“
Juliana?” the words were low and far—too calm for her husband, who had found that he rather enjoyed the full spectrum of emotion now that he had experienced it.
“Yes?”
“What are you doing twenty feet in the air?”
“Looking for a book.”
“Would you mind very much returning to the earth?”
“What are you thinking, climbing to the rafters in your condition?”
“I am not an invalid, Simon, I still have use of all my extremes.”
“You do indeed—particularly your extreme ability to try my patience—I believe, however, that you mean extremities.
”
”
Sarah MacLean (Eleven Scandals to Start to Win a Duke's Heart (Love By Numbers, #3))
“
Vices are simply overworked virtues, anyway. Economy and frugality are to be commended but follow them on in an increasing ratio and what do we find at the other end? A miser! If we overdo the using of spare moments we may find an invalid at the end, while perhaps if we allowed ourselves more idle time we would conserve our nervous strength and health to more than the value the work we could accomplish by emulating at all times the little busy bee.
I once knew a woman, not very strong, who to the wonder of her friends went through a time of extraordinary hard work without any ill effects.
I asked her for her secret and she told me that she was able to keep her health, under the strain, because she took 20 minutes, of each day in which to absolutely relax both mind and body. She did not even “set and think.” She lay at full length, every muscle and nerve relaxed and her mind as quiet as her body. This always relieved the strain and renewed her strength.
”
”
Laura Ingalls Wilder
“
But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power: and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a super-professor. all men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character.… Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too?
”
”
Robertson Davies (The Manticore (The Deptford Trilogy, #2))
“
When basic human needs are ignored, rejected, or invalidated by those in roles and positions to appropriately meet them; when the means by which these needs have been previously met are no longer available: and when prior abuse has already left one vulnerable for being exploited further, the stage is set for the possibility these needs will be prostituted. This situation places a survivor who has unmet needs in an incredible dilemma. She can either do without or seek the satisfaction of mobilized needs through some "illegitimate" source that leaves her increasingly divided from herself and ostracized from others.
While meeting needs in this way resolves the immediate existential experience of deprivation and abandonment. it produces numerous other difficulties. These include experiencing oneself as “bad” or "weak" for having such strong needs; experiencing shame and guilt for relying on “illegitimate” sources of satisfaction: experiencing a loss of self-respect for indulging in activities contrary to personal moral standards of conduct; risking the displeasure and misunderstanding of others important to her; and opening oneself to the continued abuse and victimization of perpetrators who are all too willing to selfishly use others for their own pleasure and purposes under the guise of being 'helpful.
”
”
J. Jeffrey Means
“
This term is used in the 1944 Ingrid Bergman film Gaslight, in which a husband purposefully drives his wife insane by flickering lights, making noises in the attic, and then claiming the very real experience was all in her head.
”
”
Samantha Rodman (How to Talk to Your Kids about Your Divorce: Healthy, Effective Communication Techniques for Your Changing Family)
“
it is no wonder that it is hard for us to know, let alone admit, that we are angry. Why are angry women so threatening to others? If we are guilty, depressed, or self-doubting, we stay in place. We do not take action except against our own selves and we are unlikely to be agents of personal and social change. In contrast, angry women may change and challenge the lives of us all, as witnessed by the past decade of feminism. And change is an anxiety-arousing and difficult business for everyone, including those of us who are actively pushing for it. Thus, we too learn to fear our own anger, not only because it brings about the disapproval of others, but also because it signals the necessity for change. We may begin to ask ourselves questions that serve to block or invalidate our own experience of anger: “Is my anger legitimate?” “Do I have a right to be angry?” “What’s the use of my getting angry?” “What good will it do?” These questions can be excellent ways of silencing ourselves and shutting off our anger.
”
”
Harriet Lerner (The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships)
“
no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine -- not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business. But above all that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were really useful [...] Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible because they were given in small doses) but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and those who loved her -- and that is why there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homoeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering.
”
”
Leo Tolstoy
“
A refusal on the part of psychiatrists and therapists to validate the horrors of their patients' tortured past implies a refusal to take seriously the unconscious psychological mechanisms that individuals need to use to protect themselves from the unspeakable. Such a denial is, however, no longer ethical, for it is in the human capacity to dissociate that lies part of the secret of both childhood abuse and the horrors of the Nazi genocide, both forms of human violence so often carried out by 'respectable' men and women.
”
”
Felicity De Zulueta (From Pain to Violence: The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness)
“
Literature is a field a great many men consider theirs by right. Virginia Woolf committed successful competition in that field. She barely escaped the first and most effective punishment--omission from the literary canon after her death. Yet eighty or ninety years later charges of snobbery and invalidism are still used to discredit and diminish her. Marcel Proust's limitations and his neuroticism were at least as notable as hers. But that Proust needed not only a room of his own but a cork-lined one is taken as proof he was a genius. That Woolf heard the birds singing in Greek shows only that she was a sick woman.
”
”
Ursula K. Le Guin (No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters)
“
Our musicians in residence carry this belief into the classroom. They don't think of children's self-esteem as so fragile that it will be shattered by the suggestion that the child guessed wrong or jumped to an invalid conclusion. They make corrections matter-of-factly, with no feeling that a chid is a failure because she has made an error, but with ocnfidence that the feedback will help the child learn and be accurate the next time.
”
”
Peter Perret (A Well-Tempered Mind: Using Music to Help Children Listen and Learn)
“
She was practically an invalid ever after I could remember her, but used what strength she had in lavish care upon me and my sister, who was three years younger. There was a touch of mysticism and poetry in her nature which made her love to gaze at the purple sunsets and watch the evening stars. Whatever was grand and beautiful in form and color attracted her. It seemed as though the rich green tints of the foliage and the blossoms of the flowers came for her in the springtime, and in the autumn it was for her that the mountain sides were struck with crimson and with gold.
”
”
Calvin Coolidge (Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge)
“
Spread love and understanding,” Reacher said. “Use force if necessary.” “Who said that?” “Leon Trotsky, I think.” “He was stabbed to death with an ice pick. In Mexico.” “That doesn’t invalidate his overall position. Not in and of itself.” “What was his overall position?” “Solid. He also said, if you can’t acquaint an opponent with reason, you must acquaint his head with the sidewalk. He was a man of sound instincts. In his private life, I mean. Apart from getting stabbed to death with an ice pick in Mexico, that is.
”
”
Lee Child (Never Go Back (Jack Reacher, #18))
“
Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghost of souls who hadn't lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X's without Y's. Y's without X's. They applied at her womb and were denied, but, meant for her and no one else, they wouldn't go away. Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers, they hunkered in her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs. Often to her chagrin, they would soften the voice she used in the marketplace. When she spilled wine, it was their playful antics that jostled the glass. They called out her name in the bath or when she passed real children in the street. The spirit babies were everywhere her companions, and everywhere they left her lonesome - yet they no more bore her resentment than a seed resents uneaten fruit. Like pet gnats, like phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into eternity.
”
”
Tom Robbins (Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates)
“
The rickshaw was invented by an American missionary, Jonathan Scobie, who first used it to wheel his invalid wife through the streets of Yokohama, Japan, in 1869.
”
”
John Lloyd (The Book of General Ignorance)
“
Don’t bother trying to figure out why someone thinks a particular thing about you. You cannot read their mind, only your own. And if you consider their judgment unfair, invalid, and useless, just put it in your “garbage from somebody who doesn’t know me” drawer and move on.
”
”
Zoe McKey (Catching Courage: Understand Your Fears, Control Your Anxieties and Make Better Decisions - Use Obstacles To Your Benefit)
“
Using the tactic of gaslighting, the manipulator denies, and therefore invalidates, reality. Invalidating reality distorts or undermines the victim’s perceptions of their world and can even lead them to question their own sanity. "I don't know where you got that idea." "It's all in your head.
”
”
Adelyn Birch (30 Covert Emotional Manipulation Tactics: How Manipulators Take Control In Personal Relationships)
“
So, maybe we’re the
generation of the selfie,
but we’re also the generation
that grew up in a tainted,
Photoshopped world
with every impossible beauty standard
shoved down our throat
through a tube
because eating has become
a guilty pleasure
and condemning beauty ideals
won’t go straight to our thighs.
And if, by chance,
we are able to destroy the
demons that you’ve planted
inside of us with your
constant advertisements and rules
that play behind our eyelids and
take root in our brains,
then let us take our fucking pictures
and capture that moment when
we felt beautiful because all this world
has taught us is that
our beauty is the greatest
measure of our worth.
Scoff at our phones all you like,
these delicate extensions of
our fingers, but know that
through this technology
that you couldn’t even
begin to understand,
we have smudged the entire
world with our fingerprints.
We are the generation of knowledge,
and we are learning more than
any that came before us.
So, frown at my typing fingers;
I am using them to grasp power
by the throat.
Try to invalidate us,
but we’ve heard our
parents talking about
the world’s crashing and burning
since we had sprung from the womb.
We know you’ve fucked up,
and we’re angry about it-
the kind of anger that
fuels knowledge,
that I feel in my veins every time
I read the news from my phone
before school,
that sticks in my throat like honey
in a debate;
the kind of anger that simmers,
that sharpens teeth into daggers,
that makes this generation more dangerous
than you could have ever imagined.
We are the generation of change,
and goddammit, we’re coming.
”
”
E.P. .
“
In moving through apprehensive chills to mounting excitement and waves of moist tingling warmth, the body, with its innate capacity to heal, melts the iceberg created by deeply frozen trauma. Anxiety and despair can become creative wellspring when we allow ourselves to experience bodily sensations, such as trembling, that stem from traumatic symptoms. Held within the symptoms of trauma are the very energies, potentials, and resources necessary for their constructive transformation. The creative healing process can be blocked in a number of ways—by using drugs to suppress symptoms, by overemphasizing adjustment or control, or by denial or invalidation of feelings and sensations.
