General Category Quotes

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With the world securely in order, Dain was able to devote the leisurely bath time to editing his mental dictionary. He removed his wife from the general category labeled "Females" and gave her a section of her own. He made a note that she didn't find him revolting, and proposed several explanations: (a) bad eyesight and faulty hearing, (b)a defect in a portion of her otherwise sound intellect, (c) an inherited Trent eccentricity, or (d) an act of God. Since the Almighty had not done him a single act of kindness in at least twenty-five years, Dain thought it was about bloody time, but he thanked his Heavenly Father all the same, and promised to be as good as he was capable of being.
Loretta Chase (Lord of Scoundrels (Scoundrels, #3))
The curious thing about individuals is that their singularity always goes beyond any category or generalization in the book.
Haruki Murakami (The Elephant Vanishes)
I hate over-privileged people in general. You just happen to fall into that category. No offense. But Nykyrian said you weren’t a total bitch so I’ll trust him until you make him out a liar. (Hauk) You seriously lack social skills, don’t you? (Kiara)
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Born of the Night (The League, #1))
Can we imagine a togetherness that isn't founded on gross generalizations, conceptualizing ourselves as unique individuals who still stand to gain from looking out for one another? Can we identify with each other rather than with categories or masters?
CrimethInc. (Work)
And while it is okay to acknowledge that all kinds of women, whether white, Black, Indigenous, Latina, Asian, cis, gender nonconforming, trans, queer, bi, or straight might have different experiences, it's not cool to act as though transwomen are in some entirely separate category from the more general category of woman. That is something that feminism needs to be clear on - that it isn't feminism if all women's concerns, particularly the most marginalized women's concerns, aren't taken seriously.
Brittney Cooper (Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower)
Good cannot be a single and universal general notion; if it were, it would not be predictable in all the categories, but only in one.
Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics)
Few realize that political action offers little solution to the world’s major problems. Few understand that the elite have created political parties in order to prevent real change from ever taking place. The political arena is merely the “sty” in which two or more mutually hostile agencies, created by the same hidden hand, get the chance to pummel one another. As alternative researcher Juri Lina so brilliantly put it: When the left wing Freemason is finished, the right-wing Freemason takes over The point has been emphasized by many an insider: The elementary principle of all deception is to attract the enemy’s attention to what you wish him to see and to distract his attention from what you so not wish him to see – General Sir Archibald Wavel The world’s power structures have always ‘divided to conquer’ and have always ‘kept divided to keep conquered.’ As a consequence the power structure has so divided humanity – not only into special function categories but into religious and language and color categories – that individual humans are now helplessly inarticulate in the face of the present crisis. They consider their political representation to be completely corrupted, therefore, they feel almost utterly helpless
R. Buckminster Fuller (Critical Path)
The young people nowadays – men and women, amateurs and pros – generally fall into one of two categories: either they don’t know what it is that’s most important to them, or they know but don’t have the power to go after it. But this girl’s different. She knows what’s most important to her and she knows how to get it, but she doesn’t let on what it is. I’m pretty sure it’s not money, or success, or a normal happy life, or a strong man, or some weird religion, but that’s about all I can tell you. She’s like smoke: you think you’re seeing her clearly enough, but when you reach for her there’s nothing there. That’s a sort of strength, I suppose. But it makes her hard to figure out.
Ryū Murakami (Audition)
Women are crazy.” Go didn’t consider herself part of the general category of women, a word she used derisively.
Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
I enjoy the presence of a woman in the house for brief periods of time. They fall into two categories: the organizers and the slobs. There’s probably a third category—the naggers, who try to get you to do things, but I’ve never run into one of those. Oddly, I have no preference regarding oganizers or slobs, as long as they don’t try to pick my clothes for me. Basically, all women are nurturers and healers, and all men are mental patients to varying degrees. It works fine if people stick to their fated roles. But nobody does.
Nelson DeMille (The General's Daughter)
He loved the idea behind the Chinese concept of guanxi. It fit in the same general category as the concepts of friends, family, acquaintances, but it was more based in business and politics. Guanxi was about being able to call up a person one hadn’t seen in years and ask for a favor. To have enough people in one’s debt that there was more implied leverage to use when seeking favors from others.
Wildbow (Worm (Parahumans, #1))
Generally speaking, our stuff can be divided into three categories: useful stuff, beautiful stuff, and emotional stuff.
Francine Jay (The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide: How to Declutter, Organize, and Simplify Your Life)
Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is political anymore, the word itself is meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any more, and sex loses its determinants. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly any more, and art itself disappears.
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
Categories are absolutely necessary for us to function. They give structure to our thoughts. Imagine if we saw every item and every scenario as truly unique—we would not even have a language to describe the world around us. The necessary and useful instinct to generalize, like all the other instincts in this book, can also distort our worldview.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
Man African societies divide humans into 3 categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many...can be recalled by name. But they are not living-dead. There is a difference.
Kevin Brockmeier (The Brief History of the Dead)
Where to play selects the playing field; how to win defines the choices for winning on that field. It is the recipe for success in the chosen segments, categories, channels, geographies, and so on. The how-to-win choice is intimately tied to the where-to-play choice. Remember, it is not how to win generally, but how to win within the chosen where-to-play domains.
A.G. Lafley (Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works)
The Divine Comedy has nothing comedic about it. It’s called a comedy for another reason entirely. In the fourteenth century, Italian literature was, by requirement, divided into two categories: tragedy, representing high literature, was written in formal Italian; comedy, representing low literature, was written in the vernacular and geared toward the general population.
Dan Brown (Inferno (Robert Langdon, #4))
Autistic thinking is always detailed and specific. Teachers and parents need to help both children and adults with autism take all the little details they have in their head and put them into categories to form concepts and promote generalization.
Temple Grandin (The Way I See It)
Sometimes, in rare occasions, when I see a man respects a woman, treats her like another valuable human being, uses a proper language when talking to her and does not consider her only as a sex-toy. I feel proud of being a man. I feel grateful of belonging to a gender category as he is. However, the feeling is soon gone after seeing how men in general talk about women, disrespect them and insult them any way they can.
Kambiz Shabankare
In the fourteenth century, Italian literature was, by requirement, divided into two categories: tragedy, representing high literature, was written in formal Italian; comedy, representing low literature, was written in the vernacular and geared toward the general population.
Dan Brown (Inferno (Robert Langdon, #4))
As of 2016, a rough rule of thumb is that a supervised deep learning algorithm will generally achieve acceptable performance with around 5,000 labeled examples per category, and will match or exceed human performance when trained with a dataset containing at least 10 million labeled examples.
Ian Goodfellow
Araminta had generally considered the laws of etiquette as the rules of the chase, and divided them into categories: those which everyone broke, all the time; those which one could not break without being frowned at; and those which caused one to be quietly and permanently left out of every future invitation to the field.
Naomi Novik (Fast Ships, Black Sails)
Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range of positions available in literary criticism more generally, such as postmodernist, psychoanalytical, historicist, materialist, postcolonial, and so on.
Jane Goldman (The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf)
Among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of the democratic states, few have been more important than "terror" and "terrorism." These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups. Official violence, which is far more extensive in both scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether. This usage has nothing to do with justice, causal sequence, or numbers abused. Whatever the actual sequence of cause and effect, official violence is described as responsive or provoked ("retaliation," "protective reaction," etc.), not as the active and initiating source of abuse. Similarly, the massive long-term violence inherent in the oppressive social structures that U.S. power has supported or imposed is typically disregarded. The numbers tormented and killed by official violence-wholesale as opposed to retail terror-during recent decades have exceeded those of unofficial terrorists by a factor running into the thousands. But this is not "terror," [...] "security forces" only retaliate and engage in "police action." These terminological devices serve important functions. They help to justify the far more extensive violence of (friendly) state authorities by interpreting them as "reactive" and they implicitly sanction the suppression of information on the methods and scale of official violence by removing it from the category of "terrorism." [...] Thus the language is well-designed for apologetics for wholesale terror.
Noam Chomsky (The Washington Connection & Third World Fascism (Political Economy of Human Rights, #1))
Therefore we can posit this generalization: That a painting is the representation of the artist’s notion of reality in the terms of the plastic elements. The creation of a plastic unit reduces all the phenomena of the time to a unity of sensuality and thereby relates the subjective and objective in its relevance to man. Art therefore is a generalization. The use of the plastic elements to any other ends, which are most usually particularizations and descriptions of appearances, or which serve the stimulation of separate senses, are not in the category of art and must be classified in the category of applied arts.
Mark Rothko (The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art)
Ethical transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission). We tend to judge the former far more harshly. The origin of this imbalance remains a mystery, but it surely relates to the value we place on a person’s energy and intent.
Sam Harris (Lying)
We are always completely, and therefore equally, known to God. That is our destiny whether we like it or not. But though this knowledge never varies, the quality of our being known can….Ordinarily, to be known by God is to be, for this purpose, in the category of things. We are, like earthworms, cabbages, and nebulae, objects of Divine knowledge, But when we (a) become aware of this fact--the present fact, not the generalization--and (b) assent with all our will to be known, then we treat ourselves, in relation to God, not as things but as persons. We have unveiled. Not that any veil could have baffled his sight. The change is in us. The passive changes to the active. Instead of merely being known, we show, we tell, we offer ourselves to view.
C.S. Lewis (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer)
We tend to slot any new relationship we come across into a preexisting category. We see what is general or common about it; whereas the participants see—feel—only what is individual and particular to them.
Julian Barnes (The Only Story)
A blanket can be a statement—a generalization and truism covering a multitude of categories, like corruption, ineptitude, ignorance, arrogance, greed, and sloth—which would all fall under the blanket of “Politics.
Jarod Kintz (A brick and a blanket walk into a bar)
The scope of the transgender empire may be reaching its peak, as transcriticism is increasing at a fast pace both within activist feminism and from wives and regretters. There is an increasing groundswell of criticism of the concept and practice of transgenderism from a newly invigorated radical feminist movement. Moreover, the idea of transgenderism has become so vague and general that the category is in danger of being exploded.
