Search Partial Objects
Support PO
blog advertising is good for youMeta
-
Popular Posts
Recent Comments
- Joe on Just take it
- One book, two films, two badass ladies, and some sex appeal. on So-Called Feminism in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
- Forsooth on Just take it
- Gabe Ruth on Drug Use in American Culture
- Comus on Just take it
-
Recent Posts
Tag Archives: philosophy
Blogger Live-Tweets Her Mammogram, Learns She Has Cancer
Boing-Boing.net blogger and internet “celebrity” Xeni Jardin went to get her first mammogram, and live-tweeted the experience to her thousands of followers. At the end of her doctor’s visit, she learned she may have cancer.
That is a frightening and sad conclusion to what I can only assume she thought would be a routine examination. But… Read the rest
Why do ideas become fads
The Interpretation Of Dreams was a blockbuster in its time; Decline Of The West similarly so. So what happened?
The Labels that Define us
The human mind is an incredible processing machine, and like any good storage software, it structures and categorizes information.
We naturally love to label and define stuff. It’s a way to make sense of things. Whatever we read, think, and experience, we subconsciously categorize in our brains. The stuff on the foundational level of our thinking is what makes… Read the rest
Noam Chomsky is Wrong on Bin Laden (and Foucault Won That Debate))
Let me be totally amazing clear, I am not some right wing Dittohead Fox News viewer hopping between Hannity and talk radio for my daily Two Minutes Hate.
With that said, I think I might be the only person who, upon seeing that now-famous “Justice vs. Power” Chomsky-Foucault debate immediately realized how much of a charlatan and an anti-intellectual… Read the rest
May 24, 2011
Tagged bin laden, Chomsky, debate, foucault, philosophy, politics, postmodernism
91 Comments
Enough truths to cope with already
Tarksi wondered how we could tell whether snow is white. We have more challenging proposti0nal conundrums.
Extreme possible worlds
Bin Laden sprang out of bed with an AK47 in each hand. A millisecond before squeezing the triggers, a Navy SEAL shot him in the eye. “Shit!” exclaimed the US shooter, realizing the democratic West was in trouble.… Read the rest
A Refresher Course in Ideology
The function of ideology is to separate our perception and collective representation of social reality from the facts of that reality. In other words, ideology is a way to apprehend all of social reality within a single cohesive framework by implicitly or subconsciously making certain assumptions. These assumptions are usually false, and when questioned on them directly, we acknowledge them… Read the rest
Codebreaking: Pristiq treats you like the automaton you are
Fresh from the Fritz Lang Institute of Psychopharmacology comes Pristiq, an antidepressant targeted at women who “feel like they have to wind themselves up to get through the rest of the day.”
Pristiq may be a wonderful and helpful drug, but there is something unsettling about this advertisement. What is the meaning of the toy? Why does the cured patient… Read the rest
Do We Have Free Will?
New York Times hedges: Do You Have Free Will? It’s The Only Choice. I don’t know what that means either.
It covers the usual gamut of philosophers (excluding Buddhists, go figure), psychologists and physicists, with the consensus being that it’s an illusion but we have to act like it isn’t.
They invoke the murderer example: can Bill be held… Read the rest
