Modern relationships are suffering because people have started looking at relationships through the lens of neoliberalism, as if dating was a market. The result is that sensible ideas are mixed with insidious ones, so that the sensible ideas are neutralized. A recent example is this article in The Atlantic, in which Olga Khazan interviews a…
I just had a minor autism moment that I think illustrates the death-by-a-thousand-cuts aspects. It’s my lunch break. I work from home, handling tech support tickets for a computer security testing company (why did we miss a vulnerability, can we lower the rating on such-and-such finding, etc.). Today it’s mercifully slow, so I took my…
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is an amazing book that should be mandatory reading in schools. It’s a case study of a group of around 500 police officers who were initially devastated by their participation in a massacre, but ultimately rounded up and killed 85,000 Jews, either by…
I’d say that being a “centrist” or a “liberal” has to do with a lack of clarity around assumptions and principles. A related problem plaguing the left is that “the left” has been conflated with a certain type of Hollywood-promoted coolness. It’s an upper-class fashion statement, just like people say it is. There’s a reason…
Stimming with string is extremely dangerous: A report from the Ruderman Family Foundation found the following: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Disability is the missing word in media coverage of police violence. Disabled individuals make up a third to half of all people killed by law enforcement officers. Disabled individuals make up the majority of those killed in…
The Western media seems to be largely ignoring the Rohingya crisis. My sense is that I’ve seen some articles about how Aung Sang Suu Kyi isn’t doing, and some more articles about how nobody cares when bad things happen to Muslim people. The latter is a low-hanging fruit sort of observation. Myanmar’s military has been…
Something from The Week called The profound sadness of crystal therapy is a good conversation-starter about religion. The author, Matthew Walther, is a conservative Catholic dude. I don’t believe crystals have magical healing powers, but I’m sure I understand them better than Walther. My point of view is that I’m into psychology, anthropology, and Asian…
This is the traditional relationship between police and skateboarders: Sometimes we win: The Guardian just published an article about a Canadian cop who ruins a skatepark by skating there as part of his job. It’s an abomination. If you go to the article, there’s video of the guy skating, and he even lands a bigflip…