Tag Archives: Current Events
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)
Beginning to Look Black
Excerpted from The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien, ©1954: “But last night I told you of Sauron the Great, the Dark Lord. The rumours that you have heard are true: he has indeed arisen again and left his hold in Mirkwood and returned to his ancient fastness in the Dark Tower …
Strict
The Supreme Court ruled that you have to let Black kids go to school. They ruled that you have to let Black people vote. They ruled that women get to decide for themselves whether or not to bear children. And that’s when conservatives began touting the idea of “strict interpretation” of the Constitution. If the …
Righteous Indignation™
After Christian extremists successfully stop other people from getting abortions– and that appears to be a foregone conclusion at this point– they’re not going to stop there. They still have a lot of anger inside them, and there are other people doing other things of which they disapprove. The next groups to find targets on …
Algorithms
Excerpted from How Algorithms Are Changing What We Read Online by Russell Smith: Articles that show low engagement typically get sidelined in favour of pieces that show more, a measurement that, along with all of the above, takes into account the click-through rate, or CTR. “You’re looking at your analytics,” (Andrew )Gorham explained to me, …
The Lesser Of, Still Is
“The Truth of the matter is, you all, you all know what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody (meaning the wealthy) has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change. Nothing will fundamentally change. Because …
In Defiance of All That Is Bad
Excerpted from A Power Governments Cannot Suppress by Howard Zinn, ©2006: Even when we don’t “win,” there is fun and fulfillment that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope. An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in …
