Question 7

Question 7

We have been hearing about the 'Taliban' in Afghanistan for years. Now that whatever period of the last years is over, we are hearing a lot about tribes, provinces, and rivalries. Does that mean there's no organization, no structure? And if so, what have we been bombing for all this time?

Richard Smith, the former editor of the BMJ, writes that medical research has become so dishonest that “We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that a study is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary.” Now, is that a really scary notion or not?

Since memory has been shown to be more creative and shaped than recording, can we stop reading Proust?

If you favor university vaccine mandates for low-risk American and European students, when there are not enough vaccines for older high-risk people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, are you virtue-signaling or insincere? Or are you just defaulting to an easy solution for simplicity's sake?

The last American combat death in Afghanistan was 16 months ago. Is that consistent with a 'war?'

Is it my imagination or is news reporting beginning to resemble battlefield reporting?

I googled the hurricane coming to New York and the site made a big effort to make sure I knew how to pronounce "Henri." Storms have feelings too? First things first?

Is finding a host for 'Jeapardy' no easier than withdrawing from Afghanistan?

Encounters at America’s southern border have already exceeded one million this year and reached a 21-year high of 212,672 last month. For July, that breaks down to 6,860 encounters every day, 286 every hour and almost 5 every minute. And that’s just counting the actual “encounters” at the border and not the many who likely crossed the Texas border undetected and “unencountered.” But we've got the Canadian border locked down tight, right?

The collapse of US newspaper jobs continues – by 77% from the peak of 458,000 jobs in the early 1990s to barely more than 100,000 jobs today. So, are they not doing something right?

According to the National Science Foundation, the share of bachelor degrees in “Science and Engineering” between 2008 and 2018 at US colleges and universities were almost evenly split between women and men (the NSF includes social and behavioral sciences). But don’t we hear all the time about the concern about the “shortage of women in STEM”? Or are 'social and behavioral sciences' not really science?

“If you think biological complexity can come about through unplanned emergence and not need an intelligent designer, then why would you think human society needs an ‘intelligent government’?” --Ridley

CBS News published an article Friday claiming global warming was a major factor in the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan and creating murderous chaos throughout the country, rather than political ineptitude.
CBS News argues that global warming created horrible weather conditions that decimated crop production during the past 30 years in the country, and the Taliban fed off the misery experienced by Afghan farmers. Are those crops drugs?

Recent data shows women leaving the workforce at four times the rate of men -- a number of experts chalk up to the increased burden of having children home from school. Do you smell some inequality there?

An opening paragraph from Bloomberg: Anecdotes tell us what the data can’t: Vaccinated people appear to be getting the coronavirus at a surprisingly high rate. But exactly how often isn’t clear, nor is it certain how likely they are to spread the virus to others. Read that again. Anecdotes tell us what the data can’t?

So the vaccine is unproven and may be unsafe so we should all take a livestock deworming drug?

Scruton on post-truth: 'The inspiration was Marx, whose theory of ideology put power above truth as the motive of political thinking. For the sixties Marxist my thinking is science, yours ideology: mine is the true voice of history, yours the ‘false consciousness’ of the bourgeoisie. Foucault rephrased the idea in terms of the episteme of a culture – the fabric of concepts and arguments that the ruling class lays over society so that every voice speaks with its terms. This was the dominant approach to the humanities in the seventies and eighties of the last century, and the way of thinking that has come recently to the surface in the apostles of the Momentum movement. It defined the position of the polytechnic left, who believed that ideas, beliefs and arguments are not to be judged in terms of their truth, but in terms of the ‘class’, ‘hegemony’ or ‘power structure’ that speaks through them. The question to be asked of every adversary was not ‘what are your arguments?’ but ‘where are you speaking from?’ That, to me, was the beginning of the post-truth culture.' 

So the problem isn't the existence of truth, only that truth doesn't necessarily lead to human reality? Does that sound a little New Testament?