16 ms·

The Provocations of Camille Paglia

165 points by amanuensis 7y ago

heyiforgotmypwd 7y ago
Props to David Yager for standing up to the kind of people (sheltered kidults, really) Thunderf00t calls out for crybullying. The world needs more debate and engagement of controversial figures (regardless if anyone agrees with them and especially if many don't), not fascist-style/childish de-platforming. I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to say it. - Evelyn Beatrice Hall (not Voltaire)
hos234 7y ago
"The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind" We live in interesting times. Teachers of the Paglia calibre, have become visible to larger and larger numbers of students worldwide. And that raises the bar for all those who claim to Teach.
weiming 7y ago
"Behind that devotion to heterodoxy lies something softer. She admitted that she’s chosen to censor herself in front of her students [...] I don’t want to upset them. The historical material is too painful for a music class,” she said." I don't know if this is representative of the current times, but sad if so.
- simonh 7y ago
  Her primary goal is to teach the students. You don't serve a novice mechanic well by asking them to build a Formula 1 racing engine from scratch on their first day in the machine shop. She's not saying that material is not worthy of study, clearly she thinks it is because she did teach it in class previously. She just found that the material didn't provide the best platform for education in the subject relevant to the students. EDIT: Note that the reason for changing the material was not due to the students being soft. It was because "The historical material is too painful for a music class". The point of the class was to study music, not the historical context of the lyrics, so selecting such historically charged material distracted from the actual purpose of the course.
  - jgmjgm 7y ago
    I think that was precisely the point of the parent comment.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    So studying the musical theory of say "strange fruit" (Meeropol) rather than including the historical context?
- ternaryoperator 7y ago
  >The historical material is too painful for a music class And yet in the face of great suffering, music can speak when words are insufficient.
Animats 7y ago
“These minor French theorists have had a disastrous effect on American education. Lacan encourages pompous bombast and Foucault teaches cheap cynicism, while Derrida’s aggressive method, called deconstruction, systematically trashes high culture by reducing everything to language and then making language destroy itself.” She's right, but it really upsets many academics for someone to say that. Good.
- erokar 7y ago
  I think her analysis is wrong in that regard. American puritanism is more to blame. French universities do not suffer from the current campus hysteria.
  - simonh 7y ago
    Are Lacan, Foucault and Derrida the pre-eminent influences on modern French academic literary theory? If so, why does she characterise them as minor?
    - grey-area 7y ago
      Foucault and Derrida are certainly still read widely (and deservedly so IMO) - more widely than Paglia in Europe at least - describing them as 'minor' is a little silly. You don't have to accept everything they say to see that they have some relevance and value.
      - DataWorker 7y ago
        They have relevance amongst themselves alone, and their value can be established empirically as more negative than positive. They add confusion and noise, and their utility is that of a Che Guevara T-shirt.
      - simonh 7y ago
        On reading up on this, it seems Derrida particularly is quite influential in Continental Philosophy, but in contrast his influence in the Anglophone world is mainly in literary studies. So us Anglophones see, understand and in some cases apply his work in very different ways than is prevalent in France.
simonh 7y ago
Paglia is a force of nature. It's so exhilarating to come across such a passionate yet clear-sighted academic, battle scarred by exposure of her past misconceptions to the brutality of testing in the real world, and with such a stronger voice for it. I know he's just as much of a divisive figure, but there's a great video of a conversation between Paglia and Jordan Peterson on Youtube.
- FabHK 7y ago
  Agreed - Peterson has some important things to say, and much nonsense, but that specific conversation is absolutely hilarious, by virtue of her hyperbolic and rambling, but fun excursions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-hIVnmUdXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-hIVnmUdXM https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/episode-31/ https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/episode-31/
- euroPoor 7y ago
  She’s got the same level of understanding of Foucault and Derrida as Jordan Peterson, ie. ill-informed and superficial. What a shame to call these people clear-sighted when they clearly not only misread Continental philosophers but it becomes apparent that they didn’t even read some of the works they’re criticizing.
  - simonh 7y ago
    Peterson is unbelievably well read, he was on a project for the United Nations and read 300 books on climate science. I'd be very hesitant before accusing him of criticising a book or author without having done his research. I've seen him catch out interviewers a few times where they hadn't read the material in question, but he had and knew it very well.
    - euroPoor 7y ago
      Doubtful that a clinical psychologist would grasp 300 books in a highly mathematical field. You know, next to doing his job. I’m not saying he isn’t smart just that his conceptions about Continental philosophers stem from poor understanding and shallow reading of the philosophers’ works.
ptah 7y ago
>" In the early 1970s, as she was finishing her doctoral course work, a new school of literary studies gained its first U.S. foothold at Yale and would eventually overthrow New Criticism as the main way academics would interpret texts in English departments across the country. " It sounds as if she resents having the text interpretation methodology she spent a lot of time learning become irrelevant so quickly
grey-area 7y ago
