Simple Childlike Questions

@ravi

_uacct = "UA-570443-6"; urchinTracker(); Rationalism falls short of answering the many simple childlike questions people like to ask: questions about origins and purposes such as are often contemptuously dismissed as nonquestions or pseudoquestions, although people understand them clearly enough and long to have the answers. These are intellectual pains that rationalists – like bad physicians confronted by ailments they cannot diagnose or cure – are apt to dismiss as "imagination". It is not to rationalism that we look for answers to these simple questions because rationalism chides the endeavour to look at all. — Peter Medawar, Advice to a Young Scientist

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From technocrats to garden variety "independents" who reject partisan politics, the greatest danger to society lies in the apolitical stance. Guardian: The spokesperson added: “Our search and recommendation systems reflect what people search for, the number of videos available, and the videos people choose to watch on YouTube. That’s not a bias towards any particular […]

#Politics #apolitics #disinformation #technocracy #YouTube

From the New York Times: Consolidation in the pharmaceutical world has diminished the number of manufacturing plants, so production problems at a single site can have tremendous repercussions, said Michael Ganio, director of pharmacy practice and quality at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

#Economics #capitalism #economics #healthcare

Vox has a post with legal opinion on Giuiliani and Trump’s admission that Trump was aware of the money paid to Stormy Daniels and has repaid Cohen the amount. The analysis by Douglas Spencer at the University of Connecticut is the most insightful one of the lot. Spencer correctly points out that admitting he was […]

#Politics #politics #Right #Trump

Miles Howard in The Outline: It goes like this. The 2008 recession may have cratered the wages and employment prospects for people just entering the job market, but according to the myth of the American Millennial, the real problem young people have today is themselves. Nearly a decade after the crash, the mainstream media still […]

#Economics #Politics #economy #millenials

Peru

#peru #travel #tumblr #twitter

Medicaid currently finances about 45% of all births in the United States. Trumpcare (AHCA) slashes Medicaid by $880 billion over 10 years. How is this pro-life?

#Politics #healthcare #politics #prolife

From philosopher Robert Simpson’s essay in Aeon: I’d propose a third way: put free ‘speech’ as such to one side, and replace it with a series of more narrowly targeted expressive liberties. Rather than locating actions such as protest and whistleblowing under the umbrella of ‘free speech’, we could formulate specially tailored norms, such as a […]

#Law #Politics #free-speech #law #platonism #politics #scientism

Workers at the #arganoil coop en route to #essaouira #morocco // #africa #travel #people #culture #twitter

#essaouira #arganoil #culture #travel #people #africa #twitter #morocco

Michael Puett’s book The Path draws on the 2,500-year-old insights of Chinese philosophers. He explains how ‘straightening your mat’ can help you break out of the patterns that are holding you back

The Path is in part a pleasing debunking of fashionable self-help disciplines – there are no quick fixes; improvement is incremental at best, and a lifetime of work. “I think of it as sort of anti-self-help,” says Puett. “Self-help tends to be about learning to love yourself and embrace yourself for who you are. A lot of these ideas are saying precisely the opposite – no, you overcome the self, you break the self. You should not be happy with who you are.”

#philosophy

Or, how I got a cop to admit that he perjured himself in Alabama traffic court.

Excerpt:

Traffic camera laws are popular in part because they appeal to a law-and-order impulse. If we are going to stop those nefarious evildoers who jeopardize the health of the republic by sliding through yellow lights when no one else is around and driving through empty streets at thirty miles per hour in twenty-five zones, then we need a way around such pesky impediments as a lack of eyewitnesses.

Yet traffic cameras do not always produce probable cause that a particular person has committed a crime. To get around this “problem” (as a certain law-and-order president-elect might call it), several states have created an entirely novel phylum of law: the civil violation of a criminal prohibition. Using this nifty device, a city can charge you of a crime without any witnesses, without any probable cause determination, and without any civil due process.

In short, municipal officials and their private contractors have at their disposal the powers of both criminal and civil law and are excused from the due process duties of both criminal and civil law. It’s a neat trick that would have made King George III blush.

#fb #law #twitter