Thoughtlets

September 25, 2020

Thoughlets .xii.

Members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or VHEMTers, certainly don’t think the death of 7.8 billion people over the next hundred years is a natural disaster. For them, it’s a cause for celebration! But only so long as no humans are born to replace the diminishing population. VHEMTers encourage others not to reproduce. On Continue reading

Thoughtlets

collective action, environment, environmental, population, vhemt, voluntary human extinction movement
September 24, 2020

Thoughtlets .xi.

If conditions on earth are optimal for human life — clean water, stable climate, no war, no famine, no plagues, no cancer and so on — of the 7.8 billion people alive today all but a handful of outliers will be dead in 100 years. And even those outliers won’t live more than a decade Continue reading

Thoughtlets

aging, death, disaster, extinction, life, life span, natural, natural disaster, nature, optimal, perfection, utopia
September 18, 2020

Thoughtlets .x.

I’ve noticed that those who urge others to question authority are least willing to have others question theirs. Continue reading

Thoughtlets

authority, epistemic, humility, insubordinate, political, question, question authority, social, subordinate, truth to power
September 18, 2020

Thoughtlets. ix.

What is meant by the admonition ‘Think before you speak!’ ? The vast majority of the time we don’t think before we speak. Else we’d never speak. So what is meant is either 1) stop and think about the right social thing to say or, 2) the factually correct thing. And oftentimes these two things Continue reading

Thoughtlets

censorship, compleasance, constraint, conventions, correct, correction, disapproabation, fact, factual, forethought, game theory, Hobbes, moral, Philosophy, self censorship, social, survival, tension
September 18, 2020

Thoughtlets .viii.

Stand in one room while the television is on in the other. Now see if you can distinguish the voices of Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) and Tucker Carlson (Fox News). I can’t. Notice that it’s not just their voices that are similar, it’s their style. Each sounds like a pouty prepubescent child who, in a jealous Continue reading

Political Rhetoric, Thoughtlets

analyses, analysis, anger, Carlson, commentary, Fox News, Maddow, media, MSNBC, oratory, partisan, polarization, political, politics, rhetoric, style, television, voice
September 18, 2020

Thoughtlets .vii.

Here’s some advice that’s helped me get through life: 1) Life isn’t fair and, 2) You won’t like everyone and not everyone will like you. I doubt I could share this advice with people engaged in and enraged by contemporary social movements. Continue reading

Thoughtlets

advice, aittudes, attitude, childhood, children, contemporary, dislike, fair, fairness, hate, like, mom, movement, movements, outrage, perspective, social
September 18, 2020

Thoughtlets .vi.

Another candidate for the Department of Idiotic Redundancies is the term “motivated reasoning”. As David Hume famously observed reason is a slave to the passions, by which is meant reason doesn’t move without a driver. Continue reading

Thoughtlets

ad hominem, David, Hume, psychology, reason, reasoning, redundant
September 18, 2020

Thoughtlets .v.

The phrase “my lived experience” must be reported to the Department of Idiotic Redundancies. What other kind of experience could you have? Continue reading

Thoughtlets

experience, lived, lived experience, pretentious, redundancy, social, sociology
September 18, 2020

Thoughtlets .iv.

During the Reformation, the authority of the church was taken from the hands of priests and distributed to the general populace. During the Enlightenment the process of distributing knowledge of the sciences to the general populace through education began and continues to this day. And we’ve an increasingly literate population the world over, accelerated by Continue reading

Thoughtlets

adversarial, authority, censorship, church, dissemination, distribution, double bind, education, Enlightenment, epistemic, epistemology, experts, knowledge, lay, priests, public, Reformation, secular
September 18, 2020

Thoughtlets .iii.

I worry a little that, in this politically charged environment particularly, when someone urges you to ‘be your authentic self’ she means ‘come out here where I can get you’. Continue reading

Thoughtlets

authentic, charged, code, confess, confession, deceit, expose, Hobbes, mistrust, polarized, political, prey, solidarity, tribal, witch hunt, worry