Plato’s reading suggestions, episode 89

Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:

On Tyranny: a test of American traditions.

Understatement of the decade: as a guru, Ayn Rand may have limits.

ABSOLUTE MUST-READ: on the rise and fall of globalization.

Is linguistics a science? Does it matter?

Doctor Who breaks its 👽 glass ceiling, and predictably some people don’t like it.

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Please notice that the duration of the comments window is three days (including publication day), and that comments are moderated for relevance (to the post one is allegedly commenting on), redundancy (not good), and tone (constructive is what we aim for). This applies to both the suggested readings and the regular posts. Thanks!

129 thoughts on “Plato’s reading suggestions, episode 89”

  1. saphsin

    Massimo

    I’ll be honest, feminism has been of a blindspot for my left-wing politics because so many people I talk to are incapable of talking about nuance, so I’ve had trouble wading my way through in these discussions. Of course the Right has been full of bullshit with regards to it but I don’t like how it’s discussed by many on the other side.

    Just this last month, I was talking to some liberal feminist that I think that there is a gender pay gap, that there is some sexual discrimination that is often unnoticed, and perhaps we may have gone backwards on some issues (like expectations of women in cultural media for their weight) but that I also believed that with regards to most things, women’s rights and status have improved enormously and is nothing like it was 40 years ago.

    I was accused of “mansplaining” and my insistence for evidence otherwise was being blind in recognizing what’s obvious about women’s plight. And this isn’t just one occurence, I think this is very common. Not sure if you’re aware, but this sort of thing had lead me to avoid talking about Syria on the Left, an issue that has become very toxic.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. SocraticGadfly

    Massimo, I’ve seen a few Dr. Who episodes, but nowhere near a fanboy. What I read, that the creator of the doctor allegedly envisioned a female doctor, is about all I have to report. Oh, and that the new female doctor’s pants apparently don’t have pockets, so she has to stuff devices in her bosom.

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  4. Daniel Kaufman

    As someone who has been watching Doctor Who since the early 70’s, I am not particularly happy with the casting of a female Doctor, for much the same reason that I don’t like the gender swapping being done with classic Marvel characters either. The fans apparently don’t like it either, as Marvel comics sales have been plummeting since this started.

    I am perfectly happy with female characters, of which there are many in the Marvel universe — and some of whom are amongst the most powerful; see for example, Dark Phoenix — but can see no reasons for turning male characters into female ones that don’t involve a brand of politics that I intensely dislike, in part because I think it has done tremendous damage to the fortunes of my political party (the Democrats) and of my profession (academia). Making Iron Man a black teenage girl is stupid and forced and ridiculous and aggravating and will do nothing more than kill the franchise.

    We will see if the same happens with Dr. Who. I can’t really predict, as I don’t know the demographics of the audience for the current show, which I really have little interest in. Of the four Doctors since the reboot, only Eccleston was interesting and he only lasted a season. The best Doctors — Troughton, Pertwee, Baker — belonged to a different era with an entirely different audience.

    So, while I had already pretty much lost interest in Doctor Who, this seems to me to have a similar flavor to what is happening with Marvel, and I very much dislike it. Whether it kills Who the same way that its killing Marvel will just have to be seen.

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  5. saphsin

    I reread the Dr. Who article and what it reminded me of is that people say they have no problem with the roles carried out by those of a different identity, but they feel that it is “ruined” if the changes come across for the brands they are used to. So Spiderman is “ruined” if spiderman is black (Hermoine for the Harry Potter plau if I remember) and Disney movies are “ruined” if the a gay couple plays the role. If one were to ask how much is it for deep commitment to the original set of characters and how much of it is actual prejudice, I think there could be some cases for the former but looking at the nature of
    the responses, it’s pretty transparent that it’s the latter.

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  6. Daniel Kaufman

    the issue of women in television and movies is a serious one. Take the protagonist of the recent action movie Atomic Blonde. She was criticized because her character isn’t sufficiently psychologically developed. Can you imagine someone asking the same to Sean Connery about James Bond?

    = = =

    Really? You think this is a serious issue? I don’t. The treatment of women in Saudi Arabia is a serious issue. But female actresses and celebrities in the West? Seems to me they’re doing just fine. More than fine really.