Camille Paglia is over-rated IMO. I've read a couple of her books and there is little of substance there under the gnomic bombast and pseudo-academic jargon. An example from the start of her most famous book: In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of god were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man. What does this really mean? Does it mean anything? I find it truly hard to say with any precision. If anyone is trying to make language destroy itself it is Paglia with her vague, circular, name-dropping arguments. If the rest of the book then tried to justify these assertions that'd be ok, but it continues in the same vein for hundreds of pages. If you accept her vitriolic and reductive definitions of these interesting thinkers (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida), you are doing yourself a disservice. Foucault to take one example is far from cheap cynicism and more rigorous and accessible than Paglia in every sense. Where is the cheap cynicism in The order of things (les mots et les choses) or Madness and Civilisation? These are really important works about issues that will be studied in 100 years, unlike Paglia's empty posturing. They're asking questions like What is normal? What is madness and how does the definition change? Questions which were ahead of their time and still vital and interesting today.
- cjfd 7y ago
  Actually, the quote sounds like a profoundly wise thing to say. Anyone who has ever noticed in him/herself that sexual fantasies are not necessarily very political correct should know this. E.g., rape fantasies as either the perpetrator or the victim occur in large percentages of the population.
  - grey-area 7y ago
    I agree it sounds wise (something she works very hard at), but is it wise? On reading the rest of the book, I concluded no. You make up your own mind, but I would not dismiss those other writers because of a criticism from Paglia.
  - honzzz 7y ago
    I have to admit that I fail to see any connection between that quote and the thing you wrote about sexual fantasies. Also, that thing about sexual fantasies... is it not obvious? Does anyone need to read a book to discover it? I might be missing something and I want to be corrected if that is the case but so far it seems like one of those cases when famous authors write something so vague or even empty that people project their own discoveries into it and get affirmative pleasure from that.
pjc50 7y ago
But that's assuming the conclusion! The whole point of gender studies is the idea that biology is not destiny, especially in social interaction. The roles we play and the relationships we have with each other aren't a mere clockwork expression of our chromosomes. They are far more memetic instead. You can't point to a spot on the Y chromosome that is responsible for unequal pay. Edit: I know it's frowned on to complain about downvotes, but would people at least try to understand what the nature and purpose of gender studies is before dismissing it?
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  Oh yes you can: men have testosterone, so they're more aggressive, which turns out to translate to asking for more pay raises more often and changing jobs more quickly if unhappy with their pay. Hey presto, a biological basis for unequal pay. Now obviously this doesn't explain everything about unequal pay -- but it would be foolish to ignore entirely, no?
  - cygx 7y ago
    Nurture can trump nature, though: There are matrilineal societies where competitiveness is considered a feminine trait. As is often the case, it's not simply either/or.
    - jplayer01 7y ago
      Okay, what does this have to do with what she said? > We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man. She's not saying that biology is the sole factor that determines how we behave. She's saying that we need to understand it and integrate it into our understanding of cultural, psychological, sociological artifacts. Or more importantly, we can't understand them without taking into account biology. I don't see anything wrong here.
      - cygx 7y ago
        Nothing wrong with it as long as you avoid the traps of naive essentialism or fallacious appeals to nature.
peignoir 7y ago
I recommend reading fools fraud and firebands on the matter by Roger Scruton as long as Taleb on the dictatorship of the minority https://link.medium.com/P6JRZtgtuZ https://link.medium.com/P6JRZtgtuZ I’m deeply worried about the evolution of the universities it looks more and more like a cult is taking over instead of science debate and rationalism over emotions...
- pjc50 7y ago
  What, this Roger Scruton, tobacco industry shill? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1122192/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1122192/ I'm not sure he's in a position to lecture anyone on science, let alone fraud. Or this Roger Scruton? https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/apr/10/roger-scruton-calls-for-dismissal-islamophobiad-soros-remarks https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/apr/10/roger-scruto...
  - gadders 7y ago
    The latter Roger Scruton. However, the New Statesman had to publish a lengthy retraction for the interview that the Guardian article is based on after manipulating his quotes. Scruton was also reinstated in the Government position he was sacked from. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2019/07/sir-roger-scruton https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2019/07/sir-roge...
  - Bantros 7y ago
    And how do those links you posted detract from the book that was being recommended?
sprafa 7y ago
Peterson lost a lot of credibility for me when he took a group selfie with some guys with a big Pepe The Frog flag. I mean it’s kind of funny but 90% of the Pepe memes are actually racist and horrible (from what I’ve seen). After that I couldn’t take his alt-right denialism very seriously. It’s a shame because I actually think some of his talks are quite good.
- qazpot 7y ago
  So you disregard a person's all opinions only because he took a selfie with bunch of people and a cartoon character and the 90% of the said cartoon character's memes you have seen are racist and horrible.
  - sprafa 7y ago
    Ah well if you see the selfie you might change your mind. But yes. The main thing for me was I rarely if ever see Peterson smile. And in this photo he’s grinning ear to ear.
    - _iyig 7y ago
