To be certain is to close the eyes, ears, and mind.

Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

Voltaire

There will always be things in our lives we feel confident in our knowledge of. The sun will rise tomorrow, all living things require water to survive, whichever line we join will immediately become the slowest moving. There are many things in our lives which have a great deal of evidence, both anecdotal as well as resulting from dedicated and detailed study, supporting our assumptions and assertions about them.

But the truth is the more we examine…

It is not an excuse. Nor is it a trivial afterthought.

No action or event ever happens in a vacuum. There are always multiple contributing factors which influence our choices at any given moment, a great many of which are shaped by the world around us and beyond our direct control. Decisions and actions which make perfect sense in one context can seem drastically different in another. One of the side effects of having access to everything at the same time is that it tends to strip away the context which is critical to genuine understanding.

An online post by…

# 5 — We choose leaders based on their dramatic personas rather than their qualifications.

It wasn’t all that long ago we were describing ourselves as living in an information economy. Information was currency, access to information was crucial to success, and control of information was the ultimate form of power and influence. The flow of information is still central to the functioning of our global culture but our emotional reactions have become far more important than the accuracy of the information they are based on. To the point that the information, accurate or not, is becoming almost entirely irrelevant.

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Erotic imagery has been around for thousands of years, taking different forms and facing sometimes small sometimes dramatic shifts in cultural attitudes. Sex sells. There is no denying it. The sexual drive is a primal force in our nature and has been since long before our species started walking upright. Brokering sex as a commodity is the ‘oldest profession’ for a reason.

Sexual enticement engages attention, guaranteed. Billboards and photospreads for Calvin Klein underwear are all about the model not the garment. Marilyn Munroe’s rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ isn’t iconic because of her singing voice. …

One is a freedom, one is a privilege and too much of either can be dangerous.

The debates around free speech and whether or not it can or should have boundaries have been around as long as the idea of free speech itself. With the increasing intensity of efforts to confront bigotry and oppression as well as the counter-reacting upsurge in authoritarianism in the past couple of decades the debate has become all the more prominent and important. …

The sexual drive is a primal force in our species and as such maintains a near omnipresence in our modes of self-expression. Engaging in the time-honored philosophical debate of trying to draw lines between what is considered art, eroticized art, and pornography can be a fascinating, maddening, and ultimate fruitless endeavor. Justice Potter Stewart’s famous 1964 opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio stating “I know it when I see it” might be as true as it is pithy but it is also ultimately rather unhelpful.

Sexual materials in some form or other have been with us since our earliest recorded histories…

It is simply reveals and shares an existing a difference you might not have known about.

The term ‘coming out’ has become universally associated with revelations about one’s sexuality, and in recent years one’s gender identity as well. But when you strip it down the core concept it is actually something everyone does in their daily lives on a constant basis, sometimes in large significant ways but often in rather small almost unnoticeable ones.

At its very basest root ‘coming out’ is the emerging of something which was previously concealed. The sun comes out in the morning as the planet…

Understanding the source of a behavior explains the impulse. It does not excuse the actions.

A crucial part of learning, growing, and reshaping harmful behavior either at the personal or societal level is understanding where the behavior is coming from. It provides context for the behavior, helps us to mitigate our response, and also guides the building of new approaches, habits, and processes to prevent harmful behavior from happening again.

Unfortunately, trying to understand why we do the things we do, or why others do the things they do, can be both one of the most difficult and most important…