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.

Incredibles 2

So apparently, next year they're planning to release Incredibles 2, a sequel to The Incredibles movie that came out 12 years ago. Interesting choice— there's certainly rather a lot of buzz about it to be sure. Now, I can't swear that this movie will gargle gonads but, well, unfortunately I did see the original back in the distant year of 2005, quite probably on Vee Haitch Ess, and despite the massive gulf of time between then and now, I actually do remember the plot.

So in case you didn't see it, or have simply forgotten what it was about, here's a quick summary:

In a colourful and goofy cartoon world, there is a strict division between the inherently superior race whose members are born with innate genetic superpowers that manifest in infancy and can be controlled at will and the inherently inferior race who are confined by the laws of physics. For convenience, I'll call them Supers and Normals. In this cheerful setting, we are told the upbeat tale of the Incredibles, a family of Supers, fighting to defend the supremacy of the Super race against Syndrome, an uppity Normal who has invented the technology to give superpowers to those not born with them and cooked up a dastardly plan to just give this technology to everyone, thus creating equality between all people by elevating the low without diminishing the high. Luckily, the heroic Incredibles stop him at the last minute, and successfully preserve the existing social order where the inferior races know their place (presumably, some combination of running in terror from Supers and being killed by Supers, with the survivors thanking Supers for deigning to spare their worthless lives this time).

So now it's getting a sequel. I guess with the rise of fascism around the globe, some studio felt the time was right for that sort of thing. I wouldn't harp on The Incredibles in particular since nearly every superhero movie does the same thing, but most superhero movies are mindless noise designed to distract people momentarily on the long road to the grave by way of sensory overload while The Incredibles is clearly trying to make a point about the horrors of equality; the movie starts by showing the absurdity of diminishing the high without elevating the low, but then tries to equivocate this into the message that equality itself is bad by drawing parallels between diminishing the Supers and elevating the Normals, making it clear that it considers the two functionally equivalent. It even gives Syndrome a line effectively saying as much— something along the lines of "if everybody has superpowers, then nobody does."

It's quite clear that the original pitch was meant to denounce conformity and the repression of genuine talent, only to go awry as the writers inadvertently swapped "genuine talent" for "innate biological superiority" when they repurposed superhero cliches developed for mindless action movies without examining them too closely. However, while the original intent peeks through, the message they actually delivered is too blatant to ignore.

I don't know anything about the sequel other than the planned year of its release, but given the original I'm willing to say sight unseen that Incredibles 2 will stick its head up its arse, goose step off a cliff, and make tons of money anyway because the world is full of people who will fight for the right of the aristocracy to screw them over as long as they're assured that a black trans woman gets screwed over worse— and tons more people who won't even notice it's happening as long as you make it shiny and funny and say "lesser evil" a lot.