Sexism and “Sex and the City”

To answer the question raised by this column written in very questionable taste, I imagine that women watch Sex and the City because it’s about four women who do what they like and don’t really care what you, as a man, think about their decisions.

In the interest of full disclosure, I do not enjoy the show, and I am going to go see the movie. My wife is not making me, she asked and I said yes. Just like, I asked her to watch Indiana Jones earlier in the week and she said yes. The odds that I will have suffered more from her movie in this exchange are practically zero. I think the odds that watching Richard Chamberlain play Alan Quartermain again would be worse than the Indiana Jones movie is pretty much even money.

Ach! Me Retirement Grease!

I can’t pass this one up… the NYT has an article on how rising oil prices have created a rash of grease-siphoning for profit ventures behind restaurants across America. Nice to see that our policies have created subplots that are retreads of old The Simpsons episodes.

Back at C&G…

Alright, due to the problems I’m having running my own site (I don’t want to get into them), I’m back on wordpress.com. I’m going to import some of my more recent posts from there to here, and then I’m just not going to bother with the old site.  Update your feeds accordingly.  

 

 

Meat and Morals

From Lawrence Tribe’s recent post on Balkinization:

Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has a lovely little piece in The New York Times Magazine for this May 25 (at p.15), “How Are Humans Unique?” Asking that ubiquitous question, he defends an answer focused less on our distinctive tool-making and concept-manipulating capcities than on our quite unique skills for social learning, communicating and construing the intentions of others. Tomasello makes a strong case for the proposition that it is because human beings “are adapted for such cultural activities — and not because of their cleverness as individuals — that human beings are able to do so many exceptionally complex and impressive things.” He adds that, “[o]f course, human beings are not cooperating angels; they also put their heads together to do all kinds of heinous deeds. But such deeds,” he observes, “are not usually done to those inside ‘the group.’ Recent evolutionary models have demonstrated what politicians have long known: the best way to get people to collaborate and to think like a group is to identify an enemy and charge that ‘they’ threaten ‘us.’ . . . The solution — more easily said than done — is to find new ways to define the group.”

I was struck when I read this about how antithetical to my presumptions about human beings this approach is, and this is where I believe I preserve my space for existentialism. For me, the defining character of our uniqueness appears to always come down to an irreducible, and non-replicable experience of being that each of us has as beings. In this way, I find the claims of evolutionary scientists, for all of their profound and important contributions on narrower questions, to be venturing a little out of their depth. I have a healthy dose of materialism in me, but I believe strongly in the coexistence of materialism with what we would can all recognize as uniquely living in the material world as our own selves.  

Rather than serve as a public declaration of my beliefs (although, I suppose it is that still), I wish to contrast my reaction in reading Professor Tribe’s post with the recent Philosophy Bites podcastfeaturing Peter Singer (I’m a little behind on those due to vacation). I have actually never read any of Singer’s work on animals, but I am familiar with the general outlines of the argument ( I have a fondness for his and Peter Unger’s arguments on poverty and morals, as I used them to reach the finals of the Columbia Debate Tournament in an earlier age), and the podcast pretty much confirmed those general arguments once more.