Apologetics I

– Reflections on First Encountering Ethnomethodology effectively covers a few points I would’ve loved to make (and also re-articulates some ideas I already did mention). It’s a short read that I recommend. I wanted to pay particular attention to how she describes the sculpting of religious/political beliefs. Concepts are socially created and maintained, but they are more »

A (Very Short) Pragmatic Primer

Next week, I’m going back to the topic of rhetoric, writing about apologetics. Today, more quick notes. A simple paragraph on Pragmatism that I hope to return to later. Pragmatism: Philosophical position that replaces Truth and Being with comedy and cold hard cash. -R. Scott Bakker (@theDevilsChirp on Twitter)    I was introduced to Pragmatism more »

Peaces

I’m also posting tomorrow. But it’s a small one, then I’m done for the week. For whatever it’s worth I am still thinking aloud at this point and I’m not selling anything. I’m not so sure I’ve sold it to myself. Just had to keep writing. I should clarify, again, that in these matters I’m more »

Notes on Historiography

I’m going to dump a lot of text this week. I’m not sorry at all about that. I *am* a bit concerned that this week’s writing is further from my comfort zone. Next week I’ll scoot back into familiar territory (for me, anyway). I started IDing (eye deeing, c’mon folks) my section headings so that more »

Exercises in Contingency Planning (A Postmortem)

For many of us, when we look at artifacts made by others, we enjoy a finished product for whatever it is. But when we look at our own creations, we instead see the shadows of what could have been. We see the messy process and sometimes we see the compromise. I remember watching this Youtube video, and an more »

September 02013

September is nearly over, and it’s now been over a month since my first post. I think the end of each month is a good time to outline my own logistical concerns from last month and project what I’ll do going forward.   The Horse_ebooks creators to me, over the phone on the last day more »

Controlling Commonness

I took a break from “A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History” to breeze through “Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth” (I know). my reading hiatus on Nonlinear History will probably continue so that I can wrap Venkat’s new ebooks.  I hope to finish Nonlinear History in early October.   “Mystery Teachings” is one of those more »

Playing Everything

“Loving [a thing] should make you a snob, not a cheerleader. And proper snobs are full of hate about what they love.” -Eric Zimmerman   Notes: After this post, I’m going to start writing much shorter and more sporadic posts, I think. I’ll reduce the time from writing to posting so that I can talk more »

The Weird and the Banal

I’m sure this exists in some Umberto Eco book or something somewhere- But imagine a man who is supernaturally bestowed with the power to truthfully answer any question someone else poses to him, but only on the terms that the question was posed. Our poor supergenius, call him Bert, cannot add new vocabulary that the more »

Design-Thinking

Originally, this blog was a sort of challenge to write continuously for a little while. I’ve sort of got the hang of it, but I wanted to focus some effort on other things, so I am reducing my output after next week’s pretty sizable posts. I figured it wasn’t cheating by my own lights, since more »