Critique Best Quotes

How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.

Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?

Beginning with a critique of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum.

I don't claim to be the best musician. If being the best means I earn the right to look down on people and critique their accomplishments in defense of my own, I don't ever want to be. People can say what they want about my music being 'banal' and my skill level 'competent,' and it will hurt my feelings (because despite what some believe, I do still have them), but I won't let it determine my self-worth.

Lucie announced she planned to read to James from her work in progress, Secret Princess Lucie Is Rescued from Her Terrible Family. James listened with a carefully arranged look of interest, even though he was subjected to endless tales of Cruel Prince James and his many awful deeds. “I think that Cruel Prince James has been somewhat boxed in by his name,” James offered at one point. Lucie informed him that she wasn’t looking for critique at this stage in the creative process. “Secret Princess Lucie only wishes to be kind, but Cruel Prince James is driven to cruelty because he simply cannot stand to see Princess Lucie best him again and again, in every domain,” said Lucie. “I’m going to go now,” said James.

Any critique of realism must begin with a sober assessment of the horrors of peace.

Hacks are killing our national literary culture. America treats best-sellers like literary lions and literary lions worse than stray dogs.

One of the best ways to recharge is by simply being in the presence of art. No thoughts, no critiques. Just full-on absorption mode.

Critique my better work only, because I want to get better from my best, not better from my worst.

Our generation seems to be facing a crisis of critique. We want to know what’s best, we want to know where to eat and what movie to see, but we’ve begun to forget that real opinion, real critique, must always come out of an absence of voices—from a singular subjective viewpoint. You

In our reflecting and reasoning age, a man is not worth much who cannot give a good reason for everything, no matter how bad or crazy. Everything in the world that has been done wrong, has been done wrong for the very best of reasons.

Time held no meaning as my mind darted in and out of memories. Past and present collided to create a full-sensory collage out of my life: playing hide-n-seek with my best friends Luke—who always cheated by walking through walls when he was about to be caught—and Lucy; Mr. Caldrin critiquing my sketches and offering ideas to make them more realistic; targets changing faces, blending into the same person, their thoughts rippling through my mind like waves. Through it all, a demon stalked me from the shadows of my memories, never quite showing its face, but crouching, waiting. And then I dreamed....

So between critiques, the camera flew around on its arm like some sort of drunk helicopter, getting reaction shots from each contestant, and then from the judges. They asked us to hold our reactions as best we could until they got to us. Ever smile for a photograph for someone who doesn't know how to work their camera? Twenty times longer than that. My mouth started to tremble from trying to hold a smile. During one of these awkward frozen moments, one of the contestants grinned at me and mouthed the words "I love you," and I tried as best I could to communicate my thanks while also maintaining my frozen face.

My first book was a pile of trash, but I still feel fulfilled knowing that I grinded for four years to put out that work of art. Re-writing it seventeen times while manic probably wasn't the best idea, though...or while dealing with my multiple personalities.

novel excerpts rarely benefit from group critique. It’s one thing to get all those opinions when you’ve finished, but when you’re still in the middle of a project, it’s like having fifteen people give you conflicting directions as to how best to get to the interstate.) And

With the growth of market individualism comes a corollary desire to look for collective, democratic responses when major dislocations of financial collapse, unemployment, heightened inequality, runaway inflation, and the like occur. The more such dislocations occur, the more powerful and internalized, Hayek insists, neoliberal ideology must become; it must become embedded in the media, in economic talking heads, in law and the jurisprudence of the courts, in government policy, and in the souls of participants. Neoliberal ideology must become a machine or engine that infuses economic life as well as a camera that provides a snapshot of it. That means, in turn, that the impersonal processes of regulation work best if courts, churches, schools, the media, music, localities, electoral politics, legislatures, monetary authorities, and corporate organizations internalize and publicize these norms.

Perhaps the best way to understand the book of Revelation is that it is a prophetic critique of civil religion. By civil religion I mean the religion of state where the state is the actual object of worship. Civil religion is religious patriotism. Christians are called to practice responsible citizenship but to renounce religious patriotism. In the practice of civil religion, the truth that the state is what is actually being deified and worshiped is usually carefully concealed. Instead of directly worshiping the state as God, worship of the state is expressed through sacred symbols, myths, and personifications of the state treated with religious reverence. The tendency to deify the state is particularly pronounced in empires—rich and powerful nations that believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape history according to their agenda. God’s contention with empire is one of the major themes of the Bible. From Egypt and Assyria to Babylonia and Rome, the prophets constantly critique empire as a direct challenge to the sovereignty of God. This prophetic tradition of empire critique reaches its apex in the book of Revelation. John the Revelator tells us that Rome’s claim of a divine right to rule the nations and of a manifest destiny to shape history is the very thing that God has given to his Son, Jesus Christ. Thus the drama of Revelation is cast as an epic conflict between the Lamb (Jesus) and the Beast (Rome).

