maldusiecle

12 ms·

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by maldusiecle 8y ago
Yes, a pity that the researchers didn't correlate Brexit positions with Stalinism and Maoism, political stances that are definitely widespread common enough that they could find meaningful connections.
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by maldusiecle 8y ago
Leaving aside how poorly written this is ("spergonaut"? really?), I don't really see its claims about flagging borne out. Heavily political articles are often flagged regardless of which side of the aisle they come from. Cert
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by maldusiecle 8y ago
Unconvincing, from start to finish--and what a poor start! Yes, the obvious texts in courses on postmodernism are a few decades old; it takes time for things to filter into the academy. It would be easy to argue for more recent authors like
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by maldusiecle 8y ago
I prefer the longer but more detailed writeup that LARB published: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-ashtray-has-landed-t... ! The Janet Malcolm dispute is instructive in this regard. Malcolm's book on the Ma
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by maldusiecle 8y ago
> Philosophy i think is the same question and message repeated in each era in the language of that era. (Modern lingo and memes and such) > The question is “what’s the point”. In fact, very little of what philosophers are interested i
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by maldusiecle 8y ago
Divorce is in general fine, but leaving your wife for your research assistant who is half your age feels pretty sleazy.
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by maldusiecle 8y ago
If someone presents themselves as a moral authority, as Brooks does, then their actions in private life are relevant.
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
>Mental illness is described in terms of deviance from "normal" behavior and conformance to generally accepted morals. I think this is trivially proven from a lay read of the DSM. Deviation from normal behavior and generally ac
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
A position doesn't become "relativism" just because you don't want to hear it. It's not relativism to point out that people have responsibility for their actions, nor to point out that mental illnesses do not genera
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
People doing things that you consider irrational is not automatically "mental illness." To conflate the two is both to absolve criminals and terrorists of moral responsibility and to stigmatize the mentally ill, most of whom are n
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
You can do clustering, but it might not be useful. Read Gray's article. If you take the "average position," you're likely to get to positions that Pinker and so on wouldn't find acceptable. My point isn't that
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
Given how hard it is to pin down the nature of consciousness, I can't imagine it would be productive to discuss consciousness without explicitly considering its definition. If you want to defend a position, you have to make clear what
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
I don't disagree that Gray is tendentious, but I really can't reconcile your first paragraph with what I read in his essay. Among other things, Gray points out that Voltaire and Bentham advocated "enlightened despotism."
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
Of course he didn't say that literally every Enlightenment thinker shared the exact set of values. Neither I nor Gray are claiming that. But his argument, as I understand it, is that there are a certain determinate set of "Enlight
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
The critiques of Pinker that I've found most convincing have focused on his presentation of the Enlightenment's intellectual side. The review by John Gray that Aaronson dismisses has some fairly convincing points, and it's di
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
It's unsurprising that negative views of Paul Graham are downvoted here, but this is a very worthwhile point. There is nothing "objective" about writing in a bland, unornamented style, or about treating complex problems as if
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
I like The Onion; I'm not trying to bash them. I think it's fairly obvious which side of the aisle most of their writers are on, and it's been especially hard to miss since the 2016 election.
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
I didn't say Snopes was more or less respectable; my point was that they aren't engaging in "culture war" by doing what this article says that they're doing. I'm not crazy about them fact-checking satire, but i
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
Not sure how I can put it anymore clearly. You claim that Snopes is engaging in "culture war." I point out that Snopes is evenly applying its policies to both conservatives and liberals, giving the lie to your original statement.
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
You can say that it's silly, but if it's applied evenly to either side of the aisle it's a little difficult to say it's culture war.
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
This is pretty dodgy. Snopes also fact-checks articles by The Onion, which has a definite liberal lean. (Here's the tag: https://www.snopes.com/tag/the-onion/ ) If you're going to tar them as an "arm
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
The joke is the implication that the Iraq War was a bigger disaster than WW2 and the Holocaust.
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
I think what's troubling is that this conflates really problematic, damaging speech with what is merely controversial. Dismissing "healthy speech" as a category is one thing, but let's not have any illusions about some o
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
If by "half the article" you mean "one paragraph," then yes, yes he does.
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
Worthwhile criticism of the book here: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlight...
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
It's an effort to smear Nietzsche by association more than anything else. His influence was wide throughout the twentieth century; most of the people who read and drew from his ideas weren't fascists or communists. But I wouldn&#x
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
Sure. You need a balance, and creating flawed works is a part of the process--I wouldn't deny that. But creating work after work, for the sake of creating, doesn't necessarily lead to better work; going through the slow process of
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
I'm really skeptical of this attitude. In a lot of fields I've seen people who commit themselves to "just getting it done." The result is that they do get a lot of work done: and it's bad, it's mediocre, it doe
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
This is actually my biggest problem with Prime: it feels like a bunch of substandard services, most of which I don't need, bundled together. If I'm not going to use free Kindle books or Twitch discounts (and I'm not), their v
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by maldusiecle 9y ago
You're right, I replied before clicking the link. Couldn't find a delete button, so I'll let it stand.

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