Tuesday, August 27, 2013

A false premise?

"[The article] puts forward some new arguments to explain 'grassroots resistance' to the deep marketization in many societies and answers the question why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else."

Written by a Russian economist. In what respect has "deep marketization" failed in Russia?

Thursday, August 15, 2013

I'd say this was a hoax meant to make fun of evolutionary psychology, but that doesn't seem to be the case

This: http://news.yahoo.com/why-im-a-creationist-141907217.html
Cut to now. I still read and read and listen and listen. And I have never found a more compelling story of our origins than the ones that involve God. The evolutionary psychologists with their just-so stories for everything (“You use a portable Kindle charger because mothers in the primordial forest gathered ginseng”) have become more contradictory than Leviticus. Did you all see that ev-psych now says it’s women who are naturally not monogamous, in spite of the same folks telling us for decades that women are desperate to secure resources for their kids so they frantically sustain wedlock with a rich silverback who will keep them in cashmere?
Sigh. When a social science, made up entirely of observations and hypotheses, tells us first that men are polygamous and women homebodies, and then that men are monogamous and women gallivanters—and, what’s more builds far-fetched protocols of dating and courtship and marriage and divorce around these notions—maybe it’s time to retire the whole approach.
All the while, the first books of the Bible are still hanging around. I guess I don’t “believe” that the world was created in a few days, but what do I know? Seems as plausible (to me) as theoretical astrophysics, and it’s certainly a livelier tale. As “Life of Pi” author Yann Martel once put it, summarizing his page-turner novel: “1) Life is a story. 2) You can choose your story. 3) A story with God is the better story.”
I mean, what better argument against half-assed evolutionary explanations of social behavior than to say that it encourages belief in creationism!

Also, a little earlier in the piece, there's this perhaps unintentionally cutting observation: "I assume that other people love science and technology, since the fields are often lumped together, but I rarely meet people like that. Technology people are trippy; our minds are blown by the romance of telecom." I mean, the unembarrassed juxtaposition of technology-commodity worship and old-fashioned religious obscurantism!
The case for it being at least kind of a joke would be based on 1) the purely trolling mention of climate change and 2) the fact that it really is hard to believe someone honestly following the reasoning that, more or less, science is confusing so let's default to the old testament.

Thursday, August 08, 2013

This is a lie.

"This paper takes as its starting point the fact that Bourdieu’s views on sociology as a science have not been sufficiently and adequately understood and discussed."