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Collapsniks
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Honest Sorcerer
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Resilience (US)
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Radical Non-Duality
Essential Reading
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My Bio, Contact Info, Signature Posts
About the Author (2023)
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--- My Best 200 Posts, 2003-22 by category, from newest to oldest ---
Collapse Watch:
Hope — On the Balance of Probabilities
The Caste War for the Dregs
Recuperation, Accommodation, Resilience
How Do We Teach the Critical Skills
Collapse Not Apocalypse
Effective Activism
'Making Sense of the World' Reading List
Notes From the Rising Dark
What is Exponential Decay
Collapse: Slowly Then Suddenly
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Making Sense of Who We Are
What Would Net-Zero Emissions Look Like?
Post Collapse with Michael Dowd (video)
Why Economic Collapse Will Precede Climate Collapse
Being Adaptable: A Reminder List
A Culture of Fear
What Will It Take?
A Future Without Us
Dean Walker Interview (video)
The Mushroom at the End of the World
What Would It Take To Live Sustainably?
The New Political Map (Poster)
Beyond Belief
Complexity and Collapse
Requiem for a Species
Civilization Disease
What a Desolated Earth Looks Like
If We Had a Better Story...
Giving Up on Environmentalism
The Hard Part is Finding People Who Care
Going Vegan
The Dark & Gathering Sameness of the World
The End of Philosophy
A Short History of Progress
The Boiling Frog
Our Culture / Ourselves:
A CoVid-19 Recap
What It Means to be Human
A Culture Built on Wrong Models
Understanding Conservatives
Our Unique Capacity for Hatred
Not Meant to Govern Each Other
The Humanist Trap
Credulous
Amazing What People Get Used To
My Reluctant Misanthropy
The Dawn of Everything
Species Shame
Why Misinformation Doesn't Work
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
The Right to Die
CoVid-19: Go for Zero
Pollard's Laws
On Caste
The Process of Self-Organization
The Tragic Spread of Misinformation
A Better Way to Work
The Needs of the Moment
Ask Yourself This
What to Believe Now?
Rogue Primate
Conversation & Silence
The Language of Our Eyes
True Story
May I Ask a Question?
Cultural Acedia: When We Can No Longer Care
Useless Advice
Several Short Sentences About Learning
Why I Don't Want to Hear Your Story
A Harvest of Myths
The Qualities of a Great Story
The Trouble With Stories
A Model of Identity & Community
Not Ready to Do What's Needed
A Culture of Dependence
So What's Next
Ten Things to Do When You're Feeling Hopeless
No Use to the World Broken
Living in Another World
Does Language Restrict What We Can Think?
The Value of Conversation Manifesto Nobody Knows Anything
If I Only Had 37 Days
The Only Life We Know
A Long Way Down
No Noble Savages
Figments of Reality
Too Far Ahead
Learning From Nature
The Rogue Animal
How the World Really Works:
Making Sense of Scents
An Age of Wonder
The Truth About Ukraine
Navigating Complexity
The Supply Chain Problem
The Promise of Dialogue
Too Dumb to Take Care of Ourselves
Extinction Capitalism
Homeless
Republicans Slide Into Fascism
All the Things I Was Wrong About
Several Short Sentences About Sharks
How Change Happens
What's the Best Possible Outcome?
The Perpetual Growth Machine
We Make Zero
How Long We've Been Around (graphic)
If You Wanted to Sabotage the Elections
Collective Intelligence & Complexity
Ten Things I Wish I'd Learned Earlier
The Problem With Systems
Against Hope (Video)
The Admission of Necessary Ignorance
Several Short Sentences About Jellyfish
Loren Eiseley, in Verse
A Synopsis of 'Finding the Sweet Spot'
Learning from Indigenous Cultures
The Gift Economy
The Job of the Media
The Wal-Mart Dilemma
The Illusion of the Separate Self, and Free Will:
No Free Will, No Freedom
The Other Side of 'No Me'
This Body Takes Me For a Walk
The Only One Who Really Knew Me
No Free Will — Fightin' Words
The Paradox of the Self
A Radical Non-Duality FAQ
What We Think We Know
Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark
Healing From Ourselves
The Entanglement Hypothesis
Nothing Needs to Happen
Nothing to Say About This
What I Wanted to Believe
A Continuous Reassemblage of Meaning
No Choice But to Misbehave
What's Apparently Happening
A Different Kind of Animal
Happy Now?
