“
The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
”
”
Milan Kundera
“
Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.
”
”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“
hard work is a misleading term. physical effort & long hours do not constitute hard work. hard work is when someone pays you to do something you'd rather not be doing. anytime you'd rather be doing something other than the thing you're doing...you're doing hard work.
”
”
George Carlin (When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?)
“
By mistaking alluring shadows for reality and mixing up appearances that project idealized versions of ourselves or misleading images of others, we may be deceived by willful illusions instead of remaining grounded. ("Blind date")
”
”
Erik Pevernagie
“
When someone would mistreat, misinform, misuse, misguide, mishandle, mislead… or any other "mis"… to others, they’re obviously missing something from their lives.
”
”
Donald L. Hicks (Look into the stillness)
“
When people want to win they will go to desperate extremes. However, anyone that has already won in life has come to the conclusion that there is no game. There is nothing but learning in this life and it is the only thing we take with us to the grave—knowledge. If you only understood that concept then your heart wouldn’t break so bad. Jealousy or revenge wouldn’t be your ambition. Stepping on others to raise yourself up wouldn’t be a goal. Competition would be left on the playing field, and your freedom from what other people think about you would light the pathway out of hell.
”
”
Shannon L. Alder
“
When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien's innumerable heirs. Call it 'epic', or 'high', or 'genre' fantasy, this is what fantasy has come to mean. Which is misleading as well as unfortunate.
Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés—elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.
That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps—via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabiński and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on—the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations.
Of course I'm not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine—that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it's impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it—Michael Swanwick's superb
Iron Dragon's Daughter
gives the lie to that. But given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies?
Thankfully, the alternative tradition of fantasy has never died. And it's getting stronger. Chris Wooding, Michael Swanwick, Mary Gentle, Paul di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others, are all producing works based on fantasy's radicalism. Where traditional fantasy has been rural and bucolic, this is often urban, and frequently brutal. Characters are more than cardboard cutouts, and they're not defined by race or sex. Things are gritty and tricky, just as in real life. This is fantasy not as comfort-food, but as challenge.
The critic Gabe Chouinard has said that we're entering a new period, a renaissance in the creative radicalism of fantasy that hasn't been seen since the New Wave of the sixties and seventies, and in echo of which he has christened the Next Wave. I don't know if he's right, but I'm excited. This is a radical literature. It's the literature we most deserve.
”
”
China Miéville
“
It's not unfortunate that people aren't genuine; what's unfortunate is that insincere people try to act sincere and in doing so, mislead and deceive the other. I would rather meet a person who is not amiable and who does not feel any burden to act amiable towards me, than to have the misfortune of knowing people who feel like they need to be gracious and compassionate so they will appear to be good people, whilst possessing none of those qualities within themselves! It's the latter that causes the pain in life. And that's another reason why I don't believe in religion; I have observed that religion tells people that it is highly prized a quality to act kind and compassionate and so on and so forth, but some people just do not have these innate qualities within them! We get deceived, and I'd rather not be deceived! I'd rather be able to see a person for who he/she is and not judge a brute for being a brute, but avoid the brute who carries the burden of acting like a wonderful one!
”
”
C. JoyBell C.
“
It was one of those ones they call screwball comedies, where people mislead and ill-treat each other in the most shocking and baffling way possible, then forgive and forget about it because they happen to like the look of each other. Only they call it falling in love.
”
”
Helen Oyeyemi (Boy, Snow, Bird)
“
To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.
”
”
Sam Harris (Lying)
“
Most of the time, we see only what we want to see, or what others tell us to see, instead of really investigate to see what is really there. We embrace illusions only because we are presented with the illusion that they are embraced by the majority. When in truth, they only become popular because they are pounded at us by the media with such an intensity and high level of repetition that its mere force disguises lies and truths. And like obedient schoolchildren, we do not question their validity and swallow everything up like medicine. Why? Because since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.
”
”
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
“
When you get older, you notice your sheets are dirty. Sometimes, you do something about it. And sometimes, you read the front page of the newspaper and sometimes you floss and sometimes you stop biting your nails and sometimes you meet a friend for lunch. You still crave lemonade, but the taste doesn’t satisfy you as much as it used to. You still crave summer, but sometimes you mean summer, five years ago.
You remember your umbrella, you check up on people to see if they got home, you leave places early to go home and make toast. You stand by the toaster in your underwear and a big t-shirt, wondering if you should just turn in or watch one more hour of television. You laugh at different things. You stop laughing at other things. You think about old loves almost like they are in a museum. The socks, you notice, aren’t organized into pairs and you mentally make a note of it. You cover your mouth when you sneeze, reaching for the box of tissues you bought, contains aloe.
When you get older, you try different shampoos. You find one you like. You try sleeping early and spin class and jogging again. You try a book you almost read but couldn’t finish. You wrap yourself in the blankets of: familiar t-shirts, caffe au lait, dim tv light, texts with old friends or new people you really want to like and love you. You lose contact with friends from college, and only sometimes you think about it. When you do, it feels bad and almost bitter. You lose people, and when other people bring them up, you almost pretend like you know what they are doing. You try to stop touching your face and become invested in things like expensive salads and trying parsnips and saving up for a vacation you really want. You keep a spare pen in a drawer. You look at old pictures of yourself and they feel foreign and misleading. You forget things like: purchasing stamps, buying more butter, putting lotion on your elbows, calling your mother back. You learn things like balance: checkbooks, social life, work life, time to work out and time to enjoy yourself.
When you get older, you find yourself more in control. You find your convictions appealing, you find you like your body more, you learn to take things in stride. You begin to crave respect and comfort and adventure, all at the same time. You lay in your bed, fearing death, just like you did. You pull lint off your shirt. You smile less and feel content more. You think about changing and then often, you do.
”
”
Alida Nugent (You Don't Have to Like Me: Essays on Growing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding Feminism)
“
And the same things look bent and straight when seen in water and out of it, and also both concave and convex, due to the sight’s being mislead by the colors, and every sort of confusion of this kind is plainly in our soul. And, then, it is because they take advantage of this affection in our nature that shadow painting, and puppeteering, and many other tricks of the kind fall nothing short of wizardry.
”
”
Socrates
“
This possibility was not flattering to me; it was terrifying. There were other things a guy could think I was, and he wouldn't be entirely wrong - nice, or loyal, or maybe interesting. Not that I was always any of those thing, but in certain situations, it was conceivable. But to be seen as pretty was to be fundamentally misunderstood. First of all, I wasn't pretty, and on top of that I didn't take care of myself like a pretty girl did; I wasn't even one of the unpretty girls who passes as pretty through effort and association. If a guy believed my value to lie in my looks, it meant either that he'd somehow been mislead and would eventually be disappointed, or that he had very low standards.
”
”
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
“
I’m not much of a liar. A hoarder, a hider: most definitely, yes, and sometimes I’m dishonest by default because I find it difficult to share that innermost part of myself with others. But never a conscious liar. I don’t think I have it within me to deliberately mislead anyone.
”
”
Siobhan Davis (Saven Deception (Saven #1))
“
A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection.
”
”
Benjamin Dreyer (Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style)
“
Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible; and when you strike and overcome him, never let up in the pursuit so long as your men have strength to follow; for an army routed, if hotly pursued, becomes panic-stricken, and can then be destroyed by half their number. The other rule is, never fight against heavy odds, if by any possible maneuvering you can hurl your own force on only a part, and that the weakest part, of your enemy and crush it. Such tactics will win every time, and a small army may thus destroy a large one in detail, and repeated victory will make it invincible.
”
”
Stonewall Jackson
“
Some men are so indoctrinated that they sincerely believe that other than cooking and cleaning the only thing that a woman can do better than them is being a woman.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
I cannot give up on my values and beliefs for the sake of respecting someone else’s values and morals. Because those values explain who am I. I prefer struggling and even dying for what I believe and what I don’t believe.
