Stephen J. Heaney at Public Discourse takes on the trite but ubiquitous question “How will ________ harm you?” He maintains that we have all been harmed by the current abortion and divorce regimes, and you, being intelligent, can guess what comes next.
Raymond Tallis, one of Great Britain’s top 100 public intellectuals, likes a fight:
His target: a rash of pseudo brain science that purports to explain behavior as varied as believing in God and falling in love. Tallis, a former clinical neuroscientist who devoted years to studying stroke and epilepsy, considers such claims trash. Neurotrash.
… In a cheerful voice, turned out in a magenta tie and a blue boating blazer with broad white stripes, Tallis informs 60 people gathered in a Kent lecture hall that his talk will demolish two “pillars of unwisdom.” The first, “neuromania,” is the notion that to understand people you must peer into the “intracranial darkness” of their skulls with brain-scanning technology. The second, “Darwinitis,” is the idea that Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory can explain not just the origin of the human species—a claim Tallis enthusiastically accepts—but also the nature of human behavior and institutions.
Those trends, as Tallis sees them, are like “intellectual illnesses” metastasizing from academic labs into popular culture. He sees the symptoms in neuro-economic thinkers who explain our susceptibility to subprime mortgages by describing how our brains evolved to favor short-term rewards. He sees them in philosophers who claim that our primate minds admire paintings of landscapes that would have supported hunting and gathering. He sees it in neurotheologians who preach that “God is a tingle in the ‘God spot’ in the brain.” …
Read all about it here.
If you’re thinking of “going paperless,” Shoeboxed and Evernote are a great pair. I pretty well scanned the old stuff I wanted to save before learning of Shoeboxed, but if scanning all that stuff overwhelms you, you could start with Shoeboxed and then scan stuff as it comes in thereafter.
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Bon appetit!
If it’s “too big to fail,” break it up into harmless little pieces.
“It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.”
(To save time on preparing this blog, which some days consumes way too much time, I’ve asked some guy named @RogerWmBennett to Tweet a lot of links about which I have little or nothing to add. Check the “Latest Tweets” in the upper right pane or follow him on Twitter.)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 