In the entirety of U.S. history, where does Goethe’s quote here best apply?

Most Americans would agree that it’s the behavior of Trump supporters post the 2020 election, their clinging to the baseless claim that the election was rigged, and the mindless hatred they feel for the rest of the country’s people as the “woke, radical left.”

Another solid answer is our population’s ignoring the challenges beset upon us by global warming.  As the late Kurt Vonnegut put it, when he saw what was happening shortly before his death, “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.”

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As we can see here, Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus represented the concept that, for man to acquire the best for himself, he needed to be woke, i.e., concern for the well-being of others.

Only recently did the principle of indifference to the suffering of other people come into full bloom here in the United States.  Perhaps it can slip out through the same putrid crack in the wall it entered.

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One common trait among many of our civilization’s great thinkers is their humility.   Perhaps this started with Socrates and the line for which he’s so well known: “I know that I know nothing,” meaning that true wisdom is knowing you don’t know anything.

About 2000 years later, in the 1660s, we have this quote at left from Isaac Newton.

Of course, not all great minds through the ages were so modest.  Take, for example, the physicists of the late 19th Century who were convinced that everything of any real importance in their field had already been discovered.  A few years later we have Einstein, followed by quantum mechanics.  Oops!  That belief didn’t age well.

All this raises a series of unanswerable questions. Is there an end to physics, i.e. a point at which we honestly do have our arms wrapped around cosmology and all our puzzles have been solved: wormholes, time travel, dark energy and matter, string theory, unified field theory, parallel universes, another universe before the big bang?  If there is such an end, how close are we to it?

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Our local National Public Radio affiliate broadcasts a weekly radio program called “The Reluctant Therapist,” in which the host interviews experts on subjects related to mental health.  Today’s subject explored the difference, if one exists at all, between religion and spirituality.

To me, this comes down in large part to how one defines the words.  The broad sense of the word religion, as it applies to practices like Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Jainism, seems indistinguishable from spiritualism, in that adherents hold belief systems to the effect that there are dimensions to human conscious that transcend the mental and physical functions of our bodies.

 

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The author of the meme here makes a great analogy.

Of course, disseminating the Big Lie, i.e., that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Donald Trump is far more difficult now that the right wing “news” media like Fox have learned that promoting this fabrication on the air can be extremely expensive.  The damages in the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News came to $787.5 million.

So, if Trump wants to continue the lie, he has to do it more or less on his own.

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I grant that the concept here has merit, especially re: the use of otherwise useless land.  But bicycling under it doesn’t seem like a pleasant experience. And does the cyclist enter and exit?

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In this short and extremely general video, a representative of ExxonMobil explains Direct Air Capture (DAC), a set of technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Anyone seeking to solve this problem needs to deal with the challenge that the concentration of carbon dioxide is extremely low, about 400 ppm or 0.04%, meaning that 99.96% is something else, mostly nitrogen.  Thus, the enterprise necessarily involves sucking massive volumes of air through a filter, a process that itself has a huge carbon footprint, looking for something that’s very scarce.  The concept is doomed to failure, and everyone, including Exxon, knows this.

If Exxon were honest, they would admit it, and attack the problem from another direction, i.e., transitioning away from the consumption of fossil fuels.  But we’re talking about the company that has known since the late 1970s that their products were slowly destroying our planet but conspired to withhold that information from the world’s people, including the scientists who may have been able to deal with climate change before its ruinous effects set in.

Today, Exxon is throwing out more red herrings (like DAC) so that it can continue to bake the Earth.  As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, “There are no words in the English language that describe acts like this.  The word ‘evil’ doesn’t even come close.”

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I honestly don’t know what would make an intelligent person say that.

Trump won in 2016, got more than 71 million votes in 2020, and is the runaway candidate for Republican nomination in 2024.

He’s a criminal sociopath, but he’s much beloved by almost half of the U.S. population. If we’re truly “better than that,” it’s time to start showing it.

 

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Sadly, we live in a country where many people have neither, but they’re too ignorant to realize it.

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“Hate” is the wrong word here.

I don’t hate Trump supporters, though I certainly have a low opinion of them in terms of their capacity to reason and to feel compassion for others.

In a way, I feel sorry for them.

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