      >The main thing for me was I rarely if ever see Peterson smile. Where do you usually look for his smile? In footage of high-pressure media interviews and public debates? In the photos carefully selected by the editors of whichever news sites you browse? Could be he just likes meeting fans, and is amused by a goofy cartoon frog. See also: Hong Kong protestors’ use of Pepe, and prevalence of the meme among less politically-afflicted but still sad and disaffected young men on the Internet. Also mainstream on Twitch.
      - Glide 7y ago
        It’s sad to see people fall for guilt by association. In most interviews that Jordan Peterson has when he talks about meeting his fans is when he sounds the happiest. This really is what Scott Adams talks about with two movies and one screen. The interpretation of events speaks more about the interpreters rather than the actual events now.
Hitton 7y ago
You can disagree with Camille Paglia's ideas, but one must respect her for her integrity and commitment to honest academic debate, which is sadly lacking nowadays in most western universities.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  > sadly lacking nowadays in most western universities. Where do we still have "honest academic debate" then?
  - dmaldona 7y ago
    Anonymous internet forums.
- anthonypasq 7y ago
  you watch too many alt-right youtube videos. Debate is extremely alive an well in nearly all universities
hristov 7y ago
I actually followed Camille Paglia from her time as salon columnist and found her really annoying. First of all for someone being celebrated for being provocative she is depressingly mainstream. Her views are generally center-right. She supports and repeats whatever views and opinions corporate america chooses to foist on us, supports the military industrial complex and is guaranteed to go gaga over every female celebrity sex symbol the mainstream media chooses to trot out for our adulation. But she does everything in such complicated convoluted language (liberally throwing in a lot of intellectual talk about sex in there) that she makes herself sound brilliant, radical and revolutionary for dumbly and unquestioningly following the same corporate mainstream. It is really a shame because not all social science is bullshit. There really was great social science and literally theory being done challenging the status quo and looking for ways to make societies better but people like paglia merely just take the air out of the conversation, by taking up attention “being provocative” while not saying much.
RickJWagner 7y ago
As a conservative, I like to read Camille Paglia. I don't always agree with what she writes, but I find a lot of it well thought-out and very sensible. We could use more writers like her.
jstewartmobile 7y ago
What effect does this have on anything? From what I'm seeing, the struggle of Paglia-Peterson vs the dastardly postmodernists has about as much effect on the real world as royal weddings. Tabloid shit for pseudointellectuals.
jolux 7y ago
Paglia is one of those conservatives who is incredibly transphobic and hides it behind the facade of being a “provocateur.” She has defended the completely absurd belief (in this case, proposed by Sheila Jeffries) that cross-gender hormone therapy is a conspiracy by big pharma to get trans people taking hormones for life, among other things: “In it she [Jeffries] argues among other things, that the pharmaceutical industry, having lost income when routine estrogen therapy for menopausal women was abandoned because of its health risks, has been promoting the relatively new idea of transgenderism in order to create a permanent class of customers who will need to take prescribed hormones for life.” From https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/camille-paglia-on-trump-democrats-transgenderism-and-islamist-terror https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/camille-p... Bioidentical estradiol is a generic medication with many manufacturers and costs very little. There is not very much money to be made manufacturing it. More profitable would be the GnRH agonists, frequently used as the puberty blockers which she claims are so potentially dangerous. However their benefit is clear, and furthermore there is an entire field of medical research devoted to understanding the impacts of those drugs, and so far nothing in the evidence suggests blockers are significantly risky at all, let alone anywhere near as dangerous as the increased risk of suicide that trans kids have going through the wrong puberty. Source for much of this: I’m a trans woman, also a pharmacology, psychiatry, and endocrinology nerd. I’m not taking hormones for life because I “need” to, I’m doing it because I want to, as is every other trans woman I know. If that changes, I can stop. It’s as simple as that.
- devtul 7y ago
  Blockers have a negative effect on bone density and it is unknown if they affect brain development. I guess we will only really see the negative effects(if any) in a couple of decades. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/when-transgender-kids-transition-medical-risks-are-both-known-and-unknown/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/when-transgender-...
  - jolux 7y ago
    The bone density risk is the only one that has been shown reliably, and even then it’s not enough to warrant not using them. A review of the current literature shows the evidence on brain development impact to be spotty. And here’s the Endocrine Society, saying they’re safe and effective: https://www.endocrine.org/news-room/press-release-archives/2013/medical-intervention-in-transgender-adolescents-appears-to-be-safe-and-effective https://www.endocrine.org/news-room/press-release-archives/2.... The doctors treating trans children keep up to date on this literature and should definitely review risks with parents and children. I personally had to sign an informed consent form stating that I had to assume I’d become immediately and irrevocably sterile upon starting treatment, but this is widely known among trans women to not be the case. Medical science is absolutely still catching up on transgender care, but all the concern trolling about risks in popular media is unwarranted. I had several unsuccessful suicide attempts in my adolescence, and I’ve been a loyal HNer since around the age of 14. That’s the huge risk that doctors and parents understand, and doctors, being for the most part hardcore utilitarians (particularly at the research level) will gladly take the small risk of blockers over that one.

