I work in a university bookstore. My official title is not very descriptive so I shall say that most of my days are spent shipping out web orders and receiving in merchandise. I am not altogether happy with this experience. It has surprisingly less to do with books that one might imagine from the label.… Continue reading Customary Monstrosity
Category: Polemics & Rants
Human Nature
I think there may be a new motif taking root in a certain class of writer. (How’s that for a vague beginning?) There is this idea or excuse or something that seems to be appearing in different guises all over the place. It is variously called “radical non-duality” or “basic biology” or “human nature”. It… Continue reading Human Nature
A Sexy Future
I was listening to Timothée Parrique talk with Nate Hagens on The Great Simplification. Parrique is entertaining and enthusiastic, not common qualities in an economist, much less one whose research focus is in the potentially doomy arena of degrowth. But he makes degrowth sound fun. I shared the podcast conversation on social media and attached… Continue reading A Sexy Future
Time Dis-ordered
When “sleeping in” means being up by sunrise in the summer, when “going to bed early” still requires four to six hours of electric light to see to do tasks after sunset, when we are already behind on the day’s required tasks before the day has properly begun, we are ordering our time wrong. When… Continue reading Time Dis-ordered
The Future Is…
There has been considerable argument over where the majority of humans will live in the near future. This may seem like a pointless exercise since where people end up is where people end up, and what we think of the matter matters not at all. And maybe that is true, but it is also true… Continue reading The Future Is…
Let There Be Dragons
I love reading stories. I love hearing tales. I love seeing the world through the other eyes of a book’s characters and ultimately the author. I love the invented worlds that can only be found in fiction. I love books! However, it is rare that I encounter a life-changing idea in fiction. But when that… Continue reading Let There Be Dragons
Unnecessary Work
How many of us like what we do for wages? Leaving aside arenas of obvious brute coercion and slavery — which I think we can all agree ought to have ended long ago and should not have been acceptable to a thinking species to begin with — how much wage work do we do willingly?… Continue reading Unnecessary Work
Overlorded…
Our overlords seem to be growing frantic these days. In spite of controlling everything from the US Supreme Court to the IPC, their iron-fisted hold seems to be ebbing. BoJo was forced into abdication for knowingly hiring an actual groper — and posting bad jokes on social media about the guy. (As BoJo himself seems… Continue reading Overlorded…
Further Exegesis of A Man
In the past couple weeks I’ve encountered two new books from people who should know better claiming that our big brains and social systems are rooted in hunting. This is the bad penny of origin stories — Man the Hunter. It is time someone bites down on this one and shows once and for all… Continue reading Further Exegesis of A Man
On the Existence of A Man
Hildegard's vision of the cosmos Philosophers and mystics throughout time have been showing us that everything is connected, that humans are part of that everything, that unity is fundamental — and sacred. This tradition is more prevalent and prominent in the East and in most Indigenous cultures, but in the West we have our cosmologists… Continue reading On the Existence of A Man



