Category: Uncategorized
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Commercial moralism and Ghostbusters 2016
The problem with this movie wasn’t that “people disliked it because the actors were women;” it was that people said that if you disliked it it was because they were women. And that created some fundamental tension. The actors chosen were marketed on the basis of being women. So when people weren’t impressed, that…
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Do I care about others?
I think I might be radically individualistic. I don’t care what other people think about me, I don’t have any interest in listening to anyone unless I’m convinced I should. I don’t really want to do anything for anyone else. Or maybe that’s just a part of me. In practice I’m…
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Gay hypocrisy
There’s an enormous unaddressed hypocrisy in the attitudes of existing gays and liberal activists toward the trans movement. Everyone wants to say that the thing we knocked down and the thing we changed about the world, that was a good thing. But what you’re trying to do and what you’re trying to change is crazy,…
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Three Figures
There are three men I’ve heard speak together a few times: Stephen Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, and Jordan Peterson. And they often strike me as iconic, representing different schools of thought approaching a similar subject. Pinker always strikes me as a very brilliant but very limited person with a more abstracted and scholastic view of the…
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Why must we see beauty?
It is part of the essence of beauty that it invites you to participate in it and make it part of the extended idea of yourself. That’s why we wear beautiful clothes, want to move to or visit lovely places and make them our home, why we make our homes beautiful and surround ourselves…
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Racial mascots and defining whiteness
There’s a deep need for certain instincts to have a mascot. Black people are mascots for one kind of instinct, white people for another. I think Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell have thoroughly covered what forces of the collective consciousness and collective unconscious black people are a mascot for. It’s a religious role, an…
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Finitude
The four great existential burdens are: finitude, mortality, meaning, and guilt. And every belief system must discharge them as duties. Any belief system that leaves a remainder will generate deep existential dread and confusion even if it otherwise appears stable. And people within it will keep seeking solutions, even if none present themselves. And it…
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Vague thoughts about the apocalypse
Some people aren’t bothered by the idea of an apocalypse. It doesn’t seem to them like a big deal if all life was extinguished, whereas the prospect of the death of a loved one carries a lot of weight. And some people even pride themselves on the clinical detachment and calmness they show in the…
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Rebecca Ferguson and Dune
I usually try to avoid reading what celebrities have to say on subjects. Wisdom, practicality, and intellectual sophistication aren’t exactly their stock in trade. But I did happen to read some of what Rebecca Ferguson had to say about the movie, and book, Dune, which she stars in as one of the…
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The Reductionism of Ibrim X Kendi
I often hear people like John McWhorter refuting people like Ibrim X Kendi by saying, “Yes racism is still a problem and it has been a problem. But it’s false to claim that things haven’t changed or at the same or worse than they were in the past. Maybe in 1950 a black…
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