Katla on Katja

I don’t have time to write, but apparently Katla has time for all kinds of marginally valuable activities. Here are her latest thoughts:

So apparently Katja has been learning about all kinds of fascinating philosophy stuff for like seven months. Am I the only one to notice that she hasn’t mentioned any of it here? Yes, she’s entitled to spend less time here now that she has more impressive avenues for failing to get her writing read. And it makes sense she would have less time to blog about other topics. But given that she purportedly spends all her time reading and writing about philosophy, I’d expect her to have the odd thing to post on it.

So I asked her what’s up with this. She said that since she’s reading like Ramsay and Quine and people who have been dead for years, presumably anything she has to say about them in her first half hour of thinking about it has already been said. Which just goes to show that she’s completely unfamiliar with philosophy, and strengthens my hypothesis that the whole story is a ruse to hide the fact that she’s run out of interesting things to blog about.

But more amusingly, notice that she doesn’t apply this argument to all the other things she feels entitled to have opinions on. I’m pretty sure she knows that people have studied psychology extensively before. Written about the very issues she writes about. And she hasn’t read them. Same goes for ethics, and public policy, and almost everything that she writes about. She’s nowhere near the cutting edge of these topics. She doesn’t even study them seriously. What’s the difference? Probably just that she doesn’t have to go and have lunch with the psychologists.

Here’s a logical argument for you. Either you readers are familiar with old philosophy or you are not. If you’re not, what does it matter to you whether someone else already wrote something long ago? You haven’t read it. What does it matter to you if what you read here is wrong? You’re probably wrong anyway, so you’re not going to get any wronger. And if you can’t even tell wrong philosophy from right philosophy by reading it, what hope have you got?

If on the other hand you do know about old philosophy, then you get to set Katja straight on it. Which will be fun for you, funny for the rest of us, and even funnier for the rest of us because she will insist on claiming is valuable for her too.

Sounds like win win! What could go wrong? Oh yeah, some philosophers might laugh at you. What a true intellectual. All about interesting ideas. All about saying what needs saying. Really all over that, except when there’s some hint that your status could suffer a teensy weensy bit. At least you’re on the mark about people being hypocrites.