How to tie your shoes
In this three minute TED lecture, Terry Moore indicates that you are probably tying your shoes incorrectly.
In this three minute TED lecture, Terry Moore indicates that you are probably tying your shoes incorrectly.
From Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers discusses our contentious culture with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Here is my summary of the excellent conversation, in which Haidt offers a roadmap for those of us weary from years of unproductive cultural clashes: Groupish tribalism is generally good because it ramps up cooperation among those in the ingroup while animosity toward outsiders is usually minimal. But tribalism evolved for purposes of "war," so that when a certain intensity is reached, "a switch is flipped, the other side is evil. They are not just our opponents. They are evil. And once you think they are evil, the ends justify the means and you can break laws and you can do anything because it is in service of fighting evil." (min 4:30). Haidt argues that though "morality" often makes us do things we think of as good, it also makes us do things we think of as bad. In the end, we are all born to be hypocrites. Our minds didn't evolve simply to allow to know the truth. In social settings, our minds are not designed to really let us know who did what to whom. "They are finely tuned navigational machines to work through a complicated social network in which you've got to maintain your alliances and reputation. And as Machiavelli told us long ago, it matters far more what people think of you than what the reality is. And we are experts at manipulating our self-presentation; we are so good at it that we believe the nonsense we say to other people."
Robert Scheer writes the following at Common Dreams:
That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.
Haven't they learned anything? America's warmongering politicians know that they need only rehash lies from the past to convince America's gullible and lazy mass media to beat the drums for more war. Glenn Greenwald has the headlines. [Epilogue Feb 4, 2012: Now the media is rapidly spreading the highly misleading story that Iran is doubling its military budget, painting it as a threat to the United States.]
The Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi turns the tables on Florida politicians who insist that in order to receive welfare payments, Florida residents must first take drug test: