Are we living in an Age of Unreason?

I have been thinking about how future historians will characterize the period through which we are living and the label ‘The Age of Unreason’ popped into my mind as a suitable one (at least for the US). The reason is that I marvel at the kinds of things that people currently believe and are doing that seem so detached from reality and untethered to reason. Here is a short list of things that immediately came to mind and I am sure that there are others.

Anti-vax: Vaccines are some of the greatest inventions in medicine, saving countless lives all over the world. The rapid development of the vaccines for covid-19 was a stupendous achievement. And yet, we have people refusing to take it because they think that Covid-19 was an intentionally planned outbreak and part of some plot and are willing to trust completely untested and sometimes dangerous alternatives. Some of these people are even giving up on Trump because he does not buy in to all their claims.
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Ted Baxter is the archetype for TV personalities who pretend to be journalists

Many of the people whom one sees on cable TV ‘news’ shows are not really journalists but people selected for their looks and attitudes. Some old timers may remember the Mary Tyler Moore TV comedy series in which she plays an assistant producer on a local TV new station. Much of the humor in that show comes from their TV news anchor Ted Baxter (played by Ted Knight) who was pompous and ignorant but had the look and the voice of a TV anchor, at least by the standards of that time when they were pretty much all middle-aged white men.

Chris Kaltenbach writes that in the film Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrell models his character on Baxter.

Burgundy’s is a character profile that fans of television’s “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” know well. For seven seasons, pompous blowhard Ted Baxter anchored the news on Minneapolis’ WJM-TV, mangling the English language, acting as his own biggest fan, placing more importance on the color of his blazer than on his understanding of the news. He was an insufferable buffoon who rarely did anything right, who believed the world existed for him and him alone.

Fans of the show loved him. Critics loved him. His peers loved him, awarding actor Ted Knight a pair of Emmys for his portrayal. Who knew that Knight and the show’s writers were creating an archetype that would still be going strong three decades later?
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[Show co-creator Allan] Burns, who would go on to win a pair of writing Emmys for the show, says he and Brooks patterned Baxter after a pair of news anchors popular in Los Angeles at the time the show debuted in 1970.

“[Moore’s] aunt was the assistant to the president of the local CBS affiliate here in L.A., and so Jim and I spent a lot of time hanging around that newsroom just to try and get the flavor of it,” he says. “There was an anchorman there, Jerry Dunphy — Jerry was one of those stentorian, firm-jawed, gray-haired guys who looked right on camera, but who was not a newsman, like so many of the anchors are not. They’re really newsreaders more than anything else.

Baxter would constantly mangle the script written for him to read, to the chagrin of the writers. In this clip, Baxter reads the script oblivious that the visuals accompanying it are wrong.

Heather Hendershot makes the case that the fictional Baxter, for all his faults, is better than the current crop of media news pundits.

The skills of a cult leader

When we think of cult leaders, we tend to think of those with large followings. But that same kind of phenomenon can occur with smaller numbers, even within households, because the kinds of skills used by a cult leader to control others can be seen in abusive relationships where the abused person seems unable to escape from the clutches of the abusers, even though on the surface they seem to have the ability to walk away. The abuser seems to know exactly what buttons to push with each captive, which combination of threats and affection work to keep them from leaving.

I was struck by the case of Larry Ray who has just been sentenced to 60 years in prison for trafficking. It starts with his daughter Talia asking her seven dorm roommates at Sarah Lawrence College if her father, who had just been released from prison, could stay in their dorm for a short while and they agreed.
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The Santos lies keep coming

According to Politico:

Embattled Rep. George Santos has claimed that reports and videos documenting him performing in drag are both “outrageous” and “categorically false.”

But nearly a dozen years ago, Santos himself appears to have confirmed that he participated in drag shows while he was a teenager living in Brazil.

A Wikipedia page accessed by POLITICO shows a user named Anthony Devolder — a Santos alias — writing that he “startted [sp] his ‘stage’ life at age 17 as an gay night club [sp] DRAG QUEEN and with that won sevral [sp] GAY ‘BEAUTY PAGENTS [sp].’”

That he may have once been a drag queen is not nor should be an issue. However, I will be skeptical that he actually won beauty pageants until he provides proof, because he seems to have a penchant for exaggerating his accomplishments, such as claiming that he was a volleyball star at Baruch College when they won a championship, when he did not even attend that institution. He seems to be incapable of making up simple lies, he seems compelled to adorn them with further grandiosities.
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Public libraries survive despite threats

I love libraries. They are truly egalitarian spaces that are open to everyone and enables anyone free access to information, be it in the form of books, newspapers, magazines, or the internet. I have never met a librarian who did not seem genuinely pleased to be asked to help me find out something or seek out a resource. They are welcoming spaces. The Peterborough Town Library in New Hampshire, established in 1833, is reported to be the first documented free, public library in the world, though claims of being the ‘first’ for anything are always ripe for challenge.

