Constructive Dismissal Quotes

Where utopianism is advanced through gradualism rather than revolution, albeit steady and persistent as in democratic societies, it can deceive and disarm an unsuspecting population, which is largely content and passive. It is sold as reforming and improving the existing society's imperfections and weaknesses without imperiling its basic nature. Under these conditions, it is mostly ignored, dismissed, or tolerated by much of the citizenry and celebrated by some. Transformation is deemed innocuous, well-intentioned, and perhaps constructive but not a dangerous trespass on fundamental liberties.

Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes. I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss my children’s culture in school. Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.

Unfortunately it is often easier to ignore, dismiss, reject, and even hurt one another rather than engage in constructive confrontation.

I circled the site before I came in. If there's anyone within five kilometers, I'll eat my quiver." Halt regarded him, eyebrow arched once more. "Anyone?" "Anyone other than Crowley," Will amended, making a dismissive gesture. "I saw him watching me from that hide he always uses about two kilometers out. I assumed he'd be back in here by now." Halt cleared his throat loudly. "Oh, you saw him, did you?" he said. "I imagine he'll be overjoyed to hear that." Secretly, he was pleased with his former pupil. In spite of his curiosity and obvious excitement, he hadn't forgotten to take the precautions that had been drilled into him. THat augured well for what lay ahead, Halt thought, a sudden grimness settling onto his manner. Will didn't notice the momentary change of mood. He was loosening Tug saddle girth. As he spoke, his voice was muffled against the horses's flank. "he's becoming too much a creature of habit," he said. "he's used that hide for the last three Gatherings. It's time he tried something new. Everyone must be onto it by now." Rangers constantly competed with each other to see before being seen and each year's Gathering was a time of heightened competition. Halt nodded thoughtfully. Crowley had constructed teh virtually invisible observation post some four years previously. Alone among the younger Rangers, Will had tumbled to it after one year. Halt had never mentioned to him that he was the only one who knew of Crowley's hide. The concealed post was the Ranger Commandant's pride and joy. "Well, perhaps not everyone," he said. Will emerged from behind his horse, grinning at the thought of the head of the Ranger Corps thinking he had remained hidden from sight as he watched Will's approach. "All the same, perhaps he's getting a bit long in the tooth to be skulking around hiding in the bushes, don't you think?" he said cheerfully. Halt considered the question for a moment. "Long in the tooth? Well, that's one opinion. Mind you, his silent movement skills are still as good as ever," he said meaningfully. The grin on Will's face slowly faded. He resisted the temptation to look over his shoulder. "He's standing behind me, isn't he?" he asked Halt. THe older Ranger nodded. "He's standing behind me, isn't he?" Will continued and Halt nodded once more. "Is he...close enough to have heard what I said?" Will finally managed to ask, fearin teh worst. This time, Halt didn't have to answer. "Oh, good grief no," came a familiar voice from behind him. "he's so old and decrepit these days he's as deaf as a post." Will's shoulders sagged and he turned to see the sandy-haired Commandant standing a few meters away. The younger man's eyes dropped. "Hullo, Crowley," he said, then mumbled, "Ahhh...I'm sorry about that." Crowley glared at teh young Ranger for a few more seconds, then he couldn't help teh grin breaking out on his face. "No harm done," he said, adding with a small note of triumph, "It's not often these days I amange to get the better of one of you young ones." Secretly, he was impressed at teh news that Will had spotted his hiding place. Only the sarpest eyes could have picked it. Crowley had been in the business of seeing without being seen for thirty years or more, and despite what Will believed, he was still an absolute master of camouflage and unseen movement.

It was more that I’d grown deeply skeptical of skepticism itself. It seemed much easier to poke holes in things—people, programs, systems of belief—than to construct them, stand behind them, or at least take them seriously. That ready-made dismissiveness banished too much mystery and wonder.

Actually, he says, the opposite is true. People will come to depend on writing, which is external, and stop using memory, which is internal. In fact, writing will make us forgetful. It is typical of Plato–using the character of his tricksy mentor, Socrates–to construct a written argument dismissing the value of writing.

The world of conspiracy theories is one where stupid people dismiss the expertise of highly qualified people, and attribute to these experts a wicked desire to lie to and gull the masses. In other words, they portray experts as sinister enemies of the people. Conspiracy theories reflect the increasingly prevalent notion that the average, uneducated person is always right – can always see the real truth of a situation – while the educated experts are always wrong because they are deliberately lying to the people to further a conspiracy by the elite against the people. It is increasingly being perceived as a “sin”, a crime, to be smart, to be an expert. Average people do not like smart people, do not trust them, and are happy to regard them as nefarious conspirators. They are constructing a fantasy world where the idiot is always right and honest, and anyone who opposes the idiot always wrong and dishonest. A global Confederacy of Dunces is being established, whose cretinous values are transmitted by bizarre memes that crisscross the internet at a dizzying speed, and which are always accepted uncritically as the finest nuggets of truth. Woe betide anyone who challenges the Confederacy. They will be immediately trolled.

Art is not mere entertainment or decoration, it has meaning, and we both want and need to fathom that meaning – not fear, dismiss, or construct superficial responses told to us by authorities.

