Author: Mr Nobody
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The pain of past experiences
It has been written that much good can be undone by one sinner. One might also reflect that much wisdom is undone by a drop of foolishness. Often with people they have very bad experiences with a corrupt or even simply misguided or limited imperfect version of something or someone. A bad parent, a bad…
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Dieting and moralizing
Diets have always been as much about a philosophy and a kind of cult culture (in the general sense, not the religious sense) as they have been about actual food. Go all the way back to the days of the ancient Greeks and you find all sorts of crazy diets and theories about how they…
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A letter to a friend
Dear J, as someone who has struggled through history and philosophy and religion for years, as well as shouldering a significant burden of depression that seems to arise almost inevitably as result of raising one’s awareness to the reality of such things, there is always one place I have found comfort, and I commend it…
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Good cop parenting
Parenting is often a simple matter of playing good cop bad cop. It’s pretty hard to play it with yourself. There’s a reason why it’s a stereotype. It’s a useful strategy. And really, both cops are good cops. It just helps to have two complimentary approaches. In reality the goals of both cops are the…
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Three short commentaries: on election struggles, politics and marriage, and human fallibility
It’s unfortunate how much political haymaking is going on right now as the election results are being certified. As someone who has no respect for or investment in either side, the irony and hypocrisy of both is quite shocking. People who are anti-Trump are shocked and appalled, of course, but having witnessed their own previous…
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Coveting one another’s virtues and vices
Somehow our culture is obsessed with making virtues out of our vices. And we’re so eager to embrace them that we make our actual virtues and strengths into shameful weaknesses and vices. Women, on average, are more agreeable than men, but now publicly prize disagreeability and shame agreeability, as if women being proud of being…
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The coming election and likely Trump loss
Trump keeps talking about election fraud. The cost of fraud and the likelihood it will be exposed are very high. And the potential gain of fraud is actually very small in a national-scale election. Error has a far larger actual effect on national voting than any amount of historical actual fraud. Trump just stokes this…
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On Shelby Steele
Reading Shelby’s book last year really changed how I understand not just America, but all kinds of things about all kinds of societies. I think he’s onto something about people in general and how moral-religious rituals in cultures center around guilt and absolution and the creation of a priestly class who gain moral (and perhaps…
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Surviving gender dissolution
The problem is that gender is one of the most, if not the most, fundamental representational category for human understanding. It’s one of the most basic things that a species is and must be aware of to function. So it’s one of the most basic bases of human thought, how we understand and conceptualize the…
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A comment on an argument about postmodernism
Don’t we all want equality? It all depends on what you mean by “equality” or equal treatment or even equal rights. Does equal mean “the same”? Fundamentally, are men the same as women? Are all cultures fundamentally the same? Is a transgender man the same as a biological man? If by equality you mean that…
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