Tag: 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…
Buying Education
Can we make education something more than just a commodity?
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…
Routine
Poetry written in 2015 (early junior year of HS). Silver Key in National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. The ring of my father’s phone echoes His fingers ballerina against the glass glow. I stare into darkened windows around me but cannot find another human. We move, a machine among machines. Around me, road billboards preach the cult of a…
Ballerina at the Border
A piece inspired by seeing Yo Yo Ma’s Spring 2019 performance at the Mexico-US border in Laredo. Written during a brief episode of lexical-gustatory synesthesia. La placer por la presencia de Yo-Yo-Ma This sentence tastes like a milkshake; it flows playful down the tongue The way water and children descend slides Chocolate milk, foamy cream…
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 Agent-Age Problem for Consequentialism
Suspend your disbelief for a moment, and imagine the 6-year-old daughter of a major world leader travels with her father to a major nuclear launch site. She is left unsupervised, and happens to wander into the launch room. There, out of curiosity, she presses the big red button. This launches a nuclear weapon that immediately…