Skip to main content

POST-MODERNIST POST-STRUCTURALIST POST-FEMINIST POST-CYNICAL HAPPINESS ERUPTS!

I reserve the right to be wrong.



I believe in the main assertions of third-wave feminism, that everyday discourse privileges my sex at the expense of the other; and that men too are harmed by this patriarchy in various ways, as Fathers 4 Justice ably demonstrates. Misogyny will probably be a topic I cover occasionally, since I am fascinated by the population-level misogyny in so many of our story-telling tropes and popular discourses. I'm also fascinated by popular culture for god knows what reason, as well as house prices. Ooer, lovely delicious house prices! Mortgages and rents, to you, dear reader.



I will share my learnings in the wonderful worlds of the social sciences. My focus is economics, but this blog will inevitably deal with geography, political science, sociology and psychology too. There are probably bits of humanities like archaeology and anthropology, plus some science, in particular neuroscience, since it's highly relevant to the social sciences.



Woohoo! Away we go!



Social science is the study of humans as social beings; how we do and don't behave around each other, especially in the field of sociology. Sociology is all about our non-material connections to each other, whereas economics is about the material side of our socialising, usually for some kind of advantage through exchange, also known as trade.



Society is the beast that is really being studied by these fields, rather than the internal life of the individual, which is where psychology comes in, exploring the deeper, personal side of motivation rather than the purely external connections and their social or material consequences (sociology and economics). But as psychology is my weakest social science topic, you can expect this to be the one I'm least assertive on in this blog.



Natural science has useful things to say on social matters too! Namely, the field of neuroscience grants people the inside scoop on what their brains are up to. Admittedly it's a nascent field, and we may never find the true seat of the self / soul / whatever, but damnit that doesn't stop us from trying!



Those fields will all find some kind of place, even in passing, on this blog, but as I'm writing about whatever interests me at the time, don't be too surprised to find the odd movie review / breakdown on here, too!






Because you're awesome.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Doomer Eternal?

Youtuber Sarah Z talks about the Doomers, those who despair of the world. I am not trying to criticize Sarah Z's take since it is remarkably similar to mine, but I will dump my thoughts below anyway. [ 1 ] ~ ~ ~ The media has broadcast nothing but wall-to-wall doom-and-gloom for a-hundred years and then some. If things feel more hopeless now it's because so much of that media is social media generated by us, so that we are sharing the doom-and-gloom meme with each other AS WELL AS getting it from the mainstream media. Human life is in less peril than ever before (barring the possibility of WW3 between China & Russia v. NATO & SEATO) as economic development makes comfortable civilized living more and more accessible to more and more people every year, and the carbon intensity of every unit of GDP is continually declining. CO2 emissions could plausibly lead to specific calamities with identifiable bodycounts in the near future, and preventing CO2 emissions by the one plau...
Post a Comment
Read more

Private Ownership and the Emergence of Field-based Agriculture

Quick update: There is a nicer, fancier article on this very subject on another blog. If for some reason you read my article below, treat yourself and partake of properal's piece too . ~~~ There is a paper by Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi called 'Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene' and it is wonderful. It leaves a few stones unturned and its thesis needs to be empirically verified or falsified but it really begins to clarify the intimate relationship between the form of agriculture that we refer to as farming on the one hand and private ownership on the other. Their thesis is that technology was not the driver that led to long-term (inter-generational) farming, but also that farming did not follow some moment where the folks in a society all said "hey, let's all have private property now!" Rather, what they posit is that farming and private property actually coalesced, ad-hoc and over a multi-generational time-fram...
Post a Comment
Read more

Iain McKay, Bryan Caplan & the Case of the "Anarchist" Anarchist

In the past I have written blog posts disputing claims contained in the online document called An Anarchist FAQ principally written by Iain McKay. I spent those posts trying to contend with Iain's claims re  the ancap question  and  the mode of production called capitalism . McKay has a bee in his bonnet re anarcho-capitalists' insistence on referring to themselves as anarchists, that much is obvious. Every reference to ancapism runs something along the lines of "an"cap or "anarcho"-capitalism. I find this very amusing because 'anarchist' or 'anarchism' are words (articulate mouth-sounds) first and specific concepts second.  Ditto 'socialist' and 'socialism' friends. Speaking of socialism... In  the comment section of one of his videos  the Youtuber called StatelessLiberty responded to a criticism by linking to Caplan's work  on the Anarchist adventure in Spain in the 1930's . The critic shot back with a  critic...
1 comment
Read more