Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
Some people think the Occupy movement and the issues brought up by the protests is something new. I know I’ve been talking about corporatism and income inequality for many years. While archiving some past writings, I found an essay I wrote in 2003 which has ideas in it that wouldn’t seem out of place today – unfortunately.
Michael Shermer is founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine “Skeptic”. He is a BIG NAME in the freethought community and is well known for debunking pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. Shermer has been an advocate of Scientific skepticism – questioning the veracity of claims using the scientific method – except it seems for his own political views. Recently Shermer wrote a series of tweets praising an OpEd by David Brooks that complained about the Occupy movement. He (and Brooks) totally missed the point.
The first tweet shocked me because I really didn’t know that much about Shermer’s political views:
Penn State University has a mess on its hands and many heads rolled as a result – as they should have – but many people on the Internet either falsely claimed that Coach Joe Paterno was accused of molesting the children or that his lack of action upon finding out made him as guilty as the former staff member who is actually accused. Make no mistake, Paterno was fired on Wednesday so the school could protect their brand and get ahead of the massive negative story.
Child abuse, especially of a sexual nature, is, as it should be, a heinous crime. People tend to lose their mind when it becomes public. The downside of that freak out is that due process and the concept of “innocent until proved guilty” seems to fly out the window. Incidents that become news explodes all over the people involved and indirectly seeps down to people not directly involved.
Last night I was following the continuing protesting against Big Corps and the bankers of Wall Street. The umbrella name is called ‘Occupy Wall Street’. Scores of protesters have been down on Wall Street in New York protesting the actions of the bankers and corporations who subvert our democracy and who didn’t go to jail after crashing the economy in 2008. I support their efforts 100% but one tweet last night kind of shocked me and made me laugh in a sad way. I think the current protesters need a refresher course on how to protest corporate power. It doesn’t include complaining when a big corporation doesn’t serve you food.
Today is the 10th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on US soil. The World Trade Center in New York was attacked shortly before 9 AM on a bright and sunny Tuesday in 2001. By the end of the awful day both towers were destroyed, the Pentagon had been hit, and people were killed in a fourth plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. Five days later I wrote an essay about the attacks from my secular humanist perspective. I went through it this week and have posted it again – changed little from the day I wrote it.