Sorry Don't Make It So

Offering an official apology to remedy historic wrongs is basically the same thing as offering to pay people in "exposure."

LATKES!!!!!

OH MY GOD I am eating latkes right now and they are delicious.

It's like you took the best chips in the world, then gave them the texture of raw bliss and invited onions over to play at their flavour party.

Fuck Tomato Soup.

Mulligatawny is where it's at now.

Why Am I Suddenly Craving Tomato Soup?

It's not time for tomato soup. I don't even eat tomato soup.

The Slavery Paradox

As of late, I've been increasingly caught up on an issue of moral theory that I call "the slavery paradox." The issue is simple. Most people agree that slavery is wrong in theory, but let's examine that on a logical basis. Since "slavery" is a broad category of acts rather than any one specific act, we'll narrow in and examine the case of Steve the Slave who is hypothetical but easily representative of real cases.

Steve was born into slavery in Jamaica under British rule in 1790. He died in 1830 without ever being freed.

By definition, what happened to Steve is morally wrong or it was not morally wrong. If it was morally wrong, then by definition, that wrong must be righted or it need not be righted.

If what happened to Steve is not morally wrong, then morality endorses slavery and our opposition to it is erroneous.

If what happened to Steve is morally wrong and must be righted, then morality compels us to bring Steve back from the dead so that we may free him and compensate him for his suffering. Since this is physically impossible to do, it means our moral system is incoherent and its judgements invalid; our opposition to slavery is thus unsubstantiated.

If what happened to Steve is morally wrong but need not be righted, then our moral system is impotent. It decrees that just and unjust are identical; we need not pursue the former since the latter is just as good. We may conclude slavery to be "immoral" but only by first declaring that word meaningless.

So it seems that even the basic sanity test of any moral system - that it can object to slavery - is by its very nature insurmountable. I've asked various people for their thoughts on the subject, but it turns out the popular view of slavery basically amounts to "deny that it ever happened." In the meantime, the only coherent answer is that there is no such thing as morality; we're just animals and anything we do is morally neutral— even though that answer is plainly absurd.

Does This Happen To Everyone?

Every now and then, I experience a weird phenomenon in which I say the name of a person I'm quite familiar with and their name just sounds wrong. Like, intellectually I know the person and I know their name and I know I said the right name, but it just sort of feels like I didn't and I usually feel the need to double-check that this really is their name.

So does this happen to everyone or am I just mad?

Little Things That BUG Me #13

When people refer to every cough, sniffle, and cold as "the flu."

Just because you're feeling ill doesn't mean you have the flu. "The flu" refers to a specific type of virus called influenza, and it's a severe disease, as in people actually die of it— and if you don't die, you'll still be more or less unable to function for a week or two. At the moment, my mum is currently in hospital with the flu and it'll be awhile before she's feeling well again.

But the habit of claiming to have "the flu" whenever you're feeling poorly is more than just a linguistic nitpick. The flu is largely vaccine-preventable as long as you get a new jab every year to protect against the most recent strain. However, all too many people don't bother to get vaccinated against influenza— and calling every little cough "the flu" may well contribute to that by incorrectly convincing people that the flu is no big deal. After all, if you've had a minor case of the sniffles and think that's "the flu" why bother with a vaccine?

So don't say you have the flu unless you actually have the flu. And in that case, you'd better be wearing a face mask.