Simon Paynton

Enco, Jake…. I’ve spent thirty minutes deciding how to choose a small window into profundity. I’ve landed on a Māori experience.

Each tribe has its own “marae” which is their sacred community building where they attain a sense of ‘belonging’. It is prohibited for non-tribe members.  I was adopted as sister, and embraced into the shared flow of…[Read more]

Have a great week!

@Enco the tribes I lived with were NZ Māori, Fijian Pacific Islanders and a little with the Aborigines in Australia. Not part of any group or organisation – I went by myself, and bearing in mind the potential risks, I probably ought to be dead several times over, by now.

Stories about all of them, that changed my perceptions of almost…[Read more]

Y’all know that SCOTUS just defanged the Voting Rights Act, right? So incumbent legislators are already celebrating by ramping up gerrymandering.

Short:

@Enco

”We Homo Sapiens just surround our wars with ideology and religion” is quite a profound statement.

This fits in with the behaviours of some of the far flung tribal groups I’ve lived with. For them, religion is a comfort, not a cause. They still have aggression, but the dividers between ‘them’ and ‘us’ are more commonly tribal root orientat…[Read more]

If they are doing it themselves it is not FC.

Facilitated Communication sits at the intersection of hope, identity, and perceived injustice, which makes it unusually resistant to evidence. When you watch FC in action, it can be convincing. The person appears to be communicating fluently, even sometimes at a level far beyond what anyone expected. The problem is that this impression is exactly…[Read more]

Thank you, Reg!!!

Have a great week!!

I was deplatformed as a child… now everyone’s an expert. 

– Reg.

Patience, grasshopper, this is a two-parter.

1) Call me naive, I only learned about mogging today. Here’s a 1 minute intro:

2) Here it is in a Hegsethian context, within the Trumpian context. I like the whole episode but jump into it where it serves comedic effect wrt mogging, leaving 9 minutes to…[Read more]

Trump and Gang aren’t the only ones profiting from MAGA superfans buying his personalized merch.

@fullermingjr No religion is rational by the very definition of the word rational – derived from logic and reason etc.

A religion is by definition a faith based construct, for which belief  is required, not reason.

A Venn diagram of Religion and Rationality would barely touch at their potential meeting point.
I suppose Religion could be…[Read more]

Modern workplaces bring together people with fundamentally different worldviews, be they religious, secular, scientific or ideological and then ask them to cooperate as if those differences don’t matter. But in reality, they do matter. The trick is deciding when they matter at work and when they don’t.

For me the issue is never “belief vs belie…[Read more]

“It’s a very collective society, not huge on individualism like in the US.”

People tend to think in terms of community, family, and shared identity. There’s more value placed on cooperating and supporting each other. I would say that social norms often lean toward “we” over “me”.

But it is also a liberal society. We do have a small but vocal…[Read more]