Two items today:
NY Times, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, 4 May 2023: Why Conservatives Can’t Stop Talking About Aristotle, subtitled “The 2,500-year-old roots of Ron DeSantis’s education plan.”
Today, an interesting article about whether addicts have free will.
Here’s a piece that’s interesting for its take on a still contentious philosophical issue. Do humans have free will? Intuitively virtually everyone would agree that we do. People “make decisions” all the time, as if they could have decided otherwise. Yet most modern philosophers will explain that, in some fundamental sense, free will is an illusion. I will not attempt to summarize their arguments. See Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne, Daniel Dennett. Some, like Dennett, will allow that we may as well *think* we have free will, because that’s how our minds have developed to function, via evolution. Otherwise you might sit there catatonic, unable to move. The biggest issue with understanding that free will is an illusion is the problem of personal responsibility, especially in criminal matters. And attorneys have used such defenses, about the “criminally insane,” in the past.
Three items today.
Today’s post is the completion of yesterday’s post.
It’s been a while since I’ve watched and posted about a “skiffy flick,” that is, a science fiction movie from the 1950s, plus or minus a decade, when science fiction movies were very popular — or at least, a lot of them were made — and were mostly about space flight or visiting aliens, and were almost all really bad by any standards of science or even literary science fiction of the time. (My Skiffy Flix page lists those I’ve seen or plan to see, with links to reviews already posted.)
I watched another one this past week, a 1951 film called Flight to Mars. Here’s the Wikipedia description, and my photo of the DVD case:
Observations about gun violence in the US and its relationship to mental illness.
Last month Washington Post published results of a survey, asking AR-15 owners why they bought and owned them.
Washington Post, 27 Mar 2023: Why do Americans own AR-15s?, subtitled “The Washington Post and Ipsos asked nearly 400 AR-15 owners why they own the rifle”
For today, several links and comments, and only one quote. About:
Today, noting several interesting articles without having fully read them; just commenting on their apparent premises.
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Vox, Fabiola Cineas, 28 Apr 2023: The Ten Commandments could be in every Texas classroom next fall, subtitled “Will the Texas GOP’s push to bring Christianity back into the classroom succeed?”
Remember this? Remind you of anything?
This is the logo that would appear at the end of a Universe Pictures movie in the 1930s. Continue reading
More about Robert Reich’s appearance at UC Berkeley last night; and summary notes about his book Economics in Wonderland.
