Tag: politics
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Why words like “mansplaining” only make things worse
I have to question the value and effects of terms such as “mansplaining”, that reduce the moral and cognitive value of someone’s words, actions, and motivations to merely a function of their class belonging. Such terms were developed as a type of intellectual weapon, in principle to address a perceived power imbalance. Unfortunately, they do…
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Strategies for unity
Unity and peace among people won’t be found by focusing on our differences but by embracing our commonalities. Representation is an incoherent concept for fixing human society and eliminating injustice because there is no limit to how you can divide people by their differences. If we can’t find the commonality within one another and set…
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Muck
In the current culture of muckraking and accusation and everyone constantly flinging dirt at everyone, there are two types of people who can escape and thrive. Those who absolutely refuse to get involved and stay out of the puddle, and those in the middle who are so inured to the mud that they don’t even…
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Incitement to violence and Christianity
Kill the white devils! Viva la revolution! The key difference between King and many other revolutionaries who have preached similar ethics about the need to directly overturn systems of order for the sake of justice is that King was deeply committed to the doctrine of Christian love as the guiding and restraining principle that tamed…
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Glorifying non-conformity
From a reply to a social media post about Christianity being for the outsiders and about accepting the outsiders, that that’s who Jesus liked, not the insiders. To which I said that, yes, it kind of was, but not because of their outsider-ness or insider-ness. That that wasn’t in itself the quality that made them…
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Where things are going
It’s very hard not to see our country as being in a slow process of gradual collapse. We have an enormous amount of inherited cultural capital. We have so much infrastructure and so much law, so many systems and institutions that have enormous power and value and utility. We have traditions and attitudes and conventions…
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Politicization, polarization, and extremity
I have a philosophy degree; we’re used to exploring different ideas and hearing different viewpoints, in fact we demand it. We demand testing and argumentation. We demand refinement and consistency. So I’ve been listening to the views of many opposing sides. I’ve been immersing myself into the arguments of the ideological right and the ideological…
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Rights and duties
Rights and obligations come into existence simultaneously. The principal function of rights is to protect and preserve our ability to discharge our duties. Duties are like goals in a game. Once they have laid upon us, then we have a right to pursue them. And if anyone interferes in our legitimate pursuit of our goals,…
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A note on the “Chinese Virus”
Most major viruses come from China or India. That’s because they’re the largest groups of humans on the planet. If you’re the largest civilization on Earth, it’s kind of like being the biggest city. You might as well call a disease the “urban virus”, or just “the human virus”, since the conditions for the development…
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On misogyny and child marriage
That was a great article bringing attention to the work of that doctor. It sounds like she did a lot of great at work helping women. And this is purely a comment about what’s most helpful in diagnosing and fixing problems. I’m not sure it’s enough to label child marriage as misogyny. The cause of…
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