An owl's eye view of forests and trees
People use words and phrases to persuade us, not with the truth, but with feeling comfortable. If it sounds good, we want to believe it. As long as what gets said doesn’t fall in to the “too good to be true” category, alarms do not go off, and words lull us down the path laid out for us.
Let me give you a small example of what I mean so that you can try to be on the lookout for it in the big scale. Think of this as another critical thought exercise.
What it says on the tin. Just a collection of thoughts that pop in my head over the course of a day as I watch people react to COVID-19.
Ken Cuccinelli recently mutilated of meaning behind the Statue of Liberty and “The New Colossus” to justify his racist policies. White nationalists right now sit in the highest seats of power in the land, pushing their horrid agendas and vandalizing our history to give them a sense of legitimacy. I broke down what’s going on. Check it out at Torchlight Media.
Torchlight Media: Trump’s White Nationalist Administration Slaps Liberty in the Face Again
As the 2020 presidential debate season kicks into gear, we need to demand more of the candidates.
Torchlight Media Article: “Policies, Not Political Pablum.”
The article touches on something I strongly urge we do more often. As I described in an earlier blog, we should ask “how.”
With the Mueller report completed but remaining unknown to Congress and the nation at large, we sit in a purgatory. Where some Americans sees proof positive of a witch hunt, and other Americans see a cover up of gross criminality, the truth probably lies somewhere in between those two poles. I thought I’d share some of my musings on the limits of what we know and why none of this so far should be surprising.
Calling President Trump a narcissistic bully means little if we don’t understand how to apply the terms to our analysis of Trump’s behavior. The media keeps falling down in this area, although it may in part be because they are also the bully’s victims here. Hence, part 2 of my series talking about Trump as a narcissistic bully at Torchlight Media:
Please take a look. In understanding how the media is not properly applying the narcissistic bully analytical model to Trump’s behavior, we better understand the model ourselves.
Now we come to my final part of this series. Bear with me here. I’m going to be making the same point multiple times but in different ways. I’m covering a concept that was hard for me to grasp, so I figure I should hedge my bets and present it in a bunch of different ways, just in case the one way I present it is hard for you to grasp too.
Roseanne Barr’s comments and the responses to them helped clarify for me some big problems with the current arguments by Conservatives when someone like Barr does something like this. They boil down to:
F*ck that noise.
“Double-standards!”
“Wrong! False equivalencies!”
Let’s dive into the comparisons between Roseanne Barr’s and Samantha Bee’s situations to dispel the question of which is really going on here.
Based on recent reporting on Qatar, I thought I’d offer some basic advice on handling memes we encounter. Hint: today let’s add exercising caution into our daily routines.
From time to time, I’d like to start posting a few shorter articles on thinking more critically based the kinds of things we encounter in our everyday. Like memes, advertisements, headlines, and so on.
Imaginary problems. When you don’t look through a lens of reality, it’s hard to see what’s really going on. It’s easy to end up chasing after pink Pookas instead of tackling the real problems. And that means the fixes you create don’t solve real problems either. Trying to trap a Pooka won’t net you anything real, but you can create real problems for yourself in the process. That’s what this is all about.
I found something I wrote a little over a year ago, before I started this blog. President Trump’s first “Muslim Ban” executive order sparked some thoughts that I think remain valid. So, I decided to dust off this relic from the memory box, touch it up a bit, and present it to you all.
Here we go.
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