It’s not anthropomorphism to believe that animals think & feel like us. It’s assuming they think & feel the same ways about the same things as we do. Misreading physical cues like facial expressions or body language leads to totally mistaken interpretations of what an animal has on its mind, what it intends or wants. …
Tag Archives: social/political essay
The Cost of Abandoning Eden
We have been operating for so long on such simplistic, egoistic notions of how the world works, our place in it, what other animals and even things are and can do… When we traded in instinct for intellect, maybe we also lost a sense of the connectedness of everything, of the wonderful intricacy of all …
Everyone Writes the Histories
History is such a fragile, mutable, conditional thing: History is ineffable. It’s all very well to say, no, it is what happened, it’s indelible, it is actual… So it is, an event, an action, plays out its options and leads to its conclusion. But that isn’t history. History is the story of what happened, and …
“What is a ‘weekend’?”
My son said yesterday evening that he’d thought it was Monday all day. I told him to wait a bit, and it would be. But as it’s a federal holiday, in fact this week ‘Monday’ will not really be happening until Tuesday. So many things we take for granted, we forget they are not, in …
Un-Natural
Trans-ness, gay-ness, bi-ness–none of these things are new to the human experience. They have been recognized in many non-Western cultures as normal and authentic for literal ages. They have always been here, though in the shadows at the edges of this dominant Western culture and disparaged as ‘un-natural’ by this and other patriarchal societies. Not …
Why Education in America Stinks
The root problem in American education comes from the fact that Americans don’t actually much like children. It’s a nation so young compared to one like Finland, that the relationship of authority towards children is more like older sibling/adolescent to younger child than parent/adult to child. Underneath the surface where, at the privileged end of the …
The Life Civil
Since humankind began building and living in cities, we have claimed as our own the term civilized. The word describes the next stage of humanity, following from savage to barbaric to civic. It follows from family to clan to tribe and implies something beyond the stacking of bricks, the building of close housing and monumental edifices …
The Cult of Trump
It begins at the center and spreads, this wave of delusion and absurdity, demolishing the ability to question, to think straight, to distinguish truth from lies or reality from fantasy… It overwhelms any capacity for critical thinking, any logic and common sense in its path. It flips perceptions of reality on their heads, and projects …
Privilege and Waking
Sometimes I feel like I am in one of those novels like FARENHEIT 451, where I am one of those proud citizens of one of the world’s best states–suddenly having to confront the evidences that it is not. Comes the waking, the gradually realizing that in fact it is one of the ugliest, most abusive, …
Hubris
A sad reflection on pathological power Thinking about Trump and Nixon, and about that special hubris common to narcissistic and criminal minds… The thing is, criminals think they are smarter than everyone else. They think they can outsmart the rest of the world. They really believe they can get away with anything. They are utterly …
LOOSELY SPEAKING... 