Home » People & Culture (Page 35)

Category Archives: People & Culture

All about the standing-upright chimps that really love to talk about themselves.

October Holidays

Posted on by | 4 Comments

October is a good month for holidays in North America.  At the end of the month we have the collision of the Celtic Samhain with the Aztec / Spanish Dia de los Muertos which swirled into Halloween.  But in the middle is the difficult holiday, the one where we celebrate the connection of this continent with the rest of the world.  And the three brother nations of this continent have their own ways of marking it.  This is a repeat from 2011, updated.

To our North, in Canada, the nearest Monday to October 12th is  Thanksgiving, this year on the 9th.  To our South, in Mexico, the 12th is  Dia de la Raza.  Our brother nations here in North America have found things to celebrate in the early days of Autumn, but here in the USofA we have nothing but the pseudo-holiday Columbus Day – something we’ve tossed over our shoulders and given up on.

This may be a measure of our ability to get anything together.

Continue reading →

Guns: Change the Attitude

Posted on by | 5 Comments

Another senseless gun tragedy – this one bigger than the previous. When does it end?

It ends when we as a nation get serious about the situation. Like nearly every problem we have it is primarily a mindset. New gun laws aren’t necessarily going to be the answer unless they are part of that important change.

Continue reading →

Fairness or Fairy Tale?

Posted on by | Leave a comment

It’s been a bizzy week.  This repeat from ten years ago deals with a topic that has become a central issue in People’s Economics – fairness.  This first treatment of the topic wasn’t very helpful.  But it’s an interesting starting point.

Fairness is an important concept in this thing we call Civilization. If we all lived as hunters and gatherers on the grasslands, we wouldn’t have a lot of interaction with large groups of people. The inevitable disputes that arise could be settled by a simple code or the intervention of an elder.

Continue reading →

Taking a Knee

Posted on by | 3 Comments

O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Is it ever acceptable to kneel while the national anthem is played? The controversy has deepened now that Trump has weighed in, saying that players who do so should be fired. He faulted the NFL as a unit over this just ahead of this week’s games.

The response from the league has been ferocious. And it is justified. After all, those who kneel are only answering the question with their own emphatic “No!” as is their right as a free people. It is a question we should all be asking ourselves and not the patriotism of those who answer it differently than we do. Anything less means that we are not, indeed, free.

Continue reading →

Correctness? Try Politeness

Posted on by | 6 Comments

Has “political correctness” run wild, threatening to destroy our language and culture? Certainly, it’s a pain to have to learn new terms all the time. And no one likes to be scolded for using the wrong ones. But is this all just a way of repressing free speech and making people more pliant and reducing the culture to nothing?

No. We are in the middle of a process of determining just what “polite” is.

That’s not to say it’s every gonna be easy. There is no “process” and no one gets to vote. It’s necessarily messy to clean up the language and make sure it works for everyone. We all have to agree at some point. And in the meantime, the one thing that far too many people seem to agree with is that politeness isn’t necessary at all. That’s the real problem.

Continue reading →