Sheila Jeffreys
The young people nowadays – men and women, amateurs and pros – generally fall into one of two categories: either they don’t know what it is that’s most important to them, or they know but don’t have the power to go after it.
Ryū Murakami (Audition)
SHAME-BASED FAMILY RULES Each family system has several categories of rules. There are rules about celebrating and socializing, rules about touching and sexuality, rules about sickness and proper health care, rules about vacations and vocations, rules about household maintenance and the spending of money. Perhaps the most important rules are about feelings, interpersonal communication and parenting. Toxic shame is consciously transferred by means of shaming rules. In shame-based families, the rules consciously shame all the members. Generally, however, the children receive the major brunt of the shame. Power is a cover-up for shame. Power is frequently hierarchical.
John Bradshaw (Healing the Shame that Binds You)
As for my division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge that it’s somewhat arbitrary, but I don’t insist upon exact numbers. I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. There are, of course, innumerable sub- divisions, but the distinguishing features of both categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood—that depends on the idea and its dimensions, note that. It’s only in that sense I speak of their right to crime in my article (you remember it began with the legal question). There’s no need for such anxiety, however; the masses will scarcely ever admit this right, they punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfil quite justly their conservative vocation. But the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal. Each class has an equal right to exist. In fact, all have equal rights with me—and vive la guerre éternelle—till the New Jerusalem, of course!
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Through The Mecca I saw that we were, in our own segregated body politic, cosmopolitans. The black diaspora was not just our own world but, in so many ways, the Western world itself. Now, the heirs of those Virginia planters could never directly acknowledge this legacy or reckon with its power. And so that beauty that Malcolm pledged us to protect, black beauty, was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black five-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was “white,” and so Tolstoy “mattered,” like everything else that was white “mattered.” And this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
Butler makes the general assumption that anything at all humans can meaningfully think about is socially constructed, ‘all the way down’ as it were. This means she thinks there are no material facts before language – that is, prior to culturally specific linguistic and social constructions of them. Linguistic categories, including scientific and biological ones, aren’t a means of reflecting existing divisions in the world, but a means of creating things that otherwise wouldn’t have existed.
Kathleen Stock (Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism)
Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.
Christopher Hitchens (For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports)
The sheep vs. goats analogy is presumptuous. I define the world in general to be the people who populate it without assignment of an either/or category in presumption of their final and ultimate choice as to Who and Whose Jesus is". ~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
Most of the life goals that people pursue at the level of "characteristic adaptations" can be sorted [...] into four categories: work and achievement, relationships and intimacy, religion and spirituality, and generativity (leaving a legacy and contributing something to society). Although it is generally good for you to pursue goals, not all goals are equal. People who strive primarily for wealth and achievement are [...] less happy, on average, than those whose strivings focus on the other three categories.
Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)
Each of our parents and others close to us offer their unique version of attachment, so while we have four categories to give us a general outline of what may occur, we will find that each person's expression of each style is as individual as a fingerprint.
Bonnie Badenoch (The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
Kay himself has conceded that technological wizards generally fall into two categories: the Michelangelo types who dream of Sistine Chapels and then actually spend years building them, and the da Vincis, who have a million ideas but seldom finish anything themselves.
Steven Levy (Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that changed Everything)
The mystery of this courage of Bauer’s is Hegel’s Phenomenology. As Hegel here puts self-consciousness in the place of man, the most varied human reality appears only as a definite form, as a determination of self-consciousness. But a mere determination of self-consciousness is a “pure category,” a mere “thought” which I can consequently also abolish in “pure” thought and overcome through pure thought. In Hegel’s Phenomenology the material, perceptible, objective bases of the various estranged forms of human self-consciousness are left as they are. Thus the whole destructive work results in the most conservative philosophy because it thinks it has overcome the objective world, the sensuously real world, by merely transforming it into a “thing of thought” a mere determination of self-consciousness and can therefore dissolve its opponent, which has become ethereal, in the “ether of pure thought.” Phenomenology is therefore quite logical when in the end it replaces human reality by “Absolute Knowledge”—Knowledge, because this is the only mode of existence of self-consciousness, because self-consciousness is considered as the only mode of existence of man; absolute knowledge for the very reason that self-consciousness knows itself alone and is no more disturbed by any objective world. Hegel makes man the man of self-consciousness instead of making self-consciousness the self-consciousness of man, of real man, man living in a real objective world and determined by that world. He stands the world on its head and can therefore dissolve in the head all the limitations which naturally remain in existence for evil sensuousness, for real man. Besides, everything which betrays the limitations of general self-consciousness—all sensuousness, reality, individuality of men and of their world—necessarily rates for him as a limit. The whole of Phenomenology is intended to prove that self-consciousness is the only reality and all reality.
Karl Marx (The Holy Family)
Mental obsession, or going over and over something, is a part of the addictive cycle. It is also addictive in itself. I mentioned earlier the ego defense called “isolation of affect.” By focusing on a recurring thought you can avoid painful feelings. You can also avoid feelings by ruminating, turning thoughts over and over in your head. You can be addicted to abstract thinking. One of my degrees is in philosophy. I spent years of my life studying the great philosophers. In itself this is not harmful. For me, the reading and teaching of philosophy was a way out of my feelings. When I was reading the Summa Theologia of Thomas Aquinas or Emmanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Wittgenstein’s treatise on logical positivism, I could completely mood-alter my toxic shame. Intellectualizing is often a way to avoid internal states that are shame-bound. One’s very way of intellectualizing can be addictive. Generalizing and universalizing keep one in categories so broad and abstract that there’s no contact with concrete, specific, sensory-based reality. Abstract generalizing is a marvelous way to mood-alter.
John Bradshaw (Healing the Shame that Binds You)
Blasphemy is just the fanatic's name for criticism. Charb writes wisely: 'A believer can blaspheme only to the extent that the idea of blasphemy holds any meaning to him. A non-believer, no matter how hard he tries, 'cannot' blaspheme. God is sacred only to those who believe in him. If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists. The strategy used by minority group activists masquerading as anti-racists is to pass off blasphemy as Islamophobia and Islamophobia as racism.' The crucial distinction we must defend is between acts of imagination and acts of violence....Faith is not the enemy. Fanaticism is the enemy. It always is. But only a fool would deny that faith has been the seedbed of fanaticism in mankind's long and sorry struggle for the light. As much as at times we need to seek "solidarity" among unlike groups, we also need to "desolidarize," to "unsolidarize"—to put the people we know before the abstract categories we imagine. Come to think of it, making people, with all their flaws, fully visible while leaving generalized types alone is exactly what the caricaturist has always done for us. It's his special form of bravery.
Charb (Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression)
Although data on this are sparse, it also seems that US politicians of both parties are much wealthier than their European counterparts and in a totally different category from the average American, which might explain why they tend to confuse their own private interest with the general interest.
Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
The female genital is symbolically represented by all those objects which share its peculiarity of enclosing a space capable of being filled by something—viz., by pits, caves, and hollows, by pitchers and bottles, by boxes and trunks, jars, cases, pockets, etc. Theship, too, belongs in this category.
Sigmund Freud (A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis)
When the attachment figure is also a threat to the child, two systems with conflicting goals are activated simultaneously or sequentially: the attachment system, whose goal is to seek proximity, and the defense systems, whose goal is to protect. In these contexts, the social engagement system is profoundly compromised and its development interrupted by threatening conditions. This intolerable conflict between the need for attachment and the need for defense with the same caregiver results in the disorganized–disoriented attachment pattern (Main & Solomon, 1986). A contradictory set of behaviors ensues to support the different goals of the animal defense systems and of the attachment system (Lyons-Ruth & Jacobvitz, 1999; Main & Morgan, 1996; Steele, van der Hart, & Nijenhuis, 2001; van der Hart, Nijenhuis, & Steele, 2006). When the attachment system is stimulated by hunger, discomfort, or threat, the child instinctively seeks proximity to attachment figures. But during proximity with a person who is threatening, the defensive subsystems of flight, fight, freeze, or feigned death/shut down behaviors are mobilized. The cry for help is truncated because the person whom the child would turn to is the threat. Children who suffer attachment trauma fall into the dissociative–disorganized category and are generally unable to effectively auto- or interactively regulate, having experienced extremes of low arousal (as in neglect) and high arousal (as in abuse) that tend to endure over time (Schore, 2009b). In the context of chronic danger, patterns of high sympathetic dominance are apt to become established, along with elevated heart rate, higher cortisol levels, and easily activated alarm responses. Children must be hypervigilantly prepared and on guard to avoid danger yet primed to quickly activate a dorsal vagal feigned death state in the face of inescapable threat. In the context of neglect, instead of increased sympathetic nervous system tone, increased dorsal vagal tone, decreased heart rate, and shutdown (Schore, 2001a) may become chronic, reflecting both the lack of stimulation in the environment and the need to be unobtrusive.
Pat Ogden (Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
I have completed and uncompleted screenplays, but they both fall into the category of “unsold.” I’ve seen quite a few movies where the screenplays seemed to be in the “uncompleted” category yet still got sold and made into movies, so I generally refer too all screenplays as “sold” or “unsold.” But that’s just my own filing system.
Gary Reilly (Ticket To Hollywood (Asphalt Warrior, #2))
You need the generalization instinct to live your everyday life, and occasionally it can save you from having to eat something disgusting. We always need categories. The challenge is to realize which of our simple categories are misleading—like “developed” and “developing” countries—and replace them with better categories, like the four levels.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
In some cases, perfectionists may forgive other people’s sins, but be unable to receive forgiveness themselves. Many perfectionists will sabotage potentially good relationships for one reason: being found out. They are afraid to get too close to someone, because their bad self might start leaking out, and the shame and self-condemnation they feel is unbearably painful. Generally, perfectionists opt for isolation rather than to be exposed in their failings. It is sadly ironic that perfectionists shun the very safety that could heal them. The well-known “commitment-phobic” man is often in this category. He’s the type who starts a relationship, gets close, and then disappears. As a single woman friend of mine said after one of these episodes, “I’d understand it if he’d bailed out after a fight. But on our last date, we both started sharing our fears and insecurities. Silly me. I thought that tended to bring people closer together.” What actually happened to the man was just the opposite: He started trusting my friend, and his defenses began slipping.