”
”
Peter A. Levine (Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma)
“
Now, I will make better use of my body and be useful by increasing food production just a little, then I will bid farewell to this world. It would be good to lighten the burden on this country. That is my path to best serve my country as a useless invalid. I want to die soon.
”
”
Osamu Dazai (パンドラの匣)
“
There is an appearance of humility in the protestation that the truth is much greater than any one of us can grasp, but if this is used to invalidate all claims to discern the truth it is in fact an arrogant claim to a kind of knowledge which is superior to [all others]...We have to ask: 'What is the [absolute] vantage ground from which you claim to be able to relativize all the absolute claims these different scriptures make?
”
”
Lesslie Newbigin
“
Fond of bewailing the decadence of the modern world, of denouncing the younger generation for its lack of idealism and public spirit, he is blind to the fact of his own enormous selfishness. He is one of those invalids who make use of their real or imagined sufferings to get their own way.
”
”
Christopher Isherwood (Jacob's Hands: A Fable)
“
It’s the process of being minimized, invalidated, silenced. It’s the process of being subjected to whatever someone else thinks I owe them. It’s the process of being used, examined, explored, and thrown away. It’s the process of being convinced to comply with the orders of someone who does not see me as their equal, someone who sees nothing wrong with the notion that I’m somehow lesser than they are. Rape isn’t about sex; it’s about all those other things. It’s about power.
”
”
Agnostic Zetetic
“
For invalid user name and password combinations, the service should return a 400 HTTP status code, which means that the server received a “bad request.” The service could also use the 401 (“unauthorized”) response code, but that code specifies that authentication credentials need to be in the request header, which is not quite what is required.
”
”
Paul Dix
“
I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of Gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I had found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. . . . I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.
”
”
Carl Sagan
“
03:11
And in the past few years, we've been able to propagate this lie even further via social media. You may have seen images like this one: "The only disability in life is a bad attitude." Or this one: "Your excuse is invalid." Indeed. Or this one: "Before you quit, try!" These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there. You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth. You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs. And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn. (Laughter) And I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, "Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person."
But what if you are that person?
”
”
Stella Young
“
Social democracy as we now know it underwent its moment of speciation when Eduard Bernstein began to question the orthodoxy of revolution. His essential postulate was the absence of crises. The Steven Pinker of socialism, he pointed to the empirical fact that no serious crisis had rocked the capitalist economy for the past two or three decades, which invalidated the Marxian prophecy of a system trending towards collapse. Since it was not prone to malfunctioning, the idea of seizing power, smashing decrepit capitalism and installing a completely different order had become redundant; instead social democracy could continue to grow in strength, extract piecemeal reforms and gradually lift the working class out of the mire. Rosa Luxemburg very famously objected that the crisis tendencies had merely been postponed. In the near future, they would burst forth with even more dreadful violence. Ignoring her prognosis, the social democrats in the making went ahead and presently gave their first demonstration of how they dealt with catastrophe: by expediting it through consent.
”
”
Andreas Malm (Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century)
“
it’s hardly headline news that the corporate state and its media are using the latest gadget-com and gimmick-tech to dumb us down as steadily as if they were standing on a stool and pounding our brains with a frozen ham.
”
”
Tom Robbins (Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates: A Novel)
“
Granted, vegetarian naming wrests meat eating from a context of acceptance; this does not invalidate its mission. One thing must be acknowledged about vegetarian naming as exemplified in the above examples: these are true words. The dissonance they produce is not due to their being false, but to their being too accurate. These words do not adhere to our common discourse which presumes the edibility of animals.
Just as feminists proclaimed that 'rape is violence, not sex,' vegetarians wish to name the violence of meat eating. Both groups challenge commonly used terms. Mary Daly calls the phrase 'forcible rape' a reversal by redundancy because it implies that all rapes are not forcible. This example highlights the role of language in masking violence, in this case an adjective deflects attention from the violence inherent in the meaning of the noun. The adjective confers a certain benignity on the word 'rape.' Similarly, the phrase 'humane slaughter' confers a certain benignity on the term 'slaughter.' Daly would call this the process of 'simple inversion': 'the usage of terms and phrases to label...activities as the opposite of what they really are.' The use of adjectives in the phrases 'humane slaughter' and 'forcible rape' promotes a conceptual misfocusing that relativizes these acts of violence. Additionally, as we ponder how the end is achieved, 'forcibly,' 'humanely,' our attention is continously framed so that the absent referents--women, animals--do not appear. Just as all rapes are forcible, all slaughter of animals for food is inhumane regardless of what it is called.
”
”
Carol J. Adams (The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory)
“
Three invalids.—Sufferings of George and Harris.—A victim to one hundred and seven fatal maladies.—Useful prescriptions.—Cure for liver complaint in children.—We agree that we are overworked, and need rest.—A week on the rolling deep?—George suggests the River.—Montmorency lodges an objection.—Original motion carried by majority of three to one.
”
”
Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog))
“
The difference between the Sophist and the ignorant (or stupid) is not the difference between an intentional error (into which one falls in order to trip up one's adversary) and an unintentional error (of which both interlocutors are victims). The Sophist should not be interpreted as someone who uses error as a trap and uses faulty reasoning as a crafty weapon. He occupies a different dimension from that of true or faulty reasoning; he is on the side of the semblance of reasoning. He occupies the dimension of shadow and reflection; he occupies a reasoning mirage, but he does not really reason. And this invalidation, produced not by error but by semblance, affects not only the Sophist's reasoning moreover, it affects all his wisdom, his sophia.
”
”
Michel Foucault (Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971, & Oedipal Knowledge)
“
History lessons remind us that the states in which we live, their institutions, even their laws, have come to us through conflict, often of the most bloodthirsty sort. Our daily diet of news brings us reports of the shedding of blood, often in regions quite close to our homelands, in circumstances that deny our conception of cultural normality altogether. We succeed, all the same, in consigning the lessons both of history and of reportage to a special and separate category of "otherness" which invalidate our expectations of how our own world will be tomorrow and the day after not at all. Our institutions and our laws, we tell ourselves, have set the human potentiality for violence about with such restraints that violence in everyday life will be punished as criminal by our laws, while its use by our institutions of state will take the particular form of "civilised warfare.
”
”
John Keegan (A History of Warfare)
“
In general, I felt as if I couldn’t win, that no amount of faith or hard work would push me past my detractors and their attempts to invalidate me. I was female, black, and strong, which to certain people, maintaining a certain mind-set, translated only to “angry.” It was another damaging cliché, one that’s been forever used to sweep minority women to the perimeter of every room, an unconscious signal not to listen to what we’ve got to say.
”
”
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
“
The great tendency of all persons who study techniques is to make distinctions. They distinguish between the different elements of technique, maintaining some and discarding others. They distinguish between technique and the use to which it is put. These distinctions are completely invalid and show only that he who makes them has understood nothing of the technical phenomenon. Its parts are ontologically tied together; in it, use is inseparable from being.
”
”
Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society)
“
Common phrases narcissists use and what they actually mean:
1. I love you.
Translation: I love owning you. I love controlling you. I love using you. It feels so good to love-bomb you, to sweet-talk you, to pull you in and to discard you whenever I please. When I flatter you, I can have anything I want. You trust me. You open up so easily, even after you’ve already been mistreated. Once you’re hooked and invested, I’ll pull the rug beneath your feet just to watch you fall.
2. I am sorry you feel that way.
Translation: Sorry, not sorry. Let’s get this argument over with already so I can continue my abusive behavior in peace. I am not sorry that I did what I did, I am sorry I got caught. I am sorry you’re calling me out. I am sorry that I am being held accountable. I am sorry you have the emotions that you do. To me, they’re not valid because I am entitled to have everything I want – regardless of how you feel about it.
3. You’re oversensitive/overreacting.
Translation: You’re having a perfectly normal reaction to an immense amount of bullshit, but all I see is that you’re catching on. Let me gaslight you some more so you second-guess yourself. Emotionally invalidating you is the key to keeping you compliant. So long as you don’t trust yourself, you’ll work that much harder to rationalize, minimize and deny my abuse.
4. You’re crazy.
Translation: I am a master of creating chaos to provoke you. I love it when you react. That way, I can point the finger and say you’re the crazy one. After all, no one would listen to what you say about me if they thought you were just bitter or unstable.
5. No one would believe you.
Translation: I’ve isolated you to the point where you feel you have no support. I’ve smeared your name to others ahead of time so people already suspect the lies I’ve told about you. There are still others who might believe you, though, and I can’t risk being caught. Making you feel alienated and alone is the best way for me to protect my image. It’s the best way to convince you to remain silent and never speak the truth about who I really am.
”
”
Shahida Arabi
“
We’ll have to reason with them.” “Are you serious?” “Spread love and understanding,” Reacher said. “Use force if necessary.” “Who said that?” “Leon Trotsky, I think.” “He was stabbed to death with an ice pick. In Mexico.” “That doesn’t invalidate his overall position. Not in and of itself.” “What was his overall position?” “Solid. He also said, if you can’t acquaint an opponent with reason, you must acquaint his head with the sidewalk. He was a man of sound instincts. In his private life, I mean. Apart from getting stabbed to death with an ice pick in Mexico, that is.
