Blaming Boeing for the horrible state of US aviation is like blaming GM for climate change, not wrong, but they’re avoiding looking at the larger issue, Raygun’s gutting of the antitrust laws, and the monopolies that resulted.
I wish they’d spent more than the last line in the article about that. Boeing is an obvious symptom of what monopolies do, but not ultimately responsible for the situation.
She’s baaaaack…
Paglia’s pugnacious and populist brand of intellectualism has always made for compelling viewing, as has her habit of wearing her narcissism on her sleeve. But until relatively recently her star appeared to have waned. In what has become a predictable turn of events, a sign of her return was her attempted cancellation. In 2019 students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where Paglia has taught since 1984, tried and failed to have her fired because of her views on gender and sexual assault. Paglia, who describes herself as transgender, has said that giving children puberty blockers is ‘a crime against humanity’; she also believes that in exchange for the freedoms delivered by the sexual revolution, women should take responsibility for themselves by avoiding exposure to harm. Rather than removing her from her post, the protests effectively took a bellows to her career, placing her in the midst of campus free-speech debates.
This helped return Paglia to the headlines, but her current popularity can largely be ascribed to the influential New York podcast Red Scare. The podcast’s hosts, Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, attribute their own contrarian approach to undermining progressive dogma to Paglia. A key part of their appeal is the delight they take in breaking the rules a good liberal is supposed to obey. They don’t believe in the patriarchy, they are sceptical of the ‘believe women’ mantra, they celebrate beauty and thinness and are themselves beautiful and thin, and they use ‘gay’ and ‘retarded’ as pejoratives. Khachiyan has a particular knack for dispatching lines that combine Paglia’s flair for controversy, Wildean aphorisms and the juvenile pleasures of shitposting. (‘Liberals organise their friends like their bookcases: by colour’, etc.) By frequently proselytising Paglia’s work, along with that of Friedrich Nietzsche and historian Christopher Lasch, Khachiyan and Nekrasova have established a kind of mini-canon among their millennial and zoomer fanbase. Such is their popularity that they inspired the characters Olivia and Paula, the two witheringly superior girls from the first season of the television show The White Lotus (2021–). In one scene they appear poolside at a Hawaiian resort reading Paglia’s Sexual Personae and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
I kind of wish more white people would read Fanon, tho.
Yep. And Du Bois. And, and, and…
Indeed! But given everything happening in Gaza, that text seems especially relevant.
Indeed.
Oh, and let’s not forget that the girls are not both white. And that it’s Paula who’s reading Fanon (and that it’s no surprise that Olivia is reading Paglia).
A good look at their relationship:
I still haven’t watched White Lotus… I know you’ve been a fan.
Thanks!
I think the first season is better. Has more bite. I like that kind of bite.
Has anyone posted this anywhere else on the BBS?
Listening now…
He knew that he was going to say that.
So apparently Sapolsky’s book “Determined” came out the same month as Kevin Mitchell’s book “Free Agents”. Both are written by neuroscientists, both dismiss any supernatural or dualistic notions, both work on the basis of physical, scientific evidence, but come to different conclusions. I haven’t read either of the books (yet), only some reviews and this long post on Mitchell’s blog where he directly addresses the points of disagreement between himself and Sapolsky. The blog post is in four parts: 1, 2, 3, 4.
My takeaway from Mitchell’s argument is that although we are all shaped by influences outside our control, and although all processes in the universe, including the workings of the mind, could be seen as deterministic from some hypothetical omniscient point of view, it still makes sense to think of ourselves as self-directing entities who make our own choices. That’s because the things we deal with on a human scale - not particle interactions or even neural firings, but complex cognitive processes that encode thoughts and ideas - can be meaningfully described as self-directing and decision-making. Or to quote from the last part of Mitchell’s post:
I find this line of reasoning more interesting than Sapolsky’s, which seems to be little more that a trivial refutation of dualism (there’s nothing supernatural about thinking, therefore there’s no free will) - as he himself says in the video, it is based on an idea he had when he was 14. Mitchell seems more interested in the tricky business of thinking about thinking, and what that means in a physical universe.
Yeah, that struck me too… like, he made up his mind then, and refuses to abandon that idea… 
I mean, what 14 year old isn’t somewhat of an idiot?
Thanks for the links to Mitchell!
Also, AIUI, certain quantum-mechanical phenomena like radioactive decay appear to be genuinely indeterministic. Determinism and “free will” seem both like human ideas based on philosophical-slash-theological speculation and thought experiments, that don’t actually fit the reality of the universe.
I don’t know, quantum mechanics still has the correspondence principle, where it looks like classical mechanics when things get big enough. And causes having effects and humans making choices for themselves are both a pretty good description of the reality we live in.
In all these discussions, though, I don’t get this assumption that free will should be opposed to determinism. Making a choice should depend on your values, personality, what you know, what you have been thinking about – which means it should be determined by the state of your brain. Having it be non-deterministic is being controlled by cosmic dice instead of yourself.
I’ve also heard people say we don’t make choices because scans show the brain activity happening before we consciously make them. As if having your brain weigh out the options before you pick which one you want is somehow at odds with choosing. It’s like people think “choice” means “random choice”, but what’s the point of that?
Of course! But you can in principle use that radioactive decay as a trigger for some macroscopic effect - Schrödinger’s Cat is the best known example of this - and IMO that shows the “hard” determinism, the idea of universe as a clockwork where if you know all the initial conditions you can, in principle, plot everything that was, is and will be, is broken.
Overall, though, I pretty much agree with you. 
… other people’s choices are either predictable or random, because other people are made of matter and subject to the laws of physics
MY choices are in some kind of third category because I’m special 
