Patrick Mooney's blog

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One of our larger social problems …

… is that there’s too much accurate information about the female reproductive system easily available in popular discourse.

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One way to remedy this is for the video game designers designing the sequel to one of the best-selling video games of all time to make sure that children playing the game understand that, if you eat a monkey, an egg the size of your head will pop out of your hoo-hah. Clearly.


Also, while we’re at it, let’s be sure to use euphemisms like “hoo-hah” to let children know that we should never use medical terminology about this part of the body is obscene.

Filed under video games technology 1995 Nintendo Super Mario series Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island vaginas eggs false explanation sexuality

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I think that the central issue of philosophy and critical thought since the eighteenth century has always been, still is, and will, I hope, remain the question: What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and what are its dangers? How can we exist as rational being, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers? One should remain as close to this question as possible, keeping in mind that it is both central and extremely difficult to resolve. In addition, if it is extremely dangerous to say that Reason is the enemy that should be eliminated, it is just as dangerous to say that any critical questioning of this rationality risks sending us into irrationality. One should not forget—and I’m not saying this in order to criticize rationality, but in order to show how ambiguous things are—it was on the basis of the flamboyant rationality of social Darwinism that racism was formulated, becoming one of the most enduring and powerful ingredients of Nazism. This was, of course, an irrationality, but an irrationality that was at the same time, after all, a certain form of rationality. . . .
     This is the situation that we are in and that we must combat. If intellectuals in general are to have a function, if critical thought itself has a function, and, even more specifically, if philosophy has a function within critical thought, it is precisely to accept this sort of spiral, this sort of revolving door of rationality that refers us to its necessity, to its indispensability, and at the same time, to its intrinsic dangers.

—Michel Foucalt, “Space, Knowledge, and Power” (1982 interview with Paul Rabinow in The Foucault Reader; p. 249 in ISBN 0-394-71340-0)

Filed under Michel Foucalt 1982 philosophy critical thinking reason Enlightenment rationality quotes