Tag: good and evil
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Various and et cetera, March ’24 edition
programming note: this is part of a series of three unrelated mini-posts, the topmost of which is always guaranteed not to be about politics. promise! My patient the other day was a 27 year old female “Carla” here for routine STI testing. She stated she had one partner, had no symptoms at the time, and…
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Why?
The Atlantic decided to push an issue dedicated to what a second Trump administration would look like. They gathered some two dozen of their best mucky-mucks to deliver hellfire sermons on the enormous damage Trump will wreck on law, on journalism, on NATO, on the foundations of America. You can find it here (paywall removed),…
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Various and et cetera, Nov. ’23 edition
programming note: this is part of a series of three unrelated mini-posts, the topmost of which is always guaranteed not to be about politics. promise! The most popular AI take is how it’s an extinction-level event. Nobody ever explains how, exactly, AI becomes an extinction-level event, unless there’s an unspoken assumption that someone will be…
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Doing good: both hard and simple.
The other day, I took the controversial stand that abducting, raping, and murdering civilians is wrong, and that chopping off babies’ heads is wrong, and that doesn’t change depending on the baby’s religion or nationality. This was not really a statement on the eternal Israel/Palestine debate. I can’t believe I’m having to point this out…
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Moral wickedness: not a MAGA exclusive after all.
I am not going to sugar-coat it. I emailed the NYC DSA about joining up last week. A crash course on basic morality ensued. Not that I agreed with them on everything. But it’s good to get involved and make a difference, and by all accounts they were working on making a difference. Medicare for…
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Morals and Leadership
Last month saw a boomlet in reevaluation of the JFK presidency, mostly due to his lunatic, anti-Semitic, vaccine-hating, MAGA-in-the-wrong-party nephew’s candidacy. And one word kept springing up over and over: “mediocre.” But was he? His presidency was rather… dramatically cut short, and that both inflates his favorability numbers, and also deflates his numbers with professional…
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Feels Good to Be Bad
Last post was about how the right’s surrender to Donald Trump was an issue of basic, mammalian dominance and submission, little different than when a new alpha-male chimpanzee takes over the group. But in passing I mentioned another part of his appeal: the appeal of being a bad person. There has never been a worse,…
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Follow-up: When politics becomes free of any policy.
It’s always darkly hilarious whenever some old-school conservative is stunned to find his New Right friends no longer give a crap about old-school conservative concerns. Today, it’s NRO’s Michael New flummoxed that somehow, Matt Schlapp’s CPAC, the most important series of gatherings for Republicans since the Ford administration, overlooks the whole abortion issue when it…
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Character as destiny: part III
Moral character is wholly independent of religious identity, as mentioned in part I of the series. But religions typically give or describe the moral code of a society, and the efforts of the religious adherent to follow the moral code — or not — can be quite revealing. One of the “jokes” I like to…
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Character as Destiny: Part II
Allow a detour in this series into the realm of fiction before we return our real world heroes and villains. Evil, and the failure of good, is a bit of a theme in Shakespeare. MacBeth was all about the titular character, and his wife, breaking bad in the service of raw ambition. Yet it was…
forbiddencomma 