Silence is not respect; it is not condemning brutality and cruelty, and neglecting your own existence as human being. I will be killed and so many others because of standing against the fallacy and misleading notion of religions. They will torture us and cut us in pieces alive and even won’t stop disrespecting our death bodies; that is how these monsters have been governing for hundreds thousands of years.
”
”
M.F. Moonzajer
“
Don't let the title mislead you," Arlbeth told her. "The king is simply the visible one. I'm so visible, in fact, that most of the important work has to be done by other people."
"Nonsense," said Tor.
Arlbeth chuckled. "Your loyalty does you honor, but you're in the process of becoming too visible to be effective yourself, so what do you know about it?
”
”
Robin McKinley (The Hero and the Crown (Damar, #2))
“
But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.
”
”
Susan Sontag (On Photography)
“
We stay the same as we've always been, keeping to the path we've walked our whole lives. Paths that carry so much importance and perceived stability that we are utterly convinced it is the only one to walk – that anyone not walking it with us is being misled.
”
”
A.J. Darkholme (Rise of the Morningstar (The Morningstar Chronicles, #1))
“
I was starting to realize the extent of the problem here: everyone is always lying to each other, and even when they're trying to tell the truth, it can still be misleading or wrong. In fact, it almost always is wrong from at least one angle. I mean, the truth is really just a better class of lie.
”
”
Frank Portman (King Dork (King Dork, #1))
“
Telling the truth in Washington, D.C., is a radical act. And it earns you the enmity of career politicians in both parties. When you tell the truth about Washington—when you expose the fact that elected officials are misleading the voters who elected them—you pay a price. It’s one thing to criticize the other party. But when you admit publicly that many of those in your own party are complicit in the problem, well, that’s when the long knives come out.
”
”
Ted Cruz (A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America)
“
In no country does the average income give the right picture of how people live but in a country with higher inequality it is likely to be particularly misleading. Given that the US has by far the most unequal distribution of income among the rich countries, we can safely guess that the US per capita income overstates the actual living standards of more of its citizens than in other countries....The much higher crime rate than in Europe or Japan -- in per capita terms, the US has eight times more people in prison than Europe and twelve times more than Japan -- shows that there is a far bigger underclass in the US.
”
”
Ha-Joon Chang (23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism)
“
You don't sound like a librarian," she said.
"I'm on vacation," Jacqueline laughed. "Well, I supposed there is an image, isn't there? But stereotypes are awfully misleading. there are typical librarians, but not all librarians are typical. Any more than any other profession.
”
”
Elizabeth Peters (The Seventh Sinner (Jacqueline Kirby, #1))
“
For if the question is absurd in itself and demands unnecessary answers, then, besides the embarrassment of the one who proposes it, it also has the disadvantage of misleading the incautious listener into absurd answers, and presenting the ridiculous sight (as the ancients said) of one person milking a billy-goat while the other holds a sieve underneath. (A58/B82)
”
”
Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason)
“
If I have attached anything to sacrifice other than loss, I have at some level assumed a pay-off. And if I’ve assumed a pay-off, I’m only assuming a sacrifice.
”
”
Craig D. Lounsbrough
“
It was the most important moment in human history, the telling of the first lie. That's what separates us from the other animals. It has nothing to do with humans thinking on a higher plane or having easily available credit. We lie to each other. We deliberately mislead.
”
”
Michael Robotham (Lost (Joseph O'Loughlin, #2))
“
Shall I tell you a story? A new and terrible one? A ghost story?"
The voice, a faint echo in the cave, belongs to Felicity. She turns around on the rock, faces us, wraps her arms across bent knees, hugging them close. "Are you ready? Shall I begin? Once upon a time there were four girls. One was pretty. One was clever. One charming, and one..." She glances at me. "One was mysterious. But they were all damaged, you see. Something not right about the lot of them. Bad blood. Big dreams. Oh, I left that part out. Sorry, that should have come before. They were all dreamers, these girls."
Felicity...," I start, because it's her and not the story that's beginning to frighten me.
You wanted a story, and I'm going to give you one." Lightning shoots across the cave walls, bathing half her face in light, the other in shadows. "One by one, night after night, the girls came together. And they sinned. Do you know what that sin was? No one? Pippa? Ann?"
Felicity." Pippa sounds anxious. "Let's go back and have a nice cup of tea. It's too cold out here."
Felicity's voice expands, fills the space around us, a bell tolling. "Their sin was that they believed. Believed they could be different. Special. They believed they could change what they were--damaged, unloved. Cast-off things. They would be alive, adored, needed. Necessary. But it wasn't true. This is a ghost story, remember? A tragedy."
The lightning's back, a big one, two, three of light that lets me see Felicity's face, slick with tears, nose running. "They were mislead. Betrayed by their own stupid hopes. Things couldn't be different for them, because they weren't special after all. So life took them, led them, and they went along, you see? They faded before their own eyes, till they were nothing more than living ghosts, haunting each other with what could be. What can't be.
”
”
Libba Bray (A Great and Terrible Beauty (Gemma Doyle, #1))
“
In the cloudy swirl of misleading ideas surrounding public discussion of addiction, there’s one that stands out: the misconception that drug taking by itself will lead to addiction—in other words, that the cause of addiction resides in the power of the drug over the human brain. It is one of the bedrock fables sustaining the so-called War on Drugs.
”
”
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
“
Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things ain’t what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times.
”
”
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
we’re like a shattered peasant society. I mean, the last study I saw of it was done in around 1980, and the United States was at the level of Bangladesh, it was very close to Iran.33 Eighty percent of Americans literally believe in religious miracles. Half the population thinks the world was created a couple thousand years ago and that fossils were put here to mislead people or something—half the population. You just don’t find things like that in other industrial societies.34 Well,
”
”
Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)
“
His eyes darkened. He edged toward her. "And how am I a farce?"
"You told me in your own words the night we formally met that you play the role of a gentleman for a reason, and that it has nothing to do with respectability. Which leads me to conclude that you are hiding behind the illusion of perfection you create for the sole purpose of misleading others. Because there is no perfect life, my lord. Just as there is no perfect gentleman. Lie to yourself and to those who feast on your illusion, but do not lie to me.
”
”
Delilah Marvelle (The Perfect Scandal (Scandal, #3))
“
When we undertake to deceive others intentionally, we communicate messages meant to mislead them, meant to make them believe what we ourselves do not believe. We can do so through gesture, through disguise, by means of action or inaction, even through silence.
”
”
Sissela Bok (Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life)
“
So, if we're to make any sense of the mess that the pharmaceutical industry - and my profession - has made of the academic literature, then we need an amnesty: we need a full and clear declaration of all the distortions, on missing data, ghostwriting, and all the other activity described in this book, to prevent the ongoing harm that they still cause.
”
”
Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
“
Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.
”
”
Harold Bloom (The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life)
“
Scientists have no more status than what other scientists award them through citations, talk invitations, and tenure. “Status” makes a misleadingly concrete-sounding
”
”
Geoffrey Miller (Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior)
“
You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go round the
earth, but the earth goes round the sun, revolving as it
goes, and turning towards the sun in the course of each
twenty-four hours, not only Japan, and the Philippines,
and Sumatra where we now are, but Africa, and Europe,
and America, and many lands besides. The sun does not
shine for some one mountain, or for some one island,
or for some one sea, nor even for one earth alone, but
for other planets as well as our earth. If you would
only look up at the heavens, instead of at the ground
beneath your own feet, you might all understand this,
and would then no longer suppose that the sun shines
for you, or for your country alone.
”
”
Leo Tolstoy (Eleven Stories)
“
Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, politics, or institutionalised religion. At its strongest - Johnson, Hazlitt, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Paul Valéer, among others - it is a kind of wisdom literature, and so a meditation upon life. Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.
