Anu Partanen’s book The Nordic Theory of Everything chronicles her philosophical evolution as she gained a deeper understanding of the discrepancy between American imagination and American reality after moving to New York from Finland, where she was born and raised. This article is not a stylistic breakdown or a deep analytical review. These are just …
Gender A person’s chromosomal composition can be measured as distinct from their physical appearance, i.e. genotype does not equal phenotype. Usually, the former acts as the dominant indicator for the latter but that’s not always true and we can articulate an attitude that positively includes the common and the corner cases. Physical appearance can in …
God, as I define God, is before the beginning of this universe. Morality, in the proto-form that will eventually apply to us humans, doesn’t begin until living cells begin. Above the level of the single cell, and not under, there is a spectrum of relationships that we tend to call moral. Therefore, morality doesn’t start …
The concept of truth can be broken down into at least two categories; objective truth and moral truth. Objectively true statements are true for all of us regardless of how any of us feel about them, e.g. “Most rocks are hard”, “The Sun is a star”, “Water is two parts Hydrogen and one part Oxygen”. …
What did the American slaves earn with their involuntary servitude? An attaboy and a pat on the back? Unfortunately, they earned even less than that. They earned nothing in terms of profit during that four century exploitation and they received nothing at the moment of emancipation. What about the price we paid in American lives …
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a book written by Friedrich Nietzsche between 1883 and 1885. I’m not remotely qualified to write a “review” of the book that could be taken as serious literary critique, so I won’t. This article is a layman processing his thoughts, feelings, and reactions after reading the work for the first time. …
The conditions of our births are blind luck. The socioeconomic status of our parents, their capacity for loving kindness or lack thereof, the year, the trends in geopolitics and the budding advancements in technology are all incredibly impactful regarding the adults that we become and none of those phenomena or their contents are even slightly …
TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read): Universal basic income (UBI) will probably help America. UBI will not make people lazy. Automation will probably increase the number of jobs in America instead of decreasing them. Meaningful work is very different than meaningless wage labor. The suggestion that people should find identity and meaning through wage labor is …
Why We Should End Slavery. We should end slavery in America because slavery is wrong. I’m confident that most Americans will agree with that premise without desiring further explication. For those that do want a more articulate argument on that point, I’ll try to make it in this essay. Some Americans might respond to …
I’m black, I’m proud, and identity politics could poison us all. What is identity politics? Unsurprisingly, different people answer this question differently. That’s a problem. Let’s create a shared understanding of what identity politics is in order to have a fruitful conversation about its merits, lack of merits, benefits, and harms in the future. …