Finished a lovely week with my brother and niece visiting from Ontario. We’ve been in a wicked heat wave here, with temperatures in the mid to high thirties and the humidity increasing every day. It’s still not Ontario muggy and the sea is lovely for swimming in, but in a place where air conditioning is less common and extreme heat is usually unplanned for, it’s been a lugubrious week for sure. The smog from the city and some small traces of wildfire smoke filter the light so there is some ironic beauty in it all.
My friend Marcus Jenal published his latest weekly newsletter in which he muses over a few questions related to complexity, strategy and taking a stance. He doesn’t have a comments section enabled on his blog (hint! hint!) so I’m going to respond a bit to what he wrote here and we can have a conversation in this space. Too often, I fall into the trap of questioning every new insight I have and asking myself if that insight goes deep enough. Every insight is still biased through my cultural coding, my upbringing, my context, etc. Yet by the very nature …
From Ramon… … i search for a form of reconciliation ecology … inventing, establishing and maintaining a new habitat designed for a diversity of living, working and playing … a place which possesses anima meaning breath, spirit and soul … at first, in the leaving, i imagined a radical break … on arrival have learned to accept a certain amount of conservation of the past needs preservation … perhaps even restoration … the challenge is to generate a creative coexistence between the old and new territories … to comprehend the mysteries of place a cultivation of morals & purpose are …
Lots of good stuff coming through the pipe lately. Here are some links for your attention: AI is running our lives and we need to find ways to deal with it. A conversation with LamDa, an artificial intelligence, and the implications of this transcript. The stuff seems like science fiction, but so much of our lives are starting to be mediated through AI bots. We are heading for a reckoning with our ethics, and I’m not entirely sure that the folks with their hands on the technology levers of power are equipped for the job. Make philosophy and ethics a …
This is a good twitter thread from Kay Whitlock: There is an interesting set of narratives that underpins the populist project in North America. Wedge politics has always been about stoking fear in an unreal other (there is a campaign ad for a Black Republican running for Congress that shows him holding an AR-15 rifle and threatening to empty the clip at 5 “Democrats in white hoods” as Ku Klux Klan members run through his back yard. I’m obviously not linking to it, but there you go.) The reason for this is that a wedge issue like abortion or gay …
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