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.
Language has allowed us to understand and navigate in the world, but we also rely on emotions and instincts. Much of our distress as humans is because we are receiving contradictory messages about the world. It is like listening to two radio stations at once.
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 …
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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 …
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In our writing group, there was at one time an ongoing discussion between two members on structure: one plotted out the entire arc before writing; the other jumped into the stream and let the story cut its own course. I …
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 …
.It all happened because of an orange. Currency controls were a factor, too. I could also blame xenophobia, because without it, the very border might not have existed. That border separated Afghanistan and Pakistan, and in 1972, Maggie and I …