Decent Attitude Quotes

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the résumé of a Supreme Being. This is the kind of shit you'd expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. And just between you and me, in any decently-run universe, this guy would've been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago. And by the way, I say "this guy", because I firmly believe, looking at these results, that if there is a God, it has to be a man. No woman could or would ever fuck things up like this. So, if there is a God, I think most reasonable people might agree that he's at least incompetent, and maybe, just maybe, doesn't give a shit. Doesn't give a shit, which I admire in a person, and which would explain a lot of these bad results.

As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.

It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary 'working' men. They are a race apart--outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men 'work', beggars do not 'work'; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable. Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSENTIAL difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course--but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout--in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him. Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modem talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.

if we have parents who raise us with love and respect; who allow us to experience consistent and benevolent acceptance; who give us the supporting structure of reasonable rules and appropriate expectations; who do not assail us with contradictions; who do not resort to ridicule, humiliation, or physical abuse as means of controlling us; who project that they believe in our competence and goodness—we have a decent chance of internalizing their attitudes and thereby of acquiring the foundation for healthy self-esteem.

And always waiting, waiting for a decent chance to strike terror and admiration in the nearest mediocre heart.

Planning is good for a decent survival, but an attitude to identify opportunity and act impromptu defines disproportionate success or spells immense happiness.

ABASEMENT, n. A decent and customary mental attitude in the presence of wealth or power. Peculiarly appropriate in an employee when addressing an employer.

We are being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude… it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the, from the well-being of human beings. It, this so easily rationalizes the slaughter of children. Ok, just think about the Muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up, convinced that they are agents of God’s will. There is absolutely nothing that Dr. Craig can s—can say against their behavior, in moral terms, apart from his own faith-based claim that they’re praying to the wrong God. If they had the right God, what they were doing would be good, on Divine Command theory. Now, I’m obviously not saying that all that Dr. Craig, or all religious people, are psychopaths and psychotics, but this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own.

I found Toronto an immensely likeable city, spacious and gentle and slightly dignified, but in a low-key, friendly way. The only people who didn’t seem to think much of it were its inhabitants, who could hardly wait for you to ask directions, because that gave them the perfect opportunity to apologise for it. What they were apologising for I never understood. I think they felt uninteresting, compared with America. I took the opposite view; I remember reading about the doctrine of American “Exceptionalism” and thinking that what I liked so much about Canadians was that they consider themselves unexceptional. This modest, unthreatening attitude seems to produce a nation that is stable, safe, decent and well respected. It’s just a shame that for seven months of the year it’s so cold that only Canadians would put up with it.

It will be said that a rational person accepts the world as mixed of good and evil with decent satisfaction and decent endurance. But this is exactly the attitude which I maintain to be defective... We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent.

A little bit of skin + attention to silhouette + an attitude + a vintage piece or two + a decent price tag = Hello, Nasty Gal.

At the present time the institution of the whorehouse seems to a certain extent to be dying out. Scholars have various reasons to give. Some say that the decay of morality among girls has dealt the whorehouse its deathblow. Others, perhaps more idealistic, maintain that police supervision on an increased scale is driving the houses out of existence. In the late days of the last century and the early part of this one, the whorehouse was an accepted if not openly discussed institution. It was said that its existence protected decent women. An unmarried man could go to one of these houses and evacuate the sexual energy which was making him uneasy and at the same time maintain the popular attitudes about the purity and loveliness of women. It was a mystery, but then there are many mysterious things in our social thinking.

Esser became so repulsive to some of the older and more decent men in the movement that they demanded his expulsion. “I know Esser is a scoundrel,” Hitler retorted in public, “but I shall hold on to him as long as he can be of use to me.”23 This was to be his attitude toward almost all of his close collaborators, no matter how murky their past—or indeed their present. Murderers, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies were all the same to him if they served his purposes.

There's something to be said about practice-even if I'm not actually practicing anything. Just hanging out in the water, holding my breath, withering my skin to grandma-like wrinkles. I pull off the flippers Toraf brought me and chuck them onto shore. I keep my back turned while he maneuvers his shorts into place. "Are you decent?" I call after a few seconds. No matter how many times I tell him I can't see into the water yet, he insists I'm just trying to look at his "eel." For crying out loud. "Oh, I'm more than decent. I'm actually quite a catch." I couldn't agree more. Toraf is good-looking, funny, and considerate-which makes me question Rayna's attitude.

It was said that its existence protected decent women. An unmarried man could go to one of these houses and evacuate the sexual energy which was making him uneasy and at the same time maintain the popular attitudes about the purity and loveliness of women. It was a mystery, but then there are many mysterious things in our social thinking.

