Bad Philosophy

Picture this. You’re at a swingin’ house party, it’s 1 AM, and you are royally plastered. A witty, well-styled person ambles up and you two have a fantastic conversation. As the person walks away, you realize you have no clue as to the person’s gender or name. In a drunken haze that miraculously still leaves you conscious of controversial linguistic etiquette, you calmly turn to your nearest fellow party-goer and ask, “Excuse me, do you happen to know eirs name? E and I had a wonderful talk but I never got it.” Presuming this partygoer clearly understood your drunk ass over the Arcade Fire blaring through the smokey darkness, you just avoided an awkward social misstep through the cunning use of the Spivak pronoun. Congratulations!

This week we delve into the philosophy and linguistics of gender-neutral pronouns, with all (or most) of the social and political baggage that entails. Here to weigh in on the subject were BF veterans Matt Legler and Kevin Saunders alongside resident linguist Kiki Canon. So whether you believe that the moon is a flaming homosexual guy, that kids should be raised without others knowing eir sex, or that ICQ was the greatest means of communication the human race will ever invent, dust off that copy of Dreamsnake and come aboard for our trip into the gender-neutral wild…

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This Week’s Post-show Song Pimpage: “Talkin Gender Neutral Blues” by Kristin Lems

Question Answered in This Week’s Formsqueeze: Best/Worst shows currently on TV?

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America's Got Talent, AOL, beauty, Bible, Boing Boing, Breaking Bad, Chinesh, comics, Community, Dawkins, Dreamsnake, English, fan fiction, feminism, Freewebs, Fringe, Game of Thrones, gender, gender equality, gender neutral pronouns, Geocities, God, grammar, Greek, Hawaii Five-O, iPhone, Kevin, Kiki, language, linguistic, Mad Men, Matt, Netscape, philosophy of language, Prodigy.net, Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Sesame Street, Spanish, Star Trek, Stephen, Super 8, Toddlers and Tiaras, Tripod, TV, UPS, Vonda MacIntyre

Since the dawn of computer networks, there have been those who push past the permissions, the boundaries, and the firewalls to penetrate deep within the forbidden corners of cyberspace. Recently, a group of these hackers calling themselves LulzSec has taken it upon themselves to bring some highly public meme-infused humor back into this practice. They’ve hacked Sony, PBS, the FBI, and most recently Bethesda, releasing internal server information, network maps, and many thousands of usernames, email addresses, and passwords in the name of exposing these companies’ poor security. But should we praise or prosecute these pirates of the pr0ntubes? Kevin and I tackle this and other cyber-morality questions in our latest episode. So grab your top hat and set sail for fail, it’s BF time!

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This Week’s Post-show Song Pimpage: “Secrets from the Future” by MC Frontalot

Questions Answers in This Week’s Formsqueeze:

Governmental Artificial Intelligences

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artificial intelligence, blackhat, Boing Boing, book code, brain, Colossus: The Forbin Project, computer security, consequentialism, crime, emergence, encryption, ethics, Facebook, FBI, Fox.com, Gawker, Hacker's Manifesto, Hackers, hacking, IBM, identity theory, intelligence, IRC, Kevin, Kevin Mitnick, Let Me Google That For You, Libya, lulz, LulzSec, memes, mind, morning, MySQL, network security, Nintendo, passwords, PBS, planting, porn, Pron.com, Sean Connery, singularity, Sony, Stephen, trolling, vigilantism, Watson, whitehat

Theatre Alert! Trey Parker and Matt Stone (of South Park infamy) recently launched a Broadway musical that’s getting the exact opposite flavor of attention their work usually garners. Praise is sweeping across the play from all directions. However, we love our dirt here at BF, so in this episode we explored the ‘dark’ side of this happy-go-lucky romp into postcolonial issues. Here to explore this subject with us IN PERSON were BF mainstay Kevin Saunders and newly minted doctoral student Amy Guenther. So put on your best proselytizing tie and come with us through the war-torn race issues of Uganda all the way to the war-torn race issues of Baltimore and back again.

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This Week’s Post-show Song Pimpage: “Way Down in the Hole” by The Neville Brothers

Questions Answered in this Week’s Formsqueeze:

Latin American Countries, Explaining Sound

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Africans, Amy, Austin, Avenue Q, Baltimore, broadway, David Simon, drugs, education, epistemology, Jackass, Johnny Knoxville, Kevin, Matt Stone, Mormonism, NPR, post-colonialism, racism, sound, South Part, Special Olympics, Stephen, synesthesia, Texenza, The Book of Mormon, The Ringer, The Wire, Tony Awards, transcription, Trey Parker, Uganda

Attention, everyone! After careful deliberation over a leftover half-sub from Firehouse, I decided last night to buckle up and install MediaWiki on our server. That means we’ve now got a full-fledged, Wikipedia-style wiki right here just for our use. We invite you to use this wiki to help us create an ongoing catalog of information on the show, its people, its history, and much more. Adding this wiki is a logical move for the show, and honestly should have been done much sooner. We’ve long needed a platform for things like detailed show notes, crowd-sourced episode transcriptions, and in-depth etymologies for the many BF-isms.

Be warned though, not all the functionality you know and love from Wikipedia is quite ready to go yet. I’m still in the process of figuring out the whole infrastructure of MediaWiki pretty much from scratch. It’s all well-documented but… frak if there isn’t a crap-load of documentation to slog through. That’s why in addition to asking for your help in adding first-order content to the wiki on any and all topics BF, I’m requesting some help with the second-order structure and construction of the site. These include things like porting Wikipedia functionality, designing and implementing templates for episode show note pages, and so forth. If you’ve got chops in this arena, please shoot me an email and we’ll see about getting you some extra permissions.

For those of you who’d like to avoid the gobbledeegook code and just do some good old-fashioned content writing, head on over to the link below and get yourself registered. This is your chance to make a lasting and meaningful contribution to the show. I mean, we’ll still accept your money. We’re not that crazy. We’re just all about giving you the means to build something with us and with your fellow fans. We think that’s really special, and we’re excited to see what you decide to create, highlight, and expand upon. (I suggest starting with a list of Kevin-isms. The world needs to know!)

Knock yourselves out:

Enter the Official BFWiki

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