Extra
Well, law is a bit like a printing press - itâs kind of neutral, you can make it do anything. I mean, what lawyers are taught in law school is chicanery: how to convert words on paper into instruments of power. And depending where the power is, the law will mean different things.
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it."The Second Sex"
Look, Iâm stupid, all right? Iâm not some brilliant person. Iâm a little child. You know the emperorâs new clothes? I can see the naked emperor, just because Iâm a little child-minded person. Iâm not smart. I mean, good scientists are like that. They have the minds of children, to see through all this façade of all this other stuff that they know is stupid nonsense. They just donât see it the way other people see it.interview by Shirley K. Cohen (1995)
But our present State is a dictatorship of Evil. âWeâve known that for a long time,â I can hear you say, âand it is not necessary for you to remind us of it once again.â So I ask you: If you are aware of this, why do you not stir yourselves? Why do you permit this autocrat to rob you of one sphere of your rights after another, little by little, both overtly and in secret? One day there will be nothing left, nothing at all, except for a mechanized national engine that has been commandeered by criminals and drunks. Has your spirit been so devastated by rape that you forget that it is not only your right, but your moral duty to put an end to this system?
If a person cannot even summon the strength to demand his rights, then there is nothing left for him but destruction. We will have deserved to be scattered to all corners of the globe, as dust before the wind, if we do not pull ourselves together in this eleventh hour and finally summon the courage that we have been lacking till now. Do not hide your cowardice under the cloak of cleverness! Because every day that you delay, every day that you do not resist this spawn of hell, your guilt is steadily increasing, like a parabolic curve.
Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything."The Woman Destroyed"
I've noticed a fairly big distinction in what I learned as science and the philosophy of science as it was practiced up until around the last 20 years or so and now.
Science was based on rigorous falsification. Scientists actively tried to prove themselves and other scientists wrong. Science has always been more about, 'well we know it's not all of these things, so it's probably that until we prove that wrong too'.
Sometime in the last couple decades, it's stopped being like that. Instead it's, 'my models and data say this, so it is this and everything else is wrong'.
Science at this point is really only authority driven because journals and even governments charge exorbitant prices for access to them, cutting out a vast majority of the population from actually partaking in any part of the scientific process.
When all you get is contradictory news reports on a handful of selected research from journalists that barely understand what they're reading, you're going to be stuck with an elitist authority driven system.
There's zero reason for this in todays world other than control and profit. Even within the scientific community, there's 'caste' systems, financial guardianship and other such barriers, keeping again, many people from learning and partaking.
Science isn't hard, it isn't magic, it's a systematic way of looking at the world through observation and falsification. That is all science is. Anyone can do science. I've taken groups of kids, volunteers and many people and in short time, taught them to do science.
It's just people don't really get taught to do this. It's easier to control a population that's trickled information through 'authoritative' sources than it is one that's educated and capable of thinking for themselves.
This is stuff I was literally taught in school, by other scientists. Like, we were actually taught that most people need to be given only the information they need to know, because essentially they're too dumb to understand and scientists should just run things in the world. I'm not making this up, we were actually told this by several of our professors.
Deep doubts, deep wisdom; small doubts, little wisdom.
I used to call myself a war photographer. Now I consider myself as an antiwar photographer.
Whenever a man chooses his purpose and his commitment in all clearness and in all sincerity, whatever that purpose may be, it is impossible for him to prefer another. It is true in the sense that we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery."Existentialism Is a Humanism" (1946)
If I had a friend and loved him because of the benefits which this brought me and because of getting my own way, then it would not be my friend that I loved but myself. I should love my friend on account of his own goodness and virtues and account of all that he is in himself. Only if I love my friend in this way do I love him properly.
I knew everything when I was 12, but not since. But way before I was 12, I knew that there were important things that the adults didn't know, or had forgotten, and I swore I would remember them. Now it's 60 years later and I don't remember them, but I never forgot that there were important things that nobody seemed to remember.