”
”
Lee Child (Never Go Back (Jack Reacher, #18))
“
Every culture has its own creation myth, its own cosmology. And in some respects every cosmology is true, even if I might flatter myself in assuming mine is somehow truer because it is scientific. But it seems to me that no culture, including scientific culture, has cornered the market on definitive answers when it comes to the ultimate questions. Science may couch its models in the language of mathematics and observational astronomy, while other cultures use poetry and sacrificial propitiations to defend theirs. But in the end, no one knows, at least not yet. The current flux in the state of scientific cosmology attests to this, as we watch physicists and astronomers argue over string theory and multiverses and the cosmic inflation hypothesis. Many of the postulates of modern cosmology lie beyond, or at least at the outer fringes, of what can be verified through observation. As a result, aesthetics—as reflected by the “elegance” of the mathematical models—has become as important as observation in assessing the validity of a cosmological theory. There is the assumption, sometimes explicit and sometimes not, that the universe is rationally constructed, that it has an inherent quality of beauty, and that any mathematical model that does not exemplify an underlying, unifying simplicity is to be considered dubious if not invalid on such criteria alone. This is really nothing more than an article of faith; and it is one of the few instances where science is faith-based, at least in its insistence that the universe can be understood, that it “makes sense.” It is not entirely a faith-based position, in that we can invoke the history of science to support the proposition that, so far, science has been able to make sense, in a limited way, of much of what it has scrutinized. (The psychedelic experience may prove to be an exception.)
”
”
Dennis J. McKenna (The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss)
“
Tell me, amigo," said Switters in a voice just loud enough to penetrate the fellow's earphones, "do you know why boom-boom movies are so popular? Do you know why young males, especially, love, simply love, to see things blown apart?"
The man stared blankly at Switters brightly. "Freedom from the material world. Subconsciously, people feel trapped by our culture's confining buildings and its relentless avalanche of consumer goods. So, when they watch all this shit being demolished in a totally irreverent and devil-may-care fashion, they experience the kind of release the Greeks used to get from their tragedies. The ecstasy of psychic liberation.
”
”
Tom Robbins (Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates)
“
When children become teenagers, their feelings are often invalidated by others because they have a hard time expressing them. They can’t find the words to use so adults deem their emotions as a “stage of adolescence.” As a result, everything beautiful and raw about life is reduced to a phase they're supposed to grow out of. Although how often is our growth just abandonment? Some people don’t mature, they just run away from their problems faster than they used to and happen to age. We greatly underestimate the tragedy of leaving behind the unaddressed. Many of our most intuitive and sincere experiences are lost to time. It is one of life’s saddest deficits
”
”
Kristian Ventura (Cardiac Ablation)
“
Many energy companies will use models to value assets with lifetimes of 20 years or longer—things like power plants, pipelines, and natural gas wells. Even if the model was sufficient when first developed, it can still fail before its lifetime is up. Assumptions made 15 years earlier are often invalidated due to regulatory changes, population shifts, and technological changes. Exacerbating this problem is the problem of employee turnover—commonly, the original developers of the models have moved to other jobs when problems develop. After a number of years, organizations need to take steps to ensure that someone still understands every model that is in production.
”
”
Davis W. Edwards (Energy Trading and Investing: Trading, Risk Management and Structuring Deals in the Energy Markets)
“
In languages with a garbage collector (GC), the GC keeps track and cleans up memory that isn’t being used anymore, and we don’t need to think about it. Without a GC, it’s our responsibility to identify when memory is no longer being used and call code to explicitly return it, just as we did to request it. Doing this correctly has historically been a difficult programming problem. If we forget, we’ll waste memory. If we do it too early, we’ll have an invalid variable. If we do it twice, that’s a bug too. We need to pair exactly one allocate with exactly one free.
Rust takes a different path: the memory is automatically returned once the variable that owns it goes out of scope.
”
”
Steve Klabnik (The Rust Programming Language)
“
The power to pardon is conferred upon the presidency. It is not a personal power of the man or woman who inhabits the office. ... Where a pardon is being used to protect the president personally, or protect the president’s family, friends, or conspirators, it should not be seen as a valid exercise of that constitutional power.
Being able to tell one scenario from the other may not be difficult. Until Trump’s presidency, all recent presidents used a formal process for evaluating and granting pardons. Where pardons are awarded to conspirators of the president, and without any consistent rationale to support them, a court could find the pardon to be an invalid exercise of the power of the presidency.
”
”
Andrew Weissmann (Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation)
“
Quite our of the blue a bizarre and compelling idea came into my head today: that we have ended up as human beings through forgetfulness, through lack of attention, and that in reality we are creatures participating in a vast, cosmic battle that has probably been going on since time immemorial and which, for all we know, may never end. All we see of it are glimmers, in blood-red moons, in fires and gales, in frozen leaves that fall in October, in the jittery flight of a butterfly, in the irregular pulse of time that can lengthen a night into infinity or come to a violent stop each day at noon. I am actually an angel or a demon sent into the turmoil of one life on a sort of mission, which is either carrying itself out without my help, or else I have totally forgotten about it. This forgetfulness is part of the war--it's the other side's weapon, and they've attacked me with it so that I'm wounded, invalided out of the game for a while. As a result, I don't know how powerful or how weak I am--I don't know anything about myself because I can't remember anything, and that's why I don't try to look for either weakness or power in myself. It's an extraordinary feeling--to imagine that somewhere deep inside, you are someone completely different from the person you always thought you were. But it didn't make me feel anxious, just relieved, finally free of a kind of weariness that used to permeate my life.
”
”
Olga Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night (Writings From An Unbound Europe))
“
t this point I would like to return to the question of the plot movement and the different narrative levels of the book. David Lodge raises a crucial issue when he asks 'how Charlotte Brontë created a literary structure in which the domestic and the mythical, the realistic world of social behaviour and the romantic world of passionate self-consciousness, could co-exist with only occasional
lapses into incongruity.' As far as the plot and setting go, however, this states the question rather misleadingly, for in fact at Thornfield there begins a progressive plot movement from realism to fantasy. By 'realism' I do not mean the predominance of the every day and commonplace, or an authorial objectivity of treatment,
but simply the use of material that the reader can accept
as existing in the ordinary world as well, or of events of a kind that might happen in it without being viewed as extraordinary. That is, things that have a face-value currency of meaning prior to any concealed meaning they may hold or suggest. Thus while Gateshead and Lowood School fit neatly into, and contribute importantly to,
the symbolic pattern of the book, they are perfectly believable places in their own right. Even the heavy-handed and obvious satire of Mr Brocklehurst and his family does not invalidate him as a credible conception. But with the beginning of the mystery of the Thornfield attic the plot starts moving away from this facevalue
actuality.
”
”
Ian Gregor (Reading the Victorian novel: Detail into form (Vision critical studies))
“
Often as she was painting she found herself drifting back through her past like someone wandering through an old house. She thought of her father, who used to take her for neighborhood walks on Sundays when she was a child so that her mother, already an invalid, could get her rest. “Notice the rust stains below those eaves,” he would say. “Below Mrs. Webb’s eaves. I don’t know how often I’ve told her she needs to have her gutters cleaned.” And once, when it began to rain, “Have you ever wondered where rain comes from?” “No, not really,” she had said bluntly, but he had told her anyhow—all about evaporation, condensation…Now she saw that he had adored her, and she felt a deep wave of regret for her failure to realize that before.
”
”
Anne Tyler (French Braid)
“
for ordinary African Americans, coping with hegemonic gender ideology can be so demanding that generating alternatives can seem virtually impossible. But the importance of this task cannot be underestimated because African American survival may depend on it. One important task lies in rejecting dominant gender ideology, in particular, its use of the thesis of "weak men, strong women" as a source of Black social control. Because hegemonic masculinity equates strength with dominance, an antiracist politics must challenge this connection. Within this project, the fundamental premise of any progressive Black gender ideology is that it cannot be based on someone else's subordination. This means that definitions of Black masculinity that rely on the subordination of Black women, poor people, children, LGBT people, or anyone else become invalid. Definitions of Black femininity that do not challenge relations of sexism, economic exploitation, age, heterosexism, and other markers of social inequality also become suspect. Rather than trying to be strong within existing gender ideology, the task lies in rejecting a gender ideology that measures masculinity and femininity using gendered definitions of strength. In this endeavor to craft a more progressive Black gender ideology, African American men and women face similar yet distinctive challenges. The task for African American men lies in developing new definitions of masculinity that uncouple strength from its close ties to male dominance. Good Black men need not rule their families with an iron hand, assault one another, pursue endless booty calls, and always seem to be "in control" in order to avoid the sigma of weakness. The task for African American women lies in redefining strength in ways that simultaneously enable Black women to reclaim historical sources of female power, yet reject the exploitation that has often accompanied that power. Good Black women need not be stoic mules whose primary release from work and responsibility comes once a week on Sunday morning. New definitions of strength would enable Black men and women alike to be seen as needing and worthy of one another's help and support without being stigmatized as either overly weak or unnaturally strong.
”
”
Patricia Hill Collins (Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism)
“
Actually, some asexual people celebrate sex—up to and including engaging in it themselves despite lack of sexual attraction. Some asexual people write stories or produce art depicting sexual situations and/or nudity. Some asexual people have no problem with consuming media that contains sexual content. They do not have to be attracted to other people to appreciate or create positive portrayals of these relationships. This can be especially difficult to explain if an asexual artist does create sexually explicit material, because people want to know whether they’re creating this because they secretly desire it. Or they might reverse the issue and suggest asexual people have no business creating this media—or that they can’t be good at it—if they don’t have personal experience. What artists choose to make art about has absolutely no bearing on what they’re attracted to or what they might want to experience themselves. Art can be used to express personal desires, but no one should assume someone must be doing so if that person depicts experiences or images contrary to personally expressed desires, and no one should use a person’s artwork or subject matter to invalidate claims. Asexual artists cannot be restricted to creating media that is devoid of sex. Asexual artists know and accept that most people are attracted sexually to others, so if they want to write realistic books or movies, they generally have to create at least some of their subjects with that dimension attached to them.
