Your Inner Fish For the Holidays!

You've seen all of those standard fare Christmas shoes over and over.  It's time to shake things up this holiday season.  Instead of watching predictable shows, or a show with a ghastly ending, the Grinch that Stole Christmas, open your mind and take a look at this much-stranger-than-fiction trilogy created by biologist Neil Shubin. These informative and entertaining shows are available at no charge at PBS.

Episode I - Your Inner Fish
https://www.pbs.org/video/your-inner-fish-program-your-inner-fish-2/

Episode 2 - Your Inner Reptile
https://www.pbs.org/video/your-inner-fish-program-your-inner-reptile/

Episode 3 - Your Inner Monkey
https://www.pbs.org/video/your-inner-fish-your-inner-monkey/

Continue ReadingYour Inner Fish For the Holidays!

Race Conscious “Solution” to the Limited Supply of COVID Vaccines

I've often argued that we need to refocus, to consciously move back toward the central mission of Martin Luther King:

“I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

~From MLK's “I have a dream” speech

It's distressing to see so many loud voices arguing for the opposite, demanding that we need to become ever more conscious of "race" and claiming that we have made no meaningful progress since the Civil War or since the early 1960s.

Basing anything on "race" is always a massively erroneous and ultimately destructive miscategorization.  It will lead to endless strife and mistrust because "race" tells us nothing meaningful about any of the people with whom we share this planet. There is only one way to get to know each other: Taking the time to learn about each other, one at a time. Using "race" as a proxy as a shortcut for this hard work is inevitably destructive. In its simplistic detachment from real-world facts, sorting people based on "color" is akin to basing public policy on phrenology or astrology.

The above is a short prelude for a recent proposal regarding prioritizing people for the COVID vaccine, pointed out by Andrew Sullivan:

Continue ReadingRace Conscious “Solution” to the Limited Supply of COVID Vaccines

Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis – More than a Cemetery

People in STL call it "Bellefontaine Cemetery" but on its website you'll see this: "Bellefontaine Cemetery is a nonprofit, non-denominational cemetery and arboretum . . ." I know it best as an extraordinary place for getting lost on feng shui inner roads and for reveling at the 5,000 trees. And for reading the 87,000 graves and monuments for the meagre clues they offer about those who used to walk and talk like you and me.

 

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Helen Pluckrose Discusses the Need to Push Back Against Critical Social Justice Activism (Woke-ness)

Earlier this year, British author Helen Pluckrose, also the Editor-in-Chief of Areo Magazine, co-authored a new book, Cynical Threories, with James Lindsay, who is the creator of the anti-woke website New Discourses.  The long title to their book is also their compact thesis: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody.  

Pluckrose was recently interviewed by Jason Hill of Quillette. The topic was the brand of postmodernism embraced by modern Critical Social Justice activists. In recent years CSJ's version of postmodernism has been increasingly employed as a political strategy by the Woke Left.  What is "postmodernism"?  Pluckrose offers these four characteristics:

  1. Objective knowledge is inaccessible and what we consider knowledge is actually just a cultural construct that operates in the service of power.
  2. Dominant groups in society—wealthy, white, heterosexual, western men—get to decide what is and isn’t legitimate knowledge and this becomes dominant discourses which are then accepted by the general population who perpetuate oppressive power dynamics like white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia.
  3. The critical theorists exist to deconstruct these discourses and make their oppressive nature visible. This results in the breakdown of boundaries and categories through which we understand things like emotion and reason, fact and fiction, male and female.
  4. [Critical theorists] also produce a profound cultural relativism and a neurotic focus on language and language policing as well as a rejection of individuality and humanism in favor of identity politics. This is a problem because of the resulting threats to freedom of belief and speech, the divisive tribalism and the rejection of science, reason and liberalism.

Hill asked Pluckrose why it was necessary for Lindsay and Pluckrose to write Cynical Theories at this time? Pluckrose offered this response:

Continue ReadingHelen Pluckrose Discusses the Need to Push Back Against Critical Social Justice Activism (Woke-ness)