(January 2, 2015 at 11:44 pm)ronedee Wrote: I am troubled that no one here is vigilant, or even concerned about our ever encroaching, corrupt government. Its just accepted as "progress"!!In a day and age when there is more and more investigative reporting and more people recording each other (audio and video) and more cynicism and more transparency (often to the chagrin of those who used to take privacy for granted) it may just be that it seems as if things are getting worse. But all it might mean is that the stuff that used to go on in secrecy is much more likely to be brought to light. That's a good thing. But it also can make it seem as if we're suddenly being overwhelmed by bad people doing bad things. No... there have always been bad people doing bad things, but now we catch more of them in the act.
Mind you, I can recall people lamenting the state of the world for as long as I've been alive, and I know that my parents and their parents heard the same. We tend to filter the past through a very different lens than we use to observe the present and guess at the future. So it may simply be natural to worry that things are getting worse and that there is no end in sight because no one cares enough to change it.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