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  7. Massimo Post author

    Saphsin,

    I hear you about reasonable vs unreasonable feminism, as well as the increasingly popular, very irritating, and ertainly anti-democratic, habit of shutting down a man on the ground of “mansplaining,” or any white person on the ground of “privilege.” Still, we need to keep having these discussions among reasonable people.

    Dan,

    I disagree that there is no problem with Western actresses, who are still less paid, find fewer jobs especially when they are getting older, and are generally treated differently from their male counterparts. To say that there are worse problems for women in other parts of the world strikes me as a red herring: yes, true, but I think we can deal with more than one problem at a time, at the proper scale.

    More importantly, these attitudes are reflectively of large sections of Western society as well. That is why they are a problem.

    As for Marvel’s and Doctor Who’s character switching, I think it’s fine when done in an organic, judicious way, and not fine when done just for pandering to the politically correct crowd. The difference may be hard to tell in specific cases, but for instance it was obvious, and welcome, that we would have a black and a female Star Trek captains. Doctor Who is designed in a way that invites gender switching (and if Socratic is right that was the intention all along). And a black Spider-Man annoyed me far less than the most recent White incarnation (in the comics, not the movie), who has basically become a teenage version of Tony Stark / IronMan…

    Liked by 2 people

  9. SocraticGadfly

    Dan, then what say you for the creator of Dr. Who reportedly eventually wanting a female doctor. Are you engaging in reader-response criticism, to indirectly connect to linguistics? Or even worse?

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  12. SocraticGadfly

    I think animus toward a female doctor sounds like it might be grounded in the same pre-feminism origins of the start of Doctor Who.

    Massimo mentioned Bond. I think there’s only one REAL Bond, but, I didn’t have a hissy fit (pun VERY intended with “hissy”) when Moore replaced Connery.

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  15. milesmutka

    The problem with economics may be somewhat related to the previous post on this blog: even though each atomic transaction is simple and understandable by itself, global economy is a different beast altogether. Some economic phenomena, like inflation, may be purely emergent.

    Many popular characters have had multiple actors. Doctor Who, being a children’s show originally, is unique in that it incorporates the change of the actor/actress within the storyline, to “explain” to children why the familiar face has changed. That doesn’t happen with James Bond, or whoever is playing spiderman this year. It does take some act of belief from the audience, even an adult one, to separate the character from the performer.

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  16. Daniel Kaufman

    Socratic: I explained my reasons quite clearly. That you don’t accept them is fine, but they are my reasons. From what I understand, show creators in the 1980s thought about having a female doctor, but the show goes back to the early 1960s, and as I indicated, its greatest years were in the 60’s and 70’s.

    Regardless of the current show’s producers’ attitudes, I see no reason why my reasons need match theirs. Nor do I see any reason to engage in silly Gotcha! games like “Did you protest back when the doctor became a woman for 5 minutes in a 40+year running program?” I liked Doctor Who when it was a children’s program, in which the Doctor was a (generally older) man, with young companions, both male and female, and I see nothing wrong with liking it that way.

    As I said, I really haven’t had much use for the reboot, which is when the show really took on contemporary political attitudes. Its spinoff Torchwood did it even more so and more brazenly, and I disliked it for precisely that reason.

    Re: Bond, the best Bond was George Lazenby and the best Bond film was the one with him in it: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

    Massimo:

    There is no red herring. You can concern yourself with whatever issues you like. I simply don’t find concern about the professional condition of the Scarlett Johanssons or Helen Mirrens of the world to be “serious” in the manner you suggest, given that regardless of whether they make less than some male actors or not, they are multi-millionaires nonetheless. And if you switch industries, such as modeling or even porn, women make much more than their male counterparts.

    Regardless, it all strikes me as First World problems of a sort that I simply cannot call “serious” or be very concerned with. It may just be that my reserves of moral energy are smaller than yours.

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  17. Massimo Post author

    Dan,

    Frankly, I don’t really find it useful when your responses boil down to “that’s how I think, too bad.” (That said, Socratic, please redouble your efforts to avoid snarky comments and gotcha moments…).

    This is a discussion forum, the whole point is for people (including you) to challenge other people’s opinions, and for everyone (including you) to be challenged. Saying something like “that’s my opinion and that’s it” is definitely not an invite to conversation.

