To Lessen War

Lately I've been thinking about a political principle. That a powerful form of activism is to live with integrity. I first started thinking about this after watching the film "As We Forgive". A key theme of that film is that it took love, legitimate one-on-one connection, to restore the country of Rwanda after the genocide. So love is political. Connection and tolerance are political. They are intertwined in our citizenship. And then I ran into a few instances of this philosophy in rapid succession. Jordan Peterson, who I have started investigating (and disagree with on some solid points, but have some admiration for nonetheless) espouses this philosophy from a conservativish standpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti1Tob5Ceh8 I started reading "The Slow Professor", and a key message concerns the power of the individual. That the Slowness of one academic, even in short admissions of imperfection and short grabs for meaningful time, are acts of resist...

Intro About a month ago, A google engineer sent around to his fellow employees a memo with the title “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”. The memo went viral about a week ago, and he was fired soon after. The main points of this memo were the following ( in his own summary ): Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.  This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.  The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.  Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression  Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression  Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.  Discrimination to reach e...