Date: July 22, 2017
01) Bernie Sanders Introduces His Answer to Trumpcare
“Medicare for all! Not for some.”
Date: July 22, 2017
01) Waking Up with Sam Harris #87 – Triggered (with Scott Adams)
“In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris and Scott Adams debate the character and competence of President Trump.
Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert, one of the most popular comic strips of all time. He has been a full-time cartoonist since 1995, after 16 years as a technology worker for companies like Crocker National Bank and Pacific Bell. His many bestsellers include The Dilbert Principle, Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook, and How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big. He forthcoming book is Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.”
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Date: July 21, 2017
“This film was created in its entirety by Gordon Buchan, of Maryhill Glasgow, founder of Nonce Apologists Exposed facebook page. For a very long time, I’ve personally witnessed a barrage of outright violent content, aimed at Nigel Oldfield…Most of it has been demented and sick. I don’t know exactly who has been behind every incident of it…but one example showed Nigel’s face on a body, of a person who was about to be murdered. I ask you sincerely, who deserves these words of vulgar abuse and hate, merely for daring to live, love and be loved?… Have no doubt, that Child Love and Teen Love are a pure form of love…genuine and worthy of defense, no matter what some may say about it… |
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Date: July 21, 2017
01) Waking Up with Sam Harris #86 – From Cells to Cities (with Geoffrey West)
“In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Geoffrey West about how biological and social systems scale, the significance of fractals, the prospects of radically extending human life, the concept of “emergence” in complex systems, the importance of cities, the necessity for continuous innovation, and other topics.
Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics and biology. He is a Senior Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a distinguished professor at the Sante Fe Institute, where he served as the president from 2005-2009. In 2006 he was named to Time’s list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” He is the author of Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.”
Date: July 21, 2017
01) Republican Party Imploding as Trumpcare Fails
Date: July 21, 2017
01) The Origins of Language, Reason & Violence – Steven Pinker
“The Origins of Language, Reason & Violence – Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker in conversation with Tyler discusses the origins of language, reason & of violence
Steven Arthur “Steve” Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-born American cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.”
Date: July 21, 2017
01) Does God Have a Future? Sam Harris & Michael Shermer Break it Down
“Does God Have a Future? Sam Harris & Michael Shermer Break it Down.
Sam Harris & Michael Shermer debate Deepak Chopra and J.Houston on the notion “The future of god”. This is part 2 of the debate.
Samuel Benjamin “Sam” Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, philosopher, and neuroscientist. He is the co-founder and chief executive of Project Reason, a non-profit organization that promotes science and secularism, and host of the Waking Up podcast. His book The End of Faith (2004), a critique of organized religion, appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list for 33 weeks and also won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 2005. Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) was a response to criticism of The End of Faith. In The Moral Landscape (2010), Harris argues that science can help answer moral problems and aid human well-being. He subsequently published a long-form essay Lying in 2011, the short book Free Will in 2012, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion in 2014 and, with British activist Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue in 2015.
Michael Brant Shermer (born September 8, 1954) is an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The Skeptics Society currently has over 55,000 members. Shermer also engages in debates on topics pertaining to pseudoscience and religion in which he emphasizes scientific skepticism.
Shermer is also the producer and co-host of the 13-hour Fox Family television series Exploring the Unknown which was broadcast in 1999. Since April 2001, he has been a monthly columnist for Scientific American magazine with his Skeptic column. He is also a scientific advisor to the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH).
Shermer was once a fundamentalist Christian, but ceased to believe in the existence of God during his graduate studies. He accepts the labels agnostic, nontheist, atheist and others. He has expressed reservations about such labels for his lack of belief in a God, however, as he sees them being used in the service of “pigeonholing”, and prefers to simply be called a skeptic. He also describes himself as an advocate for humanist philosophy as well as the science of morality.”
Date: July 21, 2017
01) WATCH: FCCs Ajit Pai Lies Through His Teeth on Fox News About Net Neutrality
“FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has lied to the public about his pro-corporate plan to ruin the internet by rolling back Title II net neutrality regulations. He received some help from Fox News when they brought him on ‘Fox & Friends’ and allowed Pai to spew lies with no follow-up questions. Fox News’ hosts also lied about the state of broadband in America, and presented viewers with misleading poll results in an effort to further their agenda. In this segment we attempt to dispel the abundance of misinformation disseminated by Pai and Fox News.”
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Date: July 21, 2017
“One of the greatest thinkers of our age tackles one of the most important questions of our time: why people believe in God and how religion shapes our lives and . In Breaking the Spell Daniel Dennett explores how the great ideas of religion have enthralled us for thousands of years – and whether we could (or should) break . Dan Dennett talking about his book ‘Breaking the Spell’. Includes an interesting introduction in which Michael Shermer discusses how people can be misled into.” |
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 – Atheist Media Links
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Date: July 19, 2017
01) Self-esteem World History & Terror Management Theory Evidence
“Starts out with an explanation of the theory and a presentation of some evidence using excerpts from various talks, documentaries, and a few graphs. Followed by a perspective on world history derived from Ernest Becker’s Escape From Evil and the University of Amsterdam study on Terror Management Theory (TMT) called Things Will Get Better: The Anxiety-BufferingQualities of Progressive Hope http://www.academia.edu/534931/Things_will_get_better_The_anxiety-buffering_qualities_of_progressive_hope_2009_
The video is also informed by historical evidence about ecological degradation and the unpredictability of technological developments.
From the perspective of Ernest Becker & TMT, self-esteem is primarily a reflex of an unconscious fear of death; and human culture an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality – which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism.
For more info go here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289309102_Thirty_Years_of_Terror_Management_Theory
Interestingly, the other competing (or complementary) major theory of self-esteem comes from CP – coalitional psychology (also known as “Sociometer Theory”) basically saying that what others think of us has survival & reproductive benefits, so that a sense of self-esteem would help us improve or maintain this fitness by self-monitoring – gauging others’ opinion and modifying our behavior accordingly. This would largely entail a view of history as an evolutionary adaptive set of behaviors.
The problem with this CP explanation as a sole explanation is that
1) Every major culture we know of features religious or supernatural beliefs which have less to do with what others think of us than with what gods or spirits think of us.
2) Our status or “what others think of us” is mediated by invented, largely arbitrary cultural activities and beliefs (abstract meaning systems) that have virtually nothing to do with the specific adaptive threats we encountered (or that could even be logically postulated) in the course of evolution. Work on primates shows that coalitions and alliances in primate groups serve very specific adaptive goals.
3) CP cannot account for the fact that reminders of death increase allegiance to these abstract meaning systems, and that, conversely, challenges to these meaning systems increase death-thought accessibility. These abstract meaning systems may or may not facilitate the formation and maintenance of coalitions, but TMT evidence shows that this is largely on the basis of a suppression of unconscious death-anxiety (an unfortunate byproduct of our adaptive intelligence), not as a specific adaptation for survival.”