I pity those reviewers above, and people like them, who ridicule authors like R.A. Boulay and other proponents of similar Ancient Astronaut theories, simply for putting forth so many interesting questions (because that's really what he often throughout openly admits is all he does does) in light of fascinating and thought-provoking references which are all from copious sources. Some people will perhaps only read the cover and introduction and dismiss it as soon as any little bit of information flies in the face of their beliefs or normalcy biases. Some of those people, I'm sure, are some of the ones who reviewed this book so negatively without any constructive criticism or plausible rebuttal. It's sad to see how programmed and indoctrinated the vast majority of humanity has become to the ills of dogma, indoctrination, unverified status quos and basic ignorance; not to mention the laziness and conformity that results in such acquiescence and lack of critical thinking or lack of information gathering to confirm or debunk something. Too many people just take what's spoon fed to them all their lives and settle for it unquestioningly. For those people I like to offer a great Einstein quote and one of my personal favorites and that is: "Condemnation without investigation is the highest form of ignorance" I found this book to be a very interesting gathering of information and collection of obscure and/or remote antiquated information, i.e. biblical, sacred, mythological and otherwise, that we were not exactly taught to us in bible school, or any other public school for that matter. And I am of the school of thought that has been so for intended purposes. The author clearly cites all his fascinating sources and cross-references them rather plausibly. He organizes the information in a sequential manner that piques ones interest even as he jumps from one set of information to the next. The information, although eclectic as it spans from different cultures and time periods, interestingly ties together in several respects and it is this synchronicity that makes the information all the more remarkable. For those of you who continue to seek truth and enlightenment because you understand that an open mind makes for and lifelong pursuit of such things I leave you with these Socrates quotes: "True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

Act I, Scene 1 GARRY: ....My worst defect is that I am apt to worry too much about what people think of me when I'm alive. But I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm changing my methods and you're my first experiment. As a rule, when insufferable young beginners have he impertinence to criticise me, I dismiss the whole thing lightly because I'm embarrassed for them and consider it not quite fair game to puncture their inflated egos too sharply. But this time my highbrow young friend you're going to get it in the neck. To begin with your play is not a play at all. It's a meaningless jumble of adolescent, pseudo intellectual poppycock. And you yourself wouldn't be here at all if I hadn't been bloody fool enough to pick up the telephone when my secretary wasn't looking. Now that you are here, however, I would like to tell you this. If you wish to be a playwright you just leave the theater of to-morrow to take care of itself. Go and get yourself a job as a butler in a repertory company if they'll have you. Learn from the ground up how plays are constructed and what is actable and what isn't. Then sit down and write at least twenty plays one after the other, and if you can manage to get the twenty-first produced for a Sunday night performance you'll be damned lucky! ROLAND (hypnotised): I'd no idea you were like this. You're wonderful!

And we swallow the MoJ’s premise that tribunals, and access to justice, are just for other people. Until it bites us, until we hear about our friend being abused by her co-workers for wearing a hijab, or see our ashen-faced husband come home, laid off without notice and with no idea where to turn, or learn that our teenage daughter is being paid below minimum wage and denied holiday pay by her leering, groping pub landlord, we can dismiss the true meaning of the protections we’ve spent decades constructing.

We fool ourselves about our worldview, our ideology, our religion, the evidence of our senses, and the interpretation of the world that we use to construct our beliefs. All the evidence we notice and remember confirms our views. Everything else is ignored or forgotten—or, better, dismissed based on flaws in the analysis. A reader of mine, Sam Thomsen, said it very well: The Universe is full of dots. Connect the right ones and you can draw anything. The important question is not whether the dots you picked are really there, but why you chose to ignore all the others.

A rule for life: When someone tells you, 'you are amazing' or 'you are great at something', believe them, absorb it, allow it to become part of you, go over the praise in your mind. Dismiss all opposing thoughts. If you receive harsh criticism which is not constructive feedback, replace it immediately and continue to shine" ~ Allan Wilson.

Struggle was life, not a means to some other end. It was not justified by the prosperity (capitalism) or justice (socialism) that it supposedly brought. Hitler’s point was not at all that the desirable end justified the bloody means. There was no end, only meanness. Race was real, whereas individuals and classes were fleeting and erroneous constructions. Struggle was not a metaphor or an analogy, but a tangible and total truth. The weak were to be dominated by the strong, since “the world is not there for the cowardly peoples.” And that was all that there was to be known and believed. — Hitler’s worldview dismissed religious and secular traditions, and yet relied upon both. Though he was no original thinker, he supplied a certain resolution to a crisis of both thought and faith. Like many before him he sought to bring the two together.

The task Gordan gave her was a truly daunting one: to develop the complete invariant theory for ternary forms of degree four. Whether Gordan had ever attempted this is hard to say, but one can safely say that Emmy Noether's work was the last word with regard to this problem. She was able to construct 331 associated covariants. After finishing this ambitious work and publishing it in Crelle, she passed her oral exam "summa cum laude", but later dismissed her dissertation as a piece of juvenalia (she once called it "dung").

If you are the sensing type, the intuitive’s words may seem to ignore or even contradict facts you know to be true, but don’t ignore what was said or dismiss it as foolish. It may contain an idea that could be useful, and your facts should be useful to the author of the idea. The constructive course is to state your facts as a contribution to the subject, not as a refutation of the idea. Progress in almost any direction needs contributions from both sides, facts from the sensing type and unfamiliar ideas from the intuitive.

