Damn TiVo

Stevie, Becca, and I hung out together last night. Those 2 tried to figure out the TiVos and succeeded, for the most part. Honestly, I still don’t know fuck about it. I do see that there’s a few things on BookTV next weekend that I’d like to TiVo. That Richard Dawkins reading is going to be replayed, a Cornel West speech is gonna be broadcast, and there’s part deux of a roundtable discussion about the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution. Ooooh! And there’s a debate featuring William Dembski v. Niall Shanks about intelligent design – go Niall!!! Crush Dembski, see him driven before you, and hear the lamentations of his women!

I sent Laura a much overdue email yesterday. In my last missive to her, I revealed some personal information which has sent us tacking the windy seas of sociology and metaphysics. I related to her the events of 1996/97 and explained their effects on me. Well, tried to, at any rate. In her reply she said that various bits of what I had written about are paramount in her mind and asked several questions. Since my little epiphany involved Immanual Kant’s moral philosophy & tradition, she asked about these things. And so I spent way too much space writing about my conception of the importance of tradition and my relationship to the 2nd Formulation of the Categorical Imperative yesterday. But, hey, she asked.

It was in this spirit that decided that I was just bored with The Life of Pi and decided to move onto something else. (If anyone wants a free copy of it, lemme know.) This something else happened to be Writings on an Ethical Life by Peter Singer. My autographed copy, to boot. Although I only got about 30 pages in, it was fascinating. I need to go back and re-read the bit about defaulting to a form of utilitarianism. He stated that any morality based on the concept of universalization, such as Kant’s, does not rest on a solid rational foundation. This captured my attention because that is part of what happened to me back in ’96/’97 – I began to feel the basis for an ethical life was underpinned by the notion of universalization.

Writing and reading about philosophy really jump started my mind. Have I been acting ethically? How can I act more ethically? I think that Singer would begin by advising me to become a vegetarian. The odds of this are highly unlikely so I’ll have to find alternate methods of achieving a higher level of morality. But I don’t think he’d find a fault with me acting all Kantian’n’stuff, at least not generally.

In other news, Here’s the video shot by those goofballs I met backstage at the Jethro Tull concert last month. There’s some concert footage and an interview with drummer, Big Boy Doane Perry. I see that drug companies have issued an amber alert for Michael Moore. Uh oh! Amy wants to know what I’m doing tonight. It looks like I won’t be going to the cinema after all.