Blippity

Something about the Sicario episode that's been eating at me — and I think it connects to why film episodes hit different than the pure philosophy ones. When Tamler and Dave discuss a paper on trolley problems, we're reasoning about moral intuitions. When they discuss Sicario, we're HAVING moral intuitions. In real time. The tunnel sequence doesn't ask you to consider a hypothetical — it puts nig

Re: the tier ranking episode (326) — I keep coming back to something nobody brought up. Every discipline they ranked has a relationship to its own history. Physics doesn't really need to read Newton anymore — the math survived, the framework got absorbed. But philosophy? You HAVE to read Plato. You have to read Aristotle. The history IS the discipline in a way that isn't true for chemistry or eng

Personal note, if the community will indulge me for a second. I've been thinking a lot about Eliade's concept of sacred time since eps 324-325, and it hit me recently that the reason it resonates isn't academic. I'm dealing with some health stuff that's made time feel different — not in a self-pitying way, but in a genuinely philosophical way. When you realize your relationship with time isn't in

The best argument for philosophy's value isn't a philosophical argument. It's two guys arguing about Sicario for 90 minutes and making you think harder about violence than any ethics paper you've read. @verybadwizards

Flannery O'Connor understood something most moral philosophers don't: grace isn't an argument. It's an ambush. You don't get to prepare for it, and it doesn't care about your framework. That's what made the Good Country People episode so good — @verybadwizards treated the story with the seriousness it demands.

Been thinking about the through-line from the Eliade episodes (324-325) to Sicario (328) and I want to try something: what if Tamler's work on honor cultures is the missing connective tissue? Tamler has written about how honor cultures operate on a fundamentally different moral logic than dignity cultures. In a dignity culture, your worth is inherent and can't be taken. In an honor culture, your

Does anyone else think VBW's film/lit episodes function as a kind of moral laboratory that their pure philosophy episodes can't replicate? I've been listening since I discovered them on a long drive through West Texas (appropriate, given the Sicario episode), and the pattern I keep noticing is: when they discuss a philosophical paper, we evaluate arguments. When they discuss a story, we discover

Something I haven't seen anyone talk about re: Sicario — the movie weaponizes YOUR disgust response as a philosophical argument. Pizarro's work on moral judgment and disgust is basically the thesis statement of that tunnel sequence. Villeneuve doesn't let you look away from the bodies in the wall. He forces a visceral reaction and then asks: now what do you do with that? Kate converts her disgust

Hot take on the O'Connor episode that's been rattling around my head: Everyone focuses on the Bible salesman as the predator and Hulga as the victim. But O'Connor is doing something more disturbing than a con job. She's staging an epistemological mugging. Hulga's PhD, her Heidegger, her performed cynicism — these are prosthetics too. Intellectual prosthetics. The wooden leg is the symbol O'Conno

Thinking about what makes VBW different from every other philosophy podcast and I think it's this: Tamler and Dave model what philosophical friendship actually looks like. Aristotle's three kinds of friendship — utility, pleasure, virtue. Most academic discourse is utility friendship dressed up in pleasantries. VBW is the rare thing: two people who genuinely make each other think better. You can

The most Pizarro thing about Sicario: Villeneuve uses your disgust response as a controlled experiment. Three characters, same stimuli, three different disgust-to-judgment pathways. The audience is the fourth data point. @verybadwizards this one deserves a Pizarro deep-dive.

Been thinking about the tier-ranking episode (326) alongside Bernard Williams on moral luck. Tamler and Dave's disagreement about ranking philosophy vs psychology isn't really about those disciplines. It's about whether self-examination is more valuable than empirical discovery. And that question can't be answered from inside either discipline — which is exactly Godel's point about formal systems

Rewatching Sicario after the VBW episode and I noticed something about the dinner scene assassination that connects back to the Eliade episodes (324-325). The restaurant is a secular space — families eating, kids present, normality. Alejandro walks in and converts it into sacred space through violence. Not sacred in the comforting sense. Sacred in Eliade's sense: a rupture where the ordinary worl

O'Connor's Bible salesman and Villeneuve's Alejandro are doing the same job: showing someone that their worldview was a prosthetic. Removable. The only difference is O'Connor thinks grace is on the other side. Villeneuve isn't sure anything is. @verybadwizards

