Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Community

Now That We’re Here

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

The Transgender Issue.

Excuse me? Issue? What issue?

This is in some part about science fiction, but really about my entire civilization, and touches on the choices we have facing us. I start with the so-called Transgender Issue because it exemplifies a problem I’ve been having with certain apparent contradictions.

As far as I’m concerned, the issue is not with trans people but with those who are ideologically opposed to them. The concerns they raise run counter to what I grew up expecting.*

I suppose none of this should surprise me, and from some quarters it doesn’t. I do wonder who made them arbiter of other people’s sense of self, but we’ve never had a shortage of the self-appointed in search of an issue to inflate their own sense of importance.…

Read more

3000 Words About Bad Faith

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

We compartmentalize. All the time. We divide things up so they don’t inhibit our ability to act, to judge, to feel. We don’t even seem to have to learn how, it just develops as life unfolds. The walls, though, are porous, and occasionally they collapse altogether. But they re-establish given opportunity. 

But sometimes the divide between one part of ourselves and another can become toxically entangled. It can cause a lot of pain, confusion. When challenged, there’s a kind of panic that attends to our desperate attempt to put those walls back up, to find a way back to the comforting areas where one thing did not conflict—violently at times—with another.…

Read more

Choosing

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

Given my previous post, this is not what you may think. But it’s related. Intimately.

When campaign season is in full flower and the claims and counterclaims of politicians mingle in the air like pollen or murmurations or dogfights, it can be understandably difficult to know how to choose. Trying to sort them by policy is occasionally maddeningly fraught. What is best for the country as opposed to what is best for you personally; what may have long term consequences which in the short-run may seem perfectly fine but ten or thirty years down the road leads to disaster; how to tease through the statistics and understand how they relate to anything that might be addressable.…

Read more

Post Pandemic?

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

Our governor, Mike Parsons, has announced that, for Missouri, the pandemic is over. It’s been demoted to “endemic.” Which means, in case anyone is wondering, that it’s not gone, it has “settled in” as a constant, like the flu or colds or mosquitoes. He’s more or less following the trend. People are abandoning their masks and it appears to have reached a point where he might as well give it the seal of approval or look like a stick in the mud. Or a Democrat.

I’m still masking. Depending on where I am, this is becoming a minority practice. I’m waiting for the notices of a new spike, but who knows?…

Read more

Patriots

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

I want to be precise here, so there is no misunderstanding. There will be, because the moment it becomes clear that I’m being critical of a certain posture, some will stop understanding what I’ve written (many would stop reading) and will fall back to automatic reactions that are designed to shield them from any meaningful reassessment. It can’t be helped. People live by heuristics, build walls of rhetorical shielding behind which they can feel secure, and doubt is anathema. Questioning becomes a threat. Just by bringing up the idea of an alternative point of view, the defenses come into play to shunt these ideas and their purveyors into a predetermined category, one which says that they need not be listened to, in fact, must not be.…

Read more

Just a Brief Comment About Upcoming Election Year Stupidity

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

I know, I know, you catch more flies with honey, etc etc.  I don’t care.

I would like to address the growing expectation (at least in the media) that there will be a Red Wave this fall, and the GOP will retake the Senate and House. I’m a bit of a history buff, I know these things happen cyclically, that the first midterm after a Party regains the White House tends to end up in the hands of the Other Party,  Yadda yadda. And I’m hearing the pundits talk about Biden getting the blame for this or that and his approval ratings, etc.…

Read more

The Other Country

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

Two things prompt me to write this: the first is the number of Trump-aligned members of the GOP who are praising Putin’s incursion into and threat against Ukraine. The second is the verdict in the federal hate crimes trial against the three men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia.

Bear with me.

With the ratification of the Constitution of the United States and the general agreement about what it suggested for the country then newly-formed, a divide opened between Ideals and Aspirations. That divide has widened and diminished over the years, but never gone away completely, and today it is a massive canyon.…

Read more

Life Of Words

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

My last post dealt with my principled opinions and feelings about book banning/burning. This one will be personal.

I realize it sounds clichéd when someone says reading saved their lives, but it shouldn’t. Our lives are saved by the people around us, those who are with us, relatives and friends and teachers, in an ever-widening circle of familiarity. That network is the reason we are alive and the people we are. I know it’s fashionable to try to claim island status, that we are ourselves by our own hand, but it’s nonsense, and even those most stridently dedicated to that bit of myth know better, unless they are so utterly isolated as to be clinically dysfunctional.…

Read more

Banning

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

To my mind, there are few acts more pernicious than book banning. It goes to a fundamental failure in us that usually manifests in several other ways that sometimes seem unrelated.

Firstly, it is a direct admission that the proponents care little and likely understand nothing about freedom.

All we finally have, all that allows us to be present in the world, known to each other, and recognized as ourselves is our voice. Take that away and you erase us. Any examination of the history of conquest and oppression shows that this is the primary tool of the conquerors and oppressors.…

Read more

Dear Pope

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

A consistently baffling phenomenon in life is how people with zero actual experience in something and with a stated ideological reason for not and never having that experience find it in themselves to advise, recommend, insist, dictate, and judge people who likewise choose not to have that experience—but for completely different reasons.

Life is full of this kind of thing. “Experts” with all kinds of advice for other people about things they’ve never done and have no intention of doing. One of the most egregious is all the “friendly” encouragement to have kids. (And yes, many of these people do have kids, but it’s surprising how many who don’t will join in.)…

Read more
Page generated in 5.398 seconds. Stats plugin by www.blog.ca