I can imagine the pain and the strength of my great great grandmothers who were slaves and my great great grandmothers who were Cherokee Indians trapped on reservations. I remembered my great grandmother who walked everywhere rather than sit in the back of the bus. I think about North Carolina and my home town and i remember the women of my grandmotherâs generation: strong, fierce women who could stop you with a look out the corners of their eyes. Women who walked with majesty; who could wring a chickenâs neck and scale a fish. Who could pick cotton, plant a garden and sew without a pattern. Women who boiled clothes white in big black cauldrons and who hummed work songs and lullabys. Women who visited the elderly, made soup for the sick and shortnin bread for the babies.
Women who delivered babies, searched for healing roots and brewed medicines. Women who darned sox and chopped wood and layed bricks. Women who could swim rivers and shoot the head off a snake. Women who took passionate responsibility for their children and for their neighborsâ children too.
The women in my grandmotherâs generation made giving an art form. âHere, gal, take this pot of collards to Sister Sueâ; âTake this bag of pecans to school for the teacherâ; âStay here while I go tend Mister Johnsonâs leg.â Every child in the neighborhood ate in their kitchens. They called each other sister because of feeling rather than as the result of a movement. They supported each other through the lean times, sharing the little they had.
The women of my grandmotherâs generation in my home town trained their daughters for womanhood. They taught them to give respect and to demand respect. They taught their daughters how to churn butter; how to use elbow grease. They taught their daughters to respect the strength of their bodies, to lift boulders and how to kill a hog; what to do for colic, how to break a fever and how to make a poultice, patchwork quilts, plait hair and how to hum and sing. They taught their daughters to take care, to take charge and to take responsibility. They would not tolerate a âlazy heiferâ or a âgal with her head in the clouds.â Their daughters had to learn how to get their lessons, how to survive, how to be strong. The women of my grandmotherâs generation were the glue that held family and the community together. They were the backbone of the church. And of the school. They regarded outside institutions with dislike and distrust. They were determined that their children should survive and they were committed to a better future.
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
To me, it feels like Google's entire strategy behind reCaptcha is to make it harder to protect your privacy. We've basically given up on the idea that there are tasks only humans can do, and to me V3 feels like Google openly saying, "You know how we can prove you're not a robot? Because we literally know exactly who you are." I don't even know if it should be called a captcha -- it feels like it's just identity verification.
I don't think this is an acceptable tradeoff. I know that when reCaptcha shows up on HN there's often a crowd that says, "but how else can we block bots?" I'm gonna draw a personal line in the sand and say that I think protecting privacy is more important than stopping bots. If your website can't stop bots without violating my privacy, then I'm starting to feel like I might be on the bots' side.
Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all."The Origins of Totalitarianism"
As long as we continue to have children, or accept people having children, we have chosen - as a species - to not give up on them, and their descendants.
Preserving a livable environment, and preferably much more than livable, is simply a duty springing from that fact.
There is no need for any deep philosophy, to care for the environment is - essentially - a consequence of choices already made.
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
We donât utilize [Electronic Medical Records] at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma. Partly due to patient confidentiality concerns. Partly because every operating room Iâve ever been in that has computer capability results in a nurse with her back to the surgeon and patient, typing constantly. Not good patient care, in my humble opinion.
To live under constraint is a misfortune, but there is no constraint to live under constraint.
I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 A. M. until 8 P. M. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.
Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear â kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor â with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.Address to the Annual Stockholders Sperry Rand Corporation (30 July 1957)
We could live on a paradise planet together, with complete freedom, using high tech inventions to live anywhere with power and water.
But instead we are building a prison planet.
He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile."The Stand"
Founders, investors, successful business owners and CEOs are more likely to show sociopathic behaviour than the average person next door.
They are the least competent group to be given power to shape any societal rules and contracts or to define how the humanity should look like.
The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
Stasi couldnât record what newspaper articles you were reading. For how long. And in what order. That, along with pretty much every thought you have ever explored while sitting at a computer, is now part of your permanent record â even if you never told a single human being.
The only answers are either open source or objective third party auditing, or preferably some combination of both. Words from google employees mean nothing.
