In case you weren’t aware, sting rays are basically puppies.
oh hey I know these guys! they’re in a little tide pool at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium and they’re super sweet. If they see you standing next to the pool they’ll jump up out of the water and splash you until you pet them
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.
-Carl Sandburg, “Grass”
Source: poetryfoundation.org
instead of arguing about the no-fly list and the memes it spawned, please consider donating to CAIR (Center for American Islamic Relations) or the CCR (Center for Constitutional Rights)
CAIR, specifically, is group of muslim lawyers who routinely represent muslim americans fighting for their legal rights - all for free
both groups have already won multiple cases for muslim americans who have been wrongfully profiled and surveilled by the government, and they’ve announced plans to take even broader legal initiative to protect our rights. it’s because of their work thus far that the supreme court recently ruled that muslims who have been wrongfully placed on no-fly lists are now allowed to sue the government for damages
we still have a long way to go, but organizations like these are doing so much work to make sure we get there
in general if you believe that your job is to definitively describe, capture, taxonomise, or exhaustively define reality you are going to have a bad time imo. it's far more useful to ask "which model is useful for my purposes," "does this model basically make sense with what I know of the world," "might another model be more useful for another purpose," &c.
the best map is the territory--but describing everything about the material and social conditions of each individual person on earth, besides being impossible, would be useless. in order to be useful--to describe something about the part of reality that you're interested in, to have the power to make predictions or have insights about that reality, to propose actions in order to alter that reality--you are going to have to generalise. any time you propose to reduce reality to a model you are compromising and generalising something, somewhere. the question is where do you generalise, and how much, and what do you gain from doing so, and what do you lose, and in which contexts is this model useful (i.e. how should you constrain the field in which you apply this model), and in which contexts is it more trouble than it's worth?
another Critical Thinking hack is that you must not mistake a classification or naming of something with an explanation of that thing. sorting or naming something does not have explanatory power. the phenomenon remains to be explained regardless of the fact that "this actually has a name!"
who named it? when? who sorted these discrete ideas or phenomena into one category? why? in association with what organisation, ideology, &c.? what ideas does this classification, sorting, or naming rely on? do you agree with those ideas? in what other ways could these phenomena be grouped, sorted, named, classified? what ideas would that alternate classification rely on? must these phenomena be named or sorted into categories at all?
The athletes from the great Roman mosaic, found in the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, are shown in great detail. They were discus throwers, javelin throwers, wrestlers, boxers, and winners holding a palm branch and wreath. The floor mosaic adorned the exercise area. The mosaic was discovered in 1824 and is now in the Vatican Museums.
