We’re letting our children down.

Look what advertising has so often come to: img_2567The advantage of going with this company is that they won't hit you with "hidden fees." They won't cheat you. Much food packaging and advertising is comparable. We won't poison you with strange chemicals! Zero grams of trans fats! All natural!

America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

- Hunter S. Thompson

But it gets worse. In our schools we work hard to teach our children civility and kindness. For instance, take a look at this wonderful set of "Rules to Live By" displayed at New City School, in St. Louis Missouri. Who could possibly dispute the importance of any of these rules? These characteristics precisely describe the kinds of children we want to raise, right?

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Now consider the accusations that we commonly hear as the centerpiece of media stories, especially political media stories. They are full of untruths, untrustworthy characters, refusal to listen and tons of vicious put-downs. Our conflict-pornography obsessed news media works hard every day to undo the lessons we so carefully teach our children. There is something terribly wrong with us. Fixing this lack of truth and civility should be one of our highest priorities. One easy suggestion is to turn off the television or radio whenever they report fake news that is really conflict pornography. Label it as not-news and just shut it off. Or, better yet, switch over to real news like Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, where you'll hear truth from a trustworthy reporter, who will actively listen to her guests and offer absolutely no put downs.

Continue ReadingWe’re letting our children down.

If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived.

Character is forged by failure. There are thousands of examples, and here are a few of them: A worthy segue is the advice of psychologist Carol Dweck: Praise hard work, not intelligence, because doing the latter makes students unwilling to take chances that risk failure.

Continue ReadingIf you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived.

Messing with the phone company

My phone company has utterly and repeatedly lied to me about my bill. It's infuriating. I call them up and ask them to justify my bill. They "apologize" and insist that it will cost exactly $X every month in the future. Then the bills show up and they are $X plus an extra $15. What do you do, go to small claims court over $15? I'm saving up my bills and I actually might do that someday. In the meantime, I do wonder how many other people are having the same experience, and I assume that there are plenty of you out there. Unfortunately, these do not make good class actions because they usually involve oral misrepresentations over the phone. In order to prove that a large group of people were lied to, you'd need to call every customer into court to testify. Courts usually reject these as class actions. Therefore, anyone with this situation is likely in the same boat I'm in. Small damages also combine with clever arbitration clauses to amount to telephone company immunity. I'm telling you this little story as a prelude to showing you this image. I do understand this person's frustration. Bravo!

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Agnotology: The politics of ignorance

In the January, 2009 issue of Discover Magazine, Robert Proctor discusses "agnotology," defined as the "politics of ignorance."

It’s the study of the politics of ignorance. I’m looking at how ignorance is actively created through things like military secrecy in science or through deliberate policies like the tobacco industry’s effort to manufacture doubt through their “doubt is our product” strategy [spelled out in a 1969 tobacco company memo]. So it’s not that science inherently always grows. It can actually be destroyed in certain ways, or ignorance can actually be created. . . . It’s pretty common. I mean, in terms of sowing doubt, certainly global warming is a famous one. You know, the global warming denialists who for years have managed to say, “Well, the case is not proven. We need more research.” And what’s interesting is that a lot of the people working on that were also the people working for Big Tobacco. The techniques of manufacturing doubt were created largely within the tobacco industry, and then they were franchised out to other industries.

In this Wikipedia article, the root causes of agnotology are deemed to be "media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness." To this list, I would add, fatigue, the bright-shiny distractions and gadgets offered by society, the "Dunning-Kruger Effect," limited attentional capacities and the banality of evil. I do like the trend that so many writers and scientists are beginning to focus in on these topics and the related topics of undue certitude and "tortucanism."

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