Sarah Huckabee Brags About her Humility & How Youth Coaches are Hurting Our Children
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: Theologian Thomas Aquinas preaches about free choice and the rational mind.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders knocks Harris for not having biological children: Sanders makes a ridiculous statement that insults women, step-parents, and anyone who can think.
Homophobic speech in youth sports doesn't just harm gay boys. It harms straight boys too.: The stereotypical coach who uses slurs to “motivate” athletes must be forever removed from our schools. They are lousy coaches and even lousier human beings.
Kareem’s Video Break: This baby elephant does what every little kid loves doing.
Kareem’s Kvetching Korner: Rob Schneider uses his celebrity platform to ridicule the death of basketball great and humanitarian Dikembe Mutombo.
Kareem Gets Artsy: A Soldier's Journey by Sabin Howard is a stunning World War I memorial that gets it right.
What I’m Reading: Novels: Two mystery novels. One is an enjoyable Agatha Christie clone. The other is a wonder of charming characters and intense suspense.
Kris Kristofferson: “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again)”: He was a true Renaissance man: athlete, scholar, and artist.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Italian priest, philosopher, and theologian
Thomas Aquinas said this during the Dark Ages when ignorance and irrationality were the twin forces that guided people’s opinions and actions. As a result, they were easily manipulated by royalty and religion to act based on traditions forced upon them by those who benefited most from those traditions. As a result, the royals and the Church increased their wealth and power. The commoner? Not so much.
What has changed in 800 years? A lot, actually. Developed societies value education, science, and reason more than they ever did before. But those who practice rational thought in everyday life seem to be diminishing. This is understandable in underdeveloped countries where they have less education and literacy. But to see it happening in the United States is a danger to the country.
Rational thought doesn’t come as naturally as emotion, which is why we teach critical thinking in schools. We were taught to not form opinions before gathering all possible information, weighing the evidence, and then making a rational conclusion by avoiding logical fallacies. The attacks on our schools’ reading and curriculum (as in Florida and Oklahoma) by conservatives eager to choke off critical thinking because the more educated a person is, the more likely they are to vote Democratic. Those with a college degree vote Democratic 55% to 42%. This is a recent phenomenon because twenty years ago it was the opposite, with the more educated voting Republican.
So, what Aquinas means is that unless people have the ability to think rationally, they will be doomed to be enslaved to “going with your gut,” which is made up of social traditions, religion, parental pressure, peer pressure, a need to fit in, and more. They will never be on the road they choose because they’ve been shoved on the road picked out for them by others. The only way to endure the horror of their “choice” is to convince themselves it really was their choice. This is accomplished by hanging out with others enslaved just like them (most who like to proclaim themselves as rebels).
The problem is that everyone thinks they are more rational than the next person. They don’t base this conclusion on rational thought—evaluating their thought process—but rather only on the desire to see themselves as rational. The first rule of every con game is to make the mark think they are choosing freely.
Free choice sometimes means rejecting those people and institutions that insist on choosing for you. That can be very difficult. But the reward of being your own person—not just pretending—is worth it.