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The first 3 minutes are a recap of the crime, should you wish to skip.
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[eta]
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A profile of Broadway star LaChanze that highlights her efforts to raise awareness and take action on the lack of diversity audiences don’t see (details begin at 2:15):
The same issue has been reported in Hollywood for a long time, but the focus still tends to be on the cast rather than the crew:
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Gonna watch this again, as the whole point about kitsch, modernity, pointlessness, is really interesting to me.
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I found this very interesting.
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Luxury beliefs?
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Worth watching, even if you’ve not read the books or seen the film (or maybe especially so). At the end she gets into the larger issue lit criticism and why you can both enjoy something and discuss problems with it (at about 48 minutes in).
Also, I have not watched this, but Contrapoints ALSO did a Twillight video…
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Ugh this Henderson fellow is a piece of work.
FTA (emphasis original to the article):
Ideas associated with ultra-wealthy conservatives, not young liberals, inflict the highest costs on poor people. Climate change disproportionately hurts the poor, so why is “climate denial” — an idea popular with so many right-wing millionaires and billionaires but rare on college campuses — not the ultimate luxury belief? In Henderson’s view of the world, billionaires, who can afford bunkers in New Zealand, will decide to become climate denialists knowing that only they can afford the long-term costs when the planet gets too hot. The same goes for tax cuts — the centerpiece of Republican governance over the last thirty years. The actual upper class in America, not campus liberals, fight for tax cuts that increase their own wealth while causing downstream negative effects on the quality of public services for the poor. Why is Henderson not castigating white lower middle class Americans for continually voting for a party centered around the luxury belief of tax cuts for the wealthy and gutting of government entitlements?
Hmm.
“Why…?” indeed.
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For certain definitions of “knowing”. As the old 70’s commercial used to say:
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I hold to the idea of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. Nothing in the structure of the brain hints at it, it only becomes apparent in the functioning of the whole. Which would conclude that, for all intents and purposes, free will is a thing. Even the “time block” relativistic arguments that everything exists all at once and has and essentially has already happened does not preclude this idea. As the free will having happened does not eliminate its existence. (Deep Thoughts by me!)
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Interesting thoughts there, but I don’t see how you get from this:
To this conclusion:
I’m not following how one necessarily implies the other.
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A few steps skipped in there. As far as we can tell, our decisions are, in fact, our own. There is nothing indicating that they are already pre-ordained, and even if they are, we can’t tell that. Emergent phenomena, like the flocking patterns of birds, or (IMHO) life itself, by their definition have no a priori existence, they just appear when complexity rises to a certain level. (Way oversimplified, I know.) To my mind, the emergence requires that the thing is not predictable, is not possible to fore-ordain, and so tah-dah, free will. It really does make sense in my head. Yet more evidence for free will! Who could foresee that mess!
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I recommend reading Kevin Mitchell’s book “Free Agents” as it helped me sort out various similar ideas for which I only had vague and difficult to express notions. It explores concepts like selfhood, agency and meaning as they developed over the course of evolution from the very beginning of life. Everything is framed though biology, which I found refreshingly straightforward - I’ve previously found abstract philosophical arguments needlessly confusing even when they reach similar conclusions. There are some neatly articulated ideas that are useful for thinking broadly about life and intelligence, without even getting to free will. For example:
Actually, I should amend my earlier post from before I had read the book. The summary I wrote actually applies more to the position of Daniel Dennett that Mitchell argues against:
Mitchell’s own argument goes like this. At a fundamental level, quantum uncertainty makes the universe not entirely deterministic - there is unpredictable noise in the actions of elementary particles, which may result in unpredictable behavior of molecules or even neurons. In a living organism, the ways that this indeterminacy can manifest itself are constrained by the structure of the organism that embodies its goals and reasons. Some of this structure is shaped by evolution, some - by learning over the lifetime of the organism, and some (crucially for humans) are the internal, recursive, self-referential neural processes of thinking. So the actions of a person are neither determined by the physical state of the world, nor are entirely shaped by outside influences, but rather cannot be reduced to anything other than the person’s own choices.
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Despite the GOP attacking anything related to DEI, hopefully we’ll continue to see healthcare organizations supporting improvements in training:
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I had no idea that kids’ tv was so carefully thought out and tested.
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Still…
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