Henry Cloud (Safe People: How to Find Relationships That Are Good for You and Avoid Those That Aren't)
He had learned over time to keep his thoughts to himself, which was most easily accomplished if his brain activity was split into categories. His mind was like a computer with multiple applications open, some of them buzzing with contemplation in the background. Most of the time Aldo did not give others the impression he was listening, a suspicion that was generally correct.
Olivie Blake (Alone With You in the Ether)
He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality. Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.
Barry N. Malzberg (The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich (Alternatives SF Series))
I looked at the internet for too long today and start. ed feeling depressed. The worst thing is that I actually think people on there are generally well meaning and the impulses are right, but our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempis to make sense of our present historical moment turn out to be essentially gibberish. Everyone is understandably attached to particular identity categories, but at the same time largely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve. The only apparent schema is that for every victim group (people bom into poor families, women, people of colour) there is an oppres- sor group (people born into rich families, men, white people) But in this framework, relations between victim and oppressor are not historical so much as theological, in that the victims are transcendently good and the oppressors are personally evil. For this reason, an individual's membership of a particular identity group is a question of unsurpassed ethical significance, and a great amount of our discourse is devoted to sorting individu- als into their proper groups, which is to say, giving them their proper moral reckoning.
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
My basic hypothesis is this: the people who run the media are humanities graduates with little understanding of science, who wear their ignorance as a badge of honour. Secretly, deep down, perhaps they resent the fact that they have denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of Western thought from the past two hundred years; but there is an attack implicit in all media coverage of science: in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science. On this template, science is portrayed as groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality; they do work that is either wacky or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory, probably going to change soon and, most ridiculously, ‘hard to understand’. Having created this parody, the commentariat then attack it, as if they were genuinely critiquing what science is all about. Science stories generally fall into one of three categories: the wacky stories, the ‘breakthrough’ stories, and the ‘scare’ stories. Each undermines and distorts science in its own idiosyncratic way.
Ben Goldacre (Bad Science)
6. SELFISHNESS. The leader who claims all the honor for the work of his followers, is sure to be met by resentment. The really great leader CLAIMS NONE OF THE HONORS. He is contented to see the honors, when there are any, go to his followers, because he knows that most men will work harder for commendation and recognition than they will for money alone. 7. INTEMPERANCE. Followers do not respect an intemperate leader. Moreover, intemperance in any of its various forms, destroys the endurance and the vitality of all who indulge in it. 8. DISLOYALTY. Perhaps this should have come at the head of the list. The leader who is not loyal to his trust, and to his associates, those above him, and those below him, cannot long maintain his leadership. Disloyalty marks one as being less than the dust of the earth, and brings down on one's head the contempt he deserves. Lack of loyalty is one of the major causes of failure in every walk of life. 9. EMPHASIS OF THE "AUTHORITY" OF LEADERSHIP. The efficient leader leads by encouraging, and not by trying to instill fear in the hearts of his followers. The leader who tries to impress his followers with his "authority" comes within the category of leadership through FORCE. If a leader is a REAL LEADER, he will have no need to advertise that fact except by his conduct-his sympathy, understanding, fairness, and a demonstration that he knows his job. 10. EMPHASIS OF TITLE. The competent leader requires no "title" to give him the respect of his followers. The man who makes too much over his title generally has little else to emphasize. The doors to the office of the real leader are open to all who wish to enter, and his working quarters are free from formality or ostentation. These are among the more common of the causes of failure in leadership. Any one of these faults is sufficient to induce failure. Study the list carefully if you aspire to leadership, and make sure that you are free of these faults.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich [Illustrated & Annotated])
...at the helm of the General Board of Health, Chadwick helped solidify, if not outright invent, an ensemble of categories that we now take for granted: that the state should directly engage in protecting the health and well-being of its citizens, particularly the poorest among them; that a centralized bureaucracy of experts can solve societal problems that free markets either exacerbate or ignore; that public-health issues often require massive state investment in infrastructure or prevention.
Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World)
At their best, all living religious traditions in some fashion offer a challenge to become aware of what’s going on in our minds. They invite us to refuse to settle and to resist the reality-distorting media that perpetuate debilitating forms of self-satisfaction. In this sense, living religious traditions are like arsenals, renewable resources for rethinking our lives in light of the ethical demands of more sacredly conducted living—a way of living that confronts the disfiguring generalities of mere business, religion, politics, economics, and other deluding categories. But as we understand only too well, it is often the case that the redeeming power of religious witness is sabotaged, squandered, or ignored altogether by those who claim to speak for their religious tradition. For some, their religion is nothing more than a special interest group, a bastion of offendedness and anger, the powerhouse of the saved rather than a place from which life can be viewed and lived more redemptively.
David Dark (The Sacredness of Questioning Everything)
One final note here: you’ve probably noticed that whenever I mention serial killers, I always refer to them as “he.” This isn’t just a matter of form or syntactical convenience. For reasons we only partially understand, virtually all multiple killers are male. There’s been a lot of research and speculation into it. Part of it is probably as simple as the fact that people with higher levels of testosterone (i.e., men) tend to be more aggressive than people with lower levels (i.e., women). On a psychological level, our research seems to show that while men from abusive backgrounds often come out of the experience hostile and abusive to others, women from similar backgrounds tend to direct the rage and abusiveness inward and punish themselves rather than others. While a man might kill, hurt, or rape others as a way of dealing with his rage, a woman is more likely to channel it into something that would hurt primarily herself, such as drug or alcohol abuse, prostitution, or suicide attempts. I can’t think of a single case of a woman acting out a sexualized murder on her own. The one exception to this generality, the one place we do occasionally see women involved in multiple murders, is in a hospital or nursing home situation. A woman is unlikely to kill repeatedly with a gun or knife. It does happen with something “clean” like drugs. These often fall into the category of either “mercy homicide,” in which the killer believes he or she is relieving great suffering, or the “hero homicide,” in which the death is the unintentional result of causing the victim distress so he can be revived by the offender, who is then declared a hero. And, of course, we’ve all been horrified by the cases of mothers, such as the highly publicized Susan Smith case in South Carolina, killing their own children. There is generally a particular set of motivations for this most unnatural of all crimes, which we’ll get into later on. But for the most part, the profile of the serial killer or repeat violent offender begins with “male.” Without that designation, my colleagues and I would all be happily out of a job.
John E. Douglas (Journey Into Darkness (Mindhunter #2))
În general, se presupune că îmbogățirea reprezintă țelul suprem tipic al evreului. Nimic mai fals. Îmbogățirea înseamnă pentru el numai o treaptă intermediară, un mijloc spre adevăratul scop. Ceea ce vrea cu adevărat evreul, idealul său imanent, este desăvârșirea intelectuală, promovarea într-o categorie culturală superioară. Chiar la evreimea ortodoxă răsăriteană, la care atât slăbiciunile, cât și calitățile întregii rase se manifestă mai pregnant, își găsește o expresie plastică această supremație a voinței de spiritualitate asupra factorului material nud: cel cucernic, învățatul în ale Bibliei valorează de o mie de ori mai mult în ochii comunității decât bogatul. Chiar și cel mai înstărit își va mărita fiica mai degrabă cu un învățat sărac lipit pămâtului decât cu un negustor. Această întâietate dată celor spirituale se manifestă la fel de intens în toate straturile; chiar și cel mai sărac neguțător ambulant, care-și târăște marfa prin ploi și zloată, va încerca cu prețul celor mai grele sacrificii să-și dea cel puțin un fecior la învățătură, și pentru întreaga familie este un titlu de onoare să aibă printre membrii ei pe cineva care a devenit un intelectual de vază, un profesor, un savant, un muzician, ca și când aceasta ar înnobila-o prin performanța lui. Instinctiv, ceva din firea evreului caută să se debaraseze de ceea ce este moralmente dubios, respingător și meschin, inerent oricărui negoț, oricărei simple afaceri și să se ridice în sfera mai pură, imaterială a valorilor spirituale, ca și când ar vrea - ca să vorbim ca Wagner - să scape, el și tot neamul lui, de blestemul banilor.
Stefan Zweig (The World of Yesterday)
generally speaking, there are two simplified categories that parenting falls into: intrusive or neglectful caretaking. Parents were either overinvolved—telling us what to do, think, and feel—or they were underinvolved—physically or emotionally absent. These challenges are across the spectrum from subtle to severe. As a response, we become anxious and self-absorbed, losing our capacity for empathy. We become the walking wounded in a battlefield of injured soldiers. For the child who experienced intrusive parents, in later years, she becomes an isolator, a person who unconsciously pushes others away. She keeps people at a distance because she needs to have “a lot of space” around her; she wants the freedom to come and go as she pleases; she thinks independently, speaks freely, processes her emotions internally, and proudly dons her self-reliant attitude. All the while underneath this cool exterior is a two-year-old girl who was not allowed to satisfy her natural need for independence. When she marries, her need to be a distinct “self” will be on the top of her hidden agenda.
Harville Hendrix (Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples)
(Orientals). For such divisions are generalities whose use historically and actually has been to press the importance of the distinction between some men and some other men, usually towards not especially admirable ends. When one uses categories like Oriental and Western as both the starting and the end points of analysis, research, public policy (as the categories were used by Balfour and Cromer), the result is usually to polarize the distinction—the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western—and limit the human encounter between different cultures, traditions, and societies.
