Tag: society
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Mulan 2 and duty
Here’s a super relevant topic, Mulan’s straight to video sequel! Seriously, this movie isn’t really worth talking about a lot. It was fine. Not terrible, not great. Fine. The one thing I wanted to talk about is what a perfect example it is of the conflict between Chinese and American values. As a sequel with…
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Diagnosis White Privilege: a skin condition or a heart condition?
I’ve never felt the need to respond to or say anything about Robin DiAngelo and her little book. It never seemed like there was anything there worth responding to, it’s so obviously vacuous. But I suppose you can’t really argue with millions of copies sold and hundreds of mandatory trainings in workplaces. In my own…
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The source of a culture’s lifeblood
The power of the creative divine belongs to those who have a vision of the future and are willing to bear or assign the responsibility for it. Either to carry it or to remove those who stand in its way. The power of the vision and the assignment of responsibility allows human to rise above…
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Heroes and villains
Do people need enemies? Do they instinctively seek them out? The thing that is preventing the future we envision from coming to pass. How we conceive of those enemies seems to matter a lot. Certain ideologies, such as Christianity, actively encourage us not to view actual other people as our enemies, but rather, impersonal forces…
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Cuties, part 2
An afterword about sexual taboos. Please skip if you’re easily offended. The topic of discussion is taboos we have already dropped and what ones we may still drop. So no matter where you are in the timeline of taboo holding or taboo rejecting, you’ll probably find something to be offended about. On a side note,…
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Cuties
The film Cuties has raised some ethical problems about popular art. One particular problem is, where do you draw the line between exposure of an issue and exploitation of an issue? It may have been the intent of the filmmaker to criticize the sexualization of children. On the other hand, she did it by showing…
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On individualism
It is the instinct of our time to “make something ours”, to make it your own, to particularize things to yourself. We do not seek to belong to something greater than ourselves. Our love of the individual means there is nothing greater, and we make them worthwhile by bringing them into us, not us into…
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The blind spots of all societies
It is in the nature of every civilization to be blinded by two things. First the “things that everybody knows”, the basic, fairly unchallenged assumptions that drive people’s view of the world. The “first principles” of the science of life that are themselves axiomatic (as Aristotle pointed out). The second is the confidence and self…
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Random Tangent on History
(excerpted from an older entry) It’s an interesting fact that our political parties seem to have organized themselves broadly based on personality. I have a theory for why this may have happened. Partly it may just be an inevitable consequence of having enough people, and, since personality variation is a huge natural element of human…
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The manifesto of the new age
Speech is violence Outcomes are causes Denial is guilt Censorship is inclusion Power is truth Violence is peaceful Vulnerability is power Strength is safety Freedom is uniformity of results Property is theft Dialogue is supression Knowledge is slavery Everyone is the same But differences are supreme Who you love is innate to who you are…
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