mink

Yesterday, I found the following video on more than one channel of communication I maintain, including e-mail and social media timelines. The video is a Fox News interview with Reza Aslan on his new book on Jesus. I find Fox's "critical" questioning of Aslan's work quite uncritical. I also find Aslan's defense graceful yet exactly the kind of critical that the discussion as a whole should have been. As Aslan points out, instead of targeting the 8 or so questions over 10 minutes towards the author's personal life, Fox should have targeted the questions towards the arguments put forth in the literature. In any case, I think the discussion on social media has been lazily unfair. How many people who are cajoled into ridiculing Fox news as "ignorant", "bitchy", "low", "illiterate", etc. have actually read Aslan's book and genuinly understand him? Further, how many people actually make informed judgments as Asla...

According to a rough search, the word "cultivation" yields two types of definitions. Bot relate to growth based on something. One type concerns biological cultivation - that is growth of living things - particularly of plant life. Another type concerns metaphysical cultivation - that is growth of a certain sense - particularly of human and communal life. I was prompted to conduct this rough search after a conversation with MK last night. The conversation - as always - covered many topics, but one seemed to stick for some time. That topic was about cultivation. Though we didn't use the word, we spent some time contemplating what it is that we grow up to be. Growth is inevitable, it is something we cannot prevent or whose rate we cannot decrease. So what is the reason for which we grow? Some options we discussed for answers to this question were: To make a living, to reproduce, to maintain the young or elderly, to search for new frontiers, to create from what is ar...

While real estate concerns space on land, virtual estates concern spaces in the media. "Media" here refers to broadcast media (radio, print, TV, etc.) as well as digital media (the Internet, mobile networks, satellite, etc.). Spaces in the media are not as scarce as spaces on land, particularly because more space can be created in the media than on land. Yet, because human beings have limited attention spans - much like we have limited needs for space on land - the media cannot possibly be consumed in its entirety by any one human being. Therefore, securing virtual estates could mean that you secure your content for future generations to observe. How well these estates are secured could foretell how long they will last before they are taken over. And how long they will last could foretell how many future generations could observe this content.