When the Bubonic Plague rekindled in 16th and 17th century Europe, some thought the illness was spread by diabolic agents who captured its essence in an ointment and then smeared the greasy substance on walls, people, and all kinds of… Read More ›
fear
Saturday Morning Pam-toons. There’s a Reason It’s Called a Fairy Tale.
What REALLY happened to the boy who cried, The Emperor has no clothes! The Emperor’s New Clothes
Thoughtlets. xxxii.
A scapegoat is (usually) a person or group of people unjustly blamed for some set of circumstances arising from the actions of others. Scapegoats bear the brunt of crowd hostility and, once identified by an angry mob, find themselves in no-win,… Read More ›
Saturday Morning Pam-toons. “Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions as I do by my words?” Thomas Hobbes.
It may seem strange to some man that has not well weighed these things that nature should thus dissociate and render men apt to invade and destroy one another; and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference, made from… Read More ›
Of Flocks and Wings
Lurking somewhere in the back of our adult brains is every mother’s admonition If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you? Don’t blindly follow your friends. Sometimes this warning is made explicit. When I went to university in my 40s,… Read More ›
Understanding Political Rhetoric and How It Works With Our Mental states to Persuade or Disuade
Rhetoric is, broadly put, the art of persuasion. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we’re all persuaded by rhetorical tactics and use them ourselves to persuade others. Some people find this notion unconscionable, as if there is some cognitive… Read More ›
Thoughtlets .ii.
Ever wonder why someone would reap the royalties of an end-is-nigh book if she really believes the end is nigh?
Fist Pumping.
I’ve here in mind the fist-pumping variety of politically vocal people, those certain that one side is leading us to another dark ages and the other to a totalitarian state. It appears that for some “left and right” thinking is… Read More ›
The day the Russians nuked my sawmill camp. A survivor’s memoir.
Prelude: After 44 years, my memory of this late cold-war-era event is not perfect. But it left an impression that planted seeds for my future interest in social epistemology, the social dimension of knowledge. Perhaps as something like Y2K will… Read More ›
pam-mentations.com 