Baseline Happiness

Psychologists theorize that people have a baseline of happiness, or hedonic set point. What they mean is that while an individual’s level of happiness will ebb and flow, go up and down, dependent upon the circumstances, there is a point to which his or her level of happiness tends to return. I was thinking aboutContinue

The Privileged Animal: Politics & Veganism

According to a 2018 Gallop poll, liberals are much more likely to be vegetarian (11%) or vegan (5%) than conservatives (2% vegetarian, 2% vegan). Furthermore, Americans who makes less than $30,000 a year are much more likely to avoid eating meat. I have a pet theory for why this would be. I hypothesize that itContinue

Politics & Science

Where conservatives and liberals debate their beliefs, we need solid social science. Social science may be necessarily soft compared to the natural sciences, but political scientists still do follow the scientific method, and they should therefore be in a position to help shape public policy. Politicians and voters on the left and right agree onContinue

Black Names

The case manager from my insurance company had come to meet with me. His name is Katario. We talked about my health care and just kind of hammed it up, just talking as two guys. He said, “You’re 32? I have a daughter about your age.” I asked in jest, “Oh yeah? Is she single?”Continue

Ideology & Knowledge

There was an image on social media that I saw. It said that millennials, if they were thinking that socialism or Islam should be  the basis of our political system (how many millennials  really want a Sharia state?), that we should remember the numbers of deaths attributable to those ideologies. They said that there wereContinue

Rural Sociology, Sep2017, Vol. 82 Issue 3, p499-523

Angie Carter’s article in the September 2017 issue of Rural Sociology has a copyright notice on it, so I suppose I won’t republish it here (not that I really care if I get sued, but I’ll be nice enough). I invite you, my dear readers, to read it for yourselves. But I warn you thatContinue

Democratic Socialism: A Few Words

It seems that academics who study the social sciences lean to the left, politically speaking. This I attribute to their having a strong understanding of social phenomena, phenomena effected by government policies. While I’m not an academic with an advanced degree, I do have two undergraduate degrees in the social sciences, which I credit forContinue

Deborah Tannen & Mom

In her 1990 best-seller, You Just Don’t Understand, Deborah Tannen discusses communication problems between men and women resulting from their different uses of language and conversations. (John Gray’s 1992 book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus strikes me as a watered down embodiment of Tannen’s work). Having read Tannen’s book (actually, I have read three ofContinue

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

I was going to focus my attention in these articles to the history of science, or at least to topics that are tangential to the history of science, and I bought what I expect to be an excellent book to help me in that endeavor titled The Grand Contraption by David Park. But today’s article,Continue

Phrenology

My third grade teacher taught my class about the Wild West. One of the lessons was on the James Gang. Looking at a picture of Jesse James, I said, “He doesn’t look like a criminal!” It was perhaps a nonsensical utterance, but I guess that back in my childhood, I thought that criminals resembled monsters more thanContinue