Our feeling is that when your kid steps out of line, there should be an attitude of “I know what I’d want someone to say to my kid if she did that,” followed by a carefully chosen sharp word. We’ll all be better for it in the long run. Let’s assume we all want the same thing: to raise decent human beings who will be protected from danger until they are old enough to file their own taxes.

The tyranny of merit arises from more than the rhetoric of rising. It consists in a cluster of attitudes and circumstances that, taken together, have made meritocracy toxic. First, under conditions of rampant inequality and stalled mobility, reiterating the message that we are responsible for our fate and deserve what we get erodes solidarity and demoralizes those left behind by globalization. Second, insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans those who have not been to college; and third, insisting that social and political problems are best solved by highly educated, value-neutral experts is a technocratic conceit that corrupts democracy and disempowers ordinary

The only news he wanted to hear was that people had become a little sensible and decent and peace- ful; he disliked this Cup-Tie attitude, in which people took sides for the sake of excitement, and rooted for their team to win without any sense of responsibility. This passion for vicarious belligerence! Obviously neither of them really believed that anything unpleasant would happen to them, and the bogey of being stoned by strikers was only evoked for the sake of a little uncostly excitement.

It is natural if you feel as strongly as most decent people do about racial discrimination to welcome books that give it short shrift; but to assess books on their racial attitude rather than their literary value, and still more to look on books as ammunition in the battle, is to take a further and still more dangerous step from literature-as-morality to literature-as-propaganda—a move toward conditions in which, hitherto, literary art has signally failed to thrive. ("Didacticism in Modern Dress" from Only Connect (2nd ed., 1980).

As you walk your various paths, walk with faith. Speak affirmatively and cultivate an attitude of confidence. You have the capacity to do so. Your strength will give strength to others. Do not partake of the spirit so rife in our times. Rather look for good and build upon it. There is so much of the strong and the decent and the beautiful to build upon. You are partakers of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel means "good news." The message of the Lord is one of hope and salvation. The voice of the Lord is a voice of glad tidings. The work of the Lord is a work of glorious accomplishment.

I had tracked down a little cafe in the next village, with a television set that was going to show the World Cup Final on the Saturday. I arrived there mid-morning when it was still deserted, had a couple of beers, ordered a sensational conejo au Franco, and then sat, drinking coffee, and watching the room fill up. With Germans. I was expecting plenty of locals and a sprinkling of tourists, even in an obscure little outpost like this, but not half the population of Dortmund. In fact, I came to the slow realisation as they poured in and sat around me . . . that I was the only Englishman there. They were very friendly, but there were many of them, and all my exits were cut off. What strategy could I employ? It was too late to pretend that I was German. I’d greeted the early arrivals with ‘Guten Tag! Ich liebe Deutschland’, but within a few seconds found myself conversing in English, in which they were all fluent. Perhaps, I hoped, they would think that I was an English-speaker but not actually English. A Rhodesian, possibly, or a Canadian, there just out of curiosity, to try to pick up the rules of this so-called ‘Beautiful Game’. But I knew that I lacked the self-control to fake an attitude of benevolent detachment while watching what was arguably the most important event since the Crucifixion, so I plumped for the role of the ultra-sporting, frightfully decent Upper-Class Twit, and consequently found myself shouting ‘Oh, well played, Germany!’ when Helmut Haller opened the scoring in the twelfth minute, and managing to restrain myself, when Geoff Hurst equalised, to ‘Good show! Bit lucky though!’ My fixed grin and easy manner did not betray the writhing contortions of my hands and legs beneath the table, however, and when Martin Peters put us ahead twelve minutes from the end, I clapped a little too violently; I tried to compensate with ‘Come on Germany! Give us a game!’ but that seemed to strike the wrong note. The most testing moment, though, came in the last minute of normal time when Uwe Seeler fouled Jackie Charlton, and the pig-dog dolt of a Swiss referee, finally revealing his Nazi credentials, had the gall to penalise England, and then ignored Schnellinger’s blatant handball, allowing a Prussian swine named Weber to draw the game. I sat there applauding warmly, as a horde of fat, arrogant, sausage-eating Krauts capered around me, spilling beer and celebrating their racial superiority.