”
”
Julie Sondra Decker (The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality)
“
History lessons remind us that the states in which we live, their institutions, even their laws, have come to us through conflict, often of the most bloodthirsty sort. Our daily diet of news brings us reports of the shedding of blood, often in regions quite close to our homelands, in circumstances that deny our conception of cultural normality altogether. We succeed, all the same, in consigning the lessons both of history and of reportage to a special and separate category of "otherness" which invalidate our expectations of how our own world will be tomorrow and the day after not at all. Our institutions and our laws, we tell ourselves, have set the human potentiality for violence about with such restraints that violence in everyday life will be punished as criminal by our laws, while its use by our institutions of state will take the particular form of "civilised warfare.
”
”
Steven Pinker (The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century)
“
As it turned out, the two decades immediately following the popularization of anesthesia saw surgical outcomes worsen. With their newfound confidence about operating without inflicting pain, surgeons became ever more willing to take up the knife, driving up the incidences of postoperative infection and shock. Operating theaters became filthier than ever as the number of surgeries increased. Surgeons still lacking an understanding of the causes of infection would operate on multiple patients in succession using the same unwashed instruments on each occasion. The more crowded the operating theater became, the less likely it was that even the most primitive sanitary precautions would be taken. Of those who went under the knife, many either died or never fully recovered and then spent the rest of their lives as invalids. This problem was universal. Patients worldwide came to further dread the word “hospital,” while the most skilled surgeons distrusted their own abilities.
”
”
Lindsey Fitzharris (The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine)
“
If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, reduce it to permanent invalidism, cut it off from all genuine animal well-being, and compensate for this by creating needs for countless little indulgences which only you can grant. The unfortunate creature thus becomes very useful to the rest of the household; it acts as a sump or drain—you are too busy spoiling a dog’s life to spoil theirs. Dogs are better for this purpose than cats: a monkey, I am told, is best of all. Also it is more like the real thing. To be sure, it’s all very bad luck for the animal. But probably it cannot fully realise the wrong you have done it. Better still, you would never know if it did. The most down-trodden human, driven too far, may one day turn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals can’t speak. Those who say ‘The more I see of men the better I like dogs’—those who find in animals a relief from the demands of human companionship—will be well advised to examine their real reasons.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)
“
From the beginning of the nineteenth century until Hiroshima, strategic thought was dominated by post-Napoleonic, Clausewitzian notions, and these notions have pervaded the thinking of many whose primary interests are far from removed from military matters. In their crude, popularized form, these ideas stress a particular form of war, conflicts between nationalities; they stress the primacy and desirability of offensive warfare in pursuit of decisive results (thus inspiring an aversion to defensive strategies); and they imply a sharp distinction between the state of peace and the state of war. Finally, these ideas accord primacy to the active use of military force, as opposed to the use of images of force, for the purposes of diplomatic coercion. Only since 1945 has the emergence of new technologies of mass destruction invalidated the fundamental assumptions of the Clausewitzian approach to grand strategy. We, like the Romans, face the prospect not of decisive conflict, but of a permanent state of war, albeit limited. We, like the Romans, must actively protect an advanced society against a variety of threats rather than concentrate on destroying the forces of our enemies in battle. Above all, the nature of modern weapons requires that we avoid their use while nevertheless striving to exploit their full diplomatic potential. The revolutionary implications of these fundamental changes are as yet only dimly understood. It is not surprising, therefore, that even contemporary research on Roman military history is still pervaded by an anachronistic strategic outlook.
”
”
Edward N. Luttwak (The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century Ce to the Third)
“
Key to the success of many with ADHD is finding the “right life” in which to live. This means a job in which their particular talents for nonlinear thinking and quick emergency response are prized, and a spouse who can appreciate, or at least learn to live with, an often uneven distribution of work within the relationship. Without these things, many with ADHD feel that they don’t really fit into the world, or that the face that they put forward in order to fit in is false. The other critical factor for the success of an ADHD spouse in a relationship is for both partners to continue to respect differences and act on that respect. Here’s what one woman with ADHD says about living a life in which others assume that “different” is not worthy of respect: I think [my husband] uses the ADD as an excuse to be bossy and stuff sometimes but I find it very upsetting and hard on my self esteem to have my disorder and learning disabilities used that way. We do have very different perspectives but reality is perspective. Just because I see things differently from someone else doesn’t make one wrong or right…how I experience life is colored by my perception, it is what it is. I hate how people try to invalidate my thoughts feelings and perceptions because they are different from theirs. Like telling me [since] they feel…different[ly] from me [that their feelings] should make me magically change! It doesn’t work that way. Even if my ADD makes me see or remember something “not right” it’s still MY reality. It is like those movies where the hero has something crazy going on where they experience reality differently from everyone else.
”
”
Melissa Orlov (The ADHD Effect on Marriage: Understand and Rebuild Your Relationship in Six Steps)
“
ALGERNON:
I suspected that, my dear fellow! I have Bunburyed all over Shropshire on two separate occasions. Now, go on. Why are you Ernest in town and Jack in the country?
JACK:
My dear Algy, I don’t know whether you will be able to understand my real motives. You are hardly serious enough. When one is placed in the position of guardian, one has to adopt a very high moral tone on all subjects. It’s one’s duty to do so. And as a high moral tone can hardly be said to conduce very much to either one’s health or one’s happiness, in order to get up to town I have always pretended to have a younger brother of the name of Ernest, who lives in the Albany, and gets into the most dreadful scrapes. That, my dear Algy, is the whole truth pure and simple.
ALGERNON:
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
JACK:
That wouldn’t be at all a bad thing.
ALGERNON:
Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don’t try it. You should leave that to people who haven’t been at a University. They do it so well in the daily papers. What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.
JACK:
What on earth do you mean?
ALGERNON:
You have invented a very useful younger brother called Ernest, in order that you may be able to come up to town as often as you like. I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose. Bunbury is perfectly invaluable. If it wasn’t for Bunbury’s extraordinary bad health, for instance, I wouldn’t be able to dine with you at Willis’s to-night, for I have been really engaged to Aunt Augusta for more than a week.
”
”
Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays)
“
Now perhaps this fury against me, which had abated as soon as she saw how sad I was, was only a relapse. Indeed, even those people whom, her eyes sparkling with rage, she had threatened with disgrace, death and imprisonment, using false witness if need be, as soon as she thought they were unhappy and humiliated, she wished them no ill and was ready to shower them with favors. For she was not basically wicked and if, below the surface, her slightly deeper, rather surprising nature did not confirm the kindness that her first delicate attentions had led people to suppose but rather envy and pride, yet, at an even deeper level, her third-degree, that is, her true nature, even if never quite fully realized, tended toward goodness and love of her neighbor. Only, like all people who live in a state which they wish were better, but know no more of this than their desire for it and do not understand that the first condition is to break with their present state—like neurasthenics or morphine addicts who would like to be cured but only as long as no one deprives them of their tics or their morphine, like certain rather worldly religious souls or artistic minds, aspiring to solitude yet prepared to imagine it only in so far as it does not imply absolutely renouncing their former life—Andrée was ready to love all God’s creatures but only as long as she had first managed to see them failing to triumph and, in order to do so, had humiliated them in advance. She did not understand that one should love even the proud and conquer their pride through love rather than more overweening pride. But the fact is that she was like those invalids who want to be cured by the same much-loved means as sustain their illness and which they would immediately cease to love if they abandoned these means. But one may learn to swim and still prefer to keep one’s feet dry.
”
”
Marcel Proust (The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition))
“
But if somebody does want a productive conversation and genuinely believes that being called “cracker” is the same as being called “nigger” and feels angry and invalidated by the insistence that both do not meet your definition of racism, they will say so. This is an educational opportunity. This is a great way to let that person know that you do hear them, and that your experiences do not erase theirs because even though their experience is valid, it is a different experience. A response I’ve used is, “What was said to you wasn’t okay, and should be addressed. But we are talking about two different things. Being called “cracker” hurts, may even be humiliating. But after those feelings fade, what measurable impact will it have on your life? On your ability to walk the streets safely? On your ability to get a job? How often has the word “cracker” been used to deny you services? What measurable impact has this word had on the lives of white Americans in general?” In all honesty, from my personal experience, you are still not likely to get very far in that conversation, not right away. But it gives people something to think about. These conversations, even if they seem fruitless at first, can plant a seed to greater understanding. If you want to further understanding of systemic racism even more among the people you interact with, you can try to link to the systemic effects of racism whenever you talk about racism. Instead of posting on Facebook: “This teacher shouted a racial slur at a Hispanic kid and should be fired!” you can say all that, and then add, “This behavior is linked to the increased suspension, expulsion, and detention of Hispanic youth in our schools and sets an example of behavior for the children witnessing this teacher’s racism that will influence the way these children are treated by their peers, and how they are treated as adults.” I do this often when
”
”
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
“
So you’re saying,” I interjected, “that there is no organized, conspiratorial evil in the world, no satanic plot to which we fall prey?” “None. There is only human fear and the bizarre ways that humans try to ward it off.” “What about the many references in sacred texts and scriptures to Satan?” “This idea is a metaphor, a symbolic way of warning people to look to the divine for security, not to their sometimes tragic ego urges and habits. Blaming an outside force for everything bad was perhaps important at a certain stage in human development. But now it obscures the truth, because blaming our behavior on forces outside ourselves is a way of avoiding responsibility. And we tend to use the idea of Satan to project that some people are inherently evil so we can dehumanize the ones we disagree with and write them off. It is time now to understand the true nature of human evil in a more sophisticated way and then to deal with it.” “If there is no satanic plot,” I said, “then ‘possession’ doesn’t exist.” “That’s not so,” Wil said emphatically. “Psychological ‘possession’ does exist. But it is not the result of a conspiracy of evil; it is just energy dynamics. Fearful people want to control others. That’s why certain groups try to pull you in and convince you to follow them, and ask you to submit to their authority, or fight you if you try to leave.” “When I was first drawn into that illusory town, I thought I had been possessed by some demonic force.” “No, you were drawn in because you made the same mistake you made earlier: you didn’t just open up and listen to those souls; you gave yourself over to them, as if they automatically had all the answers, without checking to see if they were connected and motivated by love. And unlike the souls who are divinely connected, they didn’t back away from you. They just pulled you into their world, the same way some crazy group or cult might do in the physical dimension if you don’t discriminate.” Wil paused as if in thought, then continued. “All this is more of the Tenth Insight; that’s why we’re seeing it. As communication between the two dimensions increases, we’ll begin to have more encounters with souls in the Afterlife. This part of the Insight is that we must discern between those souls who are awake and connected with the spirit of love and those who are fearful and stuck in an obsessive trance of some kind. But we must do so without invalidating and dehumanizing those caught in such fear dramas by thinking they are demons or devils. They are souls in a growth process, just like us.
