Blog

5 quick ideas about why and how to resist
The rich already run everything, and they’re grabbing more power. Build your power with others and find new ways to resist. We have ways to make things, communicate, and live that don’t depend on corporations. Maybe we forgot. But we can do things on our own.

Anti-trans feminism since the 1960s
After a couple of recent essays by Sophie Lewis chronicling this movement. Particularly because the anti-trans movement is fond of suggesting that trans people sprang into existence yesterday, I’m fascinated with timelines.

Would you work with the ‘Alliance Defending Freedom’?
A 2022 Bindel–Joyce debate in which Joyce calls my gender ‘an attack on the whole institution of civilization’. She thinks she’s preserving ‘the Enlightenment,’ ‘evidence,’ ‘stable meanings,’ ‘how you do science’, ‘the whole institution of civilization.’

If you’re told your position is harmful
Someone’s mad at your car. Did you almost run them over? I can pause and apologize. I care about others. I recognize that their perspectives are valid and their observations about my behavior might be correct.

I just want to select NO
The worst YES/NO interface design I’ve seen. We can create a nonviolent culture with the first questions we ask, being willing to hear an answer that’s polarized or ambivalent, loud or quiet.

Why someone complained about the review you posted to Goodreads
Their reason wasn’t as complicated as they made it sound. They say it’s too short. Or too long. What are they really complaining about? What don’t they like about your review?

If you don’t know if it’s a joke or a lie, what’s it called?
There is a word. When they issue statements halfway between jokes and lies, and they joke about it being a lie and lie about it being a joke, there’s a word for that.

Atheist-theist encounters
If you’re pretty sure there’s no god, when may you tell theists they’re wrong? Sometimes knowledge is best cultivated through personal encounters rather than intellectual demands. We see each other, and we’ll also know the world.

Moral analysis of what is ‘at stake in this story’
Naomi Kanakia on discussing novels. How to discuss a book itself and also let our learning transcend the book? To see the book as art, and to see it as a tool for our growth?