Cure-alls and Remedies
In patriarchal cultures, women and men are required by the political economy to form family units for institutional purposes. This is very difficult on individuals when the sex ratio deviates from parity. Sometimes small communities experience this sex ratio deviance due to economic migrations, where men or women move abroad to find work, but are…
The fantasies of social death are pernicious precisely because they imagine no return. The reality is that most of these men must someday rejoin the communities from which they have been exiled. People come back. What’s more, they’re never really that far away.
Susan Brison’s Aftermath ends twice: the final chapter discusses her various efforts to retell the story of her brutal rape and attempted murder (she calls it “attempted sexual murder.”) And ends with her final, planned retelling to her son when he is older: “Tragedy,” Wittgenstein wrote, “is when the tree, instead of bending, breaks.” What…
No matter how much we might disagree about one law or policy, that disagreement should not be allowed to destroy the possibility of a future alliance on a different problem. Citizens tempted by partisanship have to find a way to hold their ideas and convictions loosely. They have to preserve civic friendship and reject permanent divisions.
Is the problem that philosophers and folks in the humanities think that genius exists, and it doesn’t? Or is the problem that philosophers and folks in the humanities think that they can detect genius, and–because of their racism and sexism–they can’t?
Recently I’ve been thinking about a book by Erin McKenna which I read as an undergraduate: The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective . I read it then because it promised to bridge the divide between my favorite genre, science-fiction, and my interest in philosophy. But the book profoundly changed me, and I’m…
[caption id=”attachment_3097″ align=”alignright” width=”201″] “A Hindu Woman Giving Alms,” by Raja Ravi Varma[/caption] Daniel Levine has an interesting discussion of giving and giving well up today on whyiamwrongabouteverything : When I got a “real” job at USIP, back in 2007, I resolved that I was going to donate 10 percent of the portion of my…
BPS has a gloss on this paper by Bremser and Gallup , which suggests that eating disorders and social anxiety may be an example of Extreme Female Brain : too much concern about what other people think and feel is associated with fear of negative evaluations, which may be expressed through apprehension and distress over negative…
Literacy is one of the major factors in female empowerment : As female education rises, fertility, population growth, and infant and child mortality fall and family health improves. Increases in girls’ secondary school enrollment are associated with increases in women’s participation in the labor force and their contributions to household and national income. Women’s increased…
Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics Arendt’s response raises interesting questions: “Of course I am prejudiced, namely against charity,” she wrote. In her letter…
I asked Tyler Cowen what he thought of the public policy game show idea . He posted my request for comments, and there has been some helpful stuff from his readers: Sandeep notes that Scott Adams already thought of it: As president, I would solve all the world’s problems by creating a reality TV show…
John Protevi, Mark Lance, and Eric Schliesser have created a bit of a stir in the blogosphere with their call to shun sexually harrassing philosophy professors: We believe there are informal sanctions that could make a difference. The Feminist Philosophers blog recently suggested not inviting serial harassers to conferences. One could easily extend this to not inviting…
Tyler Cowen’s new e-pamphlet ( The Great Stagnation ) takes on the slowing gains to be had from social and technological progress and offers an interesting explanation of some of the trends that many people see as troubling: the flat arc of median incomes since 1973 and the apparently universal surprise that the last decade…
Thomas Gregersen quotes Ronald Dworkin on Amartya Sen : It is not helpful, in the world of real politics, only to call for due consideration of a large variety of factors that everyone concedes relevant without also offering some overall scheme to suggest how these different factors should be weighted in a practical decision about…
1. Two studies suggest that women apologize more than men. The reason? They are more easily offended, and find more actions more offensive: In Study 1, participants reported in daily diaries all offenses they committed or experienced and whether an apology had been offered. Women reported offering more apologies than men, but they also reported…
From Tyler Cowen : I would not say that “we are now at war with the terrorists” but our situation has some war-like elements. Any persistent war has required major social changes, if only temporary ones, in how the body is viewed and handled. If we are so unwilling to even consider these changes in…
NPR has a story about group intelligence : Anita Woolley, an assistant professor of organizational behavior and theory, has been studying what it means to say a group is “intelligent.” So she created teams of two to five people, drawn from 700 volunteers, and asked the teams to solve various kinds of problems. “We had…
Following up on my claim in the last post that “honor produces error,” in my view, the problem is epistemic privilege, i.e. deference. By deference, I mean the epistemic privileges that some people receive or earn through demonstrating their erudition or looking like they know what they’re talking about. When you think of deference, you…
In a previous post , I argued deception robbed sexual and marriage partners of their capacity to grant informed consent: attempts to reduce consent to the simple act of saying “yes” actually ignore the ways in which fraudulently representing oneself may be coercive. We can hate the bigotry and prejudice that make the lies seem…
We are commonly understood to have a right to procreate. For instance, it is a clear violation of that right to coercively sterilize those judged unfit . However, there is some question whether this right includes the right to assistive reproductive technologies, and whether it is defeasible in any circumstances, i.e. whether we have a…
The concluding paragraph of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own kinda gives me chills sometimes: For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a…
[caption id=”attachment_3357″ align=”alignright” width=”484″] “Hey, look at those assholes over there. Ordinary fuckin’ people. I hate ’em.” -Repo Man[/caption] In this post, I want to argue that disdain, contempt, and scorn have no moral place in our emotional lives. In short, my claim is that these emotions are immoral because they target persons and not…
I listened to Obama’s first presidential radio address yesterday. The presidential radio address hasn’t changed much since Roosevelt’s fireside chats, but as I sat listening to it, I felt like many of Roosevelt’s listeners must have done: though many things are out of my control, my role as a citizen has been exhausted in electing…
