Why Toni Morrison Deserves Her Place in the Literary Pantheon. Toni Morrison never liked that old seventies slogan “Black is beautiful.” It was superficial, simplistic, palliative—everything her blinkered detractors called Morrison’s complex novels when the 1993 Nobel Prize transformed her into a spokeswoman and a target. The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism, by Mary Mills Patrick. Hurry up, evolution told. » In Vicarious Defense of R. Scott Bakker. I Love Scott Bakker. Scott would probably want me to interrogate my affection for him, because (he might say) our brains are tricksy, pattern-seeking, biased organs, and the more fervently we believe in the veracity of the decisions we think we make with them, the more deluded we are.
Or, as he says, “We’re all idiots around here.” I’d like to interrogate my affection, and perhaps I will, when the furor dies down. But that’s the thing: there’s furor. And I, who have always feared confrontation and upheaval and rocking of all sorts of boats, feel compelled to address it. Fallacy: Appeal to Ridicule. Also Known as: Appeal to Mockery, The Horse Laugh.
Description of Appeal to Ridicule The Appeal to Ridicule is a fallacy in which ridicule or mockery is substituted for evidence in an "argument. " This line of "reasoning" has the following form: X, which is some form of ridicule is presented (typically directed at the claim). Therefore claim C is false. Fallacies. Dr.
Michael C. Labossiere, the author of a Macintosh tutorial named Fallacy Tutorial Pro 3.0, has kindly agreed to allow the text of his work to appear on the Nizkor site, as a Nizkor Feature. It remains © Copyright 1995 Michael C. Labossiere, with distribution restrictions -- please see our copyright notice. If you have questions or comments about this work, please direct them both to the Nizkor webmasters (webmaster@nizkor.org) and to Dr. Story of the Week: The Culture War Isn't Done with Us. Dirty Girls and Bad Feminists: A Few Thoughts on “I Love Dick” There’s a moment in almost any bad memoir where you start to get the sense that the author is telling you more than he or she actually wants you to know; a moment where the author’s persona, carefully crafted to be winning or fun or poignant or survivorly and magnificently victimized, starts to slip, and you get the sense of a different person trying to speak.
This person is less glamorous, or less admirable, or less disgusting, or meaner, or nicer than the person the author is trying to sell you; they’re less fit to be written down. Probably they’re more embarrassing. Alex Dally MacFarlane. Oh R Scott Bakker will you just shut up.
My recent post about passion and The Wild Girls was inspired by R Scott Bakker’s recent idiocy (Nick Mamatas has a handy index of the first 3 posts), but I wanted to take my feelings about that and spin it into something positive, focusing on Le Guin and passion and getting it right instead of Bakker’s foolishness. Alas, no longer. After claiming it was all a social experiment (lol, really), he is now claiming he knew he’d lose from the beginning. Everyone has proved his point by not ~actually responding~ to his arguments (calling them stupid isn’t a response, I guess) and joining in the big sheep-like group because it’s easy (are the people siding with him also choosing the easy route, one wonders?). But then he goes beyond inanity into shitfuckery. Obama Speech: 'A More Perfect Union'
How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy - Kathleen McAuliffe. No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist.
A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 53-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in thought, and his still-youthful, square-jawed face is framed by frizzy red hair that encircles his head like a ring of fire. Certainly Flegr’s thinking is jarringly unconventional. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others. Perlocutionary act. A perlocutionary act (or perlocutionary effect) is a speech act, as viewed at the level of its psychological consequences, such as persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise getting someone to do or realize something.
This is contrasted with locutionary and illocutionary acts (which are other levels of description, rather than different types of speech acts).[1] Unlike the notion of locutionary act, which describes the linguistic function of an utterance, a perlocutionary effect is in some sense external to the performance. It may be thought of, in a sense, as the effect of the illocutionary act via the locutionary act. The Overjustification Effect. The Misconception: There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love.
The Truth: Getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings. Office Space – Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox Money isn’t everything. Money can’t buy happiness. Neuroscience Marketing - Brain, Behavior, and Neuromarketing. Designer Psychologies: Moving beyond neurotypicality. Designer psychologies, or customized cognitive processing modalities, describes the potential for future individuals to selectively alter the specific and unique ways in which they take in, analyze and perceive the world. Why Cognitive Enhancement Is in Your Future (and Your Past) - Ross Andersen. Using technology to enhance our brains sounds terrifying, but using tools to make ourselves smarter may be part of humans' nature.
It could be that we are on the verge of a great deluge of cognitive enhancement. Or it's possible that new brain-enhancing drugs and technologies will be nothing compared to how we've transformed our minds in the past. If it seems that making ourselves "artificially" smarter is somehow inhuman, it may be that similar activities are actually what made us human. Let's look at the nature of the new technology. Neuroscientific Consumer Testing. You Are Not So Smart.
Project Implicit® Neuroscience could mean soldiers controlling weapons with minds. Soldiers could have their minds plugged directly into weapons systems, undergo brain scans during recruitment and take courses of neural stimulation to boost their learning, if the armed forces embrace the latest developments in neuroscience to hone the performance of their troops.
These scenarios are described in a report into the military and law enforcement uses of neuroscience, published on Tuesday, which also highlights a raft of legal and ethical concerns that innovations in the field may bring. The report by the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science, says that while the rapid advance of neuroscience is expected to benefit society and improve treatments for brain disease and mental illness, it also has substantial security applications that should be carefully analysed. The report's authors also anticipate new designer drugs that boost performance, make captives more talkative and make enemy troops fall asleep.