Fandom is really fandoms, plural—an always diverse and contentious sphere. Mass media representations of fanfiction and fan culture present it at best as a “wacky world,” or more typically as a bastion of the physically, socially, and literarily inept. Academic accounts of fandom overcompensate, often presenting overly utopian pictures of sisterly collaboration and feminist critique. Utopias and dystopias, though, are not parallel but rather intersecting universes. This is surely one of the great lessons of Star Trek—and of its fandom.

In his book Real Presences, George Steiner asks us to "imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited." In such a society there would be no more essays on whether Hamlet was mad or only pretending to be, no reviews of the latest exhibitions or novels, no profiles of writers or artists. There would be no secondary, or parasitic, discussion - let alone tertiary: commentary on commentary. We would have, instead, a "republic for writers and readers" with no cushion of professional opinion-makers to come between creators and audience. While the Sunday papers presently serve as a substitute for the experiencing of the actual exhibition or book, in Steiner's imagined republic the review pages would be turned into listings:catalogues and guides to what is about to open, be published, or be released. What would this republic be like? Would the arts suffer from the obliteration of this ozone of comment? Certainly not, says Steiner, for each performance of a Mahler symphony is also a critique of that symphony. Unlike the reviewer, however, the performer "invests his own being in the process of interpretation." Such interpretation is automatically responsible because the performer is answerable to the work in a way that even the most scrupulous reviewer is not. Although, most obviously, it is not only the case for drama and music; all art is also criticism. This is most clearly so when a writer or composer quotes or reworks material from another writer or composer. All literature, music, and art "embody an expository reflection which they pertain". In other words it is not only in their letters, essays, or conversation that writers like Henry James reveal themselves also to be the best critics; rather, The Portrait of a Lady is itself, among other things, a commentary on and a critique of Middlemarch. "The best readings of art are art." No sooner has Steiner summoned this imaginary republic into existence than he sighs, "The fantasy I have sketched is only that." Well, it is not. It is a real place and for much of the century it has provided a global home for millions of people. It is a republic with a simple name: jazz.

Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its “secret sauce.” Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schaefer, a longtime GM manager who toured the Toyota plant, told NPR’s This American Life that he realized that there were no special secrets to see on the manufacturing floors. “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people,” Schaefer said. “I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture.” It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. 1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes. Like Toyota, Southern New Hampshire University has been open with would-be competitors, regularly offering tours and visits to other educational institutions. As President Paul LeBlanc sees it, competition is always possible from well-financed organizations with more powerful brand recognition. But those assets alone aren’t enough to give them a leg up. SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.

For some, measuring porn’s real-world effects boils down to one extreme and ultimately misleading question: “Does it lead to rape?” What is overlooked here is the more subtle question of how porn shapes the culture and the men who use it. No anti-porn feminist I know has suggested that there is one image, or even a few, that could lead a nonrapist to rape; the argument, rather, is that taken together, pornographic images create a world that is at best inhospitable to women, and at worst dangerous to their physical and emotional well-being. In an unfair and inaccurate article that is emblematic of how anti-porn feminist work is misrepresented, Daniel Bernardi claims that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon believed that “watching pornography leads men to rape women.”3 Neither Dworkin nor MacKinnon, pioneers in developing a radical feminist critique of pornography, saw porn in such simplistic terms. Rather, both argued that porn has a complicated and multilayered effect on male sexuality, and that rape, rather than simply being caused by porn, is a cultural practice that has been woven into the fabric of a male-dominated society. Pornography, they argued, is one important agent of such a society since it so perfectly encodes woman-hating ideology, but to see it as simplistically and unquestionably leading to rape is to ignore how porn operates within the wider context of a society that is brimming with sexist imagery and ideology.

We were in Julie’s room one night, my eldest daughter and I, maybe a decade ago now. I wanted to show her how the canvas painting she had carefully labored over for her little sister's Christmas gift was framed and hung on the wall. I said, gazing at her masterpiece with no small amount of motherly pride, “Now it looks like a real work of art”. Bella looked at me quizzically, wondering yet again how her mother could possibly understand so little about the world. “Mama, every time you make something, or draw something, or paint something, it is already real art. There is no such thing as art that is not real” And so I said that she was right, and didn’t it look nice, and once again, daughter became guru and mother became willing student. Which is, I sometimes think, the way it was meant to be. ~~~~~ art is always real. all of it. even the stuff you don’t understand. even the stuff you don’t like. even the stuff that you made that you would be embarrassed to show your best friend that photo that you took when you first got your DSLR, when you captured her spirit perfectly but the focus landed on her shoulder? still art. the painting you did last year the first time you picked up a brush, the one your mentor critiqued to death? it’s art. the story you are holding in your heart and so desperately want to tell the world? definitely art. the scarf you knit for your son with the funky messed up rows? art. art. art. the poem scrawled on your dry cleaning receipt at the red light. the dress you want to sew. the song you want to sing. the clay you’ve not yet molded. everything you have made or will one day make or imagine making in your wildest dreams. it’s all real, every last bit. because there is no such thing as art that is not real.

