The Trumpified Republicans are no longer even pretending to care about "free speech" or "small government". They are out to destroy the left, root and branch. This is war for them, and one does not negotiate in war -- one does everything to destroy the enemy.

On the one hand, I don't really care about "the Epstein files", because it's perfectly obvious to me that Trump is a rapist and pedophile, and I don't know what new revelations would come to light here. On the other hand, talking about the Epstein files is making him really mad, and I like that.

The questions we ought to be asking is not "will AI become smart enough take our jobs?" but rather "what does it say about the nature of contemporary employment that the same tasks can be performed by a machine with no self-awareness, needs, interests, and concerns?"

Just finished The AI Mirror by @shannonvallor.bsky.social. Very highly recommended. Transcending the stale accelerationist/doomer debate, Vallor reminds us what technology is for, and where (some of the) true dangers of AI lie. Powerful stuff, eloquently written global.oup.com/academic/pro...

You don't hate AI, you hate technofeudalism.* * inspired by the old "you don't hate Mondays, you hate capitalism".

I'm fascinated, terrified, and horrified at the rise of what's being called "pro-Israel antisemitism".

Musk is a technological genius in precisely the same sense that Trump is a successful businessman.

It should be evident to everyone that Trump intends to do to Canada what Putin is doing to Ukraine, and for roughly the same reasons.

Every college and university president who does not loudly and publicly condemn Khalil's abduction should resign immediately.

Mahmoud Khalil practiced & preached non-violence. His only 'crime' being a Palestinian who demanded an end to American-sponsored genocide. He was abducted by agents of the fascist US government at the urging of fascist Zionists. If they can do this to him, they can do this to anyone. No one is safe.

One of the structural weaknesses of the liberal mindset (and I am aware of this defect in myself) is that we are very quick to attribute stupidity to our enemies.

My guiding principle is "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto". I've always wanted to regard myself as a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the universe. Patriotism, an excessive love of one's own country, has always seemed weird to me.

As I’ve often said, the difference between Trump and Vance is that Trump would kill your puppy for money and Vance would pay money to kill your puppy. I hate him so much. The smug “we both know I’m lying, aren’t I a clever boy” aura. Every quality I try to suppress in myself in one man. Fuck him.

Bezos: "we need to defend freedom as our highest value!" Me: "great, let's talk about firms and markets as forms of unjust impersonal domination!" Bezos: "no, not like that"

I don't mean to alarm anyone, but the professional leadership of the US military has been replaced by Trump loyalists who will not hesitate to give the order to shoot civilian protestors if the President invokes the Insurrection Act.

State AGs are looking for federal workers who have just been illegally fired to stand as litigants in a new lawsuit trying to freeze further action by DOGE. DM me if that’s you and you’re interested and you’re live in one of the following states: NM, AZ, CA, CT, MD, MI, MN, NV, OR, WA, RI, or VT.

"Without its ideals – its commitment to the freedom of all men, America is a piece of trash! I fought Adolf Hitler not because America was great, but because it was fragile! I knew that liberty could as easily be snuffed out here as in Nazi Germany!” (Captain America in "What If . . . ?" #44)

From the Civil Rights division of the DOJ to the CFPB, the administrative state is designed to make material the abstract rights expressed in law. In its absence, what remains is the old enslaver state governed by the unrestrained whims of the rich & powerful.

Much of my political worldview is about "the three Johns of liberal socialism": Mill, Dewey, and Rawls. I hold that Mill was pretty much right about liberty, Dewey about democracy and education, and Rawls about justice.

One very minor act of resistance we can all do: write to newspaper editors and insist that every time they quote a Trump spokesperson about his "mandate", they also mention that Trump received 30% of the votes from all eligible voters.

Trump has claimed that tariffs are the opposite of taxes: in his mind, taxes are when money flows from within the nation-state to outside of it, and tariffs are the reverse (money flowing from other nation-states to a specific nation-state).

Same in the States, except that most philosophers don't know anything about American philosophers, either.

Radio National (Australia)'s philosophy podcast, "The Philosopher's Zone", interviews some philosophers on who Sellars was and why some contemporary Continental philosophers have started reading him. www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

Everyone who ever said, "the government should be run like a business" was demanding fascism, whether or not they were too stupid and ignorant to realize.

The more I think about it, the more interesting to seems to me that Rorty's thought combines Davidsonian liberal naturalism with Rawlsian liberal socialism.

The sociologist Manfred Stanley, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, once said, "If they had chosen someone else, we would have made the best Nazis" -- that is, if the Nazis had chosen some other group to dehumanize, the Jews would have been more than happy to align themselves with the Nazis.*

I'm having trouble with the contradiction of MLK Day falling on the inauguration of a man who is president despite the content of his character, but solely on the basis of the color of his skin. Fucking dialectics.

The next few years (at least) will be the age of illiberal democracy: Trump, Erdogan, Orban, Modi, Prabowo -- and Netanyahu. Democratic in form and anti-liberal in content: majoritarian rule opposed to the Enlightenment ("tolerance, justice, fairness, openness, science and the rule of law").

I know my cats are Jewish: we have lots of rituals that are important to them, but they don't understand.

I don't know if Santa came last night, but it's one explanation for why the chimney is sticky.

To me, my X-Mas!

My current thinking about AI is that AI is like guns. They do not satisfy any genuine needs and in a rational society neither would exist. Given that they do exist, access to them should be restricted to those who have demonstrated that they know how to use them responsibly. 1./2

Got the surgery (telepathic neural module)

I love how the "Republicans" are neo-monarchists and the "Democrats" are neo-technocrats. Wait, love isn't the right word. "Hate", maybe? One of those two, anyway.

Something I struggle with as an educator. We have this society in which it has been determined that a college degree is the entry-level credential for labor functions with sufficient compensation to avoid overt precarity. 1/5

The newly powerful anti-establishment reactionaries want to undo some corrections of historical injustice that were made in order to weaken the Communist critique of capitalist societies. Without a politically organized Communist state, concessions to egalitarian politics will be rolled back.

Most important philosophers to me AT THIS VERY MOMENT 1. Sellars 2. Adorno 3. Spinoza 4. Dewey 5. Davidson

In a time when the virtues of higher education are themselves under attack, administrations that refuse to defend those values demonstrate not only cowardice but an impulse to suicide.

Happy 392nd birthday to Benedict Spinoza: , the GOAT philosopher: panentheist, rationalist, determinist, mechanistic naturalist and mystical metaphysician, secularist and republican, the last of the medievals and the first of the moderns.

Any and all reading suggestions on subjectivity in nonhuman animals? I think I know some of the basic texts but I want to make sure I'm covering everything I need to address.

It seems some academics recommend putting ORCID ID in the bio. Any thoughts on whether this is a good practice?

(1) I'm writing about revising Davidson's triangulation argument in light of ecological psychology & what that implies for the later Rorty. (2) overcoming the Myth of the Given requires suppressing the Pittsburgh School with the Frankfurt School.

With everything happening in the world, I feel guilty for caring as much as I do about academic philosophy. But I did come up with an idea for how to incorporate some ideas from ecological psychology into the triangulation argument, and how that gives us realism without authoritarianism.

I've started an American philosophy/pragmatism starter pack. Let me know if you want to be added, and spread the word! go.bsky.app/5FHqkJM

Who here works in American philosophy and/or pragmatism? Let me know and I'll make a starter pack for us.

How is Bluesky different from a room with an Italian semioticist? One of them is an Eco chamber.