1/22 - Your career success in politics, punditry, or preaching should not be threatened by conflicts in your Apparent Driving Moral Philosophy.
However, you should insure your career success's safety in this regard by having a good Actual Driving Moral Philosophy. [thread]
2/22 - Trumpism, the politics of the Radical Right and the Religious Right, and the political ideology behind American Conservatism as currently practiced, these all show shocking gaps between Apparent and Actual Driving Moral Philosophies.
3/22 - Luckily, despite what Theocrats and Dominionists might argue (via appeal to authority), there is a reasoned basis for sound and consistent moral philosophy, the kind that lacks worrisome gaps between one's Apparent and Actual Driving Moral Philosophies.
4/22 - We have T.M. Scanlon, moral philosopher, to thank for the articulation of a reasoned and, as importantly, compassionate basis for one's moral philosophy and for a moral philosophy as a whole: What We Owe to Each Other.
5/22 - Worrisome gaps between Apparent and Actual Moral Philosophies provide a reasoned basis for evaluating the actions of lawyers, judges, and politicians. Example: Do they favor corporations over the average citizen in the laws they choose to make, the judgements they give?
6/22 - And are these trying to mend the gaps between their Apparent and Actual Moral Philosophies through changing their ways to serve their societies, or by Manufacturing Consent in those societies by manipulating massive numbers of their constituents?
7/22 - Does this or that law, or this or that political ideology, do more to benefit prosperous capitalists, or for their corporations, than it does to benefit the average citizen, the good of society, One's Fellow Human Being?
8/22 - Reasons for paving over a gap between one's Apparent and Actual Driving Moral Philosophy are often enumerated in dollar amounts. This is true for pastors and pundits as well as for politicians.
9/22 - Powerful entities who benefit from all the work of politicians, pastors, & pundits pad the pockets of these effective manipulators. These benefit from Running Government Like a Business, versus Government of/by/for the People. Hence, Corporate Personhood & Money-as-Speech.
10/22 - Again, this is a reasoned, effective, and, importantly, DEMONSTRABLE measuring stick for the quality of both the prosperous & their corporations, and the politicians, pundits, and pastors themselves.
11/22 - Everyone will have their own particular opinion on whether there are gaps between the Apparent and Actual Driving Moral Philosophies of any particular politician, pundit, or pastor.
12/22 - "What We Owe to Each Other", especially compared with "What Is In It For Me", becomes an effective and justifiable gauge to measure and characterize such gaps.
13/22 - What are the Apparent and Actual Driving Moral Philosophies of corporate lobbyists? How and why do they work to preserve their political power in this regard? Do they use the fact that their money is more influential in Washington than our individual votes?
14/22 - And what of the politicians, pastors, and pundits whose pockets these prosperous powerful pad? Who among them have succeeded most by making those prosperous powerful happy?
15/22 - Also, how do these politicians, pastors, and pundits apparently feel, think, and act in terms of intellectual efforts to increase soundness of reason in law and government, and in the minds of the members of society as a whole?
16/22 - Does their Actual Driving Moral Philosophy seem anti-intellectual? Do they appear to have an axe to grind concerning the well educated, and demonstrably effective ways to become better educated, per se?
17/22 - To identify the powerful and prosperous who want to obfuscate the gap between the Apparent and Actual Moral Philosophies they favor with their influence and money, one barely needs to look beyond whose pockets these powerful and prosperous pad.
18/22 - Consider making these points, or engaging in reasoning based thereon, to a politician like @LeaderMcConnell, @Sen_JoeManchin, or @RepMTG. Consider doing this with their avid supporters.
19/22 - Consider making these points, further, to a pastor like @robertjeffress or @Franklin_Graham, to their congregations and donors, or to their sponsors.
21/22 - Finally, yes! You can make the comparison. You can be a competent judge of this, and decide for yourself. If there is manipulation, you can free yourself from it. And woe to any politician, pastor, or pundit discouraging or disabling you from doing this competently!
