Discuss Ideas Not People Quotes

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.

Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss other people. Life's too short to worry about what other people do or don't do. Tend your own backyard, not theirs, because yours is the one you have to live in.

The less you associate with some people, the more your life will improve. Any time you tolerate mediocrity in others, it increases your mediocrity. An important attribute in successful people is their impatience with negative thinking and negative acting people. As you grow, your associates will change. Some of your friends will not want you to go on. They will want you to stay where they are. Friends that don't help you climb will want you to crawl. Your friends will stretch your vision or choke your dream. Those that don't increase you will eventually decrease you. Consider this: Never receive counsel from unproductive people. Never discuss your problems with someone incapable of contributing to the solution, because those who never succeed themselves are always first to tell you how. Not everyone has a right to speak into your life. You are certain to get the worst of the bargain when you exchange ideas with the wrong person. Don't follow anyone who's not going anywhere. With some people you spend an evening: with others you invest it. Be careful where you stop to inquire for directions along the road of life. Wise is the person who fortifies his life with the right friendships. If you run with wolves, you will learn how to howl. But, if you associate with eagles, you will learn how to soar to great heights. "A mirror reflects a man's face, but what he is really like is shown by the kind of friends he chooses." The simple but true fact of life is that you become like those with whom you closely associate - for the good and the bad. Note: Be not mistaken. This is applicable to family as well as friends. Yes...do love, appreciate and be thankful for your family, for they will always be your family no matter what. Just know that they are human first and though they are family to you, they may be a friend to someone else and will fit somewhere in the criteria above. "In Prosperity Our Friends Know Us. In Adversity We Know Our friends." "Never make someone a priority when you are only an option for them." "If you are going to achieve excellence in big things,you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.."..

The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.

The conversations that follow are gratifying for Connell, often taking unexpected turns and prompting him to express ideas he had never consciously formulated before. They talk about the novels he's reading, the research she studies, the precise historical moment that they are currently living in, the difficulty of observing such a moment in process. At times he has the sensation that he and Marianne are like figure-skaters, improvising their discussions so adeptly and in such perfect synchronisation that it suprises them both. She tosses herself gracefully into the air, and each time, without knowing how he's going to do it, he catches her.

Great Minds Discuss Ideas. Average Minds Discuss Events. Small Minds Discuss People

In a conversation with someone sharing gossip, the introvert’s eyes glaze over and his brow furrows as he tries to comprehend how this conversation could interest anyone. This is not because the introvert is morally superior—he just doesn’t get it. As we’ve discussed, introverts are energized and excited by ideas. Simply talking about people, what they do and who they know, is noise for the introvert. He’ll be looking between the lines for some meaning, and this can be hard work! Before long, he’ll be looking for a way out of the conversation.

Intelligent people discuss ideas. Fools discuss how people should behave.

I saw a meme the other day with a picture of Marilyn Manson and Robin Williams. It said about the former, this isn’t the face of depression, and about the latter, this is. This really struck a chord and it’s been on my mind since then. As someone who has continuously dipped in and out of chronic depression and anxiety for close to three decades now, and I’ve never previously spoken about the subject, I finally thought it was time I did. These days it’s trendy for people to think they’re cool and understanding about mental illness, posting memes and such to indicate so. But the reality is far different to that. It seems most people think if they publicly display such understanding then perhaps a friend will come to them, open up, and calmly discuss their problems. This will not happen. For someone in that seemingly hopeless void of depression and anxiety the last thing they are likely to do is acknowledge it, let alone talk about it. Even if broached by a friend they will probably deny there is a problem and feel even more distanced from the rest of the world. So nobody can do anything to help, right? No. If right now you suspect one of your friends is suffering like this then you’re probably right. If right now you think that none of your friends are suffering like this then you’re probably wrong. By all means make your public affirmations of understanding, but at least take on board that an attempt to connect on this subject by someone you care about could well be cryptic and indirect. When we hear of celebrities who suffered and finally took their own lives the message tends to be that so many close friends had no idea. This is woeful, but it’s also great, right? Because by not knowing there was a problem there is no burden of responsibility on anyone else. This is another huge misconception, that by acknowledging an indirect attempt to connect on such a complex issue that somehow you are accepting responsibility to fix it. This is not the case. You don’t have to find a solution. Maybe just listen. Many times over the years I’ve seen people recoil when they suspect that perhaps that is the direct a conversation is about to turn, and they desperately scramble for anything that can immediately change the subject. By acknowledging you’ve heard and understood doesn’t mean you are picking up their burden and carrying it for them. Anyway, I’ve said my piece. And please don’t think this is me reaching out for help. If this was my current mindset the last thing I’d ever do is write something like this, let alone share it.

I remembered what Morrie said during our visit: “The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.” "Morrie true to these words, had developed his own culture – long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted not time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the Week.” He had created a cocoon of human activities– conversations, interaction, affection–and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.

We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking. People have a hunger for answers but an inability to formulate the questions, partly because of the short-term view of things that’s encouraged by the media and partly because there seems to be no centre to which people can turn in order to see what the heart of the discussion is. I think this is a failure of philosophy in our days – and also of the culture that our English-speaking world has generated – around the idea of an abstract question.

A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there's such a range of different kinds of market economies. Essentially, what we've been debating over—certainly since the Great Depression—is what percentage of a society should be left in the hands of a deregulated market system. And absolutely there are people that are at the far other end of the spectrum that want to communalize all property and abolish private property, but in general the debate is not between capitalism and not capitalism, it's between what parts of the economy are not suitable to being decided by the profit motive. And I guess that comes from being Canadian, in a way, because we have more parts of our society that we've made a social contract to say, 'That's not a good place to have the profit motive govern.' Whereas in the United States, that idea is kind of absent from the discussion. So even something like firefighting—it seems hard for people make an argument that maybe the profit motive isn't something we want in the firefighting sector, because you don't want a market for fire.

This is the terrible thing about learning everything from books—sometimes you don’t know how to say the words. You know the ideas, but you cannot discuss them with people with any confidence. And so you stay silent. It is the curse of the autodidact. Or “autodidiact,” as I said, on the same shameful day. Oh, that was a conversation that went so wrong.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

The Frays had never been a religiously observant family, but Clary loved Fifth Avenue at Christmas time. The air smelled like sweet roasted chestnuts, and the window displays sparkled with silver and blue, green and red. This year there were fat round crystal snowflakes attached to each lamppost, sending back the winter sunlight in shafts of gold. Not to mention the huge tree at Rockefeller Center. It threw its shadow across them as she and Simon draped themselves over the gate at the side of the skating rink, watching tourists fall down as they tried to navigate the ice. Clary had a hot chocolate wrapped in her hands, the warmth spreading through her body. She felt almost normal—this, coming to Fifth to see the window displays and the tree, had been a winter tradition for her and Simon for as long as she could remember. “Feels like old times, doesn’t it?” he said, echoing her thoughts as he propped his chin on his folded arms. She chanced a sideways look at him. He was wearing a black topcoat and scarf that emphasized the winter pallor of his skin. His eyes were shadowed, indicating that he hadn’t fed on blood recently. He looked like what he was—a hungry, tired vampire. Well, she thought. Almost like old times. “More people to buy presents for,” she said. “Plus, the always traumatic what-to-buy-someone-for-the-first-Christmas-after-you’ve-started-dating question.” “What to get the Shadowhunter who has everything,” Simon said with a grin. “Jace mostly likes weapons,” Clary sighed. “He likes books, but they have a huge library at the Institute. He likes classical music …” She brightened. Simon was a musician; even though his band was terrible, and was always changing their name—currently they were Lethal Soufflé—he did have training. “What would you give someone who likes to play the piano?” “A piano.” “Simon.” “A really huge metronome that could also double as a weapon?” Clary sighed, exasperated. “Sheet music. Rachmaninoff is tough stuff, but he likes a challenge.” “Now you’re talking. I’m going to see if there’s a music store around here.” Clary, done with her hot chocolate, tossed the cup into a nearby trash can and pulled her phone out. “What about you? What are you giving Isabelle?” “I have absolutely no idea,” Simon said. They had started heading toward the avenue, where a steady stream of pedestrians gawking at the windows clogged the streets. “Oh, come on. Isabelle’s easy.” “That’s my girlfriend you’re talking about.” Simon’s brows drew together. “I think. I’m not sure. We haven’t discussed it. The relationship, I mean.” “You really have to DTR, Simon.” “What?” “Define the relationship. What it is, where it’s going. Are you boyfriend and girlfriend, just having fun, ‘it’s complicated,’ or what? When’s she going to tell her parents? Are you allowed to see other people?” Simon blanched. “What? Seriously?” “Seriously. In the meantime—perfume!” Clary grabbed Simon by the back of his coat and hauled him into a cosmetics store that had once been a bank. It was massive on the inside, with rows of gleaming bottles everywhere. “And something unusual,” she said, heading for the fragrance area. “Isabelle isn’t going to want to smell like everyone else. She’s going to want to smell like figs, or vetiver, or—” “Figs? Figs have a smell?” Simon looked horrified; Clary was about to laugh at him when her phone buzzed. It was her mother. where are you? It’s an emergency.

Most people in politics draw energy from backslapping and shaking hands and all that. I draw energy from discussing ideas.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

When people discuss his plays, he says that he feels like he's standing at customs watching an official ransack his luggage. He cheerfully declares responsibility for a play about two people, and suddenly the officer is finding all manner of exotic contraband like the nature of God and identity, and while he can't deny that they're there, he can't for the life of him remember putting them there. In the end, a play is not the product of an idea; an idea is the product of a play.

How often have the greatest thoughts and ideas come to light during conversations with the family over the evening dinner?

[Doubt] is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men who made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas bought in - a trial-and-error system. This method was a result of the fact that science was already showing itself to be a successful venture at the end of the eighteenth century. Even then it was clear to socially minded people that the openness of possibilities was an opportunity, and that doubt and discussion were essential to progress into the unknown. If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar...doubt is not to be feared, but welcomed and discussed.

Before i launch into a discussion of what a nerd is and where the idea of nerds comes from, I'd like to diclose that when i was eleven, I had a rich fantasy life in which I carried a glowing staff.

believe ideas can be dangerous, even popular ideas held by millions, and I furthermore believe we ought to be able to discuss such ideas freely. Unfortunately, there is a growing mob mentality even in the United States that allows unpopular ideas to be shouted down and the people voicing them to be accused of closed-mindedness and bigotry.

Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I'll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political." It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they 'felt', not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and "specificities." This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance. Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighbourhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn't change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that "humanity" (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way.

I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.

Whatever it was that people experience in Jesus has today come to be identified with medieval doctrines based on premodern assumptions that are no longer believable. That identification means that serious theological discussion seems to accomplish little more than to erect a division between the shouters and the disinterested. Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me neither option is worth pursuing. Yet even understanding these things, I am still attracted to this Jesus and I will pursue him both relentlessly and passionately. I will not surrender the truth I believe I find in him either to those who seek to defend the indefensible or to those who want to be freed finally from premodern ideas that no longer make any sense.

Stop the discussion for a moment, and institute this rule: ‘Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction.’” I have found this technique very useful, in my private life and in my practice. I routinely summarize what people have said to me, and ask them if I have understood properly.

Success depends on psychological safety. At Google, members of teams with high levels of psychological safety were less likely to leave their jobs, brought in more revenue, and were rated effective twice as often by executives. MIT researchers who studied team performance came to the same conclusion: simply grouping smart people together doesn’t guarantee a smart team. Online and off, the best teams discuss ideas frequently, do not let one person dominate the conversation, and are sensitive to one another’s feelings.

So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.

Great minds,” Eleanor Roosevelt said, “discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” How big is your mind?

If I could wave a magic wand and eliminate one term from the lexicon of racism discussion, it would be “reverse-racism”. It’s the go-to of every clueless person who can’t be bothered to take any time to understand anything about history or context. Every time I hear it, my faith in humanity diminishes. Use of that term is the easiest way to tell that someone has no idea what racism actually is. These are the same people who will, in response to a POC’s complex and nuanced understanding of racism, quote the dictionary definition to us. They can’t fathom that we know more about our own experiences than the dictionary. ‘Reverse-racism’ is not a thing. Tell your friends.

The truth is that wherever you go, people want ideas, want language, want discussion, want space to share and to talk. The Web is great but there is nothing better than people in a room together. I used to be a bit dubious about all these literary festivals happening all the time, but this last visit to Sydney has convinced me of how important, and necessary they are. There is a collective hunger for real things – a kind of self-administered antidote to consumerism and spin. Yes, people spend money, buy books, but it is not about redundant marketing or pointless shopping; it is about really choosing instead of being fed the lie of choice.

great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. And life’s too short to worry about what other people do or don’t do. Tend your own backyard, not theirs, because yours is the one you have to live in.

Whom to Invite to Your Table As you bring people to your table to share ideas, be selective about whom you pick. Choose people who Understand the value of questions Desire the success of others Add value to others’ thoughts Are not threatened by others’ strengths Can emotionally handle quick changes in the conversation Understand their place of value at the table Bring out the best thinking in the people around them Have experienced success in the area under discussion Leave the table with a “we” attitude, not a “me” attitude

people in politics draw energy from backslapping and shaking hands and all that,” he has said. “I draw energy from discussing ideas.

I think it would be extremely helpful if people focused on the ideas being discussed here, rather than on calling you names—which is an easy way to ignore your ideas.

NINA Your life is beautiful. TRIGORIN I see nothing especially lovely about it. [He looks at his watch] Excuse me, I must go at once, and begin writing again. I am in a hurry. [He laughs] You have stepped on my pet corn, as they say, and I am getting excited, and a little cross. Let us discuss this bright and beautiful life of mine, though. [After a few moments' thought] Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man: he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth--I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can't help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that? Oh, it is a wild life! Even now, thrilled as I am by talking to you, I do not forget for an instant that an unfinished story is awaiting me. My eye falls on that cloud there, which has the shape of a grand piano; I instantly make a mental note that I must remember to mention in my story a cloud floating by that looked like a grand piano. I smell heliotrope; I mutter to myself: a sickly smell, the colour worn by widows; I must remember that in writing my next description of a summer evening. I catch an idea in every sentence of yours or of my own, and hasten to lock all these treasures in my literary store-room, thinking that some day they may be useful to me. As soon as I stop working I rush off to the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there, but no! Some new subject for a story is sure to come rolling through my brain like an iron cannonball. I hear my desk calling, and have to go back to it and begin to write, write, write, once more. And so it goes for everlasting. I cannot escape myself, though I feel that I am consuming my life. To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from their stems, and trample the roots that bore them under foot. Am I not a madman? Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally diseased? Yet it is always the same, same old story, till I begin to think that all this praise and admiration must be a deception, that I am being hoodwinked because they know I am crazy, and I sometimes tremble lest I should be grabbed from behind and whisked off to a lunatic asylum. The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me by my writing. A young author, especially if at first he does not make a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world. His nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking; he is irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye, like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone. I did not know my readers, but for some reason I imagined they were distrustful and unfriendly; I was mortally afraid of the public, and when my first play appeared, it seemed to me as if all the dark eyes in the audience were looking at it with enmity, and all the blue ones with cold indifference. Oh, how terrible it was! What agony!

If anyone imagines that scientists are dispassionate and impartial people, discussing theories and ideas unemotionally in the cool clear light of reason, they have been seriously misled.

To avoid beautiful thoughts turning into suffering, she developed a method: when something positive to do with Ralf Hart came into her head - and this could be the fire and the wine, an idea she would like to discuss with him, or simply the pleasurable longing involved in wanting to know when he would come back - Maria would stop what she was doing, smile up at the sky and give thanks for being alive and to be expecting nothing from the man she loved. On the other hand, if her heart began to complain about his absence or about things she shouldn't have said while they were together, she would say to herself: 'Oh, so you want to think about that, do you? All right, then, you do what you like, while I get on with more important things.' She would continue to read or, if she was out, she would focus her attention on everything around her: colours, people, sounds - especially sounds, the sound of her own footsteps, of the pages turning, of cars, of fragments of conversations, and the unfortunate thought would eventually go away.

Our youth must always be free, discussing and exchanging ideas, concerned with what is happening throughout the entire world, open to using technology coming from any part of the world; wel­coming whatever the world might offer us. And you must always be sensitive to the struggle, the sufferings, and the hopes of oppressed peoples everywhere. This is how we will build our future.

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote movingly about having her own equivalent of a Bat Cave, but in the end, she found consolation by telling herself, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” I agreed with this, but I still couldn’t get the small things or people out of my head. EVENTS IN MY PERSONAL LIFE required me to understand better where my “bats” were coming from.

Most people think they need MORE to succeed; more money, more power, more time, more friends, more fame, more ideas, more prayers, more knowledge. They have never considered that less is actually sufficient.

If we are to discuss the idea of God and be restricted to rational arguments, then it is probably useful to know what we are talking about when we say “God.” This turns out not to be easy. The Romans called the Christians atheists. Why? Well, the Christians had a god of sorts, but it wasn’t a real god. They didn’t believe in the divinity of apotheosized emperors or Olympian gods. They had a peculiar, different kind of god. So it was very easy to call people who believed in a different kind of god atheists. And that general sense that an atheist is anybody who doesn’t believe exactly as I do prevails in our own time.

People won’t see you as just another woman any more, but as a white woman who hangs with brownies, and you’ll lose a bit of your privilege, you should still check it, though, have you heard the expression, check your privilege, babe? Courtney replied that seeing as Yazz is the daughter of a professor and a very well-known theatre director, she’s hardly underprivileged herself, whereas she, Courtney, comes from a really poor community where it’s normal to be working in a factory at sixteen and have your first child as a single mother at seventeen, and that her father’s farm is effectively owned by the bank Yes but I’m black, Courts, which makes me more oppressed than anyone who isn’t, except Waris who is the most oppressed of all of them (although don’t tell her that) In five categories, black, Muslim, female, poor, hijab bed She’s the only one Yazz can’t tell to check her privilege Courtney replied that Roxane Gay warned against the idea of playing ‘privilege Olympics’ and wrote in Bad Feminist that privilege is relative and contextual, and I agree, Yazz, I mean, where does it all end? Is Obama less privileged than a white hillbilly growing up in a trailer park with a junkie single mother and a jailbird father? Is a severely disabled person more privileged than a Syrian asylum-seeker who’s been tortured? Roxane argues that we have to find a new discourse for discussing inequality Yazz doesn’t know what to say, when did Court read Roxane Gay - who’s amaaaazing? Was this a student outwitting the master moment? #whitegirltrumpsblackgirl

Even on social and cultural matters Muhammad liked to engage with people and hear views, routinely publicly praising the view of the person who initiated the discussion or whose opinion eventually prevailed, even if it had differed from his own. He delighted in good ideas, and made sure everyone knew who had advanced them, without claiming them as his own. He believed that credit should go to whom it was due.

In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident. As one who speaks on religion, I constantly hear how cruel and aggressive it has been, a view that, eerily, is expressed in the same way almost every time: “Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history.” I have heard this sentence recited like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics. It is an odd remark. Obviously the two world wars were not fought on account of religion. When they discuss the reasons people go to war, military historians acknowledge that many interrelated social, material, and ideological factors are involved, one of the chief being competition for scarce resources. Experts on political violence or terrorism also insist that people commit atrocities for a complex range of reasons.3 Yet so indelible is the aggressive image of religious faith in our secular consciousness that we routinely load the violent sins of the twentieth century onto the back of “religion” and drive it out into the political wilderness.

Dear Jeff, I happened to see the Channel 7 TV program "Hooray for Hollywood" tonight with the segment on Blade Runner. (Well, to be honest, I didn't happen to see it; someone tipped me off that Blade Runner was going to be a part of the show, and to be sure to watch.) Jeff, after looking—and especially after listening to Harrison Ford discuss the film—I came to the conclusion that this indeed is not science fiction; it is not fantasy; it is exactly what Harrison said: futurism. The impact of Blade Runner is simply going to be overwhelming, both on the public and on creative people—and, I believe, on science fiction as a field. Since I have been writing and selling science fiction works for thirty years, this is a matter of some importance to me. In all candor I must say that our field has gradually and steadily been deteriorating for the last few years. Nothing that we have done, individually or collectively, matches Blade Runner. This is not escapism; it is super realism, so gritty and detailed and authentic and goddam convincing that, well, after the segment I found my normal present-day "reality" pallid by comparison. What I am saying is that all of you collectively may have created a unique new form of graphic, artistic expression, never before seen. And, I think, Blade Runner is going to revolutionize our conceptions of what science fiction is and, more, can be. Let me sum it up this way. Science fiction has slowly and ineluctably settled into a monotonous death: it has become inbred, derivative, stale. Suddenly you people have come in, some of the greatest talents currently in existence, and now we have a new life, a new start. As for my own role in the Blade Runner project, I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by Blade Runner. Thank you...and it is going to be one hell of a commercial success. It will prove invincible. Cordially, Philip K. Dick

In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice's sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual "living" characters - I recalled this was a love story - and to leave the world of ideas behind. Here we were, two people lying in bed, Eunice's worried head propped on my collarbone, and I wanted us to feel something in common. I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn't that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?