[F]rom the perspective of outsiders to the Christian tradition, Paul has sometimes been ridiculed for having abandoned monotheism. Such ridicule is part of a more general theological critique, advanced for centuries by Muslims and Jews, against the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, namely that God became human, and the notion of a triune God, namely that God is three-in-one, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. To reduce a long tradition of theological dialogue and debate to one sentence, Muslims and Jews believe that devotion to Christ renders the Christian claim to monotheism misguided at best and idolatry at worst, while Christians see no contradiction between their affirmation of the oneness of God and the doctrine of the Trinity. But, to once again reiterate a point made several times already in this book, Christianity does not yet exist as an independent religious system in Paul’s time. Paul is not operating with the doctrine of the incarnation as it was defined in the Council of Nicea (CE 325) or the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as it was hammered out in the Council of Chalcedon (CE 451). At the same time, Paul’s letters already reflect a surprisingly high Christology that appears to anticipate later orthodox views. That is to say, Paul’s letters manifest a belief in Jesus’ divinity that came to characterize the full-out identification between Jesus and God of later official Christian doctrine. Jesus is clearly a divine figure of unique status in Paul’s letters, and this has led many historians to conclude that devotion to Christ as developed by Paul must have come from outside—that is, non-Jewish—influences.

Richard Lovelace makes a compelling case that the best defense is a good offense. “The ultimate solution to cultural decay is not so much the repression of bad culture as the production of sound and healthy culture,” he writes. “We should direct most of our energy not to the censorship of decadent culture, but to the production and support of healthy expressions of Christian and non-Christian art.”10 Public protests and boycotts have their place. But even negative critiques are effective only when motivated by a genuine love for the arts. The long-term solution is to support Christian artists, musicians, authors, and screenwriters who can create humane and healthy alternatives that speak deeply to the human condition. Exploiting “Talent” The church must also stand against forces that suppress genuine creativity, both inside and outside its walls. In today’s consumer culture, one of the greatest dangers facing the arts is commodification. Art is treated as merchandise to market for the sake of making money. Paintings are bought not to exhibit, nor to grace someone’s home, but merely to resell. They are financial investments. As Seerveld points out, “Elite art of the New York school or by approved gurus such as Andy Warhol are as much a Big Business today as the music business or the sports industry.”11 Artists and writers have been reduced to “talent” to be plugged into the manufacturing process. That approach may increase sales, but it will suppress the best and highest forms of art. In the eighteenth century, the world nearly lost the best of Mozart’s music because the adults in the young man’s life treated him primarily as “talent” to exploit.

One of the best means of preserving the balance of political community and promoting the necessary social and political changes is by keeping the dialogue open with all the political actors who accept the basic rules of the game and are committed to preserving the basic values of the society. This ... explains why many of the thinkers studied in this book, from [Raymond] Aron and [Norberto] Bobbio to [Adam] Michnik, successfully practiced the art of dialogue across the aisle and refused to see the world in black-and-white contrasts. If they adopted the role of committed or engaged spectators, they also maintained a certain degree of detachment and skepticism in their attitudes and political judgments. Their invitation to dialogue and their willingness to speak to their critics illustrated their courage and determination not to look for 'safe spaces' and lukewarm solutions. Instead, they saw themselves as mediators whose duty was to open a line of communication with their opponents who disagreed with them. The dialogue they staged was at times difficult and frustrating, and their belief in the (real or symbolic) power of discussion was an open act of defiance against the crusading spirit of their age, marked by political sectarianism, monologue, and ideological intransigence. Aron and the other moderates studied here were convinced that we can improve ourselves not so much by seeking a fictitious harmony with our critics as by engaging in an open debate with them, as long as we all remain committed to civility and rational critique. In this regard, they all acted as true disciples of Montaigne, who once acknowledged that 'no premise shocks me, no belief hurts me, no matter how opposite they may be. ... When I am contradicted it arouses my attention not my wrath.' This is exactly how Aron and other moderates felt and behaved. They were open to being challenged and did not shy away from correcting others when they thought fit. Yet, in so doing, they did not simply seek to refute or defeat their opponents' arguments, being aware that the truth is almost never the monopoly of a single camp or group.

