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“This questioning of the meaning of being, and dying and being, is behind the telling of stories around tribal fires at night; behind the drawing of animals on the walls of caves; the singing of melodies of love in spring, and of the death of green in autumn. It is part of the deepest longing of the human psyche, a recurrent ache in the hearts of all God’s creatures.” — Madeleine L’Engle

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…something called the Dartmouth Scar experiment; I think we talked about it a few episodes ago. They had this experiment whereby they had these lovely young women and they told them it was an experiment to see the effect of a scar during an interview. And so they gave each of the lovely young ladies a scar. But just before they entered the interview room, they said ‘We need a touch-up, a quick touch-up.’ And in fact it was not a quick touch-up; they completely removed the disfiguring scar. And so the women went into the interview room perceiving themselves as scarred when, in fact, they were not. And when they were questioned about the results, many of them said ‘Well I could see he was biased against my scar, I could tell he was focused on it,’ which shows you the power of self-perception. So when we do the whole woke-woke thing, we’re creating a Dartmouth Scar Experiment on a wide scale, on a wide scale with unsuspecting black kids. — Winkfield Twyman, The Free Black Thought Podcast Ep. 76, Free Black Thoughts with Bowen & Twyman, Ep. 13

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"Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee"

-- St. Augustine

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I didn’t mean to imply that I was a capital “C” Conservative, it’s more that I have a conservative temperament. I would say that, as far as I can make out, a conservative temperament has something to do with a deep understanding of the inherent value of the world, and its vulnerable and precarious nature. It is suspicious of the impulse to tear things down, dismantle things, cancel things, burn things to the ground, rather it’s more naturally inclined toward cautious, incremental change, because we need to be careful with the world. The conservative understands about loss and about grief. I’m certainly open to new things, but with an appreciation of what has gone before and a melancholy understanding that it is a lot easier to tear things down than to build them back up. But, at the end of the day, I think conservatism is an aspiration, it is something we should strive for—a society that works well enough that it is worth conserving.

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What we believe in is a serious matter. It is a condition of being. It is not something you can hide, especially if you are a songwriter because your preoccupations rise to the surface and find their way into the songs. That’s the beauty and danger of certain songs, they reveal a great deal, not just to others, but to yourself. So, whatever my beliefs may be, they exist in what I create. They are there for all to see. Of course, in The Red Hand Files I do my best to write about religious matters with some nuance, you know, about my belief, but also my unbelief. Religious ideas preoccupy me, for sure, as they always have, for as far back as I can remember. I don’t need it pointed out that there is something absurd about spending vast amounts of time contemplating the nature of something that quite possibly doesn’t exist. The thing is, songwriting and faith are inextricably linked, for me, I recognise one in the other. I find writing words to be dependent on a readiness to perceive what are essentially tenuous, softly spoken ideas, that reveal themselves, like God, as intimations, as ghost-like abstractions, as mysteries. And like God, a song rarely comes fully formed, without a struggle, declaring itself. So, in that respect, as a musician and songwriter, matters of faith are second nature, and well, impossible to ignore.

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i think all quiet on the western front and the lord of the rings are in direct conversation with each other, as in theyre the retelling of the same war with one saying here’s what happened, we all died, and it did not matter at all and another going hush little boy, of course we won, of course your friends came back

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We all like to imagine ourselves as the good guys in history. It is fun to fantasize about holding the line at Harper’s Ferry or refusing to ratify our compromised Constitution. It’s also very easy. ... 'History is as complicated as people are,' Munden says. 'We don’t have to come from a place of ‘people are right or wrong,’ but rather from a place of what we learn from them about how we can behave differently.'

The ‘Safe Space’ Where America's History is Debated in Real Time - POLITICO

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Slow Productivity basics, as summarized by Iwo Szapar in "Have you heard about 'Slow Productivity'?" from the Remote-First Institute

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The way I see God is not an attempt to take the mystical out of reality—it's a way to incorporate the miracle and mystery of the life we can see, measure, observe, and test every day. A world composed of countless strange little particles, themselves made of energy and invisible fields that defy the imagination. Skeptics challenge the idea of an unseen spirit realm, but what we know about the physical realm is far more fascinating and strange than a bush that burns without being consumed. We're already numinous and ethereal, beings made of mostly empty space and probabilistic waveforms.

— Science Mike, Finding God in the Waves

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The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. — Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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But my favorite part of this devotion is earlier, in the first half. It is where Donne employs another conceit, one that compares death to translation from one language to another. How could the book lover and language lover that I am (and that I know many of you dear readers are as well) not love, love, love this imagery?

“… all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.”

Death is a translation; God uses many translators. But God binds up all of our pages, and places us into that eternal library, where we will read and know all things.

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Tips for Spotting Bad & Bullshit History

There's no way to make sure you never fall for historical misinformation, and I'm not expecting anyone to fact-check every detail of everything they read unless they're getting paid for it. But you can make an effort to avoid the Worst Takes.

Ask yourself – if I wanted to verify this, where would I start? If you look at a statement and can’t actually find any facts to check, then you already know it’s bullshit.

