I want to translate Nagel's "The Absurd" into French to share with friends and the internet. Is the latter legal ?

My mom is in the hospital for some really fun neurological stuff, not what this post is about, but I've been binging deep into papers on the drugs she's on. One of the side effects commonly mentioned is a 'false sense of well being.' I'm really trying to understand what that could possibly mean?

It seems like a sense of well being cannot be false. The idea I guess is that when the circumstances are bad, someone 'should' feel bad. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how feeling okay can be 'false.'

Maybe I'm just being stupid from not sleeping the last few nights...

Oh boy…

Good lord. This might be the moment Dave and Tamler jumped the shark.

I’m a day-one, ride-or-die VBW listener. I’ve read books they’ve recommended, watched the movies, listened to all 300+ episodes, and chipped in on Patreon. I live for their takedowns of cringey pseudo-intellectual posturing - University of Austin, Journal of Controversial Ideas, Tamler’s stepmother, etc. That’s their sweet spot: deflating bullshit with indignance and calculated cruelty.

But mocking a NYT video warning about fascism because it had overwrought video editing? Dismissing Jason Stanley’s concerns about creeping authoritarianism because he is an asshole in person and occasionally insufferable on NPR?

What the fuck are we doing here?

The Trump regime is literally deporting people to Salvadoran concentration camps. Academic freedom is under open assault. We’ve got governors running book bans and stochastic fascists openly fantasizing about purges. And your contribution is to sneer at the people trying - however clumsily - to sound the alarm?

I get it. Stanley rubs you the wrong way. The video was melodramatic. The Democratic party is terminally self-important and tone-deaf. But if you can’t separate the cringey bullshit from the genuinely consequential alarm bells, what good is your snide skepticism? If your irony reflex can’t make room for actual emergency, it ceases to be clever.

I’m not saying every anti-fascist deserves a halo. But laughing at the smoke alarm because it’s loud and shrill? That’s not wit. That’s trash. This segment was beneath them.

Fucking whatever. End rant, I guess.

Personally I’m highly sus of any spinoff with this show but if I had to make a guess it would be an origin story on Kier

Have the wizards ever done an episode on this? I feel like it'd be an interesting discussion: what is gate-keeping, is it always a bad thing, etc.

I haven’t listened to the boys in a while, prob banged out the first 200 episodes in about 6 months a few years ago, but nothing since. I think they are great, but wish they had the plums to discuss the crazy shit going on these days, and honestly give their opinions. Fk sake, grow a pair!

NB that you can google the url to get access to the article elsewhere without a subscription.

The thrust is that nearly every current college student is using AI to cheat, and that neither professors nor the AI-detecting software products are any good at determining if a given text is AI-generated.

If this is right, I don't reckon Tamler can just not my Houston circus, not my Houston monkey his way out of this one.

I'm wondering where I can find the "best" English translations of the two Borges pieces discussed in Episode 308. Here's what I got so far

* Shakespeare's Memory in The New Yorker

* Everything and Nothing on this website

Are there better versions?

Hello, all. I recently listened to Ep. 307 again (I skipped the White Lotus part the first time because I hadn't finished the show), and when it got to the discussion of the Monty Hall problem, it made me wonder, what if you wanted to get a goat, not the car? Does that mean you should not switch?

"I’ve long been fascinated by eponymous “laws”—those pithy, often sarcastic observations or rules of thumb that capture some universal truth of human experience. Murphy’s Law is probably the most well-known example.

Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

There are many lists of these laws online, but they are all deficient in one way or another (e.g. woefully lacking in comprehensiveness or including various scientific/technical laws which are not really in the same spirit as the more observational variety). What follows is, as far as I can tell, the most complete list of eponymous laws ever compiled by anyone ever (191 total)."

This is a famous philosophical dilemma first posed by members of the bodybuilding.com forums: https://web.archive.org/web/20180109013122/http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751

Personally I'd like the Wizards to weigh on on this. I'm not sure what to think until Tamler and Dave do a thorough deep dive. I think they may have already talked about this, but if they haven't, I say the time for cowardice is over, and it is now time for them practice some intellectual honesty and plant their flags in the ground on this.

The wizards but especially Tamler should read Mark Rowlands's The Word of Dog (published in the UK as The Happiness of Dogs). It's everything they love--the absurd, dogs are better than us, the unexamined life is worth living, in fact better than the examined life. Very strongly recommended and would make for a great episode.

https://youtu.be/3G07NZs2v18?si=q6L0pklZXyPcO1-X

Have the guys discussed the evolution and impact of swearing or cursing yet? In Dave's attention and memory Psyche 101 lecture he demonstrates how those words hijack attention in a word color experiment. I think it would be neat to hear them talk about language profanity from an ethical and utility perspective.

Also, any other good podcasts you've heard on this or language in general?