”
”
James Redfield (The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision (Celestine Prophecy #2))
“
When children become teenagers, their feelings are often invalidated by others because they have a hard time expressing them. They can’t find the words to use so adults deem their emotions as a “stage of adolescence.” As a result, everything beautiful and raw about life is reduced to a phase they’ll grow out of. Although how often is our growth just abandonment? Some people don’t mature, they just run away from their problems faster than they used to and happen to age. We greatly underestimate the tragedy of leaving behind the unaddressed. Many of our most intuitive and sincere experiences are lost to time. It is one of life’s saddest deficits.
”
”
Kristian Ventura (Cardiac Ablation)
“
The reasons for cooperatives’ success should be obvious by now, but they are worth reiterating: “The major basis for cooperative success…has been superior labor productivity. Studies comparing square-foot output have repeatedly shown higher physical volume of output per hour, and others…show higher quality of product and also economy of material use.”118 Hendrik Thomas concludes from an analysis of Mondragon that “Productivity and profitability are higher for cooperatives than for capitalist firms. It makes little difference whether the Mondragon group is compared with the largest 500 companies, or with small- or medium-scale industries; in both comparisons the Mondragon group is more productive and more profitable.”119 As we have seen, recent research has arrived at the same conclusions. It is a truism by now that worker participation tends to increase productivity and profitability. Research conducted by Henk Thomas and Chris Logan corroborates these conclusions. “A frequent but unfounded criticism,” they observe, “of self-managed firms is that workers prefer to enjoy a high take-home pay rather than to invest in their own enterprises. This has been proven invalid…in the Mondragon case… A comparison of gross investment figures shows that the cooperatives invest on average four times as much as private enterprises.” After a detailed analysis they also conclude that “there can be no doubt that the [Mondragon] cooperatives have been more profitable than capitalist enterprises.”120 Recent data indicate the same thing.121 One particularly successful company, Irizar, which was mentioned earlier, has been awarded prizes for being the most efficient company in its sector; in Spain it has ten competitors, but its market share is 40 percent. The same level of achievement is true of its subsidiaries, for instance in Mexico, where it had a 45 percent market share in 2005, six years after entering the market. An author comments that “the basis for this increased efficiency appears to be linked directly to the organization’s unique participatory and democratic management structure.”122 A major reason for all these successes is Mondragon’s federated structure: the group of cooperatives has its own supply of banking, education, and technical support services. The enormous funds of the central credit union, the Caja Laboral Popular, have likewise been crucial to Mondragon’s expansion. It proves that if cooperatives have access to credit they are perfectly capable of being far more successful than private enterprises.
”
”
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
“
Hamilton articulated fundamental concepts that he later expanded upon in The Federalist Papers, concepts central to the future of American jurisprudence. In renting the property to Waddington, he declared, the British had abided by the law of nations, which allowed for the wartime use of property in occupied territory. New York’s Trespass Act violated both the law of nations and the 1783 peace treaty with England, which had been ratified by Congress. In urging the court to invalidate the Trespass Act, Hamilton expounded the all-important doctrine of judicial review—the notion that high courts had a right to scrutinize laws and if necessary declare them void.
”
”
Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
“
Key Terms A list of the most common terms you’ll encounter in this book ARGUMENT A set of statements (premises) that are given to advance a conclusion. AUDIENCE The people listening to the argument, those to whom the argument is directed. COMMITMENT A proposition that a proponent takes to be true, either implicitly or explicitly. CONCLUSION A statement that follows from the preceding statements (the argument). CONDITIONAL A statement of the form ‘if A, then B,’ where A cannot be true and B false. DEDUCTIVE ARGUMENT An argument whose conclusion follows logically from its premises. FALLACY The use of invalid reasoning in an argument. INDUCTIVE ARGUMENT An argument whose premises give good evidence for its conclusion (e.g., inferring a general law from particular examples of it). INVALID An argument is invalid only when it is not valid. LOGIC The principles and rules that govern valid inferences. MODAL A type of statement that deals with necessity, possibility or impossibility. OPPONENT A person attempting to rebut an argument. PRESUPPOSITION A proposition which an argument, or a proponent, takes for granted. PROPONENT The person putting forward an argument. SAMPLE A subset of a population, studied to make extrapolations that apply to the population as a whole. SOUND An argument is sound only when it is valid and its premises are true. VALID An argument is valid if and only if its premises cannot be true when its conclusion is false. P1,2, ETC.
”
”
Michael Withey (Mastering Logical Fallacies: The Definitive Guide to Flawless Rhetoric and Bulletproof Logic)
“
That’s why you get in shit,” Hylas said. “You and Nick both. You’re too goddamned pragmatic about everything and so, you carry blithely on and walk right into the crocodile’s mouth.” “There is nothing blithe about myself or Nick,” Tobias said. “We are not cheerful people, though I am not an unhappy person. Nick doesn’t seem to be either. Furthermore, since when have you ever known me to get into shit, as you so inelegantly put it?” “Hey, asshole, don’t criticize my parlance,” Hylas said. “I know words. I’m just not so prim that I refuse to use the dirty ones. I like the dirty ones best.” “Oh and how,” Tobias said. Cursing did not offend him, he just seldom ever did so himself. “And another thing,” Hylas carried on, ignoring Tobias for the moment. “Blithe also means ‘thoughtlessly indifferent’. So there.” “Yes, you certainly told me what’s for,” Tobias said. “I am neither thoughtless nor indifferent, if I was then I would be terrible at being pragmatic. Your argument is therefore invalid. Rephrase or shut up.” “I love you, man,” Hylas said after a drawn-out silence. He positively beamed at Tobias. “You’re the only person who can argue words with me.” “I
”
”
Justine Sebastian (Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls #2))
“
whatever you intend to do, don’t waste it, lad. You’ve only got one life. But, you know, you never realise this until you are halfway through it, that’s if you get the chance to reach that stage. Often life is taken from people before they realise that they value it. I used to be always sorry when I heard of life being snatched from the young. But then again, it might have been better that way for them, for it may have saved them suppin’ sorrow. You know, Joseph, I’m a very healthy woman. I’ve never known a day’s illness in me life and yet I’ve known such unhappiness that at times I would have swapped it for the peace which some chronic invalids seem to have inside themselves. D’you know what I mean?
”
”
Catherine Cookson (The Black Candle)
“
The historical record also shows that attitudes toward homosexuality have little to do with whether people believe it occurs in animals or not, and consequently, in its "naturalness". True, throughout much of recorded history, the charge of "unnaturalness" - including the claim that homosexuality did not occur in animals - was used to justify every imaginable form of sanction, control, and repression against homosexuality. But many other interpretations of "naturalness" were also prevalent at various times. Indeed, the very fact that homosexuality was thought to be "unnatural" - that is, not found in nature - was sometimes used to justify its *superiority* to heterosexuality. In ancient Greece, for example, same-sex love was thought to be purer than opposite-sex love because it did not involve procreation or "animal-like" passions. On the other hand, homosexuality was sometimes condemned precisely because it was considered *closer* to "nature", reflecting the base, uncontrolled sexual instincts of the animal world. The Nazis used this reasoning (in part) to target homosexuals and other "subhumans" for the concentration camps (where homosexual men subjected to medical experiments were referred to as test animals), while sexual relations between women were disparaginly characterized as "animal love" in late eighteenth-century New England . The irrationality of such beliefs is highlighted in cases where charges of "unnaturalness" were combined, paradoxically, with accusations of animalistic behavior. Some early Latin texts, for instance, simultaneously condemned homosexuals for exhibiting behavior unknown in animals while also denouncing them for imitating particular species (such as the hyena or hare) that were believed to indulge in homosexuality.
In our own time, the fact that a given characteristic of a minority human population is biologically determined has little to do with whether that population should be - or is - discriminated against. Racial minorities, for example, can claim a biological basis for their difference, yet this has done little to eliminate racial prejudice. Religious groups, on the other hand, can claim no such biological prerogative, and yet this does not invalidate the entitlement of such groups to freedom from discrimination. It should be clear, then, that whether homosexuality is biologically determined or not - none of these things guarantee the acceptance or rejection of homosexuality or in itself renders homosexuality "valid" or "illegitimate".
”
”
Bruce Bagemihl (Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity)
“
Having seen what the Earl Warren Court did with judicial power, Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork advocated an ethic of judicial restraint and deference to legislatures. Over time, however, conservative judges focused more and more on restraining legislatures through the courts by invalidating some laws as unconstitutional. Originalism was both a “shield” against judicial overreach and a “sword” to be used against acts of Congress.