Read the Wikipedia article on weasel words. Some experts say it’s very helpful!

Look for specifics: a who, a what, a where, a when. If one of those is missing or very broad, that’s a red flag. Statements need to be rooted in a time and a place. “People in the past have always…” Nope.

Vague is bad. Unless you’re looking at a deliberate large-scale overview that’s being broad and generalizing on purpose, you want names and dates and places and primary sources, pictures and quotes and examples.

But an example is not a trend. There’s a difference between what’s possible and what’s common, and history is full of exceptions and outliers. Extremely unusual people and events are overrepresented in the historical record (because nobody writes down what’s normal,) and they can tell us a lot about history, but they’re not directly representative of their place or time. Imagine a historian trying to reconstruct the 21st century based solely on Kiwifarm.

If a historian is competent or even just trying, you won’t have to go digging for sources, they will be shoved right into your face. Not out of mere academic rigor, but because a person who found them, either first- or second hand, is proud to have found them. People who have proof want to show you the proof, people who figured something out will want to show you their work, walk you through it. If they don’t, ask yourself – how do you know this? And - why won’t you tell me how you know this?

Someone might have a legit historical source, and then try to stretch it to cover times and places where it no longer applies. What’s true of 12th century England may not be true of 14th century Venice, even though both are “Medieval Europe,” so watch for those stretches.

Anecdotes are fine, they reveal a lot about people’s values and perceptions, pro historians often use them for context, but what anecdotes are not is factual truth. Notice when someone is feeding you cute anecdotes.

If someone attributes a large-scale social or cultural transformation to a single person or event, yeah that’s usually bullshit. Chances are, that person was part of a larger trend, a small link in a long chain. You can still appreciate their contribution, just put it in context!

Second-guess anyone who acts like they possess secret knowledge that the Media or Academia (or somebody) is hiding, they’re usually bullshit. Remember, if something has a Wikipedia article, it’s not actually a dark secret.

Remember that if it happened in the past sixty years, tons of people will still remember it, and you can literally just go and ask them.

Learn to recognise a smear tactic. Did this person really fuck dogs, or was their posthumous biography written by their worst enemy? Should we take it at face value? Also learn to recognise overt propaganda in the opposite direction: is the king that great or does he have a court historian on retainer? Remember that people sometimes *lie* in their autobiographies.

It’s fine to speculate about what “could” or “might” have happened, professional historians also fill the gaps in the sources with the occasional educated guess. But failing to differentiate clearly between fact and speculation is a huge mistake.

Do not seek validation in history. It's not there. I’m not saying you should approach history in an impersonal, apolitical way, of course not. Our present situation influences our interpretation of history, and it should. What I’m saying is, try not to hang too much of your individual or group identity on a historical narrative. Especially if it’s bullshit. You’re worthy and human because you’re worthy and human today, not because of the deeds and misdeeds of people in the past.

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In LA you get the occasional shop that says “We welcome everbody” and it has all of these minority identities, right? And it sounds good because it’s like ‘oh, you’re welcoming everybody!’ But of course, well every shop on the street welcomes everybody, right? But by saying who we welcome, there’s an implicit thing that says we don’t welcome you if you don’t affirm these identities, right? So what is caught up in the ‘we welcome everybody’ is an exclusion ....

If you have to say it, you know—the first question you ask is, ‘Okay well who’s not welcome here. Who are you excluding?’

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Scientific dialogue is dependent on fair and open presentation of data and evidence, yet recent years have raised concerns about bias in research practice. We present data and examples pertinent to a particular bias, a `white hat bias' (WHB), which we define to be bias leading to distortion of research-based information in the service of what may be perceived as righteous ends. 

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Our analysis (Fig 1) shows a clear inverse association between study precision and association magnitude. This PB hallmark suggests that studies with statistically significant NSB findings are more likely to be published than are non-statistically significant ones. Interestingly, this bias appears to be present only for non-industry-funded research, suggesting that non-industry-funded scientists tend not to publish their non-significant associations in this area.

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Soon before his death in 1662, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote a paragraph that can be paraphrased as ‘There is a god-shaped hole in every human heart.’ I believe he was right. … Although we disagree about its origins, we agree about its implications. There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage. That has been true since the beginning of the age of mass media, but the garbage pump got 100 times more powerful in the 2010s. It matters what we expose ourselves to—on this, the ancients universally agree. - The Anxious Generation, Chapter 8: Spiritual Elevation and Degradation

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Researchers in France exposed young women either to media photographs of very thin women, or to media photographs of average-sized women. They found that the young women exposed to images of very thin women became more anxious about their own body and appearance. But here’s the surprising thing: the images were flashed on the screen for just 20 milliseconds—too fast for the women to become consciously aware of what they had seen. The authors conclude that social comparison takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluations. This means that the frequent reminders girls give each other that social media is not reality are likely to have only a limited effect, because the part of the brain that is doing the comparisons is not governed by the part of the brain that knows, consciously, that they are seeing only edited highlight reels. - The Anxious Generation, Chapter 6: Why Social Media Harms Girls More than Boys