Sun’s out after a few days of (very welcome) rain.
What We Owe Our Fellow Animals | Martha C. Nussbaum | The New York Review of Books:
Behind these biases lies a more general failing, which the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal calls “anthropodenial”: the denial that we are animals of a certain type (the anthropoid type), and the tendency to imagine ourselves, instead, as pure spirits, “barely connected to biology.” This mistaken way of thinking has a long history in most human cultures; it remains stubbornly lodged in people’s psyches even when they think they are examining the evidence fairly. Anthropodenial has led, until recently, to a reluctance to credit research findings that show that animals use tools, solve problems, communicate through complex systems, interact socially with intricate forms of organization, and even have emotions such as fear, grief, and envy. (This is a bait-and-switch: emotions have long been denigrated on the grounds that they are not pure spirit, and yet humans also want to claim a monopoly on what they despise.)
The same idea — that we are “barely connected to biology” — underlies the idea that one can be born into “the wrong body.”
Final analysis: same as halftime. A solid performance by the USMNT: they were composed and competent throughout, but had no cutting edge. ⚽️
Halftime analysis: USMNT dominating in midfield, but has no finishing. ⚽️
I’m sticking with my prediction, but it would be the most USMNT thing ever to beat England and get knocked out by losing to Iran. ⚽️
Even if you hate soccer, listen to the first few minutes of this podcast to discover how my friend Brian, in his Ponca City, Oklahoma elementary school, proved himself a True Hero.
My prediction for USA-Wales was 0-0; it finished 1-1. My prediction for today’s match: England 3-1 USA. ⚽️
I hand-write a lot, but I don’t boost it much these days because I’ve come to realize how strongly many people hate their own handwriting. Writing by hand stresses them, and who needs that? ✍️
ark head
One mental model for this condition is what I call ark head, as in Noah’s Ark. We’ve given up on the prospect of actually solving or managing most of the snowballing global problems and crises we’re hurtling towards. Or even meaningfully comprehending the gestalt. We’ve accepted that some large fraction of those problems will go unsolved and unmanaged, and result in a drastic but unevenly distributed reduction in quality of life for most of humanity over the next few decades. We’ve concluded that the rational response is to restrict our concerns to a small subset of local reality — an ark — and compete for a shrinking set of resources with others doing the same. We’re content to find and inhabit just one zone of positivity, large enough for ourselves and some friends. We cross our fingers and hope our little ark is outside the fallout radius of the next unmanaged crisis, whether it is a nuclear attack, aliens landing, a big hurricane, or (here in California), a big wildfire or earthquake. […]
… it’s gotten significantly harder to care about the state of the world at large. A decade of culture warring and developing a mild-to-medium hatred for at least 2/3 of humanity will do that to you. General misanthropy is not a state conducive to productive thinking about global problems. Why should you care about the state of the world beyond your ark? It’s mostly full of all those other assholes, who are the wrong kind of deranged and insane. At least you and I, in this ark, are the right kind of deranged and insane. It’s worth saving ourselves from the flood, but those other guys can look out for themselves.
I think this is largely true, but I think some other things as well — primarily that any such retreat-to-the-ark is an inevitable response to the inflexible limits of our Dunbar’s Number minds.
“That’s perhaps the way out — keep trying to tell stories beyond ark-scale until one succeeds in expanding your horizons again.” Nope. We don’t need our horizons expanded, we need our attention narrowed and focused.