Posts

Easy-to-assemble Homes

Scott Adams's idea of homes built from blocks that poor people could put together under supervision perhaps is a very tiny part of home construction. The opening of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations proposes a model of language "Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right. The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones; there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words ``block'', ``pillar'', ``slab'', ``beam''. A calls them out;--B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.--Conceive this as a complete primitive language." Wittgenstein returns to this for a hundred pages to show that it's a trivial part of language, a model for almost nothing that happens
2 comments
Read more

Father Hatred Becomes Trump Hatred

Trump feels like your father who's tough but fair, leading to suggesting that TDS sufferers had bad experiences with their fathers and the hate transferred to Trump. Derrida, in a lecture on religion at CUNY, When one prays one is always a child. Something childish, something archaic. Gathering some of the memories of my childhood, and the images, the imagery, the iconography of God as a grandfather, a severe, just grandfather with a beard, and at the same time a mother who thinks I am innocent, who is ready to forgive me, there are these naive couple of terribly just but merciless father, but just, understanding father, and the mother who is trying to trust my innocence. This is the childish layer of my prayers... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyOWAcpIaB8&t=352s
Post a Comment
Read more

Transgender Sports

The purpose of sports is not crushing the opposition but celebrating the capacity of people to play.  The rules aren't arbitrary. The distance to first base is chosen to maximize the recurrent crisis in throwing the runner out, but so that it happens slowly enough to be followed by the human eye. Three strikes is in service of making getting a hit have a certain difficulty range. Men's and women's sports celebrate the capacity of men and women respectively to play. Scott Adams himself said tennis, his game, was ruined by new raquet technology - the serve is too fast.  You could say it no longer celebrated the human capacity to play but just went mechanical.  The version where you lob the ball into play on the third return celebrates play much better. So mixing men and women destroys the respective sports, against what Scott Adams wants to claim.
1 comment
Read more