Tag: society
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Why Systemic Racism?
I get now why they were calling it institution racism and systemic racism. They had to call it that to develop the argument that would allow them to enact their own institutional and systemic racism as a coubter-balance. Ironically, their accomplished this by shifting the meaning of institutional and systemic (formalized), for situations where this…
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The modernist confusion about postmodernism
One refrain that seems to come up often lately among the remaining modernists in academia is, how could this have happened? Viewing (accurately) the collapse of the ideas of truth and evidence and the descent into a postmodern ecosystem of manipulation and tribalism, they wonder where it all went wrong. Having previously spent their days…
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Gender and cooperation
Although tyranny was often an outcome, as it is of any structured political or economic system, specialization into certain roles was also, in the main, a byproduct of local historical conditions and assumptions (both of which had a grounding in empirical personal and cultural experience, experimentation, consequences, and adaptation). Local systems didn’t just arise from…
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Modern expressions of innate sexual instincts
What percent of current political conditions results from the scaled up and transposed familiar instincts in men and women? Those instincts, at the most basic level of society, are fundamental. They’re hard coded into humanity. All subsequent levels of complexity build upon them and extrapolate them. And traditionally society was built from the bottom up,…
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The value of parents, and the failure of their substitutes
The great contribution of parenthood is the ability to convey the greatest depth of love in complement with the greatest of expectations. Nothing less is sufficient to raise human beings to their fullest potential. And neither separately is a stable strategy. It is only by advancing them together, in balance, that the greatest levels of…
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Aladdin and modern Disney anthems
I’ve been trying to untangle what bothers me about the “I won’t be silent” song from Aladdin. I suppose a lot of it is context. The movie is a pale imitation of its predecessor, it adds almost nothing to the story and subtracts much. The title character is clearly the weakest in the whole movie.…
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The limits of political power for securing happiness
Political power as a strategy is far less useful for producing personal well-being and success then it is for protecting personal well-being and success. This is partly a structural feature, simply because actual human production of capital, human capital or otherwise, takes place at the individual and not the collective level. It may be aggregated…
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The relative value of violence
Is it possible that violence is the cheapest price it’s possible to pay for personal freedom? That seems counter intuitive. It depends what you mean by costly, and for whom. A society that allows the greatest extremes of personal freedom would mean a society that involves itself the least amount possible in other types of…
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Violence as a creative force
Does war and competition generate as well as reflect belief in a society? Is it the mechanism by which periods of stability are generated, by forcing us to test our capabilities and develop means for survival? Is peace ultimately conducive to stability, or does it inevitably produce long term instability? Does long peace actually drive…