Rape. It brings with it connotations, assumptions, a whole steamer trunk full of other people's ideas of it, because other people only know it as a word. A concept that's discussed, argued, demonized. If you actually know what it is, if you live and experience it and know what it is beyond a word, you have to carry that word with you. You're now "rape victim", "rape survivor." Your identity is attached permanently to a word you hate. I'm also a murder victim, but murder carries with it what it is. People don't debate what defines murder. Politicians don't argue the body's ability to fight off being killed. There's no talk of a "murder culture." No one says that you asked for murder. What you wear doesn't excuse being killed.

Regardless of who leads it, the professional-class liberalism I have been describing in these pages seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program. There have been many other virtue-objects over the years: people and ideas whose surplus goodness could be extracted for deployment elsewhere. The great virtue-rush of the 1990s, for example, was focused on children, then thought to be the last word in overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness. Who could be against kids? No one, of course, and so the race was on to justify whatever your program happened to be in their name. In the course of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, It Takes a Village, the favorite rationale of the day—think of the children!—was deployed to explain her husband’s crime bill as well as more directly child-related causes like charter schools. You can find dozens of examples of this kind of liberal-class virtue-quest if you try, but instead of listing them, let me go straight to the point: This is not politics. It’s an imitation of politics. It feels political, yes: it’s highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with, but ultimately it’s a diversion, a way of putting across a policy program while avoiding any sincere discussion of the policies in question. The virtue-quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover you’ve got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a prison spree.

Peter, why do I get the idea that you are thinking of this as a golden opportunity for Peter Wiggin?” “For both of us, Val.” “Peter, you’re twelve years old. I’m ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.” “But we don’t think like other children, do we, Val? We don’t talk like other children. And above all, we don’t write like other children.” “For a discussion that began with death threats, Peter, we’ve strayed from the topic, I think.

We love talking with someone who is interested in pealing back psychological and emotional layers, both ours and theirs if we trust them enough. Even issues that tend to deeply polarize people are open for discussion with an INFJ. While we will have strong opinions on somethings, most of the time we just want to talk about different ideas.

Effective altruists do things like the following: •Living modestly and donating a large part of their income—often much more than the traditional tenth, or tithe—to the most effective charities; •Researching and discussing with others which charities are the most effective or drawing on research done by other independent evaluators; •Choosing the career in which they can earn most, not in order to be able to live affluently but so that they can do more good; •Talking to others, in person or online, about giving, so that the idea of effective altruism will spread; •Giving part of their body—blood, bone marrow, or even a kidney—to a stranger. In the following chapters, we will meet people who have done these things.

When The Matrix debuted in 1999, it was a huge box-office success. It was also well received by critics, most of whom focused on one of two qualities—the technological (it mainstreamed the digital technique of three-dimensional “bullet time,” where the on-screen action would freeze while the camera continued to revolve around the participants) or the philosophical (it served as a trippy entry point for the notion that we already live in a simulated world, directly quoting philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 reality-rejecting book Simulacra and Simulation). If you talk about The Matrix right now, these are still the two things you likely discuss. But what will still be interesting about this film once the technology becomes ancient and the philosophy becomes standard? I suspect it might be this: The Matrix was written and directed by “the Wachowski siblings.” In 1999, this designation meant two brothers; as I write today, it means two sisters. In the years following the release of The Matrix, the older Wachowski (Larry, now Lana) completed her transition from male to female. The younger Wachowski (Andy, now Lilly) publicly announced her transition in the spring of 2016. These events occurred during a period when the social view of transgender issues radically evolved, more rapidly than any other component of modern society. In 1999, it was almost impossible to find any example of a trans person within any realm of popular culture; by 2014, a TV series devoted exclusively to the notion won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series. In the fifteen-year window from 1999 to 2014, no aspect of interpersonal civilization changed more, to the point where Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner attracted more Twitter followers than the president (and the importance of this shift will amplify as the decades pass—soon, the notion of a transgender US president will not seem remotely implausible). So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix: In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning. The idea of a character choosing between swallowing a blue pill that allows him to remain a false placeholder and a red pill that forces him to confront who he truly is becomes a much different metaphor. Considered from this speculative vantage point, The Matrix may seem like a breakthrough of a far different kind. It would feel more reflective than entertaining, which is precisely why certain things get remembered while certain others get lost.

2-Make eye contact. When someone is speaking, keep your eyes on him or her at all times. If someone makes a comment, turn and face that person. 3-During discussions, respect other students’ comments, opinions, and ideas. When possible, make statements like, “I agree with John, and I also feel that…” or “I disagree with Sarah. She made a good point I feel that…” or “I think Victor made an excellent observation, and it made me realize…” 4-If you win or do well at something, do not brag. If you lose, do not show anger. Instead, say something like, “I really enjoyed the competition, and I look forward to playing you again,” or “good game,” or don’t say anything at all. To show anger or sarcasm, such as “I wasn’t playing hard anyway” or “You really aren’t that good,” shows weakness. 5-“When you cough or sneeze or burp, it is appropriate to turn your head away from others and cover your mouth with the full part of your hand. Using a fist is not acceptable. Afterward, you should say, “Excuse me.” 6- “Do not smack your lips, tsk, roll your eyes, or show disrespect with gestures.” 7-“Always say thank you when I give you something. 8-“Surprise others by performing random acts of kindness. Go our of your way to do something surprisingly kind and generous for someone at least once a month.” 9-“You will make every effort to be as organized as possible.” 10-"Quickly learn the name of other teachers in the school and greet them by saying things like, "Good morning Mrs. Graham," or "Good afternoon Ms. Ortiz. 11-"When we go on field trips, we will meet different people. When I introduce you to people, make sure that you remember their names. Then, when we are leaving, make sure to shake their hands and thank them, mentioning their names as you do so." 12-“If you approach a door and someone is following you, hold the door. If the door opens by pulling, pull it open, stand to the side, and allow the other person 13-to pass through it first, then you can walk through. If the door opens by pushing, hold the door open after you push through." "Be positive and enjoy life. Some things just aren't worth getting upset over. Keep everything in perspective and focus on the good in your life.

For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a ‘misfiring of something useful’, it is a kind if virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive. Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by d’Holbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this “scientism” have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other “new atheists” – Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist – religion is the cause of the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and “poisons everything.” They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness. But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution. Everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that science was not competent to decide whether God did or did not exist, because it could only work with natural explanations. Gould had no religious axe to grind; he described himself as an atheistically inclined agnostic, but pointed out that Darwin himself had denied he was an atheist and that other eminent Darwinians - Asa Gray, Charles D. Walcott, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky - had been either practicing Christians or agnostics. Atheism did not, therefore, seem to be a necessary consequence of accepting evolutionary theory, and Darwinians who held forth dogmatically on the subject were stepping beyond the limitations that were proper to science.

Thinking back now, I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves—about who we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside—but hadn’t yet understood what any of it meant. I’m sure somewhere in your childhood, you too had an experience like ours that day; similar if not in the actual details, then inside, in the feelings. Because it doesn’t really matter how well your guardians try to prepare you: all the talksvideos, discussions, warnings, none of that can really bring it home. Not when you’re eight years old, and you’re all together in a place like Hailsham; when you’ve got guardians like the ones we had; when the gardeners and the delivery men joke and laugh with you and call you “sweetheart.”    All the same, some of it must go in somewhere. It must go in, because by the time a moment like that comes along, there’s a part of you that’s been waiting. Maybe from as early as when you’re five or six, there’s been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: “One day, maybe not so long from now, you’ll get to know how it feels.” So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you—of how you were brought into this world and why—and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment. It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.

Rape. It brings with it connotations, assumptions, a whole steamer trunk full of other people's ideas of it, because other people only know it as a word. A concept that's discussed, argued, demonized. If you actually know what it is, if you live it and experience it and know what it is beyond a word, you have to carry that word with you. You're now 'rape victim', 'rape survivor'. Your identity is attached permanently to a word you hate.

In 1995, psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg coined the term internet addiction disorder. He wrote a satirical essay about “people abandoning their family obligations to sit gazing into their computer monitor as they surfed the Internet.” Intending to parody society’s obsession with pathologizing everyday behaviors, he inadvertently advanced the idea. Goldberg responded critically when academics began discussing internet addiction as a legitimate disorder: “I don’t think Internet addiction disorder exists any more than tennis addictive disorder, bingo addictive disorder, and TV addictive disorder exist. People can overdo anything. To call it a disorder is an error.

Overcome Shyness Here are some tips for overcoming shyness: • Work on your listening and communications skills. • Learn more about reading nonverbal communication, such as body language and facial expressions. • Let others take the lead in conversations, then jump in after the discussion has begun. • Observe others in environments that elicit shyness in you. • Learn to smile. It’s an ice-breaker. • Learn to ask questions. That starts conversations.

Recognizing that many forms of violence are motivated by a range of intentions and hostilities, the terms racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and homophobic and transphobic violence are used here in an effort to more accurately describe the phenomena under discussion: the terms bias or hate crime suggest that such violence is motivated entirely by prejudice (presumably irrational) and not informed by historical patterns of dominance and subordination that produce tangible political, social, and economic benefits for majority groups. Regardless of the terminology used or its targets, there is no question that such violence is abhorrent, structural, and pervasive. Where

Do not keep talking to the Devil’s Advocate Guy or Gal aka DAG. I’m not against playing Devil’s Advocate, because a lot can be gleaned from it. However, when it comes to topics such as homophobia, sexism and racism, a particular kind of DAG tends to rear its ugly head. This person isn’t interested in having a fruitful discussion that will enrich everyone involved, nor do they have any intention to have an open and frank discussion about a difficult subject. This person is simply a shit-starter. Someone who is bored and wants to derail a conversation or has some inner rage that they are dying to unleash. During my days of blogging about race, I have encountered this person often. They start out as seemingly run-of-the-mill people, perhaps sharing slightly bias statistics but asking enough questions to seem like they are open to ideas. Eventually though, DAG will lose their cool, and reveal themselves for who they are.

Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religious association, because it only produces disputes, and, to conduct himself well, man needs not problems but beliefs. His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason is awakened, it should find all his opinions ready-made, at least all those relating to his conduct. Nothing is so important to him as prejudices, Let us not take this word in a bad sense. It does not necessarily mean false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, opinions adopted before any examination. Now these sorts of opinions are man’s greatest need, the true elements of his happiness, and the Palladium of empires. Without them, there can be neither worship, nor morality, nor government. There must be a state religion just as there is a state policy; or, rather, religious and political dogmas must be merged and mingled together to form a complete common or national reason strong enough to repress the aberrations of individual reason, which of its nature is the mortal enemy of any association whatever because it produces only divergent opinions. All known nations have been happy and powerful to the extent that they have more faithfully obeyed this national reason, which is nothing other than the annihilation of individual dogmas and the absolute and general reign of national dogmas, that is to say, of useful prejudices. Let each man call upon his individual reason in the matter of religion, and immediately you will see the birth of an anarchy of belief or the annihilation of religious sovereignty. Likewise, if each man makes himself judge of the principles of government, you will at once see the birth of civil anarchy or the annihilation of political sovereignty. Government is a true religion: it has its dogmas, its mysteries, and its ministers. To annihilate it or submit it to the discussion of each individual is the same thing; it lives only through national reason, that is to say through political faith, which is a creed. Man’s first need is that his nascent reason be curbed under this double yoke, that it be abased and lose itself in the national reason, so that it changes its individual existence into another common existence, just as a river that flows into the ocean always continues to exist in the mass of water, but without a name and without a distinct reality.

Wherever and whenever a physical law can be invoked in the discussion, the debate is guaranteed to be brief:No, your idea for a perpetual motion machine will never work; it violates well-tested laws of thermodynamics. No, you can't build a time machine that will enable you to go back and kill your mother before you were born - it violates causality laws. And without violating momentum laws, you cannot spontaneously levitate and hover above the ground, whether or not you are seated in the lotus position.

However, there have always been “society pedagogues”, less outstanding but more numerous, who have become fascinated by their own great ideas, which might, sometimes, even be true, but are more often constricted or contain the taint of some hidden pathological thought processes. Such people have always striven to impose pedagogical methods which would impoverish and deform the development of individuals’ and societies’ psychological world view; they inflict permanent harm upon societies, depriving them of universally useful values. By claiming to act in the name of a more valuable idea, such pedagogues actually undermine the values they claim and open the door for destructive ideologies. At the same time, as we have already mentioned, each society contains a small but active minority of persons with various deviant worldviews, especially in the areas treated above, which are caused either by psychological anomalies, to be discussed below, or by the long-term influence of such anomalies upon their psyches, especially during childhood. Such people later exert a pernicious influence upon the formative process of the psychological world view in society, whether by direct activity or by means of written or other transmission, especially if they engage in the service of some ideology or other.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto. The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out. A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.” Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag. This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done. After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber? What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here. It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness. “What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?” They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.

I have a great idea, Gregori," she told him wickedly. "Let's take a commercial flight." "What?" He was staring at her mouth. She had a great mouth.A perfect mouth. A sexy mouth. Mon Dieu, he wanted her mouth. "Doesn't a commercial flight sound fun? We could take a night flight, mingle with people.It might even throw off the reporter." "Nothing is going to throw off the reporter.He is tenacious.And there will be no commercial flight.There will be no discussion on this,either. None. If we go to New Orleans,and I am not saying we will, commercial flights are out." "Oh,Gregori,I was only kidding. Naturally we'll do things your way," she added demurely. He shook his head,exasperated at himself. Of course she had been teasing. He wasn't used to anyone treating him as Savannah did. Outrageous woman. "I need to go out and talk with Wade Carter." She stood up instantly, expectantly, her blue eyes wide in anticipation. "Tell me what you want me to do. I can probably manage mist.I'm stronger now,using your blood.I can back you up." Amusement warmed the cool silver of his eyes. "Mon Dieu, Savannah, you sound like a cop movie.

They came. The cobbler's wife made cookies. She handed one to everyone, whether they wanted it or not. People shared the books they had received. They listened to others share their own books. And they found themselves remembering the Library. Even the people who were too young to remember the Library found themselves remembering. They remembered that a story, in the mind of the reader, is like music. And discussing stories among other minds and other hearts feels like a symphony. They remembered how ideas make their own light, and how words have their own mass and weight and being.

We discussed the Curse of Knowledge in the introduction—the difficulty of remembering what it was like not to know something. Accuracy to the point of uselessness is a symptom of the Curse of Knowledge. To a CEO, “maximizing shareholder value” may be an immensely useful rule of behavior. To a flight attendant, it’s not. To a physicist, probability clouds are fascinating phenomena. To a child, they are incomprehensible. People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.

Once I did find my voice, I saw that it was necessary to speak up in order to be as effective as possible in my role. Yet, many of the women around me still fell into the trap of being seen as ineffective or weak because they never took a vocal stand. No matter how brilliant and impressive these women may have been in one-on-one discussions, not speaking up in meetings hurt their chances of succeeding professionally. When women don't share their ideas with a large number of people, their contributions are easily over looked , and it's difficult for them to be seen as leaders. People naturally want to follow people who take a stand and voice their opinions with confidence.

Almost on crossing the Ohio line it seemed to me that people were more open and more outgoing. The waitress in a roadside stand said good morning before I had a chance to, discussed breakfast as though she liked the idea, spoke with enthusiasm about the weather, sometimes even offered some information about herself without my delving. Strangers talked freely to one another without caution. I had forgotten how rich and beautiful is the countryside - the deep topsoil, the wealth of great trees, the lake country of Michigan handsome as a well-made woman, and dressed and jeweled. It seemed to me that the earth was generous and outgoing here in the heartland, and perhaps the people took a cue from it.

In these pages, it is my intention to make many people—not only Muslims but also Western apologists for Islam—uncomfortable. I am not going to do this by drawing cartoons. Rather, I intend to challenge centuries of religious orthodoxy with ideas and arguments that I am certain will be denounced as heretical. My argument is for nothing less than a Muslim Reformation. Without fundamental alterations to some of Islam’s core concepts, I believe, we shall not solve the burning and increasingly global problem of political violence carried out in the name of religion. I intend to speak freely, in the hope that others will debate equally freely with me on what needs to change in Islamic doctrine, rather than seeking to stifle discussion.

When people in churches today discuss Paul and his letters, they often think only of the man of ideas who dealt with lofty and difficult concepts, implying a world of libraries, seminar rooms, or at least the minister’s study for quiet sermon preparation. We easily forget that the author of these letters spent most of his waking hours with his sleeves rolled up, doing hard physical work in a hot climate, and that perhaps two-thirds of the conversations he had with people about Jesus and the gospel were conducted not in a place of worship or study, not even in a private home, but in a small, cramped workshop. Saul had his feet on the ground, and his hands were hardened with labor. But his head still buzzed with scripture and the news about Jesus.

The truth is that we never know from whom we originally get the ideas and beliefs that shape us, those that make a deep impression on us and which we adopt as a guide, those we retain without intending to and make our own. From a great-grandparent, a grandparent, a parent, not necessarily ours? From a distant teacher we never knew and who taught the one we did know? From a mother, from a nursemaid who looked after her as a child? From the ex-husband of our beloved, from a ġe-bryd-guma we never met? From a few books we never read and from an age through which we never lived? Yes, it's incredible how much people say, how much they discuss and recount and write down, this is a wearisome world of ceaseless transmission, and thus we are born with the work already far advanced but condemned to the knowledge that nothing is ever entirely finished, and thus we carry-like a faint booming in our heads-the exhausting accumulated voices of the countless centuries, believing naively that some of those thoughts and stories are new, never before heard or read, but how could that be, when ever since they acquired the gift of speech people have never stopped endlessly telling stories and, sooner or later, everything is told, the interesting and the trivial, the private and the public, the intimate and the superfluous, what should remain hidden and what will one day inevitably be broadcast, sorrows and joys and resentments, certainties and conjectures, the imagined and the factual, persuasions and suspicions, grievances and flattery and plans for revenge, great feats and humiliations, what fills us with pride and what shames us utterly, what appeared to be a secret and what begged to remain so, the normal and the unconfessable and the horrific and the obvious, the substantial-falling in love-and the insignificant-falling in love. Without even giving it a second thought, we go and we tell.

The idea that depression is caused by low serotonin levels in the brain is now deeply embedded in popular folklore, and people with no neuroscience background at all will routinely incorporate phrases about it into everyday discussion of their mood, just to keep their serotonin levels up. Many people also don't know that this is how antidepressant drugs work: depression is caused by low serotonin, so you need drugs which raise the serotonin levels in your brain, like SSRI antidepressants, which are 'selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors'. But this theory is wrong. The 'serotonin hypothesis' for depression, as it is known, was always shaky, and the evidence now is hugely contradictory ... But in popular culture the depression-serotonin theory is proven and absolute, because it has been marketed so effectively.

The fixed- and growth-mindset groups started with the same ability, but as time went on the growth-mindset groups clearly outperformed the fixed-mindset ones. And this difference became ever larger the longer the groups worked. Once again, those with the growth mindset profited from their mistakes and feedback far more than the fixed-mindset people. But what was even more interesting was how the groups functioned. The members of the growth-mindset groups were much more likely to state their honest opinions and openly express their disagreements as they communicated about their management decisions. Everyone was part of the learning process. For the fixed-mindset groups—with their concern about who was smart or dumb or their anxiety about disapproval for their ideas—that open, productive discussion did not happen. Instead, it was more like groupthink.

