If there’s one thing in society we think we deserve, it’s the money we earn , however we earn it. But do we really deserve it?
Whether we earn money as compensation for work, or we earn interest from investments or profits from a company we own, the vast majority of us are agreed that we deserve the money we are paid. We decide we deserve this money regardless of other factors:
Donald Trump was recently elected President of the United States of America on the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Few thought he would win for most of his 18-month campaign. Then he won. Donald Trump – the huckster Donald Trump, who doesn’t read a book and doesn’t appear to know anything at all about, well, anything except his own branding, is now President of the United States of America.
Trump won for many reasons, but one compelling reason was the use of the word ‘again’ in his primary slogan. We human beings long for the past. When someone promises the past to us we believe him, no matter how incompetent he appears. Why?
Respect. Where has it gone? Why don’t millennials have the same respect that we used to?
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The world is a weird place in 2017. Suddenly the term “Alternate facts” is being thrown out by the administration of The Most Powerful Country in the World (TM) and we are confronted with a regime in the US that seems to believe they can make up the truth.
But this shouldn’t be that shocking to us. The powers that be have manipulated “the facts” since there were people in power. It’s just that the Trump administration is more open about it than most governments of liberal democratic countries.
Whenever the television news media shows violence stemming from a protest on TV, the tacit assumption is always that the protesters started the violence: they chose to protest, they must have chosen to be violent. When the protesters come prepared for tear gas and the like, it is all the easier for the television media to look down on the protesters as instigators.
We the viewers come to these images of violent protests with the same assumptions: the protesters started it because, had they not protested, there would be no violence. Both media and audience believe that any violence by the police is justified as retaliatory. But why?
The last two years have witnessed a migration crisis in Europe the likes of which hasn’t been seen in 70 years. Though there have been plenty of migrations of people throughout the world over these decades, we in The West have been blissfully unaware because these migrations usually didn’t affect us (and there wasn’t 24 news coverage). But with Europe seemingly overwhelmed with immigrants, and with Americans and Canadians 1 fearing they’re next, it’s worth wondering what we’re so afraid of.
“Common Sense isn’t common.”
We’ve all heard this refrain. I hear it at my work every time someone does something we collectively deem idiotic. I’ve heard this said about people doing inane, silly things and heard this said about people who’ve died. Hell, I’ve said it. When someone does something stupid that we swear we’d never do, we think it even if we don’t say it.
It implies a strong judgment: I’d never do that, I know better, I understand the rules of our society because I belong. But is that really true?
Men don’t want to admit that men regularly rape women. To the men who have never raped a woman (as well as to those men who tell themselves that time they had sex with a barely coherent drunk girl wasn’t rape), rape is not a normal thing; it’s abhorrent behaviour that only really fucked up men do. So when accusations of rape outnumber a man’s perception of the number of victims there should be he has to do something to explain that higher number. So he decides the women must be making it up. And, really, don’t all women exaggerate everything?
Why is swearing bad? Why is the act of speaking using “swear” or “curse” words somehow distinct from the act of speaking with other words? Why is it that some words are worse than others?
To an outsider, it often appears as though there is no middle ground in the gun control debate in the United States: the left want weapons restricted or outright banned and the right wants even fewer restrictions than currently exist. The ferocity of the debate is both completely understandable and enormously perplexing. On one hand gun ownership is enshrined as a civil liberty. On the other, by global standards the United States is very developed economically and has rule of law, which makes fervent gun ownership advocacy seem extreme at worst and unnecessary at best.
