A Woman After My Own Heart

Another famous person has begun reading my blog.

This time it's Camille Paglia who covers territory I've already covered.

Jean Baudrillard recently passed away. Do you have any thoughts or opinions about this influential French thinker. I'm especially interested in your opinion of his idea regarding hyper-reality.
Conor Ryan

I suspect Dante designing his Inferno would have had a very special little hot spot for poststructuralists and postmodernists (see above letter), who distorted language with self-important opacity and who inflated small ideas into giant, groaning bladder-bags.

I never encountered a single sentence by Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan or Michel Foucault that drew or held my interest. As for Baudrillard's dizzy maunderings about mass media, they made no sense whatever to me as a professor of media studies or as an American who grew up on pop and whose vibrant patron saint was Andy Warhol.

Good riddance to that whole crew!

You Go Girl! But, I expressed contempt for Baudrillard before you did (but I disagree about Foucault, of that group, he's the only one with a brain).

Also, she rips Albertus Goracle a new one with incandescent fury and in surprisingly metaphysical terms (plenty of pokes at the Goracle can be found hereabouts, too many to link)

However, I am a skeptic about what is currently called global warming. I have been highly suspicious for years about the political agenda that has slowly accrued around this issue. As a lapsed Catholic, I detest dogma in any area. Too many of my fellow Democrats seem peculiarly credulous at the moment, as if, having ground down organized religion into nonjudgmental, feel-good therapy, they are hungry for visions of apocalypse. From my perspective, virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved.

Climate change, keyed to solar cycles, is built into Earth's system. Cooling and warming will go on forever. Slowly rising sea levels will at some point doubtless flood lower Manhattan and seaside houses everywhere from Cape Cod to Florida -- as happened to Native American encampments on those very shores. Human habitation is always fragile and provisional. People will migrate for the hills, as they have always done.

Who is impious enough to believe that Earth's contours are permanent? Our eyes are simply too slow to see the shift of tectonic plates that has raised the Himalayas and is dangling Los Angeles over an unstable fault. I began "Sexual Personae" (parodying the New Testament): "In the beginning was nature." And nature will survive us all. Man is too weak to permanently affect nature, which includes infinitely more than this tiny globe.

There's much, much more, but I'll trust your interest is piqued enough to head over to Salon on your own.

One of these days someone famous will link me and admit to being 'inspired' by my ideas. Until then, I'll just have to point out the similar strains of thought after the fact.

(and I heard that *cough* delusional *cough*)

Also, I'm fitting in the stereotype of the rightosphere versus the leftosphere in that I'm ignoring the parts of her Salon answers to letters bit where I vehemently disagree with what she has to say.

Always looking for converts.