Edward W. Said (Orientalism)
Throughout our research, we were continually reminded of the “hardiness” research studies done by the International Committee for the Study of Victimization. These studies looked at people who had suffered serious adversity—cancer patients, prisoners of war, accident victims, and so forth—and survived. They found that people fell generally into three categories: those who were permanently dispirited by the event, those who got their life back to normal, and those who used the experience as a defining event that made them stronger.53 The good-to-great companies were like those in the third group, with the “hardiness factor.
Jim Collins (Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't)
Adorno and his colleagues identified nine a priori clusters of personality dimensions—many surprisingly similar to Dicks’s “High F Syndrome”—that made up the authoritarian personality: 1. Conventionalism: Rigid adherence to conventional middle-class values. 2. Authoritarian Submission: Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the in-group. 3. Authoritarian Aggression: Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish, people who violate conventional values. 4. Anti-Intraception: Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded. 5. Superstition and Stereotypy: The belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories. 6. Power and “Toughness”: Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis on the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness. 7. Destructiveness and Cynicism: Generalized hostility, vilification of the human. 8. Projectivity: The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outward of unconscious emotional impulses. 9. Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual “goings-on.
James Waller (Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing)
I looked at the internet for too long today and started feeling depressed. The worst thing is that I actually think people on there are generally well meaning and the impulses are right, but our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempts to make sense of our present historical moment turn out to be essentially gibberish. Everyone is understandably attached to particular identity categories, but at the same time largely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve. The only apparent schema is that for every victim group (people born into poor families, women, people of colour) there is an oppressor group (people born into rich families, men, white people). But in this framework, relations between victim and oppressor are not historical so much as theological, in that the victims are transcendently good and the oppressors are personally evil. For this reason, an individual’s membership of a particular identity group is a question of unsurpassed ethical significance, and a great amount of our discourse is devoted to sorting individuals into their proper groups, which is to say, giving them their proper moral reckoning. If serious political action is still possible, which I think at this point is an open question, maybe it won’t involve people like us—in fact I think it almost certainly won’t. And frankly if we have to go to our deaths for the greater good of humankind, I will accept that like a lamb, because I haven’t deserved this life or even enjoyed it. But I would like to be helpful in some way to the project, whatever it is, and if I could help only in a very small way, I wouldn’t mind, because I would be acting in my own self-interest anyway—because it’s also ourselves we’re brutalising, though in another way, of course. No one wants to live like this. Or at least, I don’t want to live like this. I want to live differently, or if necessary to die so that other people can one day live differently. But looking at the internet, I don’t see many ideas worth dying for. The only idea on there seems to be that we should watch the immense human misery unfolding before us and just wait for the most immiserated, most oppressed people to turn around and tell us how to stop it. It seems that there exists a curiously unexplained belief that the conditions of exploitation will by themselves generate a solution to exploitation—and that to suggest otherwise is condescending and superior, like mansplaining. But what if the conditions don’t generate the solution?
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
Human labor, in general, is still divided into two exclusive categories: the first—solely intellectual and managerial—includes the scientists, artists, engineers, inventors, accountants, educators, governmental officials, and their subordinate elites who enforce labor discipline The second group consists of the great mass of workers, people prevented from applying creative ideas or intelligence, who blindly and mechanically carry out the orders of the intellectual-managerial elite This economic and social division of labor has disastrous consequences for members of the privileged classes, the masses of the people, and for the prosperity, as well as the moral and intellectual development, of society as a whole.
Mikhail Bakunin
We all feel the urge to exact revenge at one time or another, but most of us are able to suppress and control those impulses. Actual revenge murders tend to be one-offs rather than serial crimes. These types of murders have specific indicators and fall into one of two categories: retribution against individuals the killer feels have hurt or offended him, or retaliation against entire communities, such as school shooters who feel they have been bullied or disrespected. As a rule, though, while sexual predators tend to be acutely sensitive to any perceived slight or insult—while giving no mind to the feelings of others—they don’t generally have revenge as a motive; they don’t need it. They are already bound up with their own deadly obsessions, as we clearly see in Kondro’s case.
John E. Douglas (The Killer Across the Table)
Kafuku had reached the conclusion that most female drivers fell into one of two categories: either they were a little too aggressive or a little too timid. Luckily—and we should all be grateful for this—the latter were far more common. Generally speaking, women were more cautious than men behind the wheel. Of course, that caution was nothing to complain about. Yet their driving style tended to irritate others on the road. Most of the aggressive women, on the other hand, seemed convinced they were great drivers. In most cases, they showed their timid sisters nothing but scorn, and were proud that they, at least, weren’t like that. They were oblivious to the gasps and slammed brakes that accompanied their sudden and daring lane changes, and to the less-than-complimentary words directed at them by their fellow drivers.
Haruki Murakami (Men Without Women)
Thus every individual category is subject to contamination, substitution is possible between any sphere and any other: there is a total confusion of types. Sex is no longer located in sex itself, but elsewhere - everywhere else, in fact. Politics is no longer restricted to the political sphere, but infects every sphere economics, science, art, sport ... Sport itself, meanwhile, is no longer located in sport as such, but instead in business, in sex, in politics, in the general style of performance. All these domains are affected by sport's criteria of 'excellence', effort and record-breaking, as by its childish notion of self-transcendence. Each category thus passes through a phase transition during which its essence is diluted in homeopathic doses, infinitesimal relative to the total solution, until it finally disappears, leaving a trace so small as to be indiscernible, like the 'memory of water' .
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
some point over the next few hours, she left some food and water for her children in their room and opened their bedroom window. She wrote out the name of her doctor, with a telephone number, and stuck it to the baby carriage in the hallway. Then she took towels, dishcloths, and tape and sealed the kitchen door. She turned on the gas in her kitchen stove, placed her head inside the oven, and took her own life. 2. Poets die young. That is not just a cliché. The life expectancy of poets, as a group, trails playwrights, novelists, and nonfiction writers by a considerable margin. They have higher rates of “emotional disorders” than actors, musicians, composers, and novelists. And of every occupational category, poets have far and away the highest suicide rates—as much as five times higher than the general population. Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds—and few have so perfectly embodied that image of the doomed genius as Sylvia Plath.
Malcolm Gladwell (Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know)
considerable intellectual achievement. In particular, we should take note that this attitude enabled Newton to explore the conjectured consequences of philosophic questions as a form of “dreaming,” without thereby necessarily undermining in any way the results of the Principia, without thereby producing a “philosophical romance” in the way that Descartes was said to have done. I repeat what Newton said in the last paragraph of that preface: “And although the whole of philosophy is not immediately evident, still it is better to add something to our knowledge day by day than to fill up men’s minds in advance with the preconceptions of hypotheses.” Certain fundamental truths, such as the universality of the force of gravity acting according to the inverse-square law, were derived directly from mathematics; but in Newton’s mind even such a law—once found—had to be fitted into his general scheme of thought, and he came to believe that certain aspects of this law had been known to the ancient sages. Following the reorientation of Newton’s philosophy of nature, he came to believe that interparticle forces of attraction and repulsion exist. Such forces, according to Newton, are sufficiently short-range in their action (as he makes quite explicit in query 31 of the Opticks) that they do not raise a major problem of understanding their mode of action. They do not, in other words, fall into the category of the forces acting at a distance. His studies of matter, and in particular of alchemy, had made the existence of these forces seem reasonable. But does the reasonableness of such short-range forces provide a warrant for belief in the existence of long-range forces acting over huge distances? Consider the gravitational force between the sun and the earth: this force must act through a distance of about one hundred million miles. Even worse from the conceptual point of view is the force between the sun and Saturn, some thousands of millions of miles. Eventually Newton was to conclude that comets are a sort of planet, with the result that the solar gravitational force must extend
Isaac Newton (The Principia: The Authoritative Translation and Guide: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy)
The accelerated deindustrialization of North America, Europe, and Japan, and the shift of manufacturing to Asia in general and to China in particular, has been the leading reason for this reappraisal.[93] This manufacturing switch has brought changes ranging from risible to tragic. In the first category are such grotesque transactions as Canada, the country with per capita forest resources greater than in any other affluent nation, importing toothpicks and toilet paper from China, a country whose wood stocks amount to a small fraction of Canada’s enormous boreal forest patrimony.[94] But the switch has also contributed to tragedies, such as the rising midlife mortality among America’s white non-university-educated men. There can be no doubt that America’s post-2000 loss of some 7 million (formerly well-paying) manufacturing jobs—with most of that loss attributable to globalization, as most of that production moved to China—has been the principal reason of these deaths of despair, largely attributable to suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-induced liver disease.
Vaclav Smil (How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going)
In Indian social-cultural-political discourse there is a general tendency to ignore deeper, intellectual thought, and the sensationalist mass media has actually contributed to a great dumbing down of even the educated masses. In this climate where any and all intellectuality has been mostly confined to a few ivory towers of academy, it is difficult to get even the educated and socio-economically privileged section of the society interested in the idea of exploring any deeper intellectual thought. It seems as if the trinity of pop-sociology, pop-psychology and pop-culture has taken over the general mentality of the society leaving little room for any serious, intellectually rigorous discourse on social-cultural phenomena. If at all, there is any serious attempt to think through and understand the observed phenomena, it is almost always done using the intellectual theories and frameworks developed in the Western academic circles. But this habit of non-thinking or thinking only in terms of borrowed categories must change if we want India to awaken to her innate intellectual potential.
Beloo Mehra (The Thinking Indian: Essays on Indian Socio-Cultural Matters in the Light of Sri Aurobindo)
Some of my friends in concerned and committed activist organizations think that psychological analysis is actually the enemy of finding solutions. They think anyone with deep interest in psychology must be a total “navel gazer,” trying more to get away from the world's problems than to solve them. Some of these people believe that the world's problems would disappear if they could just translate all religious categories into Marxist terms and get everyone to be socialists. They assume, for example, that Marxists would never engage in cocaine trafficking, that a Marxist country would never have to shoot its generals for smuggling in cocaine, and that Marxists would never execute people who were longing for freedom. Did you know that? We would not have to execute students, or shoot them in the streets, if we were Marxists. You can go on and on with that, and it makes me sick, because it shows such an incredible naiveté about the realities of life. They need to read Reinhold Niebuhr's classic works on the dynamics of human pride that afflict all ideologies left and right (Niebuhr 1941–1943). The human predicament does not result from having the wrong ideology.
