1. Twitter Tantrums.
I have a Twitter account and indeed I'll hit the tab to link most of my posts there (they aren't all linked in there). That's a species of shameless blog promotion.
Anyhow the political rants on Twitter are generally moronic and apparently dominated by people who have the absolutely most hardcore views on everything. All the time I'll see rants that start off with "I can't believe that my (put in opposite camp here) Twitter friends believe . . ."
If you repeatedly post that "you can't believe" that a lot of people whose feeds you are on hold something, they probably can't believe that you believe the opposite, and there's probably a reason for that.
2. Twitter Tantrums 2. Confirmation bias.
I saw a Twitter Tweet today by somebody who is mad that Trump keeps noting that the economy is doing well and states "it isn't for me".
It likely isn't doing well for that person, and a lot of other people, as at any one time a lot of people aren't doing well for a variety of reasons. One reason it isn't doing well for everyone now is that there's been huge economic and technological developments over the last several decades that make it tough on certain sectors of the economy. Perhaps a person can argue that Trump should address this, or that he isn't addressing it correctly, but frankly no President since 1945 has addressed this really adequately. Personalizing it in this fashion doesn't prove anything, as the economy actually really is doing well in the context of how our economy works.
Indeed, while I have a lot of economic opinions including ones I think would address this, I don't see any major candidate of the left or right who has any really novel ideas about this. The worst ones in fact come from the left where the left is reviving a morbid fascination with the dead corpse of socialism, which we know is a really bad idea.
Also, let's face it, the economy doesn't do well for some people because of their life choices.
This has really become a huge topic of denial in the United States, but its true. If you go down an unemployable path and, to compound it, if you engage in conduct of certain types, you will not do well. I'm reminded in this instance of the Art History Major who appeared some years ago at the Occupy Wall Street event decrying that she couldn't earn sufficient income to pay off her student loans. Of course she couldn't. That has nothing to do with the economy as there will never be an economy which pays really high wages to everyone in Art History. That's not a reason not to pursue it, but your economic expectations, and your expenditures, in securing that goal should take that into account.
On this finally, every news item that even slightly backs your view isn't ground shaking and sure to convince your opponents of anything.
3. On Death.
Yesterday basketball player Kobe Bryant and his young daughter lost their lives with a group of other people in a helicopter accident.
This sort of things impacts me in odd ways that it didn't use to. I'm in that category of people who, when I hear such things, usually silently say a prayer for the victims of such tragedies. At the same time, however, I don't like the endless up to the moment reporting on it.
That may be really personal to me. I work on things all the time where people have died or been badly injured and the tragic nature of it is really evident to me. When last week the news was reported that Selena Shelley Faye Not Afraid's body had been found not far from a rest stop in Montana it really bothered me, and it still does.
But what I'm commenting on here is the none stop news coverage, and that really may be just me.
I was out when this was first reported on and when I came home, my wife mentioned it. Again, as with Not Afraid, I was shocked and said a silent prayer to myself. But soon the television came on and it was non stop reporting on the event. At 5:00 I redirected the television to the nightly local news, which because it is a weekend and because the channels are not really local anymore but Cheyenne channels, it was the Cheyenne news, which I'm not hugely interested in. But when that was over, it was redirected back.
Finally about 6:30, while I was working on something that a net outage had kept me from working on the day prior, I had to intervene with "that has to stop". If you work with materials in which there's a constant flood of tragic death, television reporting on it over and over is just too much.
On comments, I'll note, this one was the best I've seen:
I'm not a basketball fan at all, but in all the stuff I heard, I didn't know that Bryant was a religious man, let alone that we were coreligious. It's interesting, and Father Beeman's observation tends to be the way I look at such things.I'm not a basketball fan. But I always felt a bond with
@kobebryantbecause I knew that he shared in the Eucharist and loved the Catholic faith. We'll now share in the banquet of the Lord together in another way. Praying for his soul and for those he loved.
The stupidest observation I saw was also on Twitter where somebody posted "I wonder how many soldiers died defending freedom yesterday". I don't know the answer to that but I bet its easily discernible. Chances are that it may well be none as on most days the answer is none.
The point of the crabby commentator is supposed to be that soldiers are dying unheralded and unknown while a man who is only famous for playing a game is mourned. Well, that's a stupid point of view. There is a lot of attention paid by Americans to American casualties for one thing, and it isn't the case, as the comment implies, that the only death worth noting are those which are due to heroic sacrifice.
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