Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I know almost nothing about the late Charlie Kirk.  In case it needs to be said -- I of course abhor violence.  Anyway, one of the very few things that I do know or think I know about Kirk is that he debated undergraduate students and often showed them up as numbskulls with "minds full of mush".  [That phrase comes from the 1970s movie PAPER CHASE, about first year law students -- but it seems to apply.]   Today I came across something written by Matt Taibbi soon after Kirk's murder. Taibbi has a leftward reputation -- he is a former contributing editor for Rolling Stone , and a few years back he penned a notorious essay attacking Goldman Sachs as a sort of avatar for everything wrong with capitalism. Nonetheless, in the passage below, as in a fair amount of Taibi's recent work, one hears echoes of points made by rightward folks.  Perhaps, then, this is a point that deserves a broad hearing across partisan and ideological lines. --------------------...

Diane and I have seen the Mel Gibson directed war movie Hacksaw Ridge.  The photo here isn't a still from the movie (which doesn't use b-and-w cinematography). No, what I've pasted above is a historic (May 1945) photo of an escarpment on Okinawa that got the nickname that in turn became the title. The movie hardly needs any recommendation from me. It has been out for weeks already (it opened Nov. 4 in the US) and has received rave reviews. Rolling Stone calls it the best war movie since Saving Private Ryan, and that periodical's reviewer says that Gibson as director "deserves a medal." Another reason the movie needs no recommendation from me: it has done quite well already in box-office terms. It made $15.2 million on its opening weekend, $10.8 million on the second. These aren't blockbuster level numbers. Andrew Garfield, who plays the conscientious objector at the heart of the story, also played Spider-Man in a 2012 movie, and THAT film earned $...

Rolling Stone ran a story recently, by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, on the rape-friendly culture at the University of Virginia. Here's a link. At the heart of the story is a gang-rape of a woman named Jackie, a crime orchestrated by a "handsome Phi Kappa Psi brother" described in the story as "Drew." Erdely indicates that Jackie really is Jackie's first name, whereas "Drew" is a pseudonym. Still more recently, Rolling Stone has said: "oops." Or, in their words, "in the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced." They aren't specific about the "new information." But they are pedaling backward from this story as quickly as they can. Days before they started pedaling, two writers for SLATE  had made an observation that I think germane: although the inference that Drew has gotten away with his crime th...