Americans tends to overlook the fact that all of us benefit a great deal from our government’s programs. Few of us spend any time at all asking ourselves where capitalism ends and socialism begins, or vice versa. Snow removal is …
Category: Sustainability
Teachers Form the Foundation of What Our Society Will Look Like 10 Years Hence
What we’ve done to our teachers, in terms of underpaying them, putting them in harm’s way, and cutting off their means to discipline our children, is deplorable. We get precisely the next generation of idiots and juvenile delinquents we so …
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Tagged with: Teachers
We Need Some Nuanced Thinking Re: Law Enforcement
The meme here came from a reader who seems not to understand that everyone supports law enforcement as long as its actions are legal and fair.
Profiting from Catastrophe
The cartoon here reminds me of a similar one, in which a senior corporate executive is looking out a conference room window and sees flames everywhere. He tells the others at the meeting, “We have to monetize this. And soon.”
Tagged with: Profiting from Catastrophe
Celebrating Noam Chomsky
MIT linguistics professor emeritus Noam Chomsky belongs in the same class as Bertrand Russell: a small group of extremely intelligent people whose contribution to society is a blend of a penetrating understanding of the world, married with a profoundly humanistic …
Stupid Lasts Forever
Ancient Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes made a good point here, and it would be easy to ascribe this as an explanation of the support of Donald Trump. Giving the matter a little thought, however, we see that Americans’ IQs haven’t …
Tagged with: rejection of science
Plato on Empathy
In a world in which empathy seems to be on the run, it’s good to be reminded of what the world’s great thinkers have had to say on the subject.
Tagged with: Plato on Empathy
Earth’s Resiliency
Primatologist Jane Goodall says that one of the key reasons she remains optimistic about the future of Earth’s environment is its resiliency. I.e., the moment we stop inflicting harm to the planet, it begins the slow process of healing itself. …
Tagged with: Primatologist Jane Goodall
Greenwashing in Single-Use Plastics Generates Lawsuits in Europe
From “The Story of Stuff”: A legal complaint against Coca-Cola, Danone, and Nestlé has been issued by a consumer body and two environmental groups in Europe. The complaint alleges the companies are misleading consumers into buying a product which is …
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Is Empathy Controversial?
At left we see another example of how we will argue about anything in the modern-day chaos we call our “society.” As John Cleese points out, we can’t even agree that empathy for other people is an unequivocally good thing.
Tagged with: empathy for other people
