Tag: society
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Shang Chi and the legend of a movie review
I tried reading two recent reviews of Shang-Chi today, curious how this newest continuation of the Marvel franchise measured up. Unfortunately, I came away more mystified than enlightened, and filled with a sense of dirtiness I hadn’t expected to contract from a movie review. To be honest, I could hardly call what I read “movie…
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Anti-racist backlash
On John McWhorter’s fears of a backlash against anti-white sentiment I think this could have been put more simply. If you convince someone that everything they ever did for you voluntarily meant absolutely nothing, then there’s at least some chance that they’ll decide to stop doing things for you. And if you make it clear…
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Appreciation for civilization
Why do some people feel the miracle of civilization, while others take it for granted, feel entitled, or are dissatisfied? Thomas Sowell answered this question a couple decades ago. I think if you go from “A Conflict of Visions” and make the leap to Jonathan Haidt and “The Righteous Mind” you can figure out why…
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Decriminalizing theft
Recently in California lawmakers decided to stop prosecuting felony theft under a certain threshold. The move was hailed as a victory for racial justice, a very strange thing to say with all sorts of interesting implications behind it. Some people naturally wondered what the consequences of simply letting people rob stores, so long as the…
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Convinced or able to be convinced?
Most people calibrate their positions on issues by observing others. The social family provides a structure of costs and benefits, a sort of behavioral and attitudinal economy. And most people are instinctively invested in and responsive to that market. And well they should be. It’s actually very hard for a single person to effectively judge…
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Weaponizing archetypes
From a letter. I had a question. I dictated this in the car while driving, and I’m afraid it ran away with me. My real question is immediately below. All the background and why I’m wondering it follows. I was wondering how plausible you thought it might be to hypothesize that the archetypes are themselves…
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Rights and the new religious right
At some point rights groups became the new version of the religious right. They’re kind of like the temperance movement now, or the instigators of the “Satanic Panic”. That’s a funny transition to have made, for groups that centered themselves around advocacy for the sociological fringe. I suppose there’s a point at which, if you…
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In response to a critique of “On being seen”
After writing this, I thought better of it and never published it, which is why it cuts off abruptly. The person was arguing that I wasn’t understanding Cornell West or his points and thus my criticism had no relevance. They also made some allusions to the Navi from Avatar and their ideas of collective social…
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On “being seen”
(From an online forum discussing Cornell West, who is especially fond of this phrase) I don’t understand the obsession with “being seen”. Or how much or what kind of being seen it is that would make people happy, or whether that kind of feeling is something that someone else, even magical white people, can grant…
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A critique of “The Thrill of it All”
I recently watched an old Doris Day movie about a doctor whose wife becomes a TV advertising star. And I couldn’t help feeling that the whole problem was that the characters never had an open discussion and never asked the right questions. And that’s fine, if people did that at the beginning of the story…
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