It is feminist thinking that empowers me to engage in a constructive critique of [Paulo] Freire’s work (which I needed so that as a young reader of his work I did not passively absorb the worldview presented) and yet there are many other standpoints from which I approach his work that enable me to experience its value, that make it possible for that work to touch me at the very core of my being. In talking with academic feminists (usually white women) who feel they must either dismiss or devalue the work of Freire because of sexism, I see clearly how our different responses are shaped by the standpoint that we bring to the work. I came to Freire thirsty, dying of thirst (in that way that the colonized, marginalized subject who is still unsure of how to break the hold of the status quo, who longs for change, is needy, is thirsty), and I found in his work (and the work of Malcolm X, Fanon, etc.) a way to quench that thirst. To have work that promotes one’s lib­eration is such a powerful gift that it does not matter so much if the gift is flawed. Think of the work as water that contains some dirt. Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water. For me this is an experience that corresponds very much to the way individuals of privilege respond to the use of water in the First World context. When you are privileged, living in one of the richest countries in the world, you can waste resources. And you can especially justify your dispos­al of something that you consider impure. Look at what most people do with water in this country. Many people purchase special water because they consider tap water unclean—and of course this purchasing is a luxury. Even our ability to see the water that come through the tap as unclean is itself informed by an imperialist consumer per­ spective. It is an expression of luxury and not just simply a response to the condition of water. If we approach the drinking of water that comes from the tap from a global perspective we would have to talk about it differently. We would have to consider what the vast majority of the peo­ ple in the world who are thirsty must do to obtain water. Paulo’s work has been living water for me.

Recently scientists have found that cephalopods (the family that contains the octopus) can recode their RNA. RNA molecules have the privilege of establishing codes with DNA (in the part of the RNA that recognizes the three-nucleotide DNA codon sequence) and also with proteins (in the separate part of the RNA that recognizes the amino acid). Recoding the RNA means that new proteins can be constructed while the DNA sequence of symbols stays the same. The collective result is the destruction of the one-to-one gene-to-protein correspondence. Recoding allows a single octopus gene to produce many different types of proteins from the same DNA sequence.18 This is a big deal. It is evidence against the three concepts in biology that dismiss semiotic systems in living organisms. The system can change its code. The system has an internal codemaker that can produce biological innovations—new proteins—but not via natural selection. It illustrates the arbitrariness of the connection of a symbol with its meaning in a living system. If symbols within living systems

I believe that disclosure represents a particular kind of inventional site within autism land. Because autism, in the cultural imagination, is an ambiguous and often mystery-laden construct, any disclosure around autism invokes questions, invokes guesswork, incites demands for particularity. One cannot claim autism without being pressed for more -- more information, more cross-examination, more refutation, more response, more words flowing from more mouths. But there is likewise a problem of ethos (or kakoethos, to quote Jenell Johnson) inherent in these disclosures, wherein autistic people are figured as lacking authority to speak on or from within autism. Autistic academic Dinah Murray laments these figurations of autism and ethos, noting, "Disclosure of an autism spectrum diagnosis means disclosure of the fundamentally flawed personhood implied by [autism's] diagnostic criteria. It is likely to precipitate a negative judgment of capacity involving permanent loss of credibility." In disclosing autism, we are both too autistic and not autistic enough...

Pedigree was the centerpiece of Supreme Court chief justice Roger B. Taney’s majority opinion in the Dred Scott decision (1857). Though this case assessed whether a slave taken into a free state or federal territory should be set free, its conclusions were far more expansive. Addressing slavery in the territories, the proslavery Marylander dismissed Jefferson’s prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance as having no constitutional standing. He constructed his own version of the original social contract at the time of the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitutional Convention: only the free white children of the founding generation were heirs to the original agreement; only pedigree could determine who inherited American citizenship and whose racial lineage warranted entitlement and the designation “freeman.” Taney’s opinion mattered because it literally made pedigree into a constitutional principle. In this controversial decision, Taney demonstrably rejected any notion of democracy and based the right of citizenship on bloodlines and racial stock. The chief justice ruled that the founders’ original intent was to classify members of society in terms of recognizable breeds.

Although I have suggested that American culture tends to favor the side of independence over the side of inclusion (and I would extend that to Western culture in general), it is not a generalization that seems to apply uniformly to men and women in our culture. Indeed, although I have no idea why it may be, it seems to me that men tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for inclusion, tend to me more oriented toward differentiation, and that women tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for distinctness, tend to be more oriented toward inclusion. Whether this is a function of social experience throughout the lifespan, the effects of parenting anatomical (even genital) density, or some combination, I do not know. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. In this respect constructive-developmental theory revives the Jungian notion that there is a man in every woman and a woman in every man; saying so is both a consequence of considering that all of life is animated by a fundamental evolutionary ambivalence, and that 'maleness'/'femaleness' is but one of its expressions. Similarly, I believe that while Western and Eastern cultures reflect one side or the other of this ambivalence, they project the other. Western cultures tend to value independence, self-assertion, aggrandizement, personal achievement, increasing independence from the family of origin; Eastern cultures (including the American Indian) value the other pole. Cheyenne Indians asked to talk about themselves typically begin, 'My grandfather...' (Strauss, 1981); many Eastern cultures use the word 'I' to refer to a collectivity of people of which one is a part (Marriott, 1981); the Hopi do not say, 'It's a nice day,' as if one could separate oneself from the day, but say something that would have to be translated more like, 'I am in a nice day,' or 'It's nice in front, and behind, and above" (Whorf, 1956). At the same time one cannot escape the enormous hunger for community, mystical merging, or intergenerational connection that continually reappears in American culture through communalism, quasi-Eastern religions, cult phenomena, drug experience, the search for one's 'roots,' the idealization of the child, or the romantic appeal of extended families. Similarly, it seems too glib to dismiss as 'mere Westernization' the repeated expression in Eastern cultures of individualism, intergenerational autonomy, or entrepreneurialism as if these were completely imposed from without and not in any way the expression of some side of Eastern culture itself.

