Only An Educated Mind …
This quote from Aristotle translates as “Only an educated mind can understand (entertain?) a thought that is different than his own without necessarily accepting it.”
I’m reminded of a segment I heard on NPR just yesterday about a college economics professor and his two sons, both of whom are majoring in econ. The dad’s a libertarian, and, understandably, so are the boys.
Though this is a concept very far from what I believe, I really try to wrap my wits around this philosophy, which had a real run in the U.S. Its high watermark of acceptance here was probably somewhere in the mid-20th Century; the popularity of the Libertarian Party capped at ~5%.
It’s true that most things cannot be accomplished as efficiently in the public sector as they can be privately. If I had been allowed to pay nothing into Social Security over the years, I’m sure that I would have been far ahead of the game, now that I’m a senior citizen.
But all this ignores what I believe to be a far larger fact, i.e., that we live in a society. Yes, we have our own personal rights, but we also have duties to do things like keeping the environment clean, educating all children, and ensuring people aren’t dying of treatable diseases.
There are also hundreds of functions that can’t function at all without government: national defense, policing and criminal justice, fire-fighting, emergency management, utilities, infrastructure, and so on.
Nonetheless, I understand that people, especially rich ones, want to keep every penny of their money, and see no obligation to society at large. See example below:
The cartoon here reminds me of the many allegations aimed at Trump over the years. He’s a pathological liar, or a racist, or a backstabber, or a misogynist. All true, but all completely meaningless, because none of these is a crime.
Americans are rejoicing in the news that professional liar and conman Alex Jones is getting skewered by the U.S. justice system. Where all this goes is yet to be seen, but he’s certainly in the process of getting creamed.
The astonishing developments in the defamation suit brought by the Sandy Hook victims against Alex Jones has us all hoping that the wave of conspiracy theories/theorists may have crested.
As those who check out this excellent article on the subject of 
In an earlier post, 
As suggested here, the QAnoners of the world have a handy defense, one that’s going to be hard to beat. They claim that the fact-checkers that expose their ideas as silly and baseless were actually put in place because their ideas are true.
Pastor John Pavlovitz and I see this precisely the same way.
Laws in the U.S. that place bans on abortion took a huge hit in a Kansas election yesterday, as voters in enormous numbers turned out to express their demands for a woman’s right to choose, in a referendum that won 65.3% to 34.7%. For those unfamiliar with U.S. politics, Kansas is among the most conservative, most heavily Christian states in the country, meaning that women (and most men) everywhere heavily favor the protection of abortion under law.
I’m going with treason on this one, Michael.
