A pretty normal amount, honestly. 5-7 hours a night unless I'm having unrelated issues and I usually get to work around 7 AM. Occasionally things kick up when there's a project or production deadline approaching and I have to work overtime, and I have to be willing to pull what overtime is necessary if it gets that bad, especially if work hasn't gone as smoothly as planned, but I don't live life fueled by Red Bull and pixie stix most of the time... it's mainly pretty reasonable and regular. I could probably be a more dedicated worker but I don't get many complaints either. I work for an outsourcing company and they'd push me to the brink to get the most out of me if they had to, lol, but the company I'm contracted out to is big on emphasizing work-life balance and my immediate supervisors are great people. I just took short-notice PTO this week to take my dog to herding lessons, of all things (granted, it was a really good lesson).

Well, kind of. I don't really consider myself an "artist" but I enjoy sketching, etc. and have a certain amount of natural aptitude that I could develop further if I put my back into it, "further" meaning just "further" and not "into soul-shattering self-expression or a lucrative career." I only sit down and put something together once in a very great while anymore. I'm just pleased when I can make things look like things.

Anyway, some example drawings/compositions and stuff. My aesthetic is kind of weird... I like the half-finished, rough, juxtaposed look, and I prefer mixed media, but I also like minimalism. Nothing I "finish" ever even appears polished, which is partially due to preference (and partially to ineptitude, and partially to impatience).

The last one is the most recent, and just a cellphone photo... once I'm fine with the level of detail the plan is to scan, darken the lines, print copies to experiment with and then add some watercolor highlights in red and yellow.

The overall thrust of my ethics, in philosophical terms, is utilitarian - when it comes up I loosely refer to myself as a weak rule utilitarian.

But in philosophy-educated circles I often get argued with that I'm really a deontologist (because all rule utilitarians are deontologists) or that I'm really an act utilitarian (because rule utilitarianism that isn't secretly deontology is just act utilitarianism). It's all very funny because the things I apparently really am are kind of in opposite directions along an axis.

Having looked into various usages of the terms I've come to the conclusion that the definitions of all three have expanded / bled into one another to the extent that there is flat-out overlap between them, and the arguments are mostly about which label to apply to a static position with static implications. The arguments about what the position "really" is have no real-world impact and "weak rule utilitarian" gets across that I am more or less a utilitarian with emphasis on the need to formulate principles for general cases in order to make utilitarianism more broadly practicable, but also allowing for exceptions to general rules under circumstances where a deviant course of action is guaranteed to maximize benefits moreso than the general rule. So I keep using it, for now anyway.

I fall under the consequentialist umbrella because I think most actions/states implied by the other formal ethical positions I'm semi-familiar with can be alternatively justified in terms of their consequences. I think I'm technically a relativist, but don't remember that that excludes me from promoting wide scale adoption of certain ethical standards - it just removes universality as an option for argumentation.

Even though I like knowing how to (roughly) couch my ethical perspective in the proper academic terms, I do think that philosophy as an historical and intellectual practice has a really troubling tendency to devolve into nitpicky meaninglessness all too often.

I learned to do this in "art school" and need/want to get back into it again, eventually. My list of things to get back into again is long. I was always much sloppier about it than you seem to be!

"Evil" can really mean anything from extreme wrong to innate desire to oppose "good", its colloquial use is very free-flowing, so there is a lot to be confused about by it linguistically (or else I'm just easily confused). Supposedly its original meaning was closer to what we'd associate with "cruel" or "harmful," which is nicely enough more concrete. To me, though, even if you're using it in one of the less dramatic contemporary senses to mean something extraordinarily immoral, in order for the meaning to have much reach I would still need to be convinced of the existence of a more or less objective moral system, which is a whole discussion in and of itself. Maybe if it were taken to mean something like "innate desire to cause pain or behave cruelly" I could see it having traction. I don't think it's usually used that way, though.

I mainly avoid it in speaking and thinking because I find that it has the net result of dehumanizing very human flaws and misdeeds. I also think that that's part of the concept's appeal when you get right down to it. Using it often allows us to put distance between our idea of ourself and the nasty things a meaningful class we belong to (person) is capable of. The word and its various definitions/uses are more a vehicle for that distancing than any one fixed thing most of the time, from what I see, so unless distancing is part of the goal of the discussion I think its usefulness is usually limited, provable in some way or not. In a way I think the idea of it tends to trivialize tragedies more, by implicitly trivializing our relationship(s) to them and their frequent causes.

Not that I've read all of the articles, but I agree that the "about" section is pretty refreshing. Your motivations for blogging are interesting and it's nice to see them laid out that way.

About which thing?

I mostly avoid whipping out knowledge of logical fallacies during actual arguments in favor of just trying to explain why what's being said doesn't work in my mind, partially to avoid the temptation to treat the labels as trump cards and use them incorrectly in the process as I often see others do, and to avoid derailing discussions into debates about argumentative structure... but geez this is cute.

And valuable, because even if it's not my style to put a post-it note on a fallacy every time I think I spot one, it's still important to be able to spot them.

"Metaphors We Live By" - Lakoff & Johnson, & "Lee Miller: A Life" - Carolyn Burke

I put a hard limit on watching TV and playing video games recently to help build better reading habits. I never stopped enjoying it, but was turning to 'easier' alternatives to distract myself from life and stuff after work every day. It's helping so far.

Along the lines of what others have said... since they were using frequency of sex to approximate the male partner's sexual valuation of the woman rather than measuring that directly somehow, what this really tells us is that if a marriage is otherwise committed, sex and satisfaction seem to accompany one another, and if it's otherwise rocky (in that that one party at least is not so committed) sex and dissatisfaction seem to accompany one another - for the women involved in the (rather small) studies, anyway.

Their ideas about why that might be are just ideas, it seems like, since they don't mention asking the women why they were more/less dissatisfied under their circumstances. I can think of enough alternative explanations that unless they monitored more confounding variables/took more direct measurements than they say they did, I'm not going to take the headline too literally. It seems overreaching.

And yeah, someone you're married to (and presumably have a history with) who isn't committed to you is a whole different animal than a "short term relationship", or can be, so the two situations should not be conflated in the conclusions proposed, though they appear to have been.

Note: This is based on a reading of the abstract only, I haven't found a non-paywalled version of the full text.