I mean, if you accept the framework that says totalitarian command economies have the right to make these decisions, and if the wage levels and working conditions are fixed facts, then we have to make choices within those assumptions. Then you can make an argument that poor people here ought to lose their jobs to even poorer people somewhere else... because that increases the economic pie, and it's the usual story. Why make those assumptions? There are other ways of dealing with the problem. Take, for example rich people here. Take those like me who are in the top few percent of the income ladder. We could cut back our luxurious lifestyles, pay proper taxes, there are all sorts of things. I'm not even talking about Bill Gates, but people who are reasonably privileged. Instead of imposing the burden on poor people here and saying "well, you poor people have to give up your jobs because even poorer people need them over there," we could say "okay, we rich people will give up some small part of our ludicrous luxury and use it to raise living standards and working conditions elsewhere, and to let them have enough capital to develop their own economy, their own means." Then the issue will not arise. But it's much more convenient to say that poor people here ought to pay the burden under the framework of command economies—totalitarianism. But, if you think it through, it makes sense and almost every social issue you think about—real ones, live ones, ones right on the table—has these properties. We don't have to accept and shouldn't accept the framework of domination of thought and attitude that only allows certain choices to be made... and those choices almost invariably come down to how to put the burden on the poor. That's class warfare. Even by real nice people like us who think it's good to help poor workers, but within a framework of class warfare that maintains privilege and transfers the burden to the poor. It's a matter of raising consciousness among very decent people.

This idolisation of proficiency for its own sake is a German vice; the Germans think it is a German virtue. In any case, it is deeply ingrained in the German character. We could not help ourselves. We are the worst saboteurs in the world. If we do something it has to be done scrupulously. The voice of conscience and self-respect are powerless against this attitude. We find a deep, numbing, sinful pleasure in doing anything, be it a decent and important job, a wild adventure or a crime; as well as can be. This feeling robs us of the ability to think about the significance of what we are doing. Faced with a particularly thoroughly and methodically burgled house, a policeman may say admiringly, "That's a first class piece of work.

I just helped with a birthing." Amber flames lit his angry dark eyes. "Women have no business doing that kind of work. It's not decent!" Thoroughly provoked by his unreasonable attitude, Willow completely forgot Miriam's presence. "Well, that's a lamebrain thing to say, considering it's us females who do the birthing. All men do is prime their-" "Willow!" Miriam interjected. "That is quite enough!" Seemingly disgusted with both of them, Miriam waved Rider off dismissively. "Mr. Sinclair, you've seen for yourself she's quite all right so I suggest you take yourself elsewear." "Fine! It's a little too whiffy around here for me anyway." He jerked Sultan around and rode off in a monstrous huff. Willow was pricked by his disdain more than she cared to admit. "Did you hear what he said? He said I stink! You'd think I'd just climbed out of a pig sty! Hell, how would he know if I stink? He wasn't even close enough to sniff me." Miriam exhaled a deep sigh and wrinkled her nose. "Well, believe me, I'm close enough!" Miriam bristled but then recognized the teasing twinkle in Miriam's soft hazel eyes and broke into a grin. "It'll never do to stick you in a tub," the landlady observed. "I'd kill myself, filling and dumping it before we got you clean. Stay here and don't move. I'll be right back." Miriam returned, loaded down with towels, soap, and clean clothes. "Lead the way to that swimming hole you were telling me about." The two women silently traipsed down the narrow path to the river, Willow brooding over Rider's sarcasm and Miriam wondering if Willow's clothes could be laundered or if she should just burn them.

Christ was always purveyed to me by people who clearly regarded me not only as a delinquent but as an object of pity. There is an attitude of complacent do-gooding condescension which even decent people cannot conceal and even a small child can recognize. Their religion seemed to me over-lit, over-simple, covertly threatening. There was nowhere to hide. We roared out 'choruses' about sin and redemption which reduced the hugest theological dogmas to the size of a parlour trick. I rejected the theology but was defenceless against the guilt which was so fruitlessly beaten into me. The mood was brisk and impatient. Either you were saved by the blood of the Lamb or else you were for it, a black and white matter of breath-taking rewards or whipping. The efficacious Saviour almost figured to me as a sort of agent provocateur. Again and again the trick failed to work, the briskness turned to severity and the jollity ended in tears. In so far as there were mysteries and depths in my life I kept them secret from Christ and his soldiery. I was more moved by animals than I was by Jesus. One of the porters had a dog, and this dog once, as I sat beside him on the ground, touched my arm with his paw. This gentle gesture has stayed with me forever. And I remember stroking a guinea pig at school and feeling such a piercing strange pain, the realization that happiness existed, but was denied to me.

