thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb A “cultural issue” is one people have strong views on but don’t know how to discuss. That makes for discussions that are sometimes interesting but sometimes repetitive and aside the point. People come up with odd and inventive arguments to back up gut reactions, repeat them again and again, and ignore everyone else.
Here’s a … More ...
The past week saw a couple of events that were both predictable and widely predicted, at least among right-wing cranks, but they were still blatant enough to be a bit shocking:
In my last entry I suggested that materialist science can’t deal with all realities, even all important realities. It can’t give an adequate account of “importance,” for example, and if you can’t sort out what is more and less important you can’t deal with anything at all. In other words, materialist science can’t even make … More ...
An obvious problem with a materialist understanding of the world is that we have subjective experience and can’t begin to imagine what a materialist explanation for subjective experience would look like. What do atoms and the void have to do with our sensation of redness, as opposed to redness as a wavelength of light, type … More ...
Here’s an interesting graph showing how liberals (blue), conservatives (red), and one self-described libertarian (green) test on a survey of “moral foundations”:
Basically, liberals emphasize “harm” and “fairness” and don’t care so much about “loyalty,” “authority” or “purity,” while conservatives give more equal weight to all five dimensions. (The libertarian can speak for himself.)… More ...
I’ve sent my revised manuscript off to my editor, so I should be be posting again. I’m told that publication will be in 10-12 months, just in time for Christmas next year. So if you can get through this season, all your gift problems will be solved!
I thought I’d mention this, even though it’s irrelevant to this weblog, because you gotta know about it: in Utah 15 years ago they detected a cosmic ray—a fast-moving proton—that hit the earth or rather upper atmosphere with a kinetic energy equal to that of a well-thrown baseball. To pack that kind of wallop … More ...
According to a recent report, unmarried women have become the most important leftist demographic. The marriage gap for women (their greater tendency to vote Democratic when unmarried) is now 36 percentage points, and unmarried women have become the biggest part of the Democratic base—more than blacks and Hispanics combined.
All of which makes sense. … More ...
A couple of family members are in India just now, so I went off to the Metropolitan Museum to look at their collection of Indian art. Here are some (rather naive) notes:
A reader mentioned Michel Houellebecq in connection with my link to a consumer’s guide to women in a recent post. I haven’t read Houellebecq’s novels (I don’t read French) and decided to look up his Wikipedia entry, which led me to a review by John Updike of his most recent book.
The review’s … More ...