One-legged Goal

This is simply amazing!

Why I left the GOP

This article is worth reading , not so much because the author criticizes the worldview of the GOP, but because he describes, with great clarity, how our worldviews are constructed and preserved - and how inaccurate they can be when they are the product of confined experience.

I once hoped that the internet would prove an antidote to this process of epistemic closure, but I'm no longer as optimistic about this.

Joe Huster

P.S. I've got to change my profile.  I'm 52!

Vote For Cancer!

I just saw the following quote from Chris Rock.

“Saying that you won’t vote for Obama because he didn’t fix everything is like saying “Obama can’t cure cancer, so I’m voting for cancer.””

Okay.  Calm down!  I’m neither alleging nor implying that Republicans are cancer.  It was a joke.  Lighten up! 

That said, the underlying logic has a ring to it.  The Republicans created a huge economic mess.  Obama has not been able to completely repair the damage.  So I should vote Republican?

Interesting argument.

Joe H.

"He's Gone!"

In last night’s episode of “Breaking Bad,” Walter White (“WW”)  and Jesse Pinkman (“JP”) discuss the whereabouts of “Mike”- the muscle for the late Gus Fring’s meth distribution operation, and recent partner of WW’s and JP’s reconstituted operation.  Mike is about to be arrested by the DEA and is fleeing.  WW agrees to retrieve Mike’s drop bag - a bag containing a pistol and a large amount of cash - and bring it to Mike so that he can escape.

Their meeting did not go well.  It ended with WW killing Mike for nothing more than showing flagrant disrespect.  This, by the way, is new.  All prior killing by WW and JP was genuinely necessary for their own survival.  Here, WW kills because Mike refuses to respect him as the great man that he has become.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, anyone?

But I digress.  When WW returns to their meth lab headquarters, JP asks him what happened?  He asks, “did you get the money to Mike?  WW responded “Yes.”  JP then asks “did he get away?”  To this WW responded “he’s gone.” 

“He’s gone?”  Well, that’s certainly correct.  Mike’s corpse may have been in the trunk of the car that WW and JP were standing next to, but he was definitely “gone.”  Still, everyone can see that WW was lying to JP.  He combined JP’s knowledge of what Mike intended to do, with a technically true but intentionally misleading response, to lead JP to believe something that WW knew was false.  It was a great moment of irony - made so by the obviousness of the lie.

What interests me is how partisans can sincerely deny equally obvious instances of this type of lie in Politics?  Take, for example, the Republican’s (now campaign foundational) claim that Obama said “you didn’t build that.”  Its certainly correct to note that Obama said that - he uttered those exact words.  But the context in which Obama uttered those words makes it unmistakably clear that he said that successful business people did not build the infrastructure and “amazing American system” that allowed their business to succeed.

Yet Republicans keep claiming, with a straight face, that Obama said successful people did not build their businesses - the government did.  Hence the constant refrain “we built it!”

This is an obvious lie - so obvious that it is hard to believe it would get any traction at all.  But it has. What’s obviously a lie between WW and JP is undeniably and irrefutably true when it comes from the mouth of Mitt Romney.

That’s psychologically remarkable!

Any thoughts?

Joe H.

Debt Debacle

This new article about Mitt Romney's business career at Bain Capital   by Matt Taibibi in the Rolling Stone is really disturbing, but worth reading nonetheless!

Joe Huster