To be honest? I'd thought myself above them. What a nasty little counter-culture snob I was. There they were, doing their fucking best, trying to have a life, trying to bring up their children decently, struggling to make the payments on the little house, wondering where their youth had gone, where love had gone, what was to become of them and all I could do was be a snotty, judgmental cow. But it was no good. I couldn't be like them. I'd seen too much, done too much that was outside anything they knew. I wasn't better than them, but I was different. We had no point of contact other than work. Even then, they disapproved of my attitude, my ways of dealing with the clients. Many's the time I'd ground my teeth as Andrea or Fran had taken the piss out of some hapless, useless, illiterate get they were assigned to; being funny at the expense of their stupidity, their complete inability to deal with straight society. Sure, I knew it was partly a defence mechanism; they did it because it was laugh or scream, and we were always told it wasn't good to let the clients get too close. But all too often - not always, but enough times to make me seethe with irritation - there was an ingrained, self-serving elitism in there too. Who'd see it better than me? They sealed themselves up in their white-collar world like chrysalides and waited for some kind of reward for being good girls and boys, for playing the game, being a bit of a cut above the messy rest - a reward that didn't exist, would never come and that they would only realise was a lie when it was far too late. Now I would be one of the Others, the clients, the ones who stood outside in the cold and, shivering, looked in at the lighted windows of reason and middle-class respectability. I would be another colossal fuck-up, another dinner party story. But my sin was all the greater because I'd wilfully defected from the right side to the hopelessly, eternally wrong side. I was not only a screw-up, I was a traitor.

Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man's nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical. One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin. It would be a mistake to identify the classical view with that of materialism. On the contrary it is absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude. I should put it in this way: That part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity. This should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world. It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities. Now at certain times, by the use of either force or rhetoric, these instincts have been suppressed - in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin, and here under the Roundheads. The inevitable result of such a process is that the repressed instinct bursts out in some abnormal direction. So with religion. By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don't believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don't believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

Nope. Look. The Raft is a media event. But in a much more profound, general sense than you can possibly imagine." "Huh?" "It's created by the media in that without the media, people wouldn't know it was here, Refus wouldn't come out and glom onto it the way they do. And it sustains the media. It creates a lot of information flow-movies, news reports - - you know." "So you're creating your own news event to make money off the information flow that it creates?" says the journalist, desperately trying to follow. His tone of voice says that this is all a waste of videotape. His weary attitude suggests that this is not the first time Rife has flown off on a bizarre tangent. "Partly. But that's only a very crude explanation. It really goes a lot deeper than that. You've probably heard the expression that the Industry feeds off of biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean." "I've heard the expression, yes." "That's my expression. I made it up. An expression like that is just like a virus, you know -- it's a piece of information -- data -- that spreads from one person to the next. Well, the function of the Raft is to bring more biomass. To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. Leaves behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel... "Now I have a different perspective on it. America must look, to those poor little buggers down there, about the same as Crete looked to those poor Greek suckers. Except that there's no coercion involved. Those people down there give up their children willingly. Send them into the labyrinth by the millions to be eaten up. The Industry feeds on them and spits back images, sends out movies and TV programs, over my networks, images of wealth and exotic things beyond their wildest dreams, back to those people, and it gives them something to dream about, something to aspire to. And that is the function of the Raft. It's just a big old krill carrier." Finally the journalist gives up on being a journalist, just starts to slag L. Bob Rife openly. He's had it with this guy. "That's disgusting. I can't believe you can think about people that way." "Shit, boy, get down off your high horse. Nobody really gets eaten. It's just a figure of speech. They come here, they get decent jobs, find Christ, buy a Weber grill, and live happily ever after. What's wrong with that?

Making the Right Decisions Now if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives to all generously and without criticizing, and it will be given to him. James 1:5 HCSB Some decisions are easy to make because the consequences of those decisions are small. When the person behind the counter asks, “Want fries with that?” the necessary response requires little thought because the aftermath of that decision is relatively unimportant. Some decisions, on the other hand, are big … very big. If you’re facing one of those big decisions, here are some things you can do: 1. Gather as much information as you can: don’t expect to get all the facts—that’s impossible—but get as many facts as you can in a reasonable amount of time. (Proverbs 24:3-4) 2. Don’t be too impulsive: If you have time to make a decision, use that time to make a good decision. (Proverbs 19:2) 3. Rely on the advice of trusted friends and mentors. Proverbs 1:5 makes it clear: “A wise man will hear and increase learning, and a man of understanding will attain wise counsel” (NKJV). 4. Pray for guidance. When you seek it, He will give it. (Luke 11:9) 5. Trust the quiet inner voice of your conscience: Treat your conscience as you would a trusted advisor. (Luke 17:21) 6. When the time for action arrives, act. Procrastination is the enemy of progress; don’t let it defeat you. (James 1:22). People who can never quite seem to make up their minds usually make themselves miserable. So when in doubt, be decisive. It’s the decent way to live. There may be no trumpet sound or loud applause when we make a right decision, just a calm sense of resolution and peace. Gloria Gaither The Reference Point for the Christian is the Bible. All values, judgments, and attitudes must be gauged in relationship to this Reference Point. Ruth Bell Graham The principle of making no decision without prayer keeps me from rushing in and committing myself before I consult God. Elizabeth George If you are struggling to make some difficult decisions right now that aren’t specifically addressed in the Bible, don’t make a choice based on what’s right for someone else. You are the Lord’s and He will make sure you do what’s right. Lisa Whelchel We cannot be led by our emotions and still be led by the Holy Spirit, so we have to make a choice. Joyce Meyer

