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 …
Complexity
Scale, and The Legacy of Slavery
A lot of discussions around big topics seem to forget that a majority of the “great” things done in the past were only possible because of brutal slavery. We slowly realized slavery is evil, but inherited systems that need it, so, shoehorned modernity into that framework. It is difficult to overstate just how much depended …
The Virgin Evolved Ape vs The Chad Cosmic
Sharp Dichotomies for Thee, But Not For Me? ☸ I’m going to start by making a seemingly disconnected point: Humans are not “built” for physical fights. All fighting features/instincts are tacked on to a *comically* fragile body, and it remains that way no matter what you do. Learn to fight because you need it or …
Bad Citizen, Good Complainer
Note: this was originally a thread posted by me during the peak of COVID, in 2021 How disgustingly entitled is it to literally *mass delete* a contact tracing app (Aarogya Setu) and not use it for *a whole year* because “it’s a fascist data collection system for bhakts” and then be surprised about surges in …
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 …
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 …
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”. …