thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb 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 ...
In my recent entry on being American I quoted John McCain and Thornton Wilder as authorities. McCain evidently views America as a sort of overriding moral cause that we should all buy into, Thornton Wilder as an inescapable reality and predicament we must accept and deal with on its own terms. That is to say, … More ...
A couple of texts I found horrifying:
It’s a bad question, I think, because it overemphasizes the attribute in a way that makes no sense, certainly not in 2007 and maybe ever. You can reasonably be an American stamp collector, lawyer or Catholic, meaning one whose attitudes, understanding and pursuits are colored by a background and web of connections accumulated growing up … More ...