The attitude of the average decent person towards the classics of his own tongue is one of distrust... I will take, for an example, Sir Thomas Browne, as to whom the average person has no offensive juvenile memories. He is bound to have read somewhere that the style of Sir Thomas Browne is unsurpassed by anything in English literature. One day he sees the Religio Medici in a shop-window (or, rather, outside a shop-window, for he would hesitate about entering a bookshop), and he buys it, by way of a mild experiment. He does not expect to be enchanted by it; a profound instinct tells him that Sir Thomas Browne is “not in his line”; and in the result he is even less enchanted than he expected to be. He reads the introduction, and he glances at the first page or two of the work. He sees nothing but words. The work makes no appeal to him whatever. He is surrounded by trees, and cannot perceive the forest. He puts the book away. If Sir Thomas Browne is mentioned, he will say, “Yes, very fine!” with a feeling of pride that he has at any rate bought and inspected Sir Thomas Browne. Deep in his heart is a suspicion that people who get enthusiastic about Sir Thomas Browne are vain and conceited poseurs. After a year or so, when he has recovered from the discouragement caused by Sir Thomas Browne, he may, if he is young and hopeful, repeat the experiment with Congreve or Addison. Same sequel! And so on for perhaps a decade, until his commerce with the classics finally expires! That, magazines and newish fiction apart, is the literary history of the average decent person.

Armed with a fairly decent attitude,

The curious fact about Oxo cubes is that we have probably never really needed them. These little cubes of salt, beef extract and flavourings were, and I suppose still are, used to add ‘depth’ to stews, gravies and pie fillings made with ‘inferior’ meat. Two million are sold in Britain each day. Yet any half-competent cook knows you can make a blissfully flavoursome stew with a bit of scrag and a few carrots, without recourse to a cube full of chemicals and dehydrated cow. Apart from showing disrespect to the animal that has died for our Sunday lunch (imagine bits of someone else being added to your remains after you have been cremated), the use of a strongly seasoned cube to ‘enhance’ the gravy successfully manages to sum up all that is wrong about the British attitude to food. How could we fail to understand that the juices that drip from a joint of decent meat as it cooks are in fact its heart and soul, and are individual to that animal. Why would anyone need to mask the meat’s natural flavour? By making every roast lunch taste the same, smothering the life out of the natural pan juices seems like an act of culinary vandalism, and people did, and still do, just that on a daily basis.

I fell deeply in love with the books of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. They parented me, and gave me a sense of what it was to be a decent person, without any of the usual hypocritical rhetoric. They fired my imagination and opened me up; I read them all one after the other, Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse-Five, on and on they go, they gave me the soul nutrients I needed. He was bitterly funny and awakened in me a morality that lay dormant and unarticulated. He taught me that it was fun and beautiful to be humble, and that human beings are no more important than rutabagas. That we’ve got to love with all we are, not for some reward down the line, but purely for the sake of being a loving person, and that creativity was the highest part of ourselves to engage. He pointed out the frivolous and insensitive attitudes that birthed the absurd cruelty of war. His humorous detachment from the world’s insane and egotistical violence—“So it goes”—my first hint of a spiritual concept. To this day, his books inform my political and social views, my sense of humor, and touch me deeply. KVJ changed my life, he never gets old.

