thoughts in and out of season
Inclusiveness is radically inconsistent with free thought and speech. The problem is quite fundamental. To question the principle of equal inclusion is to put some people’s standing in question and ipso facto to exclude them from full equality with those whose standing is not in question. A regime of inclusiveness must therefore suppress questioning of … More ...
[Inspired by the upcoming debate on the topic.]
My answer, of course, is “no.” It’s obvious if you compare trends in wimpiness and trends in religious belief that the decline of Christianity has turned people into wimps. Nietzsche is big among left-wing academics. Wimpiness is big among left-wing academics. It’s wimps who have superman … More ...
We describe things by their roles, but they are more than their roles. Iron, for example, has a role in the functioning of the human body, the earth, and the universe as a whole. To describe it is to say how it acts in connection with other things. On the other hand, it is also … More ...
We were having dinner with friends last night, and got on the topic of suffering. I made some comments and the more disjointed they sounded the more I wanted to make additional comments. All of which suggested some thoughts:
A technological society naturally favors inclusiveness. In such a society:
I got a note from an editor of Contemporary Authors, a reference work that lists 130,000 people who managed to get something published. They want to include me. Among other things the note asked some questions that were supposed to add up to a statement about why, how, and what I write. Here’s my … More ...
Many people claim discrimination is merely negative: “white,” for example, means “not colored,” where “colored” refers to those whose exclusion constitutes “white” as a category. On such a view discrimination has to do with artificial categories. There are academics who make even sex a social construction.
Such claims are evidently trivial or false. It is … More ...
I recently went to “Bach Vespers” at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church here in New York. The music was good, the ceremony dignified, the physical surroundings beautiful and fitting, the people highly presentable in a high-class respectable Northern European serious-minded style.
I won’t go back, because all those fine things were made part of the rites … More ...
Real Physics, the weblog of an Aristotelian physics PhD, has an interesting post on Climategate as a manifestation of Baconian science—that is, of “science” oriented toward control rather than truth.
My take on the problem is that modern scientific thought emphasizes experimental verification and tries to pare down references to things that can’t be … More ...
