Bits and Passages

A SPROOKJE

Under a bridge, a lubricious wodge of tatterdemalions sheltered from the rain.

THAT I AM REALLY LYING

I should say, when I say I believe this or that, that I am really lying, in a sense, since I am a complete speech-act pragmatist, and so I am only looking for the operational value in holding various beliefs as precepts to various potentially interesting philosophical practices. Though I do believe stable truth values hold within paradigms.

I would not go so far as to say that philosophy is a kind of literature, since it has definite governing aims and ways of positioning and contrasting arguments, independent from particular linguistic instantiations, and even has ways of proving things locally, under provisionally given precepts, but I would say that it is more like literature than science. 

RESISTANCE TO HEGEL

Don't you understand that your resistance to Hegel contains the seeds of your acquiescence to Hegel? By denying Hegel you are only sublating Hegelian discourse and allowing it to flourish within the edifice of your denial, which propounds the positivity of its own negativity. 

SAVE THE MOSQUITOES

In 2nd grade, apparently already an incorrigible satirist, I conducted a "Save the Mosquitoes" campaign; I made signs and passed out individually crayon-scrawled awareness-raising fliers. This was in Orlando, Florida. My teacher was more bewildered than annoyed, but she made me stop anyhow. I think it was my way of asking, "Is environmentalism hopelessly anthropocentric?"

BUT

Seriously though:
Fish people.

Proving Conspiracy Theories

The realization that humans and their institutions are in fact small and vulnerable overwhelms some people’s sense of truth. People resist the idea that one man who was a pretty good shot could kill the most powerful figure in the world, by himself, or that a small group of guys with box cutters could orchestrate a disaster that would plunge us into decades of war.

However, if you want to show that a sensational theory that contradicts loads of accepted evidence is true, you need very strong counter evidence—not some circumstantial bits and pieces cobbled together with your speculations about what seems likely to you.

You have to prove that an incredible thing is true, not prove that it hasn’t been disproven—or ask me to disprove it.

If you want me to believe that there is a species of giant hominid secretly lurking in North American forests, I don’t want to see your blurry pictures of something that may or may not be a guy in an ape suit, and I don’t want to hear your speculations as to why this idea “just makes sense.” I want the actual body of a Sasquatch, dead or alive. It’s on you to prove it with strong, undeniable evidence. It’s not on me to disprove your silliness.

This is important because when you become willing to play around with the truth and suppose the world really must be the way you feel it to be, you begin to think that your enemies may really be inhuman monsters, which opens the door for the worst forms of bigotry.