Items today about
This item goes with the theme of yesterday’s post.
NY Times, Paul Krugman, 15 May 2023: Why Are Americans So Negative About the Economy?
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NY Times, Megan K. Stack, 20 May 2023: If You’re Hearing About the Border, Someone Is Trying to Scare You
Items today:
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, May 18, 2023
Several items today.
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Another simplistic talking point is making the rounds again.
Politifact, 17 May 2023: A family budget is often invoked in U.S. debt fights. Just how similar is it to a federal budget?
Answer: not very. Continue reading
Two themes today.
NY Times, 16 May 2023: How a Few Stories of Regret Fuel the Push to Restrict Gender Transition Care, subtitled “In the campaign to ban gender therapies for minors, Republicans have amplified a group of activists who no longer identify as transgender, overriding objections from transgender people and medical experts.”
Familiar topics, but worth another look, especially since if they were broadly understood it would make so many of America’s partisan controversies go away. (But conservatives will never allow concepts like skeptical thinking to be taught in schools, for precisely such reasons.)
Big Think, Jonny Thomson, 15 May 2023: Skepticism: Why critical thinking makes you smarter, subtitled: “‘In order to seek truth,’ Rene Descartes once wrote, ‘it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, all things.'”
Continue reading
For today, current events items about
For later, I need to move away from my preoccupation with Republican and conservative issues, even though they are important and evidence, to me, that the US is tearing itself apart through the re-emergence of primitive ideology and anti-intellectualism. Yet I suspect this has always been the case. Human society has always been a three steps forward, two steps back, matter. We’re currently, in the US, in a step back. The steps forward will eventually prevail, because steps back are ultimately unproductive, and we live in a competitive world. I need to shift my focus to forward steps. More on that tomorrow.
Two items today
Plus, a brief reflection on the SF writers who’ve had things to say about their contemporary world.
Salon, Kathleen Dean Moore, 13 May 2023: How Big Oil is manipulating the way you think about climate change, subtitled “A logic professor explains how a persistent, subtle fallacy has infected public discussion of climate change”
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In the upside-down world of religious privilege in Florida these days, doctors *can* discriminate against gays and lesbians, but *not* against those who refuse to take vaccines. Whereas generally the latter is of more concern to the medical community than the former. (Cue Hippocratic Oath.)
Just one topic for today.
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 12 May 2023: It’s bigger than guns: Why the right does little to stop violence, subtitled “Conservatives have cultivated a negative and hyper-individualistic view of human nature”
