I am so confused by the recent furor about the high school student supposedly harassing a protestor at the Indigenous People's March. Like, setting aside the information that came out later, setting aside people being assholes in response to it... I really don't understand why the original video went viral at all? Like, the worst possible interpretation of the video seems to be that the student is intentionally placing himself in the protestor's personal space and smirking about it, while wearing a MAGA hat. But people get harassed much worse than that at protests all the time, and in every conceivable political direction. Any narrative you might want to push, I'd think you could find something more compelling than *that*. What was it about that video that made people think that a teenager standing in one place and smiling was an especially potent symbol of the oppression of indigenous people?

Recently I was unfortunately reminded of the existence of Anger Management, a terrible Adam Sandler comedy from a decade and a half ago.

( cw transphobia )

Up to this point most of my exposure to philosophy has been either through arguing with people on the internet or through synopses like on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I haven't read a lot of like, actual philosophical writing by actual philosophers, and I've been feeling that lack lately.

I've been most interested in metaphysics lately, although ethics is also great. Epistemology is likely to be a hard sell for me right now.

Reading philosophers who are right about the objects of their analysis is not a high priority. I care much more about whether they discuss it in a way that clarifies the subject and enables me to better understand and articulate my own thoughts than I do about whether I agree with them.

I've had more luck with contemporary analytic philosophers than anything else; they seem to put a greater emphasis on clarity than most continental and historical philosophers. Though branching out from that could definitely be a good thing.

Articles and books would both be very welcome.

Thanks! <3

I'd like to refute the claim that hard determinists and compatibilists don't really disagree about free will, but merely pick different words to express the same position. Well, not quite. Since "free will" is used in a lot of subtly different ways and it's difficult to pinpoint a really precise definition for any of them, when people give different answers to "Do people have free will?" it's kind of hard to tell whether they're using the word in the same way or not. So let's make the question "What constraints, if any, does physical determinism place on how freely we can be said to make our choices, or on how much those choices can be understood as really ours?" This is intentionally vague and open-ended, but I claim that people can and do have meaningfully different positions on this question even if they agree about physical determinism.

I've sometimes encountered people making the claim that physical determinism proves that moral responsibility or moral desert is not a real thing. I don't agree with this. I'm not sure exactly what argument people have in mind when they make this claim, but clearly there's some sense in which they think that physical determinism means that people's choices are less free, or less theirs, or less... choice-y, somehow, than we otherwise might have thought. Surely we can't blame someone for having the genes/environment/brain chemistry that led to them making that choice, goes the thinking. Whereas I think that their choice is every bit as free as we might have thought before thinking about determinism, and any form of responsibility or blame or deservingness that seemed reasonable before considering determinism should seem just as reasonable after. You could possibly describe the difference between our positions here by saying that they're hard determinists and I'm a compatibilist. It's not clear to me exactly what sense of "free will" they reject that I believe in, but it does seem clear that there must be some.

(For the record, I don't believe in moral desert, at least in the sense that I believe bad things are still just as bad when they happen to bad people. But I don't see determinism as lending support to that belief.)

After poking around Dreamwidth a bit I think it's probably a pretty good platform for my needs but it's kind of hard to imagine the community I care about on Tumblr actually transplanting here. But more people have already made accounts than I would have expected by this point, so, maybe.

The community which already exists here seems to be overwhelmingly fandom-based, which isn't my thing. A significant amount of the non-fandom content that I've seen has been women in their fifties or older writing eloquently and intimately about what's going on in their lives, which is very much not what I was seeing on Tumblr but kind of makes me want to stick around even if the whole diaspora thing doesn't pan out.

Right now I'm still mostly on Tumblr and my presence here is more or less a placeholder. At the moment I'm only subscribing to people who I already follow on Tumblr, in order to maintain those connections, although that'll probably change significantly the moment I decide that I'm serious about moving over.