Robert L. Moore (Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity)
End note to The Day of Glory The Hammer's Slammers series isn't in any sense a future history. It's made up of individual stories exploring one aspect or another of what war means to the men and women at the sharp end. In these stories I've been translating into an SF setting what I learned in 1970 with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Viet-Nam and Cambodia. We—the Blackhorse—were an elite unit. I was very fortunate to have been assigned to a regiment in which you never had to worry if the guy next to you was going to do his job: he was, and so were you—whatever you thought of war or The War or our Vietnamese allies. (Generally the answer to all those questions was, "Not much.") The flip side was that the distinction between the categories Not Blackhorse and Enemy got blurred. We didn't view our job as winning hearts and minds: we were there to kill people and then go home. And we didn't much care about the cost of victory so long as somebody else was paying it. That's something civilians ought to consider long and hard before they send tanks off to make policy. Because I can tell you from personal experience, it isn't something the tankers themselves are likely to worry about.
David Drake (Other Times Than Peace)
Western medicine’s love of drawing people into diagnostic categories and applying disease names to small differences and minor bodily changes is not specific to functional disorders – it is a general trend. Pre-diabetes, polycystic ovaries, some cancers and many more conditions have all been subject to the problem of over-inclusive diagnosis. My biggest concern in this regard is the degree to which many people are wholly unaware of the subjective nature of the medical classification of disease. If a person is told they have this or that disorder, they assume it must be right. The Latin names we give to things and the shiny scanning machines make it look as if there is more authority than actually exists. To a certain extent, Sienna pursued each diagnosis she was given, but other people have diagnoses thrust upon them, having no idea that there might be anything controversial about it – and having no idea that they have a choice. Western medicine’s hold on people, and its sense of being systematic and accurate, makes it a powerful force in the transmission of cultural concepts of what constitutes wellness or ill health. But Western medicine is just as enslaved to fads and trends as any other tradition of medicine.
Suzanne O'Sullivan (The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness)
For the same reason , the American government has invented a completely new juridical category , that of 'illegal enemy combatants'. In general, the perpetrators of violence against the population clearly fall into two groups which, once they have been arrested, come under different jurisdictions, but still possess certain rights. In times of peace, they are criminals, protected in every state of law by habeas corpus, defended by lawyers, and judged in accord with the law. In times of war, they are enemy soldiers who, if captured, must be treated in accord with international Conventions. In what category are we to classify the terrorist of Al-Qaeda? Since they do not belong to the regular of a country that has signed the conventions of Geneva, they cannot claim the protection of those conventions. So do they fall under ordinary legislation? It is here that the formula' war on terror' shows how useful it is: since there is a 'war' going on, the laws of peacetime do not apply; but since this war is not being waged on anther country, international conventions do not come into it either! And since this 'war' can never end, the government that declares it is placing itself for an indefinite period above national laws, as well as above international norms.
Tzvetan Todorov
I will give technology three definitions that we will use throughout the book. The first and most basic one is that a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose. For some technologies-oil refining-the purpose is explicit. For others- the computer-the purpose may be hazy, multiple, and changing. As a means, a technology may be a method or process or device: a particular speech recognition algorithm, or a filtration process in chemical engineering, or a diesel engine. it may be simple: a roller bearing. Or it may be complicated: a wavelength division multiplexer. It may be material: an electrical generator. Or it may be nonmaterial: a digital compression algorithm. Whichever it is, it is always a means to carry out a human purpose. The second definition I will allow is a plural one: technology as an assemblage of practices and components. This covers technologies such as electronics or biotechnology that are collections or toolboxes of individual technologies and practices. Strictly speaking, we should call these bodies of technology. But this plural usage is widespread, so I will allow it here. I will also allow a third meaning. This is technology as the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture. Here we are back to the Oxford's collection of mechanical arts, or as Webster's puts it, "The totality of the means employed by a people to provide itself with the objects of material culture." We use this collective meaning when we blame "technology" for speeding up our lives, or talk of "technology" as a hope for mankind. Sometimes this meaning shades off into technology as a collective activity, as in "technology is what Silicon Valley is all about." I will allow this too as a variant of technology's collective meaning. The technology thinker Kevin Kelly calls this totality the "technium," and I like this word. But in this book I prefer to simply use "technology" for this because that reflects common use. The reason we need three meanings is that each points to technology in a different sense, a different category, from the others. Each category comes into being differently and evolves differently. A technology-singular-the steam engine-originates as a new concept and develops by modifying its internal parts. A technology-plural-electronics-comes into being by building around certain phenomena and components and develops by changing its parts and practices. And technology-general, the whole collection of all technologies that have ever existed past and present, originates from the use of natural phenomena and builds up organically with new elements forming by combination from old ones.
W. Brian Arthur (The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves)
The conception of substance, which is fundamental in the philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, is derived from the logical category of subject and predicate. Some words can be either subjects or predicates; e.g. I can say 'the sky is blue' and 'blue is a colour'. Other words—of which proper names are the most obvious instances—can never occur as predicates, but only as subjects, or as one of the terms of a relation. Such words are held to designate substances. Substances, in addition to this logical characteristic, persist through time, unless destroyed by God's omnipotence (which, one gathers, never happens). Every true proposition is either general, like 'all men are mortal', in which case it states that one predicate implies another, or particular, like 'Socrates is mortal', in which case the predicate is contained in the subject, and the quality denoted by the predicate is part of the notion of the substance denoted by the subject. Whatever happens to Socrates can be asserted in a sentence in which 'Socrates' is the subject and the words describing the happening in question are the predicate. All these predicates put together make up the 'notion' of Socrates. All belong to him necessarily, in this sense, that a substance of which they could not be truly asserted would not be Socrates, but some one else. Leibniz was a firm believer in the importance of logic, not only in its own sphere, but as the basis of metaphysics. He did work on mathematical logic which would have been
Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)
When a high IQ-test score is accompanied by subpar performance in some other domain, this is thought "surprising," and a new disability category is coined to name the surprise. So, similarly, the diagnostic criterion for mathematics disorder (sometimes termed dyscalculia) in DSM IV is that "Mathematical ability that falls substantially below that expected for the individual's chronological age, measured intelligence, and age-appropriate education" (p. 50)- The logic of discrepancy-based classification based on IQ-test performance has created a clear precedent whereby we are almost obligated to create a new disability category when an important skill domain is found to be somewhat dissociated from intelligence. It is just this logic that I exploited in creating a new category of disability- dysrationalia.T he proposed definition of the disability was as follows: Dysrationalia is the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence. It is a general term that refers to a heterogeneous group of disorders manifested by significant difficulties in belief formation, in the assessment of belief consistency, and/or in the determination of action to achieve one's goals. Although dysrationalia may occur concomitantly with other handicapping conditions (e.g., sensory impairment), dysrationalia is not the result of those conditions. The key diagnostic criterion for dysrationalia is a level of rationality, as demonstrated in thinking and behavior, that is significantly below the level of the individual's intellectual capacity (as determined by an individually administered IQ test).
Keith E. Stanovich (What Intelligence Tests Miss)
CYBERPOWER is now a fundamental fact of global life. In political, economic, and military affairs, information and information technology provide and support crucial elements of operational activities. U.S. national security efforts have begun to incorporate cyber into strategic calculations. Those efforts, however, are only a beginning. The critical conclusion...is that the United States must create an effective national and international strategic framework for the development and use of cyber as part of an overall national security strategy. Such a strategic framework will have both structural and geopolitical elements. Structural activities will focus on those parts of cyber that enhance capabilities for use in general. Those categories include heightened security, expanded development of research and human capital, improved governance, and more effective organization. Geopolitical activities will focus on more traditional national security and defense efforts. Included in this group are sophisticated development of network-centric operations; appropriate integrated planning of computer network attack capabilities; establishment of deterrence doctrine that incorporates cyber; expansion of effective cyber influence capabilities; carefully planned incorporation of cyber into military planning (particularly stability operations); establishment of appropriate doctrine, education, and training regarding cyber by the Services and nonmilitary elements so that cyber can be used effectively in a joint and/or multinational context; and generation of all those efforts at an international level, since cyber is inherently international and cannot be most effectively accomplished without international partners.
Franklin D. Kramer (Cyberpower and National Security)
The law that is imposed on us is the law of the confusion of categories. Everything is sexual. Everything is political. Everything is aesthetic. All at once. Everything has acquired a political meaning, especially since 1968; and it is not just everyday life but also madness, language, the media, even desire, that are politicized as they enter the sphere of liberation, the sphere of mass processes. Likewise everything has become sexual, anything can be an object of desire: power, knowledge - everything is interpreted in terms of phantasies, in terms of repression, and sexual stereotypy reigns in every last corner. Likewise, too, everything is now aestheticized: politics is aestheticized in the spectacle, sex in advertising and porn, and all kinds of activity in what is conventionally referred to as culture - a sort of all-pervasive media- and advertising-led semiologization: 'culture degree Xerox' . Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is political any more, the word itself is meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any more, and sex loses its determinants. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly any more, and art itself disappears. This paradoxical state of affairs, which is simultaneously the complete actualization of an idea, the perfect realization of the whole tendency of modernity, and the negation of that idea and that tendency, their annihilation by virtue of their very success, by virtue of their extension beyond their own bounds - this state of affairs is epitomized by a single figure: the transpolitical, the transsexual, the transaesthetic.
