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J. Calvin 'Bimp' Smith Profile picture
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8 Apr, 11 tweets, 3 min read
1. Part of the problem of my non-academic pursuit of learning about the field of philosophy is EXACTLY that it is a non-academic pursuit of learning about it. I can watch classroom lectures but not participate in them. I am limited in feedback I can get on my own observations.
2. There is also the age at which I started really digging into all of this. Yes, I took Honors Philosophy 101 (remembered course designator is approximate), but I was steeped in a Southern Baptist evangelical worldview and thoughtview then, as, I believe, was my instructor.
3. When the course consists of a ride through classical (Greek) philosophy, VERY early European thought, and an amusing detour over to visit the Asians and their curious one-hand-clapping riddles, and I fulfill my lone writing assignment with a paper about Democratic Theory...
4. ... with many a Middle-Georgia-aristocratic wink and grin at what should have been genuinely challenging brain fodder, it is little wonder that I felt then, and still feel now, awash in the depths of it.
5. I pick up the fiction and non-fiction works of @platobooktour, or I wander over to the Oxford Philosophy adult education video collections (thanks @OxPhil_Marianne in particular), and I do all right as far as entertaining myself and stimulating my own internal questions, ...
6. ... but then I try to sit down and take what I learned and actually try to think some well-constructed, properly-formed thoughts in any part of that Grand Field of Philosophy, sometimes looking up serious, albeit introductory, work on concepts I've discovered ...
7. ... and I'm suddenly lost in it all again: lost in the absolute basics. I am scarcely educated in modal logic, in extension vs. intension, and whoa, Nelly, to think a year or 3 ago I wanted to tackle the Mind/Body Problem? I can't even talk sensibly about Rigid Designators.
8. I will say that when Pascale in "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" talks about the sense in which probability _doesn't_ _even_ _exist_, I perked up because I'd had very similar thoughts ... and today those thoughts cross-pollenated nicely ...
9. ... with a thought process I was having about "all possible worlds," and how would one know, or think about, another possible world besides the one in which I am doing this thought experiment? Yes, yes, there is a basic modal logic framework to establish the concept, ...
10. ... and that's my point. I'm trying to play with toys, or perform laboratory experiments, and I feel so ill equipped, because yes, I started so late, my thought processes are so messy, and therefore I AM ILL EQUIPPED. Oh, tidings of frustration and joy, frustration and joy.
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J. Calvin 'Bimp' Smith Profile picture
8 Apr
1/9. There must be, I think, a whole school of philosophical thought I'm not seeing. I suspect it's out there, but it's in disguise, or surrounded by deceptive similarities that aren't as good, or as genuine. Or maybe it's psychology rather than philosophy, I don't know.
2/9. Help me out.
What I am thinking about is the whole concept of the betterment of oneself: Where do we draw the line between accepting ourselves as we are, warts and all, and trying to improve even when it is difficult to do so?
3/9. When do we want to prize our individuality and our need to march to the sound of no other person's drum, and when do we want to push at our own self-imposed boundaries?
Read 9 tweets
J. Calvin 'Bimp' Smith Profile picture
8 Apr
1. Trumpists & @GOP Radical and Religious Right fanatics - which seem to identify themselves as the only genuine Republicans - fall into two classes, with some overlap: Manipulators and Manipulated. They protect the powerful while keeping the majority exploited, ignorant & weak.
2. If hundreds of thousands die unnecessarily because of the pandemic implications of this widespread mentality of either manipulating the masses or "faithfully"/"loyally" accepting authority's manipulation of them, so be it.
3. Powerful media voices (@FoxNews, @newsmax, @OANN, @CBNNews) enforce loyalty and fidelity to the societal roles - the essential @GOP classism - that perpetuate race, gender, income inequality. Their pastors help. Their pundits help.
Read 6 tweets
J. Calvin 'Bimp' Smith Profile picture
10 Dec 20
1/10 - It's 5:52 in the morning, and I am revisiting decades-old thoughts about race, class, and privilege; about "Line" and "Staff" jobs and who tended to get each in the civilian Federal workplace from which I retired; ...
2/10 - ... about EEO, Diversity, "avoiding the appearance of impropriety" in assigning salary ranges to different classes of hard and sometimes dirty work, and the extent to which these salaries and classes seem "Stamped from the Beginning," to use a phrase from @DrIbram.
3/10 - These ideas and thoughts woke me up from sound sleep and had their seeds in a dream on a recurring theme I was having: I was back in my Federal Civilian office job, and we were once again wrestling with reorganization because it was moving our duties out from under us
Read 13 tweets
J. Calvin 'Bimp' Smith Profile picture
10 Nov 20
1) I dreamed this morning I was part of the cast for a new @DAVID_LYNCH movie, & he was shooting fairly improvisational scenes with me & several other performers, including @PattyArquette, around a large unpaved loop road with trees & buildings, around this time of year, Fall ...
2) There were ideas in the minds of the actors that Lynch had given them of where their stories were going and what to do. I performed a kind of "spazz-out" moment in a scene we shot near strange electronic devices and an uncertain sense whether we were outdoors or indoors. ...
3) Later, I was walking around the loop road, possibly but not definitely off camera, going to ask Ms. Arquette a question, but on the way I had a sudden flash of dream-memory (i.e. not from waking life) about how one of Lynch's films started as a Doctor Who episode. ...
Read 6 tweets
J. Calvin 'Bimp' Smith Profile picture
5 Sep 20
1) - Confession time:

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I in the name of non-discrimination came out on exactly the WRONG SIDE of the Diversity Training issue, due at least in part to my innate stubbornness & white male Christian heterosexual southern-born-and-raised privilege.
2) - I used my new fascination - internal social media at the Federal @DeptofDefense agency where I worked from 1979 to 2012 - to sound off frequently against quotas and set-asides, and against every move by our EEO office ...
3) - ... to take the fight against discrimination into Affirmative Action territory. We had a newsgroups system fashioned after USENET, and we had internal e-mail, and I became somewhat notorious for my activity in both - quite probably to the detriment of my promotability.
Read 10 tweets
J. Calvin 'Bimp' Smith Profile picture
31 Aug 20
1. Let's take another look at the "duopoly" argument that some Progressives use as a reason they do not want to support either mainstream party, Democratic or Republican, or their candidates. Those Progressive make valid, scary, germane points in the age of @realDonaldTrump.
2. It is no secret that I, while I see value in this argument and in fact think Progressives have the best ideas for American government improvement, some of them woefully overdue, that I have ever seen, sadly still think they were used to divide liberals and elect Trump.
3. But there is much validity in what these Progressives say about the corruption of government as a whole. I say this from my own direct experience of workplace politics as a career civilian @DeptofDefense employee, in one of its agencies, from 1979 to 2012.
Read 22 tweets

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