We just had Veterans Day in the US (honoring those who served in the US armed forces) which is not the same as Memorial Day (honoring those who died in the service of the US armed forces). That means we get to watch more lip service “Thank you for your service” statements performance theater. You don’t see these people giving those thanks to visibly disabled former service personnel. You don’t see these people giving condolences to families who lost family members in the service.

Lynn Ungar posted a really interesting note on substack talking about what she refers to as the Dominion, Individualism and Extraction (DIE) worldview. “Dominion is belief that a) you are superior and b) that your superiority entitles you to exert control over others who are inferior.” “Individualism: Not to be confused with individuality, which celebrates the ways that each person is unique, individualism refuses to see the infinite, complex ways that systems are connected.

Techdirt just published a blog post entitiled Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog - Whether We Like It Or Not. Techdirt has been a blog for 27 years dealing with the intersection of technology and policy, often targeting copyright, patents, censorship and privacy issues. They are now asking the question “But what happens when the fundamental systems that make all of those conversations possible start breaking down? When the people dismantling those systems aren’t even pretending to replace them with something better?

I heard a news interviewer asking someone about how they felt about Elon Musk’s applying normal business methods, specifically “move fast and break things” to the US Federal government and really wanted to be the one to answer the question. The question demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding that must be corrected. “Move Fast and Break Things” is not a business method, it is a Venture Capitalist approach to businesses.

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.