first published on tumblr 27 Aug 2020 Treason45 said crimes lies vomit murder unabated blood lust sadistic racist arousal the plantation slave master slave hole American rot, my gifts to America. THATS TREASON45 WORKING FOR ANOTHER NATION RUNNING FOR OFFICE IN AMERICA HOW LOVELY. JUST PRICELESS. #volume5 gwencalvo 8 27 20 From the racists who hurt humanity in texas to the racists in protests for the black lives matter movement TREASON45 wants humanity to be damaged for what reason TREASON45. BECAUSE OF THE PLANTATION MASTER IN YOUR HEAD? the racists in the world from the north to the south to east to the west who cant stand folk crossing or being near their fucking garbage lawn you cant handle that but you would fine with another nation on your lawn the green men that are not there and they are thats okay. And you are just fine with a TREASON45 who bows to another nation. All of this stupid racist garbage leads your existence not being yours but of that nations that TREASON45 WORKS FOR good luck with that racist bitches that nation will love destroying the fuck out of anything thats all it does no you dont get to keep your weapons or your fucking manicured lawn DO SOME RESEARCH RACIST ZUNTS#volume5 Real leaders in the world like 44 have attitude Biden does too so does Harris they are charismatic charming magnetic real honest and decent and thats something racists cant fucking handle. for racists its just a slave hole for humanity and that thought is pure white lunacy. TAXPAYERS voters have real power THEY ARE RUNNING FOR OFFICE VOTING FOR REAL LEADERS AND NOT TAKING THIS RACIST GARBAGE ANYMORE. WHY SHOULD WE?????????? ITS YOUR RACIST MADNESS. HUMANITY IS NOT HERE FOR YOUR RACIST VOMIT. why should voters continue to pay taxes and fund racist vomit cops and police unions who want to continue treating humanity like their fucking slaves to tame to hurt to murder to humiliate even when they are like mr blake trying to remain alive why continue this humiliation because you stupid racist cant handle that humanity has attitude that humans dare to think dare to live dare to walk away and try to get the fuck away from you A weapon had to be used on mr blake who could have been overpowered by one or two racist cops RACIST COPS WANT TO CONTINUE TO murder openly on AMERICAN STREETS. SLAVERY COLONIAL AND ALL THAT FUCKING EVIL SHOULD NEVER NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN ALLOWED WHOEVER THE FUCK ALLOWED THAT FUCKING THING TO BE OF SLAVE HOLDER SLAVE HOLE THAT BITCH IS LIKE A TREASON45 who hides notes lies during a plague to kill citizens off allows military to be murdered by another nation permits kurd genocide concentration camp isis unleashed erases federal documents purges igs buys sells humanity trafficking it for the continuation of the slave hole AMERICAN ROT in the world uses taxpayer money to destroy the planet if there is no planet there is no existence and uses courts to hide his evil hides his evil.

The practice of explicitly describing others as less than humans is nowadays often frowned upon and is widely condemned. So propagandists who cultivate dehumanizing attitudes most often do this indirectly. Rather than overtly referring to a group of people as animals or monsters, they describe them in ways that invoke this image in the minds of their listeners. There are certain themes that reappear over and over in this dehumanizing discourse. The common one is criminality. The dehumanized group is made to appear inherently threatening and their criminality is represented as crudely animalistic typically involving rape and murder. Another common theme is parasitism. The dehumanized group conspires to exploit the majority sucking the blood out of decent, hard-working people and claiming privileges that they haven't earned. Images of filth and disease are also very frequent. Dehumanised groups are vectors of infection, they are dirty and contaminating. They are often thought of as invaders, outsiders who are taking us over. They are reproducing at an alarming rate and they will soon outnumber us unless we do something about it.

Robert saw no graces in this post-war London. It seemed to him that there were no amenities, not even the ordinary little courtesies of everyday life. The houses were shabby and unpainted, there were ruins and rubble, there were crowds everywhere. It seemed to Robert that the difficulty of existing made existence hardly worth while … the difficulty of obtaining a decent meal, of buying a pair of shoes, of getting your watch mended … nobody cared whether you got what you wanted or not, take it or leave it was the general attitude. The difficulty of transport was even worse; tubes and buses were crammed to overflowing and people scrambled to enter them in much the same way as panicking people in a shipwreck might scramble for the boats. Sauve qui peut!

This kid 'was' smart. A bit of an attitude, but sharp. Enjoying Grace's company, Carter returned the smile and, for the first time, in the light, Grace got a really good look at her. She had auburn hair, close in color and in form to Grace's, actually, but it was long overdue for a decent cut. She was thin, bony, moving in the lithesome knobby-kneed way of a girl at the inelegant doorstep of puberty, but that and the ill-fitting tomboyish clothes she wore could do little to diminish the hints of the beautiful young woman she would soon become. You could see it in her when she smiled. Someone had passed on striking features to her, but there was something else that Grace saw, in the girl's big anime eyes, something mature beyond her years that seemed familiar to Grace, and immediately brought to mind the vegetable garden of her youth, where she used to sit and think and spend time alone just like this.

That sort of thing is annoying, but you get used to it after 80 years. You must remember that we are Britain's oldest colony; they have been here for 800 years. Every imperialist power creates a caricature of the conquered nations, to justify themselves: "We're only there to civilize the barbarians," you know. The ordinary Englishman and Englishwoman are very decent really, but they have 800 years of anti-Irish attitudes to unlearn. They have always been told that we are charming, quite irrational and never, never to be taken seriously for a moment. They also think we have unfortunately long memories. On the other hand, this ordinary Englishman and Englishwoman is getting a bit cynical about that myth by now. The war has gone on too long, and it is costing too much. There is a real groundswell of opinion there now that it is time to pull the troops out and have done with it. The attitude is much like the American attitude toward Vietnam around 1970, when everybody was ready to pull out except a few diehards at the top.

