I’ve been thinking a lot about the Taylor Swift vs. Spotify (#Swiftify) controversy lately. It brings up some really great questions. One of them is, ‘how should we think about the value of art?’ Most people I’ve talked to don’t feel too bad for Taylor Swift specifically, because they’re perfectly aware that she’s not hurting…
Category
Thoughts
Every Seed Is Awakened: Why I’m Not Vegan or Vegetarian (Yet)
“If you are a feminist and are not a vegan, you are ignoring the exploitation of female nonhumans and the commodification of their reproductive processes, as well as the destruction of their relationship with their babies; If you are an environmentalist and not a vegan, you are ignoring the undeniable fact that animal agriculture is…
Thought Experiments and Taking a Strong Stand: Two Ingredients
Here are two things I’ve been thinking about that would be really good ingredients for a tasty theological dish. Ingredient #1: This interview with Yale Philosopher Keith DeRose. In it he basically says two things that caught my interest: 1) Neither atheists nor believers know (at all) whether God exists. I agree. 2) there’s still…
Welcomed Evidence of Grappling Successfully with Boredom: Nurturing Creativity in Children
Preempt the time spent on television and organized activities and have them spend it instead on claiming their imaginations. For in the end, that is all we have. If a thing cannot be imagined first — a cake, a relationship, a cure for AIDS — it cannot be. Life is bound by what we can…
Guilt by association, atonement without a cross, and “just get over it” – A white guys rant on racism
But as Black voices tell us, reconciliation comes with a price, a cost, a burden. A cross if you will. This cross, this burden, is one that Whites habitually refuse to pick up. And my argument in this post is that a part of that cost and burden will be sympathy for Black rage and…
Alcoholics Anonymous is Spiritual Kindergarten: AA, Addiction & Brain Science
“This permanence is the result of a process that researchers call ‘chunking’: a person using drugs or alcohol experiences a burst of the activating neurotransmitter, dopamine, encoding memories and stimuli associated with that high in the brain. As substance use turns chronic, those same networks in the brain are increasingly engaged, and eventually the habit…
Lack of Food is Not The Only Reason People Go Hungry: Thoughts on GMOs
The world has a surplus of food, but still people go hungry. They go hungry because they cannot afford to buy it. They cannot afford to buy it because the sources of wealth and the means of production have been captured and in some cases monopolized by landowners and corporations. The purpose of the biotech…
Generalizing vs. Stereotyping: One Can Be Useful, The Other is Not
“Yeah, so you know two or three people in a particular group who don’t fit a generalization? Who cares? The point of a generalization is to say what is true most of the time — the usefulness of a generalization lies precisely in the fact that it allows us to ignore the exceptions for the…
On Being Judgmental vs. Being Opinionated
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth. –Carl Gustav Jung I like listening to podcasts. One show in particular that I like is called “Get Up On This,” hosted by Jensen Karp and Matthew Robinson. In the show, Jensen…
Producing in an Inhuman Way – or – Why Does Work Suck So Much?
“Marx’s innovation was to combine Smith and Feuerbach to derive an account of alienated labour. That is, the plight of the worker under capitalism is an instance of the way in which a person’s essence becomes detached from his or her existence; i.e. that workers live in a way that does not express their essence….