165 points by amanuensis 7y ago

Props to David Yager for standing up to the kind of people (sheltered kidults, really) Thunderf00t calls out for crybullying. The world needs more debate and engagement of controversial figures (regardless if anyone agrees with them and especially if many don't), not fascist-style/childish de-platforming. I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to say it. - Evelyn Beatrice Hall (not Voltaire)

hos234 7y ago

"The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind" We live in interesting times. Teachers of the Paglia calibre, have become visible to larger and larger numbers of students worldwide. And that raises the bar for all those who claim to Teach.

weiming 7y ago

"Behind that devotion to heterodoxy lies something softer. She admitted that she’s chosen to censor herself in front of her students [...] I don’t want to upset them. The historical material is too painful for a music class,” she said." I don't know if this is representative of the current times, but sad if so.

simonh 7y ago
Her primary goal is to teach the students. You don't serve a novice mechanic well by asking them to build a Formula 1 racing engine from scratch on their first day in the machine shop. She's not saying that material is not worthy of study, clearly she thinks it is because she did teach it in class previously. She just found that the material didn't provide the best platform for education in the subject relevant to the students. EDIT: Note that the reason for changing the material was not due to the students being soft. It was because "The historical material is too painful for a music class". The point of the class was to study music, not the historical context of the lyrics, so selecting such historically charged material distracted from the actual purpose of the course.
- jgmjgm 7y ago
  I think that was precisely the point of the parent comment.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  So studying the musical theory of say "strange fruit" (Meeropol) rather than including the historical context?
ternaryoperator 7y ago
>The historical material is too painful for a music class And yet in the face of great suffering, music can speak when words are insufficient.