Nietzsche's case is an especially interesting one for whoever wishes to undertake a critical examination of the “neotraditionalist” path. Two main reasons justify this evaluation: ― Nietzsche's work, on the one hand, explicitly and in an exemplary manner articulates the critique of democratic modernity and the denunciation of the argumentative foundation of norms: in this way it permits us ―better than does the work of other philosophers― to grasp all that is involved, within the choice between tradition and argumentation, in the rejection of the latter. ― On the other and perhaps more important hand, the way Nietzsche went about this rejection illustrates in a particularly significant fashion one of the main difficulties this type of philosophical projects comes up against: the neotraditionalist avoidance of democratic modernity makes it necessary to look for and ―we insist on this― whatever could be today's analogue of a traditional universe: the analogue, for (as Nietzsche knew better than anyone) it is out of question that in a time when “God is dead”, tradition should function as it does in theological cultures, in which whatever renders the value of tradition “sacred” and gives it its power is never unrelated to its rootedness in the divine will or in the world order supposed to express this will. Situating as he does his reflections at the same time after the “death of God” and after the (inseparably associated) discovery that the world once “dedivinized”, appears to be devoid of any order and must be thought of as “chaos”, Nietzsche take into account the end of cosmological and theological universe, an end that in general defines the intellectual and cultural location of the Moderns: we are thus dealing here, by definition and, we could say, at the stage of working sketch (since Nietzsche is, in philosophy, the very man who declared the foundations of the traditional universe to be antiquated), with a very peculiar mixture of antimodernism and modernity, of tradition and novelty ―which is why the expression “neotraditionalism” seems perfectly appropriate here, right down to the tension expressed within it. The question is of course one of knowing what such a “mixture” could consists of, both in its content and in its effects. Since, more than most of the representative of ordinary conservatism, Nietzsche cannot contemplate a naïve resumption of tradition, his “neo-conservative” approach permits us to submit the traditionalist option to an interrogation that can best examine its limitations and unintended consequences ―namely: what would a modern analogue of tradition consist of?

Interestingly, the topic that I believe can best initiate this twenty-first-century rapprochement comes from the same figure who solved the parallel problem in the eighteenth century: Immanuel Kant. In fact, the seed for the reconciliation can be found in the very idea that forms the core of the Critique of Pure Reason and the linchpin of its rationalist-empiricist synthesis; namely, the idea that the mind actively organizes experience. This idea, along with its various interpretations and ramifications, forms an important thread of what has become known as anti-realism in analytic philosophy.

And to fully demonstrate your deeply seated fears of transcendental critique, just start singing that Monty Python tune. Monty Python, the indifferentist's best defense against thought.

. I think that for most readers the best critique of Johnson's view and the claims of intelligent-design creationism is Robert T. Pennock's Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999)

Judas Rose both articulates and critiques the New World Order that was beginning to develop when Elgin was writing the novel. It also speaks to our new New World Order, in which a patriotic nationalism claiming to support feminist emancipation is activated in the name of a transnational global culture whose economic order is indifferent, at best, to the well-being of women.

Things had been different when Garveyism and Ethiopianism rather than afro-centrism and occultism set the tone. To contain modernity, to appreciate its colonial constitution and to criticise its reliance on racialised governmental codes all required finding an autonomous space outside it. A desire to exist elsewhere supplied the governing impulse. It was captured in compelling forms in the period's best songs of longing and flight, like Bunny Wailer's anthem ‘Dreamland’ 5. However, there is no longer any uncontaminated, pastoral or romantic location to which opposition and dissent might fly, and so, a new culture of consolation has been fashioned in which being against this tainted modernity has come to mean being before it. Comparable investments in the restorative power of the pseudo-archaic occur elsewhere. They help to make Harry Potter's world attractive and are routine features of much ‘new age’ thinking. They govern the quest for a repudiation of modernity that is shared by the various versions of Islam which have largely eclipsed Ethiopianism as the principal spiritual resource and wellspring of critique among young black Europeans. Their desire to find an exit from consumerism's triumphant phantasmagoria reveals them to be bereft, adrift without the guidance they would have absorbed, more indirectly than formally, from the national liberation movements of the cold war period and the struggles for both civil and human rights with which they were connected. Instead, an America-centred, consumer-oriented culture of blackness has become prominent. In this post-colonial setting, it conditions the dreams of many young Britons, irrespective of their ancestral origins or physical appearance. This brash and celebratory imperial formation is barely embarrassed by the geo-political fault-line that re-divides the world, opposing the overdeveloped north to the suffering south. That barrier provides the defining element in a new topography of global power which is making heavy demands upon the overwhelmingly national character of civil society and ideal of national citizenship. It is clear that the versions of black politics that belonged to the west/rest polarity will not adapt easily to this new configuration.

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Every intellectual project of a political kind should follow a number of basic principles1) Be deeply suspicious of anything that masks itself in universal regalia. Bring into question that which is not being questioned in the normal state of affairs. (2) Move beyond any self-righteous and self-absolving assessments of the operations of power. Look to deal with power at the level of its effects and the ways in which it positively manipulates subjects to wilfully abandon their own political freedoms. (3) Foreground the affirmative qualities of subjectivities. Not only is this integral in the fight against fascism in all its forms. It opens a challenge to the narcissism of those who would have us surrender to the mercies of the world. (4) Speak with confidence about the ability to transform the world, not for the better, but for the sake of it. Without an open commitment to the people to come, the struggle is already lost. (5) Use provocation as a political tool. Not to evidence extremist views. But to illustrate how normalizing power truly fears anything that appears remotely exceptional. The poetic most certainly included. (6) Trust in the irreducible qualities of human existence. The feelings we have, the atmospheres we breathe, the aesthetics we enfold, the fables we scribe, the playful personas we construct, they are all integral to the formation of a new image of thought. (7) Have faith in people. Just as they will resist what they find oppressive and intolerable, so they will also find their own dignified solutions to problems in spite of our best efforts. (8) Do not shy away from conflict. Without conflict there is no resistance to power. And without resistance to power there is no creation of alternative existences. (9) Reveal fully your political orientations. Do not abstract them from the work. Such a deception is of the order for those embarrassed by the mediocrity of their power. (10) Speak with the courage to truth that narrates a tale to affect a number of meaningful registers. No book should be read if it doesn't intellectually challenge and emotionally move us.