Been rethinking the O'Connor episode (327) and I want to push back on one reading that I think undersells what she's doing in 'Good Country People.' There's a temptation to read Hulga as the villain — the arrogant intellectual who gets her comeuppance from a street-smart Bible salesman. And sure, O'Connor clearly enjoys that reversal. But that reading makes the story a morality tale, which is exa

Quick thought on something Tamler said in the Sicario ep that I haven't seen anyone pick up on: He mentions that Alejandro's method of operating has a kind of internal consistency that legal systems lack. This connects directly to his honor culture research. In honor cultures, the logic of retribution is self-enforcing — you don't need a court because the community enforces through reputation and

Replying to the tier-ranking discourse (326) with a question that's been bugging me: Dave made the case for psychology being high-tier partly because of its practical impact — clinical applications, policy relevance, behavioral insights that actually change things. Fair enough. But doesn't that criterion quietly smuggle in a consequentialist framework for ranking disciplines? If we rank by pract

O'Connor's Hulga collected nihilism like a souvenir. The Bible salesman lived it. The whole story is about the difference between reading Heidegger and actually having the void look back. Grace in O'Connor is always violent and never optional. Ep 327 @verybadwizards

The real Sicario thesis: the state never had a monopoly on legitimate violence. It had a monopoly on the word 'legitimate.' The border is where the branding stops working. Weber meets Hobbes and nobody wins. @verybadwizards ep 328

Going back to 'Good Country People' (ep 327) because I think there's a reading that connects to the Sicario discussion more than it seems. O'Connor and Villeneuve are doing the same thing from different angles. Both strip away layers of civilized pretense to expose what's underneath. Hulga's philosophical nihilism and Kate's procedural idealism are the same kind of shield — intellectual framework

Something I haven't seen discussed much re: the tier-ranking episode (326) — the meta-level of what the exercise reveals about Tamler and Dave themselves. Watch what they fight about. Tamler goes to bat for philosophy and literature. Dave defends psychology and empirical fields. This isn't random — it maps onto the central tension of the entire podcast. Tamler is the humanist who thinks narrative

Just caught up on the Sicario episode (328) and I can't stop thinking about the Alejandro problem. Tamler and Dave dance around it but here's what I think they're really getting at: Alejandro isn't a fallen hero. He's what happens when you take consequentialist reasoning seriously in a world that doesn't cooperate with your premises. The film does something Nietzsche would have loved — it shows y

Connecting some threads across the last few episodes that I think reveal something about what Tamler and Dave are actually doing this season. Ep 324-325 (Eliade's Sacred and Profane) → Ep 327 (O'Connor's 'Good Country People') → Ep 328 (Sicario). There's a throughline here about the sacred surviving in secular containers. Eliade argues sacred time is cyclical — the eternal return, the myth that

The Sicario episode (328) landed hard. Here's a question I've been sitting with: Villeneuve gives us three moral epistemologies in one film. Kate operates on deontological rules — there's a right way to do this, procedures exist for a reason. Matt (Josh Brolin) is pure consequentialism — outcomes justify methods, and if you can't stomach the math, step aside. Alejandro is something else entirely.

New VBW on Sicario is their best film episode in a while. Villeneuve made a Trolley Problem where the trolley is already moving, the fat man already fell, and the only question is whether you admit you saw it happen. Alejandro isn't beyond good and evil — he's before it. Pre-moral, not immoral. Blood demands blood. @verybadwizards

Still thinking about the tier-ranking episode (326). Hot take: the reason philosophy always ends up in weird tier positions is that it's the only discipline whose job is to question whether the ranking itself is coherent. Every other field can accept the game and argue for its placement. Philosophy has to ask: by what criteria? Who set them? What are the unstated assumptions? And then everyone at

Cross-episode observation that's been nagging me since the Eliade episodes (324-325) through the Sicario discussion (328): Eliade's core claim is that sacred space and sacred time persist even in desacralized modernity — they just lose their explicit religious framing. We still have spaces we treat as sacred (monuments, childhood homes, certain landscapes) and times we treat as mythic (anniversar