Elsewhere, it's always Friday
To start with, if you haven't read the essay "Anti-Science of the 1960's and 1970's" by Steve Dutch yet, do so. Right now. You can ignore the title, since this essay is really about common anti-science and anti-technology arguments that originated in that era but still flourish today.
Paul Graham is another quality thinker. If you are not familiar with his essays, read them now. They have since been collected into a book form, but you can read them for free on his website.
In a similar fashion, Richard Harter has two good essays "A Few Good Men And Me" and "On Not Being A Professional Poker Player".
After those, read "The Power of Cool: Arthur Fonzarelli as Archetypal Shaman" in the blog "Bowing to the Future", which I notice has become recently active again. A guy can write something like this particular post, it would be a shame not to.
Jane Haddam has several excellent essays, including "Ersatz" and "Why Intellectuals Love Marx".
The culture of Japan, that land of kancho assassins, will forever remain a mystery to us barbarous round-eyes. The page "Japan SAQ" does its best to dispel these mysteries.
Metaphilm is often a good source for amusing commentary about movies. My irony detector is completely unable to tell whether "Spider-Man 2:
Science, Sexuality, and Other Sticky Subjects" is written seriously or whether it is a parody of a typical academic essay of sociology, conveniently written about some hit movie. (Speaking of which, has there ever been an anthology of academic essays about society and technology that didn't involve the movie "Terminator" or "Terminator 2" anywhere in it? I am honestly curious, since I have read many and can't recall even one.)
Eric S. Raymond lists eight movies that the brave and bold Hollywood would never dare to make in "If Hollywood Were Really Brave". All so very true. Of his older posts, my favourite is probably "Gayness is hard, lesbianism soft" tells us that in the scifi-poly-wicca community, dudes don't like to have sex with each other but encourage and like to watch the chicks make out with each other.
With all the liberating and transgressive gay marriage stuff going on everywhere, the next step is naturally polygamy. The page "alt.polyamory FAQ" contains the following, unintentionally very revealing quote:
You don't have to explain yourself at all, or answer to anyone. You're happy. Your feelings require no justification. It's a mistake to try to reconcile what you feel with a social classification, because the classification may not really suit you. You start with your feelings, understand them and be comfortable with them. You, your feeling, and the people you care about are the important things.
I will later intend to write a longer post about David Brin's observations of enlightenment versus romanticism, but until then, go read "Emotional roots for hypocricies of BOTH left and right..." The money quote:
Nobody speaks of the profoundly hypocritical exception to the left's own dogma of absolute reprogrammability. This exception is an equally absolute faith in the predetermined nature of homosexuality, labeling it as genetically pre-welded and hopelessly unalterable by any post-natal influence. No other human trait is given utterly obligate status by the left. And given it by dogmatic decree! In every other case, the ideologically correct incantation is to demand that we attribute traits to individual experience and control.
In their eagerness to deny the existence of anything innate in humans, pomo leftists often like to claim that "disability" is nothing but a social construct, so being "disabled" not objectively worse than being "healthy", since the only reason why the "disabled" don't do as well as us normos is that society has been designed for people who walk on two legs. If the society had been designed for ten-foot-tall creatures who walk on all fours, then we would be "disabled". I can kind of understand this argument although I don't find it true (or would that be "true"?), since I have serious difficulties in imagining a society organized in a way that the people with Down syndrome and other morons would fare better than people with normal IQ's. But that's probably because I am so very limited in my thinking. The article "Airing the 'disability perspective' but getting few converts" includes a quote
"I will always believe that blindness is a neutral trait, neither to be prized nor shunned. Very few people, including those dearest to me, share that conviction... They cannot fully relinquish their negative assumptions...."
Such a conviction would be easy to prove by drinking a suitable amount of methanol. I don't see (uh) any takers. It would be similarly easy to demonstrate one's belief on the text
Not only do physically disabled people have experiences which are not available to the able-bodied, they are in a better position to transcend cultural mythologies about the body, because they cannot do things the able-bodied feel they must do in order to be happy, 'normal,' and sane...
of the blog "The Gimp Parade". It's not like making somebody paraplegic would be medically that difficult.
By the way, did anybody notice how I participated in "Carnival of Feminists 10"?
Don't worry, dear readers, I haven't joined the HiveMind quite yet,
just trying to be a bit Sokalian in there. Oh, everything in "They won't wait, they won't rest, they attack continuously"
is real, but when a feminist reads that post and gets angry but
suddenly realizes the giant elephant that was said in between the lines
that forbids her to even think about the whole issue or to say anything
about it, her internal cognitive dissonance must be quite a storm. Of
course, it sure would be funny is some feminists actually did voice
their objections, not realizing that while "two Finnish men" is
technically and politically correct (and even the officially
recommended way of saying things), since there is a bit more in this
whole issue, as explained in "The iron bars of reality".
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