Almost anyone can, with careful prose and years of practice, take a brilliant idea and make at least an okay story out of it. But taking an awful idea and making it work- that's the sign of a true master (is it? I dunno, but it sounded cool).And who knows, maybe some of them will … Continue reading Deliberately awful ideas for aspiring authors

One of the funniest things on the internet is when people claim that Facebook deleting their posts is forbidden by the first amendment of the United States. As a matter of contemporary legal theory, they haven’t got a leg to stand on. Yet I want to argue that maybe, in a better world, they’d be … Continue reading You don’t have a first amendment right not to be censored on Facebook, but maybe you should.

In the past I've written both an essay on the philosophical aspects of what I learnt from OCD and another essay on the practical measures that helped me keep it under control. Now I wanted to convey the little life lessons I learnt from decades of chronic mental pain. Stuff that isn't directly about the … Continue reading Life lessons I squeezed from a lifelong severe mental illness

A little comment on Australia's recent tax cuts- please share around: And finally, I decided to face merge my two celebrity crushes (crushi is the correct plurarl actually- ed), Felix Biderman and Sufjan Stevens and it made Timothee Chalamet?

I don’t know if the views I outline here are novel or not- I asked some professional ethicist friends and they weren’t sure. I know that G.E. Moore said somewhat similar things, but I still need to do some reading to discern how similar. That’s next on the list once I get over this fever. … Continue reading A different consequentialism

"And now it frightens me, the dreams that I possessTo think I was acting like a believer, when I was just angry and depressed" -Sufjan Stevens, Ascension By rationalising ethics I mean finding an "ethical" argument for what you wanted to do anyway. You might think that a disadvantage of consequentialism as compared to deontology … Continue reading What form of ethics is the least subject to rationalising what you wanted to do anyway?

So you may be wondering why it has taken me so long to post the results of the Justice and Mercy survey. The truth is, the results themselves were uninteresting. Negative results all round, almost astonishingly so. There was no association between any of the demographic factors and mercy. There was no association between your … Continue reading Results of the Justice & Mercy Survey

Details have been changed to protect all involved. I I want to protest against a tendency I have seen, in some parts of the left, to deny that sometimes mental illness diminishes responsibility for very serious crimes. This tendency is well intentioned. The intention is to deny hurtful and dangerous stereotypes that mentally ill people … Continue reading Violence, mental illness and culpability- a left-wing perspective