oh my fucking god are you serious?

$44 MILLION for education research and the "next big idea" they're testing is if giving students CASH or CELL PHONE MINUTES for improving their scores on STANDARDIZED TESTS ( Read more... )

written in response to this column reprinted in today's herald-mail. i admit the mill paragraph is over-the-top and kind of shady (appealing to authority is usually not my bag), but i'd already sent it by the time i reconsidered. the only thing i changed was the typo i just noticed in my (mis)spelling of "abolition ( Read more... )

i spotted the girl in the long blue coat (that, from a distance, looked like it was made of velvet) while waiting for the baggage to arrive. i wanted that coat, and, being generally shallow, hence wanted to like the girl in it. she was cute, and probably very nice, talking and laughing with three cute friends ( Read more... )

i want to like you, professor edwards. i really do. you're charismatic and enthusiastic and you (thereby) do a good job at getting your students over the hump of seeing philosophy as foreign, getting them to start (seeing what they do as) thinking (and keep going with it). but your readings of almost every philosopher we've discussed so far are at ( Read more... )

so, so, so angry.

zeno's problem is, i think, damning for points. it's cool to be living at a time when people are thinking about this. (especially people close to me.) i think i get gunk now (at least sort of). it's closely tied to the arbitrariness (and ultimate failure) of measurement, and our misapprehension that everything can be measured by ( Read more... )

so not just one but both of our illustrious senators voted to allow torture. to allow not only crazy terrorist foreigners to be tortured--oh, no, that wouldn't do. to allow anyone to be tortured. anyone our illustrious president decides might be dangerous. and by what criteria might he decide? "judgments and instincts and evaluations and ( Read more... )

i can't think about anything else today until i say something about this.

how bad is torture? approximately as bad as any conceivable thing can bethere are a million and five reasons why our government--all governments, all peoples--should not torture. anyone, anytime, anywhere. torture inflicts unconscienable harm on its victims--and its ( Read more... )

i don't really want to write this, i want to say it, to someone in particular. but i also want to remember it so i am going to write it anyway.

i think i need either full-on, all-out discussion (full-time seminar, like at st. john's) or absolutely no room for discussion, pure lecture and worksheet-solving, nothing else. but it is just too damn ( Read more... )

i'm disgusting since i haven't showered in five days and i have to HAVE to write something about heraclitus to my professor because he's wrong and it's pissing me off but i'm tired and fuzzy-headed and it's three fucking o'clock in the afternoon and i feel like a waste of flesh and oxygen ( Read more... )

am i the only person in modern history to understand what de beauvoir was actually talking about?!

i mean, obviously not. but sometimes it feels like it. currently reading trudging through this essay by one signe arnfred which purports to uncover de beauvoir's "implicit assumptions" about women in the second sex. i highly suspect that arnfred a) ( Read more... )