The shifting of conservative and reform parties

I have been re-reading the classic work On Liberty published in 1859 by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). In it, he emphasizes the importance of allowing complete freedom for people to advocate ideas, even if they seem to contradict what seems to everyone to be obviously true because he says that we never know what is true or false and that it is by being challenged by alternative views that ideas become strengthened if they are good ones or overthrown because they are false, both outcomes being preferable to a fossilized unquestioned orthodoxy. He says, “The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors.”
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“Vote for us now. Learn our plan later”

It is usually the case that political parties each lay out some form of manifesto before an election to help voters decide whom they plan to support. The Republican party seems to have decided to reverse that practice.

The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has been reluctant to release details of what Republicans would do should they retake Congress in the midterms, with McConnell saying only an agenda will be revealed “when we take it back”.

…

“If we’re fortunate enough to have the majority next year, I’ll be the majority leader,” McConnell told reporters. “I’ll decide in consultation with my members what to put on the floor.

Got that? He’s saying to vote for them first and after the election they will tell you what their legislative agenda is. Although this is a perversion of what politics should be, it makes for a kind of cynical sense and McConnell is as cynical as they come.
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People of color make for easy scapegoats

It is not uncommon for people who make up, for whatever reason, some story that they were the victim of a seemingly random attack that led to robbery or assault, to claim that their assailant was a person of color, a phenomenon known as a ‘racial hoax’. In doing so, they are taking advantage of the fact that such attacks get more media coverage and, because of the nature of racial prejudices in the US, are more likely to be believed. When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he took advantage of this prejudice with a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican platform as the centerpiece of his campaign, saying that the Mexicans coming into the country were drug dealers and criminals and that his wall would stop them.
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Euphemisms for death

It is a curious feature of people that many do not like to use the word ‘dead’ to describe the end of life of their loved ones and resort to various euphemisms, such as ‘passed away’. It may be something that will slowly go away as people get used to the idea of speaking about death more matter-of-factly and not as a taboo subject to be avoided.

People’s attitudes change. I remember an uncle of mine saying that he did not like people using the word ‘pregnant’ and preferred that they say that someone is ‘expecting’. And he was a doctor! Nowadays if you say someone is ‘expecting’ you are likely to get the puzzled query, “Expecting what?”

But the confusion that euphemisms can cause does lend itself to much humor as in this comic strip.

(Pickles)

What is so hard about the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness?

I am a materialist in the sense that I think that all phenomena arise due to material entities interacting according to laws of nature. I have seen no reason to think that anything supernatural or mystical is needed to be invoked to explain anything. I have sometimes been asked by people, usually the religious seeking to challenge my atheistic viewpoint that the material world is all there is and does not allow for any gods, as to how I can explain love. They seem to think that love is an immaterial quantity and that believing in its existence requires the same leap of faith as believing in a god. I reply that love is an emotion that is created by the workings of my brain that releases certain substances that cause me to have that feeling I point out that when I die, any love that I feel for anyone or anything will die with me. It does not survive the death of my brain.
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Women surfers in Sri Lanka

When it comes to gender issues, Sri Lanka is a land of contradictions. In many areas there is a very high degree of equality. Women can be found in large numbers (sometimes the majority) in government, education, academia, business, and the professions, and it is common for them to occupy the highest positions in all those areas. So in that sense the country is quite advanced. But it is also the case that when it comes to social life, there is still quite a lot of gender disparity. Women are expected to be the main caregivers and homemakers in the family even when they are equal or the major breadwinners. This becomes more so when one leaves the more cosmopolitan metropolitan areas and move into the rural regions.

So I was interested in this article that spoke about how women living in a coastal area had to overcome objections in order to take up surfing. It began when a woman from California invited her neighbor to join her, offering to teach her.
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Don’t unnecessarily kill off animals in dramas!

One of the nice things about the arrival of streaming services is that we now get to see many programs produced in countries where the language is other than English. I tend to watch a lot of police procedurals, a genre that seems to be very popular worldwide as can be seen from the many mini-series that are being shown in a variety of languages. (Spoiler alert: In what follows, there is a spoiler for a minor plot line in the Spanish (Galician) series Bitter Daisies that can be seen on Netflix.)

In these shows, there are of course human corpses galore but one expects them so their appearance does not really disturb unless the filmmakers go out of their way to show blood and gore and violence, which, fortunately few of them do. Most often, the dead bodies are just briefly seen in the crime scene or in the morgue or the autopsy room.
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The Republican dilemma: How to keep Trump from wrecking their plans

The Republican party should be very complacent about their chances of winning majorities in both the US Senate and House of Representatives in the mid-term elections to be held in November. Usually the party that holds the presidency loses seats in mid-term elections and since the Democrats currently hold such wafer-thin majorities, even a slight swing away from them would make them the minority in both chambers. In addition Joe Biden has particularly low ratings and the issue of inflation is hurting him. The only upside for Biden and the Democrats is if the pandemic really and truly goes away, the country opens up again, and the economy starts booming with lots of jobs being created. The Ukraine war is a wild card whose effect on US elections will be hard to predict.

But clearly there is some concern in the Republican party leadership that there is a wild card that could mess up their plans and that is Donald Trump. He clearly sees his own needs and satisfying his ego as the most important thing and the needs of the Republican party a distant second.
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