“However, a lot of these existing laws are poorly enforced. Tens of thousands of felons or fugitives attempt to buy guns each year and are not prosecuted. Straw purchasers are under-prosecuted. Federal background check databases are incomplete, and federal agencies routinely fuck up and allow people to buy guns who shouldn’t.
That said, there are still loopholes one could drive a truck through.”
“Nordic welfare institutions influence work incentives for women in a number of ways. The Nordic welfare system has been designed to encourage parents to engage in market work while benefiting from various forms of public funding. But research suggests that national paid and unpaid leave policies, work entitlements, and other family benefits encourage women to work part-time rather than full-time. This hinders their ability to develop top careers.
The European Commission’s research suggests that part-time work often accompanies public parental benefits in Sweden. Eva Meyersson Milgrom and Trond Petersen similarly conclude in a study that the glass ceiling ‘appears to be more severe in the Scandinavian countries with their generous family policies, than in the U.K., U.S., and other comparable countries.'”
“The clearest example of this trailblazing is the modern conservative ascendance, starring Ronald Reagan himself. Reagan ushered in the conservative era of California politics when he was elected governor in 1966. He beat a two-term incumbent liberal Democrat, Pat Brown (father of Jerry Brown) and muscled out the more conventional progressive Republicans (yes, they existed) of that time.
Reagan then did largely the same thing at the national level roughly 15 years later. He bested the more conventional Republican candidates and beat the incumbent liberal Democrat Jimmy Carter.”
“White Evangelical Christians opposed desegregation tooth and nail. Where pressed, they made cheap, cosmetic compromises, like Billy Graham’s concession to allow black worshipers at his crusades. Graham never made any difficult statements on race, never appeared on stage with his “black friend” Martin Luther King after 1957, and he never marched with King. When King delivered his ‘I Have a Dream Speech,’ Graham responded with this passive-aggressive gem of Southern theology, ‘Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.’ For white Southern evangelicals, justice and compassion belong only to the dead.”
“The good news is that anti-elite anybody-but-Hillary-ism doesn’t really imply serious public appetite for anything like alt-right authoritarianism. The bad news is that the liberal-democratic capitalist welfare state and the so-called ‘neoliberal’ global order is far and away the best humanity has ever done, and we’ve taken it for granted. We could very well trash it in a fit of pique, and wind up a middle-income kleptocracy boiling with civil strife and/or destabilize the global order in a way that ends in utter horror.”
from: March 5, 2018 at 05:22PM
from: March 4, 2018 at 09:04AM
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Highlights include:
“It is therefore my opinion that religion is here to enforce tail risk management across generations, as its binary and unconditional rules are easy to teach and enforce.
Judging people on their beliefs is not scientific.
There is no such thing as “rationality” of a belief, there is rationality of action.
The rationality of an action can only be judged by evolutionary considerations.
Rationality is not what has conscious verbalistic explanatory factors; it is only what aids survival, avoids ruin.
Rationality is risk management, period.”
“The only way to break through a blind ideology is to be confronted by a compellingly argued contrary belief. Most of our moments of clarity will come from a great book, from an in-depth article, from a conversation with a friend more educated on an issue.”
from: February 26, 2018 at 11:59PM
from: February 19, 2018 at 10:52PM
“The wishes that underpin religious belief have to do with deliverance from human helplessness. We are vulnerable to the forces of nature, such as disease, natural disasters and ultimately death, and also to the acts of other human beings who can harm us, kill us or treat us unjustly. In recognising our helplessness, Freud thinks, we are thrown back on an infantile prototype: memories of the utter helplessness that we experienced as infants – our complete and appalling dependence on the adults who cared for us (or failed to care for us). Religious people deal with their feelings of helplessness, he suggested, by clinging to the illusion of a powerful, protective deity who will grant them an afterlife.”
[…]
“In the Kleinian scheme, there are two primary forms of psychotic anxiety: paranoid anxiety, which is the terror of being persecuted by evil, eternal forces, and depressive anxiety, which is the sense that one is guilty of having destroyed what one loves and values. Klein also described what she called the manic defence, which is a denial of helplessness and dependence on others by delusions of power, grandeur and self-sufficiency, and is expressed in the attitudes of triumph, control and contempt.”
“It is no use erecting barricades around you while hoping at the same time others will see the blossoming flower within.
The wall you construct prevents your true nature from being known to others.
It was Rumi who said: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
You must accept your vulnerability if you wish to live a wholesome life. Even the smallest act of letting down your guard is a commitment to your personal growth.”
from: February 3, 2018 at 09:48PM