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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • This happened to me. I got a PhD and expected to be able to get a tenure track job in academia. Sure, it’s hard. But it wouldn’t be me that failed at it, right? Wrong. Three years later, no job, scraping by on adjunct work.

    I went back to law school. Sometimes you have to redefine your life in a way that gives you new opportunities. Does it still hurt that I couldn’t get my dream job? Yeah, but I have a lot of good I can do for the world in other ways, and I’m not going to let that dream’s death prevent me from doing it.



  • To be clear, the vast majority of academic philosophers (at least in the Anglophone world) find Freud to be useless pseudoscience. Freud gets taken seriously in literary analysis and continental philosophy. The latter is a minority position (although drawing a hard and fast line between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy is pretty difficult these days).

    When I was getting my PhD in philosophy, I would have been laughed out of the room if I wrote a term paper that used Freud in any significant way.






  • The American left is furious at Biden for the same reason we’re angry at pretty much any President’s foreign policy. We’ve opposed most of the interventions and support for dictators that presidents in the latter half of the twentieth century up to today have engaged in. But we have never been the majority, and haven’t had the power to stop them. It’s important to remember that about a third of the US is composed or pretty reasonable, pro-peace social democrats. The problem is that another third are “moderates” that are okay with empire as long as we pretend we’re being nice, and the last third are maniacal religious fascists.


  • Your comment is pretty reasonable but I don’t think you’re misinterpreting the criticism of Biden here. The US is and has been supplying Israel with virtually unlimited arms and support for decades now. This support has come with very few strings attached. Biden could easily make aid contingent on many of the things you mention, and it would put the Israeli government in a real bind, forcing them to make concessions that their right wing doesn’t want to make. Biden isn’t being blamed for the whole conflict, and isn’t expected to fix it on his own. But he’s got a lot of leverage that he refuses to use in the interests of peace. This same problem recurs with basically every president, as AIPAC’s influence on the American government is substantial.


  • Got a divorce and lost my job. Spent six months eating 1500 calories a day, 600 of which were liquor, and walking five to seven miles a day. Hours of walking by the Sound in the rain every day. Felt like the only thing I could control was what I ate and how much I walked. Lost thirty pounds. I got a few compliments on how much thinner I looked. Didn’t tell anyone that every pound was burned with hate.

    I’m doing better now.