Category: Community

Allies, Bad Ideas, Community, Cultural Change, Cultural Traits, Culture, Friends, Human Nature, Humanism, Life, Living, Lovers, Loyalty, Politics, Quality of Life, Relationships, Society, Values

How Most of Us Say, “Our Lives Have Broken”

Paul Sunstone

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:  Paul offers his opinion that people today have all too often come to treat each other as interchangeable, faceless grains of polished rice.

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THE CRITICS EMOTE!  “De hunne of blogging, Paul Sunstone has excreted yet another one of his innumerable atrocities upon the world.  The immediate effect that ‘Our Lives Have Broken’ has upon the honest and orderly reader is to provoke him or her to yearn for the nearest body of water deep enough to drown in.  Sunstone is the refutation of the thesis that history is progressive.  He is the refutation of the dialectics of both Hegel and Marx.  A Spengler would see in Sunstone the decline of the West, and he would be correct.”    — Johanna Meyer, Der Blogkritiker, “Die Fussen-Welt”, Fussen, Germany.

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Abuse, Alienation From Self, Authenticity, Being True To Yourself, Community, Ethics, Eudaimonia, Human Nature, Life, Living, Morals, Oppression, Quality of Life, Relationships, Self-Flourishing, Society, Well Being

When It’s Cool to Try to Change Someone

Paul Sunstone

(About a 3 minute read)

In our world
Are things which should never be violated
That are violated.

–– A Death in the Spring

Is not the question a bit more complex than “to be or not to be”?  To live or to die?

For if we chose to live, then question becomes what is the good life, the best life our species of great ape is allowed by the gods to aspire to?

That’s one question no sane person wants to screw up when answering.  What is the best life we can live?

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Community, Fairness, Human Nature, Justice, Law, News and Current Events, Society

One Controversial Role of Juries

Paul Sunstone

(About a 5 minute read)

Some years ago, an enraged husband shot and killed a young man in my hometown who had been cheating on the husband with his wife.  To aggravate matters, the young man had thought it wise to write several letters to the husband mocking him in nearly every imaginable way.

The husband was a private in the army — stationed at a distant base — and quite unable to afford a lawyer.  His public defender was one of the best lawyers in town, albeit young, and this was his first murder case.

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Bad Ideas, Citizenship, Class War, Community, Competence, Cultural Change, Cultural Traits, Culture, Democracy, Education, Equality of Opportunity, Freedom and Liberty, Ideologies, Intellectual Honesty, Knowledge, Learning, Life, Living, Obligations to Society, People, Political Issues, Politics, Privilege, Quality of Life, Skeptical Thinking, Society, Talents and Skills, Teacher, Teaching, Thinking, Tomoko, Values

The Value of a Teacher

Paul Sunstone

SUMMARY: Teachers in the US are poorly compensated for the work in comparison to teachers in Japan.  Outside of the best public schools and elite private schools, students are educated to become loyal, obedient citizens with adequate job skills.  This contrasts sharply with earlier educational goals in America.

(About an 8 minute read)

My second wife, Tomoko, spent her early years in Tokyo, Japan.  She attended an elite school whose students were mainly the sons and daughters of government and corporate leaders.

Tomoko’s father, for instance, was an American on loan from Motorola to Sony who headed up Sony’s East Asian quality control during the years Japanese goods became synonymous with “quality”.   Her cousin, who tutored her growing up, was at one point the head of North American sales for Toyota.  His major accomplishment was taking Toyota products from about 6% of the car market in the US to over 22%.

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Abuse, Bad Ideas, Community, Cultural Change, Cultural Traits, Culture, Ethics, Family, Life, Living, Marriage, Memes, Morality, Morals, News and Current Events, Physical Abuse, Political Issues, Quality of Life, Relationships, Society, Thinking, Values, Verbal Abuse

Divorce

Paul Sunstone

(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.

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Allies, Altruism, Anthropology, Bad Ideas, Behavioral Genetics, Community, Competence, Competition, Cultural Traits, Culture, Ethics, Evolution, Fairness, Human Nature, Hunter/Gatherers, Ideas, Justice, Life, Memes, Morality, Morals, Nature, Obligations to Society, Quality of Life, Science, Society, Values

Lessons About Human Nature Learned From a Spider

Paul Sunstone

(About a 6 minute read)

The spider had been stalking the fly for minutes.  There didn’t seem to be anything on the barren patch of ground to attract a fly.  I expected it to finish its investigations and leave.  But it would only buzz away a few inches when the spider approached it, then in a minute or two return.

Sometimes it would allow the spider to get very close before flying off.

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Belief, Citizenship, Community, Elections, Ethics, Freedom, Honesty, Idealism, Ideologies, Intellectual Honesty, Knowledge, Morality, Morals, News and Current Events, Obligations to Society, Political Ideologies, Politics, Reason, Skeptical Thinking, Society, Thinking, Truth, Values

“With Freedom Comes Responsibility”

Paul Sunstone

(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.

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