Posts in: Longer writing

Drawing up meaning

If your baseline assumption is that the universe if meaningless, you will of course find no meaning there. If, on the other hand, you look for, inquire after, draw up the meaning in your circumstances, you will find meaning. Does that mean it’s all “just” in your head and therefore false? Of course not. By embracing the meaningfulness of the cosmos, you are co-creating that meaning alongside it. You are performing the human role of making conscious the interrelatedness of all things.

Continue reading →

The men who live in my memory

The men who live in my memory had work to do. That work had a purpose: to feed their families. They were not career men with five year plans and KPIs. The men who live in my memory did not worry about what it meant to be a man or whether they were good at “adulting.” They knew that whatsoever their hands found to do, must be done with all their might.

Continue reading →

Syncretism all the way down

Some of us children of empire are rightly worried about further damage to colonized cultures. We try, therefore, to build walls around these cultures and call any breach of those walls “cultural appropriation.” The fear of cultural appropriation, though, is itself a product of empire. Such a fear attempts to freeze those cultures at a moment in time, specifically the moment when the colonizers “discovered” those cultures. Only an imperial mind would make the mistake of ignoring a culture’s entire history, pretending that it had sprung into existence only when noticed by imperial eyes.

Continue reading →

More on rational abstraction

Following up on my post about rational abstraction. That mode of thinking is an acquired skill, taught mainly at universities. It is a technical ability needed for certain types of work; its the equivalent of the knowledge of accounting rules for accountants. Because of the self-involvement of the elites educated in such environments and employed in such jobs, it has been generalized into a skill thought to be a base requirement for functioning humanity.

Continue reading →

My Political Action Plan

I came across this in my notes from two years ago. I don’t recall if I planned to do more with this or not, but it seems okay to me in its current form. My political action plan: Our political and economic system is a world eating monster with an unalterable hostility to life. Until the powers that be get serious about killing that monster, I’ll continue assuming they are emissaries of the monster and accord them all the respect that position is due.

Continue reading →

Turn your radio on

One alternative to streaming music I don’t think I’ve ever seen discussed: radio! You probably have an oldies (or similar) station in your area with a local connection. Music: So, yeah, maybe it isn’t your favorite and maybe you have stronger feelings about music discovery than I do. But oldies are basically another canon of standards at this point. It ain’t bad! Local ads: This is America; you don’t get to escape advertising.

Continue reading →

How we’re celebrating Imbolc/Candlemas

Content warning: paganism This year, a few holidays fall into this weekend: Candlemas, St. Brigid’s day, Imbolc. Maybe they’re historically related, maybe they’re not—you’ll have to look into that for yourself. Today I’ll just be writing about our plans. At some point in the past twenty years, I found out about Candlemas and the associated practice of eating crêpes (possibly because of their sun-like appearance?). That sounded good to us so we’ve been eating crêpes by candlelight every Candlemas for a few years now.

Continue reading →

This article is being passed around in my little circle here at micro.blog. Absolutely worth reading. All of the vigor, these days, seems to be outside the mainstream (i.e., universities, legacy media, Democrats). Rachel and I were watching some videos of Dr Zach Bush this morning. He (and other “alternative health” folks) are clearly out of the mainstream. Yet his vision is so compelling.

I don’t know what to make of his claims (or those of Thomas Cowan) that fall outside the mainstream. Maybe they’re wrong in important ways. But, as I said to Rachel, I’ll take being wrong in details but right directionally. What does mainstream medicine offer us? Depressed and lonely? Take this pill. Sick? Take this other pill. The two pills causing new problems? Here are more pills to handle that.

I’m too dispositionally cautious to go very far into the deep end. But the Recognized Authorities are less compelling every day.

One of the most clarifying things Charles Eisenstein says is (paraphrasing):

If you were placed within the totality of another’s circumstances, you would behave in the same way they do.

That is, if you had the right mix of childhood trauma, economic deprivation, lack of exposure to a wider world, etc., you’d be a racist too. Given the right mix of circumstances, you’d also abuse children. To deny this is to live within the illusion of moral superiority.

This doesn’t mean bad behavior is excused. It does mean, however, that the right response to the temptation of moral superiority is to reply “there but for the grace of God go I.”