Life pro-tip: don't pass up opportunities to buy striking and inexpensive postcards.  Worst case scenario, they get buried under a pile somewhere and you've wasted some money.  Best case scenario: it's *so* awesome that you have them.

Which movie to see?

We learn that our decisions as consumers matter.  We learn that we vote with our dollars.  We stop paying companies to erect factory farms, to enslave third-world children, or to lobby congress to loosen environmental restrictions.  Or, more likely, we become firm in our convictions that people ought to so moderate their consumption, even if we're not currently possessed of the fortitude to do it ourselves.

Okay, so those are some pretty morally lofty ways that we might govern our consumer habits.  But if you take  it as a general lesson that you vote, with your money, for the world you want to become actual, then there are other ways in which you might not realize that you are paying for the world to be a way that you wouldn't, if possessed of full information, choose for it to be.  Even if these ends-directed consumer habits carry with them little or no moral consequence, they still might fit the general recipe:  you have the power to tell some producer that you wish the world would be more this way than that way, and you will reward them financially if they modify their behavior to make the world more this way than that way.  I'm referring to the behavior of film studios.

Recently it's become the case that I watch a whole lot of movies in the theater.  A lot of the movies that I've been excited for recently have been giant studio hits, including Skyfall, Looper, The Hunger Games, Wreck-It Ralph and The Dark Knight.  A lot of the movies I've seen have been, though well known (and, by design, Oscar contenders)  not the same rakers in of hundreds of millions of dollars, for instance The Master, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Seven Psychopaths.

I like the big studio hits, and I would be loathe to miss seeing them, especially since my interest in seeing movies is often to have my fingers in the pulse of a nationally shared consciousness.  But my aesthetico-political inclination (if I may be permitted a fancy sounding gerry-mandered word) is that the studios don't need any further encouragement to make movies like Skyfall and The Hunger Games.  They do need further encouragement to make the other sorts of movies.  So suppose I want to see Hunger Games and The Master equally, both are coming out this weekend, and I'm only going to see one.  How do I vote for the world I want to see with my dollar?  Easy...see The Master.  Done.  But what if I want to see both movies equally (or, at least, my desire to see both crosses some relevant threshold) and I have the time and money to see both?  How can I "vote" for The Master in the relevant sense without having my vote cancelled out by going and spending the same amount of money to see Hunger Games?  The answer boils down to: opening weekend. Movies' success is measured in how much money they bring in on opening weekend.  This is one of the reasons that movies that appeal to young teens are given such huge budgets, and why movie studios priorities are increasingly calibrated to the tastes of teens: teens flood the theaters on opening weekend. So if you want to send the studios a message that making The Master is economically worth their time, see it on the first day it comes out.  If two movies are coming out this weekend, and you plan to see both, but one of the movies is of a kind that you wish the studios would priortize more highly, then you should make a more concerted effort to see that movie during it's first several days, and feel free to put off the other movie into the coming week when you have the time.

This weekend Lincoln and The Sessions will both be coming out.  I don't have any sense that one of these is, as I put it, "of a type that I wish the studios would make more movies like this", but in the future if a movie has been produced by a smaller, more independent studio, or if the movie itself looks to be the kind of nuanced, investigative earnest attempt at perfectly exploiting the medium of film for artistic expression, then that's the movie I'm going to see on opening weekend.  I'll wait, dodging spoilers all the while, and see the Dark Night on the coming Wednesday.

