I’m taking a basic macroeconomics course over the summer (gotta raise that GPA, eh) and I’ve become more and more amazed about how pro-free trade it is. There has not been one positive statement regarding tariffs, quotas, embargoes or taxes. In fact, taxes and trade restrictions have been the primary target for criticism. Which makes [...]

That guy might have been right. He might have been a fucking genius. Technology isn’t bad, but widespread access to it is. Despite how much I enjoy you internet people, it’s just not human. It’s masturbation. I really am a philosophy major, aren’t I? And a drunk philosophy major, too boot. If I could express [...]

Peter Inwagen argues that God cannot, at the same time, grant free will and ensure that humans make exclusively morally good judgements without destroying their free will. J.L. Mackie argues that a truly omnipotent being is not limited to this logical trap and could have designed humans to freely choose good every time. This is [...]

Hume argues that an intelligent designer is not necessary for there to be a faultless design of the world, even if we had enough knowledge to deem the world faultless. He goes on to say that because there are many imperfections, it is possible that any such designer might also be imperfect. He explains this [...]

I found this blog post about my current philosophy professor. His thesis was titled Nozick’s Non-Libertarianism in Anarchy, State and Utopia: A Reconstruction. Which sounds interesting to me because: First, Nozick’s attempt to cloak the libertarian argument in the mantle of Locke and Kant does not work. And second, when corrections are made it turns [...]

Eroding our intellectual infrastructure The University of Florida has reached that point. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has been told to cut 10% from its budget. Since the biggest chunk of any university’s budget is salaries, that means a lot of people are going on the chopping block — and the administration has [...]

My maths professor went off on a tangent (no pun intended) about his first language today: Malayalam. I had assumed it would be Urdu or Punjabi -which came up and he acknowledged. He’s Indian and I figured he knew Hindi – which he does. Apparently, while it is the national language, different regions tend to [...]

Kid finds To Kill A Mockingbird offensive because the characters use historically and contextually accurate language. Ok, so the book is chock-full of niggers, but it’s widely known to be anti-racist and used in school curriculum for that very reason. This is in England, but the same argument comes up in America regularly. Nobody in [...]

The queen, for her part, all that evening achedWith longing that her heart’s blood fed, a woundOr inward fire eating her away. Such an eloquent way of saying he (Aeneas) got her all hot and bothered. You just don’t get stylish blunt sexual imagery in writing these days. It’s all either over-the-top or prudish. (This [...]

Apparently (news to me!) poet laureate Billy Collins will be participating in my University’s annual writer’s conference. He’ll be doing a reading in the PAC at a time conveniently scheduled at the same time as my Humanities class, where I’ll be learning about… something. Damn. Word is he’s also scheduled to give a workshop to [...]