Brown v. Board of Education, 1954: I’m sure you’ve heard of this one. If you live in the South and go to a diverse school, this is why. This was the case that said racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The results: The schools began to mix. What’s really interesting about this case, though, something rarely discussed, is that it’s actually a pretty racist idea. I mean, what it basically suggests is that Black kids need a fair shot, and a fair shot is in White schools. I mean, why weren’t there any White kids integrating into Black schools? The assumption was that Black kids weren’t as intelligent because they weren’t around White kids, as if the mere presence of White kids would make Black kids better. Not. True. A good school is a good school, whether there are White people there or not. Oh, and of course people were pissed about this.

We’re in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized--“Don’t ask any questions!” "No discussion!" “Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!” And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There’s nothing interesting being written--in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions. So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton--aside from their initials! Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile--they're engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power--and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy. Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, "Sexual Personae"--which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! It’s too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life. Everything is not black and white, for heaven's sake! We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood. That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he went out and did these awful things to assert his own independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert. He needed them to be dead! Cosby is actually a necrophiliac--a style that was popular in the late Victorian period in the nineteenth-century. It's hard to believe now, but you had men digging up corpses from graveyards, stealing the bodies, hiding them under their beds, and then having sex with them. So that’s exactly what’s happening here: to give a woman a drug, to make her inert, to make her dead is the man saying that I need her to be dead for me to function. She’s too powerful for me as a living woman. And this is what is also going on in those barbaric fraternity orgies, where women are sexually assaulted while lying unconscious. And women don’t understand this! They have no idea why any men would find it arousing to have sex with a young woman who’s passed out at a fraternity house. But it’s necrophilia--this fear and envy of a woman’s power. And it’s the same thing with Bill Clinton: to find the answer, you have to look at his relationship to his flamboyant mother. He felt smothered by her in some way. But let's be clear--I’m not trying to blame the mother! What I’m saying is that male sexuality is extremely complicated, and the formation of male identity is very tentative and sensitive--but feminist rhetoric doesn’t allow for it. This is why women are having so much trouble dealing with men in the feminist era. They don’t understand men, and they demonize men.

It is the homogeneity of his mind which makes him dull, and which makes him mad. It is only because we see the irony of his idea that we think him even amusing; it is only because he does not see the irony of his idea that he is put in Hanwell at all. In short, oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life. This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure for ever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel of to-day discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world.

It caused my opposition to any ideologies—Marxist, Fascist, National Socialist, what you will—because they were incompatible with science in the rational sense of critical analysis. I again refer back to Max Weber as the great thinker who brought that problem to my attention; and I still maintain today that nobody who is an ideologist can be a competent social scientist." It is extremely difficult to engage in a critical discussion of National Socialist ideas, as I found out when I gave my semester course on “Hitler and the Germans” in 1964 in Munich, because in National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work. A person on this level—which I characterize as the vulgarian and, so far as it becomes socially relevant, as the ochlocratic level—again, is not admissible to the position of a partner in discussion but can only be an object of scientific research. Because of this attitude I have been called every conceivable name by partisans of this or that ideology. I have in my files documents labeling me a Communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old liberal, a new liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian—not to forget that I was supposedly strongly influenced by Huey Long. This list I consider of some importance, because the various characterizations of course always name the pet bête noire of the respective critic and give, therefore, a very good picture of the intellectual destruction and corruption that characterize the contemporary academic world. Understandably, I have never answered such criticisms; critics of this type can become objects of inquiry, but they cannot be partners in a discussion. Anybody with an informed and reflective mind who lives in the twentieth century since the end of the First World War, as I did, finds himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language—meaning thereby language symbols that pretend to be concepts but in fact are unanalyzed topoi or topics. Moreover, anybody who is exposed to this dominant climate of opinion has to cope with the problem that language is a social phenomenon. He cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion, but he has to make them the object of investigation. There is no community of language with the representatives of the dominant ideologies.

In 2010, the Priesthood quorums and Relief Society used the same manual (Gospel Principles)… Most lessons consist of a few pages of exposition on various themes… studded with scriptural citations and quotations from leaders of the church. These are followed by points of discussion like “Think about what you can do to keep the purpose of the Sabbath in mind as you prepare for the day each week.” Gospel Principles instructs teachers not to substitute outside materials, however interesting they may be. In practice this ensures that a common set of ideas are taught in all Mormon chapels every Sunday. That these ideas are the basic principles of the faith mean that Mormon Sunday schools and other church lessons function quite intentionally as devotional exercises rather than instruction in new concepts. The curriculum encourages teachers to ask questions that encourage catechistic reaffirmation of core beliefs. Further, lessons focus to a great extent on the importance of basic practices like prayer, paying tithing, and reading scripture rather than on doctrinal content… Correlated materials are designed not to promote theological reflection, but to produce Mormons dedicated to living the tenants of their faith.

The conversation swings from the brothers Bush to the war in Iraq to the emerging rights of Muslim women to postfeminism to current cinema—Mexican, American, European (Giorgio goes spasmodically mad over Bu-ñuel), and back to Mexican again—to the relative superiority of shrimp over any other kind of taco to the excellence of Ana’s paella, to Ana’s childhood, then to Jimena’s, to the changing role of motherhood in a postindustrial world, to sculpture, then painting, then poetry, then baseball, then Jimena’s inexplicable (to Pablo) fondness for American football (she’s a Dallas Cowboys fan) over real (to Pablo) fútbol, to his admittedly adolescent passion for the game, to the trials of adolescence itself and revelations over the loss of virginity and why we refer to it as a loss and now Óscar and Tomás, arms over each other’s shoulders, are chanting poetry and then Giorgio picks up a guitar and starts to play and this is the Juárez that Pablo loves, this is the city of his soul—the poetry, the passionate discussions (Ana makes her counterpoints jabbing her cigarette like a foil; Jimena’s words flow like a gentle wave across beach sand, washing away the words before; Giorgio trills a jazz saxophone while Pablo plays bass—they are a jazz combo of argument), the ideas flowing with the wine and beer, the lilting music in a black night, this is the gentle heartbeat of the Mexico that he adores, the laughter, the subtle perfume of desert flowers that grow in alleys alongside garbage, and now everyone is singing— México, está muy contento, Dando gracias a millares… —and this is his life—this is his city, these are his friends, his beloved friends, these people, and if this is all that there is or will be, it is enough for him, his world, his life, his city, his people, his sad beautiful Juárez… —empezaré de Durango, Torreón y Ciudad de

How Should You Listen? Carl Rogers, one of the twentieth century’s great psychotherapists, knew something about listening. He wrote, “The great majority of us cannot listen; we find ourselves compelled to evaluate, because listening is too dangerous. The first requirement is courage, and we do not always have it.”159 He knew that listening could transform people. On that, Rogers commented, “Some of you may be feeling that you listen well to people, and that you have never seen such results. The chances are very great indeed that your listening has not been of the type I have described.” He suggested that his readers conduct a short experiment when they next found themselves in a dispute: “Stop the discussion for a moment, and institute this rule: ‘Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction.’” I have found this technique very useful, in my private life and in my practice. I routinely summarize what people have said to me, and ask them if I have understood properly. Sometimes they accept my summary. Sometimes I am offered a small correction. Now and then I am wrong completely. All of that is good to know.

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.

You must also know clearly what you want out of the situation, and be prepared to clearly articulate your desire. It’s a good idea to tell the person you are confronting exactly what you would like them to do instead of what they have done or currently are doing. You might think, “if they loved me, they would know what to do.” That’s the voice of resentment. Assume ignorance before malevolence. No one has a direct pipeline to your wants and needs—not even you. If you try to determine exactly what you want, you might find that it is more difficult than you think. The person oppressing you is likely no wiser than you, especially about you. Tell them directly what would be preferable, instead, after you have sorted it out. Make your request as small and reasonable as possible—but ensure that its fulfillment would satisfy you. In that manner, you come to the discussion with a solution, instead of just a problem. Agreeable, compassionate, empathic, conflict-averse people (all those traits group together) let people walk on them, and they get bitter. They sacrifice themselves for others, sometimes excessively, and cannot comprehend why that is not reciprocated. Agreeable people are compliant, and this robs them of their independence. The danger associated with this can be amplified by high trait neuroticism. Agreeable people will go along with whoever makes a suggestion, instead of insisting, at least sometimes, on their own way. So, they lose their way, and become indecisive and too easily swayed. If they are, in addition, easily frightened and hurt, they have even less reason to strike out on their own, as doing so exposes them to threat and danger (at least in the short term). That’s the pathway to dependent personality disorder, technically speaking.198 It might be regarded as the polar opposite of antisocial personality disorder, the set of traits characteristic of delinquency in childhood and adolescence and criminality in adulthood. It would be lovely if the opposite of a criminal was a saint—but it’s not the case. The opposite of a criminal is an Oedipal mother, which is its own type of criminal.

In the Middle Ages, marriage was considered a sacrament ordained by God, and God also authorised the father to marry his children according to his wishes and interests. An extramarital affair was accordingly a brazen rebellion against both divine and parental authority. It was a mortal sin, no matter what the lovers felt and thought about it. Today people marry for love, and it is their inner feelings that give value to this bond. Hence, if the very same feelings that once drove you into the arms of one man now drive you into the arms of another, what’s wrong with that? If an extramarital affair provides an outlet for emotional and sexual desires that are not satisfied by your spouse of twenty years, and if your new lover is kind, passionate and sensitive to your needs – why not enjoy it? But wait a minute, you might say. We cannot ignore the feelings of the other concerned parties. The woman and her lover might feel wonderful in each other’s arms, but if their respective spouses find out, everybody will probably feel awful for quite some time. And if it leads to divorce, their children might carry the emotional scars for decades. Even if the affair is never discovered, hiding it involves a lot of tension, and may lead to growing feelings of alienation and resentment. The most interesting discussions in humanist ethics concern situations like extramarital affairs, when human feelings collide. What happens when the same action causes one person to feel good, and another to feel bad? How do we weigh the feelings against each other? Do the good feelings of the two lovers outweigh the bad feelings of their spouses and children? It doesn’t matter what you think about this particular question. It is far more important to understand the kind of arguments both sides deploy. Modern people have differing ideas about extramarital affairs, but no matter what their position is, they tend to justify it in the name of human feelings rather than in the name of holy scriptures and divine commandments. Humanism has taught us that something can be bad only if it causes somebody to feel bad. Murder is wrong not because some god once said, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Rather, murder is wrong because it causes terrible suffering to the victim, to his family members, and to his friends and acquaintances. Theft is wrong not because some ancient text says, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Rather, theft is wrong because when you lose your property, you feel bad about it. And if an action does not cause anyone to feel bad, there can be nothing wrong about it. If the same ancient text says that God commanded us not to make any images of either humans or animals (Exodus 20:4), but I enjoy sculpting such figures, and I don’t harm anyone in the process – then what could possibly be wrong with it? The same logic dominates current debates on homosexuality. If two adult men enjoy having sex with one another, and they don’t harm anyone while doing so, why should it be wrong, and why should we outlaw it? It is a private matter between these two men, and they are free to decide about it according to their inner feelings. In the Middle Ages, if two men confessed to a priest that they were in love with one another, and that they never felt so happy, their good feelings would not have changed the priest’s damning judgement – indeed, their happiness would only have worsened the situation. Today, in contrast, if two men love one another, they are told: ‘If it feels good – do it! Don’t let any priest mess with your mind. Just follow your heart. You know best what’s good for you.

