Jesse Bering; Adam Grant; Rod Serling; Dr. Seuss and cancel culture; crazies Sherri T and Candace O.
Jesse Bering on Facebook (friends’ post, so I can’t link it):
As a rule of thumb, you can usually discern misinformation (and disinformation) by the stridency of the communicator. The more certain, righteous and angrier the voice, the more likely the message is wrong.
Most scientists are noncommittal because they acknowledge complexity.
Added as comment:
Science is humility in the face of data.
Author of one of my favorites books, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life, which I’ve read twice but have yet to write up on this blog.
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Quote by Adam Grant on Facebook (on this public post)
A mark of an open mind is being more committed to your curiosity than to your convictions.
The goal of learning is not to shield old views against new. It’s to revise old views to incorporate new facts.
Ideas are possibilities to explore, not certainties to defend.
Author of Think Again, which I wrote up here last March, and my copy of which I loaned and have not gotten back. (Which is why I rarely/never loan books. I will buy a new copy.)
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Rod Serling, quoted by The Other 98% in a public post, his closing narration to a Twilight Zone episode called “Deaths-Head Revisited.” (Obviously in reaction to the book-banning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, about the Holocaust.)
There is an answer to the doctor’s question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes – all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.
I’ve copied the narration from the Wikipedia entry for this episode. I’ve linked the graphic from the 98% post above.
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More about book banning.
HuffPost, Ryan Grenoble, 28 Jan 2022: Conservatives Are Banning Books From Schools While Whining About ‘Cancel Culture’, subtitled, “‘We haven’t seen or heard of challenges like these probably in the last 40 years,’ said Shirley Robinson, executive director of the Texas Library Association.”
When a publisher stops printing an old Dr. Seuss book nobody read because it contained harmful racial stereotypes, Fox News and the entire Republican party lose their minds over “cancel culture.”
But when conservatives across the country start banning and censoring dozens of books at a time from school libraries, they’re just trying to protect the kids.
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Headlines about the crazies:
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 28 Jan 2022: Anti-Vaccine ‘Expert’ Sherri Tenpenny Says COVID-19 Vaccines Will Turn People Into ‘Transhumanist Cyborgs
“Quantum entanglement,” she claims. Can’t bear to quote more.
Daily Kos, 29 Jan 2022: This will shock you: Candace Owens is a moon landing conspiracist.
