Politics and Science

I saw the movie Barbie today. Some of the themes reminded me of a blog post that I’d been thinking about writing. I don’t want to spoil the plot or themes of the movie. It’s very good! Go see it! So I’ll just write the blog post I was thinking about, and then maybe expand on the idea of the relation to Barbie later. In the patriarchy, women are often objectified for their beauty. In modeling and acting, women are often implicitly objectified for men’s consumption. But also in the patriarchy, men are often objectified for their status, money, and power. I wrote in a previous post about the relationship between ideal forms and gender, and how people adopt these ideal forms as goals, certain beauty, power, or other expectations. Online, we often don’t see people’s humanity. We fail to see men and women as complex, complete human beings, instead we see them as sex objects, or money objects, or power objects. Maybe that’s partly out of necessity, because I don’t have the time to know ev...

I support reasonable gun safety regulations. For similar reasons, I don't support dangerous technology proliferating. I hope there are ways that people can share scientific discoveries, because as humanity's knowledge increases, people's lives are better off. I hope that technology is used to increase people's quality of life, and not just as a tool to increase power and wealth in fewer and fewer hands or as a tool of war. Maybe that's naive. I'm sure there are no simple, easy answers. It's funny that some people will say things like, "That economist or political theorist, he is bad and wrong! But the economist or political theorist I like, he is a good and figured everything out!" Now, I think that probably no single person figured everything out, and probably drawing ideas from multiple sources is okay. I really doubt that (name your economist or political theorist) had the solution to every problem. There are underlying values that you might a...

  Luke 12:48 and Rousseau’s Social Contract When I became Unitarian in 2018 after a decade as an atheist, I started to read the Bible. Not taking it literally, as the infallible word of God, but as an important historical document and, at times in certain places, stories to learn morality. I was reading the New Testament, and I came across Luke 12:48. The final sentence reads, “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and more will be required of the person entrusted with more.” It has also been translated in other editions of the Bible, “To whom much is given, much is required.” I think this means, if you have wealth, intelligence, time, power, musical or sporting ability, you are expected to give back. Not to the point of self-destruction, but you are expected to help people with what you have. More than a decade ago, I read Jean Jacque Rousseau’s the Social Contract. When Rousseau wrote the Social Contract, most governments were monarchies, either Protestant ...