Its been over 15 years but I think I get the grift. Manufacture radical skepticism about all institutional knowledge, making atomized individuals with no knowledge seek expertise from a sea of random individuals most of whom falsely exhibit knowledge. Then monetize all the random individuals.
Nice! Happy to chat at some point if that would be helpful.
Also, how did you come to be teaching Mexican political philosophy?! That's awesome!!
Inadvertently, electric cars and wind power are being made into urgent national priorities.
A burst of interesting texts in the 90s by Villoro, Olivé, and Salmerón but that stuff was never translated. Would love to see what you do with the course!
The situation for primary texts in Mexican political phil from the 20th century is spotty. Some Revueltas in the Sánchez and Sanchez TWENTIETH C MEX PHIL volume; Sierra's POLITICAL EVOLUTION is in translation; some Flores Magón; several Dussel books, same for Sánchez Vázquez.
United Airlines updated its contract of carriage — the rules a passenger agrees to in order to fly — to specify that “passengers who fail to use headphones while listening to audio or video content” could be removed from a plane or not allowed to board. https://wapo.st/47tbvsf
Breaking open the good bourbon tonight!!!
This hip L.A. neighborhood is installing emergency sirens to warn of ICE raids
Yes, but will AI help me get a better night of sleep?
Indeed. This is very confusing, bordering on disturbing. But weirdly awesome.
It is still February, but San Diego has apparently decided it is summer.
My undergrads got wind that it was recently my birthday and they turned up with a hand-sketched portrait as well as cupcakes, cookies, snacks, for a class of 60 students! Everyone should get to have a batch of students like this at least once in their careers.
I argue that morally justified harms collaterally inflicted on civilians in war can yield compensatory duties – and that a failure to compensate post bellum renders in bello attacks retroactively unjust. Such attacks are unjust on the grounds that they violate the constraint of necessity, in the following way: the option of attacking-and-compensating is less harmful relative to the option of attacking-and-not-compensating (and typically no less effective at achieving the war’s aims). In making this point, I argue that we should evaluate the candidate courses of actions diachronically – that is, in a way that mereologically conjoins the ex ante attacks with ex post compensation. I then argue that a foreseeable risk of failing to compensate post bellum can affect the evidence-relative moral liability of those engaged in the in bello attacks. The upshot is that the moral significance of compensation for rights-infringements in war is not limited to jus post bellum, but also has profound effects on jus ad bellum and jus in bello. The US and select allies are in a position, even now, to affect the moral status of some of the military operations undertaken in the Middle East over the past two decades, by deciding whether to compensate those civilians whose rights were infringed. Neglecting to do so retroactively transforms tragic but potentially justified rights-infringements into gratuitously unjustified rights-violations. I end the article by addressing several practical quandaries that such a view seems to raise.
New article:
Saba Bazargan-Forward, "Compensation and Necessity in War", Philosophers' Imprint 26: 3. doi: doi.org/10.3998/phim...
Abstract in alt text. #philsky
Happy solar circuit to you!!
Very important Mexican Philosophy news: Miguel León-Portilla’s AZTEC THOUGHT AND CULTURE is name-dropped in the first ep of Marvel TV show WONDERMAN!!
I‘ve gotta do something about the referees.
AI seems to turn every job into quality assurance for the AI.
Wrote this: aeon.co/essays/the-l...
I will allow that curling is indeed weirdly engrossing even if you have no idea what the rules are.
First signs of creeping old-timer-ness: discovering articles by tenured faculty that say "I first read [Vargas] as an undergrad and . . . ."
Can I start yelling at people to get off my philosophical lawn?
Apparently UCSD Philosophy has been doing a good job with the grad program.
dailynous.com/2026/02/11/p...
Antibiotics and non-alcoholic beer. Living the dream.
Fine. I'm now a Bad Bunny fan.
Vaporub ads give me ptsd. Someone needs to ban those.
![I would like to march in protests too, but I can’t because I have arthritis in my knees. So I want my words to do my marching for me.
Like everybody else, I am an inhabitant of this planet; and I am a member of many other smaller communities too. I am an American citizen, for example. I was made a citizen from birth retroactively by the US government after World War II when babies born to US servicemen and German women were declared citizens from birth. My German mother came with me to the US as an immigrant without English when I was four years old and had no English either. Now I am a philosopher and a Christian -- a Catholic, actually. I identify as a woman. And so on.
I grieve the overwhelming evil that is impossible to ignore in every one of these communities. The sight of the suffering of desperate people trying to be immigrants to the US is unbearable. The inhumanity of separating their children from them, the viciousness of incarcerating small children alone, is unspeakable. And the cruelty we see on the daily news obscures but cannot hide the accelerating harm we are doing to the earth.
The people who should take the lead in governing us are vile, and so many of those who vote relish the vileness. That group includes some prominent Christians. Christians are meant to be salt and light for the world; their lives are meant to help other people taste and see the goodness of God. These people make the God they worship seem so hateful.
And so, like many other people, I mourn. But my mourning is without despondency, without the inward collapse of despair.
The baseness of injustice highlights the majesty of justice, whose power to call to people cannot be defeated by evil. The cruelty of those who rule, their indifference to the cry of the poor, illuminates by contrast the splendor of goodness and love. The growing dread at the increasing destruction of the planet testifies to its beauty. There would be less distress over [...]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:36n7wd7gg4tapamnog4zyyc6/bafkreidvwdsfwtac2b4gftp3oxwgfvwfeaxob6gmngpvu76rilfomtt7nm)
I would like to march in protests too, but I can’t because I have arthritis in my knees. So I want my words to do my marching for me. Like everybody else, I am an inhabitant of this planet; and I am a member of many other smaller communities too. I am an American citizen, for example. I was made a citizen from birth retroactively by the US government after World War II when babies born to US servicemen and German women were declared citizens from birth. My German mother came with me to the US as an immigrant without English when I was four years old and had no English either. Now I am a philosopher and a Christian -- a Catholic, actually. I identify as a woman. And so on. I grieve the overwhelming evil that is impossible to ignore in every one of these communities. The sight of the suffering of desperate people trying to be immigrants to the US is unbearable. The inhumanity of separating their children from them, the viciousness of incarcerating small children alone, is unspeakable. And the cruelty we see on the daily news obscures but cannot hide the accelerating harm we are doing to the earth. The people who should take the lead in governing us are vile, and so many of those who vote relish the vileness. That group includes some prominent Christians. Christians are meant to be salt and light for the world; their lives are meant to help other people taste and see the goodness of God. These people make the God they worship seem so hateful. And so, like many other people, I mourn. But my mourning is without despondency, without the inward collapse of despair. The baseness of injustice highlights the majesty of justice, whose power to call to people cannot be defeated by evil. The cruelty of those who rule, their indifference to the cry of the poor, illuminates by contrast the splendor of goodness and love. The growing dread at the increasing destruction of the planet testifies to its beauty. There would be less distress over [...]
From the prominent Catholic philosopher Eleonore Stump.
www.facebook.com/eleonore.stu...
I may not be ready to teach class this week, but the fact that I am 90% caught up with email I've received this year feels like a huge bit of progress for the weekend.
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I used to think "reply all" was going to be the end of all things.
