Religious entitlement

The sense of entitlement to special treatment that the highly religious have is a worldwide phenomenon. In Israel, ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) men are used to being given preferential treatment is many areas of life and have demanded that they should never have to sit next to women on planes because, well … who the hell knows, it is apparently somewhere in the 2,000-year old religious texts they study all the time and we know what a stickler their god is for following all the rules.
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When appliances run amuck

I am not an early adopter of technology, having to be pretty much driven by a strong need to acquire them. Hence I do not have a ‘smart’ home in which all manner of appliances are connected to the internet. Wi-fi and a ‘smart’ TV (i.e., one connected to the internet) are about it. When I see things like the Amazon Echo and Alexa that people have in their homes that they talk into to make purchases and run their devices, I wonder about the advisability of having a device that listens to everything you say and transmits it into the cloud. It is true that our phones can be hacked and turned into listening devices too but that takes some targeted effort on the part of some entity to do so. With smart homes, we are the ones enabling it.
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Einstein’s letter on education

I came across this letter from Albert Einstein that was published in the New York Times on October 5, 1952 and am reproducing it because it mirrors my own views that those who view education purely because of its utility value are missing something profound about it.

EDUCATION FOR INDEPENDENT THOUGHT

Albert Einstein

It is not enough to teach man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he – with his specialized knowledge – more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow-men and to the community.
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Poor Sam Harris has been misunderstood/defamed/libeled again!

Is there anyone who is more misunderstood and persecuted than Sam Harris? Once again he charges that he has been unfairly maligned, something that seems to happen to him with remarkable frequency. The occasion this time was that he invited Charles Murray to appear on his podcast after the latter’s talk at Middlebury college had to be cancelled due to protests. The title of the podcast was Forbidden Knowledge, suggesting that Harris was giving a platform for ideas that are true but are too politically incorrect to be allowed to be expressed openly. What is this dangerous knowledge that dare not raise its head in public? It is the old idea that when in comes to intelligence, the black community just does not have it to the same degree as whites and that this largely explains the socioeconomic disparity between the two communities. (I wrote yesterday my views on Murray and the shoddy way that he exploits people’s racial prejudices about intelligence in pursuance of truly regressive social policies.)
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John Oliver on immigration courts

He takes a close look at the scandalous state of the immigration court system where justice is at the bottom of their priorities. Not providing even two-year old children with legal representation is just one of the many problems.

I had no idea that there are so many daytime TV shows that feature courtroom cases for the purposes of entertainment, as he shows in the introduction.

Telling it like it is

Teachers are finally taking action to protest the lack of investment in public education that has led to their low and stagnant salaries, lack of adequate supplies for students, and poorly maintained facilities. To add insult to injury, teachers are constantly vilified by right-wingers as lazy moochers who complain despite having cushy jobs and their summers off. Teachers have long been fed up with this state of affairs but now they are getting angry.
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The drearily predictable resurgence of the race and IQ debate

So here we are again, debating the tired and discredited thesis propounded by Charles Murray and his late co-author Richard Herrnstein in their book The Bell Curve about the role of intelligence in socioeconomic success and as its pertains to race. These issues have resurfaced in a new book by David Reich and Murray has once again returned to the spotlight. Andrew Sullivan who, as then editor of The New Republic gave a huge amount of space to publicize that earlier book, has emerged to defend Murray’s ideas. Sam Harris has once again aligned himself with odious ideas and defends them as courageous truth-telling in the fight against political correctness.
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John Oliver on the Sinclair Broadcasting propaganda machine

While much attention has focused on Fox News as a purveyor of propaganda and falsehoods in the service of Donald Trump and the people he represents, less attention has been paid to a news company that has a much broader reach in the country and that is Sinclair Broadcasting, the owner of many local radio and TV stations.

In this clip, John Oliver shows how local newscasters at Sinclair stations are tightly controlled by the owners in a way that would make the leader of any totalitarian nation envious.

Jesus Christ Superstar

Last night the NBC TV network broadcast a live performance of this rock musical to coincide with Easter Sunday. I started watching the high-energy 2½ hour show but gave up after 40 minutes. This was not because I thought it was bad. I liked what I saw but the frequent breaks for commercials finally got the better of me. It seemed like for every 8 minutes of the show, we had a break for about 4 minutes of commercials. I understand the business model of ads paying for free programming, but the time spent on ads was just too much and they were so frequent that it destroyed the sense of engagement. If a DVD comes out, I may well watch it but today clips were made available and I embed some below.
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On Jordan Peterson being a Rorschach test

My post on Pankaj Mishra’s critique of Jordan Peterson aroused some interesting and thoughtful responses. As I said, I did not know anything about Peterson or his works and some tried to clue me in and provide perspective. As recommended by some, I went online to see some videos by and of Peterson and it turns out that there are a lot! I picked some based on whether their titles promised topics of interest to me, not a very effective strategy with YouTube, I know, but the only option I had if I did not want to devote the rest of my life to watching a ton of his videos. I have watched a few and plan to watch a few more and will post my comments on them after I have had time to digest them.
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