”
”
Harold Bloom (The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life)
“
One exception to the Negativity bias is found in autobiographical memory. Though we tend to remember bad events as well as we remember good ones, the negative coloring of the misfortunes fades with time, particularly the ones that happened to us.24 We are wired for nostalgia: in human memory, time heals most wounds. Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things ain’t what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times.25
”
”
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger against Gide the Luciferian. Reading his 'memories' is like meeting a man on a train who says, 'Don't look at me; that's misleading. If you want to know what I'm like, wait until we're in a tunnel, and then study my reflection in the window.' You wait, and look, and catch a face against a shifting background of sooty walls, cables, and sudden brickwork. The transparent shape flickers and jumps, always a few feet away. You become accustomed to its existence, you move with its movements; and though you know its presence is conditional, you feel it to be permanent. Then there is a wail from ahead, a roar and a burst of light; the face is gone for ever.
”
”
Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)
“
Too high for common selfishness , he could
At times resign his own for others' good,
But not in pity - not because he ought,
But in some strange perversity of thought,
That swayed him onward with a secred pride
To do what few or none could do beside;
And this same impulse would, in tempting time,
Mislead his spirit equally to crime;
So much he soared beyond, or sank beneath,
The men with whom he felt condemned to breathe
And longed by good or ill to seperate
Himself from all who shared his mortal fate.
”
”
Lord Byron
“
Blindness to larger contexts is a constitutional defect of human thinking imposed by the painful necessity of being able to concentrate on only one thing at a time. We forget as we virtuously concentrate on that one thing that hundreds of other things are going on at the same time and on every side of us, things that are just as important as the object of our study and that are all interconnected in ways that we cannot even guess. Sad to say, our picture of the world to the degree to which it has that neatness, precision, and finality so coveted by scholarship is a false one.
I once studied with a famous professor who declared that he deliberately avoided the study of any literature east of Greece lest the new vision destroy the architectonic perfection of his own celebrated construction of the Greek mind. His picture of that mind was immensely impressive but, I strongly suspect, completely misleading.
”
”
Hugh Nibley (Of all things!: A Nibley quote book)
“
Then, however, Mayer thought it fitting to remind her of the most important thing:
'Between the heart and the tongue lies an abyss,' he said. "Remember that. Thoughts must be concealed, particularly since you were born, to your great misfortune, a woman. Think so that they think you are not thinking. Behave in such a way that you mislead others. We all must do this, but women more so. Talmudists know about the strength of women, but they fear it .... But we don't ... because we ourselves are like women. We survive by hiding. We play the fools, pretending to be people we are not. We come home, and then we take off our masks. But we bear the burden of silence: masa duma.
”
”
Olga Tokarczuk (The Books of Jacob)
“
Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that 'tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for't.. And truly, I should have taken Sr. Rt: Filmer's "Patriarcha" as any other Treatise, which would perswade all Men, that they are Slaves, and ought to be so, for such another exercise of Wit, as was his who writ the Encomium (Praise) of Nero, rather than for a serious Discourse meant in earnest, had not the Gravity of the Title and Epistle, the Picture in the Front of the Book, and the Applause that followed it, required me to believe, that the Author and Publisher were both in earnest. I therefore took it into my hands with all the expectation and read it through with all the attention due to a Treaties, that made such a noise at its coming abroad and cannot but confess my self mightily surprised, that in a Book which was to provide Chains for all Mankind, I should find nothing but a Rope of Sand, useful perhaps to such, whose Skill and Business it is to raise a Dust, and would blind the People, the better to mislead them, but in truth is not of any force to draw those into Bondage, who have their Eyes open, and so much Sense about them as to consider, that Chains are but an Ill wearing, how much Care soever hath been taken to file and polish them.
”
”
John Locke (Second Treatise of Government (Hackett Classics))
“
THE ORGANIC FOODS MYTH
A few decades ago, a woman tried to sue a butter company that had printed the word 'LITE' on its product's packaging. She claimed to have gained so much weight from eating the butter, even though it was labeled as being 'LITE'. In court, the lawyer representing the butter company simply held up the container of butter and said to the judge, "My client did not lie. The container is indeed 'light in weight'. The woman lost the case.
In a marketing class in college, we were assigned this case study to show us that 'puffery' is legal. This means that you can deceptively use words with double meanings to sell a product, even though they could mislead customers into thinking your words mean something different. I am using this example to touch upon the myth of organic foods. If I was a lawyer representing a company that had labeled its oranges as being organic, and a man was suing my client because he found out that the oranges were being sprayed with toxins, my defense opening statement would be very simple: "If it's not plastic or metallic, it's organic."
Most products labeled as being organic are not really organic. This is the truth. You pay premium prices for products you think are grown without chemicals, but most products are. If an apple is labeled as being organic, it could mean two things. Either the apple tree itself is free from chemicals, or just the soil. One or the other, but rarely both. The truth is, the word 'organic' can mean many things, and taking a farmer to court would be difficult if you found out his fruits were indeed sprayed with pesticides. After all, all organisms on earth are scientifically labeled as being organic, unless they are made of plastic or metal. The word 'organic' comes from the word 'organism', meaning something that is, or once was, living and breathing air, water and sunlight.
So, the next time you stroll through your local supermarket and see brown pears that are labeled as being organic, know that they could have been third-rate fare sourced from the last day of a weekend market, and have been re-labeled to be sold to a gullible crowd for a premium price. I have a friend who thinks that organic foods have to look beat up and deformed because the use of chemicals is what makes them look perfect and flawless. This is not true. Chemical-free foods can look perfect if grown in your backyard. If you go to jungles or forests untouched by man, you will see fruit and vegetables that look like they sprouted from trees from Heaven. So be cautious the next time you buy anything labeled as 'organic'. Unless you personally know the farmer or the company selling the products, don't trust what you read. You, me, and everything on land and sea are organic.
Suzy Kassem,
Truth Is Crying
”
”
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
“
Woolf criticism has not evolved smoothly, and it would be misleading to say that any one approach or interpretation has ever prevailed to the exclusion of others. There are continuities and discontinuities in trends and arguments,
areas of common ground and major points of dispute.
”
”
Jane Goldman (The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge Introductions to Literature))
“
I mean, to talk about "corporate greed" is like talking about "military weapons" or something like that―there just is no other possibility. A corporation is something that is trying to maximize power and profit: that's what it is. There is no "phenomenon" of corporate greed, and we shouldn't mislead people into thinking there is. It's like talking about "robber's greed" or something like that―it's not a meaningful thing, it's misleading. A corporation's purpose is to maximize profit and market share and return to investors, and all that kind of stuff, and if its officers don't pursue that goal, for one thing they are legally liable for not pursuing it. There I agree with Milton Friedman [right-wing economist] and those guys: if you're a C.E.O., you must do that―otherwise you're in dereliction of duty, in fact dereliction of duty. And besides that, if you don't do it, you'll get kicked out by the shareholders or the Board of Directors, and you won't be there very long anyway.
”
”
Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)
“
In medicine, brand identities are irrelevant, and there’s a factual, objective answer to whether one drug is the most likely to improve a patient’s pain, suffering and longevity. Marketing, therefore, one might argue, exists for no reason other than to pervert evidence-based decision-making in medicine.
”
”
Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
“
Although many of us are struggling against the same oppressive powers worldwide, we are all made to think of each other as enemies rather than allies in this global struggle. We have been separated from each other by the most misleading notion that some of us are citizens of the “First World”, while others are sub-humans from the “Third World”. I dreamed of a time when we all realize that we live in one world not three worlds as politicians and warmongers want us to believe.