Animats 7y ago

“These minor French theorists have had a disastrous effect on American education. Lacan encourages pompous bombast and Foucault teaches cheap cynicism, while Derrida’s aggressive method, called deconstruction, systematically trashes high culture by reducing everything to language and then making language destroy itself.” She's right, but it really upsets many academics for someone to say that. Good.

erokar 7y ago
I think her analysis is wrong in that regard. American puritanism is more to blame. French universities do not suffer from the current campus hysteria.
- simonh 7y ago
  Are Lacan, Foucault and Derrida the pre-eminent influences on modern French academic literary theory? If so, why does she characterise them as minor?
  - grey-area 7y ago
    Foucault and Derrida are certainly still read widely (and deservedly so IMO) - more widely than Paglia in Europe at least - describing them as 'minor' is a little silly. You don't have to accept everything they say to see that they have some relevance and value.
    - DataWorker 7y ago
      They have relevance amongst themselves alone, and their value can be established empirically as more negative than positive. They add confusion and noise, and their utility is that of a Che Guevara T-shirt.
    - simonh 7y ago
      On reading up on this, it seems Derrida particularly is quite influential in Continental Philosophy, but in contrast his influence in the Anglophone world is mainly in literary studies. So us Anglophones see, understand and in some cases apply his work in very different ways than is prevalent in France.

simonh 7y ago

Paglia is a force of nature. It's so exhilarating to come across such a passionate yet clear-sighted academic, battle scarred by exposure of her past misconceptions to the brutality of testing in the real world, and with such a stronger voice for it. I know he's just as much of a divisive figure, but there's a great video of a conversation between Paglia and Jordan Peterson on Youtube.

FabHK 7y ago
Agreed - Peterson has some important things to say, and much nonsense, but that specific conversation is absolutely hilarious, by virtue of her hyperbolic and rambling, but fun excursions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-hIVnmUdXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-hIVnmUdXM https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/episode-31/ https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/episode-31/
euroPoor 7y ago
She’s got the same level of understanding of Foucault and Derrida as Jordan Peterson, ie. ill-informed and superficial. What a shame to call these people clear-sighted when they clearly not only misread Continental philosophers but it becomes apparent that they didn’t even read some of the works they’re criticizing.
- simonh 7y ago
  Peterson is unbelievably well read, he was on a project for the United Nations and read 300 books on climate science. I'd be very hesitant before accusing him of criticising a book or author without having done his research. I've seen him catch out interviewers a few times where they hadn't read the material in question, but he had and knew it very well.
  - euroPoor 7y ago
    Doubtful that a clinical psychologist would grasp 300 books in a highly mathematical field. You know, next to doing his job. I’m not saying he isn’t smart just that his conceptions about Continental philosophers stem from poor understanding and shallow reading of the philosophers’ works.

ptah 7y ago

>" In the early 1970s, as she was finishing her doctoral course work, a new school of literary studies gained its first U.S. foothold at Yale and would eventually overthrow New Criticism as the main way academics would interpret texts in English departments across the country. " It sounds as if she resents having the text interpretation methodology she spent a lot of time learning become irrelevant so quickly

grey-area 7y ago

Camille Paglia is over-rated IMO. I've read a couple of her books and there is little of substance there under the gnomic bombast and pseudo-academic jargon. An example from the start of her most famous book: In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of god were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man. What does this really mean? Does it mean anything? I find it truly hard to say with any precision. If anyone is trying to make language destroy itself it is Paglia with her vague, circular, name-dropping arguments. If the rest of the book then tried to justify these assertions that'd be ok, but it continues in the same vein for hundreds of pages. If you accept her vitriolic and reductive definitions of these interesting thinkers (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida), you are doing yourself a disservice. Foucault to take one example is far from cheap cynicism and more rigorous and accessible than Paglia in every sense. Where is the cheap cynicism in The order of things (les mots et les choses) or Madness and Civilisation? These are really important works about issues that will be studied in 100 years, unlike Paglia's empty posturing. They're asking questions like What is normal? What is madness and how does the definition change? Questions which were ahead of their time and still vital and interesting today.

cjfd 7y ago
Actually, the quote sounds like a profoundly wise thing to say. Anyone who has ever noticed in him/herself that sexual fantasies are not necessarily very political correct should know this. E.g., rape fantasies as either the perpetrator or the victim occur in large percentages of the population.
- grey-area 7y ago
  I agree it sounds wise (something she works very hard at), but is it wise? On reading the rest of the book, I concluded no. You make up your own mind, but I would not dismiss those other writers because of a criticism from Paglia.
- honzzz 7y ago
  I have to admit that I fail to see any connection between that quote and the thing you wrote about sexual fantasies. Also, that thing about sexual fantasies... is it not obvious? Does anyone need to read a book to discover it? I might be missing something and I want to be corrected if that is the case but so far it seems like one of those cases when famous authors write something so vague or even empty that people project their own discoveries into it and get affirmative pleasure from that.

