Blog
Do we find truth in stories? In nostalgia? (A contemplation)
‘Beneath the exhausted rubble of our hearts, this miraculous potion awakened something strangely precious’ — Heinrich Böll. Snow falls lightly on the street vendors. He smells cheap tobacco, hears the squeak of chalk on a blackboard, sees a woman scrubbing a front step.
Stoking ‘trans panic’?! We have to create other political narratives
Andrea Pitzer’s video on ‘Ending Trans Panic’. Political risk doesn’t always fall on the side of standing up for people’s rights. Sometimes, supporting people’s rights helps you win elections.
I’m ‘disdainful’ of the latest U.S. court ruling against trans kids
No one asked me, but 🏳️⚧️ I’ll speak up while I still can. Connecting two court cases: US v. Skrmetti and Anderson v. Crouch. We exist, we should have basic rights, we can explain why. They want to stop us.
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.”
‘Do I want it? Life, that is.’
‘On Not Knowing‘ by Emily Ogden. What is there to hope for? Should we hope? We can work in the field, making bales of hay, but the work of the soul “never will be cut and dried.”
‘Agnotology’: The study of ignorance
Our ways of knowing can be corrupted. “We’re going to have to rethink our metaphors,” Proctor said, on persuading people away from science-denial. “We’ve got to think much more creatively.”
We knew it before we were quizzed
That truth remains valuable. We existed. We went to school and forgot ourselves for a while. Then we remembered who we are. We had this knowledge with us the whole time.