Tag Archives: Current Events
Mitch
When Wall Street wanted trillions of dollars to cover their bad investments, Mitch McConnell came running. When rich people wanted a tax break to make themselves even richer, he was happy to oblige. When corporations realized they could make even more money by compromising worker safety and destroying the environment, he rushed to get his …
“The Science Of?”
“The left will have to understand the science of ‘meet you in the middle.’” ~Matthew McConaughey (source) I’m going to need some details before I take this line as anything but condescending. How do I meet racism “in the middle?” How do I meet science denial in the middle? How do I meet homophobia in …
Burn It Down
From Chris Rock: I had my father get sick when I was 22. And I was poor, alright. And my father had an ulcer, and it exploded and you know all these toxins get in your blood. And basically, my father died, whatever, 50 days after his ulcer. So I had a father get sick …
Encouraged to Discover
From the article “The Moral Contortions of the New University” by Justin Smith, in The Chronicle of Higher Education: I believe that students, for the sake of their own thriving as human beings, should be required to study at university only things that have nothing to do with their own life up until that point. …
Sorry, Abe.
I think it’s time for America to amicably dissolve the union. Our differences are simply too great, and it will be impossible to hold this thing together without violence.
As Written
There are over a thousand recognized Christian sects, and every one of them believes they are interpreting their bible “as written.” So when new Supreme Court Justice Amy Barrett promised to interpret the Constitution “as written,” I wasn’t blown away by her impartiality and objectivity. I’ve heard the phrase before. All it means is that …
And Also
“Facebook’s goal of showing people only what they were interested in seeing resulted, within a decade, in the effective end of shared civic reality… Today we mostly consume news that corresponds with our ideological alignment, which has been fine-tuned to make us feel self-righteous and also mad.” ~Jia Tolentino
Neo
“Believe me, I know the original Nazis. I was born in Austria in 1947, shortly after the Second World War, and growing up I was surrounded by broken men. Men who came home from the war filled with shrapnel and guilt, men who were misled into a losing ideology. And I can tell you that …
Protest
The largest peaceful protests in American history were against the Bush family’s Middle East Wars. Protesters applied for permits, assembled peacefully, and picked up after themselves when they were through. Local merchants loved them: they stayed in motels, bought t-shirts, ate in restaurants. The economy boomed. Not surprisingly, they were completely ineffective. Lately we’ve had …
Logic
“It is simple enough to apply reason to what is reasonable, but it is much more difficult to argue logically about the illogical.” ~John Napier, in Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality ©1972
Or All Four
“However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group’s greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family.” ~~Gloria Steinem (1980)
