Why wouldn’t we all be liberal?











  • Anthropogenic climate change is real
  • Banning abortions doesn’t reduce abortions
  • Money is corrupting the political process
  • There is racial and gender inequality still
  • The war on drugs is a failure
  • We have huge educational inequality
  • We have growing income inequality and a shrinking middle class



Who’s Responsible?


I’ve been thinking a lot about personal responsibility lately and just kind of wondering what it really means.  It’s phrase that gets thrown around a lot, especially in regards to politics.  Conservatives use the term quite a bit but often don’t seem to behave in a way that shows they grasp the meaning or try to determine if it’s actually true.

When I googled the definition it gave me this:


Let’s look at the truth of this statement first.  There are plenty of arguments that can be made to show that this does not reflect life in any way.  Simply because the choices that any one person has in front of them are simply different.  A person living in poverty has a completely different set of choices to make than a person who is wealthy.  Now let’s throw in a genetic background which varies across the human population.  Now let’s throw environmental influences.  now let’s throw in information about how the brain develops and how one can be indoctrinated or brainwashed into a certain way of thinking.  Now let’s throw in levels of education which vary.  We are all conditioned for a certain set of responses that is either likely or more likely, which I discussed in a previous post about free will.  And of course this idea of personal responsibility is used to imply that all poor people are lazy and are poor by choice.

Now even if this notion of personal responsibility was entirely true, why is it that we have a government who shows no personal responsibility?  And I’m talking about both sides of the aisle, both Democrats and Republicans.  We simply don’t have a government that demonstrate personal responsibility.  How often do we hear politicians admitting their own mistakes?  How often do they apologize for the suffering they might have caused?  How often do they apologize for the policies that haven’t worked or been implemented effectively?  How often do they apologize for not doing the things they said they were going to do?  Sometimes I wonder if the reason there is a lack of trust in government in this country has less to do with the fact that they keep doing stupid things, but rather not owning up to the stupid things they do.  I mean seriously would you trust somebody who lacked so much self-awareness that they didn’t even seem to care or notice that they are screwing you or other people over?  I know I wouldn’t?

And that brings me to a bit of a side question.  Would you be more likely to re-elect someone who admitted to his/her mistakes or someone who denied that they made any?  I guess the answer seems to lean towards the latter because it seems we spend so much time trying to prove that someone made a mistake (and yes mistakes when you are in a position of great responsibility can cost people their lives), but do we do that because we know they won’t admit themselves, or were we really expecting them to be perfect?  The rest of us make plenty of mistakes, so does anybody really believe that those we elect are part of a select group of people who don’t make any mistakes?  Isn’t the most important thing that we learn from mistakes and don’t make them again?  Take the Benghazi situation. In hindsight it seems like a lot of things could have been done differently, and perhaps they will in the future, but shouldn’t we expect that with dangerous situations, even a slight error might lead to unnecessary deaths, and that such an error might be made by anyone?  Maybe somebody else might not have made the mistake.  Or maybe somebody wouldn’t have made the mistake 99/100 times but perhaps it just happens on the wrong day where they are more tired than usual and a mistake happens.  I’m not trying to imply that Hillary is guilty of any wrongdoing, but simply that expecting high ranking politicians to be faultless is a ridiculous high bar to set, especially given the high volume and level of decisions they make daily.

It seems to me that we have to allow for some error in judgment.  We should be able to expect politicians to be honest about admitting those errors and thus we can place values on their honesty and their ability to correct their own mistakes.  This to me seems to be an important part of personal responsibility that is missing from our daily lives.  Rich and the powerful always seem immune from the standards of personal responsibility that they hold to the rest of us.   Bill Cosby is a great example of a celebrity who placed himself above this standard, even though he certainly had a lot to say about African-American parents and being personally responsible.  Isn’t there something inherently untrustworthy about a person who does not practice what they preach?  What if Bill Cosby confessed what he had done.  Made some reparations to those he has raped, and turned himself in? We might not like him still, but at least we can appreciate a person who is taking responsibility for the pain that they caused.

