John's Micro.Blog

strange thought: i’m more than 70 years old and i’ve never seen a dead person outside a coffin.

For lunch today i made my first batch of arepas. tasty! they were a bit doughier on the inside than i’d expected; i think i need to tweak the recipe a bit, maybe cook them longer at lower heat.

years ago i was interested in macrobiotics, and still find some useful things there. a contradiction i noticed early on: a basic macrobiotic principle was that we should try to eat foods that are native to where we live – but the recipes they pushed were usually based on east asian, especially japanese, eating. it seemed to me then, and now, that if we’re interested in dietary localism in the americas, corn, rather than wheat or rice, would be the basic grain in our diet. arepas are apparently almost unchanged from before the Spanish conquest, so are about as indigenous as they can get.

i may explore stuffing these with cheese and/or egg for breakfast. an indigenous breakfast sandwich!

The things you learn! Since gps appeared, Australia has moved 1.8 meters due to plate tectonics.

How to walk across a parking lot. I enjoyed this. I always aim for an area with few other cars. Can’t understand why people spend five minutes prowling around looking for a place near the store, just to avoid a nice little one-minute walk across the lot.

An installment of Nick Cave’s fine newsletter (read it, even in you don’t especially like his music) made me think again about a social mystery:

I’ve learned mostly to stay away from Facebook, Twitter, and the comments sections of almost any online forum, because they’ve become infested with ill-will and trashy, hateful expression. Yet in my day-to-day life, almost all the people I meet and speak with are kind and thoughtful. When we disagree, we either exchange disagreements in a civil way or tacitly agree to set them aside. It’s very nice! So, I ask, where does all the online vileness come from?

I spent some time theorizing, came up with a few hypotheses (that’s what I was trained to do). But rather than present them here, I decided just to remind myself that, despite the phantasmic images with which we surround ourselves, human goodness can be found everywhere we look.

The local political campaigns are ramping up, and so far I’ve seen nothing but attack ads. The only “information” I have about the candidates is that they’re all evil.

What is a merciful heart?
This by St Isaac of Syria gets quoted out of proportion to the rest of his writings, but it came to my mind today and is always worth pondering.

Q. And what is a merciful heart?

A. It is the heart’s burning for the sake of the entire creation, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons, and for every created thing; and at the recollection and sight of them, the eyes of a merciful man pour forth abundant tears. From the strong and vehement mercy that grips his heart and from his great compassion, his heart is humbled and he cannot bear to hear or see of any injury or slight sorrow in creation. For this reason he offers up prayers with tears continually even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of the truth, and for those who harm him, that they may be protected and receive mercy. And in like manner he even prays for the family of reptiles, because of the great compassion that burns without measure in his heart in the likeness of God.

– Ascetical Homilies 71

Sri Lanka imposed a social media blackout after the massacres. This piece reflects on the risks (authoritarianism) and upside. Quote:

Overall the sound of silence is not only more dignified for the dead, but also more beautiful to my ears. What have I ever gained from social media during terror attacks? Nothing, I expect, that I couldn’t have obtained more easily and with greater certainty elsewhere. And if so: Why do we bother, either consuming or producing social media posts during these events? I know I am not alone in wondering whether social media is not so much a new medium for communication as a novel form of mass psychosis, more like ergot poisoning than the invention of moveable type. It is a compulsive behavior that induces delusions about what is individually or collectively healthy. I hope that in the future we find more ways to mute it voluntarily.

From an interview with the author of a memoir by a “mixed-race” author:

It ended as an argument against race, just all the way, saying that we’re not going to transcend racism so long as we believe that you are a different race than I am, which necessarily imposes and implies hierarchies. So, I don’t think you can transcend racism without transcending racial categorization, and the book became a kind of memoir making an argument.”

One of the many, many ways that I feel we’ve backslid in my lifetime is that, all across the political spectrum, we seem to have abandoned the “color-blind ideal” as a path to human solidarity. Left and right promote identitarianism for their own purposes, and the ideal is lost. It’s bad, and no good will come of it.

I know one answer is “Color-blind is the ideal, but to get there we first have to go in the opposite direction.” Believe that if you want, but please count me out.

I know it’s difficult, and countless forces work against it, but I continue to believe that the ideal is the only way.

I was reminded of this powerful Bob Marley song, whose lyrics are excerpts from a speech by the Emperor Haile Selassie.

Report from the trenches: “I have a friend who teaches philosophy. They have a student who said demanding people have reasons for their beliefs is the same as colonialists going to other countries to tell poorer people how to live their lives. So, insisting you defend your position (in a philosophy class, mind you), is the same as invading another culture and telling them how to live. SMDH.”