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QotD: A Crack in Everything
Nov. 11th, 2018 08:07 am
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
---Leonard Cohen (Anthem)
QotD: Normal is not the goal
Sep. 28th, 2018 07:33 am When you focus on being normal, you exclude the possibility of being extraordinary.
--Ann Yoshida
QotD: Yoga goes beyond Identity
Sep. 27th, 2018 03:01 pm Yoga has the potential to transform both our inner and outer selves in a way that would allow us to see past differences of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and any other artificial identities we create, to be able to recognize the presence of the divine in one another and all of existence.
Suhag Shukla, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation
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QotD: Goebbels on Repetition
Sep. 6th, 2018 07:51 amIf you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
—Joseph Goebbels
Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joseph-goebbels-on-the-quot-big-lie-quot
QotD: Man is an Animal
Sep. 5th, 2018 06:08 pm Man is
and remains
an animal.
Here a beast of prey,
there a housepet,
but always an animal.
~~Joseph Goebbels (German Nazi propagandist)
(source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/281832.Joseph_Goebbels)
and remains
an animal.
Here a beast of prey,
there a housepet,
but always an animal.
~~Joseph Goebbels (German Nazi propagandist)
(source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/281832.Joseph_Goebbels)
QotD: Life Will Break You
Aug. 14th, 2018 08:34 amLife will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
--Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
--Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat.
Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn’t there.
Theology is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn’t there, and shouting “I found it!”
Science is like being in a dark room looking for a black cat while using a flashlight.
― Anonymous
QotD: Power Corrupts
Jun. 5th, 2018 09:13 pmI cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means.
"Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the president cannot pardon himself," the Department of Justice declared in 1974. The DOJ spelled it out just four days before Nixon resigned, explaining that the president's pardoning power "does not extend to the president himself."
To learn which questions are unanswerable,
and not to answer them:
This skill is most needful in times of
stress and darkness.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Left Hand of Darkness.”
and not to answer them:
This skill is most needful in times of
stress and darkness.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Left Hand of Darkness.”
QotD: Ideas Don't Die
Apr. 6th, 2018 07:30 pm"You can kill a man,
but you can't kill an idea."
--Medgar Evers before his own assasination
but you can't kill an idea."
--Medgar Evers before his own assasination
QotD: Lakota Namaste
Feb. 19th, 2018 09:42 pm"Upon suffering beyond suffering; the Red Nation shall rise again and it shall be a blessing for a sick world. A world filled with broken promises, selfishness and separations. A world longing for light again. I see a time of seven generations when all the colors of mankind will will gather under the sacred Tree of Life and the whole earth will become one circle again. In that day there will be those among the Lakota who will carry knowledge and understanding of unity among all living things, and the young white ones will come to those of my people and ask for this wisdom. I salute the light within your eyes where the whole universe dwells. For when you are at that center within you and I am that place within me, we shall be as one."
--Crazy Horse
--Crazy Horse
QotD: neo-Marxism = social justice today
Feb. 19th, 2018 09:32 amWhenever I bemoan the culture of "safe spaces" and "microaggressions" on college campuses, said Andrew Sullivan, people argue that "the real world isn't like that." But that's no longer true. More and more of our public discourse is now shaped by the neo-Marxist Left's "identity-based, 'social justice" worldview, in which all interactions are defined by a hierarchy of power and oppression. Free speech itself is falling into disrepute, as a tool of the patriarchy. When some feminists recently got wind of a forthcoming Harper's essay criticizing the #MeToo movement, they not only personally vilified author Katie Roiphe, they also tried to force the magazine to drop the piece before publication--a "real-world echo" of students shouting down speakers. Writers, like students, now know that one "incorrect" opinion on sensitive issues of race and gender can result in "instant social ostracism" and demands they be fired--so they remain silent. Men cannot discuss sexual harassment; whites cannot talk about racism. The goal of our society is not "the emancipation of the individual," but permanent placement of the individual in the proper identity group: white, black, brown, female, gay, etc. "We used to call that bigotry. Now we call it being woke."
--Summary of Andrew Sullivan's article (NYMag.com) from The Week February 23, 2018.
--Summary of Andrew Sullivan's article (NYMag.com) from The Week February 23, 2018.
"A single dot on a canvas is not a painting and a single bet cannot resolve a complex theoretical dispute. This will take many questions and question clusters. Of course it's possible that if large numbers of questions are asked, each side may be right on some forecasts but wrong on others and the final outcome won't generate the banner headlines that celebrity bets sometimes do. But as software engineers say, that's a feature, not a bug. A major point of view rarely has zero merit, and if a forecasting contest produces a split decisions we will have learned that the reality is more mixed than either side thought. If learning, not gloating, is the goal, that is progress."
--Tetlock, Philip and Gardner, Dan, in p269 in Superforecasting; The Art and Science of Prediction 2015.
--Tetlock, Philip and Gardner, Dan, in p269 in Superforecasting; The Art and Science of Prediction 2015.
