Daily Aphorism #6: We Think and Vote Like We Drive and Eat.

Most people claim that they are careful thinkers and conscientious voters, but I seriously doubt that claim. I've seen what happens on social media. It's a nonstop carnival of careless, invalid and fallacious reasoning. Further, we have a big problem here, in that people who don't know are unwilling to say "I don't know." But I have another reason for suggesting that we are sloppy thinkers: We sloppy even when we engage in highly risky activities.

Why would anyone take any more care in thinking or voting than they take when they engage in activities like eating or driving? After all, if you aren't careful with eating and driving, you could die.

We are lousy eaters for at least two reasons. First, we put all kinds of crap into our mouths. Many of us eat lots of food that is demonstrably unhealthy. Second, we put far too much of it into our mouths. 74% of American adults are overweight or obese. That's most of us. More than 42% of Americans are obese. Here are the definitions for "overweight" and "obese."

I won't point to any stats regarding driving. Anyone who drives has seen the insanity, the recklessness, the inattention. On second thought, I'll give two statistics:  any given moment 3% of us on the highway are texting and distracted driving (much of it texting) kills more than 3,000 each year. That is more than 10 people killed every day. That's as many people killed each year as died in the World Trade Center bombing.

I've discussed this matter in a prior post.  My very sad point is this: If a person is going put their life at risk with terrible eating habits and driving habits, why would we expect them to be more careful with how they inform themselves or attempt to persuade others?

I very much wish that none of what I have written above is true.

Continue ReadingDaily Aphorism #6: We Think and Vote Like We Drive and Eat.

Daily Aphorism #5: Fickleness and Death

It's like a on/off switch. When I'm feeling good and no one around me is notably ill, I feel like Superman, even though I am 65. All it takes to make me feel my age (or even older) is a tiny bit of morality salience. How tiny? A mild back ache often does the trick. Or noticing my gray hair. Or needing to stretch out after sitting over the computer for a couple hours. Or forgetting someone's name. That is major terror. Why "terror"? Because Terror Management Theory predicts that even subtle morality salience can send us into spirals. TMT is a power and innovative theory that explains so very many things that we encounter every day. Mainly it explains how human animals can carry one with their ordinary (and oftentimes trite) daily tasks as if everyone on the planet won't be dead in 125 years.

Truly, this is heavy stuff to consider. If you haven't before heard of Terror Management Theory, I've written more than a few articles on the topic, and you can find all of them at this link.

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Another Look at Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility

First, some statistics:

White Fragility became a New York Times bestseller for more than a year. In September 2019, Slate noted that "White Fragility has yet to leave the New York Times bestseller list since its debut in June 2018, making it the fastest-selling book in the history of Beacon Press." In June 2020, during the George Floyd protests, it reached no. 1 on the New York Times list. The July 26, 2020 edition of the list marked the book's 97th week in the Paperback Nonfiction category, where it was ranked number 1.
Now, some facts about Robin DiAngelo, carefully and accurately reported by The Woke Temple:

Here is DiAngelo's thought process, in all of its glory:

That so many American news media outlets, universities and HR Departments could embrace this divisive, poisonous, pathological, infantile, baseless nonsense for the past couple of years should send a chill through every one of us. How is it possible that so many people supported her patently racist ideas and her repeated infantilization of blacks? The fact that this utter crap was ubiquitously touted by American elites at the same time that they refused to honor Martin Luther King's brilliant time-tested idea to judge people only by their content of character demoralizes me.

It's difficult to determine how to de-program the thousands of people who run our sense-making institutions who continue to tout this garbage.

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Greenwald: Cost-Benefit Analysis of COVID Issues Deemed Off-Limits

Glenn Greenwald writes:

In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to public policy debates — except when it comes to COVID, where it has been bizarrely declared off-limits.

If we treated car safety the same absolutist way that we treat COVID safety, we would ban automobiles.

In the above video (min 22) Greenwald points out that we are entirely ignoring the mental health damage being done by lockdowns, especially the mental distress and damage caused when children are prevented from attending school in person. That said, don't ignore the small total deaths by COVID among children, even in the era of the Delta Variant.

Continue ReadingGreenwald: Cost-Benefit Analysis of COVID Issues Deemed Off-Limits