Blog
The feeling of knowing
Steven Connor’s 2019 book ‘The Madness of Knowledge’. ‘Epistemopathy’ means the feeling of knowing. We have pleasant and unpleasant feelings associated with knowing. That’s part of why knowledge matters to us.
Turtles all the way down
Finding truth in emptiness. When we acknowledge there is no final turtle, we open ourselves to discover and live more. The turtle on which we are standing is never the last one.
We can’t prepare for this moment
‘Opening to Darkness’ by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. What to make of this political and ecological moment, this chaos that arrives with no instructions? We can “see, collectively, in the dark.”
When the Nazis criminalized gay men
A story of persecution in ‘The Men with the Pink Triangle’ by Heinz Heger. The Nazis viewed gay people as weakening the gender binary. Gay men could be punished for “lewdness,” including simply hugging each other: prison or death.
100 years from now, transphobia will always have been wrong
A parallel between Wagner’s antisemitism and Rowling’s transphobia. 100 years from now, there could be a mass murder. But that’s not why Rowling’s transphobia is wrong. It doesn’t become wrong in the future. It’s wrong now.
This 1949 examination of fascist rhetoric shows us how we got here
More on the connection between transphobia and antisemitism. Max Horkheimer examined the social and psychological reasons why people become fascist agitators. This book analyzes antisemitic rhetoric in the US.
Transphobia, overt or underhanded
Either way, this behavior is proof of transphobia. Transphobes aren’t interested in trans people’s viewpoints. Instead, they turn trans people into a bad-faith debate. They see it as a publicity opportunity.
Posie Parker won’t tell us about the billionaires
On air, she alludes to a conspiracy theory — and then won’t explain it. In this March 2023 interview on Radio New Zealand, the anti-transgender activist Posie Parker says that billionaires promote the cause of being trans.
The worst transphobic words I’ve seen (this week)
…were also antisemitic. Modern antisemitism and transphobia are fundamentally linked, and the crush of anti-transgender legislation is an attempt to exterminate trans people.