Best Of

What makes me sad about them is that there a genuine problems that men and boys face and the way they weaponize them and turn it into misogyny turns people away from looking at and addressing those problems. For example in education outcomes the gender inequality is worse than it was in the 70s only the genders have swapped in terms of who's doing better and who's falling behind. The people on top of society are still more likely to be men, but the people at the bottom of society are also more likely to be men. More homelessness, greater rates of suicide deaths.

Richard Reeves is a good example of someone who is able to talk about men's issues without the red pill nonsense.

I recently noticed some new kinds of links appearing in my YouTube feed, interviews with people like Jordan Peterson and Rollo Tomassi. I innocently thought I would have a look since it mentioned some kind of Red Pill, a reference to ‘The Matrix’. I found the interview indigestible and instead had a look on Wikipedia what it’s all about… I read the pages on “Red pill”, “Manosphere” and “alt-right pipeline” before getting thoroughly sick of it.

It seems there are quite a few influencers out there who are trying to convince people to move to the right in their politics, and who seem to be convinced that men are being discriminated against, strange as it may seem. Anti-women sentiments run rampant in this group. I find it quite worrying that these people seem to have a wide reach on YouTube to suck in folks who don’t know any better.

Now I know many Buddhist groups are still men-first, and have a ways to go in terms of gender equality, but at least they are not moving in the wrong direction! This whole process of using the internet to radicalise especially young people seems to me to be something to beware of.

Trump's "Save America" act would be a first step to ending women's vote. The act requires documentary proof of citizenship, and if one's married name doesn't agree with the name on their birth certificate, they don't have that. Presumably women could get around this by providing documentation of the name change, but this would be very difficult for some women. Not everybody has a copy of their birth and marriage certificates, and it can be quite difficult for some people to obtain them.

Their is a faction of MAGA that doesn't believe women should vote, especially married women, whose husbands should speak for them. They are quite open about this.

I came across this very interesting author, poet and activist named Wendell Berry on YouTube, who died on the 31st of August, 2026. He was in favour of agricultural communities and small farms, and against industrial agriculture, which he saw as an outflow of the World War 2 industrial and chemical business. He was a prolific writer, Berry wrote at least twenty-five books (or chapbooks) of poems, twenty-four volumes of essays, and fifteen novels and short story collections.

People called him a poet and a prophet, and although he called himself a Christian “of a kind” he had a broad appeal, in his appreciation for the Earth, nature and mankind’s place within it. Some of the things he wrote were rather zennish. From Wikipedia…

According to Berry, the good life includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, animal husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, consistent life ethic, fidelity, frugality, reverence, and the interconnectedness of life. The threats Berry finds to this good simple life include: industrial farming and the industrialization of life, ignorance, hubris, greed, violence against others and against the natural world, the eroding topsoil in the United States, global economics, and environmental destruction.

“People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”
― Wendell Berry

“Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make. What would be the point, for example, if a majority of our people decided to be self-employed?
The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.”
― Wendell Berry

“Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”
― Wendell Berry

“So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts...Practice resurrection.”
― Wendell Berry

@Jeroen said:
I came across this heart-warming documentary about the turnaround of Waterstones (and in the USA Barnes and Noble by the same man), really made my day to hear about the way bookstores are surviving on the high street.

An update on James Daunt’s efforts to apply the philosophy to the US giant bookstore Barnes and Noble. They are opening quite a few new bookstores, that’s a good sign.

It's a much better thought experiment than a show. But I'm glad it was made, will tune in for season 2. It reminds me of a webcomic I've read (2/3 of, because that was available for free). It's called Righteous and it's about a "virus" that's basically kindness, so when it changes the life of a selfish corporate man and he starts spreading it, the world seem to become a better place. Now, I was constantly expecting for something to go wrong, after all it's about the elimination of free will, but apparently the author felt we'd be better off without it. Still, it was a captivating read, might finish it up sometime. For now, I'm just watching Slow Horses on Apple, I enjoy it a lot, always looking forward to a day off when I can grind through the next season.