I’ve been observing and listening to what people around me are saying concerning recent events. It’s been interesting.
Tag: consequences
Let’s Adapt to Something Positive
Humans are adaptable. More so than any creature other than, possibly, cockroaches. It’s our greatest strength. We have adapted to living almost everywhere on the planet and, soon, with the right technology — an adaptation we’ve created — off-planet, too. We’ve adapted to a different diet than our ancestors ate. In some cases, we probably…
Misplaced Hate Regarding Healthcare
I imagine most government healthcare advocates have the best of intentions, but it’s hard to view such individuals as noble and caring when their main (and often only) proposition to help the poor is to force other people to do it.
In Most Conflicts of Ideas, Socratic Dialogue Beats Research
It is far more efficient to deal with identifying the errors in logic than the errors in fact (though correcting all kinds of errors are important). Logic works by a series of first principles that everyone can learn and no one can evade. Contradictions, fallacies, false equivalencies, and other errors in thinking are much easier to dislodge than disputes over evidence (often evidence can be ambiguous).
Lenore Skenazy: Overparenting and Bad Public Policy (48m)
This episode features an interview free range kids activist, author, and syndicated columnist Lenore Skenazy from 2019 by Trevor Burrus and Aaron Powell, hosts of the Free Thoughts podcast. Should children ride the NYC subway by themselves? When did children stop having unsupervised and unstructured time? What did ‘strange danger’ do to change the way we parent? What are the consequences of over‐parenting?
“Peak Libertarianism?” No, Thom Hartmann is Just a Sore Winner
“We have now reached peak Libertarianism,” Thom Hartmann informs us at CounterPunch, “and this bizarre experiment that has been promoted by the billionaire class for over 40 years is literally killing us.” That claim is so bizarre on its face that it’s easy to dismiss. On the other hand, even the craziest claims can fool people if nobody takes the time to debunk them.
Coronavirus vs. the Non-Identity Problem
If Avengers: Endgame had been released a week later, coronavirus would have never happened; the movie grossed $614M in China, so it must have indirectly changed the space-time positions of a bunch of people in Wuhan. If something alters which humans are born, it can also easily alter which pathogens are born.
Rioting is Wrong Way to Protest
There’s a correct way to protest injustice and there’s a wrong way. You may have recently noticed people in several big cities doing it the wrong way. Although, perhaps people pretending to side with the protesters were intentionally making the protesters look bad — it’s hard to know which.
Time to Stop Messing Around and Strike at the Root of Police Violence
It’s tempting to believe that protest marches, violent confrontations, looting, burning, and riots can change police behavior, or perhaps that they COULD change that behavior if applied frequently and vigorously enough. That kind of widespread delusion is, as Thoreau put it, “a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root,” with predictable results.
Too Terrified to Talk About It
In absolute terms, most people remain terrified of coronavirus, so it’s hardly surprising that sexual harassment worries them less. The fact that sexual harassment accusations actually worry the average respondent even more than coronavirus, however, suggests that most workers really are living in fear during normal times.