Dear Commissioners: I need a little help
28 August 2018 Leave a comment
When You Make Your Voting Choice, Consider
4 August 2018 Leave a comment
Many folks will be trying to convince you to vote one way or another. Here are some ideas about what to listen and ask for, and how to react to what you hear. Persuasion works from three platforms, each a little lower than the least accessible, and each more accessible, but subject to misleading claims. Supporters and candidates will drop a mass of statements in your lap about truth, proof, evidence and facts in their attempt to persuade you to vote in their favor. Be ready.
- Rational arguments require the voter to have a broader knowledge base and be more willing to follow a line of reasoning. “This is how it would work.” (critical thinking)
- The voice of authority will ask the voter to rely on history and reputation as a matter of trust. “Have I ever lied to you?” (limited thinking)
- And the agitator will play on your baser feelings, especially those that lead to physical response. “FIRE!” (no thinking)
None of them however represents truth, though each has a relationship to facts. So let’s talk about that relationship first.
Facts are by definition real and present. They are not proven by evidence; they are evidence. Facts are accessible to anyone with functioning senses. Glass is hard. Water at room temperature is a liquid. These are not disputable. Right?
Fact → Evidence
Not all evidence is factual however. If a person’s fingerprint is found on a murder weapon (fact) that indicates that that person held the (otherwise determined) murder weapon (evidence), but that does not make indisputable that that person actually committed the murder; it’s not proof.
Evidence ↛ Fact
A proof is an evidentially sustained conclusion. Proofs are reached by logically arranging factual and circumstantial evidence to a conclusion. Such an arrangement is called a “logic,” and when there are different possible logics, leading to different possible conclusions, any one conclusion cannot be considered an indisputable proof. Furthermore, one might reasonably guess that the more pieces of evidence needed to 
reach a conclusion would suggest more possible arrangements of that evidence with more possible conclusions. And one would be correct. So does a proof lead to a truth?
Truth is a thorny issue. Is telling “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” possible? Putting aside Truth, as in the ultimate, divine truth about everything, truth is very simply a belief. If I feel a piece of glass and it feels hard, then I would believe that the hardness of glass is a truth. Of course, if I melt it down and blow it into a vase, I would find that it isn’t always hard. If I mix gelatin into hot water and cool it to room temperature, I might find it is no longer a liquid, but now a colloid. If I can’t count on facts being factual all the time, however will I be able to reach a proof I can accept as truth?
Evidence → Proof
Proof ↛ Truth
Truth is a matter of what I believe it to be. I guess I’ll just have to have faith to get to the truth. Faith is accepting the unprovable as true. My faith and therefore my truth is mine alone.
Belief → Truth
Undertaking actions then, such as voting, based on someone else’s truth is risky. If someone tells you they have the truth, and she or he wants you to accept that truth, you must remember that that “truth” may be believed but it is not provable, whether it’s really true or not. Even when someone tells you what she or he believes, you must still take his or her word for it or not. You can never really know. All evidence of belief and therefore “truth” must be highly circumstantial. The more “evidence,” necessarily circumstantial, that a person provides in support of a truth, the more you need to question that truth. Could such evidence even lead to a reasonable proof? Has that person really accepted that truth himself or herself, or is she or he really just trying to get you to accept it for some other purpose? If more evidence only makes any conclusion more debatable, what effect does more evidence have on the unprovable validity of someone else’s professed belief? How’s your faith in that? Now to the vote.
In choosing who or what to vote for, immediately dismiss any claims involving the word “truth.” Look for factual information that you can see or hear yourself, arranged in a reasonable logic that you can understand, and to a conclusion that weighs well against values and condition you support – Yes, align it with your truth. That’s still not enough.
You have to decide then if the proposition or candidate you “like” can actually get enough support to make that agreeable conclusion a reality. Beside aligning your vote to the most issues of yours that are supported, you must decide if enough of other voters’ issues are supported to have a hope of election. That will require looking more broadly at the whole campaign, all the candidates and issues, and many other societal factors that will impinge on the election.
In a statewide election, issues in one area may not be well supported in other areas. In any election, are their other candidates that support most or the most important of the issues you support? In rank choice voting, you’re asked for your alternative, compromise choices up front. Are there hot topic issues in the public eye that might influence voters? These can often be completely unrelated to the competencies necessary for the role to be played in governing. Such things as ethnicity, race, gender and religion are particularly common “false” factors in voting choices. Is the best outcome
- voting for the best candidate,
- getting the best alternative candidate elected or
- keeping the worst choice from getting elected?
Most of all, avoid the temptation to vote for something or someone because that’s what or whom you were told to vote for. Be wary. If you haven’t been worked up enough to do something constructive, how will it help you to have someone get you all worked up to do something destructive?
And finally, if you want to vote for someone because that candidate is just like you, then write your own name in. You’re probably just as qualified as he or she is.
This Thing We Call Mortality
8 April 2018 Leave a comment
When do we apprehend our mortality?
When we look into the mirror and see the same face we saw yesterday?
When we wake stiff and hurting from a night of frequent tosses and turns?
When we look to the left and then to the right and to the left again and to the right again?
When we forget the names of the flowers in the garden we have silently tended year after year?
No.
When we look into the eyes of a child and see the wonder of what is new,
When we observe the tender expression of restrained passion in the faces of young lovers,
When we look at the straight lines and right angles of buildings mounted on the graves of forests,
When we watch as friends and acquaintances of long standing drift silently by as we sit quietly here,
Then we apprehend our mortality.
April 2018
Never a Truer Word
28 January 2018 Leave a comment
Things are not going well with the world. I have recently pondered the overwhelming, perhaps overshadowing, general sense of dysfunction, this decay of civility we now endure. It blares out of politics, economies, technologies and even organized religions. It erodes our quality of life, our access to necessities, our feelings of safety, our sense of humanity. As is natural, we strike out at the things that threaten us, usually people whom we are predisposed not to like. And we declare our injuries, real and anticipated, demanding justice, yet accepting revenge which is more tangible.
Even when justice and/or revenge is achieved, the sense of impending doom remains and seems to envelope us in a vague fog of unknowing. A place of victimization and powerlessness becomes the abode of tens of millions, even hundreds of millions. Much of what we hear when we listen are the screams of rage and fear. Reality is cracking.
There is a churning cloud of words and images hovering behind, around and over people, a cloud so unstable and so filled with threat, yet so impervious to any efforts to quell it or fend it off, that it can only be called the Darkness. It is as if the Void and the Chaos that were banished in Creation have truly crept back in, not from the starry heavens, offended by arrogant space venturers, but from the inner depths of the very people whom it afflicts.
It is as if malignant insecurity, buried under the nurturing soil of civilization is reaching up from its grave to fuel the chaos of misinformation, accusation, incrimination and virulent conflict that surrounds us. Nothing is as it seems; everything is confuted with evil forces reckoning to destroy each of us, isolated and confused. Yet, it is from within ourselves that this malignancy originates; it is our own internal dysfunctions, made manifest and fed on by parasites of power, that have created the Darkness that threatens us. We feed the turmoil we dread.
Walt Kelly’s words have never been more true, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” (Pogo, 1971)
Who Am I to Say?
21 January 2018 Leave a comment
Below a bright, white sun there were clouds
Scudding across the clear, sharp sky,
First white and puffy, then flattening and smearing,
And now faded into a grey obscurity.
I know who I am – says the Black girl.
Yo sé quién yo soy – dice el abuelo.
We know who we are – say the Grange men.
We are who we have always been – say the Lakota.
I am not who you say I am – says Samira,
But I know who I am. So who are you to say?
Who are we? And who am I to say,
If we have faded into grey obscurity?
January 2018
Now It Is Really Winter
2 January 2018 Leave a comment
It is cold and it has been cold for days,
The cold that singes your cheeks
And makes your eyes run,
And your tears freeze.
Burningly cold.
So cold and dry the air feels like sand.
So cold that even with thick socks and mittens
Feet and hands feel buried in cold, sharp, dry sand
Drawing out the heat and moisture
Desiccately cold.
And it is quiet, dead still and cut off.
The windows and doors are closed and sealed
Two, even three deep, holding the cold dead air,
And curtained. The heavy drapes
Silencing the whoosh of traffic,
The thud of human steps
And the birds brittle song.
Deafeningly cold.
Inside, closed in and cut off as in a crypt,
Alone, holding a weeks-long breath of arctic air,
Staring at the white blankness of paper,
I chip words out of my frozen thoughts
As I listen to the booming in the walls
And the cracking of encasing ice.
Perhaps it is terminally cold,
Mummifyingly cold.
January 2018
I’m a Yank
11 September 2018 Leave a comment
I’m a Yank, but I don’t feel any pride, any satisfaction in the winning of the Civil war, only the satisfaction that the slaves were freed and the country was reunited.
It was the sorriest time in our history. We went to war with ourselves. Hating and killing our fellow Americans was the bottom. I can’t admire bragging about winning. I can only be proud that we put ourselves back together, not when we were trying to tear ourselves apart. Good goals were accomplished, but many bad things happened. The cost was horrendous, and worsened by the economic devastation of the South following our bloody victory.
I hardly wonder that a Southern would feel outrage at the pulling down of statues, when our Minnesota Capitol and Washington are adorned with Union soldiers. It must look like 150+ years of gloating—the ultimate poor sportsmanship.
This country has some growing up to do. Arrogant winners make sore loser. Defeat on the battlefield is bad enough. It isn’t necessary to take their honor as well. We were better to the Japanese following WWII than we were to the South after the Civil war. Can’t we show the world we’re better than that?
All the memorials of the war should be honored, but put away. Leave the memorials to the reuniting and the freeing of the slaves. Commemorate the good stuff.
jcritterson@gmail.com
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Filed under Philosophy, Politics, Social Commentary Tagged with Civil War