meaning

Hobbits & Hooligans

What kind of voter are you?

Just curious, do you consider yourself a Hobbit, a Hooligan or a Vulcan? Not sure?  Well, are you politically well informed?  Do you perhaps vote in accordance with your best buds, your BFFs, your clan, your family, friends or grossly defined political party (largely disregarding the issues associated with a particular candidate)?  You wouldn’t by chance make a habit of either choosing a candidate without even knowing who or what you are voting for or (perhaps more likely) do you not vote at all?  If you recognize yourself in two of these three descriptions, according to political philosopher Jason Brennan, you should be excluded from the voting rosters of your community.

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Between the Lines

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
~Martin Luther King, Jr.

peace forum icon

Peace and Progress

The above quote was famously delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was apparently often quoted by President Barack Obama.  But it was probably originally written by slave abolitionist, and Unitarian church minister Theodore Parker on the eve of the American Civil War.   All three men were suggesting hope as a hallmark of our days on earth. Do we still believe this quote?  Are we justified in such a belief? (more…)

Proof of Truth

Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to bring the truth back.
~Gore Vidal

What are we trying to do when we say something is “true”? On what basis do we make such statements (with a straight face, believing these notions to be justified)?

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AI News?

On the frontier of artificial intelligence journalism

AI News Title II

In an era when venerable news publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post are being maligned by key societal figures accusing them of “leftist” bias, when publications such as Breitbart or similar media sources often deemed “conservative” unabashedly present stories slanted to reflect political views far right of the majority of public sentiment in the country and when a significant portion of the general public acquires its “facts” about the nature of world events from Twitter, Facebook and a network that used to fly a banner emblazoned with the words “fair and balanced”, bias both inadvertent and intentional has become an insurmountable impediment to attaining the “truth” about what is going on around us. In the face of such a large, sprawling situation, we sometimes get lost, failing to understand the meaning of our daily encounters and  the most appropriate intent we should seek regarding any of these events. Enter knowherenews.com.  This website proposes that computer software can filter reports of world events and effectively sanitize them of ideological bias.

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