”
”
Louis Yako
“
The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of sharks and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will. Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart. Fossil feelings. Better off without them, once you’d outgrown the savanna and decided that Truth mattered after all. But Humanity wasn’t defined by arms and legs and upright posture. Humanity had evolved at the synapse as well as at the opposable thumb—and those misleading gut feelings were the very groundwork on which the whole damn clade had been built. Capuchins felt empathy. Chimps had an innate sense of fair play. You could look into the eyes of any cat or dog and see a connection there, a legacy of common subroutines and shared emotions.
”
”
Peter Watts (Firefall (Firefall #1-2))
“
On the other side of the debate are a group of psychologists known as the Situationists. Situationism posits that our generalizations about people, including the words we use to describe one another—shy, aggressive, conscientious, agreeable—are misleading. There is no core self; there are only the various selves of Situations X, Y, and Z.
”
”
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
He who misleads others in other to succeed in life will definitely be misled at his post of success”.
”
”
Abdulazeez Henry Musa
“
Misleading, lie, destruction, vexatious conduct, and dishonour to others, abuse, blames, denying facts, and use of awkward language, do not match with a real, fair, and true leader of any nation.
”
”
Ehsan Sehgal
“
We’re in the same position as any scientist. All we have to go on is experiential evidence. And sooner or later we have to trust our own experience, because that’s all we really have. Otherwise it’s a vicious circle. If I fundamentally distrust my experience, then I must distrust even my capacity to distrust, since that is also an experience. So sooner or later I have no choice but to trust, trust my experience, trust that the universe is not fundamentally and persistently going to lie to me. Of course we can be mistaken, and sometimes experiences are misleading, but on balance we have no choice but to follow them. It’s a type of phenomenological imperative. And especially mystical experiences—if anything, as you say, they are more real, not less real, than other experiences.” I
”
”
Ken Wilber (Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber)
“
In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosophical theory typically does is to choose one of those metaphors as "right," as the true literal meaning of the concept. One reason there is so much argumentation across philosophical theories is that different philosophers have chosen different metaphors as the "right" one, ignoring or taking as misleading all other commonplace metaphorical structurings of the concept. Philosophers have done this because they assume that a concept must have one and only one logic. But the cognitive reality is that our concepts have multiple metaphorical structurings.
”
”
George Lakoff (Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought)
“
If any man at this day sincerely believes that a proper division of local from federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbids the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the federal territories, he is right to say so, and to enforce his position by all truthful evidence and fair argument which he can. But he has no right to mislead others, who have less access to history, and less leisure to study it, into the false belief that "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live" were of the same opinion - thus substituting falsehood and deception for truthful evidence and fair argument.
”
”
Abraham Lincoln
“
There are others whose concept of God, such as it is, ascribes to him the nature and moods of the human spirit, a mistake which ties their arguments about God to distorted and misleading rules of interpretation.
”
”
Augustine of Hippo (The Trinity)
“
All pantheists feel the same profound reverence for the Universe/Nature, but different pantheists use different forms of language to express this reverence. Traditionally, Pantheism has made use of theistic-sounding words like “God,” but in basically non-theistic ways - pantheists do not believe in a supernatural creator personal God who will judge us all after death. Modern pantheists fall into two distinct groups in relation to language: some avoid words such as God or divine, because this makes listeners think in terms of traditional concepts of God that can be very misleading. Others are quite comfortable using these words, but when they use them they don’t mean the same thing that conventional theists mean. If they say "the Universe is God," they don’t mean that the Universe is identical with the deity in the Bible or the Koran.
”
”
Paul Harrison (Elements of Pantheism; A Spirituality of Nature and the Universe)
“
Then, at one particular corner of the gooseberry patch, the change came. What awaited her there was serious to the degree of sorrow and beyond. There was no form nor sound. The mold under the bushes, the moss on the path, and the little brick border, were not visibly changed. But they were changed. A boundary had been crossed. She had come into a world, or into a Person, or into the presence of a Person. Something expectant, patient, inexorable, met her with no veil or protection between. In the closeness of that contact she perceived at once that the Director’s words had been entirely misleading. This demand which now pressed upon her was not, even by analogy, like any other demand. It was the origin of all right demands and contained them. In its light you could understand them; but from them you could know nothing of it. There was nothing, and never had been anything, like this. And now there was nothing except this. Yet also, everything had been like this; only by being like this had anything existed. In this height and depth and breadth the little idea of herself which she had hitherto called me dropped down and vanished, unfluttering, into bottomless distance, like a bird in a space without air. The name me was the name of a being whose existence she had never suspected, a being that did not yet fully exist but which was demanded. It was a person (not the person she had thought), yet also a thing, a made thing, made to please Another and in Him to please all others, a thing being made at this very moment, without its choice, in a shape it had never dreamed of. And the making went on amidst a kind of splendor or sorrow or both, whereof she could not tell whether it was in the molding hands or in the kneaded lump.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (That Hideous Strength (The Space Trilogy #3))
“
Get Out’s runaway success led to an almost-immediate boom in what became known as “social horror,” a weirdly banal descriptor for horror movies and books that engage directly with racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression and bigotry. It’s sort of a misleading term, implying that this is a recent cultural development—if you take one thing away from this book, let it be that horror has always engaged with social issues.
”
”
Emily C. Hughes (Horror for Weenies: Everything You Need to Know About the Films You're Too Scared to Watch (The Outsider's Guides Book 1))
“
The point is, our minds aren't as private as we like to imagine. Other people have partial visibility into what we're thinking. Faced with the translucency of our own minds, then, self-deception is often the most robust way to mislead others. It's not technically a lie (because it's not conscious or deliberate), but it has a similar effect. "We hide reality from our conscious minds," says Trivers, "the better to hide it from onlookers.
”
”
Kevin Simler (The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
“
Qualitative and quantitative research with adults and children reporting ritual abuse has found that it occurs alongside other forms of organised abuse, particularly the manufacture of child abuse images (Scott 2001, Snow and Sorenson 1990, Waterman et al. 1993), and hence subsuming such non-ritualistic experiences under the moniker ‘ritual abuse’ is misleading at best and incendiary at worst. Moreover, it is unclear why an abusive group that invokes a religious or metaphysical mandate to abuse children should be considered as largely distinct from an abusive group that invokes a non-religious rationale to do so. The presumption evident amongst some authors writing on ritual abuse that a professed spiritual motivation for abusing children necessarily reflects the offenders actual motivation seems naïve at best, and at worst it risks colluding with the ways in which abusive groups obfuscate responsibility for their actions.
”
”
Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
“
You might be too enmeshed with the other person, or “codependent,” and you must learn to set better “boundaries.”
The basic premise underlying this point of view is that the ideal relationship is one between two self-sufficient people who unite in a mature, respectful way while maintaining clear boundaries. If you develop a strong dependency on your partner, you are deficient in some way and are advised to work on yourself to become more “differentiated” and develop a “greater sense of self.” The worst possible scenario is that you will end up needing your partner, which is equated with “addiction” to him or her, and addiction, we all know, is a dangerous prospect.
While the teachings of the codependency movement remain immensely helpful in dealing with family members who suffer from substance abuse (as was the initial intention), they can be misleading and even damaging when applied indiscriminately to all relationships.
”
”
Amir Levine (Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love)
“
To try to understand the experience of another it is necessary to dismantle the world as seen from one's own place within it, and to reassemble it as seen from his. For example, to understand a given choice another makes, one must face in imagination the lack of choices which may confront and deny him. The well-fed are incapable of understanding the choices of the under-fed. The world has to be dismantled and re-assembled in order to be able to grasp, however clumsily, the experience of another. To talk of entering the other's subjectivity is misleading. The subjectivity of another does not simply constitute a different interior attitude to the same exterior facts. The constellation of facts, of which he is the centre, is different.
