I have an idea I haven’t heard or read anyone express before: that some of the confusion about science on the one hand, and the legitimacy of crazy, sometimes deliberately fabricated, nonsensical ideas about what’s going on in the world on the other hand, is due to the use of the word “theory” to describe both.
How fast is the Earth moving, and in what direction? How the ancient Greek philosophers were mostly wrong but blazed conceptual trails. And thought experiments that challenge conventional thinking.
The crazy fringes being Fox News, Fox & Friends, Arizona Republicans, and conservatives who believe in witches and demons. With a palette cleansing quote from Carl Sagan.
(Added Sunday: another take on the same study from a writer at Vox.)
NYT, Bret Stephens, 21 Feb 2023: The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?
A conservative columnist for the NY Times claims a meta-study on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illness has concluded that they didn’t work.
Two books about how to argue; more on the “national divorce”; and items about the right-wing battle for the next century, train deregulation, a new target list of enemies, and buying your way onto bestseller lists.
Here’s a review in today’s NYT of two books about arguing.
NYT, Jennifer Szalai, 22 Feb 2023: Fight or Make Nice? Two Books Consider How to Listen and Be Heard., subtitled “‘Win Every Argument,’ by Mehdi Hasan, and ‘Say the Right Thing,’ by Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, offer different approaches to talking to others.
About a fringe notion to split the US into separate nations of red and blue states; and about the range of human nature and the value of diversity.
Haven’t run this item yet; it seemed so fringe, a couple days ago. But reactions are still echoing, two days later.
Via, Fox News 20 Feb 2023: “Rep. Taylor Greene suggests ‘national divorce’ on Presidents Day, subtitled “Georgia congresswoman calls to ‘separate by red states and blue states'”
Items today about how Americans treat Presidents’ Day and other holidays; about more Republicans lying on their resumes; why Fox News viewers don’t care the network is lying to them; and why Putin’s fabulations about his war in Ukraine appeal to conservatives’ own fabulations. And how reality might eventually come crashing down.
Two related items today. Florida’s idea of a Christian, Western tradition that students should be tested to, instead of SAT; and a professor’s debunking of a “grand narrative of Western Civilization”, via a book review at PW.
Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, 20 Feb 2023: Florida’s “Christian” alternative to the SAT won’t help students, subtitled “The Classic Learning Test offers no real value to students”
This is his take on an item I mentioned yesterday, how Florida wants to replace the SAT (apparently now referred to simply as “SAT” without the ‘the’) with tests about Christianity and the “western tradition.”
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