Anti-Intellectualism: A Worrying Trend in American Politics

This article should alarm people. It's from the Guardian UK. It's a discussion of the rising tide of anti-intellectualism in the United States. There is a deliberate effort with mass support from the fundamentalist Christian right that is attempting to roll back the enlightenment and all of its tenets. This movement wants to do away with cultural and philosophical self-criticism and reflection, which are the only path to cultural growth and evolution and are essential to a cosmopolitan society. I have never understood the drive of religious fundamentalists to return us to the Dark Ages.

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Jerry Seinfeld: It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.

Awareness is and should be an important part of life, but in the modern era, finding reliable and pertinent news information quickly, despite the myriad of sources, can be very difficult. In the 21st century , we now know there is no such thing as objective news, so the best one can do is seek for a kind of intersubjectivity that allows one to develop one's own subjectivity in the hope of fostering a kind of refined or cultivated objective perspective that appreciates from whence differing opinions came from. Marcus Aurelius said, "Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." This intersubjectivity can only be achieved via a plethora of news sources from a diversity of backgrounds and cultures. Unfortunately, that is very time consuming. I tend to check these services as I can: CNN International BBC World Service The Week The Economist NYTimes WSJ euronews Bloomberg FT The Guardian NPR Le Monde ...

Know thyself!

The spirit of this blog can be summed up thus: Know thyself! These words were inscribed in the stones of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and they are the essential mystery of the human experience, both as an individual and as groups, throughout time.

Joseph Stiglitz on Economics

Joseph Stiglitz's recent article in Vanity Fair is an excellent analysis of the western world's current economic problems. Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University and a Nobel prize winner . The article asserts a central tenet of modern economic theory that strikes me as elementary . That tenet is that a strong economy is based upon the spending of a robust middle class . That, historically, is what drives consumption . In America, the owners of businesses are short sighted to simply cut taxes to their own class, because their own class benefits most from a flush middle class . What they gain in the short term, they lose in the medium to long term. In addition, they condemn their businesses and the overall economy to more frequent and unnecessary boom and bust cycles in the process. The American economy is undermining its own engine of growth, consumption , in the hapless pursuit of immediate riches for the wealthiest Americans, who need the m...

Island Eudaimonia

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