Using Animals

Recent pedagogy, romance, and reading have converged to lead me to reconsider my thoughts on animals and our ways of using them.  I'm considering some lifestyle changes in the near future (perhaps New Years) but I want to get my thoughts straight on the matter.  I put together this chart...if you have anything to add let me know. bitly.com/S790OG

Why I Couldn't Vote for Romney Even if I wasn't a Liberal Partisan Hack (which I am)

I actually think that Romney is a good manager.  I think there is truth to the conservative narrative that Romney is the guy you want at the head of the board room table.  I think this is compatible with the gafftastic nature of the romney compaign; the CEO of a company doesn't usually have to put up with public scrutiny; they have to put up with private scrutiny (and, thus, have to be able to hash out pragmatic solutions to real problems and set all the bullshit aside) and they have to make public appearances.  But those two never don't usually intersect.  The CEO's public, chiseled, meticulous image doesn't usually face the threat of being ruffled by an overly curious public.  When they have the liberty to drop the facade and get down to brass tacks, and stop worrying about press or bloggers, they can be very effective.  I bet Romney would be very effective in this way.

The thing is:  CEO's don't need to make agendas in the same ways that presidents do.  they don't have to prioritize from scratch.  Because the CEO's agenda, the ultimate priority, is quite obvious:  make more money and don't lose money.

But for a nation, success is not so well defined.  One of the reasons that bipartisanship is so rare, and so unsatisfying when it actually happens, is because the sides don't agree on what it is for the country to be doing well, to be on the right tack.  So Romney might be very effective in getting-it-done, but without any antecedent understanding of what "it" is, a president has to make a substantive stand on what kind of success they are aiming at, knowing that that very result will not be acknowledged as a version of "success" by the other side.  The president has to know not only how we get to where they want to go, they have to establish where we want to go.

I'm not deluded into thinking that Obama is some ideological purist who "stands on the strength of his convictions", but I think he gets his sense of what it is for the country to be succeeding from a pretty traditional, democratic, left-of-center ideology, along with a somewhat right-of-center approach to America's international presence.  Use government as a way of correcting for the subtly coercive and oppressive maneuvers that unfettered capitalism invites people to exploit for their own gain.  that's the goal.  Be on the lookout for where capitalists have found a way to maximize their profits by robbing the less well off of any statistically reasonable chance at a minimum quality of life, and flex legislative muscles to make the capitalists cut it  the fuck out.  That's my understanding of left-of-center ideology, and I think that's by-and-large the perspective from which Obama approaches policy making.

Where does Romney take his cues from with regard to criteria for success?  He appears to be a bit of a sponge in this regard.  Make your demands of him, and he'll tout your ends as criteria for success.  That may not even be bad, except it's clear enough whose demands are the most audible in the oval office.  They're the demands of huge monied interests.  So I have no doubt that Romney would succeed at managing the executive branch as a machine built to accomplish some x, but I think we have ample reason to believe that Romney himself will be indifferent as to what the x is, and is likely to listen to fringe interests groups in his party's caucus, in the hopes that those interests can get him re-elected.  And this isn't idle speculation.  I think this is the best guess we can make given his apparent fickleness during the primaries.  As different voices got louder and quieter, Romney vacillated on which goals he trumpeted most loudly.

We all know how active and aggressive special interests are in Washington.  I feel pretty confident that the USFG would be as capable in achieving its goals under Romney as it would under any president.  I really do think that, I think.  My concern comes in how those goals will be decided upon, and I think we'd be foolish to take anything said in this campaign as an unbreakable promise.  I think that the most rational guess, given all we know, is that massive monied and corporate interests would successfully ensure that the agenda of a Romney executive branch would be their agenda.  And given how effective Romney would be at accomplishing his goals...

Stanley Cup playoff predictions

Western Conference

Canucks d. Kings in five.

Blues d. Sharks in seven. [I've picked the blues to win it all]

Blackhawks d. Coyotes in five.

Predators d. Wings in six.

Eastern Conference

Rangers d. Senators in five. [I think the Rangers make it to the finals and lose to the Blues in seven]

Bruins d. Capitals in six.

Panthers d. Devils in seven.

Penguins d. Flyers in seven.