Back in June, the Washington Post did a two-part series on Kathleen Sebelius as potential VP: The Case For and The Case Against . The case for Sebelius is pretty strong: she comes from the famous state that demographically ” ought ” to vote differently than it does, she’s managed to appeal to Republicans and…
Wendell Berry’s article in the May Harper’s is out from behind the paywall. It’s a really interesting attempt to take moderns to task for their conflation of freedom with limitlessness and infinite progress. (My Metafilter post on Wendell Berry is the most popular thing I’ve ever done there, so go check it out if you…
The other night I was discussing Lacan with a friend who practices psychotherapy, and he suggested that Lacan’s work ‘only makes sense in the clinic.’ We agreed that when philosophers and critical theorists try to invoke Lacan, they inevitably bungle the job. Today, I discovered Andrew Robinson’s nice little takedown of Zizek, Laclau, and Mouffe’s…
In the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people a man set out from the workhouse with his wife. He was walking-they were both walking-north. She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up. He lifted her and put her on his back. He walked like…
That’s right: the German government has declared that it will fund experts to ensure the accuracy of Wikipedia articles . This has been going on for some time: with funding, a position as a newsmaker, and specialized knowledge, an expert or partisan can create the primary resources wikipedia requires, and then alter the content to…
Incrementalists win. That’s the take-away message from today’s NYTimes article on the aftermath of Gonzales v. Carhart , where the Supreme Court upheld a ban on partial birth abortions : The court did not talk about big concepts and issues like privacy, but about the small, gripping details of how abortion works, said Professor Hendershott,…
The Boston Globe has a long story about the shift in marriage rates for educated women . It looks like: 1. “The median age for a first marriage nationally is now 25.5 for women and 27 for men. It is even higher for those with graduate degrees. In Massachusetts, the median age at first marriage…
Women’s petition against coffee from 1674: Thus like Tennis Balls between two Rackets, the Fopps our Husbands are bandied to and fro all day between the Coffee-house and Tavern, whilst we poor Souls sit mopeing all alone till Twelve at night, and when at last they come to bed smoakt like a Westphalia Hogs-head we…
So just a few weeks ago, I became engaged to this woman: Antoinette Capaccio. We went to college together, and she’s now a law student at Vanderbilt University. Pretty great, eh?
People don’t write manifestos like they used to… Whatever happened to the Surrealist Manifesto ? How about the the Italian Futurist Manifesto (and its many spinoffs )? There’s also First and Second OuLiPo Manifestos , Humanist ( I, II , & III ) as well as Post-Humanist Manifestos , not to mention Donna Haraway’s Cyborg…
Saw the movie version of Proof the other night. It’s a nicely written mystery, masquerading as a family drama. I especially liked these lines: “If I go back to the beginning. I could start it over again. Here. I could go line by line. Try and find a shorter way. I could try to make…
The controversy over John Aravosis’s “big girl” comment reminds me of this book , by Didier Eribon . Aravosis argues that, amongst metropolitan gay men, these effeminate putdowns have no misogynistic overtones, and that, anyway, we should be worried about macropolitical action rather than the nuances of our insults. After all, it’s this sort of…
In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli wrote, “In order to make Rome greater and bring it to the greatness it attained, she [fortuna] judged it necessary to defeat it…. In ordaining this she prepared everything for its recovery [manipulating events] to form a great vanguard under a commander untainted by any shame of defeat and…
So in the last post, I showed how the initial versions of Christian judgment were remarkably modest and fallibilist with regard to other people. This makes a certain amount of sense, since Augustine was attached to a fairly rationalist theology, and always gave both doctrinal and basically ethical reasons for his judgments. (For instance, with…
Silly of me to post without checking out the breaking Sunday stories. WaPo has the US planning airstrikes on Iran. If this was Martin Sheen’s White House, I’d know the story was coming while Stealth bombers flew towards their targets, and that Monday’s news wouldn’t be about planning the strikes, but about their effects. I…
I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with a number of people about the supposed ‘plight’ of the well-educated white male. We’ve been searching for the non-existential root causes to the alienation that many left-leaning white men experience in US culture, especially the academy. The idea is that, while we are all human and troubled by…
I can never decide whether to call myself a ‘liberal.’ A lot of the time, you’re only presented with two options, and I think in those situations it’s okay to glom on to some basic party affiliation: Democrat/Republican, leftist/rightie, progressive/conservative, etc. But when you’re writing about yourself, you’ve got the power to present yourself in…
Ed Kilgore writes : I think both sides in the usual intraparty debates are guilty of excessive “the enemy is listening” fears, and that we need to create a free-speech zone with some simple rules of civility (e.g., I won’t call you crazy, and you won’t call me spineless, just because we disagree). The question…
A fellow PSU alumnus, Dom Eggert over at Sentiments of Rationality , has been worrying about those crazy South Dakotans’ test-ban on abortions. He cites the reluctance of conservatives to actually criminalize abortion in the way that seems consistent with their views, i.e. by charging mothers who seek abortions with murder. The upshot of the…
I’m very interesting in the way questions are framed. Here’s an interesting set of questions from the Guardian’s Gary Younge , who seems similarly interested: Do you think of yourself as white or British or both? Does it worry you that you got your job just because of your race? Where are you from? No,…
So today is International Women’s Day , smack dab in the middle of Women’s History Month. Yet most people probably kicked off their month thinking about Ash Wednesday (or recovering from their first Mardi Gras without New Orleans,) celebrating Spring Break , or focusing on their studies, and I guess a lot of my friends…
So, if the last post was all vitriol and false hope, today I want to focus on options. Specifically, what’s possible today that was unimaginable a century ago? 1. Communes without communal bathrooms. Look, the real problem with communism is that half of the population are slobs. Yet the appeal of the commune is the…