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The Provocations of Camille Paglia

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Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#61

Post by _iyig »

sprafa wrote: post #59
qazpot wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you disregard a person's all opinions only because he took a selfie with bunch of people and a cartoon character and the 90% of the said cartoon character's memes you have seen are racist and horrible.

Ah well if you see the selfie you might change your mind. But yes. The main thing for me was I rarely if ever see Peterson smile. And in this photo he’s grinning ear to ear.

>The main thing for me was I rarely if ever see Peterson smile.

Where do you usually look for his smile? In footage of high-pressure media interviews and public debates? In the photos carefully selected by the editors of whichever news sites you browse?

Could be he just likes meeting fans, and is amused by a goofy cartoon frog. See also: Hong Kong protestors’ use of Pepe, and prevalence of the meme among less politically-afflicted but still sad and disaffected young men on the Internet. Also mainstream on Twitch.

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#62

Post by twic »

wickedsickeune wrote: post #48
macspoofing wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The whole point of gender studies is the idea that biology is not destiny That's the whole point? Because I think this is the sentiment of pretty much every rational person, and heck, every non-rational person. Nobody argues biology is destiny. Even the most stringent materialists won't argue that physics or chemistry or biology is the best way to understand interactions between people. This is why biologists don't…

> No. But we can do in depth economic analysis. And in fact, we can explain unequal pay quite well, and it has very little to do with discrimination. Because I'm really interested in this and have been unable to find something convincing, could you point me towards any such studies?

Freakonomics covered it a while ago:

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...

I'm not well-informed enough to say that this is an accurate summary of the current understanding, and certainly not in a position to say it will convince you!

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#63

Post by hristov »

I actually followed Camille Paglia from her time as salon columnist and found her really annoying. First of all for someone being celebrated for being provocative she is depressingly mainstream. Her views are generally center-right. She supports and repeats whatever views and opinions corporate america chooses to foist on us, supports the military industrial complex and is guaranteed to go gaga over every female celebrity sex symbol the mainstream media chooses to trot out for our adulation.

But she does everything in such complicated convoluted language (liberally throwing in a lot of intellectual talk about sex in there) that she makes herself sound brilliant, radical and revolutionary for dumbly and unquestioningly following the same corporate mainstream.

It is really a shame because not all social science is bullshit. There really was great social science and literally theory being done challenging the status quo and looking for ways to make societies better but people like paglia merely just take the air out of the conversation, by taking up attention “being provocative” while not saying much.

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#64

Post by twic »

Hitton wrote: post #38
pjc50 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Camille Paglia is also a global warming denier, which is the sort of error that should give you cause to not only doubt everything she says but to use her as a contrarian indicator.

Many great minds are in some way flawed, the thing that makes them great thinkers able to come up with revolutionary ideas probably makes them more susceptible to crackpottery. Examples: Linus Pauling, Peter Duesberg, William Herschel, Isaac Newton, Fred Hoyle, Lynn Margulis

Kary Mullis invented PCR, won a Nobel prize for it, then became an HIV/AIDS denier.

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#65

Post by depressedpanda »

cygx wrote: post #28
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes you can: men have testosterone, so they're more aggressive, which turns out to translate to asking for more pay raises more often and changing jobs more quickly if unhappy with their pay. Hey presto, a biological basis for unequal pay. Now obviously this doesn't explain everything about unequal pay -- but it would be foolish to ignore entirely, no?

Nurture can trump nature, though: There are matrilineal societies where competitiveness is considered a feminine trait. As is often the case, it's not simply either/or.

> There are matrilineal societies where competitiveness is considered a feminine trait.

Never heard this before. Could you list some examples?

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#66

Post by not_a_terf »

sterlind wrote: post #56
rvn1045 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not that familiar with her work. But my understanding is that when disciplines like gender studies were being formed they completely ignored biology and nature.in fact there were no biologists in the gender studies departments. And she was one of the first people to suggest that we must study gender with a basis in biology. This is what she may be referencing in the passage you quoted.

Gender studies did indeed start out this way, dismissive of notions of "biological sex," until the case of David Reimer threw a bucket of cold water on those second-wave feminist theories. David was the victim of a botched circumcision as an infant. His doctors decided to turn an outie into an innie, constructed a vagina, and told his parents to raise him as a woman. He was given "vitamin" pills (actually estrogen) a…

Wouldn't the Reimer story support a naive version of biological sex moreso than an acceptance of gender identity?

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#67

Post by obviuosly »

cygx wrote: post #28
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes you can: men have testosterone, so they're more aggressive, which turns out to translate to asking for more pay raises more often and changing jobs more quickly if unhappy with their pay. Hey presto, a biological basis for unequal pay. Now obviously this doesn't explain everything about unequal pay -- but it would be foolish to ignore entirely, no?

Nurture can trump nature, though: There are matrilineal societies where competitiveness is considered a feminine trait. As is often the case, it's not simply either/or.

This result failed replication in 27 ethnic groups along the matrilineal belt in Central Africa:

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/slowes/files/lowes_competi...

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#68

Post by Glide »

_iyig wrote: post #61
sprafa wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah well if you see the selfie you might change your mind. But yes. The main thing for me was I rarely if ever see Peterson smile. And in this photo he’s grinning ear to ear.

>The main thing for me was I rarely if ever see Peterson smile. Where do you usually look for his smile? In footage of high-pressure media interviews and public debates? In the photos carefully selected by the editors of whichever news sites you browse? Could be he just likes meeting fans, and is amused by a goofy cartoon frog. See also: Hong Kong protestors’ use of Pepe, and prevalence of the meme among less politic…

It’s sad to see people fall for guilt by association. In most interviews that Jordan Peterson has when he talks about meeting his fans is when he sounds the happiest.

This really is what Scott Adams talks about with two movies and one screen. The interpretation of events speaks more about the interpreters rather than the actual events now.

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#69

Post by raxxorrax »

raverbashing wrote: post #45
Animats wrote: post #5

“These minor French theorists have had a disastrous effect on American education. Lacan encourages pompous bombast and Foucault teaches cheap cynicism, while Derrida’s aggressive method, called deconstruction, systematically trashes high culture by reducing everything to language and then making language destroy itself.” She's right, but it really upsets many academics for someone to say that. Good.

While no idea is impervious to criticism, I think Americans take those authors much more "serious" (as in their ideas as "hard truths") than them themselves take it (in France). So her criticism might be right in substance (in the American context) but targeting the wrong thing. Derrida is pretty much Gödel's incompleteness theorem for philosophers instead of just "reducing everything to language and then making lang…

If you summarize Derrida to one or two sentences, you could say he critiqued western civilization to have a tendency for black and white thinking. Quite ironic.

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#70

Post by obviuosly »

grey-area wrote: post #14

Camille Paglia is over-rated IMO. I've read a couple of her books and there is little of substance there under the gnomic bombast and pseudo-academic jargon. An example from the start of her most famous book: In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of god were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our a…

Yeah, she's pretty dull, but she's a women hence you can cite her on obvious truth about sexual dimorphism without being called sexist which is convenient and also fully explains her rising popularity.
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