22/22 - It is a reasoned analysis of why Dark Money needs to stay Dark to survive, and why Corporate Personhood and Money-as-Speech go unfettered: They are threatened by making apparent the moral gaps described here.
1. Degrees of personhood can say a lot about the privileged in society. Who are "People" here? In America, White Males assigned inferior personhood to women, Africans, and those of the Indigenous nations. We said some of that was God-approved. Now, "corporations are people."
2. Mind you, there is a common thread in all of these examples of societal and political decisions about who gets to be a person, who gets the blessings of equality with the Wealthy Landowners and Industrialists. These examples have helped benefit and protect the super-rich.
3. If you're speaking about Manifest Destiny and Corporate Personhood - both of which have deleterious effects for the average human being in America today, and especially for the poor and low in status - it seems that Who Has The Gold, Makes The Rules.
1. Robert Redfield was a professor of anthropology & one of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s favorite teachers. He gave us the idea of "folk societies," like-minded communities which, Redfield and Vonnegut saw, were on the way out as technology and automation brought vast changes to America.
2. Not only has technology and automation grown, perhaps not exactly as Vonnegut feared, but today's Information Age has changed us almost as drastically as we have thrown off many of the racial attitudes that came from manipulation by our powerful and prosperous forefathers.
3. Some of what my native Southeastern United States now struggles with, & what gave the cultural manufacturers of consent the wedge to erect what @JYSexton calls "The Cult of the Shining City" across the rural USA, is, I think, a strong desire to preserve a "folk society" here.
1/7 - So ... when and if the millions who hate liberals and still love Trump come around, maybe not to accepting Biden's win or to admitting Republican corruption, sedition, or insurrection, but at least to not actively participate in plans to continue it...
2/7 - ... when accountability comes for highly-placed leaders who manipulated millions and became an actual domestic threat to our Constitution and our Government ...
... when heads roll for a worsened pandemic and a multitude who were manipulated to make it that way ...
3/7 - What do you think our friends and neighbors who never came around to "our way of thinking" will do? What will they say? How will they act? What will our society become?
1/ - I have Tweeted before about the number study I am doing, & I want to update this information. I am examining prime numbers from 2 on upward - I am currently at 6733 - to understand more about their Pisano periods: the cycle length the Fibonacci Series has modulo any integer.
2/ - In particular, I want to discover more about what we apparently do not yet understand: the behavior of the Pisano period, which for a prime p ending in 3 or 7 divides 2*(p+1), and for a prime ending in 1 or 9 divides p-1. When I do the division, I get what I call the Ratio.
3/ - For a good majority of the prime numbers ending in 3 or 7, the Ratio of p plus one to the Pisano period is 0.5. For a slightly smaller number of the prime numbers ending in 1 or 9, but still a majority of them, the Ratio is 1.0.
Or the hoi polloi, millions strong, manipulated by @FoxNews, @OANN, @newsmax, and certain prosperous evangelical pastors?
2/4 - The descendants of the hoi polloi who bought into Manifest Destiny & who were okay with exterminating Natives & enslaving Africans?
Or the hoi polloi that sees humanity as equal?
They each have argued dangers of government by "hoi polloi," & point fingers at each other!
3/4 - Luckily, objective, sound reason gives us methods with which we can determine which of the "hoi polloi" actually speak with the voice of the people, a voice not manipulated by powerful forces trying to stay powerful by using subtle PsyOps to get us to play their game.
1/9 - There is a class war being waged - a war of intimidation - against America, & its roots are centuries old. It has turned deadly in recent years, with a worsened pandemic and a Capitol riot among deliberate attacks on us, but it also fuels the fight against Progressivism.
2/9 - Industrialists, corporatists, and the keepers of huge sums of inherited wealth are the ranks from which those super-powerful super-rich who are fighting this war of intimidation against the rest of us come. They use politicians, pundits, preachers, & psychological tactics.
3/9 - Chief among their aims is the avoidance of proportional taxation or any change in who gets to sit in the catbird seat in America. As I said, this is a class war. Many in the Investor Class, who wish to join the Super-Rich and stand any chance of doing so, fight for them.