In the end, it seems to me that “personal responsibility” is not a philosophy to center one’s self around.  It seems largely untrue, and even if it was true we rarely see it from the people in this world who should be the most personally responsible because of how powerful their positions, their influence, and their voice is. If one wants to believe in personal responsibility then let’s look at the factors that encourage people to be more personally responsible and address those issues instead.

Technological Literacy







AI October: The Ethics Of… The Robot Uprising

Another great post on ethical problems to think about for our future.

The Ethics Of

Ok so I admit it – last week’s contribution to AI October didn’t actually have anything to do with Artificial Intelligence at all. The prospect of humanity accidentally making itself redundant is still a pretty worrying concept, but since we as a species always seem to be working busily on new ways to wipe ourselves out, it’s not so much a problem of technology as it is a problem of the human condition.

True artificial intelligence on the other hand, is a very different kettle of fish. Let’s be clear here; when we say artificial intelligence we’re not just talking about a sophisticated machine that can fake being alive. Our rapidly advancing technology has developed machines that can walk and talk (moderately) convincingly, can gather information and make decision, but these are all reactive skills – no more intelligent or alive than a wheel’s ability to roll when pointed down…

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The Bible Could Use Some Updating

“Bible Teaching and Religious Practice,” Europe and Elsewhere



  • We support gay people
  • We support evolution
  • We support science
  • We support education
  • We would rather avoid war
  • We know the Bible isn’t meant to be taken literally
  • We think helping those that are less fortunate is important
  • We know it’s our belief and we don’t need proselytize
  • We think birth control is an important part of health care
  • We think separation of church and state is important









Sweet Sorrow – My Ode to Autumn

After running with long healthy strides,
Summer sighs and rests its weary bones,
And catching its breath and closing its eyes,
It thinks back on the life it has made, it smiles,
And begins a journey of deep reflection,
In that quite moment, autumn is born.


That green, so pervasive and full of life,
Begins to give way to a symphony of colors,
And a clear night ends in a cool morning
Bringing us all relief from summer heat.
No surface is excluded from thick dew,
Lying under a blanket of slumbering fog,
Snaking its way through the valley,
Slow to wake and start its day in the rising sun,
And as the noon time sun shines brightly,
The skin no longer hides from that blazing orb,
The humid haze of summer has left,
The sky, a perfect blue, brings clarity of mind,
A feeling of nostalgia for carefree days,
A joy for the closeness of friends and family,
Inner warmth protects against shorter days.


Gentle summer breezes are replaced by brisk winds,
And waning leaves are forced from their homes,
To settle anew on the hardening soil below,
And the year begins to feel the consequence,
Of getting lost in sweet remembrances.
It must also account for the passage of time,
And see that less lies ahead than lies behind,
A bountiful harvest is full of summer’s heat,
Animals fill their bellies with old sunlight,
Saying their goodbyes as life withers on the ground,
And as the morning air hints at winters bite,
Fur is thickened and homes are secured,
Each ray of warm sunshine becomes a great gift,
Moments of laughter are appreciated more,
And wisdom and gratitude replace youthful vigor.

And in the longer night hours, silence sets in.
A light frost adheres to stubborn leaves,
Who cling to their branches, refusing to face,
The inevitability that all life must meet its end,
And that all we can do is hope we lived well,
So a better world begins in winter’s wake.

AI October: The Ethics Of… They Took Our Jobs

A great blog piece looking at the future and how technology is slowly replacing humans in just about everything!

The Ethics Of

The ironic thing about living in this information age, with technology advancing at an unprecedented rate, is that there really haven’t been all that many truly new ethical problems to sort out yet. Sure the internethas created virtual worlds from scratch, and personal surveillance drones have suddenly made the jump from ‘science fiction’ to ‘$19.95 at Dick Smith’, but despite the new technical complications both of these basically boil down to the issue of privacy– something society has had a long debate about for hundreds of years. The emergence of global terrorism has lead us to willingly forsake civil liberties we used to hold dear, but again, the general debate of ‘security versus freedom’ has been around forever.

Sure, the continued march of technology is likely to give us plenty of terrifying new ethical issues to tackle someday soon. Should cloning be allowed? Does lab-grown meat qualify as…

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