Memories of the 28th Century

I was thinking about writing about the misfortune that people are acting up about racism, but I was listening to TV coverage of an electrical storm that has produced a tornado, when the reporters said many things that were false. It was clear that they didn't know much about weather and probably never studied meteorology, and they certainly never bothered reading the National Weather Service information about warnings and watches. They tried to make the thunderstorm sound like something exciting ...

In the past, it seemed like most people used facts as the bases of their opinions; Marketers usually based their campaigns in fact; even politicians worked from facts. And people who disagreed usually started from contrary facts. Recently, it has seemed like most people ignore facts, just saying what their fantasies dictated.

It might be that I was deluded in the past, and it could be that I have been mistaken more recently, but I think it would be safe to say that even opinions ...

In Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, Niccolò Machiavelli went on at some length about how elders have been complaining about the younger generation and younger people have been complaining about the elders for thousands of years. His thought was that the degeneration was exaggerated, because humanity would have fallen into savagery long ago if the generations were progressively that degenerate. Or I might have made that up to try to make Machiavelli look even better. But even the ...

Voter fraud has been common in some times and places, but it mostly went out of style many decades ago, Candidate fraud is perhaps even more popular now that it was in the past.
It used to be that politicians in the U.S.A. were some of the best people in the country, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, and so on. But that came to an end in the 1820’s and 1830’s, when people like Andy Jackson started doing well in elections. There had been a few populists and demagogues before that, ...

I was working on a work of fiction, when I realized that what I had one character complain about was a major problem in today's world. The character was talking about setting up a school that would teach the basics of Rhetoric and Logic, so that the graduates would later be able to make better arguments and to detect fallacious arguments. The problem is that most people never learn the basics of argumentation and logic, so they can't tell when someone is using a logical fallacy, and much of the ...