Jordan Peterson: ‘The pursuit of happiness is a pointless goal’; Guardian, January 21, 2018

Tim Lott, Guardian; 

Jordan Peterson: ‘The pursuit of happiness is a pointless goal’

"It is uncomfortable to be told to get in touch with your inner psychopath, that life is a catastrophe and that the aim of living is not to be happy. This is hardly the staple of most self-help books. And yet, superficially at least, a self-help book containing these messages is what the Canadian psychologist Jordan B Peterson has written.

His book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is an ambitious, some would say hubristic, attempt to explain how an individual should live their life, ethically rather than in the service of self. It is informed by the Bible, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung and Dostoevsky – again, uncommon sources for the genre.

I doubt it has the commercial appeal of The Secret (wish for something and it will come true) and it certainly strays markedly from the territory of How to Win Friends and Influence People. But then Peterson is in a different intellectual league from the authors of most such books. Camille Paglia estimates him to be “the most important Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan”.

Atheists tend to be seen as immoral – even by other atheists: study; Agence France-Presse in Paris via Guardian, August 7, 2017

Agence France-Presse in Paris via Guardian; Atheists tend to be seen as immoral – even by other atheists: study

"“It is striking that even atheists appear to hold the same intuitive anti-atheist bias,” the study’s co-author, Will Gervais, a psychology professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, said.

“I suspect that this stems from the prevalence of deeply entrenched pro-religious norms. Even in places that are currently quite overtly secular, people still seem to intuitively hold on to the believe that religion is a moral safeguard.”

Only in Finland and New Zealand, two secular countries, did the experiment not yield conclusive evidence of anti-atheist prejudice, said the team."

New Florida Law Lets Residents Challenge School Textbooks; NPR, July 31, 2017

Greg Allen, NPR: New Florida Law Lets Residents Challenge School Textbooks

"More recently, the group has turned its attention to the books being used in Florida's schools. A new state law, developed and pushed through by Flaugh's group, allows parents, and any residents, to challenge the use of textbooks and instructional materials they find objectionable via an independent hearing."

How DC’s Flintstones Became The Most Important Comic Of The Year; Comic Book Resources, June 13, 2017

Chris Neill Comic Book Resources; How DC’s Flintstones Became The Most Important Comic Of The Year

"In twelve issues, writer Mark Russell and artist Steve Pugh have created a series that is both one of the sharpest social satires to come out in recent years, and one of the most moving explorations of the human condition that you’ll ever read. That’s right, one of the best comics of 2016 and 2017 was about the modern Stone Age family...

...[T]hat’s the overarching message of Russell and Pugh’s Flintstones: it’s easier to destroy than create, but you get nothing from destruction. The world can be a scary and lonely place, and it’s easy to judge others purely based on their beliefs or appearance – Russell and Pugh don’t back down when tackling how ugly humanity and so-called civilized life can be. People will straight up refuse to understand another’s way of life because it’s inconvenient to them. When discussing the newly created concept of marriage, one of Bedrock’s news anchors describes it as being “An immoral threat to our way of life… because it wasn’t around when I was kid!” But Russell and Pugh also remind us that we all have the capacity for kindness. It’s easy to destroy, but more worthwhile and valuable to understand."

Darwin Day Revelation: Evolution, Not Religion, Is the Source of Morality; HuffingtonPost.com, 2/12/16

Clay Farris Naff, HuffingtonPost.com; Darwin Day Revelation: Evolution, Not Religion, Is the Source of Morality:

"Murder stands as most heinous of immoral acts, yet we find that the countries with the lowest murder rates include those with the lowest rates of religiosity: Sweden, Japan, Britain, and the Czech Republic, to name a few. Murder rates in medieval Europe, when religion was universal, were ten times modern rates. Within the U.S., states that have the highest rates of religiosity also tend to have the highest murder rates.

Homicide is not an exception; this pattern holds for other crimes. Are we perhaps capturing an affluence effect? Nope. Vietnam is a poor country (per capita GDP ~ $5,000). It is both moderately religious and murderous -- but still has a lower homicide rate than the wealthier and more devout United States.

So where does morality come from? Evolution. This is as close to certain as science gets.. Human universals are pretty good evidence for a start. It turns out that a prohibition on murder is found in every known culture. (Of course there are individuals -- drug dealers, dictators, and fanatics, for example -- who use murder as a tool of their trade, but they are the exceptions.)

Most human universals are not moral matters. Jokes, tools, and aesthetics have no inherent moral valence. That we can pick out some behaviors as morally relevant is a clue. That we can pick out some behaviors as morally relevant is a clue. It points to the fact that we have evolved moral instincts. At root they are empathy, disgust, and fairness."

Government Requests to Remove Online Material Increase at Google; New York Times, 12/19/13

Claire Cain Miller, New York Times; Government Requests to Remove Online Material Increase at Google: "Governments, led by the United States, are increasingly demanding that Google remove information from the Web... Often, the requests come from judges, police officers and politicians trying to hide information that is critical of them. The most common request cites defamation, often of officials... Government requests to remove information increased most significantly in Turkey and Russia because of online censorship laws, according to Google... Google also said officials were resorting to new legal methods to demand that Google remove content, such as citing copyright law to take down transcripts of political speeches or government news releases."