Many ppl are dismissive of "great books" conservatives, but I think for one thing it is good to have conservatives who aren't anti-intellectual. The movement away from expertise, science, and the humanities among conservative voters has huge negative repercussions. We will always have conservatives. I grew up among people who were quite conservative, notably my maternal grandfather who was a major general with the Belgian army. Textbook conservative, but also super-well read and well-informed about science. He had subscriptions to ...2/

Go to big conference, come back with covid. Many of my academic friends are on "their sickbed," "convalescing," "still so tired," after infection, and we decided collectively this is normal? Comes with the job, like jet lag and CO2 footprint? Aren't Academics smarter than that? I know academics who back in 2020 (I came back to FB after a long hiatus so I can confirm) who were super super cautious, washing their groceries, running in the woods with a mask in early 2020, who are now on their 4th-5th infection....

A friend shared this today: extensive covid testing protocols for the International Economic Forum, to begin tomorrow in St. Petersburg. She said "World leaders are protecting their health while assuring us all it's over".
However, they're failing to protect themselves 1/ A key mistake world leaders and economic elites are making is to think that you can somehow isolate yourself from the rest of the world/nature, and sacrifice the plebs to covid, the climate crisis, and societal collapse while you will be fine. 2/

Today I learned about this elaborate eulogy carved into stone of a 1st c Roman husband for his wife (identity uncertain, traditionally referred to as "Turia")
It's the longest personal document of this kind. He loved her a lot, they were married for 40 years.
Highlights: 1/ This elaborate carved eulogy challenges our expectations about Roman women. Far from these meek, defenseless creatures the husband keeps on going on about how his wife saved him (and doesn't seem to feel threatened in his masculinity for this), how she avenged her family, etc. 2/

We all know we are mortal. It's in the classic syllogism where all men/humans are mortal and Socrates is a man so...
Yet we also think of ourselves as practically immortal.
What happens then if you find yourself in a situation where you might not live? How does it change you? that's where I had been thinking of. at some point things looked really bleak with 20% survival over 5 yrs. Then it considerably looked better. Now, it might look better or not I am waiting. It is psychologically hard. Very difficult.

One more covid thread. I have a (serious) personal health situation.
I do link it to my prior covid infection.
So: We often see the choice presented as follows: just accept this new level of illness OR restrictive, politically unpopular measures
But this is not the choice 1/ This presentation of choices implies that it is sustainable to live with covid. That's the choice we made. But I think we see mounting evidence that at a population level this choice is not sustainable. 2/

Things we said we would fix back in 2020, but didn't bother to when we went back to normal:

1/ essential workers seem pretty essential for the well functioning of our society. They need better pay, better working conditions, paid leave and things like that. 2/ School inequality: Some schools struggle to provide any form of education because kids have no stable internet connection, are in a car close to a place that has WiFi trying to log into google classroom. Let's address that inequality and invest in schools and teachers!

I don't understand academics. Our brain = our bread and butter. Without it properly functioning, we cannot work.
We read peer reviewed lit and trust it. That lit says: covid = bad for brain.Really bad!
Yet no mitigation in our conferences or classrooms.
Our workplaces are unsafe.

https://twitter.com/brownecfm/status/1763114055097565612

So, what's going on?
A couple of thoughts:
1/ Most academics don't know about this. I am not sure this is true. In any case, I try to inform. There is really a lot of peer-reviewed lit out there, some of which comes in mainstream press. When did we stop following the science?

I saw someone today whom I had not seen since September. We were at a memorial service. It was packed. I was one of two people wearing a mask then. She then asked me "What's wrong, are you not feeling well?"
I said, "No, I just protect myself against covid."
So now we spoke 1/ She told me how she got covid shortly after then and was so, so tired for many months. How she had difficulties concentrating and getting anything done.
She said "I think you are wise to still protect yourself against covid, I didn't know it would be this bad." 2/

"people used to live life to the fullest when the plague and smallpox were going around," is a minimizing argument that's used against people who, in spite of public health and governments having given up, continue to protect themselves. Here's why it doesn't work: 1/ I think it seriously underestimates how horrible it was/is to live in times where infectious disease goes rampant and can come for your children, your middle-aged parents, and of course you. Hence Jane Austen "Are your parents well" before convo could even begin 2/

Many academics I know, and in general people experienced collective trauma in 2020-2021. They were very eager to return to normal and leave it all behind. Even on the height of it, they were anticipating this return to normal. So, is it a surprise that they went for it? Even as the hoped-for herd immunity, hybrid immunity, exit waves (notice how the minimizers have quietly dropped exit waves, at some point even they realized how ridiculous it was) did not end the fact that we're still in a pandemic and a mass disabling event.

