Aristotle wrote with great insight and clarity that maintaining friendships was a prerequisite to acting virtuously. For Aristotle, to act virtuously was necessarily to consciously act for the right reasons. But doing this requires bringing our non-rational parts into harmony with the rational. Further, finding this harmony requires self-knowledge that…
A quick question, please. Why does each local TV newscast have almost five minutes of weather? I’m not talking about those days when a big snowstorm is about to hit. I’m talking about a typical weather day. Who makes the decision to beat mediocre weather into the ground each night, and why?
I’ve discussed this with quite a few people I respect and no one knows. Is it because of the stiff price the station has paid for all those expensive machines that generate the fancy weather graphics? Is it because weather people are usually such wholesome-looking people (translated: a bit too wholesome)? Are they trying to encourage us to be squeaky clean like that? I can’t be that person, damn it.
Here’s what I want. For those increasingly rare times when I can tolerate the local new-less newscast, all I want from the weather segment is the five-day forecast, something that can be accomplished in ten seconds:
Tonight: low in the 40’s and dry. Tomorrow: low of 45, rainy, temp rising to 55. The next three days – fair weather, temp gradually warming into the 60’s.
There. I know what to expect. I’m quite happy, even if it’s not exactly on target. When they get it wrong, it’s rarely terribly wrong and it really doesn’t matter anyway. The weather will be what it will be.
What if a co-worker told you both of the following things: A) She was leaving the company to take a new job; and B) She was not leaving the company to take a new job.
You would probably assume that she was playing a joke on you or that she was struggling with an illness that affected her memory. Or maybe that you caught her in a lie.
But these sorts of contradictory statements are now the norm in American politics.
See the following:
Yesterday, Condoleezza Rice stated the following in Iraq: “I don’t know who the prime minister is going to be, and it’s not our role to try and determine who the prime minister is going to be.”
Then again, it seems like we are trying to determine who the prime minister should be:
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on an unannounced visit to the Iraqi capital amid a months-long political crisis, publicly questioned the leadership of interim Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, the strongest indication yet that the United States wants him out of contention as head of Iraq’s permanent government.
Such American interference in Iraqi politics is also corroborated by this recent statement by the Iraqi prime minister:
Facing growing pressure from the Bush administration to step down, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari of Iraq vigorously asserted his right to stay in office on Wednesday and warned the Americans against interfering in the country’s political process.
Perhaps there’s no lesson here, only frustration that our …
In 1997, Amotz and Avishag Zahavi published a remarkable book: The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle. The theme of the book, substantiated by the authors by use of dozens of case studies of animals in the wild, is twofold: In order to be effective, signals have to…
A lot of people are beating up on old Sigmund Freud these days. More than a century ago, however, Freud hit a particular ball out of the park and it’s still sailing: he concluded that many important thought processes are unconscious.
In Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), Mark Johnson and George Lakoff listed some of the many important unconscious mental activities:
In short, most of what is going on in our heads is unconscious. Lakoff and Johnson concluded that “unconscious thought is at least 95 percent of all thought and that our unconscious conceptual systems function like a “hidden hand” that “shapes how we automatically and unconsciously comprehend what we experience. It constitutes our unreflective common sense.”
Nietzsche expressed this same idea in Thus Spake Zarathustra:
“It is by invisible hands that we are bent and tortured worst.”
Freud and Nietzsche have been proven absolutely correct on this point. That consciousness is only the “tip of the iceberg” has been conclusively proven by hundreds of experiments outlined in numerous …