It is this heightened state that may produce several relatively new phenomena in childhood today. As the clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair,10 the author of The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age, observes, the most commonly heard complaint when children are asked to go off-line is “I’m bored.” Confronted with the dazzling possibilities for their attention on a nearby screen, young children quickly become awash with, then accustomed to, and ever so gradually semi-addicted to continuous sensory stimulation. When the constant level of stimulation is taken away, the children respond predictably with a seemingly overwhelming state of boredom. “I’m Bored.” There are different kinds of boredom. There is a natural boredom that is part of the woof of childhood that can often provide children with the impetus to create their own forms of entertainment and just plain fun. This is the boredom that Walter Benjamin described years ago as the “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”11 But there may also be an unnatural, culturally induced, new form of boredom that follows too much digital stimulation. This form of boredom may de-animate children in such a fashion as to prevent them from wanting to explore and create real-world experiences for themselves, particularly outside their rooms, houses, and schools. As Steiner-Adair wrote, “If they become addicted to playing on screens,12 children will not know how to move through that fugue state they call boredom, which is often a necessary prelude to creativity.” It would be an intellectual shame to think that in the spirit of giving our children as much as we can through the many creative offerings of the latest, enhanced e-books and technological innovations, we may inadvertently deprive them of the motivation and time necessary to build their own images of what is read and to construct their own imaginative off-line worlds that are the invisible habitats of childhood. Such cautions are neither a matter of nostalgic lament nor an exclusion of the powerful, exciting uses of the child’s imagination fostered by technology. We will return to such uses a little later. Nor should worries over a “lost childhood” be dismissed as a cultural (read Western) luxury. What of the real lost childhoods? one might ask, in which the daily struggle to survive trumps everything else? Those children are never far from my thoughts or my work every day of my life.

Like Hamlet, the postmodernists were declaring that language did not describe the world around us. It was just “words, words, words.” Like Hamlet, the postmodernists announced that what we thought was reality was just a construct of our minds that needed to be disassembled in order to be truly understood. And like Hamlet, the postmodernists had dismissed the notion of absolute morality. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” But there was one big difference. Hamlet said these things when he was pretending to be mad. My professors said them and pretended to be sane.

In 1991 Money, a New Zealander–American psychologist, was at the peak of his fame. He was seventy and had given the world the vocabulary to talk more intelligently and kindly about sexual orientation, about being transgender, about atypical genital anatomy, about sexual identity, and indeed about gender itself. Before Money came along, those who failed to fit society’s pigeonholes were customarily dismissed as deviants and freaks. It was this sexologist who in 1955 introduced the label gender, which until then had been used only for grammatical classification. In English, we recognize the gender of words such as king and queen or ram and ewe. In some other languages, the gender of nouns is reflected in articles, such as le and la in French, or der and die in German. Money borrowed this grammatical label, saying that for him gender refers to “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively.” He set gender apart from biological sex, aware of the occasional disparity between those two. He also founded the world’s first Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in 1965. The terminology invented by Money gained immense popularity when feminism declared gender to be a social construct and when transgender people gained public recognition.1

As adults, we can also protect ourselves from vulnerability with cool. We worry about being perceived as laughing too loud, buying in, caring too much, being too eager. We don’t wear hoodies as often, but we can use our titles, education, background, and positions as handles on the shields of criticism, cynicism, cool, and cruelty: I can talk to you this way or blow you off because of who I am or what I do for a living. And, make no mistake, when it comes to this shield, handles are also fashioned out of nonconformity and rejection of traditional status markers: I dismiss you because you’ve sold out and you spend your life in a cubicle or I’m more relevant and interesting because I rejected the trappings of higher education, traditional employment, etc. DARING GREATLY: TIGHTROPE WALKING, PRACTICING SHAME RESILIENCE, AND REALITY CHECKING Over the course of one year, I interviewed artists, writers, innovators, business leaders, clergy, and community leaders about these issues, and how they stayed open to the constructive (albeit difficult-to-hear) criticism while filtering out the mean-spirited attacks.

The two most durable joke constructions were (a) casually dismissing something new that would later become extremely common, and (b) referring to some forgotten triviality as if it were destined to be timeless.

I found my identity in refuting the standards that society tried to impose on me. I refused to concede to anyone else’s standard of good and evil, even if their constructs were rational and mine were not. Relativizing good and evil allowed me to dismiss any concept of a moral code. Dismissing the moral code did not get rid of my inward compass that told me when one thing was wrong and another was right, but it did allow me to mock others’ concepts of right and wrong in preference to my own.

In short, anyone headed to California had to be either highly motivated or highly desperate. Some were both. John Sutter had made it to California from Switzerland in 1839. Fleeing creditors and leaving his wife behind, Sutter had managed to curry favor with the Mexican authorities and started life anew with some land in northern California. From his base on the Rios de los Americanos—American River even before it became one—Sutter had looked to erect a sawmill. A few miles north of the base, Sutter’s hired overseer, James Marshall, had spotted an area that appeared to be the most suitable place. During a routine check of the construction, Marshall saw sparkles in the ground below the trickling water. His camp was notably startled but dismissed the small find of yellow, metallic flakes. After a few days, Marshall took his discovery downriver to his boss. After some investigation using scales and nitric acid, Sutter was convinced: It was gold.

Contentious debates aside, thought-terminating clichés also pervade our everyday conversations: Expressions like “It is what it is,” “Boys will be boys,” “Everything happens for a reason,” “It’s all God’s plan,” and certainly “Don’t think about it too hard” are all common examples. Among New Age types, I’ve also heard semantic stop signs come in the form of wily maxims like “Truth is a construct,” “None of this matters on a cosmic level,” “I hold space for multiple realities,” “Don’t let yourself be ruled by fear,” and dismissing any anxieties or doubts as “limiting beliefs.

