The Books of Bokonon

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action...Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests." Gore Vidal, Imperial America, 2004

  Happy Festivus , everyone! It may not be an official holiday, but I celebrate anyway. So, let's get that meatloaf cooked up and air some grievances. The fact that I remembered to post this Festivus message that I had planned to do months in advance is truly a Festivus Miracle. Cheers, everyone! And the lack of traffic on this blog lately has me deeply disappointed with you all. I have a lot of issues with you all right now...Okay, you get the idea.  On a more serious note, the holiday, which was originally portrayed on an episode of Seinfeld, was practiced by a family starting in the late 1960s, if I recall the lore correctly. The basic premise of Festivus was to challenge all the social pressure and commercialization that characterize our current Christmas holiday season. So instead of a tree, just use a plain metal pole. A meal that most don't consider all that fancy or attractive challenges some of the extravagance that goes with the usual festivities during Christmas. Re...

Since the middle of the last decade, I've heard repeatedly that we live in a "post-truth" era. That was best exemplified by Kellyanne Conway's usage of the term "alternative facts" back in 2017 in response to the kerfuffle over the crowd size for Trump's inauguration in late January of that year. So, this is the so-called post-truth era. Admittedly it has been a long while since I was taking philosophy classes as an undergraduate student, but terms like relativism (sometimes used interchangeably with perspectivism and perspectivalism) have some value. The basic gist is that each of us will have a somewhat different experience of the same phenomenon. Note what isn't in dispute: that there is some phenomenon that has occurred and that each of us had an experience of it. The facts on the ground are what they are, but what each of us might make of the facts may vary - sometimes in ways that can be constructive, and sometimes in ways that are not. As long...

Nancy LeTourneau's blog, Horizons, has a wonderful post on the truth about the impact immigrants have on small towns and cities throughout the US. I would call it required reading. JD Vance may have made some headlines about how he needed to make shit up Haitian immigrants to get Springfield OH in the news, but the truth is that journalists have been writing about how small communities have been impacted beneficially by immigrants for quite a while now. Read for yourself. I can add my own personal perspective. I lived in a town called Goodwell, OK during the aughts. It's practically in the middle of Oklahoma's panhandle. There is a small university there where I was employed for about a decade before I moved to my current location. Goodwell is located about 10 miles southwest of the Texas County seat, Guymon, OK. I very quickly learned a few things about Guymon and the surrounding area. At some point in the 1990s a meat packing facility owned by Seaboard Farms opened for b...

I will use culture here in the broadest, most global sense of the term. Stephen Fry is right about how toxic social media have turned out to be , after initial optimism: Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk are "the worst polluters in human history", Stephen Fry has said. The actor and comedian made the claim during a lecture at Kings College, London. "You and your children cannot breathe the air or swim in the waters of our culture without breathing in the toxic particulates and stinking effluvia that belch and pour unchecked from their companies into the currents of our world," he said of the pair. [...] He said he was at first enthusiastic about the potential of social media to unite people around the world and bring about positive change in society, citing the Arab Spring protests which were coordinated online as an example – but added that he had been proved wrong. He described what he considered to be a fatal flaw in attempts by early Facebook a...