”
”
John Berger (A Seventh Man)
“
Too high for common selfishness, he could
At times resign his own for others’ good,
But not in pity, not because he ought,
But in some strange perversity of thought,
That swayed him onward with a secret pride
To do what few or none would do beside;
And this same impulse would, in tempting time,
Mislead his spirit equally in crime;
So much he soared beyond, or sunk beneath,
The men with whom he felt condemned to breathe,
And longed by good or ill to separate
Himself from all who shared his mortal state.
”
”
Lord Byron (Lara)
“
But as soon as we grasp this—and I appreciate it takes quite a bit of latching onto for people who have spent their whole lives thinking the other way—we see that if salvation is that sort of thing, it can’t be confined to human beings. When human beings are saved, in the past as a single coming-to-faith event, in the present through acts of healing and rescue, including answers to the prayer “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” and in the future when they are finally raised from the dead, this is always so that they can be genuine human beings in a fuller sense than they otherwise would have been. And genuine human beings, from Genesis 1 onward, are given the mandate of looking after creation, of bringing order to God’s world, of establishing and maintaining communities. To suppose that we are saved, as it were, for our own private benefit, for the restoration of our own relationship with God (vital though that is!), and for our eventual homecoming and peace in heaven (misleading though that is!) is like a boy being given a baseball bat as a present and insisting that since it belongs to him, he must always and only play with it in private. But of course you can only do what you’re meant to do with a baseball bat when you’re playing with other people. And salvation only does what it’s meant to do when those who have been saved, are being saved, and will one day fully be saved realize that they are saved not as souls but as wholes and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them.
”
”
N.T. Wright (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)
“
The conclusion that all these studies converge upon is that about half of your IQ was inherited, and less than a fifth was due to the environment you shared with your siblings – the family. The rest came from the womb, the school and outside influences such as peer groups. But even this is misleading. Not only does your IQ change with age, but so does its heritability. As you grow up and accumulate experiences, the influence of your genes increases. What? Surely, it falls off? No: the heritability of childhood IQ is about forty-five per cent, whereas in late adolescence it rises to seventy-five per cent. As you grow up, you gradually express your own innate intelligence and leave behind the influences stamped on you by others. You select the environments that suit your innate tendencies, rather than adjusting your innate tendencies to the environments you find yourself in. This proves two vital things: that genetic influences are not frozen at conception and that environmental influences are not inexorably cumulative. Heritability does not mean immutability.
”
”
Matt Ridley (Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters)
“
To return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God to terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a ‘big bang singularity’, or some other physical concept as yet unknown. Calling it God is at best unhelpful and at worst perniciously misleading.
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion: 10th Anniversary Edition)
“
How can I love my neighbor without misleading her into thinking I approve of everything she does?” First, remember that Christians cannot give good answers to bad questions. No one approves of everything that others do. No one. It is a false question. The better question is this: “How can my neighbors know that because I live under God’s authority rather than the compulsions of my own selfish desires, their secrets are safe with me?” The answer is simple: love the sinner and hate your own sin. Or, as Mark says, “Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another” (Mark 9:50).
”
”
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield (The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World)
“
We enter into all major relationships with no real clue of where we are going: marriage, birth, friendship. We carry maps we believe are true: our parents' relationship, what it says in the baby books, the landscape of our own childhood. These maps are approximate at best, dangerously misleading at worst.
”
”
Maureen F. McHugh
“
Kessler is a tireless and fair journalist who does not shy from calling out untruths uttered by either Democrats or Republicans. By mid-2019, Kessler’s team had documented more than ten thousand false or misleading statements by the president—an ignominious record unlikely to be matched by any other public figure.
”
”
Jonathan Karl (Front Row at the Trump Show)
“
Dr. Chanter, in his brilliant History of Human Thought in the Twentieth Century, has made the suggestion that only a very small proportion of people are capable of acquiring new ideas of political or social behaviour after they are twenty-five years old. On the other hand, few people become directive in these matters until they are between forty and fifty. Then they prevail for twenty years or more. The conduct of public affairs therefore is necessarily twenty years or more behind the living thought of the times. This is what Dr. Chanter calls the "delayed
realisation of ideas".
In the less hurried past this had not been of any great importance, but in the violent crises of the Revolutionary Period it became a primary fact. It is evident now that whatever the emergency, however obvious the new problem before our species in the nineteen-twenties, it was necessary for the whole generation that had learned nothing and could learn nothing from the Great War and its sequelae, to die out before any rational handling of world affairs could even begin. The cream of the youth of the war years had been killed; a stratum of men already middle-aged remained in control, whose ideas had already set before the Great War. It was, says Chanter, an inescapable phase. The world of the Frightened Thirties and the Brigand Forties was under the dominion of a generation of unteachable, obstinately obstructive men, blinded men, miseducating, misleading the baffled younger people for completely superseded ends. If they could have had their way, they would have blinded the whole world for ever. But the blinding was inadequate, and by the Fifties all this generation and its teachings and traditions were passing away, like a smoke-screen blown aside.
Before a few years had passed it was already incredible that in the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century the whole political life of the world was still running upon the idea of competitive sovereign empires and states. Men of quite outstanding intelligence were still planning and scheming for the "hegemony" of Britain or France or Germany or Japan; they were still moving their armies and navies and air forces and making their combinations and alliances upon the dissolving chess-board of terrestrial reality. Nothing happened as they had planned it; nothing worked out as they desired; but still with a stupefying inertia they persisted. They launched armies, they starved and massacred populations. They were like a veterinary surgeon who suddenly finds he is operating upon a human being, and with a sort of blind helplessness cuts and slashes more and more desperately, according to the best equestrian rules. The history of European diplomacy between 1914 and 1944 seems now so consistent a record of incredible insincerity that it stuns the modern mind. At the time it seemed rational behaviour. It did not seem insincere. The biographical material of the period -- and these governing-class people kept themselves in countenance very largely by writing and reading each other's biographies -- the collected letters, the collected speeches, the sapient observations of the leading figures make tedious reading, but they enable the intelligent student to realise the persistence of small-society values in that swiftly expanding scene.
Those values had to die out. There was no other way of escaping from them, and so, slowly and horribly, that phase of the moribund sovereign states concluded.
”
”
H.G. Wells (The Holy Terror)
“
In other words, the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope's object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself. (...) The surest way of spoiling a pleasure was to start examining your satisfaction. But if so, it followed that all introspection is in one respect misleading. In introspection, we try to look 'inside ourselves' and see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a moment before is stopped by the very act of our turning to look at it. Unfortunately, this does not mean that introspection finds nothing. On the contrary, it finds precisely what is left behind by the suspension of all our normal activities; and what is left behind is mainly mental images and physical sensations. The great error is to mistake this mere sediment for the activities themselves.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life)
“
In TV newsrooms, if it bleeds it leads remains the watchword. A study of 559 newscasts in twenty television markets across the United States compared the crimes covered by local news to the number and types of crimes actually committed. Although crime had fallen for eight years prior to the 2004 study, in all twenty markets “audiences were told essentially the same story—that random, violent crime was a persistent and structural feature of American society,” the researchers found. All the more misleading, the newscasts consistently gave the impression that murder and other serious crimes are rampant in places where they are rare.
”
”
Barry Glassner (The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Muta)
“
Our conjecture that metaphysics is a substitute, albeit an inadequate one, for art, seems to be further confirmed by the fact that the metaphysician who perhaps had artistic talent to the highest degree, viz Nietzsche, almost entirely avoided the error of that of confusion. A large part of his work has predominantly empirical content. We find there, for instance, historical analyses of specific artistic phenomena, or an historical psychological analysis of morals, In the work, however, in which he expresses most strongly that which others express through metaphysics or ethics, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he does not choose the misleading theoretical form, but openly form of art, of poetry.
