Time for the Antigone Spring Books Give-away! 40+ books and pamphlets on offer worldwide. Just repost this message and follow us, and on Sunday 3 names will be drawn. 1st chooses 20 things, 2nd 12, 3rd gets the rest. We'll add details of the items over coming days. Good luck all!
A society that burns neighbourhoods and calls for the defunding of the police for the guy on the left and largely ignores the public butchering of the woman on the right is one that is drowning in the infinity pool of Suicidal Empathy.
Today is J.R.R. Tolkien's birthday.
Tolkien penned some of our civilization's greatest works, but you may not know *why* he did — or how.
His stories are so enduringly real because he actually lived them... (thread) 🧵
LotR is a meditation on the virtue of hope. Next time you read it notice how many times the author uses that word.
For JRRT, hope is not about a “positive attitude” or sunny optimism, but more about simply staying in the fight—because things might turn your way. 🧵
It's called the Cobra Effect.
In colonial India, under British rule, the city of Delhi had a problem with cobras. To control the cobra population, the government offered a bounty for every dead cobra.
Huge numbers of dead cobra were handed in but the cobra problem got worse, not better. Why? Because people realised they could profit from this bounty by breeding cobras, not to kill them in the wild, but to kill them for the bounty. This turned into a small-scale cobra farming operation.
When the government became aware of this practice, they discontinued the bounty program. Without the incentive, the cobra breeders released their now-worthless snakes into the wild. As a result, the cobra population in Delhi ended up increasing rather than decreasing, exacerbated by the government's own policy.