Author Archive for Timothy McGettigan
Tim McGettigan is a professor of sociology at Colorado State University – Pueblo. The Socjournal is an outstanding resource for all things sociological. Too often, the media examines social issues from a singularly economic perspective. If you really want to understand how the social world works, it's better to use a broader, clearer lens. In this column, I will discuss a variety of forces (technological, scientific, political, cultural, and, yeah okay, economic) that are currently reshaping the globe. Whether or not the world is changing for the better is an open question — and, thus, it's a question that I look forward to debating at length in this column.
Elementary My Dear Watson! The Beauty (and Baloney) of Being Right about Everything
Fate is the most potent weapon in a the arsenal of determinists like Stephen Hawking. To contend, as determinists plainly do, that the outcomes of events are pre-determined is essentially the same as saying that the ebbs and flows of history are all dictated by fate. Actors, whether animate or inanimate, have no control over [...]
It’s Alive!! Ray Kurzweil, AI, and Frankentelligence
If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. Morpheus in The Matrix. Ray Kurzweil is obsessed with artificial intelligence (AI). Kurzweil has written a series of bestselling books–most recently How to Create a Mind–in which he advances the argument that machine intelligence [...]
Sweet Revenge: Barack Obama and the Death of White Republican Privilege
As Republicans conduct an autopsy of the 2012 election they’ll need to acknowledge that their particular brand of vanilla–rich, white, and well-aged–is no longer a recipe for electoral success. No doubt, this will be a tough pill to swallow. After all, bigotry, greed and xenophobia have always been a sure fire recipe for success in [...]
Queers Need Not Apply: The Boy Scouts of Amerika Continue to Disappoint
Boy Scout Oath (or Promise)* On my honor I will do my best To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; To help other people at all times; To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. Morally straight. Wow. In other words, queers need not apply. [...]
False Gods and Monsters: The Terrible Costs of the Joe Paterno Cult at Penn State
On Sunday, July 22, 2012, Penn State University removed the statue that the university had erected in Joe Paterno’s honor at Beaver Stadium. In removing the statue, the university has made an emphatic statement: Penn State University no longer wishes to commemorate its disgraced football coach How could Joe Paterno, a man who had been [...]
Many Worlds, but only One Reality: Stephen Hawking and the Determinist Fallacy
One can hardly broach the subject of agency without acknowledging the long-standing and unresolved philosophical debate regarding the agency vs. determination dichotomy. To provide an illustration of the extent of disagreement over this dualism, determinists, such as Stephen Hawking have argued that agency and free will are nothing but an illusion: …the molecular basis of [...]
It Takes a Village Idiot: Romney’s Artful Distortion of Obama’s ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Quote
“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that [...]
Putin’s Pussy Problem: From America with Love
On Friday, August 17, three female members of the band, Pussy Riot, were sentenced to two years in prison for staging a piece of political theater. In February, 2012, The Pussy Rioteers had–if you will pardon the expression–the balls to perform a song containing an anti-Vladimir Putin message (see the entire lyric below) at the [...]
The Innocence of Muslims: Sam “The Imbecile” Bacile, Religious Freedom and Free Speech
Let’s begin by making it clear that Sam Bacile’s “film,” The Innocence of Muslims, is a piece of crap. The film is embarrassingly terrible. Imagine the worst Saturday Night Live sketch that you have ever seen and then multiply it by 100. Everything about the film is distressingly awful: the script, the make-up, costumes, editing, [...]
Artificial Intelligence: Is Watson the Real Thing?
Artificial intelligence represents a threshold in computing that will transform machines into human-like intellectual entities. In a world grown used to rapid technological progress, it hardly stretches the imagination to contemplate next-generation computers that are substantially smaller and more powerful than their predecessors. However, the goal of transforming computers into sentient beings is an entirely different matter.
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Sociology for the revolutionary in you. 