Essentially My Life...

Please, Keep Looking

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are. Mindfulness, courage and truth. I don't know if they'll carry the day, but I know they're the only values worth having.

Conservatives Aren't Moral at All. They're Tribal

What liberals have a hard time understanding is that conservatives, while constantly paying lip service to what they call morality, actually do not accept the rule of law, or any universal moral imperatives.

In their view, what other tribes do is wrong, period, and what their tribe does is right, period — up to and including torture, encouraging the murder of journalists and unarmed black citizens and lying the nation into war for private profit.

America: A Land That Has Left Truth Behind

"The Oxford English Dictionaries named 'post-truth' its word of the year in November 2016, right before the U.S. election.

"Citing a 2,000 percent spike in usage – due to Brexit and the American presidential campaign – they defined post-truth as 'relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.'

"Ideology, in other words, takes precedence over reality.

"When an individual believes their thoughts can influence reality, we call it 'magical thinking' and might worry about their mental health. When a government official uses ideology to trump reality, it’s more like propaganda, and it puts us on the road to fascism.

"As Yale philosopher Jason Stanley argues, 'The key thing is that fascist politics is about identifying enemies, appealing to the in-group (usually the majority group), and smashing truth and replacing it with power.'"

— Prof. Lee McIntyre

Life Under the Liar in Chief

I’ve always thought that people lie too easily, and don’t fully appreciate what damage they do by lying. And now we have an object lesson in that principle: Donald Trump, the ultimate liar, the man to whom truth is a joke, completely meaningless. And, not coincidentally, he is one of the greatest disasters in U.S. history.

Whipping the Watchdogs

The corporate, political and bureaucratic imperatives under which we operate today preclude the idea that anyone owes the American public the truth. That’s why professional journalism is not merely dying because of shifting commercial considerations. It is actively being slain.

How the Uneducated Con the Gullible

Republicans always think that because they are ignorant of something, that makes it untrue.