Month: July 2017

Greening Big Chem – Will Millenials Save Us from Ourselves?

Yes!  Some good environmental health news for a change.  And evidently driven, on the demand side, by millenials. See:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-du-pont-results-health-idUSKBN1AC2ZP

Sure, you have to view the apparent changes in Big Chem cited in the Reuters article as grudging concessions supplemented by greenwashing. Nevertheless, minimally incremental progress toward the good is better than no progress toward the good.  And I am happy to see that those socially mediated young people are moving the consumer goalposts on at least one critical issue.

(Also check out the piece on Walmart and consumer preferences that follows the Big Chem piece. When it comes to buying American, the price is not always right—despite consumer professions of patriotic buying practices, when the actual purchase is made, patriotism takes a back seat.)

How Cheating Starts, and the Path to Oligarchy

Breathing an Atmosphere of Lies

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last two years, you can probably guess why lying and other forms of spreading untruths fester with new virulence in the minds of the public (that is, that portion of the public who is paying attention to public life).

Communicating untruths, whether deliberate lies or “alternative facts” mistaken for truths through ignorance, is a very broad topic.  There are polite lies, “white lies,” or lying to protect a loved one, all of which are in a different moral universe from evil lies. The latter are the kind that constitute Fake News as well as other kinds of dishonest villainy.

If a lie inflicts harm on somebody’s Bad Guys, then justifying it may depend on whose side you’re on.

Subverting the system with lies is OK if you win.  That’s where we stand in the days of rank partisanship.

Continue reading “How Cheating Starts, and the Path to Oligarchy”

The Creep toward Autocracy – Real or Imagined?

Crossing this line is worse than uncivil, and is no joke

In the face of more and more ominous signs that the President of the United States is inciting violence against journalists, what voice among Republicans has been lifted against him?  In any substantive way: none.

Now that Donald Trump has crossed a line by tweeting a cartoon of himself physically bashing a CNN journalist, it is time for some high-ranking Republican to denounce this behavior as WRONG—not merely inappropriate or tasteless or even “loathsome,” as they are euphemistically calling it, but flat-out wrong, and not just morally but in the sense of a threat to the free press and therefore Western democracy (such as it is).

Administration spokespersons are asking why Trump detractors “can’t take a joke.”  Well, it was a joke when posted on Reddit—probably as satire—but not a joke when appropriated by the President himself. Anyone who minimizes it has put himself or herself on the wrong side of an increasingly dangerous line.

Continue reading “The Creep toward Autocracy – Real or Imagined?”