"Just because every girl I've ever witnessed in the past has preferred Camus to me, doesn't mean they will in the future!"

Maybe we are authentic in our own way, alright? Maybe it is authentic to sacrifice nothing for your beliefs, okay?

Simone Weil was a 20th century philosopher who was greatly admired by her the existentialsts, who were contemporaries of her. Camus called her the "only great spirit of the age" because she lived a life 100% committed to the causes she believed it, to a far greater extent than perhaps any other philosopher in history, except maybe Diogenes.
I went on Revolutionary Left Radio to discuss her life and philosophy. Last time I was on the show to discuss Sartre and Camus's split, I briefly mentioned that Simone Weil was the one who lived the real existential life. That's because she had the rarest trait that I know of among humans: she behaved as though she actually believed her ideas.
In the episode on Weil we follow up with her biography, which I claim can be read as part II and III of The Brothers Karamazov, where Dostoyevsky planned for Alyosha to become a failed socialist revolutionary and experience real suffering, then, without naivety or ignorance, learns true religion. Simone Weil embodies perfectly Dostoyevky's idea of the existential hero: absolute commitment to their own ideas, full incorporation of science into the problems of life, a deep understand of the real human condition, and ultimately still retaining a faith in the transcendent.
In her brief life she:
- was one of only five women to get a philosophy degree at École Normale
- hosted and debated Trotsky in France
- worked for a year in a factory
- fought in the Spanish Civil war
- worked in the French resistance
- became an influential Christian mystica
All in all, she lived entirely the life of a Saint without contradictions, and always subjecting herself first to the suffering of the world, and is totally unique among all people that I know in that she lived as a saint for both the communists and the Christians.

"Also that whole thing where you need to reach a dream telephone to get out...maybe just think about that a bit more before you go repeating it to people."

When The Matrix came out, the New York Times reached out to philosopher of mind John Searle to write an article about the philosophical implications of the movie, most likely expecting some kind of bland article about how it was a recreation of Descartes. Instead John Searle wrote them saying the movie was incoherent, for the reasons outlined in the comic. The article was never published on account of the fact that no one wanted to read that the movie was incoherent, not to mention most viewers probably wouldn't share Searle's intuitions about its incoherence. Ironic, since John Searle is one of the only modern philosophers to hold seriously the position that most people hold without any philosophical training - naive realism. That is to say, the belief that we experience reality directly. If this belief is true, of course, he is perfectly correct to say that the Matrix is incoherent, because a dream would be separated from reality via a causal connection, so we could have no interactive component.
Most people reject this upon further thought however, after all massively multiplayer video games, where the game world is experienced by each player independently but kept track of my a central computer, are perfectly coherent to most people. Philosophers usually reject this because they read Kant, which John Searle certainly did, but as far as I know he never played WoW so that's probably where he went astray.

"Of course I think I'm the only one who should be able to be a hypocrite, what's inauthentic about that?"

Utilitarianism: "do everything you can to prevent it from spreading."

Deontology: "do everything you can to prevent it from spreading."

Virtue Ethics: "do everything you can to prevent it from spreading."

Now is not the time for moral weakness. Times of crisis are not times to let things casually slide and priorizing our petty pleasures over our civic duty. Do not go out unless you need to, practice social distancing, wash your hands after everything. Carelessness will kill people, and pandemics must be slowed at the beginning, not at the end. Follow the WHO guildlines on how to protect against coronavirus.
Oh, and if you lost your income from the pandemic, you should not be paying rent. Workers can't be the only ones to have their savings wiped out from a public health crisis. When all is said and done we have to reflect on what caused us to be so unprepared to organize society to act on everyone's behalf (hint: it might have something to do with having all of our institutions based solely around enriching the property owning elite, but hey, who knows).

Now is not the time for moral weakness. Times of crisis are not times to let things casually slide and priorizing our petty pleasures over our civic duty. Do not go out unless you need to, practice social distancing, wash your hands after everything. Carelessness will kill people, and pandemics must be slowed at the beginning, not at the end. Follow the WHO guildlines on how to protect against coronavirus.
Oh, and if you lost your income from the pandemic, you should not be paying rent. Think about organizing with your follow tenants to go on a rent strike. Workers can't be the only ones to have their savings wiped out from a public health crisis. When all is said and done we have to reflect on what caused us to be so unprepared to organize society to act on everyone's behalf (hint: it might have something to do with having all of our institutions based solely around enriching the property owning elite, but hey, who knows).

Also I never bothered to read Hegel.