This Creature
Did Early Humans Have Selves?
Nothing On Offer Here
Even Simpler and More Hopeless Than That
Glimpses
How Our Bodies Sense the World
Fragments
What Happens in Vagus
We Have No Choice
Never Comfortable in the Skin of Self
Letting Go of the Story of Me
All There Is, Is This
A Theory of No Mind
Creative Works:
Mindful Wanderings (Reflections) (Archive)
A Prayer to No One
Frogs' Hollow (Short Story)
We Do What We Do (Poem)
Negative Assertions (Poem)
Reminder (Short Story)
A Canadian Sorry (Satire)
Under No Illusions (Short Story)
The Ever-Stranger (Poem)
The Fortune Teller (Short Story)
Non-Duality Dude (Play)
Your Self: An Owner's Manual (Satire)
All the Things I Thought I Knew (Short Story)
On the Shoulders of Giants (Short Story)
Improv (Poem)
Calling the Cage Freedom (Short Story)
Rune (Poem)
Only This (Poem)
The Other Extinction (Short Story)
Invisible (Poem)
Disruption (Short Story)
A Thought-Less Experiment (Poem)
Speaking Grosbeak (Short Story)
The Only Way There (Short Story)
The Wild Man (Short Story)
Flywheel (Short Story)
The Opposite of Presence (Satire)
How to Make Love Last (Poem)
The Horses' Bodies (Poem)
Enough (Lament)
Distracted (Short Story)
Worse, Still (Poem)
Conjurer (Satire)
A Conversation (Short Story)
Farewell to Albion (Poem)
My Other Sites
Category Archives: Our Culture / Ourselves
AI and the Arts
I‘ve been playing with one of the new AI bots called Midjourney, which is specifically oriented toward the creation of images — ranging from the photorealistic to the abstract. I’m still working on an older version which lacks some of … Continue reading
Grooming Us to Hate and Fear
image from piqsels, CC0 My last article talked about how we’re biologically and culturally conditioned to love the music we love (and perhaps the people we love). This time around I want to explore the shadow side of this — … Continue reading
Accounting for Tastes
This is a bit of a follow-up to my post last fall exploring why I love sad songs (and romantic comedies). still from dance-practice video by Japanese-Korean hip-hop/R&B group XG Some of my favourite YouTube channels offer analysis of music, … Continue reading
Links of the Month: March 2023
cartoon by Michael Leunig Letting go of the idea of free will is both liberating and terrifying. As I watch the world devolve into fascism and nuclear brinksmanship, I long to believe this is just a temporary aberration in human … Continue reading
Our Incapacity to Admit Failure
Afghan children, from pxhere, CC0 Recently, the rather dim-witted right-wing leader of Canada’s Conservative party, Pierre Poilievre, whose elected representatives have been hobnobbing with the German neo-Fascist AfD party, announced a bid to overturn Canada’s new, tepid, right-to-die law. Sufferers … Continue reading
Shameful Pleasures
Chart from Wikipedia by Derek Snider, CC-BY-SA 3.0 There is a lot of controversy about current experiments to decriminalize ‘hard’ drugs. Critics, and long-time supporters of the horrific “war on drugs”, argue that it’s a road to perdition, and that … Continue reading
The Preteriat
(Another post on political theory) The late David Graeber talks with Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, image from London Real (2015) The adjective ‘preterite’ (rhymes with the adjective ‘confederate’) is an ancient word referring to ‘that which has been passed over’. … Continue reading
Wish List
image from rawpixel, public domain cc0 This blog just turned 20 years old, celebrated its 3,000th post and surpassed the 10,000 cumulative page mark. Looking back at its evolution, I’m astonished how little I’ve perceived myself changing from year to … Continue reading
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves
4 Comments
Why Humans Struggle With Democracy: A Theory of Governance and Power
This is a bit of a theoretical exploration. I had to write it out to make sense for myself of the two complex articles it attempts to summarize, so I thought others interested in the theory of politics and power … Continue reading
Links of the Month: February 2023
cartoon by Michael Leunig Every once in a while I take a quick peek at the publications that I once lauded for their insight, their investigative reporting, and their courage to speak truth to power. Basically I wanted to read … Continue reading
