The Humble Axiom

What do religion, truth and lies, philosophy, fiction and math, intellectuals, journalism, propaganda, cults, politics and mental health have in common? The humble axiom. And its errant son, the profound insight. All rationality, all reasoning, all the things that a human mind can think– are bounded. That means that they work only within the boundaries … 

 

Conservative Agriculture / Humans Ex Natura

If the word “unnatural” is colloquially defined as “anything which humans do that the earth wouldn’t or couldn’t have on its own”, agriculture and animal husbandry are fundamentally unnatural endeavors— whether it is done in vast fields of noxious chemicals or a permaculture food forest painstakingly built over three decades. However, this point of view … 

 

When The Brain Betrays You

This is a difficult article for me to write, because avoiding talking about the fact that my own mind can betray me so terrifyingly helps me cope with the fear of it happening again. I still don’t know where the line is between keeping stories to yourself for your self-preservation vs putting it out there … 

 

The Internet: What I Learned the Hard Way

The ultimate metric for anything on the internet is this: the health and prosperity of the communities you build. That is the point of the internet. It is the only point of the internet. It is the only thing it does better than the real world. Every other metric and buzzword you know is a … 

 

Voting in the Golden Age of Misinformation

“In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.” ― Barbara W. Tuchman We all live in pretty filter bubbles. We read hot takes from the Wire, Scroll, Swarajya and Twitter and feel enlightened, champions of the underdog, lone voices fighting for what is right against the mob and … 

 

Intersectionality as a Method, Not a Madness

A quick piece on how it can meet its potential, instead of its end.  EDIT: I should add links and examples I’ve collected. Once I’ve stopped procrastinating. When its most well-known associations are discarded, intersectionality is simply a method for identifying and understanding what happens in the intersection points of distinct categories, attributes or domains. It’s … 

 

We’re Overthinking Health

A Heuristic Approach for the Info-Weary For a TL;DR, scroll down to the bottom of the post. To understand my reasoning, read the article. When it comes to health, it is better to be sane and smart at the cost of not being current, rather than confused and gullible as the cost of being “knowledgeable”. …