mazzaroth

Living through a pandemic has been much more surreal than I think most of us could have imagined. One particularly surreal part of it all, is that this single topic has overwhelmingly commanded the attention of the vast majority of people all across the world, for weeks. We're all thinking about the same problem. I wonder what kind of long-term effects we might see, especially politically. The immediate ramifications on politics are quite clear. Economic stimulus measures, governor-ordered lockdowns. Many people speculate the impact on the upcoming presidential election, mostly in terms of judging the president's performance on the issue, or what kind of relevant policy platform differences may emerge from either major political party. But long-term effects are harder to pin down. Here's one way things might change substantially. Jordan Peterson has popularized some of the work Jonathan Haidt has done around the psychology of disgust and attendant behavioral systems

What makes someone conservative or progressive? And actually, are those really the only two choices?  I’d like to talk about politics today. But not about the politics of the day -- there’s no value in such fleeting things. Instead I’d like to talk about the roots of politics. What makes someone conservative or progressive.  And I’d like to talk about why sometimes we talk about politics as though those are the only two choices. They aren’t, but there are reasons why things often get distilled down to simplifications like that.  And I’d like to know if YOU are conservative or progressive. Or if maybe you just think you are. I’m going to give you a quick quiz, and the answers might surprise you.  Moral Foundations So let me first tell you about the psychological science behind this quiz. I’m pulling this info from the work of a group of academics, most famously Jonathan Haidt from NYU, but let me also give all the due credit, to Ravi Iyer, Sean Wojcik, Matt Motyl, Gary Sh

Tick tock, tick tock When you see a clock, what do you think of? What comes to mind? We could talk about making the best use of our time, as each one of these seconds ticks by. For you, for me. We know we’re not getting them back. We know we have a limited supply -- of unknown quantity . Sit back for a moment, and watch a clock. Look at those seconds tick by.  They’re gone. For you. For me. We know this.  But we also know there’s nothing we can do about it, so most of the time, I think most of us just kinda shrug it off, right?  It is what it is. Here’s what I think of when I see a timer. Couple time-related factoids. We toss “million” & “billion” around all the time, we know they’re big numbers, but it’s easy to lose the sense of the scale. So how old are you when you become one million seconds old ? Answer is 11 Days, 13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds . Just a newborn, and a million seconds go by, just like that. Not even two weeks. But you become one billion

 There’s this crazy connection between justice & grace. But to see it, you need to understand what these things are. We think we do, usually, but can you put it into words? Do you really understand what these things are, and do you understand how other people understand these things? We see injustice all around us, in the news, we all care very much about justice, but what do we really know about it? That’s the tricky part; there are 3 different forms of justice active in our world today. When someone calls something “justice,” we don’t all hold the same concept about what that means. So let me quickly explain these three ideas of justice. I’ll explore them more deeply another time, but you can explore them, too. Harvard opened a free online course , their first course you can do for free, just sign up online and take the class, or you can just watch the YouTube videos . The professor is Michael Sandel, and he wrote a book called Justice: What’s the Right Thing to