”
”
Matthew Continetti (The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism)
“
She had been hurrying along Park Avenue at a time approaching one thirty in the afternoon on Friday, swinging a walking stick she did not really need, one which she had in fact purchased for Mr. Green but which he refused to use, and as she walked she was whistling a tune she could not have described if asked, a mingling of various rhythms she had lived her life by, her feet moving at speeds that younger people seemed to find surprising, most probably because they associated old age with infirmity--whereas Experience, the experience of it, in her experience, in fact made you not an invalid but a warrior.
”
”
Jonathan Lee (The Great Mistake)
“
[A]dults today have been enculturated by a society where the language used, the built environment, policy-making, healthcare, school curriculums, afterschool programs, mental health counseling, libraries, and parenting can all invalidate the worth, depth, ideas, knowledge, actions, and opinions of children and youth.
”
”
Adam F.C. Fletcher (Democracy Deficit Disorder: Learning Democracy with Young People (Counterpoints Book 540))
“
it is argued, the religions of the world each have a grasp on part of the truth about spiritual reality, but none can see the whole elephant or claim to have a comprehensive vision of the truth. This illustration backfires on its users. The story is told from the point of view of someone who is not blind. How could you know that each blind man only sees part of the elephant unless you claim to be able to see the whole elephant? There is an appearance of humility in the protestation that the truth is much greater than any one of us can grasp, but if this is used to invalidate all claims to discern the truth it is in fact an arrogant claim to a kind of knowledge which is superior to [all others] . . . We have to ask: ‘What is the [absolute] vantage ground from which you claim to be able to relativize all the absolute claims these different scriptures make?’8 How could you possibly know that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior, comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed that none of the religions have?
”
”
Timothy J. Keller (The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism)
“
We shall now use the technique of Reductio ad absurdum to disprove fatalism. This is a method where the statement to be invalidated is accepted as the premise. Then it is shown to lead to a logical inconsistency. Let us start with the premise that everything is predestined.
”
”
Swami Mukundananda (7 Mindsets for Success, Happiness and Fulfilment)
“
Most readers of this section of the book will smile at this point, realising that a seemingly sophisticated philosophical argument is clearly invalidated by the context within which Lewis sets it. Yet Lewis has borrowed this from Plato—while using Anselm of Canterbury and René Descartes as intermediaries—thus allowing classical wisdom to make an essentially Christian point. Lewis is clearly aware that Plato has been viewed through a series of interpretative lenses—those of Plotinus, Augustine, and the Renaissance being particularly familiar to him. Readers of Lewis’s Allegory of Love, The Discarded Image, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and Spenser’s Images of Life will be aware that Lewis frequently highlights how extensively Plato and later Neoplatonists influenced Christian literary writers of both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Lewis’s achievement is to work Platonic themes and images into children’s literature in such a natural way that few, if any, of its young readers are aware of Narnia’s implicit philosophical tutorials, or its grounding in an earlier world of thought. It is all part of Lewis’s tactic of expanding minds by exposing them to such ideas in a highly accessible and imaginative form.
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Alister E. McGrath (C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet)
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One of the core strategies the narcissist uses is invalidation. When you acknowledge someone’s point of view, you validate them. You don’t necessarily have to agree with them, but it means that you welcome diverse viewpoints. Narcissists never validate. For example, they may bring something unrelated into conversations that will get other people’s minds stuck - hereby taking the problem off their shoulders.
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Caroline Foster (Narcissistic Mothers: How to Handle a Narcissistic Parent and Recover from CPTSD (Adult Children of Narcissists Recovery Book 1))
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Freedom from resentment and the understanding of the nature of resentment—who knows how very much after all I am indebted to my long illness for these two things? The problem is not exactly simple: a man must have experienced both through his strength and through his weakness, If illness and weakness are to be charged with anything at all, it is with the fact that when they prevail, the very instinct of recovery, which is the instinct of defence and of war in man, becomes decayed. He knows not how to get rid of anything, how to come to terms with anything, and how to cast anything behind him. Everything wounds him. People and things draw importunately near, all experiences strike deep, memory is a gathering wound. To be ill is a sort of resentment in itself. Against this resentment the invalid has only one great remedy—I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism which is free from revolt, and with which the Russian soldier, to whom a campaign proves unbearable, ultimately lays himself down in the snow. To accept nothing more, to undertake nothing more, to absorb nothing more—to cease entirely from reacting.... The tremendous sagacity of this fatalism, which does not always imply merely the courage for death, but which in the most dangerous cases may actually constitute a self-preservative measure, amounts to a reduction of activity in the vital functions, the slackening down of which is like a sort of will to hibernate. A few steps farther in this direction we find the fakir, who will sleep for weeks in a tomb.... Owing to the fact that one would be used up too quickly if one reacted, one no longer reacts at all: this is the principle. And nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment. Mortification, morbid susceptibility, the inability to wreak revenge, the desire and thirst for revenge, the concoction of every sort of poison—this is surely the most injurious manner of reacting which could possibly be conceived by exhausted men. It involves a rapid wasting away of nervous energy, an abnormal increase of detrimental secretions, as, for instance, that of bile into the stomach. To the sick man resentment ought to be more strictly forbidden than anything else—it is his special danger: unfortunately, however, it is also his most natural propensity. This was fully grasped by that profound physiologist Buddha. His "religion," which it would be better to call a system of hygiene, in order to avoid confounding it with a creed so wretched as Christianity, depended for its effect upon the triumph over resentment: to make the soul free therefrom was considered the first step towards recovery. "Not through hostility is hostility put to flight; through friendship does hostility end": this stands at the beginning of Buddha's teaching—this is not a precept of morality, but of physiology. Resentment born of weakness is not more deleterious to anybody than it is to the weak man himself—conversely, in the case of that man whose nature is fundamentally a rich one, resentment is a superfluous feeling, a feeling to remain master of which is almost a proof of riches. Those of my readers who know the earnestness-with which my philosophy wages war against the feelings of revenge and rancour, even to the extent of attacking the doctrine of "free will" (my conflict with Christianity is only a particular instance of it), will understand why I wish to focus attention upon my own personal attitude and the certainty of my practical instincts precisely in this matter. In my moments of decadence I forbade myself the indulgence of the above feelings, because they were harmful; as soon as my life recovered enough riches and pride, however, I regarded them again as forbidden, but this time because they were beneath me.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Ecce Homo/The Antichrist)
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multithreaded programs are subject to all the performance hazards of single-threaded programs, and to others as well that are introduced by the use of threads. In well designed concurrent applications the use of threads is a net performance gain, but threads nevertheless carry some degree of runtime overhead. Context switches—when the scheduler suspends the active thread temporarily so another thread can run—are more frequent in applications with many threads, and have significant costs: saving and restoring execution context, loss of locality, and CPU time spent scheduling threads instead of running them. When threads share data, they must use synchronization mechanisms that can inhibit compiler optimizations, flush or invalidate memory caches, and create synchronization traffic on the shared memory bus. All these factors introduce additional performance costs;
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Brian Goetz (Java Concurrency in Practice)
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When egalitarians claim that 1 Corinthians 14:33-35 applies only to a special situation of disruptive women in the church at Corinth, they are changing the meaning of a verse by restricting it to a very narrow situation. And they are basing this on mere speculation, not on any hard facts. In doing this they are setting up a pattern of interpretation that will be imitated by others who will speculate (without any hard facts) about “special situations” that can be used to invalidate other New Testament commands as well. And in that way they take another step on the path to liberalism.
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Wayne Grudem (Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism?)
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By the time Beatrix had finished the letter, she was aware of a peculiar feeling, a sense of surprised compassion pressing against the walls of her heart.
It didn’t seem possible that such a letter could have come from the arrogant Christopher Phelan. It wasn’t at all what she had expected. There was a vulnerability, a quiet need, that had touched her.
“You must write to him, Pru,” she said, closing the letter with far more care than she had previously handled it.
“I’ll do no such thing. That would only encourage more complaining. I’ll be silent, and perhaps that will spur him to write something more cheerful next time.”
Beatrix frowned. “As you know, I have no great liking for Captain Phelan, but this letter…he deserves your sympathy, Pru. Just write him a few lines. A few words of comfort. It would take no time at all. And about the dog, I have some advice--”
“I am not writing anything about the dratted dog.” Prudence gave an impatient sigh. “You write to him.”
“Me? He doesn’t want to hear from me. He thinks I’m peculiar.”
“I can’t imagine why. Just because you brought Medusa to the picnic…”
“She’s a very well behaved hedgehog,” Beatrix said defensively.
“The gentleman whose hand was pierced didn’t seem to think so.”
“That was only because he tried to handle her incorrectly. When you pick up a hedgehog--”
“No, there’s no use telling me, since I’m never going to handle one. As for Captain Phelan…if you feel that strongly about it, write a response and sign my name.”
“Won’t he recognize that the handwriting is different?”
“No, because I haven’t written to him yet.”
“But he’s not my suitor,” Beatrix protested. “I don’t know anything about him.”
“You know as much as I do, actually. You’re acquainted with his family, and you’re very close to his sister-in-law. And I wouldn’t say that Captain Phelan is my suitor, either. At least not my only one. I certainly won’t promise to marry him until he comes back from the war with all his limbs intact. I don’t want a husband I would have to push around in an invalid’s chair for the rest of my life.”
“Pru, you have the depth of a puddle.”
Prudence grinned. “At least I’m honest.”
Beatrix gave her a dubious glance. “You’re actually delegating the writing of a love letter to one of your friends?”
