Gender, Race and Philosophy: The Blog A forum for philosophers and other scholars to discuss current work and current affairs with race and gender in mind.
James argues that what is characteristic of assholes is that they systematically "act out of a deep-rooted sense of entitlement, a habitual and persistent belief that they deserve special treatment." He develops a typology of different kinds of assholes, and also theorizes about the rise of "asshole capitalism," which is where:
As an outsider, it's pretty depressing how "new Labor's" cult of rule by "management experts" (as if one could be an expert without actually having any particular expertise) just added another layer of awfulness to the Thatcher educational depredations. Some of my British friends had minor hopes that the new conservative government would actually do their job and stand up for what was valuable in Western culture, but as far as higher edumacation, all they seem to be good at is following Napoleon Bonaparte's demand that the bureaucracy must expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
Anyhow, Critchley brilliantly describes how this played out while he was in the U.K. and also how it relates to his experience in New York. He also describes what he's done with the New York Times and some of his more recent philosophical work. It's a great interview. Joe Bob says check it out.
Nice background on his history of Regnerus' almost unbelievably foul misogynistic "research" and punditry HERE. The story's punchline:
What do we need with a retrograde researcher who instructs young women to reorder their lives according to men’s “market value”; who treats women like a uniform mass of economic actors seeking only to turn their relationships into marriage with kids; who can’t quite imagine a world in which women have sex for sexual reasons (once describing female consent as “sexual strategies for making men 'fall in love’”); and who traffics in the mid-century notion that the timing of marriage should be arranged around a woman’s “most fertile years”? Now that Regnerus has definitively added “provider of ill-conceived research to Focus-On-The-Family types” to his CV, here’s hoping that more news outlets will decide that his isn’t a voice we need at all.
Article HERE. It's nice to see Corvino eviscerate Mark Regnerus, though his conclusion is almost unbearably depressing:
None of this knowledge, sadly, will prevent same-sex-marriage opponents from citing the study as evidence for their position. That’s unfortunate because it’s illogical and unfair. But it’s especially unfortunate because it misses yet another opportunity to focus on actual child welfare.
But the depression is mitigated somewhat by the fact that one of our magazines of record has posted such an effective takedown.
It was a rather strange situation because the war was over. Before the war there was quite a strong fascist party led by Oswald Mosley and he and his cohorts were put in detention (jail) during the war by Churchill. After the war they came out and immediately started up again with their anti-Semitism and running through the streets and having meetings, it was quite ridiculous. Many truly brave Jewish ex-servicemen started the “43 Group” because there were 43 people at the first meeting they had. These were tough men who had been through the war. Of course volunteers were needed, I was 16 or 17 at the time, most of my friends joined the 43 Group and there were quite a few hundred of us. Truly the fascists were smashed in the streets and yes if you were scared at times because it was scary. But after we saw the pictures that came out and the whole story of the Holocaust, there was actually no way we could allow fascists to run through the streets. I was arrested one night and put in jail, the following day the judge told me ‘to be a good boy’ and let me go. That was our life in those days, we decided that we were absolutely not going to allow what happened pre-war when Jews were just beat up indiscriminately in the streets. It worked beautifully because of mainly the tough Jewish characters that were in the British armed forces during the war, they were the people that did it. But also there were quite a few gentiles who had seen the camps, the horror of Europe and fought with us.
You owe it to yourself to watch the video (below the fold):
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