More on police lies

I recently posted about how the initial police reports of incidents that are routinely used by the media in their reports often contain distortions or outright lies, all. designed to exonerate the police from any blame when things go wrong. I used the George Floyd case as one of three examples. A new report in just the state of California shows how widespread the practice is.

A review of police killings in California showed that law enforcement spokespeople frequently publish highly misleading or sometimes false information about the people they have killed. Over the last five years, the Guardian found at least a dozen examples in the state of initial police statements misrepresenting events, with major omissions about the officers’ actions, inaccurate narratives about the victims’ behaviors, or blatant falsehoods about decisive factors.
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One should not have to even say this …

… but in the propaganda world we live in in the US, it has to be constantly repeated.

Run Lula Run!

The former president of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as just Lula, lambasted the current president Jair Bolsonaro as a psychopath who has made Brazil into a global pariah.

In an interview with the Guardian, Brazil’s former leftist leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who is widely tipped to challenge Bolsonaro for the presidency after regaining his political rights – stopped short of explicitly confirming he would run. But Lula, who rose from rural poverty to become Brazil’s first working-class president, left no doubt he was plotting an extraordinary finale to one of the world’s most enduring and dramatic political careers.
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Mother Teresa’s cult of suffering

Ashlie D. Stevens reviews a new podcast series The Turning: The Sisters Who Left that talks to some of the nuns who joined Mother Teresa’s missionary order and later left because they could not take it anymore. It seemed like MT had a peculiar fixation that suffering was somehow ennobling and good for you, and the nuns had to go out of their way to adopt the most painful option in any situation.

It’s a telling detail that Mother Teresa was so intently focused on Christ’s crucifixion. While, as [producer and host Erika] Lantz put it in “The Turning,” one would anticipate that the scriptural passages that would have most impacted Mother Teresa would have centered on Jesus’ interactions with the poor, sick and hungry, she was perhaps most moved by how his pain catalyzed his holiness. 
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How to write memos

One of the things I realized early on in my working life is that what follows after the first few lines of an email or other communication rarely registers in the consciousness of people, although they may have ‘read’ it in the sense that their eyes scanned over it. So you need to make the most important point right at the start.

This cartoon captures it exactly.

(Baldo)

Hope for the end of neoliberalism in Chile

Chile was where US imperialism had one of its darkest chapters, in a history of dark chapters, where in 1973 the Richard Nixon-Henry Kissinger team first tried to destabilize the economy and then had the CIA instigate and support a military coup that violently overthrew that country’s democratically elected government and murder its president Salvador Allende because he was advocating socialist policies. The US installed the brutal dictator General Augusto Pinochet who then implemented the neoliberal agenda that the US seeks to impose via outright fascists, theocrats, and other authoritarians.

Chileans are celebrating the possible end of neoliberalism in that country that had been written into their constitution by the Pinochet regime.

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Great review of my book!

Karim Bschir, a philosopher of science at the University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland, has published a very detailed review of my book The Great Paradox of Science in the April 29, 2021 issue of the journal Metascience (This is a Springer journal and is thus behind a paywall. You can read it in full if you have the institutional access that universities often provide.) It is always gratifying for an author to have their book assigned to a reviewer who not only has a deep knowledge of the subject matter, but has clearly also read the text very carefully and summarized its content accurately and succinctly.

Since the review is behind a paywall, I will just provide the conclusions at the end where he looks at how I try to resolve the paradox that is central to the book, of why scientific theories work so well even though we have no reason to think that they represent the truth about the world or even that they are approaching the truth. (That is what the ‘anti-realist’ position referred to in the review means to philosophers of science. It does not mean that I live in some imaginary world!) Bschir’s summarizes my argument even better than I could and I hope it encourage readers of the review (and this blog!) to obtain and read my book.
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Bob Garfield fired from On The Media

I am a regular listener and supporter of the public radio show On The Media whose co-hosts over its 20-year history have been Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield. I have frequently linked to clips from the show, most recently just yesterday. Hence I was shocked to learn later that same day that Garfield has been fired from the show.

Bob Garfield, host of the public radio show and podcast On The Media, has been fired. According to a statement from New York Public Radio, an outside investigation found that Garfield violated the company’s anti-bullying policy. Garfield was the subject of a similar investigation in 2020 that resulted in, “disciplinary action and a warning about consequences if the behavior continued.”

On Twitter, the veteran journalist and critic denied that he was fired for, “bullying, per se but for yelling in 5 meetings over 20 years.” Garfield continued, “the provocations were just shocking. In time the story will emerge and it is tragic.”

I found Garfield to be a good interviewer with a droll sense of humor and and sharp sense of irony. His laid back manner on air did not prepare me for the charge that he had a bullying attitude, which just shows that one never knows how closely the public and private personas of people mesh.

Israel is increasingly recognized as an apartheid state

While Israel’s supporters keep claiming that it is a democracy, the reality is that it is an ethno-religious state that privileges the rights of the Jewish community over even its non-Jewish citizens and treats the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories in a manner that can only be described as an apartheid system. Gaza is rightly described as the world’s largest open-air prison. In addition, Israel practices collective punishment, legalized discrimination, forcible ethnic cleansing, and destroys the offices of Palestinian media outlets, all of which automatically disqualifies it from claiming the right to be called a democracy.

For the longest time, the Israel lobby in the US has managed to keep this ugly reality under wraps by lobbing the explosive charge of anti-Semitism at anyone who pointed out the truth. They were aided in this by a political and media establishment that would faithfully parrot the official line that Israel was seeking peace with the Palestinians, that a two-state solution was the way forward, that the US government was a neutral party seeking to broker peace, and that it was only the intransigence of the Palestinians that was holding back a solution, all of which have been manifestly false for a long time.
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