Prudence waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “Not a love letter. There was nothing of love in his letter to me. Just write something cheerful and encouraging.
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Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
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In the November 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi reported on the special courts established around the country for the express purpose of streamlining and accelerating foreclosure actions. Presided over by retired judges who were unfamiliar with the complexities involved in the mortgage fraud, these courts were not set up “to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity.” The whole process was designed to transfer the property of ordinary citizens to the nation’s largest banks regardless of entitlement. As Taibbi wrote: The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville [Florida] judge, the Honorable A. C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes. The following month, the Washington Post reported that similar courts in Virginia were “making it easier for lenders to defend themselves when accused of giving homeowners too little warning of impending foreclosures.” Indeed, “the process moves so quickly in Virginia…that homeowners can receive less than two weeks’ notice that their house is about to be sold on the courthouse steps.” The design of the courts guaranteed that even banks with no legal foreclosure entitlement had an almost insurmountable advantage. In the very short time they were accorded, homeowners seeking to stop foreclosure had to “gather evidence, file a lawsuit and potentially post a bond with the court that could total thousands of dollars.” These arduous requirements, combined with the near-impossible deadlines, meant that many borrowers simply ran out of time when trying to fight invalid foreclosure proceedings. It
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Glenn Greenwald (With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used To Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful)
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Jacksonville [Florida] judge, the Honorable A. C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes. The following month, the Washington Post reported that similar courts in Virginia were “making it easier for lenders to defend themselves when accused of giving homeowners too little warning of impending foreclosures.” Indeed, “the process moves so quickly in Virginia…that homeowners can receive less than two weeks’ notice that their house is about to be sold on the courthouse steps.” The design of the courts guaranteed that even banks with no legal foreclosure entitlement had an almost insurmountable advantage. In the very short time they were accorded, homeowners seeking to stop foreclosure had to “gather evidence, file a lawsuit and potentially post a bond with the court that could total thousands of dollars.” These arduous requirements, combined with the near-impossible deadlines, meant that many borrowers simply ran out of time when trying to fight invalid foreclosure proceedings. It is hard to imagine a purer expression of two-tiered justice than special courts created for the sole purpose of helping large banks take people’s homes more expeditiously. Such courts show that the legal system not only fails to protect Americans from societal injustice and inequality, but also serves as a tool of injustice and inequality in its own right. Prisons
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Glenn Greenwald (With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used To Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful)
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crucial patent that Nestlé used to protect its popular Nespresso machine was invalidated in the UK, in part because the company had sent 40 test machines to exclusive customers in Belgium and Switzerland without requiring them to sign any confidentiality agreements. That oversight opened the door for knockoff coffee pods to enter the market.
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Anonymous
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Whether they are implemented manually or by using code contracts, if a precondition, postcondition, or invariant fails, clients should not catch the exception. Catching an exception is an action that indicates that the client can recover from this situation, which is seldom likely or perhaps even possible when a contract is broken. The ideal is that all contract violations will happen during functional testing and that the offending code will be fixed before shipping. This is why it is so important to unit test contracts. If a contract violation is not fixed before shipping and an end user is unfortunate enough to trigger an exception, it is most likely the best course of action to force the application to close. It is advisable to allow the application to fail because it is now in a potentially invalid state
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Anonymous
“
Lack of Saline Placebo in Vaccine Clinical Trials. You vigorously defended the inadequate and scientifically invalid use of an aluminum adjuvant or another vaccine as a placebo in pre-licensure vaccine clinical trials. When we pointed out that the use of a potent neurotoxin or another vaccine instead of a true inert placebo in the control group would conceal dangerous side effects caused by the vaccine, you replied that you considered it “a brilliant design.” I respectfully find that statement astounding.
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Robert F. Kennedy (Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak (Children’s Health Defense))
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An immature mind seeks to use the exception to invalidate the rule.
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Katina Bertrand Ferguson
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It’s an open secret in good old Hollywood. When charges are filed (rarely), the studios just continually settle with the victims, and use their PR machines to invalidate the claims. Usually where there is smoke there is an inferno, especially as Hollywood is concerned.
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Rose McGowan
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Vices are simply overworked virtues, anyway. Economy and frugality are to be commended but follow them on in an increasing ratio and what do we find at the other end? A miser! If we overdo the using of spare moments we may find an invalid at the end, while perhaps if we allowed ourselves more idle time we would conserve our nervous strength and health to more than the value of the work we could accomplish by emulating at all times the little busy bee.
Laura Ingalls Wilder; , February 20, 1916
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Stephen W. Hines (Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist: Writings from the Ozarks (Volume 1))
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Statistically speaking, saying that the entire population of women is more reckless and gullible than men because a single woman in the Bible was reckless and gullible is invalid. A single data point is not sufficient for determining whether or not women are more likely to be gullible and reckless than men, and Eve only represents ONE DATA POINT that supports the claim! To use Eve's sin to state that women are more gullible and reckless would mean that you are creating a claim derived from only one data point, which is insufficient statistical support.
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Lucy Carter (Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics)
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There was a trick of his imagination which recurred persistently; it had recurred, ever since the last ghastly news was brought by the Dillard's [that the third (and last) son had died in the Civil War]. Ira kept seeing his sons around the place, he kept hearing their voices. Sometimes at home he would be in his tool shed, and it seemed that a corner of his vision caught the impression of young Moses going out the door. He was positive that sometimes lying dry and wakeful in the middle of the night, he heard the faint ring of china from Sutherland's room as the young man got up and used his chamber pot. Ira did not believe in ghosts as such. But he thought that perhaps the actual impression of the boys' living had left a variety of sights, sounds and scents which had never been expended and were not dead, even though the boys were dead. He thought that all the trees and shrubbery and walls and fences on the plantation might have absorbed the day-by-day activities of his sons, and still gave them forth, but faintly--as a roasted brick retain its heat long after it had been pinned up in flannel, and so afforded comfort to the cold feet of the invalid who needed warmth. And Ira needed this reassurance that his sons had once been part of a waking, busy scheme called Life; ah, he needed it.
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MacKinlay Kantor (Andersonville)
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Prince Vasily was standing beside the invalid chair on the other side of the door. He had drawn up a carved, velvet chair and was resting his left hand on its back, holding a candle, and using his right hand to cross himself, rolling his eyes upwards every time he put his fingers to his forehead. His face conveyed a gentle piety and resignation to the will of God. ‘If you cannot understand feelings like these,’ his face seemed to say, ‘that’s too bad for you.
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Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)
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I should use my stick. But I hate it. It makes me feel like an invalid. People look at me with pity. I hate being pitied. Pity should be saved for those who deserve it.
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C.J. Tudor (The Hiding Place)
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(On Engels' critique of anti-authoritarianism)
“Nobody was talking about the use of revolutionary violence being authoritarianism. That's always been an invalid thing to point out. You know, is a slave rising up and overthrowing their master, is that "authoritarian"? Is a woman trying to escape her abusive husband or defending herself against her abusive husband, is that "authoritarian"?
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Anark
“
Using the tactic of gaslighting, the manipulator denies, and therefore invalidates, reality. Invalidating reality distorts or undermines the victim’s perceptions of their world and can even lead them to question their own sanity.
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Adelyn Birch (30 Covert Emotional Manipulation Tactics: How Manipulators Take Control In Personal Relationships)
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Rosalie.” She reaches for my hand again, but I yank it away. “Are you feeling poorly? You look so pale. It’s not the baby, is it?” “No, I…” But that cramp hits me again. Still, I’ve got an entire month to go. I’m not in labor. I’m just having a panic attack that a woman is dead because of me. “Greta, how could you do something like that?” She blinks at me. “I did it for you, Rosalie.” Her eyes darken. “If I hadn’t, you would have none of this! He would have left you. No restaurant, no baby. Christina wanted him. You did not meet that woman. She thought I was on her side so she confided in me.” “She… did?” “You do not know how she spoke about you. Nick’s invalid wife. Frigid—won’t even touch him. He deserves better. That’s what she used to say.” Those Tarot cards were right all those years ago about my future. Death. Because Nick and I got married, a woman is dead. But he wasn’t the
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Freida McFadden (Do Not Disturb)
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The preponderance of an altruistic way of valuing is the result of a consciousness of the fact that one is botched and bungled. Upon examination, this point of view turns out to be: "I am not worth much," simply a psychological valuation; more plainly still: it is the feeling of impotence, of the lack of the great self-asserting impulses of power (in muscles, nerves, and ganglia). This valuation gets translated, according to the particular culture of these classes, into a moral or religious principle (the pre-eminence of religious or moral precepts is always a sign of low culture): it tries to justify itself in spheres whence, as far as it is concerned, the notion "value" hails. The interpretation by means of which the Christian sinner tries to understand himself, is an attempt at justifying his lack of power and of self-confidence: he prefers to feel himself a sinner rather than feel bad for nothing: it is in itself a symptom of decay when interpretations of this sort are used at all. In some cases the bungled and the botched do not look for the reason of their unfortunate condition in their own guilt (as the Christian does), but in society: when, however, the Socialist, the Anarchist, and the Nihilist are conscious that their existence is something for which some one must be guilty, they are very closely related to the Christian, who also believes that he can more easily endure his ill ease and his wretched constitution when he has found some one whom he can hold responsible for it. The instinct of revenge and resentment appears in both cases here as a means of enduring life, as a self-preservative measure, as is also the favour shown to altruistic theory and practice. The hatred of egoism, whether it be one's own (as in the case of the Christian), or another's (as in the case of the Socialists), thus appears as a valuation reached under the predominance of revenge; and also as an act of prudence on the part of the preservative instinct of the suffering, in the form of an increase in their feelings of co-operation and unity. ... At bottom, as I have already suggested, the discharge of resentment which takes place in the act of judging, rejecting, and punishing egoism (one's own or that of others) is still a self-preservative measure on the part of the bungled and the botched. In short: the cult of altruism is merely a particular form of egoism, which regularly appears under certain definite physiological circumstances. When the Socialist, with righteous indignation, cries for "justice," "rights," "equal rights," it only shows that he is oppressed by his inadequate culture, and is unable to understand why he suffers: he also finds pleasure in crying; if he were more at ease he would take jolly good care not to cry in that way: in that case he would seek his pleasure elsewhere. The same holds good of the Christian: he curses, condemns, and slanders the "world" and does not even except himself. But that is no reason for taking him seriously. In both cases we are in the presence of invalids who feel better for crying, and who find relief in slander.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
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Teaching is a mode of social interaction we can deliberately deploy in order to think more intelligently. There’s another form of social exchange that we can use to our advantage, one that comes just as naturally to the human animal: arguing. THE STUDY was positively devilish in its design. Participants were asked, first, to solve a series of logic puzzles: “A produce shop sells a variety of fruits and vegetables, some of which are organic and some of which are not. The apples sold by this shop are not organic. Which of the following statements about the shop’s wares are true? Provide a reason for each answer. 1) All the fruits are organic; 2) None of the fruits are organic; 3) Some of the fruits are organic; 4) Some of the fruits are not organic; 5) We cannot tell anything for sure about whether the fruits in this shop are organic.” After solving the puzzles, study participants were then asked to evaluate the responses provided by other participants—that is, to judge whether the reasons given by others seemed valid or not. The trick: one of the answers presented in this second round did not issue from someone else but rather was an answer the participant herself had supplied in the first round. Some participants recognized their own response, but many others did not. What happened next was fascinating. More than half of those who believed they were evaluating someone else’s response rejected as invalid the answer they themselves had put forth! They were especially likely to reject their own response when they had, in fact, offered a logically invalid answer originally. In other words, they applied more critical analysis to (what they thought were) other people’s arguments than to their own—and this scrutiny made them more accurate.
