17 Life-Learnings to Celebrate the 17th Birthday of Maria Popova’s “The Marginalian”

This morning I received 17 wonderful gifts. Maria Popova’s website has been one of my places of respite for many years. In her most recent article, she celebrates her 17 years of online writing at “The Marginalian” by crystallizing 17 lessons she has learned along the way. Here is Maria’s introduction to her 17 lessons:

The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006, under an outgrown name, to an outgrown self that feels to me now almost like a different species of consciousness. (It can only be so — if we don’t continually outgrow ourselves, if we don’t wince a little at our former ideas, ideals, and beliefs, we ossify and perish.)

What follows are merely the titles to Popova's 17 lessons. She discusses each of these more fully at her website. Everything she writes is, somehow, both analytically precise and poetic. I've printed this list and it has gone up on my wall so that I have daily reminders:

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone

3. Be generous.

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life.

5. You are the only custodian of your own integrity.

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.”

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit.

9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist.

10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively.

11. Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality.

12 There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again.

14. Choose joy.

15. Outgrow yourself.

16. Unself.

17.Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for.

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One Approach for Dealing with Vague Verbal Attacks

Notice the simple technique used by this Canadian politician. He asks for examples. He asks the attacker to clarify what he is trying to say. Relentlessly asking for clarity does two things: It reveals the empty rhetoric and it shows that what is really going on is that the attacker is calling other people "bad." The politician was faced with an emotional feeling wrapped up in incomprehensible rhetoric. Not that emotional concerns are invalid. That said, things that look like an analytical argument should always be fair game for testing. We should always be invited to kick the tires and see what's under the hood.

This technique is non-partisan, however. Any person can use this technique to derail any conversation if used to an extreme. All language is inherently rickety, laden with conceptual metaphors. Using this technique incessantly will end almost every conversation. The only conversations that have any chance of surviving will be those involving only basic math and logic propositions (2 + 2 = 4) and "basic level categories," as described by Eleanor Rosch: Conversations like "I have a dog" or "It's raining outside." See also here, here and here.

There is balance to be had in the use of such inquisition and people of good faith do work together to make their conversations understandable and thus meaningful. If only there were more good faith and less suspicion in the world . . .

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“What is Your Gender Identity?”

"What is Your Gender Identity?"

How would you respond to this question if you were put on the spot? Here's one approach . . .

If I were asked today, I would say something like this: "Unlike sex, "gender identity" is an incoherent and thus meaningless term."

Why do I think "gender identity" is an incoherent term? Here is one reason:

In other words, gender ideologists claim that one's genitals are both A) completely irrelevant to one's gender and B) highly relevant to one's gender. To make both of these claims is incoherent. Here's another thing I might add:

Another idea . . .

Perhaps you could point out that "gender ideology" embraces the regressive sex stereotypes most of us (not only feminists) have been trying to downplay for decades:

A comment to the above tweet:

It really sucks to know that we worked so hard to erase gender stereotypes. Let girls and boys dress how they want, play with whatever toys they wanted, play whatever sports, have whatever interests...boys can dance, girls can be mechanics. We fought so hard. Then this crap.

Or you could invite them to listen to this podcast where Bari Weiss interviews Andrew Sullivan, a pioneer in gay rights.  Sullivan doesn't support gender ideology because it is functionally homophobic. Most children claiming to be confused about their sex will, if left alone (not surgically butchered and rendered sterile by cross-sex hormones) grow up to accept their bodies, the great majority of them growing up to be gay (and see here).  For this reason, Sullivan characterizes gender ideology to be homophobic.

If things heat up too much, you might want to inject some humor:

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Jettison Your Tribal Politics!

I’ve repeatedly expressed my concern with the idea of a “political spectrum.  In their book, The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis argue that the notion of a “political spectrum” is the root of much of our political dysfunction. I agree and I would recommend reading their article at Heterodox Academy. Here are a few excerpts from their article:

For most of our history, Americans didn’t think in terms of a spectrum. They just saw (accurately) that America had a two-party system and that each of these parties stood for a bundle of unrelated positions. This all started to change after World War I when Americans imported the left-right model that had arisen in Europe during the French Revolution. Since then, the use of the spectrum has grown exponentially and actual policy has been obscured as Americans have become accustomed to placing every person, institution, or group somewhere on a left-right scale (with radicals on the far left, progressives and liberals on the center left, reactionaries on the far right, and conservatives on the center right). The political spectrum is, without question, the most common political paradigm in 21st-century America.

The central problem with this model is that it’s inaccurate for the simple reason that there’s more than one issue in politics and a spectrum can, by definition, measure only one issue. There are a multitude of distinct, unrelated political policies under consideration today (e.g., abortion, income taxes, affirmative action, drug control, gun control, health care spending, the minimum wage, military intervention, etc.), and yet our predominant political model presumes that there is just one.

So if there is more than one issue in politics, why do Americans use a unidimensional political spectrum to describe politics? Generally, it’s because they are convinced that there is one essential issue that underlies and binds all others, such as “change,” and therefore the political spectrum accurately models where someone stands in relation to this essence

We contend that this is exactly backward. There is no essential issue underlying all others—abortion and tax rates really are distinct and unrelated policies—and socialization, not essence, explains the correlation between them. People first anchor into a tribe (because of peers, family, or a single issue they feel strongly about), adopt the positions of the tribe as a matter of socialization, and only then reverse engineer a story about how all the positions of their tribe are united by some essential principle (e.g., progressivism or conservatism) . . . Left-right ideology is the fiction we use to justify and mask our tribal attachments.

. . .  Would it be useful for medical doctors to model all illnesses, treatments, and patients on a spectrum? Obviously not because medicine is multidimensional and trying to model all medical issues using a single dimension would do great harm. The same is true of politics. Doctors get along just fine by talking about specific illnesses and treatments (lung cancer, fractured tibia, bronchial infection, chemotherapy, bone setting, antibiotics), and political discourse would be much more productive if we simply talked about specific political problems and policies (crime, poverty, inflation, gun control, welfare spending, interest-rate tightening).

Yes, all models are simplifications of reality, but those models must also be accurate such that they improve rather than hinder our understanding of the matter in question. A bad model is actually worse than no model at all (as the four humors theory of disease makes clear), and the political spectrum is a bad model. It is a tool of misinformation, false association, and hostility.

. . .  Talking in terms of a spectrum serves no informational function, but it does serve to elevate the temperature of debate and make the public really angry about the “commies” or “fascists” on the other side.

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A Sensible Question about the Language Gender Ideologists Insist that Everyone Use

Wilfred Reilly asks:

Even if you're pro-gender ideology, why not just say "woman" and "trans woman?" Why would an additional modifier ("cis," etc) for 99.5% of the population ever be necessary? We don't use the label "hearing man" every time we describe someone who is not deaf.

Other contributors to this thread wrote:

Thank you for pointing this out I will now be referring to every person who is not disabled as able-bodied man or able-bodied woman. Brilliant.

Because it's a signaler that when you use it, it signals that you have accepted the gender cult's dogma.

because, no matter how hard they try to convince themselves and everyone else, they know it’s not the same!

That's power. Make 99.5% do the extra work. —woman —cis woman simple 😐

Norm Macdonald once said cisgender was "a way of marginalizing a normal person."

Because no men are a subset of women. There are women and men. That’s it. Some men LARP as a 1950s version of women but that doesn’t make them women

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