A blog dedicated to the joy and adventure of thinking (and often spiced with humor).
(About a 4 minute read)
A few days ago, I was reading about a pastor from one of the Southern states who is of the angry opinion (why does everyone think they need to be angry to open their mouths on nearly any subject these days?) that divorce was far too easy in America.
He blamed no-fault divorce for breaking up the American family, and warned that it would soon lead to the collapse of the nation. Consequently he was calling for laws that would make it much harder to get divorced.
(About a 9 minute read)
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” — Warren Buffett
One of the top five or six core issues running through-out all of human history has been the eternal war between elites and non-elites. That is, those who have the greater wealth, power, and control of resources and those who have the lesser wealth, power, and control of resources in any given society or economy.
In my opinion, anyone who is unfamiliar with the conflict is politically, socially, and economically ignorant. The primary or most significant conflicts in history have not been between competing systems such as capitalism and communism. Such conflicts are more clearly understood as battles between competing elites and between elites and non-elites.
(About a 6 minute read)
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” — Martin Luther King, jr.
In high school, I had a math teacher — who I blogged about here — who was something of a political outlaw back in his day.
He was a member of the John Birch society. A political organization founded by a millionaire that espoused, among other things, the notion Eisenhower had been a communist agent of the Soviet Union, and that had even attacked the nation’s parent-teacher associations as somehow subversive of American values.
The Birchers had been cast out of mainstream American politics by William F. Buckley, the most influential right-wing political thinker and pundit of the time (They would not return to the mainstream until our own age, in 2010). Buckley considered them dangerous fools and radicals.
(About a 5 minute read)
Some years ago, I had a contract to supervise and manage for a corporation its small call center of about a dozen people. One day, my client informed me that a vice-president of the corporation had come to her more or less demanding that a young friend of hers be given a job as one of the callers. Consequently, I was forced to bring the young woman on board without going through the normal hiring practice.
I forget her name now, but she was about 20 years old and black. The day following her first day on the job, all three of my other black employees approached me — one by one — to privately warn me about her.
(About a 10 minute read)
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.” — Anonymous, but often ascribed to Mark Twain.
At the least, most of us harbor a few ideas that we mostly, or even entirely, owe our understanding of to the popular media. That’s to say, we have not studied the ideas much beyond what we hear of them from media sources.
A good case in point is the concept of “socialism”. Very few Americans, I’ll wager, have ever had the benefit of actually studying what socialism is — and isn’t. I would base my wager on having spent nearly a lifetime listening to descriptions of it that simply don’t match up with the reality of it.
(About a 3 minute read)
The recent death and funeral of John McCain has once again raised a debate about the propriety of speaking ill of the dead. Naturally, the loudest voices have belonged to partisan pundits who can be expected to flip their opinions — pro and con — when the next prominent Democrat dies.
But I think a lot of common people are concerned with the issue too. How fair is it to criticize the dead? If it’s fair at all, then does our criticism have limits? And if so, what should those limits be?
(About 5 minute read)
Growing up, I had a keen sense that I could get away with a good amount of rule-breaking. Not just little things, but some fairly sizeable offenses too. I didn’t usually push things as far as I sensed I could, but I did have the perception I could get away with a whole lot of things — if only I wanted to.
The sense stayed with me when I got older, although it became a little vaguer. When I was in my late teens, early twenties, majoring in philosophy I was aware that I wouldn’t have much trouble getting a good job upon graduation — despite some warnings that my major was impractical.
(About a 4 minute read)
I am old enough to have known a time — long before the internet — when porn was something you could get hold of only by being man enough to face a real human in order to lay your sweaty hands on it. A store clerk, or at least now and then, a postal carrier.
Well, I concede you didn’t really have to be fully a man to get it. In an earlier post on this blog, “How to Get Away with Buying a Playboy, Circa 1970“, I confessed to how I would buy porn long before I — much to my mother’s surprise — actually turned into a man.
It’s fun to make fun of New Zealand
It’s fun to make fun of them.
They stand too close to their sheep, you see
They stand too close to their sheep.
And they can’t build a decent battle tank.
No they can’t build a decent battle tank.
I even heard their last moon rocket
Was actually some kid’s toy.
Yeah, it was just some little kid’s toy.
But then you recall Jacinda.
Then Jacinda comes to mind.
The people elected Jacinda,
But we elected Trump.
Yes, we elected TRUMP.
It’s fun to make fun of America
It’s fun to make fun of them.
Yes, at least we can make fun of them.
“Truth isn’t truth” — Rudy Giuliani, NBC “Meet the Press”, August 19, 2018.
(About a 4 minute read)
In Western philosophy, the notion truth is relative dates back at least 2,400 years to the sophist Protagoras, who is stated by Plato to have said, “What is true for you is true for you, and what is true for me is true for me.”
In the East, the notion goes back perhaps another 100 years earlier to the Jain teacher Mahavira, who seems to have been the first to teach Anekantavada, a doctrine that has been described as advocating religious pluralism.
(About an 8 minute read)
One evening when I was fresh back from university for the summer, I heard someone shout my name. A car sped away up a hill, and I was left wonder who had been driving it.
The phone was ringing the moment I got home. “Hi, Paul! This is Terri. I just now saw you’re in town. Let’s hang out together tonight.”
(About a 4 minute read)
It it is a peculiar fact that America stands entirely alone in the world as the only nation in which the ideology of Ayn Rand is not laughed away as immature rubbish. Yet, I myself can almost see the attraction of her ideology.
I was briefly attracted to it myself when, at age 15, I read Atlas Shrugged. Back then, as today, I was willing to force myself to adopt views if they seemed to make sense, and if I could not find sound reasons to oppose them. At 15, Rand’s views satisfied both requirements, and though I was upset to discard my former views, I conscientiously adopted hers.