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
ON THE MODUS OPERANDI OF OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT, DONALD J. TRUMP "According to a new ABC/Washington Post poll, President Trump’s disapproval rating has hit a new high." The President's response to this news was "“I don’t do it for the polls. Honestly — people won’t necessarily agree with this — I do nothing for the polls,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “I do it to do what’s right. I’m here for an extended period of time. I’m here for a period that’s a very important period of time. And we are straightening out this country.” - Both Quotes Taken From Aol News - August 31, 2018 In The United States, as in other Republics, the two main categories of Presidential motivation for their assigned tasks are #1: Self Interest in seeking to attain and to hold on to political power for their own sakes, regarding the welfare of This Republic to be of secondary importance. #2: Seeking to attain and to hold on to the power of that same office for the selfless sake of this Republic's welfare, irregardless of their personal interest, and in the best of cases going against their personal interests to do what is best for this Republic even if it means making profound and extreme personal sacrifices. Abraham Lincoln understood this last mentioned motivation and gave his life for it. The primary information any political scientist needs to ascertain regarding the diagnosis of a particular President's modus operandi is to first take an insightful and detailed look at the individual's past. The litmus test always being what would he or she be willing to sacrifice for the Nation. In the case of our current President, Donald John Trump, he abandoned a life of liberal luxury linked to self imposed limited responsibilities for an intensely grueling, veritably non stop two year nightmare of criss crossing this immense Country's varied terrain, both literally and socially when he could have easily maintained his life of liberal leisure. While my assertion that his personal choice was, in my view, sacrificially done for the sake of a great power in a state of rapid decline can be contradicted by saying it was motivated by selfish reasons, all evidence points to the contrary. For knowing the human condition, fraught with a plentitude of weaknesses, for a man in the end portion of his lifetime to sacrifice an easy life for a hard working incessant schedule of thankless tasks it is entirely doubtful that this choice was made devoid of a special and even exalted inspiration to do so. And while the right motivations are pivotal to a President's success, what is also obviously needed are generic and specific political, military and ministerial skills which must be naturally endowed by Our Creator upon the particular President elected for the purposes of advancing a Nation's general well being for one and all. If one looks at the latest National statistics since President Trump took office, (such as our rising GNP, the booming market, the dramatically shrinking unemployment rate, and the overall positive emotive strains in regards to our Nation's future, on both the left and the right) one can make definitive objective conclusions pertaining to the exceptionally noble character and efficiency of the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And if one can drown out the constant communicative assaults on our current Commander In Chief, and especially if one can honestly assess the remarkable lack of substantial mistakes made by the current President, all of these factors point to a leader who is impressively strong, morally and in other imperative ways. And at the most propitious time. For the main reason that so many people in our Republic palpably despise our current President is that his political and especially his social agenda directly threatens their licentious way of life. - John Lars Zwerenz
John Lars Zwerenz
proper legal structure. The best structure is that of the Mondragon companies, which do not allow workers to own a tradable share of equity. Instead, in addition to their wages they each have an internal capital account the value of which depends on the business’s performance and on the number of hours the member works. A new member has to pay a large entrance fee, most of which is credited to his internal account. He receives interest at the end of every fiscal year, but he cannot withdraw the annually accumulating principal from his account until retirement. Almost all profits are divided between these individual accounts and a collective account that helps ensure the company’s survival. No buying or selling of shares takes place in this scheme, so it’s difficult for the firm to lose its worker-controlled status. Not until 1982, however, did the internal-capital-accounts legal structure exist in the United States (and then only in Massachusetts); prior to that, worker cooperatives had to make convoluted use of other categories, which sometimes made them vulnerable to degeneration.113 In any case, the survival rates of contemporary cooperatives put the lie to traditional theories of cooperatives’ unsustainability, for they appear to have higher rates of survival than conventional firms. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the death rate for co-ops in France (due either to dissolution or to conversion into a capitalist firm) was 6.9 percent; the comparable rate for capitalist competitors was 10 percent. A study in 1989 found much higher failure rates for capitalist companies than cooperatives in North America.114 A study conducted by Quebec’s Ministry of Industry and Commerce in 1999 concluded that “Co-op startups are twice as likely to celebrate their 10th birthday as conventionally owned private businesses.”115 A later study by the same organization found that “More than 6 out of 10 cooperatives survive more than five years, as compared to almost 4 businesses out of 10 for the private sector in Québec and in Canada in general. More than 4 out of 10 cooperatives survive more than 10 years, compared to 2 businesses out of 10 for the private sector.”116
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
But nothing in my previous work had prepared me for the experience of reinvestigating Cleveland. It is worth — given the passage of time — recalling the basic architecture of the Crisis: 121 children from many different and largely unrelated families had been taken into the care of Cleveland County Council in the three short months of the summer of 1987. (p18) The key to resolving the puzzle of Cleveland was the children. What had actually happened to them? Had they been abused - or had the paediatricians and social workers (as public opinion held) been over-zealous and plain wrong? Curiously — particularly given its high profile, year-long sittings and £5 million cost — this was the one central issue never addressed by the Butler-Sloss judicial testimony and sifting of internal evidence, the inquiry's remit did not require it to answer the main question. Ten years after the crisis, my colleagues and I set about reconstructing the records of the 121 children at its heart to determine exactly what had happened to them... (p19) Eventually, though, we did assemble the data given to the Butler-Sloss Inquiry. This divided into two categories: the confidential material, presented in camera, and the transcripts of public sessions of the hearings. Putting the two together we assembled our own database on the children each identified only by the code-letters assigned to them by Butler-Sloss. When it was finished, this database told a startlingly different story from the public myth. In every case there was some prima fade evidence to suggest the possibility of abuse. Far from the media fiction of parents taking their children to Middlesbrough General Hospital for a tummy ache or a sore thumb and suddenly being presented with a diagnosis of child sexual abuse, the true story was of families known to social services for months or years, histories of physical and sexual abuse of siblings and of prior discussions with parents about these concerns. In several of the cases the children themselves had made detailed disclosures of abuse; many of the pre-verbal children displayed severe emotional or behavioural symptoms consistent with sexual abuse. There were even some families in which a convicted sex offender had moved in with mother and children. (p20)
Sue Richardson (Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas)
There are two famous quips of Stalin which are both grounded in this logic. When Stalin answered the question "Which deviation is worse, the Rightist or the Leftist one?" by "They are both worse!", the underlying premise is that the Leftist deviation is REALLY ("objectively," as Stalinists liked to put it) not leftist at all, but a concealed Rightist one! When Stalin wrote, in a report on a party congress, that the delegates, with the majority of votes, unanimously approved the CC resolution, the underlying premise is, again, that there was really no minority within the party: those who voted against thereby excluded themselves from the party... In all these cases, the genus repeatedly overlaps (fully coincides) with one of its species. This is also what allows Stalin to read history retroactively, so that things "become clear" retroactively: it was not that Trotsky was first fighting for the revolution with Lenin and Stalin and then, at a certain stage, opted for a different strategy than the one advocated by Stalin; this last opposition (Trotsky/Stalin) "makes it clear" how, "objectively," Trotsky was against revolution all the time back. We find the same procedure in the classificatory impasse the Stalinist ideologists and political activists faced in their struggle for collectivization in the years 1928-1933. In their attempt to account for their effort to crush the peasants' resistance in "scientific" Marxist terms, they divided peasants into three categories (classes): the poor peasants (no land or minimal land, working for others), natural allies of the workers; the autonomous middle peasants, oscillating between the exploited and exploiters; the rich peasants, "kulaks" (employing other workers, lending them money or seeds, etc.), the exploiting "class enemy" which, as such, has to be "liquidated." However, in practice, this classification became more and more blurred and inoperative: in the generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied, and other two categories often joined kulaks in their resistance to forced collectivization. An additional category was thus introduced, that of a subkulak, a peasant who, although, with regard to his economic situation, was to poor to be considered a kulak proper, nonetheless shared the kulak "counter-revolutionary" attitude.
Slavoj Žižek
But Christianity has protected itself from the beginning. It begins with the teaching about sin. The category of sin is the category of individuality. Sin cannot be thought speculatively at all. The individual human being lies beneath the concept; an individual human being cannot be thought, but only the concept "man." —That is why speculation promptly embarks upon the teaching about the predominance of the generation over the individual, for it is too much to expect that speculation should acknowledge the impotence of the concept in relation to actuality. —But just as one individual person cannot be thought, neither can one individual sinner; sin can be thought (then it becomes negation), but not one individual sinner. That is precisely why there is no earnestness about sin if it is only to be thought, for earnestness is simply this: that you and I are sinners. Earnestness is not sin in general; rather, the accent of earnestness rests on the sinner, who is the single individual. With respect to "the single individual," speculation, if it is consistent, must make light of being a single individual or being that which cannot be thought. If it cares to do anything along this line, it must say to the individual: Is this anything to waste your time on? Forget it! To be an individual human being is to be nothing! Think—then you are all mankind: cogito ergo sum [I think therefore I am]. But perhaps that is a lie; perhaps instead the single individual human being and to be a single human being are the highest. Just suppose it is. To be completely consistent, then, speculation must also say: To be an individual sinner is not to be something; it lies beneath the concept; do not waste any time on it etc. [. . .] Sin is a qualification of the single individual; it is irresponsibility and new sin to pretend as if it were nothing to be an individual sinner—when one himself is this individual sinner. Here Christianity steps in, makes the sign of the cross before speculation; it is just as impossible for speculation to get around this issue as for a sailing vessel to sail directly against a contrary wind. The earnestness of sin is its actuality in the single individual, be it you or I. Speculatively, we are supposed to look away from the single individual; therefore, speculatively, we can speak only superficially about sin. The dialectic of sin is diametrically contrary to that of speculation
Søren Kierkegaard (The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening)
The Seventh Central Pay Commission was appointed in February 2014 by the Government of India (Ministry of Finance) under the Chairmanship of Justice Ashok Kumar Mathur. The Commission has been given 18 months to make its recommendations. The terms of reference of the Commission are as follows:  1. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure including pay, allowances and other facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, having regard to rationalisation and simplification therein as well as the specialised needs of various departments, agencies and services, in respect of the following categories of employees:-  (i) Central Government employees—industrial and non-industrial; (ii) Personnel belonging to the All India Services; (iii) Personnel of the Union Territories; (iv) Officers and employees of the Indian Audit and Accounts Department; (v) Members of the regulatory bodies (excluding the RBI) set up under the Acts of Parliament; and (vi) Officers and employees of the Supreme Court.   2. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure, concessions and facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, as well as the retirement benefits of the personnel belonging to the Defence Forces, having regard to the historical and traditional parties, with due emphasis on the aspects unique to these personnel.   3. To work out the framework for an emoluments structure linked with the need to attract the most suitable talent to government service, promote efficiency, accountability and responsibility in the work culture, and foster excellence in the public governance system to respond to the complex challenges of modern administration and the rapid political, social, economic and technological changes, with due regard to expectations of stakeholders, and to recommend appropriate training and capacity building through a competency based framework.   4. To examine the existing schemes of payment of bonus, keeping in view, inter-alia, its bearing upon performance and productivity and make recommendations on the general principles, financial parameters and conditions for an appropriate incentive scheme to reward excellence in productivity, performance and integrity.   5. To review the variety of existing allowances presently available to employees in addition to pay and suggest their rationalisation and simplification with a view to ensuring that the pay structure is so designed as to take these into account.   6. To examine the principles which should govern the structure of pension and other retirement benefits, including revision of pension in the case of employees who have retired prior to the date of effect of these recommendations, keeping in view that retirement benefits of all Central Government employees appointed on and after 01.01.2004 are covered by the New Pension Scheme (NPS).   7. To make recommendations on the above, keeping in view:  (i) the economic conditions in the country and the need for fiscal prudence; (ii) the need to ensure that adequate resources are available for developmental expenditures and welfare measures; (iii) the likely impact of the recommendations on the finances of the state governments, which usually adopt the recommendations with some modifications; (iv) the prevailing emolument structure and retirement benefits available to employees of Central Public Sector Undertakings; and (v) the best global practices and their adaptability and relevance in Indian conditions.   8. To recommend the date of effect of its recommendations on all the above.
