Category: Politics
Reclaiming Slurs through Conceptual Engineering
Introduction Ideology can leave us “stuck in a cage, imprisoned among all sorts of terrible concepts.”[1] Slurs are linked to an especially harmful kind of concept. Successfully reclaiming slur terms requires understanding and rejecting these concepts. Linguistic reclamation of slur terms, when combined with critique of the underlying concept, can put an oppressive weapon out…
Two Ways to Promote Positivity and Disrupt Echo Chambers
Social media algorithms are the unseen forces modifying our minds and swaying our societies. Most of us have no idea how they work. We just accept their results. Only a few programmers, product managers, and executives know the full details, and even fewer can change these systems. But they have an immense influence on our…
Compensating for What? Dworkin, sociology, and mental illness
Introduction: Just Compensation? “What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with.” ― Haruki Murakami Who should society compensate? Which differences in outcome does justice require that we rectify? Dworkin argues that a person with handicaps or poor endowments is entitled to compensation, while a person with negative behavioral traits like…
Against Toil
Stop buying into the toil ethic.
To End All Wars?
About four years ago, I read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque on a Sunday in November, a lot like this one. It was painful. Paul (the “protagonist,” if there is one) is a brutal narrator. Reading most of the book in a day made his story more real, rushed, and urgent. I remember…
LDS Doctrine is Silent on Homesexuality
Who am I to write about LDS doctrine? I’m not a leader in the church. I’m not even a member of the church. But I’m interested in understanding the doctrine, and I’ve spent a large part of my life attempting to understand it. And I have a question: why is it an overwhelmingly common belief…
The Fetishization of Individuals: From Hitler to Ken Bone
Humans have a relentless tendency to treat individuals as microcosms for the world. If we can identify a certain individual who fits into a group, we generalize this individual and make him/her representative of the group or concept as a whole. When we speak about these concepts or groups, we are implicitly thinking of these fetishized…
The Gradual Causes and Long History of the ‘Fake News Crisis’
It seems undeniable that the specter of fake news has taken control of the media. It seems that we’ve now entered a dark age of journalism, where the fake is indistinguishable from the real. It seems that we have entered an unprecedented era of hoaxing and counterfeiting. But journalism has never been free of fake…
What Matters in a President, and Why Electability Doesn’t
I’m not going to argue for any of the candidates in this post. That’ll come later. For now, I think there are three main factors that should be considered in a president. They are all interrelated, and in order of importance. However, if a candidate doesn’t meet any one of these criteria, it is practically…