Coming face-to-face with people who hold discriminatory attitudes often breaks down their bigotry. This is consistent with a growing body of research that confirms much of what LaPiere discovered all those decades ago.

One consequence of all of this has been a severe erosion of democracy, an immediate consequence of sharp concentration of wealth and business power. We’ve discussed some of the means: virtual purchase of elections, radical escalation of lobbying, undermining of voting rights, all facilitated further by the most reactionary Supreme Court in living memory. There is no longer fear of excessive democracy. There’s a lot of fuss, as you know, about alleged Russian meddling in the elections. It is scarcely detectable, but even if it existed on any substantial scale, it would be invisible in comparison with the interference in elections by extreme wealth and corporate power. But these are more things that it wouldn’t do to say. Best to worry about the Russians. One consequence of all of this, also well established in the academic political science literature, is that a considerable majority of the population, those who are lower on the income-wealth scale, are literally disenfranchised. They may cast votes, but it doesn’t much matter. They’re disenfranchised in the sense that when you compare their preferences and attitudes with the decisions made by their own representatives, there’s virtually no correlation. The legislators are listening to other voices. The donor class. During the neoliberal period, the past generation, both parties shifted pretty far to the right. The Democrats abandoned the working class. They delivered them to their class enemies, who try to mobilize them on what are called cultural issues: white supremacy, fundamentalist religion, and in other ways to which we’ll return. And with the promises of decent jobs, which oddly enough are not fulfilled.

The tyranny of merit arises from more than the rhetoric of rising. It consists in a cluster of attitudes and circumstances that, taken together, have made meritocracy toxic. First, under conditions of rampant inequality and stalled mobility, reiterating the message that we are responsible for our fate and deserve what we get erodes solidarity and demoralizes those left behind by globalization. Second, insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans those who have not been to college; and third, insisting that social and political problems are best solved by highly educated, value-neutral experts is a technocratic conceit that corrupts democracy and disempowers ordinary citizens.

Conservatism should not be a party but the normal attitude of every decent man.

To stop Scum America, the decent majority must arise now and do four things: Vote in huge numbers and hand massive electoral defeats to Asshole Nation and Scum America Call out scummers when they trumpet their base and vile notions Never stop ridiculing “conservative” ideas Get together with other decent Americans to brainstorm ways to spread the attitude of decency

There is a good reason why you cannot imagine one of the Pilgrim Fathers kicking back at Six Flags, or Daniel Boone going down a water slide. It is not that their lives were busier than ours, or that they were more serious people. We are all busy in our own ways, whether we are hunting down dinner in a forest or laboring through the crowds at our local market. The difference is in our attitudes towards leisure time. Today reading a novel or going to see a play is just a way to pass the time, and a fairly admirable one at that, given the alternatives of video games and reality television. Two hundred years ago, however, a decent man or woman would not have wasted God-given time with people and events that had never taken place, and in a manner designed to artfully stimulate the emotions. The theater is “wholly useless,” a minister told his flock in 1825. “Can it teach the mechanic industry, or the merchant more economy and skill?” Surely not, he declared. Even at its very best, the theater is “mere recreation.

There is a good reason why you cannot imagine one of the Pilgrim Fathers kicking back at Six Flags, or Daniel Boone going down a water slide. It is not that their lives were busier than ours, or that they were more serious people. We are all busy in our own ways, whether we are hunting down dinner in a forest or laboring through the crowds at our local market. The difference is in our attitudes towards leisure time. Today reading a novel or going to see a play is just a way to pass the time, and a fairly admirable one at that, given the alternatives of video games and reality television. Two hundred years ao, however, a decent man or woman would not have wasted God-given time with people and events that had never taken place, and in a manner designed to artfully stimulate the emotions. The theater is “wholly useless,” a minister told his flock in 1825. “Can it teach the mechanic industry, or the merchant more economy and skill?” Surely not, he declared. Even at its very best, the theater is “mere recreation.

