Category Archives: Uncategorized

   It is part of the essence of beauty that it invites you to participate in it and make it part of the extended idea of yourself. That’s why we wear beautiful clothes, want to move to or visit lovely places and make them our home, why we make our homes beautiful and surround ourselvesContinue reading “Why must we see beauty?”

   There’s a deep need for certain instincts to have a mascot. Black people are mascots for one kind of instinct, white people for another. I think Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell have thoroughly covered what forces of the collective consciousness and collective unconscious black people are a mascot for. It’s a religious role, anContinue reading “Racial mascots and defining whiteness”

The four great existential burdens are: finitude, mortality, meaning, and guilt. And every belief system must discharge them as duties. Any belief system that leaves a remainder will generate deep existential dread and confusion even if it otherwise appears stable. And people within it will keep seeking solutions, even if none present themselves. And itContinue reading “Finitude”

Some people aren’t bothered by the idea of an apocalypse. It doesn’t seem to them like a big deal if all life was extinguished, whereas the prospect of the death of a loved one carries a lot of weight. And some people even pride themselves on the clinical detachment and calmness they show in theContinue reading “Vague thoughts about the apocalypse”

       I usually try to avoid reading what celebrities have to say on subjects. Wisdom, practicality, and intellectual sophistication aren’t exactly their stock in trade. But I did happen to read some of what Rebecca Ferguson had to say about the movie, and book, Dune, which she stars in as one of theContinue reading “Rebecca Ferguson and Dune”

    I often hear people like John McWhorter refuting people like Ibrim X Kendi by saying, “Yes racism is still a problem and it has been a problem. But it’s false to claim that things haven’t changed or at the same or worse than they were in the past. Maybe in 1950 a blackContinue reading “The Reductionism of Ibrim X Kendi”

America is facing a crisis. A crisis of division. At this point, many people in America are actually living in such absolutely different cultural worlds with radically divergent conceptions of their most basic fundamental premises about reality, that they cannot be said to be living in the same country any more. Or perhaps even theContinue reading “Managing the crisis of division”

On of the most cult-like elements of wokeism, or critical theory, or whatever you wish to call it, is its persistence in separating you from your culture by any means necessary. It’s adherents are orphans of time, isolated and cut off from their family, their culture, their history, all the traditional anchors of the self.Continue reading “Naming the god of wokeism”

Anyone who has had children and has had their eyes open should have seen through all this victimhood culture in an instant. I have a child whose entire approach to life is to explain everything she does as either someone else’s fault or an accident. She never claims any kind of agency. And I’ve toldContinue reading “On Victimhood”

I just saw the weirdest REI ad, and it took me a while to figure out what it was saying. I got it in the end.     I believe the argument of the ad was “The outdoors is racist, it’s hard for black people to be outside because it’s so racist, and we canContinue reading “Selling $#!% with racism”

The only real difference between the far right and the far left is loyalty. Both view life as a zero sum game in which the most meaningful divisions are oppressor and oppressed, or more accurately predator and victim. They only differ on who they believe you should back. If you can win, you should, youContinue reading “Prey or Predator?”

There’s no way that this story is meant to be only two movies. This is clearly just the first third. If they were intending to have two movies, they would have gone further into the story. The score is a but overdone and repeats itself a little. It could have used more internal variety soContinue reading “My review of Dune”

Like all bigots of the past, you think that your judgment is justified.  What was wrong with the judgements and bigotry of the past wasn’t that they identified the wrong group. And maybe if they had just got the group right, like I have, it would have been fine.  You’re setting yourself up, not toContinue reading “An open repudiation”

A series of discussions about men, women, and feminism. In particular, some of the bad outcomes of certain types of feminism, and who is to blame. The video that sparkes this discussion is listed below. But to summarize, this lady argues that classical feminism has somehow been captured and used to promote values and messagesContinue reading “Are men to blame for bad feminism?”

    It’s far easier to understand the problem with hate speech laws when you realize that “hate speech” isn’t really a descriptor of the subjective state of the speaker, it’s a statement about the subjective state of the listener (or regulator).    When someone says “free speech is protected, hate speech is not protected”,Continue reading “The problem with hate speech laws”

Someone once asked me, can we evolve beyond lying. Here is my reply.  No. The seeds are sown in the nature of our subjectivity. I don’t mean that truth is necessarily subjective, but that we can only experience it subjectively and communicate it subjectively. Therefore everything from interpretation to uniqueness of perspective to distortion toContinue reading “Is dishonesty inevitable?”

   Why do businesses capitulate to popular social demands? That’s a very good question, but I don’t think the fellow who tries to address that question in this video quite understands business, and the motivations at work, probably because he’s an academic. As someone who has actually owned and run a business for over aContinue reading “Businesses and social justice”

How weird to define someone in terms of what they aren’t. My dad is a doctor and has been told by his hospital system they’re not supposed to say “women” any more. He also says that his nurses are enraged by it. One obvious problem with this is that it’s going to feed enormous resentmentContinue reading “Holding reality hostage”

People radically underestimate the attractiveness of unhappiness. Until you’ve seen a close friend or relative who has genuinely and willingly given themselves to it, it’s hard to really believe in it. There’s a strangely compelling allure to the negative emotions. It is a way of getting along in the world. We think we dislike negativeContinue reading “The attraction of unhappiness”

    Tradition is about learning to apply love and fear to their proper objects, and passing on that knowledge. And it’s not that easy a thing to figure out. Knowing which things are most loveable, what will genuinely benefit us on the deepest and widest timescale, and which are most fearful, which we shouldContinue reading “Tradition”