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Liam Bright Profile picture
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17 Apr, 4 tweets, 1 min read
I think the Voyager episode "One Small Step" is an excellent piece of Star Trek world building. It's basically about humanity's first encounter with a negative space wedgie, and also Seven of Nine coming to appreciate the too-science-to-live ethos of the Federation...
... (where science is always understood on the, like, Doc Brown mad scientist model, it basically consists of approaching negative space wedgies and poking them to see what happens) ....
... in Star Trek canon, but not irl, these are genuinely significant features of the universe and the human spirit respectively, and so it feels like an episode fleshing out its own world for its own sake, not just using the setting as a means of exploring real world issues...
... but for my part I'm reminded of it recently because at the end there's a moment where Seven shows she has bonded with this man who died upon the first encounter, and makes a gesture to acknowledge that. Weirdly enough, a paper I am writing right now feels like that for me.

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Liam Bright Profile picture
17 Apr
I guess the reason I find moderate centrism irritating is I think a fair look at the evidence suggests the status quo is a wasteful death cult with all industry and culture serving at the behest of a tiny global elite whose status basically requires callous indifference from them
Of course it's far from obvious what to do next, and maybe even the best we can do is working-from-within incremental reforms away from here. I don't think the latter is true and I have opinions on the former. But I find the Sensible Set disdainful sneer at radicals infuriating.
Given the scale of the problems and the potential for improvement, the sheer amount of misery we could alleviate through better organisation, sneering at radicals just strikes me as what one does if one is either thoughtless or a base propagandist with no integrity whatsoever.
Read 4 tweets
Liam Bright Profile picture
14 Feb
Technological changes spur wealth creation. They may be fettered or encouraged by a political institutional system. If economic forces are fettered tensions tend to mount until a crisis point prompts combat between those who benefit from the old order and those who stand to gain.
At that point their balance of forces, inclusive of the respective degrees of organisation and unity as a class of the contending groups, decides who wins. If the newcomers win then, of course, they do not govern altruistically, but intend to rule in their own interests.
However it can so happen that the new way of doing things has so dispersed wealth and power that they cannot close off avenues by which their competitors may themselves prosper. In such cases wealth, accompanied by the "creative destruction" of capitalist social turmoil, follows.
Read 6 tweets
Liam Bright Profile picture
13 Feb
Ok I'm going to try a similar thing but with my understanding of Charles Mills' overall schtick, which I think he has been developing since the 90s (his early career was more Marxist so had some differences to the liberal project he is now engaged in) The Mills project, a thread!
I think one can break Mills' project into three core elements, which much like Stanley's intertwine to form an interesting coherent whole. Mills has (1) a metaphilosophical project, (2) a descriptive project, and (3) a prescriptive project. That's a good order to cover them in!
The metaphilosophical project has probably been the most influential aspect of his work, independent of the particulars of his first order views in (2) and (3). This relates to what it is Mills thinks political philosophy should be in the business of doing and how it may do so
Read 19 tweets
Liam Bright Profile picture
13 Feb
Just finished Hill's The World Turned Upside Down. I say now it'll join Black Jacobins, Black Reconstruction, Reisch's To the Icy Slopes of Logic, Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution, Taylor's Trouble Makers ,and Cooper's Family Values as works of history that have really shaped me
I want to blog about how reading lots of history helps me be a philosopher in ways that I think are relatively unusual in analytic philosophy. I have done so a couple of times before (sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2017/02/defend… & sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2018/03/ideal-…) but never really got to the heart of things.
My guess is it reflects one weakness and one skill of mine. The skill: I read quickly and retain the info without having to take notes so it's lower cost for me to take in more. There's a sort of general "all else equal more evidence is better than less" that I thus benefit from.
Read 5 tweets
Liam Bright Profile picture
16 Jan
Ok here's my actual attempt to impress @jasonintrator - here's my Take on characterising the general position he's been developping these past few years, in one convenient twitter thread shaped place...
... the big message is: now's a very dangerous time in the US (and other places especially Turkey, Brazil, India, but I'll focus on the US). There's a serious chance of meaningful democracy being seriously eroded or destroyed, and hard authoritarianism stepping up its violence...
... to understand why that is, there's four interconnected lines of thought Jason has been pursuing. First, there are some near-perennial psycho-social principles about how people can be attracted to responsive to certain fearful, violent, and authoritarian forms of governance...
Read 20 tweets
Liam Bright Profile picture
18 Oct 20
I decided to make a public philosophy page for my website, linked in last tweet. And to inaugurate it I am posting it with the very strange essay, wherein I try and outline my ethical perspective. First para explains more. I'm not an ethicist, sorry!

liamkofibright.com/uploads/4/8/9/…
The origins of this essay is that @haicinnamon and I were thinking about how we would write if we had no journal constraints, and also what we wanted to get out of philosophy of science. I realised that for me philosophy of science is really just part of a broader ethical project
So I wrote up the result, and tried to make it clear both where I am coming from in general. It's somewhat personal. I don't think my views are very original but I will note that the essay is not actually that long - it's just a huge bibliography! Read if you have a moment spare.
Read 4 tweets

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