All Thoughts Being Equal

This post is third in the Summer camp for "adults" series: See part 1 and part 2 . How long can I go in critiquing another, more transparently corporate-retreat-aspiring "summer camp for grown-ups" before giving up and yelling "fuck off"? Read and see! I. At the end of last summer I wrote two posts about Camp RAHH, "Seattle's summer camp for adults." And my feeling by the end of it was less rage than bleakness and despair, except for the one hopeful fact that they were paying money to their host camp, Camp Kirby, and that Kirby is a lovely place that deserves all the money it can get. Now I've come to learn about the broader trend of adult summer camps, and I'm angry again. I think I have a Facebook sponsored ad to thank for this, but first, here's a TIME article from 2013: Like cartoons and cupcakes, summer camp is becoming one of those things adults just won’t leave to the kids anymore. “Glamping” — that is, stay...

This post is a direct follow-up to: Summer camp for adults, pt. 1 – The Rahh of the wild I. In the previous post I analyzed the marketing for Camp RAHH, a so-called "summer camp for adults." The whole thing made me almost excessively peevish, and I want to figure out why. Let's recap what seems to be the problem here. The ethos at play is one where the main problems are external. It's society that's creating FOMO in us; society that demands constant status updates and check-ins; society that forces booze and drugs into our hands, and makes us use them; it's all peer pressure . Them, not us. Society is preventing us from unleashing our truly authentic, uniquely personal selves . But see, all five ( five ) sections in that post were more or less predicated on the assumption that the target demographic for Camp RAHH is sane . The alternative, far more depressing than enraging, is that something is wrong. The prospective RAHHers haven't made pis...

This post is a partial follow-up to: Bowling alone, camping together I. Many posts ago I wrote about the so-called "invention of loneliness" and the intentional community of adult Cool People who volunteer at CampQuest Northwest. To be honest it probably wasn't the best editorial decision; the post seems rather disjointed, and CQNW deserves better than that. But it's from Kayla (who's a CQNW staffer in addition to blogging at Crows Against Murder ) that I learned about Camp RAHH. Camp RAHH is "Seattle's Summer Camp For Adults," and if that doesn't already sound twee-or-maybe-unctuously-startuppy enough, check out their website , and their mission statement: Let’s face it… we’ve got a problem. Our dependence on technology and the urgency of our demanding routines can often introduce unnecessary anxiety into our daily lives.  Social pressures to stay on top of everybody’s business - and to excessively share all of our own - can often...

Source In the annals of philosophical thought experiments, it is written : There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks . Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the correct choice? And lo, there were many variations: Fat Man Trolley As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your onl...

Thought Catalog is a dumping ground for any brainless dribblings that happen to hit the right spots on the keyboard. One such was the fecal gem titled 9 Reasons You Absolutely Do Not Want a Feminist to Be the Father of Your Children , and since I made fun of Salon -style stupidity in critiquing libertarianism a while back , let's make fun of stupid-critiques of feminism here... by stupid-critiquing libertarianism! Tee hee and tra la! So you’ve decided to ignore my advice about dating libertarian women and you are okay with shitty sex and kinda really like the whole no accountability and no consequences deal, and you are wondering if perhaps your libertarian girlfriend might make a pretty terrific libertarian wife and mother for whatever children you conceive. No need to make sure the children are biologically hers, because a true libertarian understands that infidelity and paternity fraud are just a bit of pro-free-market activism in the face of centuries of statist oppression ...

[Note: This is a parody of a recent Alternet/Salon piece called "The 7 strangest libertarian ideas," which was silly enough to warrant a mirror-satirization. Try to decide before section II whether I'm super committed to the implied ideology or not.] I. Few movements in the United States today harbor stranger political ideas than the self-proclaimed feminists. The Tumblr school of feminism is at least as far outside the mainstream on the left as, say, a rather doctrinaire old-school form of anti-Masonism on the right. The difference is this: The mainstream media isn’t telling us that we’re in the middle of a “Anti-Masonic moment.” Anti-Masonic politicians aren’t being touted as serious presidential contenders. And all the media chatter we’re hearing about a “Feminist moment” ignores the very harsh, extreme and sometimes downright ugly ideas that are being disseminated under that banner. It’s great to have allies like MoveTheFuckOverBro working alongside other Am...