In his recent critique of fashionable ecological philosophies, Andreas Malm pointedly remarks: 'When Latour writes that, in a warming world, 'humans are no longer submitted to the diktats of objective nature, since what comes to them is also an intensively subjective form of action,' he gets it all wrong: there is nothing intensively subjective but a lot of objectivity in ice melting. Or, as one placard at a demonstration held by scientists at the American Geophysical Union in December 2016: 'Ice has no agenda - it just melts.'' The reverse claim is that human interventions have only had such a menacing and even fatal consequences for our living conditions within the Earth system because human agency has not yet sufficiently freed itself from its dependence on natural history. This seems to be the conviction behind the 'Ecomodernist Manifesto,' for instance, which claims that 'knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, even great, Anthropocene,' and that a good Anthropocene 'demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.' In this confrontation, an age-old dualism has assumed a new guise: the attempt to establish a complicity with the forces of destiny - if necessary at the price of surrendering human subjectivity or perhaps involving other forms of self-sacrifice - is juxtaposed with the attempt to achieve human autonomy by subordinating the planet under the superior power of human ingenuity. These two positions, a modernist stance and a position critical of it, are usually considered to represent mutually exclusive alternatives. Actually, however, the two positions have more in common than first meets the eye. At the beginning of chapter 3, I referred to Greek philosophers who suggested that the best way to protect oneself against the vicissitudes of fate was to learn how to submit oneself to it willingly, sacrificing one's drives and ambitions while expecting, at the same time, that this complicity with destiny would empower one to master worldly challenges. What unites the seemingly opposite positions, more generally speaking, is a shared move away from engagement with the concrete and individual human agency (i.e., with empirical human subjects and with the unequal power distribution in human societies) toward some powerful form of abstraction, be it 'to distribute agency' or to use the 'growing social, economic, and technological powers' of humanity for a better Anthropocene. I suggest that we take a more systemic look at the role of humanity in the Earth system, taking into account both its material interventions and the knowledge that enabled them.

Although neither condemning nor protesting either institution in any explicit sense, the humble saint’s life serves as a radical juxtaposition and critique of the values of the world. He is not concerned with power. He is not interested in wealth. All he wants, with all his heart, is to be a poor imitator of Christ. Our world, as St. Francis knew, values individual greatness. In order for our lives to be significant—in order to be “great”—we are told that we must obtain as much power, wealth, and prestige as we can, living in constant competition with one another to see who has the most and thus is the best. Our worth is defined by what we possess as it relates to what others possess, and those who have more than others live believing that they are owed certain things from the world. Respect. Admiration. Glory. Fear. Love. This is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ that St. Francis lived by.

Here is where many Christian parents make a decision that seems right on the surface, but I believe is all wrong if they hope to prepare their teenagers to be a redemptive influence in the cultural struggle. Like the Smiths, many Christian parents try their best to keep the surrounding culture out of their homes (cassette tapes, CDs, and videos). In so doing, they lose a wonderful, focused opportunity to teach their children how to use a biblical view of life to understand and critique their culture.

After Apollo, Norton, still with TRW, worked on a project to computerize the distribution of hydroelectric power in the Northwest. He was still writing his painfully detailed critiques of other people’s software. As it happened, a high school senior named Bill Gates came to work for him as a programmer. Gates has credited Norton with being among his best software teachers. Norton surely learned more from reading our code than we learned from him. Users of Microsoft software might wish he had learned more.

Clearly, the “midlife crisis” genre draped a veil of narcissism over the entire enterprise of individual development. In the era of Levinson’s Jim Tracy, an individual problem, “I’m unhappy with my wife,” gave rise to an individualistic solution, “I need a divorce.” But the resulting critiques leveled against “individualistic marriage,” “consumer marriage,” and “expressive divorce” were also problematic; in their effort to protect children from their parents’ misguided seeking, they shortchanged people’s authentic emotional longings. The “heroic” midlife crisis genre wrongly characterized the connection of individuality and intimacy, by suggesting that we develop ourselves by casting off relationships we’ve done little to change. But if we’ve learned anything from the profusion of research on marriage and emotions, it’s that emotions are not best managed by simple suppression. Staying married by stifling individual needs isn’t a solution either. Happily,

Ibn Hazm subjects to his critique the four views concern- ing the sources of knowledge, that is, that all knowledge is derived 1. from inspiration (ilhâm), or 2. from the teachings of a religious leader (imâm), or 3. from transmitted information (khabar), or 4. through a blind trust in tradition (taqlid). These do not admit the possibility of evidence gained through reasoning, which Ibn Hazm upholds. On the origin of language, he does not want to commit himself, but he tends toward the view that the single original language of mankind, from which all other languages were derived, owes its development not to convention but to divine teaching (tawqîf ). Very sensibly, he argues against those who feel that there are qualitative differences between the various languages, and who claim that theirs is the best (afdal ) language.

