Thursday, April 16, 2009

Noted Notables, Linked Linkables

* Sally Haslanger, "But Mom, Crop-Tops are Cute!": Social Knowledge, Social Structure, and Ideology Critique (PDF)
Rachel Evans, The Rationality and Femininity of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen

* Turretinfan discusses Turretin on middle knowledge: Part I, Part II, Part III. Basic Summaries: Part I, Part II, Part III. There are more coming. I'll try to put them up as they come online.
ADDED LATER: Part IV. Summary of Part IV. Part V. Summary of Part V. Part VI. Summary of Part VI.

* Mr. Weathervane has become Christian again. Joy among the angels and all that, but Wilson, like the winds of God, moves hither and thither and every which way. My prayers are that he'll be settling down for a bit.

* This has been going around the blogs recently, and rightly so: Susan Boyle shows the world what real singing talent is. It's quite a nice story, actually. Boyle, a church-going Catholic, apparently used to sing in the church choir, but had mostly stopped singing after her mother died a couple of years ago. But when she had a chance to go on television, she decided that she'd go ahead and do it as a sort of tribute to her mother, who had been a fan of the show. She is an example not merely of talent, impressive though her talents may be, but true grace.

* A short story I haven't yet had a chance to read, but certainly will: John Farrell, A Circle of Cypresses.

* Diana Schaub discusses Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

* Eliezer Yudkowski considers the question of why 'rationalist' forums tend to tilt heavily male. Of course, any outsider would suggest immediately that perhaps it's because intelligent women generally are more rational than the sort of people who participate in such forums; but to his credit, Yudkowski at least recognizes that possibility, even if it is never really faced squarely in the comments. One obvious problem with both OB & LW is that, setting aside a few people who are clearly in it partly to improve themselves, it's a collection of people with obvious biases and prejudices that they are (apparently) not bothering to examine, who are telling other people that they are biased and prejudiced, or at least, who enjoy talking about how biased and prejudiced other people are. Posts like this, where someone raises the question of whether the people involved might themselves have some sort of problematic bias or prejudice that they haven't adequately examined, are rare. It's nice, though, that they aren't nonexistent; it means there's hope for them after all.