks in the cold is give their Category a clunky new name (the unhoused) ?

Let’s Talk TUA (Transcendental Unity of Apperception)

would be foolish, and utterly and completely just John Rawls the Liberal, not to choose a society all of whose spoils are distributed equally and in proportion to the needs of human flourishing.

his veiled subjects in the state of nature would have chosen. Meaning that, in the first place, the difference principle was not construed as socialist, even though it would seem obvious to anybody engaged in the purposive task of an *ideal society based on self-unaware self-interest* —

Later, after about ten thousand more pages of the most heavily abstracted liberal theory, pages that go down like sand, and after several years, Rawls publishes an addendum to his gigantic book, in which he discovers that a broadly socialist sort of society is actually the sort of society that —

at best a spicy plot twist in a thought experiment that is unable to map itself onto anything resembling the terrain of reality for which it is meant to serve as an allegorical representation.

disadvantaged underclass. Rather than just getting rid of that, for some reason, these blindfolded political philosophers choose a society in which there is a substratum of the relatively disadvantaged. He calls this the difference principle. It’s hard to see how it’s a principle, rather than—

But are not able to decide the obvious: a society in which the resources required for individual flourishing are distributed equally amongst everybody. Instead, Rawls picks something that hardly merits the name of “ideal” theory, including, as it does, the bizarre assumption of some —

Then the participants of the veil meeting sort of forget that their job is to do ideal theory about what kind of society would be best. The people/person under the veil clearly knows enough about political theory that they can come to Rawls’ ultimate and wretchedly defended conclusion —

You don’t know anything about yourself except you know about all the other things including what you ought to wager on for your self interest, there’s a bunch of you but since there is nothing over which to bargain, there could just as well be one, namely John Rawls

Unpopular position: Rawls — the original position + the minimax principles of Justice he derives from it — is absolutely embarrassingly obviously wrong to the point that it’s rhetorically tempting to call him a charlatan

application deadlines again. But whatever, I’m gonna get into schools sooner or later, by hook or by crook, as the zoomers say

It’s fundamentally changing important aspects of my argument in the paper I’ve been tortuously trying to write on Marx and moral philosophy (moral, as distinct here from the broader ethical), which I am grateful for, I needed a catalyst. Not so grateful for the fact I’ll almost certainly miss phd —

I read (most of) an earlier manuscript of this a while ago, @vcwills.bsky.social was my professor and mentor in things Marx in grad school. Finally ordered the book and it is really an instant classic in Marxist philosophy. The most thorough and original treatment of Marxian ethics I’ve read

A bully is the lowest thing a person can be. A bully enters a social sphere and sniffs out the Strong people — who of course aren’t actually strong in any virtuous sense but merely efficaciously cruel brutes with psychopathic fauxrisma— and cowers together with them, for safety

I made Frankfurt school memes please clap and laugh

Having a good time is the mainest thing of life and that means everyone deserves the basic resources for flourishing, a social sphere, and the opportunity to plunk a war guy or sweatshop boss’s head onto a stake

Class on Crack This is a story about crack, and everything that cracks underneath its weight. For the uninitiated, some exposition is warranted. The genre of the gonzo drug abuse romp has had its day, and neither...

There’s a lot I wish I did differently in this piece, kinda wrote it all in one burst in a waiting room years ago, but it at least hints at an issue in drugs discourse that I think has bigger implications. Published under a pseudonym for obvious reasons

hardcrackers.com/class-on-cra...

This sometimes causes arguments that begin like “But you love HEGEL!” Which is true, I do think Hegel was perhaps the greatest philosopher, in his time, since Aristotle. So it can come off disciple-like. But he is simply much, much better

And that’s to speak only of B&T and take it at face value, to say nothing of the fact that ultimately you can smell the SS jump boot leather in his ontology itself. No one would have needed to tell a discerning reader he was a proud Nazi for them to figure that out, arguably even from B&T

It’s truly worth bothering. I spent half the summer reading Being and Time on the urging of internet friends, and the rewards are there, but they’re dramatically overstated by his disciples. —

No subtype of philosophy nerd is as simultaneously totally devoted to, and totally unable to paraphrase or agree on the correct reading of their favorite Guy like Heideggerians. In combination with the extremely bad writing and question begging claims, it does make one wonder if —

I like this new pope