The first dysfunction is an absence of trust among team members. Essentially, this stems from their unwillingness to be vulnerable within the group. Team members who are not genuinely open with one another about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation for trust. This failure to build trust is damaging because it sets the tone for the second dysfunction: fear of conflict. Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate of ideas. Instead, they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments. A lack of healthy conflict is a problem because it ensures the third dysfunction of a team: lack of commitment. Without having aired their opinions in the course of passionate and open debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy in and commit to decisions, though they may feign agreement during meetings. Because of this lack of real commitment and buy-in, team members develop an avoidance of accountability, the fourth dysfunction. Without committing to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that seem counterproductive to the good of the team. Failure to hold one another accountable creates an environment where the fifth dysfunction can thrive. Inattention to results occurs when team members put their individual needs (such as ego, career development, or recognition) or even the needs of their divisions above the collective goals of the team.

We are not doing it for Jagen. We are doing it for our kind.” “We?” Rayna snaps. “What Gift do you have, Grom? Oh, that’s right. You and Nalia get to stay safely behind while me and Galen and Emma drown an entire island.” Oh, heck no. “Um, I’m not killing anyone,” I say, raising my hand. “Not humans, not Syrena.” “It’s a good thing your Gift isn’t deadly then, isn’t it?” Rayna sneers. “I have an idea. You can give the humans their last meal. That would be special, wouldn’t it?” “How would you like to go without eating for a while?” I shoot back. I could use my Gift to send the fish away from her, or I could just bust all her teeth out. Maturity seems to be evaporating into the air. I wonder if her Gift includes pushing all my buttons in rapid-point-five seconds. But then, I know her animosity is really toward Grom, not me. All I’m doing is feeding her anxiety. Galen tucks a tendril of my hair behind my ear. It’s enough to distract me and he knows it. I give him a sour look for interfering, but he grins. “You don’t have to kill anyone, angelfish. In fact, we need your help to save them.” He seems to be telling me something with his eyes, but I’m not picking up on it. I’d love to blame it on the pain meds. “Doesn’t that kind of miss the point?” Rayna says. “Of course not,” Galen says. “Our objective is to rescue our kind, not kill the humans. We can do that without destroying them.” Everyone is all ears, but Galen is not ready to divulge his plan just yet. He stands. “Highness, tell the Archives we will meet with them to discuss our terms.” “Terms?” Grom says. “This isn’t negotiable, Galen. They need us. It’s our duty as Royals.” Galen shrugs. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s entirely negotiable. And we’re not Royals anymore, not until I hear it from their lips.” He turns to Antonis. “And tell them that in view of recent events, the council must come here, on land. There is no reason for us to doubt that this is a trap to recapture us.” Antonis chuckles. I get the feeling that this is all an amusing game to him. But then, old people have earned the right to be amused by everything. And I’m pretty sure he’s the oldest person I know. “Young Prince Galen, I am at your service.” With that, my grandfather leaves. I turn away as he begins to finagle the shorts from his skinny waist on his way down the beach.

So, then...” Petra interjected, caught up for the moment in the story, “nobody knows who was right? “Who was right?” Growland repeated slowly. “How do you mean?” “In the war.” As she tried to articulate her question, she became less sure of it. “You don't know which side was... right?” “Cub,” the big bear explained patiently, “nobody has ever gone to war believing their cause to be wrong!” “Well, sure, I get that. But afterwards... don't people usually... figure out... who was really right?” she finished lamely. “What people?” “I don't know!” Petra said, flinging her arms wide. “Historians, maybe?” Jumphrey snorted and removed his pipe from between his teeth. “Historians are people, and people have opinions and sympathies. I think if you pay attention, you'll find that histories usually demonstrate that the winning side was in the right all along; or else, occasionally, they demonstrate that those who won are despots and tyrants who deserved to be fought against, and still should be. You see? Everyone has a perspective. If you convened a representative post-war council to discuss what started the conflict and who ought to have given way to whom, a new war would break out from their arguments.” Petra felt her spirits slump a little. “But then... how–” “As everyone has always done,” the rabbit answered. “You pray that war does not come. But if it does come, you fight in accordance with your own convictions, or to defend the home or people you love; or you take a vow of pacifism, and follow your conscience some other way, if you are allowed. Whatever the political justification for war is said to be, armies are invariably made up of ordinary people fighting for the most basic of ideas, the simplest of reasons. 'Sides' are largely determined by the happenstance of birth, nothing more.” “That's... tragic,” Petra said, realizing a truth she'd heard before but never really processed. Jumphrey shrugged, and said simply, “All war is.

In 1517, few western Christians worried that Muslims might have a more convincing message to offer than Christianity or that Christian youth might start converting to Islam. The Turks were at the gate, it's true, but they weren't in the living room, and they certainly weren't in the bedroom. The Turks posed a threat to the physical health of Christians, but not to the spiritual health of Christianity. Muslims were in a different boat. Almost from the start, as I've discussed, Islam had offered its political and military successes as an argument for its doctrines and a proof of its revelations. The process began with those iconic early battles at Badr and Uhud, when the outcome of battle was shown to have theological meaning. The miracle of expansion and the linkage of victory with truth continued for hundreds of years. Then came the Mongol holocaust, which forced Muslim theologians to reexamine their assumptions. That process spawned such reforms as Ibn Taymiyah. Vis-a-vis the Mongols, however, the weakness of Muslims was concrete and easy to understand. The Mongols had greater killing power, but they came without an ideology. When the bloodshed wound down and the human hunger for meaning bubbled up, as it always does, they had nothing to offer. In fact, they themselves converted. Islam won in the end, absorbing the Mongols as it has absorbed the Turks before them and the Persians before that. ... The same could not be said of the new overlords. The Europeans came wrapped in certainty about their way of life and peddling their own ideas of ultimate truth. They didn't challenge Islam so much as ignore it, unless they were missionaries, in which case they simply tried to convert the Muslims. If they noticed Islam, they didn't bother to debate it (missionaries are not in the debating business) but only smiled at it as one would at the toys of a child or the quaint relics of a more primitive people. How maddening for the Muslim cognoscenti! And yet, what could Muslims do about it?

Mr. Grayson was just…explaining the workings of the ship.” She attempted to tug her hand from Gray’s grasp, shooting him a pained look when he refused to relinquish his prize. Gray said smoothly, “Actually, we were discussing debts. Miss Turner still owes me her fare, and I-“ “And I told you, you’ll have it today.” Beneath that abomination of a skirt wrapped about his leg, she planted her heel atop his booted toe and transferred all her weight onto it. Firmly. Once again, Gray regretted trading his old, sturdy boots for these foppish monstrosities. Her little pointed heel bit straight through the thin leather. With a tight grimace, Gray released her hand. He’d been about to say, and I have her handkerchief to return. But just for that, he wouldn’t. “Good afternoon, then.” A sweet smile graced her face as she stomped down on his foot again, harder. Then she turned and flounced away. He made an amused face at Jonas. “I think she likes me.” “In my cabin, Gray.” Gray gritted his teeth and followed Joss down the hatch. Whether he liked being Gray’s half brother or not, Joss was damn lucky right now that he was. Gray wouldn’t have suffered that supercilious command for any bond weaker than blood. “You gave me your word, Gray.” “Did I? And what word was that?” Joss tossed his hat on the wood-framed bed and stripped off his greatcoat with agitated movements. “You know damn well what I mean. You said you wouldn’t pursue Miss Turner. Now you’re kissing her hand and making a spectacle in front of the whole ship. Bailey’s already taking bets from the sailors as to how many days it’ll take you to bed her.” “Really?” Gray rubbed the back of his neck. “I hope he’s giving even odds on three. Two, if you’ll send young Davy up the mast again. That got her quite excited.” Joss glared at him. “Need I remind you that this was your idea? You wanted a respectable merchant vessel. I’m trying to command it as such, but that’ll be a bit difficult if you intend to stage a bawdy-house revue on deck every forenoon.” Gray smiled as Joss slung himself into the captain’s chair. “Be careful, Joss. I do believe you nearly made a joke. People might get the idea you have a sense of humor.” “I don’t see anything humorous about this. This isn’t a pleasure cruise around the Mediterranean.

IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern Strategy from the 1960s worked partly because it rode demographic change. In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the white majority in the whole country is down nearly to 60 percent; in other words, America’s racial makeup is now more “Southern” than the Deep South’s was in the 1960s. For a while, the party’s leaders were careful to clear their deck of explicit racism. It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to be concerned about violent crime spiraling upward from the 1960s through the ’80s? We don’t want social welfare programs to encourage cultures of poverty and dependency, do we? Although the dog-whistled resentment of new policies disfavoring or seeming to disfavor white people became more audible, Republican leaders publicly stuck to not-entirely-unreasonable arguments: affirmative action is an imperfect solution; too much multiculturalism might Balkanize America; we shouldn’t let immigrants pour into the U.S. helter-skelter. But in this century, more Republican leaders started cozying up to the ugliest fantasists, unapologetic racists. When Congressman Ron Paul ran for the 2008 GOP nomination, he appeared repeatedly with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was just coining the term “alt-right” for his movement. Senator Rand Paul employed as an aide and wrote a book with a former leader of the League of the South, an organization devoted to a twenty-first-century do-over of Confederate secession. After we elected a black president, more regular whistles joined the kind only dogs can hear. Even thoughtful Ross Douthat, one of the Times’s conservative columnists, admitted to a weakness for the Old South fantasy. During the debate about governments displaying Confederate symbols after nine black people were shot dead by a white supremacist in Charleston, he discussed “the temptation…to regard the Confederate States of America as the political and historical champion of all…attractive Southern distinctives….Even a secession-hating Yankee like myself has felt, at certain moments the pull of that idea, the lure of that fantasy.