”
”
Rudolf Carnap
“
Compounding the problem of insufficient information is the problem of bad information. Children believe in things like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy not because they are particularly credulous but for the same reasons the rest of us believe our beliefs. Their information about these phenomena comes from trusted sources (typically, their parents) and is often supported by physical evidence (cookie crumbs by the chimney, quarters under the pillow). It isn’t the kids’ fault that the evidence is fabricated and that their sources mislead them. Nor is it their fault that their primary community, outside of their family, generally consists of other children, who tend to be equally ill-informed.
”
”
Kathryn Schulz (Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error)
“
Fate isn't good with people and the other way around, it is the same. For us, it is expressing itself in a misleading way, speaking in a different language. From its point of view, however, what we would call a stroke of fate is not really that, but might just as well be a preparation for a gift it plans to hand to us, at some point in the future.
”
”
Sima B. Moussavian (Tomorrow death died out: What if the future were past?)
“
Money must follow Perpetual Exponential Quantitative Growth. I call it PEQG for short. Most people simply call it Growth but that is as misleading as calling a nuclear bomb a large firecracker. PEQG is a monster, overruling all other laws. That monster, cleverly wrapped in layers of concepts, happens to be the founding principle of Modern Economics.
”
”
Mansoor Khan (The Third Curve: The End of Growth as we know it)
“
Reigning doctrines are often called a "double standard".The term is misleading.It is more accurate to describe them as a single standard,clear and unmistakable,the standard that Adam Smith called the "vile maxim of the masters of mankind: ...All for ourselves,and nothing for other people." Much has changed since his day,but the vile maxim flourishes.
”
”
Noam Chomsky (Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy)
“
The public does not like you to mislead or represent yourself to be something you're not. And the other thing that the public really does like is the self-examination to say, you know, I'm not perfect. I'm just like you. They don't ask their public officials to be perfect. They just ask them to be smart, truthful, honest, and show a modicum of good sense.
”
”
Ann Richards
“
Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things ain’t what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times.25 As the columnist Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.
”
”
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
The older I grow, the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all look so much like each other. If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn’t expect them to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are.
”
”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“
No one under mind control has the capacity to cleverly lie and creatively twist words like Bill Clinton does! The more you understand about mind control, the easier it will become to identify victims. Victims can eloquently deliver a speech over and over using the same words, same voice inflections and gestures, the same dramatic pauses as programmed, yet cannot think to spontaneously respond to questions charismatically.” Mark furthered the explanation. “Especially questions pertaining to dates, times, geography, or even how to spell simple words like ‘potato’. People under mind control are literal, and are therefore incapable of playing word semantics, misleading others, and spontaneously telling a blatant lie the way Slick Willie does.
”
”
Cathy O'Brien (ACCESS DENIED For Reasons Of National Security: Documented Journey From CIA Mind Control Slave To U.S. Government Whistleblower)
“
It is often the case that people of noble character and great mental gifts betray a strange lack of worldly wisdom and a deficiency in the knowledge of men, more especially when they are young; with the result that it is easy to deceive or mislead them; and that, on the other hand, natures of the commoner sort are more ready and successful in making their way in the world.
The reason of this is that, when a man has little or no experience, he must judge by his own antecedent notions; and in matters demanding judgment, an antecedent notion is never on the same level as experience. For, with the commoner sort of people, an antecedent notion means just their own selfish point of view. This is not the case with those whose mind and character are above the ordinary; for it is precisely in this respect — their unselfishness — that they differ from the rest of mankind; and as they judge other people's thoughts and actions by their own high standard, the result does not always tally with their calculation.
But if, in the end, a man of noble character comes to see, as the effect of his own experience, or by the lessons he learns from others, what it is that may be expected of men in general, — namely, that five-sixths of them are morally and intellectually so constituted that, if circumstances do not place you in relation with them, you had better get out of their way and keep as far as possible from having anything to do with them, — still, he will scarcely ever attain an adequate notion of their wretchedly mean and shabby nature: all his life long he will have to be extending and adding to the inferior estimate he forms of them; and in the meantime he will commit a great many mistakes and do himself harm.
”
”
Arthur Schopenhauer (Counsels and Maxims (The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer))
“
Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are. But in the love of Christ we know all about every conceivable sin and guilt; for we know how Jesus suffered, and how all men have been forgiven at the foot of the cross. Christian love sees the fellow-man under the cross and therefore sees with clarity. If when we judged others, our real motive was to destroy evil, we should look for evil where it is certain to be found, and that is in our own hearts. But if we are on the look-out for evil in others, our real motive is obviously to justify ourselves, for we are seeking to escape punishment for our own sins by passing judgement on others, and are assuming by implication that the Word of God applies to ourselves in one way, and to others in another. All this is highly dangerous and misleading.
”
”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (The Cost of Discipleship (SCM Classics))
“
The design is based on the old St. Stephen’s Chapel, where the earliest parliamentarians sat, like choirboys in facing pews, yet there is little that is angelic in the modern set-up. Members face each other in confrontation, as antagonists. They are separated by two red lines on the carpet, whose distance apart represents the distance of two sword lengths, yet this is misleading, for the most imminent danger is never more than a dagger’s distance away, on the benches behind.
”
”
Michael Dobbs (House of Cards)
“
Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write. But I have never stopped, and of course, as a professional philologist (especially interested in linguistic aesthetics), I have changed in taste, improved in theory, and probably in craft. Behind my stories is now a nexus of languages (mostly only structurally sketched). But to those creatures which in English I call misleadingly Elvesfn11 are assigned two related languages more nearly completed, whose history is written, and whose forms (representing two different sides of my own linguistic taste) are deduced scientifically from a common origin. Out of these languages are made nearly all the names that appear in my legends. This gives a certain character (a cohesion, a consistency of linguistic style, and an illusion of historicity) to the nomenclature, or so I believe, that is markedly lacking in other comparable things. Not all will feel this as important as I do, since I am cursed by acute sensibility in such matters.
”
”
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien)
“
To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.2 This leaves stage magicians, poker players, and other harmless dissemblers off the hook, while illuminating a psychological and social landscape whose general shape is very easy to recognize. People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions—the more consequential the lie. As
”
”
Sam Harris (Lying)
“
Rich Cordray did. Rich was fearless, and he led by example. Among other things, he investigated Capital One for misleading customers about the costs of “free” add-ons to their credit cards—“free” services that actually cost customers a total of $140 million. (He ultimately forced Capital One to send the hidden fees back to every customer—and not one customer had to file papers or ask for a refund because the checks came automatically in the mail. Rich and his team also hit up the company to pay an additional $25 million fine.)
”
”
Elizabeth Warren (A Fighting Chance)
“
If we grant that our evolutionary history did not prepare us to detect lies from demeanor, why do we not learn how to do so in the course of growing up? One possibility, and my second explanation, is that our parents teach us not to identify their lies. Their privacy may often require that they mislead their children about just what they are doing, when they are doing it, and why they are doing it. While sexual activity is one obvious focus of such lies, there might well be other activities that parents want to conceal from their children.
”
”
Paul Ekman (Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage)
“
Marriage, in short, is a bargain, like buying a house or entering a profession. One chooses it knowing that, by that very decision, one is abnegating other possibilities. In choosing companionship over passion, women like Beatrice Webb and Virginia Woolf made a bargain; their marriages worked because they did not regret their bargains, or blame their husbands for not being something else--dashing lovers, for example. But in writing biographies, or one's own life, it is both customary and misleading to present such marriages, to oneself or to one's reader, as sad compromises, the best of a bad bargain, or scarcely to speak of them at all. Virginia Woolf mentioned that she, who is reticent about nothing, had never spoken of her life with Leonard. but we know that she said of him that when he entered a room, she had no idea what he was going to say, a remarkable definition of a good marriage. Such marriages are not bad bargains, but the best of a good bargain, and we must learn the language to understand and describe them, particularly in writing the lives of accomplished women.
