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How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan – an interesting read, especially, for me, the chapter on the neuroscience of psychedelics “It could be that in order to judge an insight as merely subjective, one person’s opinion, you must first have a sense of subjectivity. Which is precisely what the mystic on psychedelics has lost.” …

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Apparently, I have poor people skills. I’m literal-minded and I take people ‘at face value’, which means that I assume that people mean exactly what they say. Which is to say that having people skills means assuming that people do not mean what they say—i.e., that they are dishonest (or, less likely, linguistically inept). Which …

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“Matthew, how do you know these things?” “How do you not?” (from one of Jodi Taylor’s Time Police novels, but sooooo applicable to so many conversations)

“Capitalism can be good, proper, brutal fun, the biggest schoolyard game in the world.” Indeed. Schoolyard. “What do you think she would be like in bed?” “I’ve nevr met her.” “How would that matter?” So telling.

from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news “The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate …

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“Trump responds more to his Twitter ‘likes’ than his briefing books and the Constitution of the United States.” (And that was about his first term.) “He has the maturity of an 8-year-old boy and the insecurity of a teenage girl.”

“Under certain conditions, it is improper to live any longer. Continued vegetation in cowardly dependence upon physicians and prescription, after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, should entail the profound contempt of humanity.” Nietzsche “Natural death is death under the most contemptible conditions. It is involuntary death, death at the …

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“People hardly ever make use of the freedom which they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of expression as compensation.” Kierkegaard (1838)

And another thing (from Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes): the guy who considered his football game to be far more important than knowing whether or not his girlfriend was pregnant. Not unusual. Most men worship football. Guys, especially jocks—you have been brainwashed. It’s a fucking GAME. A game of tag with a game of catch. To see …

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Jodi Picoult’s excellent novel, Nineteen Minutes, got me thinking, yet again, about when people (most often males) claim they were “just kidding around” or that it was “just a joke”, what they really mean is “I don’t want to be held accountable for what I just did.” And it’s appalling that such immaturity persists well …

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