#FollowFriday / #FF is a fun Twitter tradition that expresses gratitude to your retweeters and gives them exposure to a wider audience. On Friday mornings, compose a tweet comprised of the usernames of your most loyal retweeters. You can also #FF writers you admire or members of your critique group or book club.

Science fiction and fantasy are often genres of social critique, but that doesn’t mean they have to wrap things up neatly for you; instead, they can provoke and unsettle you, and allow you the space to consider and reconsider and come to new conclusions. And they will show you how we endure. Whether we endure. What our endurance might cost us. What we will give away in pursuit of resilience, and what we will gain if we achieve it. There are no easy answers, not in these stories, and not in our own lives. But we must continue to ask these questions. The only way out, the saying goes, is through—​and how lucky for us, that science fiction and fantasy are already so consistently concerned with what “through” might look like—​in another dimension, on another planet, or in a world just as surreal as our own. Veronica Roth

Put it another way: the saint is the one who does the terribly difficult thing of climbing the ladder of spiritual ascent, a ladder that is coated with the venerable gold of the religious tradition. All will praise him if he makes it to the top. The knight of faith, the real sinner, is climbing, too, only he is climbing up a Babel tower of his own building. He is seeking unauthorized access to heaven. He wants to know, like Faust, like Prometheus (who are his only gods) what secrets they are that Jehovah so jealously guards. In plain terms, he wants to know the truth that orthodoxy is afraid to know, for which it can make no room on its narrow shelf of holy and well-worn relics. The saint takes a spiritual journey along the path prescribed and well-beaten with holy footprints. He uses the conventional doctrines and symbols to their best advantage. But the sinner, the real sinner, dares to question and even to reject those forms and names and paths. If he can leap high and far enough, he will even get, for a moment, beyond all our sheltering religious systems, all our inherited philosophies and worldviews, and he will reach the Void of outer space: the bare Suchness which no doctrine can contain and which mandates no doctrine. The Nihil, the Nothing. It is an airless heaven he has reached for a moment, but one where the stars shine all the brighter for it. He will return to earth, to walk among the familiar landmarks and familiar faces, but no longer familiar to himself. The Eden of simplicity and convention and assumption is forever barred for him, though all his contemporaries still sport blissfully within. They may see him as trapped in Hell, like Milton’s Satan, but he would rather rule it than be a docile slave in heaven.

The philosopher of tragic knowledge. He masters the frenzied instinct for knowledge but not through a new metaphysics he establishes no new belief he feels tratically that the grounding of metaphysics has been taken away from him and yet cannot be satisfied by the gaudy vortex of sciences. He works at building a new life: he restores its right to art. ... The tragic Philosopher sees a complete image of existence emerge, in which everything that fills under the province of metaphysics seems merely anthropomorphic. He is not sceptical. He must create here a concept: for scepticism is not the goal. When the instinct for knowledge reaches its limit, it turns back on itself and becomes a critique of knowledge. This is knowledge at the service of the best kind of life. We must even want illusion―that is what the tragic is.

Another detrimental effect of undervaluing people skills was that in some cases, programmers were rewarded more for raw code production than for meeting the user's needs. Marge Devaney, a programmer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950's, recalled sex differences in how programmers judged their performance. Asked if she had ever experienced gender bias on the job, sh replied that discrimination was difficult to prove, adding, "With things like computing, it's very hard to judge who's doing the best. Is it better to produce a program quickly and have it full of bugs that the users keep hitting, and so it doesn't work? Or is it better to produce it more slowly and have it so it works?...I do know some of the men believed in the first way: 'Throw it together and let the user debug it!'" This critique is echoed by women today who find their male peers rewarded for averting disasters through heroic last-minute efforts, while women's efforts at preventing such problems through careful work and communication with users go unrecognized. As a female software engineer complained in 2007, "Why don't we just build the system right in the first place? Women are much better at preventive medicine. A Superman mentality is not necessarily productive; it's just an easy fit for the men in the sector.

The email alarmed Ive and Dye. They feared that the message Chaudhri sent could be interpreted to mean that Apple’s best days had passed. Its river had run dry. It was one thing for outsiders to say that the company was no longer innovative, but another thing altogether for that critique to come from someone who had helped birth multitouch technology for the iPhone. They worried it would poison morale and moved to contain the damage. Shortly after the email, Dye fired Chaudhri. The move had crushing financial ramifications. Chaudhri would no longer receive his shares. Stung, he complained to friends about the dismissal, telling them that Ive and Dye misunderstood his comment about the river. He explained to those people that the email was a personal reflection on his own lack of joy, not a comment on Apple.

