In a recent post, Robert Rackley riffs on an article by Jon Askonas at the New Atlantis arguing that Jon Stewart paved the way—however unintentionally—for Tucker Carlson. I haven’t yet read the piece (I will over the weekend) but I have to say that I agree with the premise. The Iraq War, the War on Terror, the Bush presidency generally were formative times for me. Voting for Bush in 2000 was the last time I voted for a Republican for president.
Chris Gilliard: These “smart” devices all fall under the umbrella of what the digital-studies scholar David Golumbia and I call “luxury surveillance”—that is, surveillance that people pay for and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits. These gadgets are analogous to the surveillance technologies deployed in Detroit and many other cities across the country in that they are best understood as mechanisms of control: They gather data, which are then used to affect behavior.
Graham Harvey: Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others. Dana Driscoll: Animism is a belief in the spirit of all things. Animistic views recognize that rivers, stones, trees, animals, human-created objects, and people all have spirits and that those spirits can be worked with, learned from, and honored in various ways.
We’re having a beautiful Fall here in Indiana.
Rachel, Darcy, and I have been enjoying a week off from school and work. Mainly we’ve been getting a lot of work done—cleaning out the garage and basement, prepping raised beds for next spring, setting up grow lights. We’ve also had some fun. On Sunday night, Rachel and I camped out for the third consecutive week at Hardin Ridge. On Tuesday we made our annual trip to Huber Orchard and Winery to pick a pumpkin for carving.
A really excellent video on the complicated task of defining what we mean by the word “religion.” (That’s a great YouTube channel, by the way.) Beware of anyone who says religion just is this or that—they’re trying to sell you something.
Speaking of podcasts, I’ve finished season one of Old Gods of Appalachia and I absolutely love it.
Theme music for Spooked podcast makes me happy every time.
I’ve really been enjoying looking through blogroll.org, which (if I’m not mistaken) is the excellent work of @alongtheray. So far I’ve added Hermitary and The Druid’s Garden to my RSS reader.
In July 2020 I wrote the following: Two reasons people change: “Mugged by reality.” Someone’s experience creates an irreconcilable rupture with their previous beliefs. At this point they either double down on the previous beliefs and ignore experience or they change. Participate in the universe’s ongoing process of change. This requires a disciplined openness to reality. This does not come naturally; rather, it is spiritual work. It may be, in part, what the Taoists meant by wu-wei.