One thing to note is that the modern library is far more than a repository for books. It also provides classes, workshops, internet access, resume and tax help, and serves as a meeting space for community events, as community gathering places, and so forth
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Harvard reverses rejection of Israel critic

Kenneth Roth, the outgoing heard of Human Rights Watch, was offered a fellowship by Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy school of government but that offer was vetoed by the school’s dean Doug Elmendorf for what became clear was uneasiness with Roth’s role in HRW’s criticisms of Israel’s human rights record, which included a scathing report that accused Israel of practicing a form of apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories. It joined an Amnesty International report that described Israel’s policies in those same terms. That apartheid description has become widely accepted but is opposed by the Israel lobby in the US.
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Media obsession with the British monarchy

I suspect many readers of this blog are as wearied as I am from being bombarded with news headlines about the the Windsor family’s internal fights. It seems like it never ends.

This 11-year-old clip from the Australian sketch comedy team The Chasers pokes well-deserved ridicule at the media’s obsession with the most trivial details about that annoying family. And that was long before the current media binge about whatever the hell is the latest topic in this long-running soap opera.

Wasting food

I hate to see food wasted. I really, really hate it. I will try and eat everything in the fridge, even if I don’t like it, if the alternative is throwing it away. I will cut out the bits of food that are spoiled and eat the rest. It is not that I am cheap. It is just that I think that throwing food away should be the absolute last resort. It really bothers me that so much food is wasted in the US. Part of it is due to the sheer size and complexity of the food distribution system in which the producer and consumer are separated by such vast distances that some wastage is inevitable in storage and transportation. This is perhaps understandable as an unavoidable consequence of creating complex societies.
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Mystifying behavior

I know that prejudice exists. I know that some people carry their prejudicial animosities to extremes. But despite that awareness, I am still surprised when I read reports like this.

A woman was arrested for stabbing an 18-year-old girl in the head multiple times on a Bloomington Transit bus in Indiana.

Billie R. Davis, 56, repeatedly stabbed the teen using a pocket knife while she was waiting for the bus doors to open at the intersection of West Fourth Street and the B-Line Trail at around 4:45 p.m. on Wednesday, according to police.
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According to the police’s review of the stabbing, footage from Bus No. 1777 showed no interaction between the two women prior to the attack.
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A passenger who witnessed the attack reportedly followed Davis off the bus and updated police on her location. Davis was arrested near the intersection of Kirkwood Avenue and South Washington Street.

According to an affidavit of probable cause, Davis said she attacked the 18-year-old for being Chinese.

“Race was a factor in why she stabbed her,” the affidavit read, according to The Herald-Times. “Davis made a statement that it would be one less person to blow up our country.”
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According to the affidavit, Davis had the intention to kill the teen as footage shows her unfolding her knife and stabbing the victim seven times in the head.

The actions of people like Davis baffle me. Her thinking that Asians are trying to blow up “her” country is not what puzzles me. Thanks to Trump and the Republicans whipping up nativist and anti-Chinese sentiment, such beliefs are sadly all too common. But did she carry a knife with her all the time in the event that she ran across some Asian she could kill? Or was it a spontaneous action that was caused by having an Asian person next to her that caused her to whip out a knife she happened to be carrying?

It is all so pointless. Don’t these people do a simple cost-benefit analysis of their actions? After all, killing one Asian would still leave millions of them alive so the benefit is slight. But the cost to her personally would be huge because she is surely going to prison fr a long time.

Finally, news reports that month-over-month CPI has dropped

In a recent post, I complained that the media tends to report just the year-over-year inflation figures even though those numbers can remain high even when inflation has stopped or prices have even fallen. I said that the month-over-month figure is a better indicator of current inflation and should be reported as well.

Well today, they reported just that, confirming my suspicion that inflation likely peaked back in June and since then has ceased or even declined.

Prices dropped in the US in December for the first time since May 2020, in an encouraging sign that the inflation crisis may be easing.

According to the latest consumer price index (CPI) – which measures a broad range of goods and services – the cost of living dropped 0.1% in December compared with a rise of 0.1% in November. The annual rate of inflation fell to 6.5% from 7.1% in the previous month, the sixth straight month of yearly declines, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Falling gas prices were by far the largest contributor to the monthly decrease, falling 9.4% over the month, more than offsetting increases in shelter indexes, which rose 0.8% over the month and were 7.5% higher than a year ago.
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US inflation peaked at 9.1% in June, its highest rate since 1982, as the war in Ukraine drove up energy costs and supply-chain issues in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic continued to push prices higher.

Despite the fall, the inflation rate remains more than three times as high as the Fed’s annual target rate of 2%, and is expected to remain elevated through 2023.

The professionals at the Federal Reserve know all this of course and likely take both CPI rates and other factors into account but the general public may not be as aware and giving only the year-over-year figure may make them fearful that inflation is still high when it might have stopped or even declined.