Tag: society

Adults are the new kids

3 experiences this morning:

Grocery store. (apparently) Single adult buying: Sprite, oreos, white bread, Jif, Welch’s, Fritos. Grabbed a $6 chocolate bar at the register.

Hardware store. 50 year old man doing card tricks for the clerk.

In the street: 10s of cars all costing more than $65K.

They’re kids. But with (even more) money.

this is not surprising at all

Decline of Violence

the prevalence of violence has been declining. cause unknown, but cause for optimism.

What went right? No one knows, possibly because we have been asking the wrong question—”Why is there war?” instead of “Why is there peace?” There have been some suggestions, all unproven. Perhaps the gradual perfecting of a democratic Leviathan—”a common power to keep [men] in awe”—has removed the incentive to do it to them before they do it to us. Payne suggests that it’s because for many people, life has become longer and less awful—when pain, tragedy, and early death are expected features of one’s own life, one feels fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. Wright points to technologies that enhance networks of reciprocity and trade, which make other people more valuable alive than dead. Singer attributes it to the inexorable logic of the golden rule: the more one knows and thinks, the harder it is to privilege one’s own interests over those of other sentient beings. Perhaps this is amplified by cosmopolitanism, in which history, journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the contingent nature of one’s own station, more palpable—the feeling that “there but for fortune go I.”

The End of -ISMs

Racism, Sexism, Species-ism, Age-ism, Elitism, Fundamentalism. These –isms, and others, have fueled hatred, inspired war, justified torture, divided countries, prevented education, increased disparities in wealth, and destroyed civilizations. There is a single underlying cause: a brain that evolved an unconscious capacity to seek differences between self and other, and once identified, seek to demote the other in the service of selfish gains. This is the bad news.

The good news is that science is uncovering some of the details of this destructive capacity, and may hold the key to an applied solution. If we play our cards correctly, we may see the day when our instinctive prejudice toward the other will dissolve, gaining greater respect for differences, expanding our moral circle in the words of Peter Singer.

Postmodernism

If I ever want tenure somewhere this will come in handy 😉

Socialist realism, capitalist discourse and Marxism

John la Fournier
Department of English, Carnegie-Mellon University

Jacques R. Long
Department of Sociology, University of Illinois

The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator.

2008-05-15: Oy. Pomo discovers satellite imagery, with typically inane results.
2008-11-11: The spread of postmodernism nicely tracks the rise of all sort of illiteracies. It also nicely explains why a US college education leaves you laughably clueless.
2009-03-29: Taking down pomo fools a few notches is always good fun.

As far as I know, the only person ever to win a Nobel Prize in Literature for writing that was explicitly anti-obscurantist was Bertrand Russell. (Orwell might have gotten one had he lived longer; maybe a case could also be made for Churchill.) In retrospect, Russell’s clarity seems to have been a serious mistake: had he learned to write as cryptically as his student Wittgenstein, his reputation today would’ve been vastly greater. Alas, more recent “public rationalists”—such as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Richard Feynman, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins—have repeated Russell’s mistake of boringly saying what they mean, and for that reason, have failed to produce any serious literature. Almost by definition, people who like rationality are going to want to write dry, methodical arguments, rather than novels or poems that bypass the neocortex and directly engage the emotions. But the consequence is that they’ll tend to cede the emotional field without contest to the woo merchants. If you want to defend yourself against obscurantist sharks, you need to enter the dark waters where the sharks live. That’s why, in my view, the rare efforts to do that—to right the historical imbalance, to sing Modus Ponens from the rooftops—are actually worth something.

2013-09-24: A lot of academia isn’t actually doing anything useful. Shocking, I know.

What do porn star Ron Jeremy, Max Weber and Michael Jackson have in common? Very little — except the 3 names appear in the list of references for a recent hoax paper by a group of Serbian academics who, fed up with the poor state of their country’s research output, scammed a Romanian magazine by publishing a completely fabricated article.

The paper is replete with transparent gimmicks — obvious, that is, had anyone at the publication been paying attention — including a reference to the scholarship of Jackson, Weber, Jeremy and citations to new studies by Bernoulli and Laplace, both dead more than 180 years (Weber died in 1920). They also throw in references to the “Journal of Modern Illogical Studies,” which to the best of our knowledge does not and never has existed (although perhaps it should), and to a researcher named, dubiously, “A.S. Hole.” And, we hasten to add, the noted Kazakh polymath B. Sagdiyev, otherwise known as Borat.

2015-05-25: This article tries hard to find value in abstruse nonsensical writing like Foucault, eventually grasping for “poetry”, but ultimately failing. A better explanation is “idea effort justification”, the mistaken belief that obscure texts are profound because you had to work so hard for them.
2017-04-04: Pomo is cancer

The irrational and identitarian “symptoms” of postmodernism are easily recognizable and much criticized, but the ethos underlying them is not well understood. This is partly because postmodernists rarely explain themselves clearly and partly because of the inherent contradictions and inconsistencies of a way of thought which denies a stable reality or reliable knowledge to exist. However, there are consistent ideas at the root of postmodernism and understanding them is essential if we intend to counter them. They underlie the problems we see today in Social Justice Activism, undermine the credibility of the Left and threaten to return us to an irrational and tribal “pre-modern” culture.