Blog
‘Compensation is zero’ in the DOGE working group
It isn’t a real federal department anyway. You’d be the unpaid assistant and loyalist of the richest man in the world, who in turn is a loyalist of Donald Trump, who acts as though he’s the richest.
If you can’t campaign on it, how can you achieve it in office either?
You can’t shove aside an inconvenient group of people during a campaign and expect to be able to address their needs in office. My gender & body aren’t an ‘interest group’ nor ‘tactic,’ aren’t ‘rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites,’ aren’t a ‘set of related issues.’
We’ll need to heal from this years-long torrent of insults
But we don’t need to fix or forgive those who continue to hurt us. It’s each person’s responsibility to choose good, and our choices are our own work to do. No one can redeem or heal anyone else. We can set boundaries.
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.