pjc50 7y ago

But that's assuming the conclusion! The whole point of gender studies is the idea that biology is not destiny, especially in social interaction. The roles we play and the relationships we have with each other aren't a mere clockwork expression of our chromosomes. They are far more memetic instead. You can't point to a spot on the Y chromosome that is responsible for unequal pay. Edit: I know it's frowned on to complain about downvotes, but would people at least try to understand what the nature and purpose of gender studies is before dismissing it?

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
Oh yes you can: men have testosterone, so they're more aggressive, which turns out to translate to asking for more pay raises more often and changing jobs more quickly if unhappy with their pay. Hey presto, a biological basis for unequal pay. Now obviously this doesn't explain everything about unequal pay -- but it would be foolish to ignore entirely, no?
- cygx 7y ago
  Nurture can trump nature, though: There are matrilineal societies where competitiveness is considered a feminine trait. As is often the case, it's not simply either/or.
  - jplayer01 7y ago
    Okay, what does this have to do with what she said? > We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man. She's not saying that biology is the sole factor that determines how we behave. She's saying that we need to understand it and integrate it into our understanding of cultural, psychological, sociological artifacts. Or more importantly, we can't understand them without taking into account biology. I don't see anything wrong here.
    - cygx 7y ago
      Nothing wrong with it as long as you avoid the traps of naive essentialism or fallacious appeals to nature.

peignoir 7y ago

I recommend reading fools fraud and firebands on the matter by Roger Scruton as long as Taleb on the dictatorship of the minority https://link.medium.com/P6JRZtgtuZ https://link.medium.com/P6JRZtgtuZ I’m deeply worried about the evolution of the universities it looks more and more like a cult is taking over instead of science debate and rationalism over emotions...

pjc50 7y ago
What, this Roger Scruton, tobacco industry shill? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1122192/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1122192/ I'm not sure he's in a position to lecture anyone on science, let alone fraud. Or this Roger Scruton? https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/apr/10/roger-scruton-calls-for-dismissal-islamophobiad-soros-remarks https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/apr/10/roger-scruto...
- gadders 7y ago
  The latter Roger Scruton. However, the New Statesman had to publish a lengthy retraction for the interview that the Guardian article is based on after manipulating his quotes. Scruton was also reinstated in the Government position he was sacked from. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2019/07/sir-roger-scruton https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2019/07/sir-roge...
- Bantros 7y ago
  And how do those links you posted detract from the book that was being recommended?

sprafa 7y ago

Peterson lost a lot of credibility for me when he took a group selfie with some guys with a big Pepe The Frog flag. I mean it’s kind of funny but 90% of the Pepe memes are actually racist and horrible (from what I’ve seen). After that I couldn’t take his alt-right denialism very seriously. It’s a shame because I actually think some of his talks are quite good.

qazpot 7y ago
So you disregard a person's all opinions only because he took a selfie with bunch of people and a cartoon character and the 90% of the said cartoon character's memes you have seen are racist and horrible.
- sprafa 7y ago
  Ah well if you see the selfie you might change your mind. But yes. The main thing for me was I rarely if ever see Peterson smile. And in this photo he’s grinning ear to ear.
  - _iyig 7y ago
    >The main thing for me was I rarely if ever see Peterson smile. Where do you usually look for his smile? In footage of high-pressure media interviews and public debates? In the photos carefully selected by the editors of whichever news sites you browse? Could be he just likes meeting fans, and is amused by a goofy cartoon frog. See also: Hong Kong protestors’ use of Pepe, and prevalence of the meme among less politically-afflicted but still sad and disaffected young men on the Internet. Also mainstream on Twitch.
    - Glide 7y ago
      It’s sad to see people fall for guilt by association. In most interviews that Jordan Peterson has when he talks about meeting his fans is when he sounds the happiest. This really is what Scott Adams talks about with two movies and one screen. The interpretation of events speaks more about the interpreters rather than the actual events now.