M. Laxmikanth (Governance in India)
DEONTOLOGY AND CONCEQUENTIALISM, A NOVEL APPROACH: Consequentialism and Deontology (Deontological Ethics) are two contrasting categories of Normative Ethics, the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental principles that determine the morality of human actions (or non-actions). Their supposed difference is that while Consequentialism determines if an action is morally right or wrong by examining its consequences, Deontology focuses on the action itself, regardless of its consequences. To the hypothetical question “Should I do this man a little injustice, if by this I could save the whole humanity from torture and demise?”, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, a pure deontologist (absolutist) answers: “Fiat justitia, pereat mundus” (Do justice even if the whole world would perish). Superficially, it seems that a decent deontologist don’t care about consequences whatsoever. His/her one and only duty is to invariably obey to pre-existing, universal moral rules without exceptions: “do not kill”, “do not lie”, “do not use another human as a means to an end”, and so on. At this point I would like to present my thesis on this subject. The central idea here is that deontological ethics only appears to be indifferent to the consequences of an action. In fact, it is only these very consequences that determine what our moral rules and ethical duties should be. For example, the moral law “do not kill”, has its origin to the dire consequences that the killing of another human being brings about; for the victim (death), the perpetrator (often imprisonment or death) and for the whole humanity (collapse of society and civilization). Let us discuss the well-worn thought experiment of the mad axeman asking a mother where their young children are, so he can kill them. We suppose that the mother knows with 100% certainty that she can mislead him by lying and she can save her children from certain death (once again: supposing that she surely knows that she can save her children ONLY by lying, not by telling the truth or by avoiding to answer). In this thought experiment the hard deontologist would insist that it is immoral to lie, even if that would lead to horrible consequences. But, I assert that this deontological inflexibility is not only inhuman and unethical, it is also outrightly hypocritical. Because if the mother knows that their children are going to be killed if she tells the truth (or does not answer) and they are going to be saved if she tells a harmless lie, then by telling the truth she disobeys the moral law “do not kill/do not cause the death of an innocent”, which is much worse than the moral rule “do not lie”. The fact that she does not kill her children with her own hands is completely irrelevant. She could have saved them without harming another human, yet she chose not to. So the absolutist deontologist chooses actively to disobey a much more important moral law, only because she is not the immediate cause, but a cause via a medium (the crazy axeman in this particular thought experiment). So here are the two important conclusions: Firstly, Deontology in normative ethics is in reality a “masked consequentialism”, because the origin of a moral law is to be found in its consequences e.g. stealing is generally morally wrong, because by stealing, someone is deprived of his property that may be crucial for his survival or prosperity. Thus, the Deontology–Consequentialism dichotomy is a false one. And secondly, the fact that we are not the immediate “vessel” by which a moral rule is broken, but we nevertheless create or sustain a “chain of events” that will almost certainly lead to the breaking of a moral law, does surely not absolve us and does not give us the right to choose the worst outcome. Mister Immanuel Kant would avoid doing an innocent man an injustice, yet he would choose to lead billions of innocent people to agonizing death.
Giannis Delimitsos (NOVEL PHILOSOPHY: New ideas about Ethics, Epistemology, Science and the sweet Life)
What a joy this book is! I love recipe books, but it’s short-lived; I enjoy the pictures for several minutes, read a few pages, and then my eyes glaze over. They are basically books to be used in the kitchen for one recipe at a time. This book, however, is in a different class altogether and designed to be read in its entirety. It’s in its own sui generis category; it has recipes at the end of most of the twenty-one chapters, but it’s a book to be read from cover to cover, yet it could easily be read chapter by chapter, in any order, as they are all self-contained. Every bite-sized chapter is a flowing narrative from a well-stocked brain encompassing Balinese culture, geography and history, while not losing its main focus: food. As you would expect from a scholar with a PhD in history from Columbia University, the subject matter has been meticulously researched, not from books and articles and other people’s work, but from actually being on the ground and in the markets and in the kitchens of Balinese families, where the Balinese themselves learn their culinary skills, hands on, passed down orally, manually and practically from generation to generation. Vivienne Kruger has lived in Bali long enough to get it right. That’s no mean feat, as the subject has not been fully studied before. Yes, there are so-called Balinese recipe books, most, if I’m not mistaken, written by foreigners, and heavily adapted. The dishes have not, until now, been systematically placed in their proper cultural context, which is extremely important for the Balinese, nor has there been any examination of the numerous varieties of each type of recipe, nor have they been given their true Balinese names. This groundbreaking book is a pleasure to read, not just for its fascinating content, which I learnt a lot from, but for the exuberance, enthusiasm and originality of the language. There’s not a dull sentence in the book. You just can’t wait to read the next phrase. There are eye-opening and jaw-dropping passages for the general reader as Kruger describes delicacies from the village of Tengkudak in Tabanan district — grasshoppers, dragonflies, eels and live baby bees — and explains how they are caught and cooked. She does not shy away from controversial subjects, such as eating dog and turtle. Parts of it are not for the faint-hearted, but other parts make you want to go out and join the participants, such as the Nusa Lembongan fishermen, who sail their outriggers at 5.30 a.m. The author quotes Miguel Covarrubias, the great Mexican observer of the 1930s, who wrote “The Island of Bali.” It has inspired all writers since, including myself and my co-author, Ni Wayan Murni, in our book “Secrets of Bali, Fresh Light on the Morning of the World.” There is, however, no bibliography, which I found strange at first. I can only imagine it’s a reflection of how original the subject matter is; there simply are no other sources. Throughout the book Kruger mentions Balinese and Indonesian words and sometimes discusses their derivations. It’s a Herculean task. I was intrigued to read that “satay” comes from the Tamil word for flesh ( sathai ) and that South Indians brought satay to Southeast Asia before Indonesia developed its own tradition. The book is full of interesting tidbits like this. The book contains 47 recipes in all, 11 of which came from Murni’s own restaurant, Murni’s Warung, in Ubud. Mr Dolphin of Warung Dolphin in Lovina also contributed a number of recipes. Kruger adds an introduction to each recipe, with a detailed and usually very personal commentary. I think my favorite, though, is from a village priest (pemangku), I Made Arnila of the Ganesha (Siwa) Temple in Lovina. water. I am sure most will enjoy this book enormously; I certainly did.” Review published in The Jakarta Globe, April 17, 2014. Jonathan Copeland is an author and photographer based in Bali. thejakartaglobe/features/spiritual-journey-culinary-world-bali
Vivienne Kruger
Although there are four general types of emotionally immature parent, their children tend to fall into just two main categories: internalizers and externalizers. In the next chapter, we’ll take a look at these two very different coping styles.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
Intellectual Fascism – 1/3 If fascism is defined as the arbitrary belief that individuals possessing certain traits (such as those who are white, Aryan, or male) are intrinsically superior to individuals possessing certain other traits (such as those who are black, Jewish, or female), and that therefore the "superior" individuals should have distinct politico-social privileges, then the vast majority of (American) liberals and so called antifascists are actually intellectual fascists. In fact, the more politico-economically liberal our citizens are, the more intellectually fascistic they often tend to be. Intellectual fascism - in accordance with the above definition - is the arbitrary belief that individuals possessing certain traits (such as those who are intelligent, cultured, artistic, creative, or achieving) are intrinsically superior to individuals possessing certain other traits (such as those who are stupid, uncultured, unartistic, uncreative, or unachieving). The reason why the belief of the intellectual fascist, like that of the politico-social fascist, is arbitrary is simple: there is no objective evidence to support it. At bottom, it is based on value judgements or prejudices which are definitional in character and are not empirically validatable, nor is it falsifiable. It is a value chosen by a group of prejudiced people - and not necessarily by a majority. This is not to deny that verifiable differences exist among various individuals. They certainly do. Blacks, in some ways, are different from whites; short people do differ from tall ones; stupid individuals can be separated from bright ones. Anyone who denies this, whatever his or her good intentions, is simply not accepting reality. Human differences, moreover, usually have their distinct advantages. Under tropical conditions, the darkly pigmented blacks seem to fare better than do the lightly pigmented whites. At the same time, many blacks and fewer whites become afflicted with sickle-cell anaemia. When it comes to playing basketball, tall men are generally superior to short ones. But as jockeys and coxswains, the undersized have their day. For designing and operating electric computers, a plethora of gray matter is a vital necessity; for driving a car for long distances, it is likely to prove a real handicap. Let us face the fact, then, that under certain conditions some human traits are more advantageous - or "better" - than some other traits. Whether we approve the fact or not, they are. All people, in today's world, may be created free, but they certainly are not created equal. Granting that this is so, the important question is: Does the possession of a specific advantageous endowment make an individual a better human? Or more concretely: Does the fact that someone is an excellent athlete, artist, author, or achiever make him or her a better person? Consciously or unconsciously, both the "politico-social" and the "intellectual fascist" say yes to these questions. This is gruesomely clear when we consider politico-social or lower-order fascists. For they honestly and openly not only tell themselves and the world that being white, Aryan, or male, or a member of the state-supported party is a grand and glorious thing; but, simultaneously, they just as honestly and openly admit that they despise, loathe, consider as scum of the earth individuals who are not so fortunate as to be in these select categories. Lower-order fascists at least have the conscious courage of their own convictions. Not so, alas, intellectual or higher-order fascists. For they almost invariably pride themselves on their liberality, humanitarianism, and lack of arbitrary prejudice against certain classes of people. But underneath, just because they have no insight into their fascistic beliefs, they are often more vicious, in their social effects, than their lower-order counterparts.