The wise critique Unlike the overt narcissist who would openly put you down and discard your efforts, with coverts, things get a bit more complicated and a lot more undercover. Their aim is to lower your self-confidence by taking the role of a wise teacher who only wishes the best for you. They are the one who knows everything, and you are an infant who is unable to deal with the world around you.  When they are around, you simply won't feel supported or protected, and you won’t be able to pinpoint exactly why. When someone else criticizes you,

For Freire, political literacy clearly matters, not just actual illiteracy. Indeed, as we will see, actual literacy is, at best, a secondary concern. He feels this way because, in keeping with Karl Marx, whose theology he adopted in full, man’s true nature lies in gaining the power to transform the world (into a socialist utopia through relentless critique of what is), and his ability to participate in this process of political activism and transformation is the most fundamental aspect of his being and his key human right.

Episode 1 – Anger: Ramy said that as soon as I got off the phone with Mama, she raged around the living room, furious that I would dare to attack her for being a bad parent. I wish I could have watched this impassioned performance, which included such hyperbolic claims as, ‘I am the best mother in the world’; ‘how dare Amrou accuse me of this when it is Amrou who made me unhappy all my life’; and, with utter seriousness and self-belief: ‘I am perfect’. This was the reaction I assumed she’d have. Whenever any critique came her way, her go-to response was that she was a person without flaws. As much as I admired the goddess complex, it automatically made everyone else at fault. She so vehemently believed that she was the ideal mother and person, that by proxy you were always in the wrong. Mama was good at gaslighting, but also an expert emotional manipulator; it didn’t take long for her eyes to water, and for her to spin out gut-wrenchingly guilt-tripping phrases like ‘I sacrificed my life for you’, and ‘I only ever wanted you to be happy’.

With the absence of subsidized childcare, paid federal parental leave, and rampant pregnancy discrimination, young women who have had a healthy amount of class advantages are left to ask themselves if they want to effectively lose them—because that’s what parenthood in the United States will ultimately entail: If they want to partake in a different kind of labor that will offer them fewer legal protections, limited pay, increased hours, increased personal financial burdens, and with zero support from the institutions to which they have dedicated expanding days and increased workloads. In this increasing neoliberal cultural terrain, where everyone is encouraged to optimize themselves for the best employment, the strongest partnerships, the most successful path, what strategically middle-class, somewhat self-aware woman wants to do more work for less money? If it wasn’t parenthood we were talking about but a white-collar job, Sheryl Sandberg would tell these young women to lean out. The pragmatics of having a baby are fundamentally incompatible with the dominant cultural messages surrounding economic security, class ascension, and performance aimed at women of these particular socioeconomic backgrounds. This is the tension that underlies many of these waffling motherhood essays and, I think, what young, professional, child-curious people are looking to reconcile when they click on these “Should I, a Middle-Class Woman Who Went to NYU, Have a Baby and Fuck Up This Good Thing?” headlines. But what often awaits them is a contemplation of “choice” and very seldom an expanded structural critique. They are placated into the numbing mantra that having children is “a personal choice,” encouraging increased individual reflection on what is actually a raging systemic failure that relies on women’s free labor. But structuring the conversation of having children around personal autonomy and lone circumstances also successfully eclipses the identification of parenthood as labor in the first place.

We tend to mistrust our own natures, as if uncontrolled we'd be freaky, dangerous, hateful, unacceptable, or at best, dull. I think in our culture we fear wisdom.

In one sense, for all its vulnerability to philosophical critique, the widespread veneration of nature, the strong cultural propensity to endow the natural with transcendent virtue, is a good thing. It obliges millions of laypeople, whose grasp of the scientific questions involved is at best vague and shallow, to take seriously some of the potential threats discerned by environmental scientists. In that sense it is pious fraud, justifiable not by its innate truth, but by the healthy effects it has on the popular temperament.

Critiques are your best friends. They bring out the best in you. Never shun them, criticize them or run them down. They have an opinion because of some reason. That reason will eventually be the reason for your growth.

Evidence against Darwinian Evolution Darwinism is unable to say how life could have emerged from non-life. The more we learn about the complexity of the cell, the deeper the problem becomes. If Darwinian evolution were true, we should find millions of transitional forms in the fossil record, but the missing links are still missing. Darwinists say natural selection is evidence of macroevolution. However, natural selection, which is basic science, simply demonstrates change within species. This is called microevolution. Critiquing Darwinism does not make a person anti-science. We all share the same scientific evidence. The question is, what theory or interpretive framework best explains the evidence?

What is often lost in the critiques of the Federal Acknowledgement Process is the fact the leaders of the Five Tribes and other Indian nations do not see it as an entirely foreign, nonaboriginal regimen. They were actively engaged in its creation during the 1970s, and they continue to support the process because they view it as the best method available to determine which groups are viable indigenous nations today. By supporting the government process, Five Tribes leaders are engaging in an ongoing Native project that seeks new ways to define their peoples using both precontact, “traditional” measures and criteria borrowed from the dominant, Euro-American society. Ventures that seek to delineate and measure “Indianness” and “tribes” are no less troublesome from the tribal persepective. However, how native leaders perceive unrecognized individuals and groups is important to understanding modern Indian identity. The Five Tribes and related groups have exerted their sovereignty by extending government relations to formerly unrecognized tribes in the Southeast. They have also chosen to withhold recognition to groups they feel are inauthentic. While they support the process of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, tribal leaders us their own definitions and “ways of seeing” when making these decisions. Their criteria generally represent a complex mixture of indigenous and non-Indian notions of ethnicity and authenticity. The Five Tribes and other long-recognized Native nations have always been actively engaged in tribal acknowledgement debates. Today they have important reasons for remaining involved. Recognition politics involving established tribes, unrecognized communities, and non-Indians exposes the fundamental truth about ethnic and racial identities: they are constantly evolving and negotiated.

