Neal's Rants (Mostly Political)

WARNING: This is where all the really political things are found. Know that I am so liberal that I don’t mind at all that others are conservative—as long their your opinions are based on facts. While I have mellowed considerably with age, I still suffer fools poorly.

As Artemus Ward reputedly observed: “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble, it’s the things we do know that just ain’t so.”

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conservatives not exactly enthralled by trump are a problem

April 18, 2020September 17, 2018 by Neal

THIS ONE IS A DOOZY! The question on Quora was, “Would liberals be surprised to learn that conservatives aren’t exactly enthralled with Donald Trump either?” One must make some assumptions when engaging other Internetally, so I assume that the person who posted this question is politically conservative. I also assume that he assumes that asking it displays his feelings and opinion about the current administration as being reasonable. READ MORE

it was fifty years ago today, mayor daley sent his troops to play

April 18, 2020August 28, 2018 by Neal

MY SEVENTEENTH YEAR of this life-cycle opened with the Viet Cong launching the Tet Offensive, in which they put the lie to everything our government, our military, and our media had been telling us about the war “over there.” This supposedly causes President Lyndon Johnson to announce that he will not seek re-election. READ MORE

the hydra of hate bubbling beneath america’s surface

June 29, 2018June 21, 2018 by Neal

I SKIPPED “MONSTER TALK” with Blake Smith as he prepared for CryptidCon in the latest Skeptic newsletter. The question “What does science have to tell us about monsters” didn’t attract my interest. Nor did common misconceptions about the origins and development of identical and fraternal twins. READ MORE

george zimmerman and self-defense

March 24, 2020April 30, 2018 by Neal

I RARELY PAY ATTENTION to the letters written into the local newspaper. Too many letters are from misinformed individuals who almost always vote Rep*blican and actually believe that Limbaugh and Beck and O’Reilly are sources for actual “news.”

I am astounded by the people willing to put their name in print and claim credit for something that would take them five minutes of research on the internet to discover was not so. READ MORE

an experiment that actually curbed hate speech on the internet

April 18, 2020April 30, 2018 by Neal

I HATE BULLIES and I see internet trolls as bullies. So I hate internet trolls. But aside from Facebook, where I can keep them curbed by excluding them from my comment thread, I have little interaction on social media platforms on the internet. Consequently, I have little interaction with bullies and trolls on the internet. READ MORE

barbara lee and the boundless consequences of war

March 24, 2020April 15, 2018 by Neal

“SO YOU THINK YOU’RE RIGHT and everybody else is wrong?” I heard those words from my father many times while growing up. Of course, the rationale behind those words is sound: most of the times we hold an opinion that differs with that of 99% of everybody else, then 99% of the time we will probably be wrong. READ MORE

lies, damn lies, fake news, and the misinformation ecosystem

April 18, 2020April 8, 2018 by Neal

FAKE NEWS AIN’T NEW NEWS. The term has been in fairly regular if not quite common use for years: it initially referred to the mis/disinformation and propaganda circulated by the thousands of well-connected, rightwing radio talk shows for propaganda. It grew to even vaster proportions with the emergence of the millions of ‘conservative’ websites and blogs known as the Rightwing Blogosphere. READ MORE

in a dark time, the eye begins to see a world of early childhood damage

April 18, 2020March 22, 2018 by Neal

WE LIVE IN A WORLD of early childhood damage, says Morris Berman. This is what caught my eye when I was turned on to Berman’s website, Dark Ages America. The reader will find below excerpts from an interview with Berman by Murray Cox for Omni magazine (August 1991 issue). READ MORE

right-wing extremists inject hateful rhetoric

April 18, 2018March 18, 2018 by Neal

AS I HAVE MENTIONED over and over again, the prevalence (that’s a bit of understatement there) and virulence of rightwingnuts on various social media on the Internet—how they inject hate and fear here, there, and everywhere. I thought I’d let someone with a bigger pulpit reiterate some of my points: in October 2017, Right Wing Watch featured “White Supremacy Figured Out How To Become YouTube Famous” by Jared Holt. READ MORE

FAVORITE QUOTES

"Sometimes fear needs fearing more than the things we fear." – Elizabeth Bligh

"If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you see the cost of hiring an amateur." – Nealism

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. We should, therefore, claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." – Karl Popper

“A state of skepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision.” – Edward Gibbon

"Time is a created thing. To say, ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’” ~ Lao Tzu

"So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old." – John Stuart Mill

"Clearly, any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have length, breadth, thickness, and duration." – H.G. Wells

“When you speak truth to power, power fights back." – Alexandria Octavia-Cortez

"Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind." – Virginia Woolf

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." –Albert Einstein

"Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it." – M. Scott Peck

"The future has a way of arriving unannounced." – George F. Will

"Right now, I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before." – Steven Wright

“How did it get so late so soon?” ― Dr. Seuss

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” – Philip K. Dick

"While all acronyms are initialisms, most initialisms are not acronyms." – Q (lol)

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble—it's what you know that just ain't so." – Mark Twain

"I don't trust anybody I'm not close enough to kill." – Kelly Burkhardt

"I have lived with many Zen masters, all of them cats." – Eckhart Tolle