Albert Ellis
Table 6.1 Skill Categories Skill Category Description Comment Determining the Meaning of Words (Word Meaning) Student determines the meaning of words in context by recognizing known words and connecting them to prior vocabulary knowledge. Student uses a variety of skills to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words, including pronouncing words to trigger recognition, searching for related words with similar meanings, and analyzing prefixes, roots, and suffixes. This skill category includes more than just lexical access, as word identification and lexical recall are combined with morphological analyses. Understanding the Content, Form, and Function of Sentences (Sentence Meaning) Student builds upon an understanding of words and phrases to determine the meaning of a sentence. Student analyzes sentence structures and draws on an understanding of grammar rules to determine how the parts of speech in a sentence operate together to support the overall meaning. Student confirms that his or her understanding of a sentence makes sense in relationship to previous sentences, personal experience, and general knowledge of the world. This skill category focuses on the syntactical, grammatical, and semantic case analyses that support elementary proposition encoding and integration of propositions across contiguous sentences. Understanding the Situation Implied by a Text (Situation Model) Student develops a mental model (i.e., image, conception) of the people, things, setting, actions, ideas, and events in a text. Student draws on personal experience and world knowledge to infer cause-and-effect relationships between actions and events to fill in additional information needed to understand the situation implied by the text. This skill category is a hybrid of the explicit text model and the elaborated situation model described by Kintsch (1998). As such, category three combines both lower-level explicit text interpretation and higher-level inferential processes that connect the explicit text to existing knowledge structures and schemata. Understanding the Content, Form, and Function of Larger Sections of Text (Global Text Meaning) Student synthesizes the meaning of multiple sentences into an understanding of paragraphs or larger sections of texts. Student recognizes a text’s organizational structure and uses that organization to guide his or her reading. Student can identify the main point of, summarize, characterize, or evaluate the meaning of larger sections of text. Student can identify underlying assumptions in a text, recognize implied consequences, and draw conclusions from a text. This skill category focuses on the integration of local propositions into macro-level text structures (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978) and more global themes (Louwerse & Van Peer, 2003). It also includes elaborative inferencing that supports interpretation and critical comprehension, such as identifying assumptions, causes, and consequence and drawing conclusions at the level of the situation model. Analyzing Authors’ Purposes, Goals, and Strategies (Pragmatic Meaning) Student identifies an author’s intended audience and purposes for writing. Student analyzes an author’s choices regarding content, organization, style, and genre, evaluating how those choices support the author’s purpose and are appropriate for the intended audience and situation. This skill category includes contextual and pragmatic discourse analyses that support interpretation of texts in light of inferred authorial intentions and strategies.
Danielle S. McNamara (Reading Comprehension Strategies: Theories, Interventions, and Technologies)
There is no way to write the perfect book for everyone in modern policing, as your work environment may not reflect exactly what has been laid out here. As the caveat for new car fuel consumption warns, your mileage may differ. But, in general, there are some common useful areas. The aim is to identify recurring problems that are concerns to the public and the police. The lists in Box 3.2 are not exhaustive nor do you have to include them all if some are not relevant; however, they may help you get started in terms of categories to explore.
Jerry H. Ratcliffe (Reducing Crime: A Companion for Police Leaders)
1975 was International Women's Year. I had never heard the word 'feminism' before then. I was writing my books from the experiences of my own life and from watching and studying the lives of those around me in general. I did not know that writing the way I was, was putting me into a special category. I had the first inkling of it on 28 June 1975 when the International Women's League invited me to give a speech.
Buchi Emecheta (Head Above Water)
Red activities are extremely sedentary, such as lounging and watching TV, and burn just 0 to 50 calories per hour. Yellow activities generally have you up on your feet and puttering about. Activities such as standing and stretching while on the phone and chopping vegetables for dinner fall in this category. A few of the more energetic sitting activities, such as board games (e.g., Cranium), crafts, and sewing, also fall into yellow. They burn 50 to 100 calories per hour. Green activities have you on the move and include things such as mowing the lawn and playing with your kids. They burn 100 to 200 calories an hour.
James A. Levine (Move a Little, Lose a Lot: New N.E.A.T. Science Reveals How to Be Thinner, Happier, and Smarter)
Citizen Courtney Hall of the yulp caste, in the name of the Compassionate Society, you are under arrest for a Category Eight PainCrime violation; namely that you did, at or about twenty-thirty of the previous day, unlawfully gain access to, and utilize, a restricted security code, and through use of same, did with full cognizance and malice aforethought cause the general publication of Material Detrimental to the General Populace as specified under Section 29C, Paragraph 12, subsection 6, of the Social Responsibility (Publications and Mass Media) Act: Satire, Irony, and Associated Nonconstructive Criticism.
Ian McDonald (Out on Blue Six)
Police-Citizen Interactions At a high level, it is easiest to separate contacts into two broad categories: citizen-initiated and self-initiated. Generally speaking, most self-initiated encounters are traffic stops. Of deadly incidents in 2015, 73% did not begin on a traffic stop, and 27% began on traffic stops.
Nick Selby (In Context: Understanding Police Killings of Unarmed Civilians)
Essentially you can put pet owners into one of four categories—excellent, good, fair, and bad or abusive. The excellent pet owner absolutely adores and loves his pets and will do anything for them. This pet owner has made an absolute bond with his or her pets that many times supersedes even human relationships, and these types of owners can treat their pets like human beings. This category of pet owner generally considers his pets to be part of his family, and because they are animal lovers they usually have more than one pet. They also tend to spend more money on their pets and on health care for their pets. The good pet owner is probably the category under which most pet owners fall. The good owners treat their pets kindly and give them varying amounts of attention and love and may or may not consider them to be part of the family. This category of pet owner also includes the majority of families that have children. Typically because the family does have children, pets may not get the attention and devotion that the excellent pet owner gives, simply because there is not as much to go around after the children get their rightful share. The fair pet owner is generally one that doesn’t necessarily give a lot of attention or love to their pets, but does make sure that they are properly fed and basically taken care of. You will find this owner many times to be one who has animals as service or working animals as well as pets. Their pets may work for their room and board, so to speak. You will also find that this owner has too many things going on in his life to give much time or attention to his pet, and usually his pet is not an indoor pet. These pet owners may like animals but aren’t necessarily big animal lovers. This type of owner also will give his pet away or give him to the pound if the pet becomes too much of an inconvenience in his life. Generally speaking, this type of owner should not have pets because he doesn’t give them the love and attention that they should have, and the only thing that saves him from being a bad owner is that he does feed and care for them minimally well. The bad pet owner is just that—not only a bad owner but a bad human being. These pet owners give their pets practically no attention or love and, in fact, many times will beat and abuse them unmercifully. This type of owner will also translate that abuse into their own lives and many times will be involved in alcohol or drug abuse, unlawful activities, and perhaps into child and spousal abuse. This is the owner that will starve or neglect his animals or even train them to fight for pleasure or profit. Sharing
Sylvia Browne (All Pets Go to Heaven: The Spiritual Lives of the Animals We Love)
The logo for this growing professional community [Christian psychotherapy] was the word integration. Through articles and books the integrationist agenda was hammered out. Psychology and theology would mutually stimulate one another. Liberals had simply bowed to psychology as a superior authority. In contrast, integrationist evangelicals sought to interact with psychology in a sophisticated manner, hoping to weed out the tares of error form the wheat of truth. They sought to plunder psychological data and explanatory categories, utilizing a grid of general scriptural themes. The sought to profit from psychology's practices and institutional arrangements, under the guidance of general scriptural principles.
David A. Powlison (Power Religion: The Selling Out of the Evangelical Church?)
Job-defined markets are generally much larger than product category-defined markets. Marketers who are stuck in the mental trap that equates market size with product categories don’t understand whom they are competing against from the customer’s point of view. Notice
Harvard Business Publishing (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing (with featured article "Marketing Myopia," by Theodore Levitt))
My best friend and I used to play a game sometimes...we'd divide everyone we knew into two categories based on the way they related to a single qualifying factor. It was a way to make sweeping generalizations that were wildly inaccurate, but invariably amusing to pronounce. For instance, people fall into two categories, those who listen to music to 'put' them in a certain mood, and those who listen to music because they're already 'in' a certain mood.
Kemper Donovan (The Decent Proposal)