I dispute that scientifically illiterate adults are a problem, rather that the issue is scientifically illiterate adults in positions of power.
There is nothing we can do–or need to do–about the 100 million or so adult Americans who couldn’t tell you the first thing about epidemiology, climate science, economics, or dozens of other subjects. All we need to do is prevent their ignorance from inflicting great damage on our lives.
Wonderful little graphic here.
For anyone wishing to find a wonderfully lucid and vaguely humorous essay on this subject, I highly recommend Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism based on a lecture he gave in 1946.
It’s true that humanists are, by definition, not religious, but I would submit that few of us are troubled by Christians who simply want to apply the teachings of Jesus in their lives: love, kindness, charity, and compassion.
In the 45 years I’ve lived in/near Los Angeles, there have been few major changes. It’s still the entertainment capital of the world, while continuing to feature obnoxious traffic and housing prices. Like most if not all of the largest U.S. cities, its government is headed by Democrats.
What has changed is that the president of the United States is, for the time in American history, a person of unbridled vengeance against his perceived enemies, and thus he loves to punish these urbanites.
No surprise: the chief executive also surrounds himself with bald-faced liars who are happy to spread utter crap like that which we see above.
The idea that Dale Carnagie expressed in the first part of the 20th Century originated thousands of years earlier with the ancient Greeks; in fact, Aristotle wrote an entire treatise on the subject.
It’s probably more important today than ever before, where we’re seeing how our cognitive biases leave us open to some seriously dangerous thinking, where it comes to the application of science and the validity of certain of our political leaders.
Before Trump, no politically active U.S. citizen thought he was taking a risk to his personal safety by criticizing the president and/or his administration. This country, and, in fact, the entire West, had experienced the Enlightenment (aka the Age of Reason) of the late 18th Century, central to which were the doctrines of the French Revolution and the U.S. Constitution. In place of monarchy, our societies now had rule of law and various guarantees of freedom, e.g., that of speech and of the press.
250 years later, we Americans live in a country in which these freedoms are teetering on the edge of extinction. The only reason I don’t feel the terror of an armed state coming to my door is that my following is a tiny fraction of the high-profile activists of our day.
If you were asked to name the most dangerous person in Trump’s cabinet, your first thought might be Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, whose only qualification for the job of running the Pentagon is his tenure at Fox News and his alcoholism.
But not too far down the list would be RFK, Jr., in Health and Human Services, who is joyfully going about the task of preventing the nation from protecting itself from disease.
Even when I was a small boy, I had a tough time believing everlasting torture in hell was a fair punishment for anything that a person could possibly do, regardless of how heinous, in a single lifetime.
Was the damage that Elon Musk inflicted on Tesla worth it?
I remind the reader who sent me the meme here that the main use of property tax is the funding of public schools. Speaking for myself, this is a sacrifice I’ve always happily made, both before and after I had school-age children.
It’s true that Floridians have a different set of sensibilities than people in most states. Governor Ron Desantis signed a bill banning abortion after 6 weeks (before most women know they’re pregnant) and passed a “Don’t Say Gay” law. He says, “Florida is where woke goes to die.”
Having said all this, I doubt too many voters in the Sunshine State want to live around pure ignorance.
I have to admit, Roberts’ statement here does seem stupid in the extreme.
Also, the idea that a sitting president can’t be charged with a crime is asinine; it’s antithetical to the idea of democracy.
