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News Briefs 08-08-2011

But what about shades of gray?

Thanks to Greg — and his Freudian slips. 😉

Quote of the Day:

When Dr. [Martin Luther] King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true and repugnant face in public.

In contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze.

Drew Westen, here.

  1. Semi-nonexistence
    Re: How does a skeptic understand the ‘paranormal’?

    How (and why) do we still even use the terms, ‘paranormal’or ‘supernatural’?

    Anything that does exist, is entirely natural and normal. The only apparent reason we still apply them is to sidestep the obvious; that we aren’t as smart as we think we are. It’s a way of denying our ignorance by tagging an unknown as being (impossibly) semi-nonexistent.

    Gods, angels, UFOs, ghosts… they’ve always been with us. They don’t go away even as our species (supposedly) fell out of the trees, moved into the caves, moved out of the caves, took up farming, learned to sail ships, ride horses, drive cars and even fly in space. But we still like to keep them all at arm’s length.

    1. Re: How does a skeptic understand the ‘paranormal’?
      Paranormal and supernatural become normal and natural as soon as anything remotely plausable has been formulated to explain the given phenomena. Now, I’ve had my fair share of the aforementioned “things” happening to me, but I still regard them as figments of my own imagination. It probably makes me a skeptic of sorts. I find it very uncomfortable parading my own personal subjections, or the projections of the cesspool that is my subconscious, as the truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth.

      In my view gods, angels and ghosts exist in the metaphysical quasi-realities of men. In a way, one could argue that they “really” exist for that particular reason, and who am I to argue otherwise. My personal view on the matter does not diminish the interest and curiosity I have over the subject, quite the contrary.

      Truth be told, I have never seen an UFO, with my own eyes, that is. There is so much BS, disinformation, and blatant attempts to make money over the whole thing, that I have pretty much lost interest. I am not denying the existence of the phenomenon, I am simply tired of watching the umphty-umpth Youtube-hoax, or reading about the alien rimjob of yet another village lunatic in Cowpoke, Nebraska.

      I have to agree with Redoubt’s notion of “anything that does exist, is entirely natural and normal”. What I find unnerving, is the endless need for dualistic “us vs. them -attitude”. The has to be an enemy, or prime evil, or the undefined “them” whom we must oppose. Those who are wrong, those who got it wrong, or those who are not worthy of the membership of the (pick and choose your) clandestine/esoteric sewing circle. Human motivation, if not fuelled by selfishness and greed, has its origins in conflict.

      The question I find myself asking is simply,

      “if we agree such things exist, where do they exist?”

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