Finally, some people tell me that they avoid science fiction because it’s depressing. This is quite understandable if they happened to hit a streak of post-holocaust cautionary tales or a bunch of trendies trying to outwhine each other, or overdosed on sleaze-metal-punk-virtual-noir Capitalist Realism. But the accusation often, I think, reflects some timidity or gloom in the reader’s own mind: a distrust of change, a distrust of the imagination. A lot of people really do get scared and depressed if they have to think about anything they’re not perfectly familiar with; they’re afraid of losing control. If it isn’t about things they know all about already they won’t read it, if it’s a different color they hate it, if it isn’t McDonald’s they won’t eat at it. They don’t want to know that the world existed before they were, is bigger than they are, and will go on without them. They do not like history. They do not like science fiction. May they eat at McDonald’s and be happy in Heaven." Pro: "But what I like in and about science fiction includes these particular virtues: vitality, largeness, and exactness of imagination; playfulness, variety, and strength of metaphor; freedom from conventional literary expectations and mannerism; moral seriousness; wit; pizzazz; and beauty. Let me ride a moment on that last word. The beauty of a story may be intellectual, like the beauty of a mathematical proof or a crystalline structure; it may be aesthetic, the beauty of a well-made work; it may be human, emotional, moral; it is likely to be all three. Yet science fiction critics and reviewers still often treat the story as if it were a mere exposition of ideas, as if the intellectual “message” were all. This reductionism does a serious disservice to the sophisticated and powerful techniques and experiments of much contemporary science fiction. The writers are using language as postmodernists; the critics are decades behind, not even discussing the language, deaf to the implications of sounds, rhythms, recurrences, patterns—as if text were a mere vehicle for ideas, a kind of gelatin coating for the medicine. This is naive. And it totally misses what I love best in the best science fiction, its beauty." "I am certainly not going to talk about the beauty of my own stories. How about if I leave that to the critics and reviewers, and I talk about the ideas? Not the messages, though. There are no messages in these stories. They are not fortune cookies. They are stories.

Early on it is clear that Addie has a rebellious streak, joining the library group and running away to Rockport Lodge. Is Addie right to disobey her parents? Where does she get her courage? 2. Addie’s mother refuses to see Celia’s death as anything but an accident, and Addie comments that “whenever I heard my mother’s version of what happened, I felt sick to my stomach.” Did Celia commit suicide? How might the guilt that Addie feels differ from the guilt her mother feels? 3. When Addie tries on pants for the first time, she feels emotionally as well as physically liberated, and confesses that she would like to go to college (page 108). How does the social significance of clothing and hairstyle differ for Addie, Gussie, and Filomena in the book? 4. Diamant fills her narrative with a number of historical events and figures, from the psychological effects of World War I and the pandemic outbreak of influenza in 1918 to child labor laws to the cultural impact of Betty Friedan. How do real-life people and events affect how we read Addie’s fictional story? 5. Gussie is one of the most forward-thinking characters in the novel; however, despite her law degree she has trouble finding a job as an attorney because “no one would hire a lady lawyer.” What other limitations do Addie and her friends face in the workforce? What limitations do women and minorities face today? 6. After distancing herself from Ernie when he suffers a nervous episode brought on by combat stress, Addie sees a community of war veterans come forward to assist him (page 155). What does the remorse that Addie later feels suggest about the challenges American soldiers face as they reintegrate into society? Do you think soldiers today face similar challenges? 7. Addie notices that the Rockport locals seem related to one another, and the cook Mrs. Morse confides in her sister that, although she is usually suspicious of immigrant boarders, “some of them are nicer than Americans.” How does tolerance of the immigrant population vary between city and town in the novel? For whom might Mrs. Morse reserve the term Americans? 8. Addie is initially drawn to Tessa Thorndike because she is a Boston Brahmin who isn’t afraid to poke fun at her own class on the women’s page of the newspaper. What strengths and weaknesses does Tessa’s character represent for educated women of the time? How does Addie’s description of Tessa bring her reliability into question? 9. Addie’s parents frequently admonish her for being ungrateful, but Addie feels she has earned her freedom to move into a boardinghouse when her parents move to Roxbury, in part because she contributed to the family income (page 185). How does the Baum family’s move to Roxbury show the ways Betty and Addie think differently from their parents about household roles? Why does their father take such offense at Herman Levine’s offer to house the family? 10. The last meaningful conversation between Addie and her mother turns out to be an apology her mother meant for Celia, and for a moment during her mother’s funeral Addie thinks, “She won’t be able to make me feel like there’s something wrong with me anymore.” Does Addie find any closure from her mother’s death? 11. Filomena draws a distinction between love and marriage when she spends time catching up with Addie before her wedding, but Addie disagrees with the assertion that “you only get one great love in a lifetime.” In what ways do the different romantic experiences of each woman inform the ideas each has about love? 12. Filomena and Addie share a deep friendship. Addie tells Ada that “sometimes friends grow apart. . . . But sometimes, it doesn’t matter how far apart you live or how little you talk—it’s still there.” What qualities do you think friends must share in order to have that kind of connection? Discuss your relationship with a best friend. Enhance

Despite her grave concern over her uncle, Elizabeth chuckled inwardly as she introduced Duncan. Everyone exhibited the same stunned reaction she had when she’d discovered Ian Thornton’s uncle was a cleric. Her uncle gaped, Alex stared, and the dowager duchess glowered at Ian in disbelief as Duncan politely bent over her hand. “Am I to understand, Kensington,” she demanded of Ian, “that you are related to a man of the cloth?” Ian’s reply was a mocking bow and a sardonic lift of his brows, but Duncan, who was desperate to put a light face on things, tried ineffectually to joke about it. “The news always has a peculiar effect on people,” he told her. “One needn’t think too hard to discover why,” she replied gruffly. Ian opened his mouth to give the outrageous harridan a richly deserved setdown, but Julius Cameron’s presence was worrying him; a moment later it was infuriating him as the man strode to the center of the room and said in a bluff voice, “Now that we’re all together, there’s no reason to dissemble. Bentner, being champagne. Elizabeth, congratulations. I trust you’ll conduct yourself properly as a wife and not spend the man out of what money he has left.” In the deafening silence no one moved, except it seemed to Elizabeth that the entire room was beginning to move. “What?” she breathed finally. “You’re betrothed.” Anger rose up like flames licking inside her, spreading up her limbs. “Really?” she said in a voice of deadly calm, thinking of Sir Francis and John Marchman. “To whom?” To her disbelief, Uncle Julius turned expectantly to Ian, who was looking at him with murder in his eyes. “To me,” he clipped, his icy gaze still on her uncle. “It’s final,” Julius warned her, and then, because he assumed she’d be as pleased as he to discover she had monetary value, he added, “He paid a fortune for the privilege. I didn’t have to give him a shilling.” Elizabeth, who had no idea the two men had ever met before, looked at Ian in wild confusion and mounting anger. “What does he mean?” she demanded in a strangled whisper. “He means,” Ian began tautly, unable to believe all his romantic plans were being demolished, “we are betrothed. The papers have been signed.” “Why, you-you arrogant, overbearing”-She choked back the tears that were cutting off her voice-“you couldn’t even be bothered to ask me?” Dragging his gaze from his prey with an effort, Ian turned to Elizabeth, and his heart wrenched at the way she was looking at him. “Why don’t we go somewhere private where we can discuss this?” he said gently, walking forward and taking her elbow. She twisted free, scorched by his touch. “Oh, no!” she exploded, her body shaking with wrath. “Why guard my sensibilities now? You’ve made a laughingstock of me since the day I set eyes on you. Why stop now?

This, of course, gives rise to the argument of the invalidation of the Old Testament with the coming of the New, the idea being that the actions of Jesus were so antithesis to the “laws” prescribed in Exodus and Leviticus that the modern Christian should base the standards of his doctrine on the teaching of the son of their god instead. There are several large flaws with this reasoning, my favorite being the most obvious: no one does it, and if they did, what would be the point of keeping the Old Testament? How many Christian sermons have been arched around Old Testament verses, or signs waved at protests and marches bearing Leviticus 18:22, etc? Where stands the basis for the need to splash the Decalogue of Exodus in public parks and in school rooms, or the continuous reference of original sin and the holiness of the sabbath (which actually has two distinctly different definitions in the Old Testament)? A group of people as large as the Christian nation cannot possibly hope to avoid the negative reaction of Old Testament nightmares (e.g. genocide, rape, and infanticide, amongst others) by claiming it shares no part of their modern doctrine when, in actuality, it overflows with it. Secondly, one must always remember that the New Testament is in constant coherence with proving the prophecy of the Old Testament, continuously referring to: “in accordance with the prophet”, etc., etc., ad nauseum—the most important of which coming from the words of Jesus himself: “Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest part or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” (Matthew 5:17) And even this is hypocritical, considering how many times Jesus himself stood in the way of Mosaic law, most notably against the stoning of the woman taken by the Pharisees for adultery, the punishment of which should have resulted in her death by prophetic mandate of the Old Testament despite the guilt that Jesus inflicted upon her attackers (a story of which decent evidence has been discovered by Bart Ehrman and others suggesting that it wasn’t originally in the Gospel of John in the first place [7]). All of this, of course, is without taking into account the overwhelming pile of discrepancies that is the New Testament in whole, including the motivation for the holy family to have been in Bethlehem versus Nazareth in the first place (the census that put them there or the dream that came to Joseph urging him to flee); the first three Gospels claim that the Eucharist was invented during Passover, but the Fourth says it was well before, and his divinity is only seriously discussed in the Fourth; the fact that Herod died four years before the Current Era; the genealogy of Jesus in the line of David differs in two Gospels as does the minutiae of the Resurrection, Crucifixion, and the Anointment—on top of the fact that the Gospels were written decades after the historical Jesus died, if he lived at all.

