Very often, statements of conditions are challenged. For instance, the Atlantic had an article titled How America Outlawed Adolescence. Without finishing the article, my thoughts (Continue Reading)
Pat’s Polemics
My new Web site
Role Reversal
10/26/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentWith the election upon us, I’ll post this list of reversals, things the conservatives accused liberals of that have proved to be true of them, (Continue Reading)
What’s on YOUR internet?
10/26/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentI guess browser is the proper word. Anyway, in the face of trolls and internet racists we can find really nice things on the internet. (Continue Reading)
What is a conservative?
10/25/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentSomeone who wants to conserve things the way they are. Why does he want to do that? Because he is comfortable with that way and (Continue Reading)
Many voices make one think
10/24/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentBack when I worked as a therapist in a mental health center, a psychiatric clinic, we charted our contacts with our patients. The medical model (Continue Reading)
The phony Romans
10/17/2020 Pat Barrett Add Comment“The embrace of demographic determinism is self-defeating: it causes the right to cease any attempt to do the hard work of persuasion and winning new (Continue Reading)
The Great Migration
10/15/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentNo, not the one Wilkerson wrote so brilliantly about. The one Brian Williams denominated thus in reference to the Republicans edging away from Donald Trump (Continue Reading)
Flotsam and jetsam of the great GOP foundering
10/15/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentAs pieces of reality float by, I grasp at one after the other, hoping to find one large enough and stable enough to carry me (Continue Reading)
ad mulierem argument
10/13/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentAn ad hominem argument, from Latin for “to or toward the man/person”, bypasses the elements of fact and evidence in a judgment and judges the (Continue Reading)
BLM
10/12/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentGuy B. Johnson, quoted in Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, wrote: “This fact [total control over slaves] is of great significance for the understanding of racial conflict (Continue Reading)
U.S.M.C. for autistic people
10/09/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentI shamefacedly admit that I and others in the family thought our grandson was being unrealistic for wanting to be a U.S. Marine. He joined (Continue Reading)
How’s my little body?
10/03/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentFor some time now I have maintained a fairly steady routine of exercise, alternating between a set of exercises focusing on the core and another using weights (Continue Reading)
Divided
10/03/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentWe live in a democracy where urging people to vote has become a “partisan issue.”
From here? Straight down or straight up?
10/03/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe HVAC guy was over today, a guy in his 50s, who casually mentioned Obama’s foreign birth and a few other Fox News hunks of (Continue Reading)
Upworthiest is great, but……
09/26/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentHeart-warming stories are the stock-in-trade of the site Upworthiest. Puppies, little kids, kittens, grateful oldsters, tough guy softies, and so on. Lots of fun. Makes (Continue Reading)
Poll Worker
09/25/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentI signed up to be a poll worker. Special to working in the East Valley of Maricopa County Arizona: I get to carry an AK47. (Continue Reading)
Two Kinds of Conservatism
09/24/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentIgnoring for now the variety of ideologies, policies and crank ideas that make up the so-called conservative movement (Paleoconservatives. Reactionaries, Libertarians, Movement Conservatives, Old Guard, (Continue Reading)
Who Are These People?
09/24/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentJoe Scarborough this morning asked, Who are these people? referring to people at the Trump rally who cheered when he described a reporter being injured (Continue Reading)
RBG imitators
09/23/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentSeeing pictures of adorable young girls dressed as Ruth Bader Ginsburg made me think of the dangers of little girls wanting to be like RBG, (Continue Reading)
Do we have to hold together?
09/22/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentI usually don’t combine Basics and Politics but a book just came out surveying empires across the world and suggesting the collaps of the Roman (Continue Reading)
R.I.P. R.B.G.
09/18/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentWhat we hoped against has come. Before he body was cold, McConnell declared a nominee would be brought to the floor for a vote quickly. (Continue Reading)
Peer Review
09/17/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentOnly one instance of this term appears in this blog:” I found that people whose knowledge and wisdom I had reason to respect presented this (Continue Reading)
whistleblew
09/15/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentFor the first time I heard the verb ‘whistleblow’. I don’t know if this goes under ‘language change’ or ‘from under the bus’. A very (Continue Reading)