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Carolyn G. Heilbrun
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France aspired, in other words, to create a situation whereby “every ambition and unjust enterprise [would] find both its condemnation and a perpetual obstacle.” This might sound like a grand, unattainable ideal, he said, but Europe really had no choice. Without such principles in place, held firm and rigorously guarded, international affairs would soon degenerate into a reckless pursuit of self-interest and power—just as that reckless scramble had plunged the Continent into that “long and deadly horror” of the last quarter century. Now that Napoleon was defeated, Europe must take this opportunity to crown justice as the “chief virtue” of international affairs. Leaders of states must pledge that they would never act nor acquiesce in any deed that could not be considered just, “whatever consideration [that] may arise,” because only justice, he said, can produce a true state of harmony and stability. Anything short of that would create a misleading and meaningless false order, destined to collapse when the first powerful state decided to take advantage of its superior strength.
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David King (Vienna 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made War, Peace, and Love at the Congress of Vienna)
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The war has ended with every one owing every one else immense sums of money. Germany owes a large sum to the Allies, the Allies owe a large sum to Great Britain, and Great Britain owes a large sum to the United States. The holders of war loan in every country are owed a large sum by the States, and the States in its turn is owed a large sum by these and other taxpayers. The whole position is in the highest degree artificial, misleading, and vexatious. We shall never be able to move again, unless we can free our limbs from these paper shackles.
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John Maynard Keynes (The Economic Consequences of the Peace)
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The implication that the change in nomenclature from “Multiple Personality Disorder” to “Dissociative Identity Disorder” means the condition has been repudiated and “dropped” from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association is false and misleading. Many if not most diagnostic entities have been renamed or have had their names modified as psychiatry changes in its conceptualizations and classifications of mental illnesses. When the DSM decided to go with “Dissociative Identity Disorder” it put “(formerly multiple personality disorder)” right after the new name to signify that it was the same condition. It’s right there on page 526 of DSM-IV-R. There have been four different names for this condition in the DSMs over the course of my career. I was part of the group that developed and wrote successive descriptions and diagnostic criteria for this condition for DSM-III-R, DSM–IV, and DSM-IV-TR.
While some patients have been hurt by the impact of material that proves to be inaccurate, there is no evidence that scientifically demonstrates the prevalence of such events. Most material alleged to be false has been disputed by someone, but has not been proven false.
Finally, however intriguing the idea of encouraging forgetting troubling material may seem, there is no evidence that it is either effective or safe as a general approach to treatment. There is considerable belief that when such material is put out of mind, it creates symptoms indirectly, from “behind the scenes.” Ironically, such efforts purport to cure some dissociative phenomena by encouraging others, such as Dissociative Amnesia.
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Richard P. Kluft
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Jalal-ud-Din Rumi used to tell a story about a far distant country, somewhere to the north of Afghanistan. In this country there was a city inhabited entirely by the blind. One day the news came that an elephant was passing outside the walls of this city. ‘The citizens called a meeting and decided to send a delegation of three men outside the gates so that they could report back what an elephant was. In due course, the three men left the town and stumbled forwards until they eventually found the elephant. The three reached out, felt the animal with their hands, then they all headed back to the town as quickly as they could to report what they had felt. ‘The first man said: “An elephant is a marvellous creature! It is like a vast snake, but it can stand vertically upright in the air!” The second man was indignant at hearing this: “What nonsense!” he said. “This man is misleading you. I felt the elephant and what it most resembles is a pillar. It is firm and solid and however hard you push against it you could never knock it over.” The third man shook his head and said: “Both these men are liars! I felt the elephant and it resembles a broad pankah. It is wide and flat and leathery and when you shake it it wobbles around like the sail of a dhow.” All three men stuck by their stories and for the rest of their lives they refused to speak to each other. Each professed that they and only they knew the whole truth. ‘Now of course all three of the blind men had a measure of insight. The first man felt the trunk of the elephant, the second the leg, the third the ear. All had part of the truth, but not one of them had even begun to grasp the totality or the greatness of the beast they had encountered. If only they had listened to one another and meditated on the different facets of the elephant, they might have realized the true nature of the beast. But they were too proud and instead they preferred to keep to their own half-truths. ‘So it is with us. We see Allah one way, the Hindus have a different conception, and the Christians have a third. To us, all our different visions seem incompatible and irreconcilable. But what we forget is that before God we are like blind men stumbling around in total blackness ...
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Anonymous
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find your Element you may have to challenge your own beliefs about yourself. Whatever age you are, you’ve almost certainly developed an inner story about what you can do and what you can’t do; what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. You may be right, of course. But for all the reasons we’ve discussed, you may be misleading yourself. Part of making sense of where you are now is to understand how you got here. So if you do doubt your aptitudes in certain areas, think about how these doubts were first formed. Are there other ways of developing them that you’d
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Ken Robinson (Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life)
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Whatever name you want to pin on Germany's trouble, it is contagious, it is human, and there is a lot of it around. Doctor Brickner has managed to give the impression that the problem of the peace is a problem of turning Germans into nice people. This is misleading and gives many persons the same sort of holier-than-thou feeling which Nazism celebrates. The question today is not whether German is incurably paranoid but whether her enemies are incurably nationalistic. The answer to this question is yet to be made and we advise our readers to keep their eye on the ball.
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E.B. White (The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters)
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The argument that personal moral views should not be imposed on others when it comes to lawmaking is incoherent and misleading. It is incoherent because a great deal of law implicitly "imposes" a particular moral view on the wider society. It would be disingenuous to pretend that the legalization of abortion on demand or euthanasia does not impose a certain moral view on the rest of society. This is especially true when arguments for abortion and euthanasia are based on rights. The appeal to rights is a moral argument, and it is this appeal to moral authority that gives force to laws enshrining rights.
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George Pell (God and Caesar: Selected Essays on Religion, Politics, and Society)
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In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation… The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid.
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Bob Black (The Abolition of Work)
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Just as summer-killed meat draws flies, so the court draws spurious sages, philosophists, and acosmists who remain there as long as their purses and their wits will maintain them, in the hope (at first) of an appointment from the Autarch and (later) of obtaining a tutorial position in some exalted family. At sixteen or so, Thecla was attracted, as I think young women often are, to their lectures on theogony, thodicy, and the like, and I recall one particularly in which a phoebad put forward as an ultimate truth the ancient sophistry of the existence of three Adonai, that of the city (or of the people), that of the poets, and that of the philosophers. Her reasoning was that since the beginning of human consciousness (if such a beginning ever was) there have been vast numbers of persons in the three categories who have endeavored to pierce the secret of the divine. If it does not exist, they should have discovered that long before; if it does, it is not possible that Truth itself should mislead them. Yet the beliefs of the populace, the insights of the rhapsodists, and the theories of the metaphysicians have so far diverged that few of them can so much as comprehend what the others say, and someone who knew nothing of any of their ideas might well believe there was no connection at all between them.
May it not be, she asked (and even now I am not certain I can answer), that instead of traveling, as has always been supposed, down three roads to the same destination, they are actually traveling toward three quite different ones? After all, when in common life we behold three roads issuing from the same crossing, we do not assume they all proceed toward the same goal.
I found (and find) this suggestion as rational as it is repellent, and it represents for me all that monomaniacal fabric of argument, so tightly woven that not even the tiniest objection or spark of light can escape its net, in which human minds become enmeshed whenever the subject is one in which no appeal to fact is possible.
As a fact the Claw was thus an incommensurable. No quantity of money, no piling up of archipelagoes or empires could approach it in value any more than the indefinite multiplication of horizontal distance could be made to equal vertical distance. If it was, as I believed, a thing from outside the universe, then its light, which I had seen shine faintly so often, and a few times brightly, was in some sense the only light we had. If it were destroyed, we were left fumbling in
the dark.
