Category: Culture

For me, the words are very meaningful, and I do care if a person is feminine or masculine. But then, noone would confuse me with anyone who’s answered the opposite. I am also very much aware of the contingency and cultural specificity of femininity and masculinity as constructs. I am aware that there are plenty […]

Read about the sonnet: Sonnet – Wikipedia Read lots of sonnets. Get comfortable with writing in metre. Start with blank verse. Get a rhyming dictionary. Pick a sonnet scheme. The sonnet scheme determines the structure of the argument you’re going to be making in the sonnet. In the Italian sonnet (the Petrarchan), the octet (first […]

Originally asked as: What would a conversation between heavenly bodies be like? Downtown at Brazzers HQ: —Hey stranger! Woah! Nice sixpack, dude! —Yeah, gotta work out when I can. Hey, you’ve healed up nice! —Yeah, you like? I went with the single Ds. Better match for my frame. —Awesome. So. Standard set of positions in […]

A fair bit of philosophy and logic (and theology, which they were bound up with) was done in the West, and was built on subsequently. The De dicto and de re distinction is Thomas Aquinas’ handiwork, for example. European nationhood is mostly a Romantic era creation, but its raw materials came out of the Middle […]

Clarissa, you have asked a bonafide sociologist and an anthropologist, and for some reason you’ve also asked me. Sven Williams and Heinrich Müller have both advanced convincing and complementary accounts. Clearly, there are many social factors playing a role here, and there is room for more than one explanation. The factors I’ll point to are […]

Originally Answered: What is your favorite verse of scripture in The Holy Bible and why? For linguistic reasons, Mark 16:4, referring to the stone being rolled away from the tomb: ἦν γὰρ μέγας σφόδρα. For [the stone] was fiercely huge. It’s easy to lose sight in translation of how colloquial Mark is. For stylistic reasons, […]

As I have admitted elsewhere, I am a dunce when it comes to philosophy. So my answer is going to be relentlessly positivist. If we do not discriminate between entities in the world, we do away with any possibility of predicate logic. And in language, we do away with nouns. If we do not discriminate […]

Answering this is just enabling pettiness, and sowing dissension between myself and my friends who are believers. I’m answering it because I’ve found a passage I’ve been wanting to quote here for a long time. In answering it, I do not mean disrespect to my friends who are believers; and if they might take it, […]

I’m with Lyonel Perabo. Vote #1: Lyonel Perabo’s answer to At what point does a spiritual tradition cross the line into a religion? The distinction between spirituality and religion is not a particularly old one. People who want to believe in something beyond the material, but want to dissociate themselves from Christianity or other formalised […]

Placebo effect, people. A lot of this plays out in people’s heads. Not just the redhead-chasers’ heads, but the redheads’ too. If you live in a culture in which redheads are told they are better in bed, a non-trivial number of redheads are going to believe that they really are better in bed, and act […]