My current project is going very well. This has only been helped by spending far less time online recently ( Read more... )

Occasionally it gets to me that not only do many people one argues with today not know how to argue well-logically, persuasively, and so forth-they do not even argue. They seem to have no idea that their claims could be found true or false, right or wrong, by a process. No, they are right and they are true, and fuck you. Some might say it nicely, ( Read more... )

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It may be that the most shocking thing to do is restate the obvious, so that someone has to notice.

I finished playing through the main story of Alan Wake last night (on Normal difficulty). I can't think of any other interactive entertainment with more psychological depth to the story. You can push through the story like a dope and miss most of it, I guess, but there's so much wonderful symbolism and character development there, especially when ( Read more... )

Power Makes Stupid: Reich, Kultur, and Bildung in Imperial Germany and America

The story about this essay is that I did a lot of work for it in July 2005; then, because I decided I didn't like the form it was in and it would need a ton more work, I largely sat on it until early spring 2010 around the same time I was writing the last essay I did on ( Read more... )

An ability to make inferences about other people based on small evidences seems like an enviable talent. It is admittedly quite useful. It is compelling enough as a challenge and so appealing as a personal power that I once fairly lusted after practicing it-naively, for as I have discovered, it has unintended consequences. It transforms many ( Read more... )

I manage to find a great many ways to feel like I'm the wrong age, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong age. This probably applies in about a dozen different ways. All versions of feeling out of context, I guess.

I'm trying out a new blog format here.

Those under cover of authority do not need apologists among the public to make excuses for their actions. Yet every day, I read defenses that are more appropriate to sorting out arguments among friends when one is being picked on ( Read more... )