My hat is off to Bird Dog and his wife who do daily links at Maggie's Farm. It's been a week in this format, and I think I'm going to just sit around and be stupid for a while. It is good to set goals you can accomplish.
Palestinians executing their own for seeking food.
There used to be a saying "The personal is political," meaning that our individual domestic decisions have larger political implications. I always thought that was true but only half the story. It occurred to me a few days ago that this has reversed, and people take their personal behavior cues from their politics. I would think that marrying, having children, living near family, and working for a living would of necessity be mostly personal. I no longer think so, and when I tried to trace it back I think the switch started decades ago. I suppose if you define your life in terms of your politics they will consume you.
Rob Kurzban at Living Fossils on the perverse incentives in academia, It's All Academic.
Another important piece of the puzzle is the lack of one particular kind of incentive: penalties for being wrong, even luminously wrong. As far as I know, no (modern) scholar ever got fined, jail time, or even fired for publishing a genuinely stupid idea.3 Indeed, in many areas of the academy, such behavior can be richly rewarded. (Working to expose the stupidity of such ideas might be punished, however.) The basic explanation for this is that academics make the rules and they don’t want any that hold them accountable for being wrong. Why would they? Why would anybody?
I have gotten out of the habit of picking the best of my old posts. From the beginning of 2012, my views on Sex Offender Registries.
I saw an article on the personal being political just yesterday.
ReplyDeletehttps://the-pipeline.org/the-column-the-political-is-now-personal-women-hardest-hitters/
At the end, the author notes a very different tone about how to make women of the era get involved from the one we're seeing now, when Democrats are trying to figure out how to appeal to men.
"I think “apolitical” women are not in the movement for very good reasons, and as long as we say “you have to think like us and live like us to join the charmed circle,” we will fail. What I am trying to say is that there are things in the consciousness of “apolitical” women (I find them very political) that are as valid as any political consciousness we think we have. We should figure out why many women don’t want to do action. Maybe there is something wrong with the action or something wrong with why we are doing the action or maybe the analysis of why the action is necessary is not clear enough in our minds."
Cf: we just need to teach the men not to be sexists and to get on board with what Democrats say; we need to figure out how to 'code talk' them into doing what we want; we should fool them into it.
Apropos of the political: Did you ever read The Gostak and the Doshes?
ReplyDeleteI almost understood that.
ReplyDeleteThe physics is handwavium, of course.
ReplyDeleteI strongly suspected that. I am undecided in science fiction whether I prefer a writer who gets a lot of it right versus one who is strictly focused on a good yarn.
ReplyDelete