    As for first world problems (and setting aside your strange reference to one of the most exploitative industries in the world, regardless of how much some female performers may make), disagreements about Wittgenstein are even more so, and yet people spend a lifetime engaging in them.

    Liked by 3 people

  18. synred

    Some economic phenomena, like inflation, may be purely emergent

    One of the problems with money is that apart from taxes its value is nearly scale invariant.

    https://goo.gl/VeIJnr (the origin of money )= )

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  19. Daniel Kaufman

    Massimo: I gave my reasons. I saw no reason to repeat them, insofar as Socratic hadn’t engaged with any of them.

    As for exploitation, the entire entertainment industry is exploitative, some elements of it more than others.

    I don’t see why it is a problem that people have different moral concerns. This area just isn’t one of mine. Undoubtedly there are things about which I have more moral concern than you do. That’s just the nature of the thing. I only commented to begin with, because you lamented the fact that no one really was discussing the Doctor Who piece.

    Liked by 1 person

  20. synred

    disagreements about Wittgenstein

    Dan, I would be interested in your opinion about AI inventing languages!

    It looks like a gag from the Onion to me!

    Maybe the Donald is an A(not so)I.

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  21. brodix

    I agree with Dan on Bond. Saw that one in the theater as a child and it imprinted deeply.

    The issue Dan and Massimo are arguing over, the relevance of some issues in broader, or different contexts, is, as I see it, one of emergence. As society evolves, the issues become both more complex and fine tuned, so that what might be a matter of life and death at a more primitive level(and I’m explicitly putting Saudi Arabia in that category), becomes, say, a matter of respect in a more evolved society. Which is not a knock to either, but a function of the stages of development and social evolution.

    To paraphrase Jesus; “The arguments will always be with you.”

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  23. SocraticGadfly

    Cousin, on the Facebook AI, yes, it was unintelligible to you, but that’s part of the point. Once the bots moved beyond actual English, it became something that they made more intelligible and creative for themselves. Now, I wouldn’t read too too much into this, but in general, the self-evolution of a language is going to be a sign of stronger versions of AI, as I see it.

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  24. SocraticGadfly

    Also, setting “hardware” issues aside (brain, palate, tongue, etc. in hominids) the Facebook bots will surely have at least a small bit to say about the evolution of languages, especially if their human overlords don’t shut them down so quickly in the future.

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  25. synred

    Hell, he wasn’t even British

    ‘Rick Grimes’ in the Waling Dead[a] is British, but plays American well. I seen few Bond films, but didn’t like them because of the cavalier attitude to killing. Still ‘It’s only a movie.’

    [a] Soap Opera with zombies…

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  26. synred

    AI, yes, it was unintelligible to you, but that’s part of the point

    So how do we know it’s language at all instead of the gibberish it looks like.

    I’m in general I am skeptical of AI. Most of it is just more or less sophisticated look-up-tables. I would not ascribe ‘understanding’ to that. The information content of ‘to me to me to me to me’ hist very low — a waste of bits and bandwidth.

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  28. SocraticGadfly

    Oh, I think I engaged enough, Dan. I’ll note (assuming this is not considered “snarky”) that political INcorrectness can run just as amok as political correctness. That’s my main “engagement.”

    Liked by 2 people

  30. Alan White

    Interesting comment thread!

    I just have one input here: I’ve seen all the Bonds–I even have a knockoff page from my old Philosophy Songs site (over 20 years and hanging in there!) about them:

    http://philosophysongs.org/awhite/bond.html

    I’d argue that Daniel Craig is the best Bond–flawed, no-nonsense, tough-minded, and all that with the requisite good looks (and the best physique of any Bond). His movies are uneven though, more due to plot than his acting. My favorite of his–and my favorite of all the movies–is Skyfall. Certainly it includes one of the best villain taunts since Goldfinger’s to Bond about using a laser to make him talk: “No Mr. Bond–I want you to die!”

    Rauol Silva (Javier Bardem), catching up to Bond after quite a fight: “Do you see what comes of all this running around, Mr. Bond? All this jumping and fighting, it’s exhausting! Relax. You need to relax… “

    Liked by 1 person

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