Please join Socrates Café at the Mayfield Road Phoenix Coffeehouse, next Tuesday, 13 September for 90 minutes of philosophical discussion. Socrates thought that understanding the perspectives of others made him a more excellent human being. In this spirit, the purpose of the Socrates Café is not to persuade others to our point of view, but to deepen our understanding of the views of everyone who participates.

Via the very common Dan Moulthrop…

Dr. Keith Ablow of Faux New’s Medical A-Team, writes:

The last thing vulnerable children and adolescents need, as they wrestle with the normal process of establishing their identities, is to watch a captive crowd in a studio audience applaud on cue for someone whose search for an identity culminated with the removal of her breasts, the injection of steroids and, perhaps one day soon, the fashioning of a make-shift phallus to replace her vagina.

It is a toxic and unnecessary byproduct of the tragic celebration of transgender surgery that millions of young people who do watch “Dancing with the Stars” will have to ponder this question: Maybe my problems really stem from the fact that I’m a girl inside a boy’s body (or a boy inside a girls body). Maybe I’m not a tomboy; I’m just a boy! Maybe I’m not just being bullied because I’m a sensitive, reflective young man interested in flowers, not football. Maybe I’m not just uncertain about my sexuality. Maybe I’m a girl! Maybe all this angst and suffering I’m feeling as I emerge into puberty and pass through it isn’t just because I’m changing, but because I should change completely—and have my breasts removed or my penis amputated!

Sherry Linkon writes:

Some students responded exactly as the administration must have hoped: blaming the faculty and creating a facebook page that included many statements by students vowing to vote in support of SB5 because of this. But others were not reeled in. Instead, they organized. They created a facebook page, YSU Students for Faculty (which now has almost 900 members), but they also held protests, conducted a letter-writing campaign, and challenged the University administration to treat its workers fairly. They analyzed the administration’s actions and communications, and they have used a wide range of tools, from social media to filing public records requests to showing up and trying to ask questions at a Board of Trustees press conference last week. They are also working with the campaign against SB5.

1611: The logic of science

An advantage of overlapping domains can be seen in the newly discovered phenomenon of cognitive reserve. Many people are found to have the neural ravages of Alzheimer’s disease upon autopsy – but they never showed the symptoms while they were alive. How can this be? It turns out that these people continued to challenge their brains into old age by staying active in their careers, doing crossword puzzles or carrying out any other activities that kept their neural populations well exercised. As a result of staying mentally vigorous, they built what neuropsychologists call cognitive reserve. It’s not that cognitively fit people don’t get Alzheimer’s; it’s that their brains have protection against the symptoms. p. 128-9

Incognito: The Secret Lives Of The Brain by David Eagleman

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

0640:THE MAN WHO NEVER DIED: The life, Times and Legacy of Joe Hill…

Ari Berman writes:

A major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop. Out of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud – and many of the cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility. A much-hyped investigation in Wisconsin, meanwhile, led to the prosecution of only .0007 percent of the local electorate for alleged voter fraud. “Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere,” joked Stephen Colbert [below]. A 2007 report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a leading advocate for voting rights at the New York University School of Law, quantified the problem in stark terms. “It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning,” the report calculated, “than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

What are the Republicans afraid of? This…

Paul Krugman writes:

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

The answer, it turns out, is yes

0653: The Way of Tea

Mike Lofgren writes:

…[I]t hardly seems conceivable that a Republican could have written the following:

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)

It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in the manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce Bartlett.

I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country’s future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and “shareholder value,” the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP’s decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren’t after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté. They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be “forced” to make “hard choices” – and that doesn’t mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.

During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP’s disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans’ own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency – a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined.

If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America’s status as the world’s leading power.

Mike Lofgren retired as a congressional staffer on June 17.

Sam Riech convinced his father, Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, to take part in a Q&A on Reddit. The whole discussion is awesome, but this exchange is my favorite.

catamorphism: Mr. Reich: I really liked something you said a month ago on Twitter: “If you respond to what’s happened in DC with more cynicism and apathy, the radical right wins completely. Instead: Organize and mobilize!” I’m trying to figure out how to live this out. I’m 30, and halfway towards a Ph.D in computer science. I love the work, but I don’t love that most people in my field don’t care about politics (or they say they don’t, but what they really mean is that they’re happy with what the system is doing for them as a privileged white guy, and don’t feel they need to change anything) and don’t want to use their skills for anything more than increasing the number of clickthroughs on some Web ad. I’m also a pretty disorganized person, so volunteering for something in my spare time probably won’t cut it — I’m too tired in my spare time. I feel like if I’m going to organize for change, it has to be my full-time job.

The problem is, I don’t know how; all of my connections are in a field that I’m not particularly inspired to keep working in. I also don’t know what; I’m not independently wealthy, so if I’m changing the world, I have to be employed while I’m doing it. So, what would you recommend to a 30-year-old with a liberal arts bachelor’s degree and an engineering master’s degree (the latter from Berkeley, by the by, and the libertarians in my department were just the beginning of my disenchantment with my academic field) who has no dependents, nothing tying him down to one particular location, who is more or less completely free to do anything, and who wants to do something with his life that will ameliorate social inequality? I’m really hoping the answer isn’t law school.

robertbreich: The answer isn’t law school (unless you love the law). I’d recommend you get involved with a political campaign — local, state, or national, or even a ballot initiative — between now and Election Day. It’s the best way to understand politics from the ground up, find out where your skills and enthusiasms lie, how much time and energy you really want to devote. Obviously, it should be a campaign you believe in.

Mitch Albom writes:

This is not a sob story. This is a Detroit an urban story. One that repeats itself over and over, block after block, year after year.

0751: A national weight problem?

The Tao that can be known is not Tao.
The substance of the World is only a name for Tao.
Tao is all that exists and may exist;
The World is only a map of what exists and may exist.

One experiences without Self to sense the World,
And experiences with Self to understand the World.
The two experiences are the same within Tao;
They are distinct only within the World.
Neither experience conveys Tao
Which is infinitely greater and more subtle than the World.

Interpolation by Peter A. Merel based upon the translations of:
Lin Yutang, Ch’u Ta-Kao, Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English, Richard Wilhelm and Aleister Crowley.