iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

The secret third option is that, thanks to PF Strawson, it can also mean “literally any question about moral responsibility”

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I can’t believe we finally hit the follower goal where you release your ranking of the races

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

And they say conceptual analysis has no real-world problem-solving applications !!

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

As a survivor of a childhood with three siblings, the only explanation I can think of for them not going with “I was JOkingUH, reLAX” is that this was also already banned

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

If you’re prepping Hooters Guys and need a sort of weirdly wholesome palate cleanser, I really loved this piece from a year ago about Hooters waitresses looking out for gay kids who get dragged there by their dads who hope it will turn them straight

nytimes.com

Opinion | Why Dads Take Their Gay Sons to Hooters (Published 2025)

Many fathers and grandfathers take their gay sons to the bar. It’s become a place of refuge, and how that happened is a curious story.

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

My immediate thought was “Does she think she can pull off the equivalent of Obama’s Lion King joke at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner” and oh man, (a) and (b) are the PERFECT specification of the conditions that Obama’s joke met that hers did not

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

God what a nightmare! I know it’s uncomfortably punitive, but is there any part of their grade—“participation,” say—that you could tell them this will impact? (I know you’re more venting than looking for advice—I’m more thinking aloud in horror about encountering this when I next teach again 😭)

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I’m currently reading it for the first time and I have spent it cycling through exactly these three tweets—“I’m just annoyed at this imprecision because I’m an analytic philosopher! I gotta relax!” to “Oh god that’s a reason why X can’t be necessary for Y presented as a reason X can’t be sufficient”

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I recall a high school teacher saying “The iPad is a good idea, but we already know it’ll never sell, because everyone’s making period jokes. That’s the importance of branding” and I must say, years later, thinking on the “i” he neglected, I’ve indeed learned a lesson in The Importance Of Branding

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

How was the music ?? We’re going to London next weekend and briefly considered it as a contender for the one West End show we will see while there (it’s too late now for this trip but never too early to plan for the next)

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I genuinely think there is a continuity between this dismissal of philosophy (as opposed to many dismissals to which I’m sympathetic!!) and the dismissal of modern art as “something my kid could draw,” the response to which—as I learned from an artist friend—is “But they didn’t, did they? DID THEY?”

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Oh man this is great ! My stumbling block is that I also want to encourage them to have the readings on hand in class, and I can’t expect them to print them out—but I’m remembering that, for unrelated reasons, you may have ended up distributing hard-copy versions of your readings this term anyway ??

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the babahuck @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

genuinely cannot imagine anything like this ever happening again.

DSA •
@DemSocialists
X.com
Democratic Socialists of America extends our deepest condolences to the family, friends, and fans of Dolly Parton, a hero of the working-class and an inspiration to us all.

Donald J. Trump
@reaDonald Trump
+
Very sad to report that Dolly Parton, one of the greatest Country singers, and far beyond, EVER, has just passed away. This is a true loss for millions of people. There has never been anyone like her, and never will. In her honor, I am lowering the American flag throughout the United States for a one week period beginning tonight at 6:00PM. Rest in Peace, Dolly! The World loves you. President DONALD J. TRUMP

664480772

Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

She means so much to so many people, and she means so much, specifically, if you’re a girl in East Tennessee and your hair is too big and your body’s too big and your voice is too loud and your clothes are too loud—you can go bigger and louder, and it will be amazing. Ok. I gotta go cry now

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Grew up in East Tennessee loving her music and her style and never stopped. Saw her in concert while in California for grad school and it was like going to a party and also going home. Have bonded over her music with friends from literally every inhabited continent. Thanks for everything, Dolly

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

This is a long way of saying that I have so much admiration for the players who have been forced to respond to this deliberately un-respond-to-able conduct and who are doing an unbelievably heroic job—but also that I’m so furious for them, and for everyone watching them getting this reminder too

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

For anyone who ever wants to not take me seriously “It’s funny for a woman to try to do things” is just there as a rhetorical option in social space and it’s not the worst part of the patriarchy or anything by a long shot but feels so horrible to remember it’s there

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I feel like I’m eight years old again, getting laughed at by my boy cousins, or fifteen and hearing my boy classmates’ jokes, and that’s how they want you to feel. There are versions of racism and homophobia and transphobia that do this too—that make you feel small and humiliated and impotent

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The disruptions of WNBA games by these assholes is a specific kind of sexism that always gives me a horrible helpless tears-in-my-eyes fury-in-the-pit-of-my-stomach feeling—it’s a joke to them, women doing anything is a joke, if you laugh it off they win, if you fight back you make it even funnier

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I feel this. A sphere is one thing, but staying in a horizontal ring means the dust all has to agree on which way is up, which things in outer space shouldn’t do. I know how it works but I don’t have to like it

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Reading a British book that flags “freeway” as an Americanism (in contrast to “motorway”). I’ve always called them “interstates.” How many US-specific words are there for this one thing? Are the differences regional? Where does “highway” fit into this geolinguistic morass? I wish this site had polls

