Blog
‘We are in trouble,’ but not for the reason you think
Douglas Murray defends prejudice in ‘The Madness of Crowds’. If he were inclined to support trans people, he wouldn’t find basic affirmation ‘the hardest part.’ He wouldn’t say we need to argue more.
If we have a fundamental moral disagreement, why are we still talking?
Holly Lawford-Smith shows up for the self-appointed ‘heterodoxy’ at Colorado State University. The Heterodox Academy supports ‘gender-critical feminism,’ whose entire purpose is to exclude trans women and misrepresent trans men.
Barnes: ‘Just think why’ some don’t want their marriage to turn gay!
Journalist Hannah Barnes gets in a dig against same-sex marriage. Why does it matter whether one spouse’s gender change happens before or after the couple’s legal split? This anti-trans article is homophobic.
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.