As usurpation is the exercise of power which another hath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to; and this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private, separate advantage. When the governor, however entitled, makes not the law, but his will, the rule, and his commands and actions are not directed to the preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion.Second Treatise on Government
It's also a really convenient place to get news, because since all news sources are government approved then there's no fake news to worry about.
Comments like this remind me that totalitarianism doesn't need to be forceful or hostile, implemented by a shadowy government from above. People themselves will often happily serve as salesmen for the regime - with a 0% commission, to boot.
Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it.
What is finished... is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of you out there that's finished, because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of some 200-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston rods... Well, the time has come to say, is dehumanization such a bad word. Because good or bad, that's what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid - creatures that look human but aren't. The whole world not just us. We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first. The whole world's people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things..."Network"
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.
Religions get lost as people do.The Fourth Notebook, February 26, 1918
I have expressed my strong interest in the mass of the people; and this is founded, not on their usefulness to the community, so much as on what they are in themselves. Indeed every man, in every condition, is great. It is only our own diseased sight which makes him little. A man is great as a man, be he where or what he may. The grandeur of his nature turns to insignificance all outward distinctions.
Know what's cooler than a billion dollars? Being a decent human being.
Nixon was also operating at the height of the Cold War, when there may have been a legitimate right to more control over what the press can and can't say or release.
Obama is operating at the height of what? Asymmetric warfare where we're basically beating third world peasants into submission. Or maybe the War on Drugs where we're basically beating first world peasants into submission and slavery, whilst turning a complete blind eye to what's only comparable to genocide in a country we share a border with.
What our government is trying to do is on par with returning us to serfdom. I keep hearing that things are supposed to get better, but it's important to remember; freedom comes after the blade of a guillotine.
Humans, in so far as they are more than a completion of functions able to react, whose lowest and therefore most central are the purely animal like reactions, are simply superfluous for totalitarian systems. Their goal is not to erect a despotic regime over humans, but a system by which humans are made superfluous. Total power can only be achieved and guaranteed when nothing else matters except the absolutely controllable willingness to react, marionettes robbed of all spontaneity. Humans, precisely because they are so powerful, can only be completely controlled when they have become examples of the animal like species human."Elemente und UrsprĂŒnge totaler Herrschaft" p. 667
Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle.
There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blast on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.
Forward!foreword of "The Pogo Papers" (1953)
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
It is typical for the discouraging superficiality of contemporary thinking that the word "greatness", which describes a quantity and not a quality, is used as expression of recognition, like "beauty", "kindness", "wisdom" for example. What is great [or big] today, is nearly automatically seen as beautiful and good."Germany: Jekyll & Hyde (1939 - Deutschland von innen betrachtet)" (1940)
All big changes of the world come from words.
Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.
We all need to try to understand what is happening. We need to try to understand what is happening, and in my humble opinion, ideology is only going to get in your way. Nobody understands what is happening, not Buddhists, not Christians, not government scientists... no one understands what is happening. So forget ideology. They betray. They limit. They lead astray.
Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you? People who walk around saying, âWell, I donât understand quantum physics, but somewhere, somebody understands it.â. Thatâs not a very helpful attitude toward preserving the insights of quantum physics.
Just deal with the raw data, and trust yourself. Inform yourself.
What does âinform yourselfâ mean? It means transcend and mistrust ideology. Go for direct experience. What do you think when you face the waterfall? What do you think when you have sex? What do you think when you take psilocybin? Everything else is unconfirmable rumor, useless, probably lies. So liberate yourself from the illusion of culture. Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.
Turn your body inside out like a piece of cloth, look how it is made from the inside and what it will be when age, sickness and debauchery have taken their toll on it! Of short duration are those who praise as well as those who are praised, those who remember and those who are remembered. And even that happens just in one corner of the world, and even there not everybody agrees with one another, a single person doesn't even agree with themselves. This whole Earth however is but a dot.
My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.
There is a constant stream of opportunity. Looking back and looking forward can be useful, but not if it stops you looking in the present.
There was a time when academia was societyâs refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all."The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"