Ayer's Moorean Paradox

Moore's open question defies informative analyses of GOOD to provide such an analysis (of the form "to be good is to be F") which passes the following test: Can I intelligibly ask whether something, which is F, is also good? If such a question is intelligible, Fness cannot be identical to goodness. Even if all the good things are F, their goodness is not their Fness, though their goodness may be in virtue of their Fness. Ayer kickstarted the 20th century noncognitivist tradition by accepting Moore's conclusion that GOOD cannot be identical to any complex property. But instead of following Moore to the conclusion that GOOD must be a simple, nonnatural, sui generis property, Ayer proposes that GOOD is no property at all, and that attributions of goodness are not attributions of a property to objects, but rather expressions of approval.

My Life in Wikipedia Articles

Got this idea from a friend-of-a-friend's website. Organized in roughly chronological order. About a half-dozen of these pages don't exist. But they should.

Reconstructing Moore's Open Question

Andy Altman (an old professor of mine at Georgia State University!) wrote a paper some years ago in which he proposed a new construction of Moore's open question argument (OQA). The argument confuses me, so I wanted to work through it a bit here.

This melts in my mind.

Always Sunny

Several years ago I saw my first several episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I thought it was a pretty straightforwardly (objectively) bad show. If you had caught me on a less aggressive day, I would have backed off and said "I think that anyone with tastes that resemble my own would regard it as a straightforwardly (objectively) bad show." But I would have stood by this weaker claim as something in which I was reasonably confident.

Over the years I've realized that a lot of people like this show. Then I realized that I had talked to several people, perhaps a dozen or so, with whom I share broadly the same tastes in entertainment, and who also love the show. People who I think of as having worse taste than me, people who have far better taste than me, and people who are by and large the same: The all love Always Sunny. I'm not sure I know anyone who dislikes the show. And I'm worrying that what seemed at first to be an objectively correct aesthetic judgment, and which was then weakened into a confident sociological prediction, may turn out to be a potentially universally rejected opinion. I think I'm the only person who thinks that It's Always Sunny is anything other than awesome, and I think it's terrible.

Does anyone else think that the humor on this show is contrived, effortful, rarely funny, and altogether dumb? Does anyone else think that the characters are one-dimensional, uninteresting, despicable in a non-endearing manner, and that the narrative structures are all predictable amalgamations of ridiculousness, reaching an apex of insipid buffoonishness that lacks even the dignity of thoughtfully constructed slapstick? Am I really alone here?

Pepperfest!

My uncle Bob is an avid gardener that lives in Denver. His back yard is lined with herbs, pepper plants, tomato plants, carrots, onions, zucchini, and a raspberry bush. Every autumn Bob hosts 'Pepperfest'. It's a sort of autumn harvest, an all day party built around the garden and its yield. Salsas, sauces, rubs, and spice mixtures are all made out of Bob's tomatoes, peppers and herbs...most of the rest of the vegetables in the garden simply get roasted and set on the table. Bob cooks ribs, grills chicken, and smokes brisket for three days prior. He's been doing this for a few years now, but I've never been able to make it out to Colorado for the big event. This year, however, my parents were going, and Pepperfest fell right in the middle of a two week period during which I was...wait for it...visiting my parents. So, although I do wish that being at my uncle's house didn't always involve the constant background drone of Fox News, I finally got the chance to get out to Colorado and see the product of some really skilled gardening.

Propositions

Today is the first day of the Autumn '10 school year at Ohio State. I'm beginning my second year of my PhD program here at OSU. As per my coursework, I will spend my next twelve weeks thinking about the metaphysics of propositions (with Ben Caplan) and Frege's philosophy of language (with William Taschek). I'll also be sitting in (limitedly) on Lisa Shabel's seminar on Kant's first Critique and I'll be grading for Caplan's advanced metaphysics class, which will discuss basic topics like mereology, persistence, essence and change. In addition, I'll be thinking/writing a little bit about Love, Sex and Friendship, topics which I've recently been very interested in as an AOC, and I need to decompress concerning my work over the summer: I need to write some thoughts on Huw Price and his anti-representationalism. There, then, is a brief roadmap for the next twelve (or so) weeks.