To dismiss the most central fact of man's being because it is inner and subjective is to make the hugest subjective falsification possible-one that leaves out the most critical half of man's nature. For without that underlying subjective flux, as experienced in floating imagery, dreams, bodily impulses, formative ideas, projections, and inventions-and above all with increasing lucidity in language-the world that is open to human experience can neither be described nor rationally understood. When our age learns that lesson, it will have made the first move toward redeeming for human use the mechanized and electrified wasteland that is now being constructed, at man's expense and to his permanent loss, for the benefit of the mega-machine.

works and give advice as needed, making procedure adjustments. Coaching is a form of on-the-job training. Promote meritocracy. Ensure the establishment and continuous improvement of a performance evaluation system (standardize the process). Promote an honest, constructive evaluation of your team, providing it with regular feedback (at least once a year). Dismiss when necessary. Dismiss 5 percent to 10 percent of the team members that have received

It is extraordinarily difficult to be clear in one’s mind as to just what Rodd and many others who make the same move (at least Rodd is candid!) think they are doing. The difficulty does not arise out of their refusal to accept the Bible’s normativity: they are perfectly frank about that. But the overt appeal to think of God in line with what appears acceptable to the contemporary spirit is a strange one—as if God changes with the cultural mood. If this is the approach, how on earth can one avoid domesticating God? Anything each generation does not like, it dismisses as uncivilized, or unenlightened, or unacceptable, and reshapes God to a more pleasing fancy. It soon becomes difficult to see how this differs very much from Kaufman’s postmodernist insistence that theology does not describe or expound some being called “God” but is a “construct of the imagination which helps to tie together, unify and interpret the totality of experience.”72 In any case, the result here is a God not clearly personal, and, if absolute, sufficiently remote to be of little threat and of little use.

The refusal to examine Islamic culture and traditions, the sordid dehumanization of Muslims, and the utter disregard for the intellectual traditions and culture of one of the world’s great civilizations are characteristic of those who disdain self-reflection and intellectual inquiry. Confronting this complexity requires work and study rather than a retreat into slogans and cliches. And enlightened, tolerant civilizations have flourished outside the orbit of the United Sates and Europe. The ruins of the ancient Mughal capital, Fatehpur Sikri, lie about 100 miles south of Delhi. The capital was constructed by the emperor Akbar the Great at the end of the sixteenth century. The emperor’s court was filled with philosophers, mystics and religious scholars, including Sunni, Sufi, and Shiite Muslims, Hindu followers of Shiva and Vishnu, as well as atheists, Christians, Jains, Jews , Buddhists and Zoroastrians. They debated ethics and beliefs. He forbade any person to be discriminated against on the basis of belief and declared that everyone was free to follow any religion. This took place as the Inquisition was at its height in Spain and Portugal, and as Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Rome’s Campo de Fiori. Tolerance, as well as religious and political plurality, is not exclusive to Western culture. The Judeo-Christian tradition was born and came to life in the Middle East. Its intellectual and religious beliefs were cultivated and formed in cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. Many of the greatest tenets of Western civilization, as is true with Islam and Buddhism, are Eastern in origin. Our respect for the rule of law and freedom of expression, as well as printing, paper, the book, the translation and dissemination of the classical Greek philosophers, algebra, geometry and universities were given to us by the Islamic world. One of the first law codes was invented by the ancient Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, in what is now Iraq. One of the first known legal protections of basic freedoms and equality was promulgated in the third century B.C. by the Buddhist Indian emperor Ashoka. And, unlike, Aristotle, he insisted on equal rights for women and slaves. The division set up by the new atheists between superior Western, rational values and the irrational beliefs of those outside our tradition is not only unhistorical but untrue. The East and the West do not have separate, competing value systems. We do not treat life with greater sanctity than those we belittle and dismiss. Eastern and Western traditions have within them varied ethical systems, some of which are repugnant and some of which are worth emulating. To hold up the highest ideals of our own culture and to deny that these great ideals exist in other cultures, especially Eastern cultures, is made possible only by a staggering historical and cultural illiteracy. The civilization we champion and promote as superior is, in fact, a product of the fusion of traditions and beliefs of the Orient and the Occident. We advance morally and intellectually only when we cross these cultural lines, when we use the lens of other cultures to examine our own. It is then that we see our limitations, that we uncover the folly of or own assumptions and our prejudices. It is then that we achieve empathy, we learn and make wisdom possible.

The truth is that modern atheists have constructed their position very carefully so that they can never be asked why they hold it. Like the annoying Christian who declares he’s had a "special" religious experience that has wholly persuaded him of the Gospel’s absolute truth, the New Atheist declares that his entire life and education is an "anti" religious experience, which proves, without further discussion, that there is no God. Any evidence the believer suggests that there might be a God is dismissed by the New Atheists as not being evidence at all.

