Economics:
Philosophy:
...Everything is heritable:
Politics/religion:
"The Acquired Immune System: A Vantage from Beneath", Hedrick 2004 (immune systems as parasites; excerpts)
I absolutely loved this. The concept of the adaptive immune system as something that gives the ability to get a slight advantage over your conspecifics, at the expense of selecting your pathogens to be more virulent such that loss of the adaptive system becomes fatal, reminds me forcefully of all sorts of things in prokaryotic and eukaryotic genome structure. Things that happen because they can and then get locked in place by other things built on top of them even though they themselves are harmful, or sheer selfish elements. Like poison/antidote pairs of genes in bacteria that stick around even though they increase average generation time because fluctuations in the levels of the two make a small fraction of bacteria grow extra slowly and be stress-resistant, or the evolution of the spliceosome to make sure self-splicing introns always leave leading to vertebrate genes that are 90% spliceosome-requiring introns, or the sheer abundance of transposons that make up more than half of our genomes...
I suppose there isn't really a standard progressive view, but I attend Young Democrats meetings, my school voted with something like a ⅔ majority for Obama in the last mock election, and I read newspapers and magazines that target a progressive audience, so I encounter a lot of progressive viewpoints.
I thought that the "tools of oppression and domination" was a reference to how stereotypes are used, not how they are formed. I don't really picture a bunch of people in positions of power deciding that the best method to oppress people was to assume insulting things about them, instead of, say, passing harmful legislation, so I assumed that other progressives would agree with me on that point.
Also, I wanted to discuss stereotype origins without using phrasing that made the originators of those stereotypes look immoral, because I thought that doing so would distract for advancedatheist from the point I was trying to make, so I shied away from that explanation.
I thought that the "tools of oppression and domination" was a reference to how stereotypes are used, not how they are formed.
If you are into that kind of thing, you can view stereotypes as soldiers in memetic warfare. If you want to win, you want to shape your soldiers and not just pick whichever ones happen to come along.
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
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