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Your last point first: I find the concepet of 'meme' irritating for a number of reasons, not least that its thrown around lazily and unhelpfully and tends to obscure debate rather than clarify it. Its meaning is vague enough for it be deployed to describe all sorts of diverse phenomena with the...

Since reading The Language Instinct several years ago I've suspected Steven Pinker to be something of a charlatan. Charlatan or not, the quote reproduced above by Guybrush illustrates that he's the worst sort of complacent, unimaginative intellectual fraud. There's so much wrong about his...

Thanks for that link - very informative and entertaining: "But the conference unexpectedly escalated into the last-gasp "countercultural event" of the '70s. Two thousand people attended what quickly devolved into a conflagration between Old and New Left: Activists, academics, feminists, and...

I'm a fan of Hellman, too, after a fashion - I've only seen Two Lane Blacktop, which really blew me away the first time I saw it. His other films have eluded me - I know Cockfight was banned until very recently in the UK because its scenes of animal cruelty fell foul of our censhorship laws. Are...

Nature may well 'precede' culture (and as Levi Strauss points out, the moment when food moves from the raw to the cooked is the moment 'nature' ends and 'culture' begins) but to state that 'culture' is merely 'us' (who's is this us you keep mentioning?) revealing our 'nature' is laughable. Oh...

Sorry, completely wrong thread...

Human cultures that have arisen naturally??? Hmm, that's a new one on me. Human cultures, surely, arise culturally, otherwise they're not cultures, are they?

Disease might not be considered attractive - it has little to do with aesthetics and is irrelevant to this debate. As for disability, well there's plenty of testaments from amputee prostitutues or those born with congenital defects (eg lack of legs) about their multiple successes with countless...

My point was that this is little more than aesthetics masquering as science. As for your list: who is this 'we' that wouldn't find such features attractive? That was the point of my post: that such universalisation is little more than a totalising strategy designed to impose a contemporary...

D'oh! Perhaps I was thinking of the, eh, ahem post-apostrophe remix version currently tearing up the reading groups in downtown Dublin :confused:

I've found one of the most interesting, and telling, case studies is the recent attempts to establish that there is some sort of universal ideal of the female body that constitutes 'attractiveness'. It's a debate I've kept half an eye on over the past few years and often it surfaces in the pages...

On a different note, this argument about Sokal, Dawkins taking Baurdrillard to task for not using 'scientific' terminology 'correctly' so spectacularly misses the point of his writing that it's staggering. Baudrillard, in his late work, consistently seized on such concepts - entropy, cloning...

Yeah, Simulations and Simulacra is the best place to start: and the book on Symbolic Exchange is the most thorough going exposition of B's concept of simulation. I don't know if they're still in print but In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities and The Ecstasy of Communication are also good...

'd like to intervene at this late point in the thread and record my own personal sadness at JB's passing. I've enjoyed his writing immensely since I first came across it 15 or so years ago and over the years I've found his texts to be provocative, piercing, amusing, stimulating, maddening and...

Personally, I'm really shocked that Swears has been getting all this personal abuse. I think his questions are valid and provocative (in a good way). Not that I'm going to answer them mind - except to point out that his description of rock n roll is equally applicable to, say, Hollywood. The...

I thought AP made a real arse of himself in that Josef K review (which I read on the train going into work this morn). As far as I could work out he seemed to think pop music's whole legitimacy resided in sales - and he seemed completely nonplussed that Josef K (and that whole tendency in...

Nah - don't bother reading the book. I'd recommend the original moivie though - The Life of Brian. The problem is Gibson's remake is nowhere near as funny as its predecessor :o

It maybe time to shoot me right down but, to be honest, I recognise what the arse-tastic Harris is getting at with the reggae piece. When I went to university in the mid-80's I did notice that the public school educated/wealthy/middle class mates I made had an overwhelming preferance for reggae...

Is it the The Secret Miracle? I think it might be...

I don't know if Mitchell has or hasn't accepted such a premise, I was pointing out that he likes to make a very big show of utilising the influence and techinques of the likes of Borges, Calvino etc in a 'look at me, I'm sooo clever, cutting edge and postmodern' way, and yet he seems completely...