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I have gotten the impression that American schools do not teach Civics very well. There seem to be U.S. citizens who think that the people should do what the government says, and that the Duty of Civil Disobedience is not a responsibility that Americans should take seriously. The matter of how citizens should act in a republic has a great deal formal philosophical literature behind it, and its origin go back before the origin of organized government. I could go back to Plato’s Republic and some ...

Christmas In Fallujah
It’s evening in the desert
I’m tired and I’m cold
But I am just a soldier
I do what I am told
إنه المساء في الصحراء
أنا متعب وجسمي يقشعر
ولكني جندي فحسب ...

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 just red an article from the New Yorker, "Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake?" By Nathan Heller.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...GSe6mI5KV2vtJk
I don't think the automobile era was a mistake, but that article was, for the most part. Private transportation has been around for as long as there are records; although at the beginning of that era shank's mare ...

I just read an article about “The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories” (Karen M. Douglas, Robbie M. Sutton, and Aleksandra Cichocka), and I had been thinking about blogging on the philosophy and logic of conspiracy theories. The only place where I agree with this article is on this point” Our analysis suggests that conspiracy theories may satisfy some epistemic motives at the expense of others—for example, by shielding beliefs from uncertainty while being less likely to be accurate. The epistemic ...