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Annie Murphy Paul (The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain)
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The overall objective of logical design is to achieve a design that’s (a) hardware independent, for obvious
reasons; (b) operating system and DBMS independent, again for obvious reasons; and finally, and perhaps a little
controversially, (c) application independent (in other words, we’re concerned primarily with what the data is, rather
than with how it’s going to be used). Application independence in this sense is desirable for the very good reason
that it’s normally—perhaps always—the case that not all uses to which the data will be put are known at design
time; thus, we want a design that’ll be robust, in the sense that it won’t be invalidated by the advent of application
requirements that weren’t foreseen at the time of the original design.
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C.J. Date (Database Design and Relational Theory: Normal Forms and All That Jazz)
“
Do you see?” asked Renee. “I’ve just disproved most of mathematics: it’s all meaningless now.” She was getting agitated, almost distraught; Carl chose his words carefully. “How can you say that? Math still works. The scientific and economic worlds aren’t suddenly going to collapse from this realization.” “That’s because the mathematics they’re using is just a gimmick. It’s a mnemonic trick, like counting on your knuckles to figure out which months have thirty-one days.” “That’s not the same.” “Why isn’t it? Now mathematics has absolutely nothing to do with reality. Never mind concepts like imaginaries or infinitesimals. Now goddamn integer addition has nothing to do with counting on your fingers. One and one will always get you two on your fingers, but on paper I can give you an infinite number of answers, and they’re all equally valid, which means they’re all equally invalid. I can write the most elegant theorem you’ve ever seen, and it won’t mean any more than a nonsense equation.” She gave a bitter laugh. “The positivists used to say all mathematics is a tautology. They had it all wrong: it’s a contradiction.” Carl tried a different approach. “Hold on. You just mentioned imaginary numbers. Why is this any worse than what went on with those? Mathematicians once believed they were meaningless, but now they’re accepted as basic. This is the same situation.” “It’s not the same. The solution there was to simply expand the context, and that won’t do any good here. Imaginary numbers added something new to mathematics, but my formalism is redefining what’s already there.” “But if you change the context, put it in a different light—” She rolled her eyes. “No! This follows from the axioms as surely as addition does; there’s no way around it. You can take my word for it.” 7
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Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others)
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Confronted with the difference that had been thrust into their predictable world, they reached into their imaginations and, using an ancient pattern, weaved themselves a reason for its existence. Out of necessity they stitched all of their secret fears and lingering childhood nightmares into this existence, because even though it was deceptive enough to try and look as they looked, talk as they talked, and do as they did, it had to have some hidden stain to invalidate it—it was impossible for them both to be right.
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Gloria Naylor (The Women of Brewster Place)
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It is of interest that from the seventeenth century the word ‘vicious’ was used to describe a fault in logic, when a conclusion was realized by false means of reasoning. Webster’s third definition of the vicious circle cites this fault in logic: ‘an argument which is invalid because its conclusion rests upon a premise which itself depends on the conclusion.
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Christopher Bollas (The Christopher Bollas Reader)
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Never use damaging personal information to invalidate your adversary and, by implication, his contentions. ... If you watch your words when you fight, the issue can usually be resolved.
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Joseph Telushkin (The Book of Jewish Values: A Day-by-Day Guide to Ethical Living)
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landmarks were “a little shabby.” Half the gilding was gone from the dome of Les Invalides, where Napoleon was buried. The same was true of the pedestal of the Egyptian obelisk in the Place Vendôme and he was sorry to see so much of the statuary marred by black streaks. He spent considerable time at the Panthéon, which, he explained to Katharine, was not used as a church but as commemoration of the great men of France. The dome seen from inside was “not much,” he decided—too high in proportion to its diameter, like looking into an inverted well—but the interior was “very grand.” He took architecture seriously, thoughtfully, and made up his own mind, irrespective of whatever was said in his red Baedeker’s guidebook. Notre Dame was a disappointment. “My imagination pictures things more vividly than my eyes.” He thought the nave too narrow, the clerestory windows too high, the interior far too dark. “The pillars are so heavy and close together that the
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David McCullough (The Wright Brothers)
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Also, for every startup to succeed, a validation of two types of hypotheses is crucial: Value hypothesis, which explains whether a product or a service will deliver value to customers Growth hypothesis, which determines how a product or a service will spread and grow But for an experiment to be successful, there are three steps which need to be followed. Preparation is the first step. During the preparation process, a startup should articulate its value and growth hypothesis. Know that if a failure is not an option, then it is not an experiment. The second thing to do is test. Tests should be created and run as quickly and cheaply as possible. The third and the final thing to do before doing an experiment is measure. By measuring, the author means the collection of both data and customer feedback. After doing this, we will be able to see if the results make the hypothesis valid or invalid.
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Rapid-Summary (Summary | The Lean Startup: By Eric Ries - How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (The Lean Startup: ... Audiobook, Hardcover Book 1))
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How to Bulletproof Your Association’s Biggest Asset: The Money The 35-Point Financial Procedures Manual If you are elected treasurer of your community association and accept the challenge, there are many policies and procedures you will need to learn before you start planning budgets, collecting assessments, and signing checks. Board members and officers of all community associations in America should read the following 35-point list of financial procedures and consider it a survival manual. It is divided into four segments: •Inheriting Old Books •Guarding and Vigilance •Cyberbanking Procedures •Efficiency Maximization and Return The Takeover: Inheriting Old Books 1.Incoming treasurers or accounting managers should never accept the recording of financial books or accounts of a previous money manager. In order to be sure there is a clear line between the actions of the prior money manager and the current, a new bank account should be opened and the funds transferred to the new account. The new account helps to draw the line of accountability. Liability is also reduced by the new account, since any old checks that may be lying around will then be invalid. 2.Immediately notify the bank when officers change. Bank signature cards must always be brought current immediately following the annual election. All officers should go to the bank together to provide identification and verify signatures. 3.For incoming treasurers or accounting managers, a “transition document” stating all association account balances—including a statement as to the purpose of the reserve account, all contracts (including the vendors’ names and the expiration dates), and any outstanding payments due for services rendered or received—should be provided to the new money manager. 4.Destroy all old checks and deposit slips. Use a cross shredder or a document destruction company. 5.Keep new checks under lock and guard the keys. 6.If a board treasurer or management company refuses to give up the bank accounts (it has happened), send the person or company a certified letter demanding the rightful return
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Sara E. Benson (Escaping Condo Jail)
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Gender and sex can, and do, mean different things in different contexts. More than that, they interact. Why is it that we classify bodies into "male" and "female" first, rather than through any other categorization? Why do so many ideas about sex cleave so strongly to gender stereotypes? Is it possible to consider the body as something neutral that exists apart from the sexed and gendered terms we use to describe it?
Some trans people would prefer to avoid this argument altogether; others to others to bring it to a head. I stand with the latter option. Not because trans people are a problem to be explained away - validated or refuted by a singular notion of scientific truth - but because, when the facts of our supposed sexes are used to invalidate and endanger us, it is too dangerous not to. Not only that: the possibilities as to what trans people can teach us all about the science of sex and gender are too precious to dismiss.
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C.N. Lester (Trans Like Me)
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So what does it mean, that Peyton Place by Grace Metalious sold more copies than Sanctuary by William Faulkner? It means that reading has as many functions as the human body, and that not all of them are cerebral. One is mere entertainment, the pleasurable whiling away of time; another is more important, not intellectual but serious just the same. "She had learned something comforting," Roald Dahl wrote in Matilda of his ever-reading protagonist, "that we are not alone." And if readers use words and stories as much, or more, to lessen human isolation as to expand human knowledge, is that somehow unworthy, invalid, and unimportant?
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Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)