Hoodwinked Racism

It's really hard to take serious the claim that people who aren't racists can be tricked in to sincerely saying things only racists would say otherwise.

Dead People Maintaining Control

Concerning guns in America: Having our lives controlled by an 18th century sentence fragment and what people who have been dead for 200 years did or didn't say is not a sign of our intelligence.

Humans Gone Viral

It would be difficult to accurately define the results of a virus attacking its host without that definition including the results humans have had on the planet.

Attack of the Fetus

Abortion opponents who are trying to push "stand your ground" and "personhood" rights for fetuses don't realize it, but this "logic" contains within it a justification for abortion at any time because a pregnancy is an attack on the pregnant woman by the fetus and she is allowed to protect herself again anyone attacking her. If a fetus is declared a person that can be seen to exercise a "stand your ground" defense, then so can the pregnant woman by standing her ground against the attack of the fetus. And, it would be constitutional under the equal protection clause.

Related from Womenshealth.gov.

Choice Ignorance

I sometimes think people see ignorance as just another lifestyle choice that everyone would be wise to consider.

Each Day That Comes is the Best

Anytime someone asserts a past point of view as more valid than one infused with new information, it's a benefit to remember that during every day that passes we can truthfully say, "We have better information now."

Throwing Bullets

It is often said by the pro-gun crowd that reasons to restrict guns are silly because the same logic could then be used to ban silverware because some people eat too much. Well, if that's a valid conclusion, eating with one's hands instead of a fork or spoon would result in the same amount of food being consumed, and therefore the same number of deaths would occur by people using their hands to throw bullets instead of firing them from a gun.

Metaphorical Misdirection

Some people assert that being on public assistance is equivalent to "being a slave" to the government, hoping that people will accept as valid their use of "slave" as a legitimate alternative definition instead of the metaphor it actually is, then running with it to try to prove that assistance to the poor is unethical.

Spoon-Fed Fragments

It is an unfortunate practice that pundits and preachers spoon feed audiences sentence fragments from documents like the Constitution and the Bible causing the requirement of context to be ignored as irrelevant.

Mismatched Meanings

"We can never be sure if our communication was successful; there is no certainty about what actually it was we shared." -Thomas Metzinger

Because all methods of communication include connotation and context specific to all individuals' own unique experiential history--and there is no way to strip away that collateral meaning--completely successful communication will inevitably be unattainable.

Not Getting It

After hearing or seeing a conversation that includes a child-like response that ignores what was just revealed, I often think "...but this one goes to eleven."

Not Knowing What One Doesn't Know

"Foolish people understand quickly, or believe they do, because they are not capable of imagining the difficulties and hence have no hurdles to leap over." -George Sarton

The above quote from the 1950s lines up with a named cognitive bias from late 1990s known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, the idea that unskilled people have no (or limited) capacity to realize the level of their own inadequacies.

Taken together, it seems fitting that a major goal of any society should be to instill the idea that we should never assume we're done learning.

Unique Justice

The visual metaphor created by Lady Justice—wearing a blindfold and holding balanced scales to show the law should be applied equally to all—is as bad as outright bias. A better image would be a blindfold over one eye and, in place of the scales, a magnifying glass held in front of the other. Because language is inherently too inaccurate to describe every possible situation and every event, criminal or not, no laws can be written to fairly cover every incident in life, all of them being unique.

To truly implement justice, there must be room to compensate for our required use of the faulty tool of terminology and the lack of our ability to predict a detailed future using it. Otherwise, justice remains absent.

"The more laws, the less justice." -Cicero

Existence Wages

If a corporation somehow can't possibly exist without paying its employees wages that won't sustain them, no other proof is needed that the corporation shouldn't exist.

Dishonorable Wealth

Individual prosperity from within an inherently faulty or rigged system is not the honorable achievement so many claim.

Trading Taxes for Military Service

From the book Bursts by Albert-László Barabási in reference to a 16th century crusade: “The king gave land and villages to lords and knights so that they could bring their own weapons, armor, horses and men to bear whenever the king called them into battle. But if the wealth and tax-free status of these men was based on their military service, why, then, were the peasants now being asked to march to Constantinople?” 

Compare this to the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, written in the 18th century, talking about a "well-regulated militia" and everyone keeping arms to make the militia idea work. Could it be that they were looking to make taxes and military service more egalitarian than was historically the case by not distinguishing between the wealthy and the poor? It is surely the case that those responsible for the Second Amendment would be aware of this aspect of the traditional feudal arrangement, a system they were specifically against. For those who today claiming that the sentence fragment having to do with the "right to bear arms" should stand alone, the historical basis for it is much more complicated.

Consequential Diversion

Naming some potential results as side-effects skews perception of an action's outcome.

Defeated Standards

There appears to be no substantial difference between the standards used at Fox News and The National Enquirer, two places where accuracy and relevance are seen as unfair obstacles to be defeated.

It's Not My Fault

In a failed attempt to avoid responsibility for ourselves, we create a virtual reality that contains gods and constitutions to take the blame.

Book Bliss Surprise

When I read a book that calls me to finish it as fast as possible, it feels like I suspect lottery winners do.

Pro-Horror

Far too many people make me think that when they watch Children of the Corn they root for the children.

Conservative Custodian

It's hard to see today's political conservatives and not think they need a chaperone.

A Flood of Incest

Those who hold the Noah's Ark myth to be true must also then hold that every animal alive today is descended from incestuous first cousins or siblings.

Goal Confusion

The "ends" and the "means" are far too often confused.

Inviting Slavery

Given modern day support by some for wealth-based corporate power to supersede democracy-based government power, it's important to remember the fight against slavery was also the fight against the power of ownership.

No So All-Powerful

To claim that prayer works is to also claim that humans have the paradoxical power to control an all-powerful deity.

Societal Desertion

Given the realities that no one survives alone and we tend to be social creatures, those who push the individualistic notion that everyone should "be happy alone" (or many other similar sentiments) as a primary goal in order to be healthy seems to work against an enthusiastic effective existence.

Pushing Impaired Values

The impaired state of mind brought on by sudden and extreme fear, one where invalid primordial instincts take control of our actions, is now a political philosophy.

Monday Morning Believers

There is no way the world could deny a deity if its followers took over an emergency room for a weekend and successfully healed with prayer all those who entered.

Supporting Symbiotic Democracy

For anyone who is truly a supporter of a democracy powered by "the people," there must also be a symbiotic relationship with efforts to maximize participation. Otherwise, the claim is crap.

Permission and Power

Those who have the most power never consent to have it curtailed; it must always be done without their permission.

Nurturing Destruction

How many people go through life failing to contemplate the fact that our existence depends on nurturing other forms of life in order to destroy and consume them?

Untrained Superiority

It is likely true that we all have moments where we want to claim knowledge in a subject superior to those who have studied it.

Loneliness of Intelligence

It has been said in various ways that loneliness is a failure to successfully communicate what one finds important, an absence of being understood. Because this situation can often result in a crushing type of frustration, could it be the cause of notoriously bad temperaments and attitudes from some of history's smartest people, especially for those who have challenged ideas assumed to be fundamental?

Non-Working Capital

Money is a mechanism for those who have it to give themselves credit for the work of those who don't.

Merchant Democracy

New definition of American democracy: Advancing the idea that government should be declared a corporate subdivision under the control of those in the merchant class with the most money.

Fish Story Faith

It is entirely appropriate to see religious texts as collections of fan fiction.

Rigged Worth

It is a basic truism that the primary goal of any business or corporation is to funnel as much skimmed money as possible to owners, a rigged structure that demands wealth be concentrated in the hands of a few.