This is an autobiography of the famous Mexican painter Frida. There’s so much to say about this movie — I really like it. It’s special and unique, not your standard Hollywood schlock. I love the camera work — it’s dynamic, with many cool angles. For example, right at the beginning there’s a really creative, abstract puppeteering scene. (Other visually striking shots can be found at 40:20, 1:10, 1:18, 1:46, and 1:56.)

Also, Schopenhauer gets mentioned — I really want to read him. But how can you read Schopenhauer without having read Kant? And how can you appreciate Kant if you don’t know the philosophers who came before him, like Hegel? But how can you appreciate Hegel’s idealism without understanding the fundamental divide between the empiricists and the rationalists? And you can’t understand that without grasping the philosophical model of their age — Christianity. But to appreciate Christianity, you need to understand Neoplatonism. And for Neoplatonism, you need the Stoics. And for the Stoics, Aristotle and Plato. So basically, we need to read the entire Western philosophical canon before we can ever properly read Schopenhauer. Sigh. I got sidetracked.

I love the music — Spanish, Mexican… are these Flamenco or Mariachi influences? Maybe it’s because I play guitar, and because I learned on Spanish flamenco, I have a certain fondness for it. But when I hear the guitar shimmering — it’s pure bliss. The music fits beautifully with the actors’ accents in the English dub, which still sounds distinctly Spanish to me.

I especially appreciated the dance sequence in the first quarter of the film — the cinematography paired with the Mexican music, the subtle eroticism — perfect. Also noteworthy: I loved the imagined dialogues people in the 1920s might have had about socialism and the rise of Stalin.

In general, this movie has such a wonderful vibe — the 1920s in Mexico, with the architecture, the music, the actors, the dialogue, the political atmosphere, the paintings, the drinking, the bars, the parties. 9/10.

A classic—with an interesting philosophical theme: authenticity versus safety and comfort. However, it is more like an impulse than a serious exploration of the significance of metaphysical the truth of reality. 7/10.

Yellowstone is a Western TV show about a group of cowboys protecting their ranch from land developers. I don’t recommend it, though it is better than your average TV show. I like the concept—it’s a kind of fresh mix between a cowboy story and a political drama. The story and characters are engaging and unique.

That said, there are quite a few things I disliked. None of the main characters are virtuous, which gets tiring after a while. I did appreciate the depiction of what I’d consider an approximation of an ideal love between two characters—especially after watching shows like Twin Peaks or Boardwalk Empire, where everyone seems to be cheating all the time.

The show also leans too heavily on convenience rather than properly introducing story elements. Its political undertones—both conservative and environmentalist—are very on-the-nose and full of clichés. Whenever a character “doesn’t get their life” on the ranch or does something “bad,” they’re inevitably from California.

In terms of storytelling craft, it just doesn’t operate on the same level as something like The Wire. You have to suspend your disbelief more often than you should—it feels like the writers took some shortcuts.

I love movies that are stylized like that —- the old-school music playing, the voiceover narration —- the vibe. What do we learn? Never fuck a BPD women. 8.5/10.

David Hume is an empiricist who believes that all of our knowledge stems from experience. I did a summary of parts of his book here.

There are two interesting results from this paper that lead to an intriguing interpretation. The first result is that believing in induction—reasoning based on experience (as opposed to deduction, which is reasoning based on our mind alone, like in mathematics, where you don’t need sensory experiences)—is unjustified. That is a wild claim because we rely on induction all the time in our daily lives: the cereal is empty, so someone must have eaten it; my street is blocked, so there must have been an accident; my room looks trashed, so someone must have come in and done it. All these, and many more, are examples of induction. Yet Hume argues that believing in induction is completely unjustified, and I think his book presents this argument quite convincingly.

The second result is that we are unjustified in believing that cause and effect will hold in the future. This means we can’t know that, in a few minutes, gravity won’t suddenly invert and make everything fly upward for no reason, or that a unicorn won’t suddenly appear in front of us.

Both the rejection of induction and the uncertainty of cause and effect follow directly from Hume’s empiricism. However, these conclusions seem so counterintuitive—so absurd—that this can be interpreted as an example of reductio ad absurdum: if a theory leads to absurd results, then the theory itself must be flawed.

In a way, by highlighting these positions and their absurdity, Hume undermines his own philosophy—reducing it to the absurd and untenable.

What is Hume’s response to this? Not my problem. Instead of reconsidering whether this might invalidate empiricism, he simply accepts it.