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Identity Segmentation
Part of what I do professionally involves attempting to identify groups of people who act a certain way, so that businesses can meet their specific needs. The marketing term for this is “customer...
View ArticleI Am So Sorry
I would like to apologize for the role my behavior played in recent events. As I was saying recently, we have a tendency to adopt certain identity-segmentation paradigms as mental models to try to...
View ArticleMoral fault and culpability
Our exalted Founding Fathers owned slaves. And of course they were founding “fathers” because they didn’t recognize the moral or political equality of women. Our ancestors perpetrated genocides,...
View ArticleLessons from Daddy: There’s Nothing Shameful About Trying to Get Above Your...
“It’s hard to be brilliant and stunning and still feel lower class – even when you aren’t really.” Those words knocked the wind out of me. I was gchatting about Eve Peyser’s essay on Daddies with my,...
View ArticleRoles of Authority
Why are people in authority allowed to do things that the average person is not? What exactly is authority, apart from the use of organized force to pursue some agenda? We have trouble forming a clear...
View ArticleDiscourse of Free Cities
Every political change must be accepted by the populace, either tacitly or explicitly. On a more granular level, different types of political change require different levels of acceptance from...
View ArticleWhat We Talk About When We Talk About Democracy
There are a lot of ways to tell people to shut up. A good one, in the wake of a large vote is to say “democracy” loudly and repeated, and to accuse your opponents of anti-democratic tendencies. This...
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Scott Adams and the Anti-If-By-Whiskey
If-By-Whiskey is a beloved rhetorical device dating from the decline of the prohibition era in 1950s Mississippi. It was a strange, transitional time when whiskey was still officially banned, and yet...
View ArticleAcceptance as Accepting Responsibility
Featured image is In Love, by Marcus Stone. Last year, while struggling to come to terms with some ugliness close to home, I wrote about acceptance. Of its opposite, rejection, I said this: Rejection...
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Accountability, For Good or Ill
Featured image is the Execution of Admiral Byng – anonymous It is the nature of elites that they cannot be eliminated, but only replaced and contained. Elites compete with each other for power and...
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