Summary: The guest this week the University lecturer and no good commie C Derick Varn. Varn and I discuss the ideas of the French historian, literary critic, and philosopher Rene Girard while also taking Siskel and Ebert as our subjects. Diet Soap relies on donations and if you'd like to donate you can find the paypal buttons on douglaslain.com and at the podomatic page for Diet Soap. In the next month I'll be starting a Kickstarter campaign in order to fund a Diet Soap tour that I plan to call "Think the Impossible!" but that shouldn't stop you from kicking in a fiver or a tener now. Per wikipedia Rene Girard was: a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science. His work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy. He is the author of nearly thirty books (see below), in which he developed the ideas of: mimetic desire: all of our desires are borrowed from other people; mimetic rivalry: all conflict originates in mimetic desire; the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry; the Bible reveals the three previous ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism. Siskel and Ebert, on the other hand, were: ...two film critics [who] shared their opinions of newly released films. Their program aired under various names. Its original hosts were Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times and WLS-TV and Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune and WBBM-TV.
