So on a site I frequent, one member asked why are super hero movies so popular, since they are so childish and stupid. (I told him he supplied the answer.) this quickly evolved into a discussion of "I agree except for the (insert franchise here) movies". From practically everyone! Fantasy is perfectly fine, Homer has monsters and gods, but I do find it amusing that with Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot in living memory so many seem to need fantasy to imagine evil.
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Yes. This is something I point out too. There are more crazy ideas afloat now than in the Middle Ages, and with less excuse (illiteracy for example).
ReplyDeleteSo on a site I frequent, one member asked why are super hero movies so popular, since they are so childish and stupid. (I told him he supplied the answer.) this quickly evolved into a discussion of "I agree except for the (insert franchise here) movies". From practically everyone!
ReplyDeleteFantasy is perfectly fine, Homer has monsters and gods, but I do find it amusing that with Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot in living memory so many seem to need fantasy to imagine evil.