"Okay but would you still love me if counterfactuals had no truth value?"

The girlfriend is using similar arguments to Donald Davidson's Swampman thought experiment, which he argues that identity much follow a causal chain of events, and physical composition isn't enough.

"We are still allowed to do philosophy in our spare time though, right?"
"As long as it doesn't benefit our employers, then...well, although...wait a minute GOD damnit shut up!"

There is a massive University Strike going on in the UK right now, over pay, pensions, and working conditions. This comic was inspired by philosophers like Liam Bright, whose first instinct was to take to twitter and start philosophizing about how best not to philosophize.
It's a particularly tricky problem, of course, to know if you are breaking a strike when your work is entirely mental. For example, you might not be able to read or learn anything, because clearly a large portion of your job is knowing things. Reading and learning about your subject tangibly benefits the university. Maybe it would be fine if you re-read the same book again during work hours, after the strike was over? Ultimately though, you really can't even think about things. What if you have a clever philosophical idea during the strike? Certainly you wouldn't be able to wait and publish it after the strike was over, because the main labor was done during the strike. Could you re-do the labor of "coming up with the idea"? Unlikely. The best thing to do, in my opinion, would be to just smoke a lot of weed constantly, because then you'd be reasonably certain that all the ideas you came up with were really stupid.

After realizing his error, he killed himself. Not out of a sense of honor though, but because he calculated that it would cause the most happiness.

Still a better ref than the one in the actual game though, amirite England fans?

For Baudrillard, a Simulacrum is a sort of simulation of a simulation that no longer directly relates to reality in any real way. Usually this is about how the media presents a shared reality to us, often about things like war. A mundane example might be something like grape flavored candy. You might notice it doesn't really taste much like grapes, also it doesn't use any grapes in the production of it. We can assume it originally was designed to taste like grapes, however supposedly the type of grape it was simulating is no longer around, so grapes we buy at the store don't taste like what the first candies were even going for. So if a new candy is coming out today they probably try to make it taste like "purple grape flavor" rather than grapes itself, because that's what the consumer is actually expecting. The connection to reality is therefore severed, and grape flavor is a pure simulacrum.
The same, I think, more or less goes for diving in football. Players seem to show behaviors to me that are totally unique to the sport for simulating pain. They roll around in a very particular way, have certain shared mannerisms, etc. I believe they are for the most part no longer showing a simulation of pain, but rather a simulation of other football player's behavior when trying to draw a foul. You can see how this situation would come about, obviously. When football started players began to notice that the refs would award fouls more easily if they visibly displayed their pain, so they began simulating pain. Then they probably began to notice that some players were better at drawing fouls, so they would simulate how those players acted. Over a hundred years of diving the performance has become its own art form, with little to no connection to reality: a simulacrum. Interestingly enough, they perform this simulacrum whether or not there was a foul, and whether or not they are actually in pain. This is because they aren't trying to display pain, even if it is real, they are trying to show the referee that a foul has a occurred, so they perform the act of "footballer in pain" even as they are actually in pain, and in fact are often in a weird way even masking their genuine natural reaction to the pain to do so.

Foucault was definitely using some beads for assistance when he wrote Discipline and Punish, that's all I'm going to say.

All I want for Christmas is a violent revolution to overthrow the bourgeoisie!