Los Angeles—the dream-making capital of the world—serves as the backdrop for a number of the stories I recount. Some readers who cut their teeth in the urban centers of Europe or on the East Coast of America may prefer to dismiss what happens in Los Angeles as from a place apart, the aberrations of a migrant’s city within a migrant land. Such sentiments are understandable. Awash in the solar energy of a subtropical paradise, Los Angelinos engage life in the moment. The pace is fast, the music loud, and money is on display. Part of me, too, would prefer to dismiss such an existence as a mythmaker’s parody. But the place is real. In its immediacy and in its magnification of the familiar, Los Angeles creates its own reality and in so doing offers a “fast-forward” simulation of our collective future as a migrant culture. As Americans we must now decide whether such a future is of our choice, and whether it is sustainable. In the pages that follow, it is my goal to help inform that choice. Will we learn as a people to constructively channel the opportunities and individual enticements of the Fast New World toward an equitable social order, as Adam Smith had envisioned, or will the material demand for economic growth continue to erode the microcultures and intimate social bonds that are the hallmark of our humanity and the keys to health and personal happiness? Have the goals of America’s original social experiment been hijacked by its commercial success, threatening the delicate dance between individual desire and social responsibility, or will the nation in its migrant wisdom effectively apply its market and military dominance to remain a “beacon of hope,” enhancing the well-being of all the world’s peoples? This is a critical time in America, a time for careful thought and diligent action, for we have discovered in our commercial success that in an open society the real enemy is the self-interest that begins with a healthy appetite for life and mushrooms into manic excess during affluent times. Americans are again in the vanguard of human experience, and the world is watching. It is again a time for choosing.

construction company such as the owner were indicted, with or without detention. Section 2. Employment Restrictions for Public Officials Dismissed for Corruption

to [David] Simon and his partner, Ed Burns, The Wire was explicitly a piece of social activism. Among its targets, large and small, were the War on Drugs, the educational policy No Child Left Behind, and the outsize influence of money in America's political sytem, of statistics in its police departments, and of Pulitzer Prizes at its newspapers. The big fish, though, was nothing less than a capitalist system that Burns and Simon had begun to see as fundamentally doome. (If Simon was a dyed-in-the-wool lefly, Burns practically qualified as Zapatista; by ex-cop standards, he might as well have been Trotsky himself.) In chronicling the modern American city, Simon said, they had one mantra, adapted from, of all sources, sports radio personality Jim Rome: "Have a fucking take. Try not to suck." Neither Burns nor Simon would ever seem entirely comfortable acknowledging the degree that The Wire succeeded on another level: as beautifully constructed, suspenseful, heartfelt, reasonant entertainment. [...] "It's our job to be entertaining. I understand I must make you care about my characters. That's the fundamental engine of drama," Simon said dismissively. "It's the engine. But it's not the purpose". Told that The Wire had trascended the factual bounds that, for all its good intentions, had shackled The Corner, he seemed to deliberately misunderstand the compliment: "I have too much regard for that which is true to ever call it journalism." The questioner, of course, had meant the opposite: that The Wire was too good to call mere journalism. As late as 2012, he would complain in a New York Times interview that fans were still talking about their favorite characters rather than concentrating on the show's political message.

In fact, the kind of post hoc interpretation of evidence to fit a God hypothesis could be repeated effectively for the Force or any other suitably vague and yet potent fictional construction. That no one has seen anyone with the ability to manipulate the Force not only ignores (also incredible) claims made by those who believe in spiritual magic powers, say associated with esoteric martial arts, but it could be dismissed simply enough by pointing out that they simply haven't met a Jedi willing to demonstrate the ability. Eastern mystics and their adherents make this exact claim all the time when defending their own outrageous claims, and we have no trouble dismissing what they wish to pass as “evidence” for the phenomena.

Your gods are trivial constructs. Easy to dismiss. Animistic fantasies or mammalian wish complexes. You are lost children longing for papa, and casting his image into the sky.

Pyongyang dismissed the report as baseless. The officially-sanctioned itinerary consisted mostly of newly built projects, testament to a recent jump in construction activity in the capital funded partly by booming business with China. This was further reflected in a large number of residential building sites across the city. Officially recorded trade between China and North Korea reached $6.5bn last year, up more than a 10th from 2012. The developments included the Okryu children’s hospital, equipped with modern medical scanning equipment – although

Your gods are trivial constructs. Easy to dismiss. Animistic fantasies or mammalian wish complexes. You are lost children longing for papa, and casting his image into the sky.’ ‘Very

Relationship conflict is destructive in part because it stands in the way of rethinking. When a clash gets personal and emotional, we become self-righteous preachers of our own views, spiteful prosecutors of the other side, or single-minded politicians who dismiss opinions that don’t come from our side. Task conflict can be constructive when it brings diversity of thought, preventing us from getting trapped in overconfidence cycles. It can help us stay humble, surface doubts, and make us curious about what we might be missing. That can lead us to think again, moving us closer to the truth without damaging our relationships.

When someone violates you sexually, it does not simply haunt and aggrieve you; it alters the very shape of your soul. And altered I was. Contrary to the mythology surrounding the unflinching nature of African-American women, we, too, experience trauma. Black women—our essence, our emotional intricacies, the indignities we carry in our bones—are the most deeply misunderstood human beings in history. Those who know nothing about us have had the audacity to try to introduce us to ourselves, in the unsteady strokes of caricature, on stages, in books, and through their distorted reflections of us. The resulting Fun House image, a haphazard depiction sketched beneath the dim light of ignorance, allows ample room for our strength, our rage and tenacity, to stand at center stage. When we express anger, the audience of the world applauds. That expression aligns with their portrait of us. As long as we play our various designated roles—as court jesters and as comic relief, as Aunt Jemimas and as Jezebels, as maids whisking aperitifs into drawing rooms, as shuckin’ and jivin’ half-wits serving up levity—we are worthy of recognition in their meta-narrative. We are obedient Negroes. We are dutiful and thus affirmable. But when we dare tiptoe outside the lines of those typecasts, when we put our full humanity on display, when we threaten the social constructs that keep others in comfortable superiority, we are often dismissed. There is no archetype on file in which a Black woman is simultaneously resolute and trembling, fierce and frightened, dominant and receding. My mother, a woman who, amid abuse, stuffed hope and a way out into the slit of a mattress, is the very face of fortitude. I am an heir to her remarkable grit. However, beneath that tough exterior, I’ve also inherited my mother’s tender femininity, that part of her spirit susceptible to bruising and bleeding, the doleful Dosha who sat by the window shelling peanuts, pondering how to carry on. The myth of the Strong Black Woman bears a kernel of truth, but it is only a half-seed. The other half is delicate and ailing, all the more so because it has been denied sunlight.

