The Open Society Institute attempted to develop a predictor of media literacy in 2019 here. The intent was to develop ideas for resiliency against fake news, post-truth, etc and offset the diminishing public trust and severely polarized politics. It’s an interesting idea but I think it needs more development. This post is a summary of my overthinking of their predicator. CAUTION: Long (About 8,200 words). No, I don’t expect anyone to read it.

It is a sad commentary on media and the species that so many things are seen only in binary. We are told we are on one side or the other whether we want to be or not - You are with us or you are against us. Either you support X or Y, the A or the B! The innocent noncombatants are conflated with one combatant or the other and then dehumanized and erased from existence.

I’ve been reading some of the attempts on the anti-abortion side to avoid tying themselves into knots with respect to the definition of when something is a person. This is similar, but not exactly the same as the Cartesian duality question of whether mind and body are separate. In a religious sense it also seems to touch on when a soul is attached to a body. Obviously they can’t say “soul” in the United States due to separation of church and state, but they can use “personhood” as a substitute.

After the leaked draft of the US Supreme Court decision yesterday, I decided to share this post from Lynn Ungar, a UU minister. Source: https://www.facebook.com/shirley.worth/posts/10159952661629483 OK, this is going to take a minute, but hear me out. I am pro-religion. I’ve been an ordained minister for 30 years, and not the kind of ordination you buy online. I believe in people coming together in community, being accountable to one another, and to something that is larger than our individual whiny selves.

I recently saw someone post a quote that reads as follows: “If you have something to say, then silence is a lie.” I couldn’t help myself and responded “But what if what you have to say is a lie?” I was immediately downvoted because the participants thought I was commenting on the author (who I will leave unnamed) rather than the quote itself. I think that speaks to the sorry state of affairs and the unwillingness to actually engage.

I have run into an argumentation tactic several times in the last few years and I finally discovered that it has an actual name. Consider the following: You and I are arguing over something which has a common usage understanding. I can’t convince you and then I insist that we are arguing over something using a technical definition different than common usage. I can prove my point using that definition. Have I won the original point?

I like this comment from Joscha Bach, a German cognitive scientist: “Political opinions are unlike other kinds of opinions: they appear to be without alternative to the one who has them. ‘This protest is invalid, because the people who participate in it are wrong.’ = ‘These people have political opinions that are different from mine.'” I sometimes need to remind myself that other people’s ways of looking at things may or may not be better than how I look at things.

I was watching a youtube video on Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity and reading the comments left me thinking about the many feet of lumber in both the eyes of the commenters and myself. I’m going to somewhat change the terminology used because it is rather loaded with dog whistles and use a made-up word “upcculf” or “upcculfity”, which I will define as a state of conciousness of a true believer in X (left wing, right wing, multi-level marketing, crypto currencies, anti-vax, blind intellectualism, … [insert name your belief to which you have become a convert]).

I don’t know about you, but I often see exchanges of the following type (replace “murder” with any of a thousand different behaviors which are unkind to other people): Team Humanity member: “Murder is wrong. Gang A and Gang B murder people. Stop it.” Gang A member: “That is false equivalence. Gang B murders more people and more enthusiastically than we do.” Team Humanity member: “Stop murdering people.

So, one year into retirement and so far no regrets. I could rant at the abyss about the global state of affairs, but I know exactly how much attention the abyss would pay. Several people asked me if I was behind the Twitter feed @GoodTaxTakes. The answer is no, but I agree with probably 90% of it. Click on the title of this post for some thoughts about the current state of affairs in international tax which I can get away with because I don’t represent anyone anymore.

Per the Officer Down Memorial page, so far 243 police officers have died in the line of duty in 2021 and of those deaths, 132 are from COVID-19. So more deaths from Covid than every other cause combined. Remind me why police unions are opposed to masks and vaccination? Seriously, I don’t get it.

It seems like a lot of people would have no meaning to life if they didn’t have someone to hate. Fortunately I hate everyone so a lot of targets would have to go away. From time to time friends in the international tax arena call and update me on the latest goings on. Usually it is fairly clear that most of the parties at the table are engaged in political posturing but do not actually seem to want to resolve the issues.

I’ve been hearing horror stories from friends in the medical field about COVID deniers even as they are gasping for breath. Many of these people (and their families) simultaneously deny the existence of COVID and insist that the doctors gave it to them to get more money. How did this happen? Because people told them lies. Children are taught the saying “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.