From this past week, about philosophy, billionaires and Fox News, the flawed Ten Commandments, what expertise is about, fear the Covid plan will work, conspiracy theories defined, and a protestor’s spelling.
Quote by Peter Bolland (a philosophy professor):
I’m a college philosophy professor. We don’t teach “socialism” or even liberal political values. We teach critical thinking, evidence-based truth seeking, global awareness, empathy, curiosity, and humility. DeSantis and others on the right face an enormous obstacle — reality itself skews left. When people become more educated, they become more acutely aware of the suffering of others, and of their own moral responsibility to do something about it. Me-first ideologist wither in the light of wisdom.
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Quote by Adam McKay (film and TV director)
Every day I have to marvel at what the billionaires and FOX News pulled off. They got working whites to hate the very people that want them to have more pay, clean air, water, free healthcare and the power to fight back against big banks & big corps. It’s truly remarkable.
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Katha Pollitt (essayist and poet):
When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted — anything! — the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly & unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people’s countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating woman — or anyone — as chattel or inferior beings.
[[ my comments: of course most of these things are *approved* of by the Hebrew God in the Old Testament ]]
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Adam Grant (author):
Expertise isn’t about being consistently right. It’s about becoming decreasingly wrong.
A hallmark of understanding is the ability to rule out inaccurate theories and flawed evidence, and thereby move closer to the truth.
Learning is the art of discarding mistaken ideas.
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Stuart Stevens (former Republican strategist)
“To be clear, most Republicans are worried that Biden’s COVID plan will WORK. Covid is the key to the economy, and if Covid drops, the economy goes up, and Republicans want the economy to fail under Biden. It’s not that Republications think Biden’s plan WON’T work, they are terrified that it WILL!
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Meme:
Conspiracy Theory Defined:
1) A belief that a consensus of the world’s scientific experts missed something they’ve spent their lives researching–that you were able to uncover in seventeen minutes due to superior Googling skills.
2) A belief that decades ot medical research, carried out by people committed to caring for humanity–are secretly and irredeemably evil–and have been exposed to random people you’ve never heard of, making claims with no evidence, on sites with dubious credibility.
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Photo of protestor on city street wearing orange T-shirt and some kind of helmet and carrying this sign:
“I Know More than the Scietists” (sic)