Studies of Japanese Zen rarely include consideration of any aspects of Zen practice that fail to conform to the criteria of otherworldly meditation and enlightenment. The other activities of Zen monks typically are dismissed as vulgar popularizations. More attention is paid to ideal constructs than to what Zen monks actually did (and do). Yet to ignore the so-called non-Zen practices within Japanese Zen is to overlook a vital component of both Zen history and Japanese religion. Many so-called popular rites do not represent random syncretism but are performed in a distinctly Zen manner, the exegesis of which promises to reveal much about how Zen functions as a viable Japanese religion.

Brouwer’s radical view that mathematics is entirely a human construct was one Wittgenstein also fully shared. Brouwer dismissed the idea that mathematics in any sense constitutes an “objective” truth.

Well, Our little man,' said God. 'You have waited till the last, and slept on your decision, and We are sure you have been thinking hard all the time. What can We do for you?' " 'Please God,' said the embryo, 'I think that You made me in the shape which I now have for reasons best known to Yourselves, and that it would be rude to change. If I am to have my choice I will stay as I am. I will not alter any of the parts which You gave me, for other and doubtless inferior tools, and I will stay a defenceless embryo all my life, doing my best to make myself a few feeble implements out of the wood, iron and the other materials which You have seen fit to put before me. If I want a boat I will try to construct it out of trees, and if I want to fly, I will put together a chariot to do it for me. Probably I have been very silly in refusing to take advantage of Your kind offer, but I have done my very best to think it over carefully, and now hope that the feeble decision of this small innocent will find favour with Yourselves.' " 'Well done,' exclaimed the Creator in delighted tones. 'Here, all you embryos, come here with your beaks and whatnots to look upon Our first Man. He is the only one who has guessed Our riddle, out of all of you, and We have great pleasure in conferring upon him the Order of Dominion over the Fowls of the Air, and the Beasts of the Earth, and the Fishes of the Sea. Now let the rest of you get along, and love and multiply, for it is time to knock off for the week-end. As for you, Man, you will be a naked tool all your life, though a user of tools. You will look like an embryo till they bury you, but all the others will be embryos before your might. Eternally undeveloped, you will always remain potential in Our image, able to see some of Our sorrows and to feel some of Our joys. We are partly sorry for you, Man, but partly hopeful. Run along then, and do your best. And listen, Man, before you go ..." " 'Well?' asked Adam, turning back from his dismissal. " 'We were only going to say,' said God shyly, twisting Their hands together. 'Well, We were just going to say, God bless you.

Indeed, quite sweeping disparagements of the claims of ‘‘conceptual authority’’ have invaded the academic humanities in recent years, to generally deleterious effect (we shall examine a case in point in 2,v). Within this strain of self-styled post-modernist critique, most appeals to ‘‘conceptual content’’ are dismissed as rigorist shams, representing scarcely more than polite variants upon schoolyard bullying. Run-of-the-mill appeals to ‘‘conceptual authority’’ tacitly masquerade prejudiced predilection in the form of falsely constructed universals which, in turn, covertly shelter the most oppressive codes of Western society. But such sweeping doubts, if rigorously implemented, would render daily life patently unworkable, for we steer our way through the humblest affairs by making conceptual evaluations as we go. In what alternative vocabulary, for example, might we appraise our teenager’s failings with respect to his calculus homeworks? Forced to chose between exaggerated mistrust and blind acceptance of every passing claim of conceptual authority (even those issuing from transparent charlatans), we should plainly select gullibility as the wiser course, for the naïve explorer who trusts her somewhat inadequate map generally fares better than the doubter who accepts nothing. We will have told the story of concepts wrongly if it doesn’t turn out to be one where our usual forms of conceptual evaluation emerge as appropriate and well founded most of the time. Of a milder, but allied, nature are the presumptions of the school of Thomas Kuhn, which contends that scientists under the unavoidable spell of different paradigms often ‘‘talk past one another’’ through their failure to share common conceptual resources, in a manner that renders scientific argumentation more a matter of brute conversion than discourse. We shall discuss these views later as well. Although their various generating origins can prove quite complex, most popular academic movements that promote radical conceptual debunking of these types draw deeply upon inadequate philosophies of ‘‘concepts and attributes.’’ Such doctrines often sin against the cardinal rule of philosophy: first, do no harm, for such self-appointed critics of ‘‘ideological tyranny’’ rarely prove paragons of intellectual toleration themselves.

Aristophanes, in Plato's "Symposium", is purported to suggest that human form was not always as it is today: Originally, humans were spherical, with four arms, four legs, and two faces on either side of a single head. (In evolutionary terms, it's hard to see the advantage of this construction.) Such was their hubris that they dared to challenge the gods themselves. Zeus, in his wisdom, split the upstarts in two, each half becoming a distinct entity. Since then, men and women have been running around in a panic, searching for their lost counterparts, in a desire to be whole again. (Plato makes clear what he thinks of this theory by having Socrates casually dismiss it. We should at least give some credit to Aristophanes for originality.)

