Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
al shal be wel, and al shal be wel, and al manner of thyng shal be wele
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The U of Tulsa destruction will make it harder for anyone to recruit top academic talent to start new initiatives: why leave a secure tenured job & move your kids across the country if the institution can turn on a dime and kick you out? What's the point in trying? Maybe…
Natural ≠ statistically normal. Something can be common, indeed widespread, and still not in keeping with our natural telos as human beings.
Monogamy is not natural for men. Statistically only 20-30% of men have ever reproduced, while 80-90% of women have reproduced. Women were always sharing kings and discarding the surfs. This is the same today, all capable men have multiple women. Betas settle with one…
The point generalizes. Many if not most tech improvements exacerbate bad politics
The Industrial Revolution improved everyone’s life, in the long run. But in the medium run, it caused the rise of communism, the murder of capitalists, and the advent of world war. Technological advance caused political chaos. Then again, would you prefer no electricity?
In practice, our choices are democratic oligarchy, oligarchical oligarchy, or monarchical oligarchy. Politics mostly boils down to ruling class selection mechanisms. Not having a ruling class isn't on the table.
"Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive." — Solzhenitsyn
Great paper on a hugely important topic. One question I have is whether reprotech will in fact boost fertility (significantly or at all)
📢 New article with @CraigWilly06 just out: Techno-Natalism: Reproductive Technologies in a World of Sub-Replacement Fertility What happens when nations use IVF, embryo selection, and gene editing to gain power? Here’s a quick thread 🧵
This statement is both beautiful and hard(er) to make sense of if postmosterm repentance is impossible.
"The Lord never tires of forgiving. It is we who tire of asking for forgiveness." - Pope Francis
Is an institutional commitment to truth compatible with an institutional commitment to neutrality of some kind? If so, how? (Is neutrality, say, a means to truth?)
It took a Supreme Court decision for UW-Madison and almost every other public university to stop (officially) racially discriminating against most rural Wisconsinites
If you are a smart kid from rural Wisconsin then you basically won the college lottery because you get in-state tuition at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, one of the greatest universities on the planet. These “populist” dipshits don’t think public schools are real
I appreciate @rbnmckenna86's pushback. The context, we should remember, is widespread, flagrant, and illegal hiring discrimination on the basis of sex, race, etc.—and political ideology. That context should indeed be taken into account.
yeah I've been confused about this. At least 5 of the readings seem like no-brainers (Gandhi, King, Foucault, Fanon, Beauvoir). The rest could be justified as a special focus, or in all sorts of other ways. This acontextual attack on syllabi is one of my least favourite things.
Locke, but no Filmer. Rousseau, but no Burke. Mill, but no Stephen. Maybe you see the problem. The lopsidedness of the canon actually runs much farther back than the 20th century and is of course much broader than one Columbia class.
columbia core discourse is agonizing anyways we also read the bible, martin luther, aquinas, adam smith, hobbes, plato, aristotle, tocqueville, js mill in cc
Surprisingly, being called illiterate by a Columbia professor who dislikes my point of view *doesn't* give me more confidence in Columbia's openness to a wide range of perspectives
This is how @Columbia's "Contemporary Civilization" course ends. A nice illustration of the lopsidedness of almost all humanities curricula— promising "a wide range of perspectives" and then excluding all unapproved perspectives
There are some Marxists in my replies saying, "Actually this syllabus is goated" and I think they may be proving my point
This is how @Columbia's "Contemporary Civilization" course ends. A nice illustration of the lopsidedness of almost all humanities curricula— promising "a wide range of perspectives" and then excluding all unapproved perspectives