The Wild Girls & thoughts about passion. Passion is so refreshing. I have waded through my share of arguments in favour of misogyny and the generally appalling treatment of women in works of fantasy that – I can’t say they’re based on medieval Europe, because judging by their remarks the authors have either never picked up a history book or never got further than the Horrible Histories. Jesse Bullington’s books are based on medieval Europe and he has the bibliographies to prove it.
The generic fantasyland popularised by every Tolkien rip-off ever – including the supposedly “subversive” works of Abercrombie & co – is about as close to medieval Europe as my piss is to wine, and this includes the apparently widespread attitude that women’s historical narratives were 24-hour suffering and also BORING and why would we talk about them? Men men men raped women men, ad eternum.
Pete Hoekstra Ad Draws More Criticism, Called 'Really, Really Dumb' LANSING, Mich. -- Criticism of a Senate campaign ad featuring a young Asian woman talking in broken English about China taking away American jobs grew Monday as some warned it could revive discrimination against Asian-Americans. Michigan has seen its share of Asia bashing, especially in the 1980s, when images of sledgehammers smashing imported cars were common. Chinese-American Vincent Chin died after being beaten to death in 1982 by two unemployed autoworkers angry about competition from Japan.
Republican Senate hopeful Pete Hoekstra began taking heat after his ad targeting Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow ran statewide Sunday before the Super Bowl. "Mr. Hoekstra may believe that his ad is just a way to express his political goals. The ad was created by media strategist Fred Davis of California-based Strategic Perception Inc., known for both Michigan Gov.
"We knew we were taking an aggressive approach on this. California Sen. CNN's Roland Martin Under Fire From GLAAD For David Beckham Super Bowl Tweets. Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture. The OF Blog: Un forastero, sentado a la mesa, inquieto. At dinner, the Santiago poet averts her face from the gringo although no one else is sitting close enough for her to engage in conversation. Marc hauser retractions. Marc Hauser’s second chance: Leading science writers endorse his upcoming book. Godwin's law. James-R. The OF Blog: Interesting article on racism and sexism found in Tolkien's works. Sweet Manna « Three Pound Brain. I-80 crash claims UNL student's life. Derek Kieper was a smart, funny, intense young man who relished a good debate and would do anything for his friends. Lost Decade (Japan) Karo jisatsu (suicide from overwork): a spreading occupational threat. The 6 Stupidest Things We Use to Judge People We Don't Know.
Critique of Pure Reason. Mathematics Learning in Early Childhood: Paths Toward Excellence and Equity. Self-actualization. Untitled. Poll-Position-crosstabs-divine-intervention. Newsnight: Paul Mason: Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere. The OF Blog: Thoughts on two recent R. Scott Bakker short stories. MINISTRY OF PANTS: Drusas Achamian and Cnaiur Urs Skiotha. Jackmcdonaghart. The False Sun « Three Pound Brain. Wicked North. Untitled. Reductionism. Thou Art Physics. Wiki. 12. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49. Mise en abyme. Mathematics and the Russian Doll Structure of, Like, the Whole Universe « Three Pound Brain. I'm hooked on George RR Martin's flights of fantasy. Suppression of PKR promotes network excitability and en... [Cell. 2011. “Super memory” pill–and possibly an Alzheimer’s cure–could be around the corner.
A Muscular Empathy - Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Research Bust - The Chronicle Review. Getting out of the way. Cilia control eating signal. Catching up on lost time – the Ancestral Health Symposium, food reward, palatability, insulin signaling and carbohydrates… Part II(a) You Are A Machine : Cosmic Variance. Using Cognitive Science to Think about the Twelfth Century: Revisiting the Individual through Latin Texts. 20111213. Jabberwocky. Rise of Neurocinema: How Hollywood Studios Harness Your Brainwaves to Win Oscars. CAUSA SUIcide « Three Pound Brain.
FAN FIC « Three Pound Brain. Enhanced E-Book of the Heroes. Nascence: the reveal at Tobias Buckell Online. Amazon. Ray Brassier. How to Squeeze an Entire Universe into Three Seconds or Less: An Answer to ‘Brassier’s Problem’ « Three Pound Brain. Parmenides’ Hinge (1999) « Three Pound Brain. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Rhapsophy: A Prolegomena to the Next Whacked-Out Problematic Ontological Assumption « Three Pound Brain. Adventures in Recent Continental Thought « Three Pound Brain. Amazon E-Library Is Publishing’s Profit Model: Virginia Postrel. ‘LWOS’ and The Naturalization of Deconstruction « Three Pound Brain. The Things by Peter Watts. Catherynne M. Valente. Oxygen binding in alligator blood related to temperature, diving, and "alkaline tide" Quantum Theorem Shakes Foundations. Vox Popoli: The downside of meritocracy. Outing the It that Thinks: The Collapse of an Intellectual Ecosystem « Three Pound Brain. To Be and Not To Be: Some Radical Reflections on the Origins and Extent of the ‘Hard Problem’ « Three Pound Brain.
Life Without Plot In 'Leaving The Atocha Station' Untitled. The Prince of Nothing Book Club: The Darkness that Comes Before Part One. Fantasy and the Anglosphere. Timeline - Prince of Nothing. The Four Revelations of Cinial’jin « Three Pound Brain. The Future of Literature in the Age of Information « Three Pound Brain. Looking for a good read? Don't disregard the snarky snobs.