Gonna break my X fast for this one since I find it important.
We tenured faculty are still actively helping the destruction of academia, and not doing much in the way of helping to save, let alone reform and improve, the structures that make our scholarly work possible. /1 E.g. cosplaying Harvard's academic integrity committee in the case of Claudine Gay. We *know* why the plagiarism stuff came up. Rufo even put the playbook on WSJ. Yet white fellow philosophers seemed eager to lift quotes from Free Beacon, "Much as it pains me, it's plagiarism" 2/

Long covid is trending once again on Twitter/X. How many people do you know with long covid? You can expect that number to grow in the next months. If you don't have long covid, you might get it in a future bout w the virus. That's bc you have been sacrificed for political gain. You might think you don't need to worry because your health is great and only the vulnerable need to worry. But unfortunately, everyone is potentially vulnerable. The people I know who got long covid were in excellent health before.

The situation of Isabel Fall (you can find easily what happened if you do not know) is one case that keeps on being at the back of my mind when I say we should exercise restraint when we are tempted to pile on. A couple of (probably controversial) thoughts on pile-ons 1/

https://twitter.com/christapeterso/status/1706881955730698526

I understand why this dynamic happens. Often, at least in philosophy, the pile on is an exasperated response to something that is systematically deeply wrong in our discipline, that angers us, and we want to vent. The writer of the pile-on has often no idea 2/

I've read this book by Lahontan (Dialogues de Mr le Baron de Lahontan et d'un sauvage (1704) that Graeber and Wengrow (Dawn of Everything) discuss as being foundational to the Enlightenment. I'm very intrigued by this book. I think Graeber and Wengrow are right to argue there is a clear influence of Indigenous thought in western philosophy, notably the notion of freedom but also critiques of religion etc. 2/

Oh wow I only recently got to read Peter Park's Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830 (I had skimmed it before but now, a deep dive). It's so revelatory. And bemusing. It tells how philosophy could've chosen 1/ A different path. A path open to philosophies across the world. Like Christian Wolff who enjoyed the Analects, or Leibniz who was intrigued by the Yijing (I Ching), or like the Renaissance hermetic scholars who thought wisdom lay in African philosophy (Hermes Trismegistus)

I am still mulling over the fact that
1. If my platform had been smaller and
2. If I didn't have people advocating for me
I'd still be banned from this site without any explanation on their part of what terms I violated, and without possibility of appeal.
This is unacceptable. Without a clear policy in place of what is and isn't acceptable speech in a platform, you cannot uphold freedom of speech/thought and the platform just becomes subject to the whims and preferences of its owner, as we've seen

Seeing people get covid again and consoling themselves with "It's inevitable now" and "WAYGD, mask forever?" -- even if you don't like masking, this defeatist attitude is socially engineered and lets governments get away with not implementing simple interventions 1/ It's nbd to mask in situations where social cost (which is partly bc of anti-mask attitudes) are low and chance of infection is high, e.g., airports, airplanes. It's not by masking there you miss out on your best life or whatever. Public health messaging could be better. 2/

Academic book publishing: some tips (not exhaustive!)
1/ If you're early in the project, it's a good idea to talk to an editor to get a sense of what they're looking for. Editors are experts w a good sense of what a good book-length project looks like & help shape proposal 2/ Getting an advance contract based on your proposal is nice. Be aware though it will still need to clear a peer review, for academic presses such as Oxford, Princeton, etc green light of the delegates of the press. This is a substantive step (cf recent discussion)

I'm reading Francis Van Den Enden (1602 – 1674), a Dutch utopian thinker and political philosopher, a radical egalitarian (inc gender egalitarianism) and proponent of democracy.
He also has a remarkable life story. Being kicked out by the Jesuits for excessive interest in women (apparently) he started a school on the Singel in Amsterdam, where you can learn Latin by speaking it. He staged plays (also women were allowed to partake, this scandalized the Calvinists) 2/

How do you publish a book with scandalous, shocking ideas and remain anonymous?
An interesting case is Robert Chambers' Vestiges (1844), an evolutionary book published 15 years before Darwin's Origin of Species. 1/ Vestiges presents an early transmutationist (proto-evolutionary theory that synthesized and innovated upon ideas by e.g., Hutton on deep time that already existed in the 18th century. Unique for transmutation unlike other biological theories was the idea that species evolve 2/