People speak of the profound injustice of the social arrangement, as it the fact that one man is born in favourable circumstances and that another is born in unfavourable ones—or that one should possess gifts the other has not, were on the face of it an injustice. Among the more honest of these opponents of society this is what is said: "We, with all the bad, morbid, criminal qualities which we acknowledge we possess, are only the inevitable result of the oppression for ages of the weak by the strong"; thus they insinuate their evil natures into the consciences of the ruling classes. They threaten and storm and curse. They become virtuous from sheer indignation—they don't want to have become bad men and canaille for nothing. The name for this attitude, which is an invention of the last century, is, if I am not mistaken, pessimism; and even that pessimism which is the outcome of indignation. It is in this attitude of mind that history is judged, that it is deprived of its inevitable fatality, and that responsibility and even guilt is discovered in it. For the great desideratum is to find guilty people in it. The botched and the bungled, the decadents of all kinds, are revolted at themselves, and require sacrifices in order that they may not slake their thirst for destruction upon themselves (which might, indeed, be the most reasonable procedure). But for this purpose they at least require a semblance of justification, i.e. a theory according to which the fact of their existence, and of their character, may be expiated by a scapegoat. This scapegoat may be God,—in Russia such resentful atheists are not wanting,—or the order of society, or education and upbringing, or the Jews, or the nobles, or, finally, the well-constituted of every kind. "It is a sin for a man to have been born in decent circumstances, for by so doing he disinherits the others, he pushes them aside, he imposes upon them the curse of vice and of work.... How can I be made answerable for my misery; surely some one must be responsible for it, or I could not bear to live."... In short, resentful pessimism discovers responsible parties in order to create a pleasurable sensation for itself—revenge.... "Sweeter than honey"—thus does even old Homer speak of revenge.

One concern, voiced by Epicurus, is that it is hard to acquire wealth without adopting a servile attitude toward someone: toward a superior if one seeks patronage, toward the mob if one seeks popular approval.10 This was presumably more true in ancient times than today, since in prosperous modern societies the opportunities for ordinary working people to build a decent-sized nest egg are far greater than in the past. Yet Epicurus’s observation is not entirely outdated. Employees in any organization, if they wish to advance their careers or even just keep their jobs, usually have to make nice to their superiors. And a concern for money, even if not in the form of an individual’s lust for wealth, often underlies the quest for public approval, whether it is politicians seeking votes, entrepreneurs selling goods or services, college presidents seeking to boost admissions, TV producers with their eyes on ratings, or writers hoping to sell books. All will find themselves drawn toward trying to gratify their audience’s desires.

Page 72-73 All Jews who really want to extricate themselves from the tyranny of the totalitarian Jewish past must face the question of their attitude towards the popular anti-Jewish manifestations of the past, particularly those connected with the rebellions of enserfed peasants. … Do decent English historians, even when noting the massacres of Englishmen by rebellious Irish peasants rising against their enslavement, condemn the latter as ‘anti-English racists’? What is the attitude of progressive French historians towards the great slave revolution in Santo Domingo, where many French women and children were butchered? To ask the question is to answer it. But to ask a similar question of many ‘progressive’ or even ‘socialist’ Jewish circles is to receive a very different answer; here an enslaved peasant is transformed into a racist monster, if Jews profited from his state of slavery and exploitation.

Fumio to dinner. We look at old photos. I turn up one of [Na­ka­no] Yuji at work—part-time laborer, standing there for forty years now. I wondered why I still think so much about him, now that I have not seen him for decades, now that he is an old man, if even alive. Fumio said, “Because, he was the last Japanese.” It’s true. Yuji had all of the old virtues—he saw a connection between himself and nature, the way things are. He believed in authority, though he was sly about evading it; was polite, decent, honest to the extent that he did not get caught; willing to do his best and allow himself to be much imposed on; fond of pleasure, and probably drank himself to death. And, more, he embodied an attitude now extinct—he accepted without bitterness, and made the most of what was left. I don’t know if this defines old-fashioned Japanese-ness, but it defines Yuji.

There’s a decent guy hiding behind all that attitude.

14. Pack Light This brings us to the stage of our journey where I can begin to equip you with some of the key ‘know-how’ to help you survive the many obstacles that lie ahead. Now, there is ‘good’ kit we need to carry and then there is ‘bad’ kit. The ‘good’ is the list we are going to start compiling. The ‘bad’ is the stuff we are going to drop. Ultimately I want you to be empowered with a super-efficient, totally functional kit list made up of solid principles on which to build your life and adventure. And here is the reason why we want to keep our kit list light: On an expedition, obviously you never want to carry more gear than you need. Unnecessary kit is just extra weight - and too much baggage slows you down. Part of the appeal of the TV shows I do is that they show how you can survive with just a bottle of water, a decent knife and some key know-how. The message is that attitude is king and the greatest resource we have is inside of us all. Pack the right skills, and the right attitudes, and you don’t need much else.

I have no moral objections to makeup, you understand, it’s just . . . I know me. And makeup isn’t me. This, in addition to my edgy, hard-nosed, take-no-prisoner attitude, and I think I could have made a pretty decent lesbian. Not to pigeonhole the demographic.

It didn't take him long - no more than a year after his wedding - to realize that although married life did provide some conveniences, it was actually rather a complex and difficult business, and the path of duty, which meant leading a decent life approved of by society, called for a clearly defined attitude, as at work.