Hitton 7y ago

You can disagree with Camille Paglia's ideas, but one must respect her for her integrity and commitment to honest academic debate, which is sadly lacking nowadays in most western universities.

akhilcacharya 7y ago
> sadly lacking nowadays in most western universities. Where do we still have "honest academic debate" then?
- dmaldona 7y ago
  Anonymous internet forums.
anthonypasq 7y ago
you watch too many alt-right youtube videos. Debate is extremely alive an well in nearly all universities

hristov 7y ago

I actually followed Camille Paglia from her time as salon columnist and found her really annoying. First of all for someone being celebrated for being provocative she is depressingly mainstream. Her views are generally center-right. She supports and repeats whatever views and opinions corporate america chooses to foist on us, supports the military industrial complex and is guaranteed to go gaga over every female celebrity sex symbol the mainstream media chooses to trot out for our adulation. But she does everything in such complicated convoluted language (liberally throwing in a lot of intellectual talk about sex in there) that she makes herself sound brilliant, radical and revolutionary for dumbly and unquestioningly following the same corporate mainstream. It is really a shame because not all social science is bullshit. There really was great social science and literally theory being done challenging the status quo and looking for ways to make societies better but people like paglia merely just take the air out of the conversation, by taking up attention “being provocative” while not saying much.

RickJWagner 7y ago

As a conservative, I like to read Camille Paglia. I don't always agree with what she writes, but I find a lot of it well thought-out and very sensible. We could use more writers like her.

jstewartmobile 7y ago

What effect does this have on anything? From what I'm seeing, the struggle of Paglia-Peterson vs the dastardly postmodernists has about as much effect on the real world as royal weddings. Tabloid shit for pseudointellectuals.

jolux 7y ago

Paglia is one of those conservatives who is incredibly transphobic and hides it behind the facade of being a “provocateur.” She has defended the completely absurd belief (in this case, proposed by Sheila Jeffries) that cross-gender hormone therapy is a conspiracy by big pharma to get trans people taking hormones for life, among other things: “In it she [Jeffries] argues among other things, that the pharmaceutical industry, having lost income when routine estrogen therapy for menopausal women was abandoned because of its health risks, has been promoting the relatively new idea of transgenderism in order to create a permanent class of customers who will need to take prescribed hormones for life.” From https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/camille-paglia-on-trump-democrats-transgenderism-and-islamist-terror https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/camille-p... Bioidentical estradiol is a generic medication with many manufacturers and costs very little. There is not very much money to be made manufacturing it. More profitable would be the GnRH agonists, frequently used as the puberty blockers which she claims are so potentially dangerous. However their benefit is clear, and furthermore there is an entire field of medical research devoted to understanding the impacts of those drugs, and so far nothing in the evidence suggests blockers are significantly risky at all, let alone anywhere near as dangerous as the increased risk of suicide that trans kids have going through the wrong puberty. Source for much of this: I’m a trans woman, also a pharmacology, psychiatry, and endocrinology nerd. I’m not taking hormones for life because I “need” to, I’m doing it because I want to, as is every other trans woman I know. If that changes, I can stop. It’s as simple as that.

devtul 7y ago
Blockers have a negative effect on bone density and it is unknown if they affect brain development. I guess we will only really see the negative effects(if any) in a couple of decades. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/when-transgender-kids-transition-medical-risks-are-both-known-and-unknown/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/when-transgender-...
- jolux 7y ago
  The bone density risk is the only one that has been shown reliably, and even then it’s not enough to warrant not using them. A review of the current literature shows the evidence on brain development impact to be spotty. And here’s the Endocrine Society, saying they’re safe and effective: https://www.endocrine.org/news-room/press-release-archives/2013/medical-intervention-in-transgender-adolescents-appears-to-be-safe-and-effective https://www.endocrine.org/news-room/press-release-archives/2.... The doctors treating trans children keep up to date on this literature and should definitely review risks with parents and children. I personally had to sign an informed consent form stating that I had to assume I’d become immediately and irrevocably sterile upon starting treatment, but this is widely known among trans women to not be the case. Medical science is absolutely still catching up on transgender care, but all the concern trolling about risks in popular media is unwarranted. I had several unsuccessful suicide attempts in my adolescence, and I’ve been a loyal HNer since around the age of 14. That’s the huge risk that doctors and parents understand, and doctors, being for the most part hardcore utilitarians (particularly at the research level) will gladly take the small risk of blockers over that one.