One of the things I realized early on in my working life is that what follows after the first few lines of an email or other communication rarely registers in the consciousness of people, although they may have ‘read’ it in the sense that their eyes scanned over it. So you need to make the most important point right at the start.
This cartoon captures it exactly.
(Baldo)
Chile was where US imperialism had one of its darkest chapters, in a history of dark chapters, where in 1973 the Richard Nixon-Henry Kissinger team first tried to destabilize the economy and then had the CIA instigate and support a military coup that violently overthrew that country’s democratically elected government and murder its president Salvador Allende because he was advocating socialist policies. The US installed the brutal dictator General Augusto Pinochet who then implemented the neoliberal agenda that the US seeks to impose via outright fascists, theocrats, and other authoritarians.
Chileans are celebrating the possible end of neoliberalism in that country that had been written into their constitution by the Pinochet regime.
Karim Bschir, a philosopher of science at the University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland, has published a very detailed review of my book The Great Paradox of Science in the April 29, 2021 issue of the journal Metascience (This is a Springer journal and is thus behind a paywall. You can read it in full if you have the institutional access that universities often provide.) It is always gratifying for an author to have their book assigned to a reviewer who not only has a deep knowledge of the subject matter, but has clearly also read the text very carefully and summarized its content accurately and succinctly.
Since the review is behind a paywall, I will just provide the conclusions at the end where he looks at how I try to resolve the paradox that is central to the book, of why scientific theories work so well even though we have no reason to think that they represent the truth about the world or even that they are approaching the truth. (That is what the ‘anti-realist’ position referred to in the review means to philosophers of science. It does not mean that I live in some imaginary world!) Bschir’s summarizes my argument even better than I could and I hope it encourage readers of the review (and this blog!) to obtain and read my book.
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Most petty criminals are not that smart, and this dognapper is no exception
I am a regular listener and supporter of the public radio show On The Media whose co-hosts over its 20-year history have been Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield. I have frequently linked to clips from the show, most recently just yesterday. Hence I was shocked to learn later that same day that Garfield has been fired from the show.
Bob Garfield, host of the public radio show and podcast On The Media, has been fired. According to a statement from New York Public Radio, an outside investigation found that Garfield violated the company’s anti-bullying policy. Garfield was the subject of a similar investigation in 2020 that resulted in, “disciplinary action and a warning about consequences if the behavior continued.”
On Twitter, the veteran journalist and critic denied that he was fired for, “bullying, per se but for yelling in 5 meetings over 20 years.” Garfield continued, “the provocations were just shocking. In time the story will emerge and it is tragic.”
I found Garfield to be a good interviewer with a droll sense of humor and and sharp sense of irony. His laid back manner on air did not prepare me for the charge that he had a bullying attitude, which just shows that one never knows how closely the public and private personas of people mesh.
While Israel’s supporters keep claiming that it is a democracy, the reality is that it is an ethno-religious state that privileges the rights of the Jewish community over even its non-Jewish citizens and treats the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories in a manner that can only be described as an apartheid system. Gaza is rightly described as the world’s largest open-air prison. In addition, Israel practices collective punishment, legalized discrimination, forcible ethnic cleansing, and destroys the offices of Palestinian media outlets, all of which automatically disqualifies it from claiming the right to be called a democracy.
For the longest time, the Israel lobby in the US has managed to keep this ugly reality under wraps by lobbing the explosive charge of anti-Semitism at anyone who pointed out the truth. They were aided in this by a political and media establishment that would faithfully parrot the official line that Israel was seeking peace with the Palestinians, that a two-state solution was the way forward, that the US government was a neutral party seeking to broker peace, and that it was only the intransigence of the Palestinians that was holding back a solution, all of which have been manifestly false for a long time.
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Oliver discussed how pernicious so-called Stand Your Ground laws are, since they seem to give a license to many people to shoot at the slightest provocation.
Meanwhile, Bee points to some hopeful grassroots groups that are trying to reduce the number of gun deaths and injuries, such as Moms Demand Action that seeks to combat the NRA at the local level and violence interrupters who try to identify potential dangers in their local communities before they occur and step in to mediate conflicts.
We are all familiar with the little test called a ‘captcha’ (an acronym that stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) that we sometimes have to pass in order to access some website. You may have noticed that these tests are getting harder, in that we often fail once or twice before passing.
The video below explains why this is happening and it is not because we are becoming less human. It says that there is a race between these tests and computers, that as computers get better at doing them, the tests have to raise the level of difficulty. It also says that there is something else that is going on in the background, and that is that our responses are used to create databases that enable computers to become better at character and image recognition. For example, many of the captchas are to identify things that we see while driving, such traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, fire hydrants, and the like. The responses are used to program self-driving cars to better identify those things.
We may arrive at a point where this system runs out steam because we are not able to design simple tests that only humans can pass.
Ronald Regan’s ‘welfare queen’ rhetoric propagated the myth that many Americans are lazy good-for-nothings who would take any opportunity to not work, a slander on working people that did not seem to hurt his popularity with the working class, perhaps because many people believes it to be true of other people, not themselves. The reason for pushing that myth was to justify cuts in benefits to the poor (“It is for their own good, so that they learn the value of work.”) in order to give tax cuts to the rich. Neoliberal Democrats like Bill Clinton also seized on it continue the cuts, in the name of ‘ending welfare as we know it’.
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I am someone who thinks that patriotism is a silly and even dangerous concept, implying as it does that one’s own national tribe is somehow special and to be valued over all others. Hence I am also not a fan of the associated symbols of patriotism, such as flags and anthems.
The comic strip Get Fuzzy had a series on national anthems and ran three strips in sequence on a a particularly silly one and that is the British national anthem that captured what I feel about it. The lines “Send her victorious/ Happy and glorious” never fails to get a chuckle from me. I mean, really?
You can see the above strip here and then click on the next two days to see the full set on this topic.