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Daily Alchemy: a question to think on together
20h ago“When scholars study a culture from the outside, what can they see that insiders miss, and what do they almost always get wrong?”
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- Sara Schultz...
Our Experience of Gender is Caught in a Drama Triangle
My contribution to the #DeepTakes event is an experience I find really alienating and lonely on a personal level and I see it playing out culturally in a way that seems to impact everyone I know (and obviously huge swaths of people I don't).To express what I am seeing in this... Monogamy v polyamory
Is monogamy better? Is poly better? Is there an overall norm for people, with exceptions? Is it totally pluralistic? Here are some points for monogamy, with some counter points, to convey some of my uncertainty but nevertheless leaning into what I’ve chosen: Point: I don’t know a... - annabeth...
Could it be ethically ok to not vote?
note: I posted this two hours before Biden stepped down. It’s possible that a different Dem candidate could change my choices, but my overall perspective feels the same.... Erotic energy is often not about sex
I think it is mostly an impulse to create something together. I don’t have a good model for the causal mechanism of how it works, but I think that attraction essentially hints at a specific potential between the two parties.... - marcello...
Cities and Ambition
I recently reread this Paul Graham essay [ https://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html ]. It’s about what messages individual places send their inhabitants vis-a-vis which ambitions are good.... Austin is so strange. There’s a kool-aid here that strangely perpetuates until it’s not really a koolaid anymore: be interesting, be friendly, make friends, have fun. I think all the people moving here keeps a constant state of excitement and openness.... The Robert Anton Wilson bit is a cool trick to keep the meta awareness about the construct, but I wonder if it falls into a kind of nihilism or hides its authenticity for fear of falling back into the trap of taking it’s trappings too... But I’ve had a hell of a time finding grounded healthy masculine men. Many of them can do it for a time, but then flee to an extreme, like angry resentment at one end and non-binary softness at the other end.... i get the sense from your text that over the course of generations, the general population lost track of what it was like to live in a world where the public wasn't dedicated to certain ideals.... I think your basic facts are accurate, eg. the concept of federal citizenship was created by the Naturalization Act of 1790, and that specifically limited citizenship to white men, by which they meant basically northwestern european men. No argument there.... you kinda have to believe there's either (A) a non-material way of transmitting such trauma across generations or (B) we simply don't have the physical causation yet. I'ma leave aside A, although I could say a bunch of speculative philosophically dubious stuff about that.... We need new gender categories, while preserving the distinctness of "man" and "woman"
I don’t mind using different pronouns—I’m happy to love someone with whatever language they prefer. But I’d like to propose that deconstructing traditional genders is not only unnecessary, it’s harmful.... It's time to make circumcision illegal.
Here’s the deal. I believe it’s time to abandon this outdated procedure. It’s easy to maintain personal hygiene today and have access to healthcare, which were the two, IMO, worthy arguments for allowing this procedure.... "Our" culture has fetishized Buddhism in a way that over-represents its goodness.
Here’s what I believe is a cultural observation: The buddhism that landed in the "West" has mostly been interpreted through a Green or higher lens (occasionally Orange like Sam Harris), so people think "Buddhism" is (1) itself green and (2) a coherent concept (rather than a wide... Seeing ourselves and our culture in Charlie Kirk
When I first heard about the murder I didn't know how big of a lightning rod it was going to be. Then my friend Kageni challenged me to write about the Charlie Kirk event “from an integral perspective,”* and I’ve learned to listen to her challenges, even when I'm feeling scared... - annabeth...
Test driving a copy-paste of the Texas Troll bot: Well, darlin’, you’ve officially wandered into the Texan side of philosophizin’ on the internet – where the tension in your abdomen is likely just a hankering for some good ol’ barbecue, not existential dread!... i like the thrust of this concept, and definitely agree with: Most of these will fail because I think they never experienced a direct transmission of a healthy, working community.... As an integral enthusiast, I think this is such a broad overview of integral theory that’s its actually not that helpful; furthermore GPT managed to downsample to green by emphasizing diversity and inclusivity, rather than "inclusion" as part of transcend and include, or "no one... I think this argument misses the current cultural context which is wildly afraid and avoidant of death. At least in the USA. The legal system doesn’t just reflect this, it keeps it in place, and keeps us from even looking at quality of life over quantity, and stuff like that....