Day: May 31, 2019

Is Twitter good for me?

Workout notes: weights only; rotator cuff, pull ups: 15-15-10-10-5, incline: 10 x 135, 3 x 155 (ran out of gas), decline: 7 x 170, military: 8 x 50 standing, 10 x 45, 10 x 45, rows (machine) 3 sets of 10 x 110. plank, side plank (MUCH easier with shoes), head stand, knee stretches, crow (got 35 seconds at the house), headstand.

That’s enough for today.

Twitter: I wonder if using this social media platform is making me shallow and sloppy. There is this study, as well as our decreasing amount of empathy (the ability to see things from the point of view of someone else) and this video (yes, it is from Templeton)

The desire for “Twitter likes”, “follows” and just general approval sometimes leads one to attempt to make that pithy remark that one’s friends approve of rather than to attempt anything resembling a fair and detailed intellectual analysis. This issue came up during the discussion of Twitter’s “like” button. And there is the dreaded “being ratioed” which means that one gets a lot of comments but few “likes” or “retweets” (“being ratioed” is supposed to be a punishment of sorts)

Personally, I like the access to articles. But I’ve found Facebook to be a better platform from which to discuss things as one has more space to make one’s argument.

A couple of comments:
Evidently Trump is calling “impeachment” a “dirty word”. he didn’t always have such qualms.

Steven Pinker He is one of my favorite public intellectuals. And his intellectual honesty just drives some of the “woke crowd” nuts.

Some late May politics and social issues…

Will the House impeach President Trump?
I still think that Fareed Zakaria raises some good points. But as the Muller Report gets digested and summarized..

More and more Democrats (and a Republican) in the House are clamoring for impeachment. I had wondered if there were enough votes, given that there are about 30 moderates representing reddish CDs. Fivethirtyeight thinks that there *probably* are.

Note: Nancy Pelosi is probably wise to slow-walk this.

I’ll be interested to see how this plays out. Note that Trump admitted (albeit, probably unwittingly) that Russia helped him win.

What I find interesting is that so many conservatives are fine with Trump praising a ruthless dictator who executes even his own officials. One was just recently executed.

And I admit that I am disgusted with Trump’s relationship with the military and how there seems to be little push-back (this is about the Navy, at least at first, trying to ensure that Trump didn’t see the ship name “John McCain”. Talk about a “triggered snowflake.”

Other issues

Thank you, Meryl Streep, for pushing back on this “toxic masculinity” nonsense.

Political correctness on campus: yes, some students ..AND FACULTY..will reject science if they think that the science in question runs counter to what they think “ought” to be true. Biology catches this from several angles: religious nutters can’t deal with evolution, and the woke can’t deal with the fact that humans aren’t blank slates.

I think that online discussions aren’t helping matters. I wonder if overuse of Twitter is leading me to stat thinking in slogans and catch phrases. There is some research that suggests that Twitter could make you dumber.