Random Rants XL: I'm having trouble growing my wood
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Ajidica
High Quality Person
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Were they fire drills, or are there more hippies in Iowa than I thought?
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Finally got my iTunes neatened out, and out of curiosity slapped together smart playlists for each decade. Turns out the ratio of 70s:80s:90s:2000s:2010s is (give or take) 1:2:7:18:3. How can I be a music snob with such a modern-slanted library!?
The first one was a drill, second and third it doesn't seem like it considering my RA had no idea what was happening.
madviking
north american scum
My first-year dorm had a microwave popcorn problem.
NickyJ
Retired Narrator
Today feels.... eerie. It's crystal clear out, and a little chilly. I don't know why, but it feels very strange.
Summer to autumn transition is a strange feeling?
I love the feeling and smell of the first fall air.
Mango Elephant
Deity
We have church fêtes, school fairs and the like, yes, but they tend to be a local affair.
haha would a Catholic fair in Britain not be a local affair?
Rant: This one book for my Introduction to Politics in the Muslim World is so godawful. It spends page after page urging people and criticizing people for not keeping a neutral point of view on Islamist movements and parties in the region, which is good enough in itself. But then whenever anything involving America/Israel comes in, it throws all the neutrality out the window and just goes nuts with the bias. Every single sentence involved multiple uses of the words "neo-coloniel", "imperialist", and "empire"; it just got impossible to read without any sort of rage at the hypocrisy. Don't spent 20 pages urging me to view things without bias only for you to go ahead and be incredibly biased.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Those should not in themselves be biased terms, they're just ways of describing certain political-economic phenomena. If it comes across like that, then either the author is a hack, or you're imposing your own biases onto them.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Descartes is a realist, he's just a methodological sceptic.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
What does that mean. I remember it was fun to realise that his wonderful reasoning for the existance of God is invalid unless you believe in God.
hobbsyoyo
Deity
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What is a solipsist and who is Descartes?
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
His arguments for God are pretty crap, yeah. He's really more important because of how much later philosophy was developed in opposition to his work, rather than in itself. (I also tend to think that a lot of his ontology is essentially a coherent reproduction of a lot of "common sense" thinking, and is useful to engage with on those grounds.)
The way he uses them though come off as biased; he just automatically assumes a position on American foreign policy in the region, and uses that to justify his arguments about various Islamist topics. He doesn't give any air to the reasons America might have taken the actions it has in the region, and just comes out and says its because of an American, neo-conservative imperialist project to colonize the Middle East, with the help of racist liberal Orientalists. To me that screams "bias!".
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