Posts from — November 2010

There’s an entertaining video on Fora.tv of Jay-Z’s appearance at the New York Public Library. He was with Cornel West, a philosopher, civil rights activist and Princeton professor, as well as Paul Holdengräber, the director of the event. Entertaining it was, but it was also rather strange and a tad annoying, the latter two properties being intimately tied. The whole show was soaked in a weird over-reverence for Jay-Z. This was weird in part because over-reverence is never deserved, even though it must have been somewhat difficult to avoid a reverential stance, given that Jay-Z was there to promote Decoded, a book in which he analyses the lyrics of his songs. [Read more →]

If the place of indiscriminate killing in the evolutionary realm was comparatively clear, and the place of theft was a little more muddied, then the place of rape is considerably more complicated. Once again, since we are trying to understand it in evolutionary terms, we must try to work out the nature of the motivation in the first place, and only then try to work out whether this amounts to a benefit or otherwise for the species.

There is much controversy in the psychological and legal communities regarding the extent to which rape is sexually motivated and the extent to which it is power-driven. We can surely say without reams of evidence that neither in isolation is anything like a satisfactory solution. Sexual desire exists in virtually everyone, and hardly ever manifests itself as rape; the desire for power exists in many people and doesn’t usually result in such extreme harm. There is also the question, in the latter case, of exactly what sort of power rape confers on the rapist. If it does confer power, it is only of the most worthless kind (as opposed to, say, owning a multinational company or being the President of France), and we therefore must conclude that the person who desires this sort of power is suffering some kind of mental imbalance. But neither are the two in combination quite a satisfactory solution, for the problems that attend them individually exist in combination, too. [Read more →]