Some interesting reading

I've come across some interesting reading that I thought I would share. 

• First up is an article about POTUS45's appalling claims that the pandemic is fake - which is one of tens of thousands of lies #45 has made.
  "I had four families that I called and told them their loved one was never coming home. I was devastated, I didn't have an emotion left, I was numb."
  But a moment even worse came for Dr Keeperman when President Donald Trump suggested in a tweet that what he and his colleagues were doing was fake.
  On November 30, Dr Keeperman posted a selfie on Twitter from the Renown Regional Medical Center's makeshift ward in the hospital's car park. / He simply wanted to thank his co-workers and encourage them to stay strong after five COVID-19 deaths in 32 hours.
  Two days later, Mr Trump retweeted a now-blocked post claiming the car park ward was a "scam".
  There is a somewhat questionable set of informal awards called the "Darwin Awards", described on Wikipedia as "a tongue-in-cheek honor originating in Usenet newsgroup discussions around 1985. They recognise individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool from dying or becoming sterilized via their own actions". 
  #45 doesn't qualify, but his actions have led to so many avoidable deaths that I - in despair - wonder if there should be a special category for him in these "awards"?
  See here.
• A call for philosophers to stop "shit stirring" - which is the best thing I've heard in that field for years:
  "Non-action in the face of threats such as climate change, pandemics and technologically facilitated extremism has moral implications of its own, and it’s utilitarianism that offers the most emphatic responses to these problems.
  But philosophers often don’t do a good job of discussing utilitarianism. They traffic in astounding thought-experiments – is it right to harmlessly kill your newborn infant if it’s screaming a bit too much? . . .
  But ‘gotcha’ answers to ethical enquiries about how to raise, or not raise, kids are a triumph of a philosophical style that prioritises aggravation over moral substance. Those who offer them are not engaged in good-faith philosophical debate. They’re engaged in what I call ‘moral shit-stirring’. . . .
  Similarly, shit-stirring has become the great enemy of good-faith debate in contemporary philosophical ethics."
  See here. 
• "What Election Day Revealed About Progressive Policies"
  From the USA: "Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explains how policies that embrace humanity and dignity are a winning electoral strategy, given the success of progressive ballot initiatives and candidates on Election Day."
  See here. 
• Not equality by any means, but a significant step towards it at an earlier date than I knew: the UK Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919. 
• A US woman farmer who inherited a farm in 1897, only used profits to pay for expansion, followed the results of science (which is not always good for animals - nor is the farming she was doing), insisted on hygiene 30 years before it was legislated there, and played music for her cattle.
  “Howie’s application of prescribed female values to the rural environment in Wisconsin was just one element of the large-scale progressive reform movement that swept the nation during the long Gilded Age and Progressive Era (the 1870s through the 1920s). Many middle-class women claimed that they were compelled to activism by the skewed American value system that was the result of male domination of business and technology. Profit had replaced morality, these women charged, as men focused on financial gain as the sole measure of success and progress. In the factories whose profits turned a few individuals into millionaires, working-class men, women, and children toiled long hours for low wages in unsafe conditions, only to go home to urban squalor. Non-renewable resources were exploited with no thought to their conservation. And farmers, often struggling financially, heedlessly exhausted soils and raised animals in filth, seeking to maximize their profits from the impure crops and stock they foisted on an unsuspecting public. In the face of so much gross injustice, women, long prescribed to be the civilizers of men, staged protests and organized reform efforts.”
   . . .
  “Howie’s cattle were “brushed and petted and everything done to make the barn as sanitary and attractive as possible.”10She made no effort to hide her emotional attachment to her cattle: “I love the cows on my farm as one would love a person and I do not believe the people generally have an appreciation of the worthy and noble animals commensurate with their true worth.” ”
  Unger, N. (2017). Adda F. Howie: “America’s Outstanding Woman Farmer.” Wisconsin Magazine of History, 100(4), 40–45. http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/wmh/id/52633/rec/399 
• "Deficit Attention Disorder: Partisan-Motivated Reasoning About Government Overspending
  Working Paper", by John V. Kane New York University and Ian G. Anson University of Maryland, Baltimore County - which I found on Twitter here, which pointed to this website,  which led to this download.
• "Can the Judiciary Guard Democratic Transitions of Power? An Indian-Israeli Perspective". by Prof. Rivka Weill.
  
• "Australia's eSafety commissioner would be able to remove 'seriously harmful' content under proposed cyber abuse laws".
• An investor group - often described as activist - is wanting companies to avoid reputational loss in the first place - which is what I have been wanting to see for some time now. See here.