PU #247 - WOULD YOU RATHER? - On the Value of Silly
Read More“instead of answering it, I asked a different question: why do we think dumb “would you rather” questions like this are worth answering?“
PU#244 - REFORMING OUR BROKEN MINDS: On Acknowledging Our Influences
Read More“I have long argued that a key problem with modern humanity is our unwillingness to acknowledge how deeply influenced we are by television and other media. Despite living in a world where we know billions are spent every year on marketing and advertising because of its known and repeatedly demonstrated efficacy on driving consumer behaviours, we still like to believe that our decisions are freely made.“
PU #238 - CENSORING TOURETTE'S - Baffled By The BAFTAs
Read More“How the BBC dealt with John Davidson’s attendance at the BAFTAs last week is definitely morally questionable and offensive, but not because they let the racial slur slip past the censors when other insults were cut…“
PU #236 - CHOMSKY & EPSTEIN - How Much Do The Actions Of The Person Undermine Their Argument?
Read More“the more I read, the more my instinct for defending Noam Chomsky seemed to have finally run out of ground“
234. WHAT IF THEY WERE RIGHT? - On Kids These Days
Read More“What if what our parents warned us about did cause us harm but we were too harmed to see?“
230. CHRISTMAS SHOPPING - In Defence of Chainstores
Read More“This is not a defence of capitalism, nor a defence of the current order, but it is a defence of the notion that perhaps the proliferation of corporate chain-stores everywhere, which once made me mourn the quirky individuality of the independent high street, is not necessarily a bad thing.“
219. CULTURAL COLLAPSE - What Happens When We Lose All Context?
Read More“We are adrift and discombobulated. Deeply so. “
213. IS GOOD CONTEXTUAL WHEN IT COMES TO ART? - Aesthetics and Geography
Read More“This conclusion doesn’t intend to demean our ideas of what we find good or bad in art. Rather it intends to expand our definition. Recognise that the thing we have written off before might only be written off because it was the wrong time or place to receive it. That everything can be given a second chance, or a third, or even a fourth if you are open to seeing what it is that others seem to appreciate but which you cannot, yet, seem to access.“
212. A WASTE OF TIME? - How Ought We Spend Our Days?
Read More“the older I get, the more I am coming to realise that everything we do could be perceived as both a potential waste of time, or as precisely what time is there for: to fill it. The assumption that there is an objective “ought” about what we should do with our days is the mistake. “
205. SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: A Philosophy for Life
Read More“This month marks the 50th anniversary of long-running (fifty years!) American sketch comedy TV show, Saturday Night Live. To celebrate, I thought it worth taking a look at the philosophical life lessons its fifty year success story can teach us.“
201. THE FORBIDDEN BEAT - Should I Stop Listening to Marilyn Manson?
Read More“Manson always was a symptom and not a cause of the social sickness he personified. Watching the documentary this week simply reminded me that the world which created him continues to fail to confront the true causes of its sickness, and points the finger at individuals we can demonise instead of looking in the mirror and asking why such demons continue to exist.“
191. WRESTLING WITH DONALD TRUMP - Why We Ignore The Wrestling Connection at Our Peril
Read More"Trump is undoubtedly a monster. Trump is a massive threat to the kind of democracy that all Americans should hold dear. But he is using the playbook of professional wrestling to win the White House once again and is therefore a monster we are responsible for keeping alive so long as we continue to not take the influence of professional wrestling on politics seriously."
183. I WATCHED EUROVISION - Does That Make Me a Bad Person?
Read More“As a self-identified punk since my teenage years, I am very used to feeling shame about watching the Eurovision Song Contest each year, and even hiding the fact from people who know me…“
182. MUCH TOO QUIET ON SET - Stepping on Eggshells as we All Work Under Capitalism
Read More“This is not just Hollywood stuff. This is not just the entertainment business. This is all work under capitalism.“
175. SUING MADONNA - The Ethics of Honouring Stage Times
Read More“is Madonna’s late start really “unconscionable, unfair, and/or deceptive”? In philosophical terms: are such late start times, different from those advertised, genuinely immoral?“
174. THE TRAITORS AND EPISTEMOLOGY - Why We're All Floundering In The Dark About Knowledge
Read More“It is epistemically wild to watch how fellow human beings construct seemingly viable theories of knowledge out of the flimsiest of observations and inferences.“
172. INFLUENCERS - Why Violent Video Games Must Make Us More Violent
Read More“When you speak to a classroom of teenagers about the possibility that playing violent video games might make them violent, you can immediately see the smirks and ready yourself for their knee-jerk defensiveness. After all, they are the smirks and defensiveness you, yourself, have given in response to the same suggestion your whole life…“
170. ON HEELS - Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?
Read More“When things are so awful everywhere all the time, they lose their impact as being awful. Exploiting children to bring us cheap consumer goods is no longer an outrage, it’s just good business. Taking a home away from someone is just what happens. Another bomb is dropped on Gaza, we hit another year in the Russian invasion of Ukraine - this is just life for those people. We glaze over. We don’t think too much about it. We share some more funny memes and watch videos of people injuring themselves online.“
168. IT'S NOT JUST THE KIDS, IT'S US - Why It's Important for Teachers to Look in the Mirror
Read More“in a world where there is a very real epistemological threat coming from falling down online rabbit-holes into algorithm-guided conspiracies, we teachers are spending a lot of our own free-time guided by those very same dangerous algorithms as we hunt and click for hours looking for the perfect clips for our students. We then normalise this behaviour to our students“
159. TAKING STUDENT SILLINESS SERIOUSLY - Lightning McQueen and the Importance of Battling Deepities
Read More“Like garbage washing up on the shore of a polluted sea, the Philosophy classroom is often where a lot of these deepities come to rest as students, impressed by their apparent wisdom, share them with the one person they think will be equally impressed: their Philosophy teacher. Often those students are soon disappointed, even angry, when that teacher is not impressed at all and, instead, pops the bubble of the illusion and exposes its emptiness.“