How Schools Fail Democracy A principal cause of this catastrophic educational failure has been the dominance within the school world of a faulty how-to theory of language mastery. Full membership in any speech community and in any democracy involves mastery not just of grammar and pronunciation, but also of commonly shared knowledge—often unspoken and unwritten—that [...]

Much of this blog consists of noteworthy and interesting points that comprise my world-view. Sometimes I just point out obvious examples of what is right/wrong/absurd. And this is an example my untied notes. I haven’t written this out yet, but it’s the skeleton for an argument against the Difference Principle in John Rawls’ Theory of [...]

‘Going Rogue,’ a memoir by Palin, now due this fall “Governor Palin has been unbelievably conscientious and hands-on at every stage, investing herself deeply and passionately in this project,” said Jonathan Burnham, publisher of Harper. I read that as “Governor Palin has been very cooperative with her ghost-writer and actually talked to him/her.” The publisher [...]

School and life have been incredibly busy these last couple of weeks. I will get around to compiling some of it (mostly philosophy and linguistics gibberish, but I think there is some literary and sociology stuff mixed in) in the next week or so. Things are going to be necessarily quiet around here because I’m [...]

Tremble before science.

Psychology is one of those bizarre soft sciences that uses qualitative and quantitative empirical data to study how the brain works. Freud has been more or less dismissed in the field outside of setting historical precedents – although he is widely studied in other fields, namely literary studies and sociology. Philosophy can study any discipline [...]

I’m writing a criticism of Jane Austin for school. Nothing special, nothing new. It’s in the “New Critical” style, which makes it somewhat boring and restricts my ability to say, “they’re flirting. duh.” That’s not the nerdy part. No, the nerdy part is that in my frustration to note something, I actually went looking for [...]

Thought Riot Interpretation Fucking enjoy. The things I do for you people.

Now the goal is applying this to the sexual market. How to entice the female brain to flood itself with oxytocin is key. “Markets are about serving the needs of another.” This is almost counter to what most people think about trade, but it resonates with a study I read last year (google it yourself, [...]

Gordon Brown finally admits that England was wrong to prosecute Alan Turing – who may have done more to save England from total destruction in WWII than any other man alive – for being gay. England just can’t stop trying to one-up us with past misdeeds. I spotted this on the relevant Fark.com thread and [...]