Geoff's Miscellany

Warning, the quote below has bad language, the misspellings are the authors.

If you focus on them, you’re missing his point. @Aja_Cortes, a fitness bro on Twitter explained what he thinks the problem with conservatives is:

Steinem argued in the 1980s that opposing abortion is actually a secret form of Nazism, and she repeats the argument in an interview below:

Well, the new generation of reader is instructing me by saying that these essays are still relevant …. on a more serious note, to put it mildly, is why Hitler was actually elected, and he was elected and he campaigned against abortion. I mean, that was — he padlocked the family planning clinics. Okay, so that is still relevant in the terms of the right wing. So there were very few things, actually, that I had to take out.

Conservatives rarely conserve anything. This is well known.

What they like to do is make conservative cases for making society worse. For instance:

henever you find an article that begins with the title, “The Conservative Case” for or against something, lock your door, check your wallet, and grab your gun. You know what’s coming is an unadulterated sell-out of everything “conservatism” purports to hold dear.

I don't watch the Big Bang Theory and I intentionally don't watch shows with laugh tracks. BBT has a laugh track and I just decided to watch a bit of it without the laugh track:

Very little to none of that is funny. But why are there laugh tracks? Well, they work. People laugh out loud more, even when they rate material just as funny as the group that has no laugh track and does not laugh out loud. But I think more work needs to be done on longer exposure to laugh tracks. Even brief interventions can change views, which is upstream from behavior. Also, parody works wonders at promoting negative viewpoints about the target of the parody, which can ultimately change behavior.

I cannot tell if this is the most powerful piece of journalism ever written or a recently discovered H.P. Lovecraft fragment, but here is a "twittor thred" by one Bronze Aged Mantis:

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As promised I release a dark secret on New Year's Eve...the most grotesque plans in motion revealed to me by mole inside Karl Rove office, regarding what he, Huber, the Utah deep state, and establishment GOP is planning ...what Romney thinks he has masterminded

The ever-interesting Bruce Charlton explains why people are "naturally atheists."

The fact that all modern public discourse excludes the divine.

As a modern child grows up, he becomes socialised, he becomes trained in modern public discourse of many kinds: school work, everything to do with the mass media, sports, pastimes, hobbies... and all of these exclude the divine.

It Just Isn't There. The lexicon of objects that function in the system exclude the divine; the causality of the system excludes the divine.

As the child reaches adolescence - these modes of thought become more dominant, and they become habitual to the extent of being simply taken for granted; and eventually they become so habitual as to be extremely difficult to break out from.

This process is exacerbated in the world of work, where nearly all jobs exclude the divine (in whatever social system, the law, medicine, science, government, politics, police, the military, engineering - as well as the mass media and academia) - becoming competent means internalising these 'materialist' ways of thinking; thus, excluding the divine.

Socrates was so useful in all circumstances and in all ways, that any observer gifted with ordinary perception can see that nothing was more useful than the companionship of Socrates, and time spent with him in any place and in any circumstances. The very recollection of him in absence brought no small good to his constant companions and followers; for even in his light moods they gained no less from his society than when he was serious. 

Together we will make America Great Again, better than ever before.

It’s a phrase and sentiment that is not unique to Trump and I recall hearing Bill Clinton say it several times and saw a Reagan speech in class in which Ronald Reagan also said it: