GARY OLSON—Our culture of rugged individualism has privatized the idea of caring and minimized the emotional needs of others. It allows for individual expressions of concern but brackets off any notion of social empathy. This exemplifies what sociologists term “feeling rules” that are shaped by ideology and class and include the idea that thinking only about oneself is just “common sense.”
MARC NORTON—But we don’t really know. We don’t know because there hasn’t been anywhere enough testing to know. And we don’t know how many non-symptomatic people are wandering around infecting those who haven’t met the virus yet.
We are all aware that this problem starts in the Very White House, where Trump and his cohorts are trying to wish away the pandemic. But wouldn’t you expect our state and local government leaders to be shouting to the rafters that we need more testing? You would think the Democrats especially would be eager to point the finger at the murderer-in-chief in Washington.
Many people on the radical left —including some of its most intelligent voices—are suspicious if not downright hostile to Malthusian and Neo-Malthusian arguments seeking to limit and ideally reduce the human population footprint on the planet. Besides regarding Malthus as a misguided and above all anachronistic upper class philosopher, they advance a series of arguments that rest on largely irrefutable facts…
PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—Bernie Sanders and other ( so called ) progressive Dems are now calling for a 10% cut in military spending. So, even if they succeed, that means only 40+% of your taxes will go down that rabbit hole. This writer, for years, was part of a movement to demand a 25% cut from this obscene military spending. I even spoke to my local city council, mentioning the other cites that signed on to this resolution. As one can figure, it got nowhere. Now, years later ( and with even higher amounts spent) the radicals want 10% cut. Go figure.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Generally speaking, humans are confused about the nature of experience and their thoughts and actions are largely governed by unconscious conditioning patterns. Rather than experiencing life as it actually shows up, we tend to experience it through layers of mental narratives about what’s really going on which distort our ability to experience things lucidly.
Becoming conscious of your inner world brings clarity to your internal dynamics in exactly the same way that becoming conscious of your external world brings clarity to world dynamics: you are able to see what’s really happening.