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Going to create a random name generator where every entry is comprised of real English-language common nouns that I, personally, have only ever seen in crosswords and word puzzles. Lantana Lanai. Odeon Callaloo. Ennead Nabob. Pepita “Pipit” Pinniped. Arhat Apparat

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

I’m genuinely fascinated by artifacts like this that sailed through Woke 1.0 completely untouched. No one thought “should we have a single director on here who isn’t a white guy, just for optics.” Or else they thought Carol Reed would fool everyone

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I want YouGov to poll people on how they interpret the relationship between the chance of rain listed for today in the daily forecast and the chance of rain listed for each time in the hourly forecast, because maybe that will finally get someone to explain it to me

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I like that the analogy here suggests that the reason it’s bad to have “encampments” in front of schools is that the kids who are on their way to the school will get distracted by the cool encampment and go there instead

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

My gut says Henrietta is in light green but my instincts aren’t fine-tuned enough to place Dozy

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I can’t believe Natalie Harp was born in 1990. I thought I’d long since aged out of blonde-ingenue-whispering-in-the-ear-of-powerful-old-man eligibility but apparently I have at least two years left. Honestly an inspiration

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Maybe it’s time to get Louise Antony back for one more job

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Last night I watched Psycho for the first time and am having this feeling again. Everybody in the world knows every twist in this movie from the moment they’re born and it still blew my socks off. All I want to talk about today is fucking Alfred Hitchcock’s fucking Psycho. Humiliating

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Insanely valuable to me for the specific intersection of (1) and (3) of “the job market is making me feel so unbelievably bad about my philosophical abilities that I have to let it out but not where anyone who might be hiring for those jobs can see it”

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

This totally makes sense and tracks all our norms around PhD supervisions. If my doctoral advisor had posted my dissertation on her website under her list of her own publications, I’d say, “That’s normal and good, and it’s how we’ve all always done things”

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

👏 EVERY 👏 WORKER 👏 A 👏 MEMBER 👏 OF 👏 THE 👏 BOARD

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Oh wow this wiki section! “You see McCullers was a lesbian and therefore hung out with a lot of gay people” sort of weird how none of the gay people mentioned seem to be lesbians, then

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Today’s racists can’t even keep track of which non-white peoples are constructed as having no culture and which are constructed as having cultures so advanced and alien and dangerous as to justify our perpetual readiness for war, smh

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Good to know, though this in itself is perhaps a good sign! (I’d imagine here too the small class size helps—easier to see the board, ask clarifying questions, request that the instructor slow down for a moment, etc)

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I can’t decide if it’s more in character for General to be (1) lamenting the current flag as a deviation from Betsy Ross’s original 13-star masterpiece or (2) praising the current flag because he thinks Betsy Ross had the incredible foresight to put 50 stars on there right away

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Oh man I LOVE this idea. Have you run into any accessibility issues? I’m wondering what “send the slides ahead of time”-style accommodations would look like if I just wrote on the whiteboard. (Obviously don’t want you to have to dox your students’ access needs in order to answer—just wondering!)

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Speak for yourselves—my local metaphysics store has gone woo-woo and only has “all-natural” kinds. Where am I supposed to go now to buy a tip of my nose and the Eiffel Tower

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

(This is meant as agreement, to be clear—by way of error theory, I’ve just realized how hard it can be to present a view as neither “counterintuitive but true” nor “false but the fact that it seems true tells us a lot about society” but simply “engaged in a dialectic that died millennia before you”)

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Totally agree that “this is alien” is way more interesting than “this is false” or “this is responding to a contemporary question (if you zoom out far enough that the question becomes so abstract as to be boring)”—and talking to historians has impressed on me that it can also be WAY harder to convey

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Today makes four years of being married to my wonderful husband, which means it makes three years of both of us forgetting our wedding anniversary until our parents congratulate us on it

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The solution to bad research only being called out when racists find black people doing it is for more of us to call out more bad research by everybody. As a huge asshole who loves complaining about bad citation practices I first formed this opinion as a self-serving joke but I’m starting to mean it

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Bluesky has the juice, and by “juice” I mean “jokes aimed at the Venn diagram intersection of people who do professional philosophy and people who have been extremely online for at least five years”

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victor @notnaughtknot.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

me after trying to teach undergrads about de morgan’s laws

ikea couch with bisexual colors and lots of hand prints with text that reads when you change or to and nobody believes you

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

This is literally me and—worse—I sometimes also confuse both of them with Weezer

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Musicology Duck @musicologyduck.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

drunk girl trying to tell her friends that she thinks they are “weekend at Bernie’s” with McConnell, but she has got completely the wrong movie and keeps calling it “doing a Fish Called Wanda” with him and I’m dying

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

I learned about some incredible new opinions in that thread, including the type of guy who agrees with the article because he hates Palantir for disrespecting the legacy of JRR Tolkien

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Thleen @kathleenbot.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Around Munich one sees a surprising number of young guys in lederhosen, and my prevailing theory is that it’s because it’s a socially acceptable way for men to wear shorts and count as “dressed up” enough for (say) a date. It’s a cultural-sartorial vacuum that cries out to be filled !!

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