Alien Experience

I don't think it would be possible for a visiting alien species to visit earth and conclude we were anything but a planet-sized insane asylum because here is some of what they would see:

1) If someone creates an imaginary enemy, the result can include quite a bit of praise and help in trying to do battle. If someone creates an imaginary friend, the result will almost certainly be a conclusion of mental illness.

2) Many of us will die defending the idea that magic is real, but only our own magic.

3) There seems to be a general assertion that there is a homunculus at the helm of the universe, with some people asserting it exists outside of it, looks like us and cares about the outcome of card games.

4) We find it normal and sometimes virtuous to hate a lot of people at once, but find it repulsive to love that way.

5) The pleasurable act of sex is seen as disgusting unless it is done in a manner where no one can be aware it takes place.

6) We work hard to find ways to stop the destructive actions of viruses and bacteria, except when we emulate them ourselves.

7) Money.

8) Not realizing that we live on a planet that doesn't need us at all.

9) So many of us experience joy as a direct result of pain in others.

10) Finding meaning for one's life is often passed off on others to determine.

Gun Accidents Save Lives

For some reason, there are people who love to compare the deaths of those who fall in their bathtubs to those who die from being shot. When someone dies by falling in their bathtub when using it for the purpose for which it was designed, it is an accident. When it comes to guns, an accident is when someone lives when using it as it was designed to be used.

Israel's Surprising Achievement

It is quite an achievement for a group of people to lose widespread support and sympathy they gained following genocidal attacks on its members that killed millions.

Exceptional Greed

The pursuit of money is usually derided as a faulty motive for action except when it can be associated with a setting called a business, the way humanity has convinced itself that there is a virtuous exception.

The Power To Be Unpleasant

The current Israel-Gaza situation has reminded me that none of humanity's oppressed groups become models to emulate if the oppression is reversed. Power to treat others badly never seems to goes unused.

Categorical Denial

Our need to give simple and vague labels to large groups of individual actions and events relieves a potential mental burden by reducing the need for critical thinking in hiding away details that always differentiate one set of circumstances from another. Ironically, this desire for consistency results in inconsistent reactions and attitudes because no two actions are identical. It is nonsense to pretend they are in order to give us mindless permission to apply the same reactions to a designated category of actions. When it comes to human behavior, there are simply too many variables in play to assert one event is equivalent to another. Our reactions to any event should be appropriate its uniqueness.

Our Obsessive Need For a Changeless Cause

One of humanity's obsessive but under-noticed pursuits is the search for a stable and unchanging framework on which to hang everything we discover and experience. These efforts range from the creation of mythologies, adages, creeds, axioms and religions, to the scientific pursuit of a Theory of Everything. It also plays out in what I've called founderism, which contains within it the desire for something foundational to not only be forever fixed, but that it has been accurately discovered. This need to discover and revere a reliable and enduring primary "truth" that can't be challenged is, like any obsession, an unintended cause of dreadful behavior. Rivals in this quest can treat each other like vermin. Foes congeal into antagonizing groups that can sometimes reach the point of full-scale war.

If it exists, our descendants may one day come across an undeniably perfect description of the universe and how it works that can be used as the basis to discover a verifiable answer to any question imagined. If it happens, what conclusion it ends up producing about the path we took to get there will put a stain on the victory.

Religion Justifies All

Anyone looking to justify any action (or inaction) can always find one in religion, which means it will likely never die.

Hypothesis as Proof

Many of us make the major mistake of confusing a hypothesis with a conclusion that doesn't need to be verified. For example, it is often stated that abstinence-only sex "education" for teens is valid because if teens don't have sex there can be no pregnancies, abortions or problems with STDs. As statistics show, the areas that don't provide full and accurate sexual education to teens are the ones with the highest levels of teen pregnancies and abortions. The unrecognized cause of the discrepancy is the idea behind the abstinence-only movement is a hypothesis, not a verified conclusion.

The way it should be approached is to state the idea as a hypothesis: "If we expose teens to abstinence-only ideas, there will be fewer teen pregnancies, abortions and issues with STDs." That is a statement that can be tested and verified. Instead, proponents state this as an already-proved claim which allows them to ignore the actual results.

Here are additional examples:

People will kill at the same rate with or without guns
Captialism works because of the invisible hand
It's better for everyone to be selfish
Marijuana use leads to abusing other drugs
Welfare leads to people not wanting to work
Taxing the rich leads to calamity and hurts poor people
Taxing the poor makes them work harder

Vitamin supplements are just as good as vitamins in food
Spare the rod, spoil the child

Pro-Dystopia

If a group was formed with the specific goal of bringing on a dystopian future, it would hard to find a difference in whatever plans they adopt and the Tea Party/Libertarian agenda.

Freezing 1789

For those who claim that only Christians in the U.S. have religious freedom because Christianity was the religion used by the country's founders when the Bill of Rights was adopted, they should also agree that only the arms available to the founders should be relevant too.

Illusionary Rights

Rights must remain as protections for all, unable to be rescinded or forfeited for any treason. Otherwise, they are an illusion.

Clan Kids

For me, articles like these ("Why So Many People Care So Much About Others' Sex Lives") highlight a social bias that children have always been seen as the sole responsibility of their biological parents in every human society, past and present.

I'm only tapping in to a general memory of history and sociology books I've read over my lifetime, but I know many of them outlined societies where children were seen as everyone's responsibility. I think it would be an insane proposal to them that biological parents be the only ones responsible for their children. They did pay attention to family relationships, of course, but these connections were used to identify membership in a large and complicated clan structure, not to isolate a "nuclear" family from everyone else in the larger group. Given that social structure, their attitudes about sex would have to be different than the conclusions in this article. 

The Israel Experiment

It is entirely fair to now admit Israel to be a failed social engineering experiment. Turning the population that was living there prior to the country's creation into inmates of a closed and disjointed reservation-zoo system cannot be claimed a success.

Do You See What I See?

Using religion as an example, I used to wonder hard about how people can read the same book and come up with different conclusions--thousands of different conclusions, in fact. But after reading comments people leave below on-line articles and blog posts I have realized the phenomenon is more-or-less universal. It's hard to find a string of comments where all of them take into account the actual content of the article. Some are so wrong they even completely miss the wording of the headline.

I'm not sure what to make of this specifically, but it's clear evidence of human incompetency and blind bias that keeps misery alive.

Cause As Justification

I don't understand the reasoning behind the “it's just business” defense. How can some bad condition be justified by simply stating its cause?

We could also use this faulty mindset for “it's just religion” or “it's just the law.” When the existence of a problem is realized, we have a responsibility to step up and make it better, not try and justify it by simply stating the cause of the problem.

False "Too Much" Exemptions

It is correctly said that too much of anything can be bad for you, but many mistakenly think age or an agonizing life are exceptions to that adage.

Childhood Path of Corruption

From Raw Story:

A study published in the July issue of Cognitive Science determined that children who are not exposed to religious stories are better able to tell that characters in “fantastical stories” are fictional — whereas children raised in a religious environment even “approach unfamiliar, fantastical stories flexibly.”

...

This conclusion contradicts previous studies in which children were said to be “born believers,” i.e. that they possessed “a natural credulity toward extraordinary beings with superhuman powers. Indeed, secular children responded to religious stories in much the same way as they responded to fantastical stories — they judged the protagonist to be pretend.”

This early start toward the acceptance of fantasy as factual is not to be ignored in our pursuit of discovering how to improve our future.

Still Sleeping

Has the popular "Wake Up, America!" ever had an effect on anyone, ever?

Alien Babysitter

I often think that if a superior alien race were to visit us, their first move would be to assign us a babysitter.