How To Balance Individualism And Community In Society
People are neither completely social like ants, nor completely independent like most spiders. We have characteristics of both, and each attribute has its own benefits and drawbacks.
People are neither completely social like ants, nor completely independent like most spiders. We have characteristics of both, and each attribute has its own benefits and drawbacks.
How can we best make sense of the world? There are a number of areas that, taken together, give a useful description of the human condition: the nature of society, how language is essential for its complexity, and further consequences …
I’m not minimizing the horror of what is happening in Israel, and I assign blame to both sides, whether the split is 90/10 or 60/40. But look at the above chart of global temperature deviations since 1850 from the NY Times …
Small War in Middle East; Climate Tipping Point Has Begun Read more »
There is much buzz about Threads and whether it can be the successor to Twitter. Twitter has been much in the news since Musk bought it, with each of his attempts to make it profitable causing more damage to the …
How Twitter and Other Social Media Will Fade Away Read more »
If I invite you to dinner and for dessert, serve you raw eggs on a bed of flour and sugar, do you you say “Oh, what a delicious cake!” or “What kind of joke is this?” It has all the …
Life Begins at Conception and Roe v. Wade was Correct Read more »
We humans are a wildly successful species. Why is that? As life developed, it first responded to the world with reflexes, then emotions, then by thinking, but it was the human invention of language that turned thinking into a superpower. …
Why Language is a Superpower and Why That Has Created a Problem Read more »
Chauncey Devega prophecies loudly and often about the risk of authoritarianism in the US: https://www.salon.com/2021/12/10/democracy-doom-loop/ https://www.salon.com/2021/11/15/american-democracy-is-on-the-treadmill-of-doom-how-do-we-get-off/ Today, Aaron Blake, senior political reporter at the Washington Post, writes that “lawmakers are disregarding private principle in their votes and often doing so …
In my London childhood, a horse-drawn wagon delivered milk each day in glass bottles with the cream risen to the top in a visible layer. Sparrows had learned to peck through the foil caps and gorge on the prize. My …
.The right-wing populist movements here and in the UK are driven by anger. They justify disruption of the present system because it is seen as not working for people. They do not respect law and tradition when they stand in …
How the Populist Movements Compare to the Hippies Read more »
Why do we believe what we believe, and how is it possible that we differ so much? Our beliefs comes from our senses, culture, in-group, experts, feelings and thinking. Of these, only thinking and expertise can make a defensible case. (This is a major rewrite of the original 5/19/19 post.)