Postscript, 2005 From the Publisher ON APRIL 7, 2004, the Mid-Hudson Highland Post carried an article about an appearance that John Gatto made at Highland High School. Headlined “Rendered Speechless,” the report was subtitled “Advocate for education reform brings controversy to Highland.” The article relates the events of March 25 evening of that year when the second half of John Gatto’s presentation was canceled by the School Superintendent, “following complaints from the Highland Teachers Association that the presentation was too controversial.” On the surface, the cancellation was in response to a video presentation that showed some violence. But retired student counselor Paul Jankiewicz begged to differ, pointing out that none of the dozens of students he talked to afterwards were inspired to violence. In his opinion, few people opposing Gatto had seen the video presentation. Rather, “They were taking the lead from the teacher’s union who were upset at the whole tone of the presentation.” He continued, “Mr. Gatto basically told them that they were not serving kids well and that students needed to be told the truth, be given real-life learning experiences, and be responsible for their own education. [Gatto] questioned the validity and relevance of standardized tests, the prison atmosphere of school, and the lack of relevant experience given students.” He added that Gatto also had an important message for parents: “That you have to take control of your children’s education.” Highland High School senior Chris Hart commended the school board for bringing Gatto to speak, and wished that more students had heard his message. Senior Katie Hanley liked the lecture for its “new perspective,” adding that ”it was important because it started a new exchange and got students to think for themselves.” High School junior Qing Guo found Gatto “inspiring.” Highland teacher Aliza Driller-Colangelo was also inspired by Gatto, and commended the “risk-takers,” saying that, following the talk, her class had an exciting exchange about ideas. Concluded Jankiewicz, the students “were eager to discuss the issues raised. Unfortunately, our school did not allow that dialogue to happen, except for a few teachers who had the courage to engage the students.” What was not reported in the newspaper is the fact that the school authorities called the police to intervene and ‘restore the peace’ which, ironically enough, was never in the slightest jeopardy as the student audience was well-behaved and attentive throughout. A scheduled evening meeting at the school between Gatto and the Parents Association was peremptorily forbidden by school district authorities in a final assault on the principles of free speech and free assembly… There could be no better way of demonstrating the lasting importance of John Taylor Gatto’s work, and of this small book, than this sorry tale. It is a measure of the power of Gatto’s ideas, their urgency, and their continuing relevance that school authorities are still trying to shut them out 12 years after their initial publication, afraid even to debate them. — May the crusade continue! Chris Plant Gabriola Island, B.C. February, 2005

As Allied forces moved into Hitler’s Fortress Europe, Roosevelt and his circle were confronted with new evidence of the Holocaust. In early 1942, he had been given information that Adolf Hitler was quietly fulfilling his threat to “annihilate the Jewish race.” Rabbi Stephen Wise asked the President that December 1942 to inform the world about “the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history” and “try to stop it.” Although he was willing to warn the world about the impending catastrophe and insisted that there be war crimes commissions when the conflict was over, Roosevelt told Wise that punishment for such crimes would probably have to await the end of the fighting, so his own solution was to “win the war.” The problem with this approach was that by the time of an Allied victory, much of world Jewry might have been annihilated. By June 1944, the Germans had removed more than half of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews, and some Jewish leaders were asking the Allies to bomb railways from Hungary to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In response, Churchill told his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, that the murder of the Jews was “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,” and ordered him to get “everything” he could out of the British Air Force. But the Prime Minister was told that American bombers were better positioned to do the job. At the Pentagon, Stimson consulted John McCloy, who later insisted, for decades, that he had “never talked” with Roosevelt about the option of bombing the railroad lines or death camps. But in 1986, McCloy changed his story during a taped conversation with Henry Morgenthau’s son, Henry III, who was researching a family history. The ninety-one-year-old McCloy insisted that he had indeed raised the idea with the President, and that Roosevelt became “irate” and “made it very clear” that bombing Auschwitz “wouldn’t have done any good.” By McCloy’s new account, Roosevelt “took it out of my hands” and warned that “if it’s successful, it’ll be more provocative” and “we’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business,” as well as “bombing innocent people.” McCloy went on, “I didn’t want to bomb Auschwitz,” adding that “it seemed to be a bunch of fanatic Jews who seemed to think that if you didn’t bomb, it was an indication of lack of venom against Hitler.” If McCloy’s memory was reliable, then, just as with the Japanese internment, Roosevelt had used the discreet younger man to discuss a decision for which he knew he might be criticized by history, and which might conceivably have become an issue in the 1944 campaign. This approach to the possible bombing of the camps would allow the President to explain, if it became necessary, that the issue had been resolved at a lower level by the military. In retrospect, the President should have considered the bombing proposal more seriously. Approving it might have required him to slightly revise his insistence that the Allies’ sole aim should be winning the war, as he did on at least a few other occasions. But such a decision might have saved lives and shown future generations that, like Churchill, he understood the importance of the Holocaust as a crime unparalleled in world history.*

Today there is much talk about democratic ideals in the outside world. But not in Germany! For here in Germany we had more than enough time-fifteen years-to acquaint ourselves with these democratic ideals. And we ourselves had to pick up the legacy left behind by this democracy. Now we are being credited with many a truly astounding war aim, especially by the English. After all, England is quite experienced in issuing proclamations of objectives in warfare as it has waged the greatest number of wars the world over. Truly astounding are the war aims announced to us today. A new Europe will arise. This Europe will be characterized by justice. This justice will render armament obsolete. This will lead to disarmament at last. This disarmament in turn will bring about an economic blossoming. Change and trade will spring up-much trade-free trade. And with the sponsorship of this trade, culture shall once more blossom, and not only culture will benefit, but religion will also prosper. In other words: we are heading towards a golden age! Well, we have heard of this golden age before. Many times precisely the same people attempted to illustrate its virtues to us who are now flooding us with descriptions of its benefits. The records are old ones, played once too often. We can only pity these gentlemen who cannot even come up with a new idea to trap a great people. For all this they had already promised us in 1918. Then, too, England’s objectives in the war were the creation of this “new Europe,” the establishment of a “new justice,” of which the “right to selfdetermination of the peoples” was to form an integral part. Back then already they promised us justice to render obsolete-for all time-the bearing of any sort of weaponry. Back then already they submitted to us a program for disarmament-one for global disarmament. To make this disarmament more evident, it was to be crowned by the establishment of an association of nations bearing no arms. These were to settle their differences in the future-for even back then there was no doubt that differences would still arise-by talking them to death in discussion and debate, just as is the custom in democratic states. There would be no more shooting under any circumstances! In 1918, they declared a blessed and pious age to come! What came to pass in its stead we all lived to see: the old states were destroyed without even as much as asking their citizenry. Historic, ancient structures were severed, not only state bodies but grown economic structures as well, without anything better to take their place. In total disregard of the principle of the right to self-determination of the peoples, the European peoples were hacked to pieces, torn apart. Great states were dissolved. Nations were robbed of their rights, first rendered utterly defenseless and then subjected to a division which left only victors and vanquished in this world. And then there was no more talk of disarmament. To the contrary, armament went on. Nor did any efforts materialize to settle conflicts peacefully. The armed states waged wars just as before. Yet those who had been disarmed were no longer in a position to ward off the aggressions of those well armed. Naturally, this did not herald economic prosperity but, to the contrary, produced a network of lunatic reparations payments which led to increasing destitution for not only the vanquished, but also the so-called victors themselves. The consequences of this economic destitution were felt most acutely by the German Volk. International finance remained brutal and squeezed our Volk ruthlessly. Adolf Hitler – speech in the Sportpalast Berlin, January 30, 1940

The pacifist-humanitarian idea may indeed become an excellent one when the most superior type of manhood will have succeeded in subjugating the world to such an extent that this type is then sole master of the earth. This idea could have an injurious effect only in the measure in which its application became difficult and finally impossible. So, first of all, the fight, and then pacifism. If it were otherwise, it would mean that mankind has already passed the zenith of its development, and accordingly, the end would not be the supremacy of some moral ideal, but degeneration into barbarism and consequent chaos. People may laugh at this statement, but our planet moved through space for millions of years, uninhabited by men, and at some future date may easily begin to do so again, if men should forget that wherever they have reached a superior level of existence, it was not as a result of following the ideas of crazy visionaries but by acknowledging and rigorously observing the iron laws of Nature. What reduces one race to starvation stimulates another to harder work. All the great civilisations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood. The most profound cause of such a decline is to be found in the fact that the people ignored the principle that all culture depends on men, and not the reverse. In other words, in order to preserve a certain culture, the type of manhood that creates such a culture must be preserved, but such a preservation goes hand in hand with the inexorable law that it is the strongest and the best who must triumph and that they have the right to endure. He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist. Such a saying may sound hard, but, after all, that is how the matter really stands. Yet far harder is the lot of him who believes that he can overcome Nature, and thus in reality insults her. Distress, misery, and disease, are her rejoinders. Whoever ignores or despises the laws of race really deprives himself of the happiness to which he believes he can attain, for he places an obstacle in the victorious path of the superior race and, by so doing, he interferes with a prerequisite condition of, all human progress. Loaded with the burden of human sentiment, he falls back to the level of a helpless animal. It would be futile to attempt to discuss the question as to what race or races were the original champions of human culture and were thereby the real founders of all that we understand by the word ‘humanity.’ It is much simpler to deal with this question in so far as it relates to the present time. Here the answer is simple and clear. Every manifestation of human culture, every product of art, science and technical skill, which we see before our eyes to-day, is almost, exclusively the product of the Aryan creative power. All that we admire in the world to-day, its science and its art, its technical developments and discoveries, are the products of the creative activities of a few peoples, and it may be true that their first beginnings must be attributed to one race. The existence of civilisation is wholly dependent on such peoples. Should they perish, all that makes this earth beautiful will descend with them into the grave. He is the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth, always kindling anew that fire which, in the form of knowledge, illuminated the dark night by drawing aside the veil of mystery and thus showing man how to rise and become master over all the other beings on the earth. Should he be forced to disappear, a profound darkness will descend on the earth; within a few thousand years human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert.