I'll never be virtuous enough for this world,...
"Most of the people who graduated in the 60's, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, and educational systems. You are stuck with them. You can't get through to them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior."
"The demoralization process in the United States is basically completed already for the last 25 years,...Most of it is done by Americans to Americans thanks to lack of moral standards,...exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. ...he will refuse to believe it.... That's the tragedy of the situation of demoralization."
"People with greater math and numerical reasoning skills actually skewed their results more than those with lesser abilities depending on what they felt the fake study was assessing. Being smarter about something made it more likely that you would allow your political beliefs to harm your objective reasoning skills."
"None of this is good — because it means that objective sets of facts, science and evidence are becoming increasingly less relevant in today's society, while the 'tribes' you belong to and their leaders may be vastly more important to what you think and how you act."
"Where it can become dangerous is when the leaders that you trust for road maps simply lie or deceive for their own purposes, because more and more, this research implies, there is a tendency to simply ignore an objective set of facts if it goes against your beliefs and what people you trust are telling you."
This sort of 'cultural cognition' model has profound implications for all sorts of things. In the Syrian situation, for instance, it may not matter whether Syria used chemical weapons against its own people. What may matter more to you is whether you believe Barack Obama when he presents that objective set of facts. Facts don't matter. Who describes them to you does."
You can’t just tell Johnny to be good, or not to steal and assume that he will know how, or even be able, to do this by willpower alone. Moral education needs to be more skill-based. That is, we would advise parents to tell their kids not only what the goal is, but also how to get there — what tricks to expect their minds will engage in and what strategies they can use to keep their character moving in the direction they want. Because in the end, it’s not about “Are you a good person in general” — it’s about “Are you a good person right now.”
“The widening “wonk gap” — the G.O.P.’s near-complete lack of expertise on anything substantive,...the dumbing down extends across the spectrum, from budget issues to national security to poll analysis. Remember, Mitt Romney and much of his party went into Election Day expecting victory….
But that was then. Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very much given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient facts,...Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been a real conservative.
It’s all kind of funny, in a way. Unfortunately, however, this runaway cult controls the House, which gives it immense destructive power,...and it’s disturbing to realize that this power rests in the hands of men who, thanks to the wonk gap, quite literally have no idea what they’re doing.”
“GOP’s massive new lie:
The truth about Obama’s second term It's factually and morally wrong to say his agenda is doomed if war vote loses.”
"And the award for Getting to the High Ground While Ditching Your Spouse Who Got Cancer goes to Catherine Zeta-Jones."
"You're a top-shelf artist, working as a landscaper?
That doesn't make any sense,…"
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct. The term comes from the Greek word ethos, which means "character". Ethics is a complement to Aesthetics in the philosophy field of Axiology. In philosophy, ethics studies the moral behavior in humans and how one should act. Ethics may be divided into four major areas of study:
• Meta-ethics, about the theoretical meaning and reference of moral propositions and how their truth values (if any) may be determined;
• Normative ethics, about the practical means of determining a moral course of action;
• Applied ethics, about how moral outcomes can be achieved in specific situations;
• Descriptive ethics, also known as comparative ethics, is the study of people's beliefs about morality;
Ethics seeks to resolve questions dealing with human morality—concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime.