Monthly Archive: March 2016

These past few weeks I have had the pleasure of having a philosophical back and forth with someone with whom I went to grad school in philosophy. He is a political philosopher who has no background in disability studies, but (I gather) a burgeoning interest in disability.

For those who don’t know, I have a rather strong personal and professional interest in disability. Much of my freelance work is about disability, and my son, Edmund, has Cri du Chat syndrome.

Former Fellow Grad Student hasn’t quite said outright that we should not accommodate people with disabilities until they are as typically functioning as possible, but has said, more or less: capital isn’t free, some people with disabilities will suck up enormous resources and we can expect very little in the way of economic return for our investment.

From: Investing in People with Disablities – Blinded Trials II

THE EAGLE mentioned that a few of Alabama probate judges have halted issuing the marriage licenses altogether. This will allegedly steer clear the marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Senator Greg Albritton, R-Range also stated...

But barroom banter can descend into a deep freeze when one popular St Patrick’s Day drink is called for: the Irish Car Bomb, which consists of a shot of Irish whiskey, Bailey’s Irish Cream...

Donald Trump horrifies even the vast majority of leaders of his own party. Circumstances in the US – brought about in large part by major errors committed by the Republican Party itself – have...

HOWEVER. I am here neither to sing its praises nor bemoan its shortcomings qua entertainment. I am here to write of its morality. It means to be taken very seriously as a message to the audience of the evils institutional racism. Not as self-serious as Crash, but maybe only a few frames shy.

Briefly, in the city of Zootopia, all animals have shed their species’ genetic destiny to become the animal they wish to be. We follow bunny protagonist, Judy Hopps, as she defies expectations that she farm. She becomes the first bunny cop. Both explicitly and implicitly, though, the characters clearly have not shed their beliefs that anatomy is destiny – exhibiting their damaging prejudices against other species and groups of species (e.g., foxes are seen as sly, prey distrust predators).

It’s a much more clever and subtle message movie than Crash, actually. (Not that that’s difficult. And not that any movie, even children’s movies, need be a message movie.) It has a very nuanced understanding of the ways bias keeps an animal down in the world. The species do not, with one glaring exception which will be discussed below, strictly correspond to any one human ethnic group or race. There are, though, moments, experienced by the animals that recall human biases – one animal is complimented for being “articulate.”

From: Zootopia, che cozz? – Blinded Trials II

On social issues, the differences are more noteworthy. Trump backers were far more pro-choice than Cruz or Rubio supporters, at 0.63 (0.67 is equivalent to agreeing that “abortion should be available, but with stricter...

So if you are good enough to be reading this rebooted blog of ours, allow me to promise you I did not decide to resume work on it for the sole purpose of blathering on about my writing elsewhere. Insofar as I can think of some aspect of it that may seem interesting to the audience here, I’ll write about it. (“Why the pseudonym?” has come up often enough that I may as well write a post, if only to have something I can just link in the future if I get asked again.) But I’m not going to make Blinded Trials II: The Blindening some kind of humblebragging clearinghouse.

To that end, I’ve decided to put a question I’ve been pondering to you lot, and you can tell me what your collective preference is. It’s a question I alluded to in my re-introductory post, which I’ll just ask outright:

To what degree would you here like me to mention/otherwise promote my work on other sites?

From: Shameless to be sure, but tastefully so? – Blinded Trials II

The Vatican is replacing its controversial ambassador to the U.S., who arranged the meeting between Pope Francis and antigay Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis last fall. Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò will leave the...

If conservatives have nothing to fear from Garland, then liberals should beware: If he is confirmed, the court’s new liberal majority is not going to start marching off in their preferred directions. Garland himself...