Stanley Hauerwas has observed that the most basic job of the church is just to be the church—to embody a different way of being that arises from following the radical Rabbi from Nazareth who managed to get himself executed on a cross outside the city walls.[32] The twin temptations to either shortcut the process by too heavily relying on legislation or to withdraw into sectarianism should not be underestimated. Maintaining a position that allows the church primarily to be the church while still offering a critique to the political institutions is difficult. It is, however, critical for our best serving a kingdom agenda at all levels of human interaction—public and private. The role of the church is to just be the church, but in so doing the church should both embody and speak critique to the powers that have been corrupted and no longer serve a kingdom agenda.

Written language is conducive to critical thinking because it is stable and explicit. Speech, by contrast, is evanescent. Written lines of reasoning can be pondered, discussed, dissected, and critiqued so that the reader can in some sense rise above the text, judge it, and keep the very best ideas—those that pass scrutiny.

Good critique is comprised of three key elements: It identifies a specific aspect of the idea or a decision in the design being analyzed. It relates that aspect or decision to an objective or best practice. It describes how and why the aspect or decision work to support or not support the objective or best practice.

A prophet critiques a system by quoting its own documents, constitutions, heroes, and Scriptures against its present practice. This is their secret: systems are best unlocked from inside.

The sooner the event is defused or debriefed, the faster the reactions will ease or disappear. Denial prolongs the pain and can keep the event freshly in mind far longer than necessary. Once a situation has been identified as a critical incident, there are several options for managing the group’s response. During a critical incident, watch for acute stress symptoms. Someone allowed to continue functioning when suffering acute stress can cause additional, if inadvertent, rescue burdens to arise. Soon after the event, within a few hours, a defusing is likely to help the group. Everyone is brought together and the event is discussed informally. This is not a critique of how the event was handled. A defusing is a time for examining how people are responding to the situation emotionally, physically, and cognitively. It is an acknowledgment that something unusual happened and that unusual responses may be occurring because of it. Defusing these intense reactions allows healing to begin. As a WFR, you may be called upon to manage a defusing. It is generally best to form the group into a circle with no one hanging back “in the shadows.” Establish guidelines for the defusing. Encourage everyone to speak, but do not allow anyone to cast blame or dwell on things he or she thinks were done wrong. Let no one interrupt while another is speaking. Ask each person to relate (1) his or her role during the incident, (2) how he or she felt and now feels, and (3) what he or she thought and now thinks. A formal critical-incident stress debriefing requires the assistance of a trained group. Many critical incident stress management (CISM) or critical incident stress debriefing (CISD) teams exist. You may wish to check for local availability even before leaving the trailhead. A formal debriefing is conducted by a group composed of both peer counselors (in this case, the ideal would be wilderness oriented peers) and mental health workers who have been specially trained in CISM. Only those who were involved are invited. The process usually takes 2 to 4 hours. The relief of a properly debriefed group is palpable. The ability for an untrained, or well intentioned but naïve, group to cause permanent damage to participants is also very real. Call in only an established, trained CISD group.

It’s only when the editor has named it for me that I fully face the fact that I need to make some changes. Critiquing with care works best when someone names something we ourselves almost but did not quite know. Critiquing with care works best when that naming happens within a context of unconditional regard, that just and loving attention that conveys unshakable respect for another person’s struggles.

new age of “dynamism” and a compensating new science of “dynamics” to “treat the primary unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of love, and fear, and wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character.” The human, he says, “is not the creature and product of mechanism, but in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.” “Signs of the Times” is one of the best pieces Carlyle ever wrote. Critique is balanced by prospectus, denunciation by advocacy. “This deep paralysed subjection to physical objects comes not from nature, but from our own unwise mode of viewing nature.” Nowhere in English is there a more forceful statement of the importance of the German concept of Bildung. “To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects in himself.”10

When I’m writing, I sometimes unconsciously know that a part of what I’m writing is not working. I have these vague vibrations that something is wrong, kind of like the vibrations you feel when you leave the house and you subtly sense you’ve left something important behind but you don’t know what. I often suppress these vibrations because I’m lazy or I want to be finished with the work. Invariably a good editor will locate the exact spot I semiconsciously knew wasn’t working. It’s only when the editor has named it for me that I fully face the fact that I need to make some changes. Critiquing with care works best when someone names something we ourselves almost but did not quite know. Critiquing with care works best when that naming happens within a context of unconditional regard, that just and loving attention that conveys unshakable respect for another person’s struggles.