Mental Illness, Gun Violence, and Lying

It’s hard to get through a week without more incidents of gun violence in the US, and Republican claims that they’re all due to mental illness. So why is the US an extreme outlier in gun violence? Why would more people per capita in the US be mentally ill? The Repubicans can’t explain that. (My explanation, a few posts ago, is that there are mentally ill people in every nation, but the the US gives easy access to the mentally ill to assault weapons; that is, those most attracted to assault weapons whose purpose is to kill masses of people, are by definition mentally ill.)

I’ve missed a couple of days of blogging here, laid low with another cold, this one sniffly, coughy, and chest congested. But no temperature; not COVID. I think my partner picked this bug up somewhere (because he had it first), and brought it home to me. It’s curious that I’ve had two colds now, in two months (the previous one was in early March), after some three years of none at all, because of mostly staying at home due to COVID threats. I suppose I’m back to normal; for my entire life, since I was a schoolchild, I’ve *always* had two or three colds every year. Though rarely flus, with temperatures, chills and being laid up in bed for a week or more. With a cold, it’s downtime for three or four days. And I’m getting better. And being laid up gives you time to think, and… make decisions.

For today, a couple takes on the weird political situation in the US.

Salon, Paul Rosenberg, 7 May 2023: Undoing Undue Hate: The corrosive role of common false beliefs, subtitled “Author of ‘Undue Hate’ on how a handful of universal cognitive biases exacerbate perceived divisions” Continue reading

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This Week’s Political and Cultural Items

  • Why Republicans can no longer be called the party of “family values”
  • How Republicans are obsessed by the woke mind virus
  • More reasons why the US needs more immigrants, not fewer
  • Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Tucker Carlson
  • Jerry Coyne on another wokeism issue, and his take on sex and gender

Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 3 May 2023: How to weaponize Republicans’ words, subtitled “It’s far past time to stop calling the GOP the party of ‘family values'”

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Social Pressures that Subvert Objective Knowledge

Two items today:

  • How conservatives are steering education to the classics of the ancient Greeks, as if only ancient “knowledge” is valid
  • How some modern institutions prioritize identity and D.E.I. over objective science

NY Times, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, 4 May 2023: Why Conservatives Can’t Stop Talking About Aristotle, subtitled “The 2,500-year-old roots of Ron DeSantis’s education plan.”

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Addicts and Free Will

Today, an interesting article about whether addicts have free will.

Here’s a piece that’s interesting for its take on a still contentious philosophical issue. Do humans have free will? Intuitively virtually everyone would agree that we do. People “make decisions” all the time, as if they could have decided otherwise. Yet most modern philosophers will explain that, in some fundamental sense, free will is an illusion. I will not attempt to summarize their arguments. See Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne, Daniel Dennett. Some, like Dennett, will allow that we may as well *think* we have free will, because that’s how our minds have developed to function, via evolution. Otherwise you might sit there catatonic, unable to move. The biggest issue with understanding that free will is an illusion is the problem of personal responsibility, especially in criminal matters. And attorneys have used such defenses, about the “criminally insane,” in the past.

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Book Censorship, Swivel-Eyed Loons, and Declining Millennial Religion

Three items today.

  • Why book censorship doesn’t work, and how conservatives don’t learn this.
  • Cory Doctorow on how the objections to the “15-minute city” reflect a genuine concern about corporate influence over the government.
  • How the current generation (unlike past generations) is not becoming more conservative as it ages, and why.

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May 1st

Today’s post is the completion of yesterday’s post.

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Skiffy Flix: Flight to Mars

It’s been a while since I’ve watched and posted about a “skiffy flick,” that is, a science fiction movie from the 1950s, plus or minus a decade, when science fiction movies were very popular — or at least, a lot of them were made — and were mostly about space flight or visiting aliens, and were almost all really bad by any standards of science or even literary science fiction of the time. (My Skiffy Flix page lists those I’ve seen or plan to see, with links to reviews already posted.)

I watched another one this past week, a 1951 film called Flight to Mars. Here’s the Wikipedia description, and my photo of the DVD case:

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Gun Violence and Mental Illness

Observations about gun violence in the US and its relationship to mental illness.

Last month Washington Post published results of a survey, asking AR-15 owners why they bought and owned them.

Washington Post, 27 Mar 2023: Why do Americans own AR-15s?, subtitled “The Washington Post and Ipsos asked nearly 400 AR-15 owners why they own the rifle”

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A Warm Friday Afternoon

For today, several links and comments, and only one quote. About:

  • The Ten Commandments in Texas;
  • The ambitions of powerful men;
  • The potential loss of literacy;
  • Simon Winchester’s book about the transmission of knowledge;
  • Jerry Coyne on Jesus ‘n’ Mo and trying to make sense of the ‘sacrifice-and-resurrect-Jesus story’

Today, noting several interesting articles without having fully read them; just commenting on their apparent premises.

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Vox, Fabiola Cineas, 28 Apr 2023: The Ten Commandments could be in every Texas classroom next fall, subtitled “Will the Texas GOP’s push to bring Christianity back into the classroom succeed?”

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The Relative Risks of Being Alive

  • The latest scientific studies of the effects of alcohol have concluded that the best amount of consumption is as little as possible, and how this is best understood through statistics about all kinds of risks;
  • Robert Reich’s take on Trump as treasonous;
  • A compilation of the lies of Tucker Carlson, and wondering why they work.

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