If there is one thing failure has taught me, it is the value of regret. Regret is one of the most powerful emotional reminders that change and growth are necessary. In fact, I’ve come to believe that regret is a kind of package deal: A function of empathy, it’s a call to courage and a path toward wisdom. Like all emotions, regret can be used constructively or destructively, but the wholesale dismissal of regret is wrongheaded and dangerous. “No regrets” doesn’t mean living with courage, it means living without reflection. To live without regret is to believe you have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with your life.

Fomenko was a classic conspiracy theorist: he proved his assertions by way of relentlessly logical constructions based on random mathematical assumptions, and he dismissed all contrary evidence as falsification by his enemies.

These days, activists who advocate "a world without prisons" are often dismissed as quacks, but only a few decades ago, the notion that our society would be much better off without prisons--and that the end of prisons was more or less inevitable--not only dominated mainstream academic discourse in the field of criminology but also inspired national campaign by reformers demanding a moratorium on prison construction.

Bell Labs director Mervin Kelly guided the construction of a new home for the lab that would purposefully encourage interaction between its diverse mix of scientists and engineers. Kelly dismissed the standard university-style approach of housing different departments in different buildings, and instead connected the spaces into one contiguous structure joined by long hallways—some so long that when you stood at one end it would appear to converge to a vanishing point. As Bell Labs chronicler Jon Gertner notes about this design: “Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.” This strategy, mixed with Kelly’s aggressive recruitment of some of the world’s best minds, yielded some of the most concentrated innovation in the history of modern civilization.

Race, as we often use the term (not as in ethnicity or people group, like Revelation 7:9), is an evolutionary construct. Our country has a sordid history of using that construct to oppress image bearers. That history impacts the church, no matter what we call it. Biblically specific language is a must. Dismissing issues based solely on terminology isn’t helpful.

Any optimism I felt about Bibi’s concession was short-lived. No sooner had Netanyahu announced the temporary freeze than Abbas dismissed it as meaningless, complaining about the exclusion of East Jerusalem and the fact that construction of already-approved projects was continuing apace. He insisted that in the absence of a total freeze, he would not join any talks. Other Arab leaders quickly echoed these sentiments, spurred in part by editorializing from Al Jazeera, the Qatari-controlled media outlet that had become the dominant news source in the region, having built its popularity by fanning the flames of anger and resentment among Arabs with the same algorithmic precision that Fox News deployed so skillfully with conservative white voters in the States.

Despite the perma-shock in which many of us have lived our entire lives, with alarms in our ears made only more shrill by 24 hour news cycles, and unrelenting internet death row photos of dogs and cats at animal shelters, we inexplicably expect our shocking truths--that ours is a society built on oppression, rape and murder--to get heard the first time through. When the truths aren't heard, we end up beyond frustrated. We butt up against other people's moral hypocrisies and shut down as we hear the same stories about people who are compassionate but still eat animals. We grow weary of taking people's hands and walking them down the road to see the more than 23 million chickens killed for food every day in the U.S. And we forget that people can't see the animals hiding in their words and signifiers; we forget that we can't see them either. Beyond beef and bacon, there are other words that hide animals: deforestation, road construction, housing development, war. We must learn to be attuned to those words. And we have to learn how to speak kindly to people who are thinking about them, even if they don't recognize the absent referents in their speech. When we are thinking about how oppressors have guns, prisons, and slaughterhouses, we remember that words are weapons. When we turn them on each other and our potential allies, we forget. Out of frustration over all the things that haven't gotten better, we resort to name calling, dismiss the possibility of bridge building with other movements and within our own, and retreat back to internet cliques to discuss cupcake recipes or bash something read in the Huffington Post.

will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best material, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one—and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces.18 Defining the motorcar as a necessity “that would meet the wants of the multitude,” Ford linked his vehicle to a larger vision of contentment through consumption. In My Life and Work, he dismissed some businessmen's fears of overproduction and market saturation with a utopian vision of consumer abundance: We believe it is possible some day to reach the point where all goods are produced so cheaply and in such quantities that overproduction can be a reality. But as far as we are concerned, we do not look forward to that condition with fear—we look forward to it with great satisfaction…. Our fear is that this condition will be too long postponed.

I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best material, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one—and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces.18 Defining the motorcar as a necessity “that would meet the wants of the multitude,” Ford linked his vehicle to a larger vision of contentment through consumption. In My Life and Work, he dismissed some businessmen's fears of overproduction and market saturation with a utopian vision of consumer abundance: We believe it is possible some day to reach the point where all goods are produced so cheaply and in such quantities that overproduction can be a reality. But as far as we are concerned, we do not look forward to that condition with fear—we look forward to it with great satisfaction…. Our fear is that this condition will be too long postponed.

It was as if an intellectual Iron Curtain of highly sophisticated mendacity had been erected in anticipation of the fall of the actual Iron Curtain in order to forestall any prospect of a moral reckoning. With the idea of truth reduced to the status of a mere social construct--and thus dismissable as a malign instrument of power-- history itself had been rendered absurd. Our culture was no longer in command of the moral intelligence that was needed to measure the scale of human suffering and loss that had been incurred as a consequence of eighty years of totalitarian terror. We can only hope that the price to be paid for such a self-willed ignorance and complacency will not be as high in this century as it was in the last.

In the modern world, particularly in the world of work, the fear of change becomes misaligned with the actual threat presented by that change—in other words, we often blow it all out of proportion. This explains why even good ideas get ignored or dismissed. They’re threatening simply because they are new. That’s just the brain doing what it does best: trying to protect you, for better or worse.

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