Polytropy

This post is based on recent readings, often on or through Twitter, especially of

• Lilith Saintcrow on “Domestic abusers, white supremacists, and religious bigots”;
• C. S. Lewis on gulling the educated, and objectivity as a dubious value;
• Marilynne Robinson on consensus as concealing the objectively true;
• Neil deGrasse Tyson on objectivity as a good value;
• Plato on seeming wise, without being so;
• Mark Vernon on imagination in William Blake;
• whoever wrote an “Open Letter Concerning Transphobia in Philosophy,” signed by many professional philosophers;
• Kathleen Stock, the subject of the “Open Letter”;
• Agnes Callard on how philosophers shouldn’t be signing petitions;
• Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, on the incoherence of the notion of gender identity;
• Aaden Friday, on what’s wrong with Reilly-Cooper and other such women;
• Brian Earp, on declaring pronouns;
• John Steinbeck, on being a man;
• Christa Peterson, on what gender identity might be.

I have edited and augmented this essay since originally posting it on January 9, 2021; the current version is from January 19.

A lot of old PSA’s about drugs are on YouTube and the Web Archive, and sometimes they are linked to by articles that ridicule them. There is one that I have not been able to find, perhaps from around 1970, in which parents confront their teenager with the drug paraphernalia that they have found in his room. The boy storms out of the house, saying, “You don’t understand!”

There’s a lot that I don’t understand. I must not, since it seems childish, but is coming from adults. Some of these adults stormed the US Capitol the other day; others encourage them; still others are professors of philosophy.

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