I also made vegetarian sushi the other night, and it was glorious. I look forward to much more wonderful cooking in the next few months.

In preparation for the first meeting of my metaphysics seminar, I read Scott Soames contribution to the Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, titled simply "Propositions". Soames, who is one of the main writers we'll be engaging in this seminar, was helpful in setting the scene, and I thought I'd use this first post to re-hash some of the major points I took from Soames, in order to introduce the dialectic in which we'll be participating this fall. I am very new to this topic, so this should post should read as me trying out my sea legs, not me presenting myself as an expert that warrants being listened too.

I'm a terrible blogger

More will come soon. Apparently my initial enthusiasm was not sustainable. i need to tap into a steady, moderate commitment, 1-2 posts every 1-2 days, rather than outbursts of proliferate writing about whatever. I will be thinking of this, and the Critique will return.

Worlds that aren't the Actual World

In this post i'm going to give a cursory introduction to possible worlds talk as it is relevant to my project, so that I have something to refer back to when relevant.

So there's this world. Take the world to be everything. That is, everything there is. Worlds aren't planets, they're whole realms of being. So everything that you think of as true is true of this world. Now take one of those truths...for instance, Joe Biden is vice president. Now, you might want to say that the proposition expressed by the sentence "Joe Biden is vice president" has interesting properties besides being true. It also has the property of being contingent. That is, it didn't have to be true, and that's an interesting difference between the proposition expressed by "Joe Biden is vice president" and "all triangles are trilateral".

Martini Realism!

These metaphysical disputes, Hirsch points out, seem rather different from disputes about whether the Loch Ness monster exists, or whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They are more like the dispute between the purist who says that only cocktails made of gin or vodka, dry vermouth, and perhaps an olive or two count as martinis, and the sorority girl who calls practically anything a martini as long as it served in the classic V-shaped glass. If these two are seated at a table on which such a glass contains some nonsense made of sour green apple liqueur, the latter will say that there is a martini there, and the former will deny it. This is a paradigm case of a verbal dispute. The disputants agree on all the facts, but disagree on how to use the word ‘martini’. (The purist is of course right about the use of the word. remember that there can be verbal disputes in which one side is straightforwardly mistaken!)

Karen Bennett "Composition, Colocality and Metaontology"

It's rare that a philosophical example is as revealing and insightful concerning the content of the example as they are concerning the philosophical concept that the example is wheeled in to elucidate.

Make thy presence known

I have reason to believe some folks are reading this...but I don't have any way of knowing who or how many! One of the reasons my last blog never took off was because I never committed to posting regularly. One of the reasons I never posted regularly was because I thought (correctly) that no one read. A vicious cycle, you see. I'm doing better this time around, but do me a fave and comment from time to time, so I don't fall into the same rut.

Also, The Books.

Go Blue Team!

Yesterday Lindsey and I did our global duty and watched the world cup (loved it!). It was an epic finish, yada yada, but something interesting happened. Lindsey and I don't know anything about soccer, or the teams playing. We decided ahead of time that we were both going to be rooting for the Netherlands...because the Netherlands were underdogs. And we like underdogs. Also, Amsterdam.

Fucose mutarotase is queer

Studies like these always worry me. While many people see in them the opportunity to decisively demonstrate that homosexuality is not a choice, I see them as both (a) further entrenching an ideology according to which sexuality is a binary determinate property that accurately draws the line down the middle of two different 'kinds' of person, and (b) offering up hope to parents that might want to prevent gayness through genetic engineering, and doctors that would like to profit off of them.

Vanilla extract

As of yesterday I have some 60 oz. of homemade vanilla extract! Back in May, I bought Madagascar vanilla beans on E-bay. I bought a pint of rum, a pint of brandy and a pint of vodka, and three glass jars that cork.

Twerp

I had a feeling we were overestimating that proton.