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Gene Wolfe (The Sword of the Lictor (The Book of the New Sun, #3))
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They control Europe under the attractive and falsely uniting banner of the “European Union”, the Middle East under the convenient banner of “fighting terrorism”, Africa and South America under the false and misleading banners of “democracy and development”, and many other banners under which the most hideous crimes are daily committed against humanity. Indeed, a closer examination reveals that all these banners are just different logos for one and the same goal, which is to ensure that the overwhelming—and overwhelmed—majority of people are imprisoned, disabled, and deprived of their fair share of bread, sun, and dignity.
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Louis Yako
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Humans have undoubtedly evolved mechanisms that assess their own mate value relative to others in their social environment. Ancestral environments were populated with relatively small groups of people containing around 50 to 150 individuals. Assessments of relative mate value were probably fairly accurate. One function of accurate assessments would have been to focus attraction tactics on potential mates within their own mate value range. In our current environment, however, the population is substantially larger, and the images to which individuals are exposed through television and the internet show an unprecedented comparison standard. Fashion models and actresses, for example, are often highly physically attractive. Extremely attractive women are a tiny fraction of the population, yet images of these women are presented at a misleadingly high frequency. This might have the effect of artificially lowering women’s judgments of their value as a potential mate relative to competitors in the local pool of potential mates. This, in turn, might escalate intrasexual competition between women or cause them to take drastic measures to try to increase their attractiveness—a possible cause of body image problems, eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, or depression (Faer et al., 2005).
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David M. Buss (Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind)
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Like many doctors, I was frankly traumatized by some of the experiences I had early on in my career. When you lean over a patient in an emergency room, trying to bring a dead body back to life, you are entirely focused on the job at hand. On the other side of a thin curtain, you can hear that person’s husband or wife howling and wailing, knowing that the person they loved and lived with for fifty years is dying, begging the staff to do all they can, phoning their children, struggling to speak through tears to form the words and communicate the horror, telling them to come, quickly. I have memories from cubicles that I will never be able to deal with, and they upset me even now.
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Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
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Words are not cubicles for truth telling. Words do not allow us to touch the face of God or define the contours of the soul. Words are imprecise and cannot capture all aspects of reality or replicate all facets of a person’s emotional mélange. Language allows for limited explorations of reality and minimal probing of the human mind. I accept that the only possible relation between language and the world is the image displayed in each person’s head by the picture invoking ability of language. Select word pictures might accurately portray what I perceive and still be vague, blatantly inaccurate, completely meaningless, misleading, distorted, or incomprehensible in other persons’ minds.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Contrary to Stimson’s highly influential but totally misleading account in Harper’s in February 1947, “The Decision to Use the Atom Bomb”—written for Stimson by McGeorge Bundy177 while he was in the Society of Fellows, and a successful propaganda counter to the impact of John Hersey’s New Yorker report “Hiroshima” in August 1946—there was no moral agonizing at all among Truman’s civilian or military advisors about the prospect of using the atom bomb on a city.† That moral threshold had been crossed long before. There was, in reality, no debate or even discussion whatever in official circles as to whether the bomb would or should be used, if it were ready in time before the war ended for other reasons.
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Daniel Ellsberg (The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner)
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It remains to mention some of the ways in which people have spoken misleadingly of logical form. One of the commonest of these is to talk of 'the logical form' of a statement; as if a statement could never have more than one kind of formal power; as if statements could, in respect of their formal powers, be grouped in mutually exclusive classes, like animals at a zoo in respect of their species. But to say that a statement is of some one logical form is simply to point to a certain general class of, e.g., valid inferences, in which the statement can play a certain role. It is not to exclude the possibility of there being other general classes of valid inferences in which the statement can play a certain role
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Peter Frederick Strawson (Introduction to Logical Theory (Routledge Revivals))
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Some have estimated that the pharmaceutical industry overall spends about twice as much on marketing and promotion as it does on research and development. Regardless of how those two figures compare to each other, the fact that they are in the same ballpark gives one pause, and this is worth mulling over in various contexts. For example, when a drug company refuses to let a developing country have affordable access to a new AIDS drug it’s because – the company says – it needs the money from sales to fund research and development on other new AIDS drugs for the future. If R&D is a fraction of the company’s outgoings, and it spends a similar amount on promotion, then this moral and practical argument doesn’t hold water quite so well.
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Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
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It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting and fornicating? But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories. The
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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I am fascinated by the evolution of language, and how local versions diverge to become dialects like Cornish English and Geordie and then imperceptibly diverge further to become mutually unintelligible but obviously related languages like German and Dutch. The analogy to genetic evolution is close enough to be illuminating and misleading at the same time. When populations diverge to become species, the time of separation is defined as the moment when they can no longer interbreed. I suggest that two dialects should be deemed to reach the status of separate languages when they have diverged to an analogously critical point: the point where, if a native speaker of one attempts to speak the other it is taken as a compliment rather than as an insult.
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Richard Dawkins (An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist)
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Some have estimated that the pharmaceutical industry overall spends about twice as much on marketing and promotion as it does on research and development. Regardless of how those two figures compare to each other, the fact that they are in the same ballpark gives one pause, and this is worth mulling over in various contexts. For example, when a drug company refuses to let a developing country have affordable access to a new AIDS drug it’s because – the company says – it needs the money from sales to fund research and development on other new AIDS drugs for the future. If R&D is a fraction of the company’s outgoings, and it spends a similar amount on promotion, then this moral and practical argument doesn’t hold water quite so well. The scale of this spend is fascinating in itself, when you put it in the context of what we all expect from evidence-based medicine, which is that people will simply use the best treatment for the patient. Because when you pull away from the industry’s carefully fostered belief that this marketing activity is all completely normal, and stop thinking of drugs as being a consumer product like clothes or cosmetics, you suddenly realise that medicines marketing only exists for one reason. In medicine, brand identities are irrelevant, and there’s a factual, objective answer to whether one drug is the most likely to improve a patient’s pain, suffering and longevity. Marketing, therefore, one might argue, exists for no reason other than to pervert evidence-based decision-making in medicine.
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Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
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As soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself, it always creates the world in its own image. It cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual iteration of the Will to Power, the Will to 'creation of the world anew', the Will to the causa prima. As Philosophies emerge from the cave of shadows & symbols, they insist this world too is the work of symbol & shadow; a mystery to be solved. But we cannot know our world in any empirical sense; the five we have been given, allow us to see a minute fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, & our senses of smell, taste, & hearing leave us no better off than the three blind English scholars, confronted with an African Elephant, something their learning has failed to acquaint them with. As they each report from their stations around the beast, one of them gropes the tail, certain he holds a vine. Another wrestles with the powerful trunk, equally certain it must be a python, or some other breed of tree-dwelling snake, just as their third peer has examined the strange bark of the animal's leg. Together they conclude that even without their eyes, tactility & logic have revealed a jungle tree, it's branches dangling vines and a powerful snake. In passing, he had even cheated, feeling one of its great, broad ears, which could only logically a great, broad, leaf, swaying in the breeze. Two of the three scholars declared the 'truth' a prank to discredit them. We are those blind men, blind to the realities that science has often flawed & misleading methods of 'seeing' the whole elephant. But science remains a tool; the most powerful tool we possess in freeing ourselves from the willful blindness of religion & political faith, but a tool nonetheless. It will have to evolve, & avoid the dogmatic attitudes which already corrupt it. The name of science is given to the pseudo-science of psychology & psychotherapy, which certainly promise to be useful down the road, but are incapable of producing repeatable results, and fails even to produce identical variables. Everything about Psychology & the social 'sciences' belong in the realm of Philosophy, but weakness & corruption, followed by the call of greed, power, & control have allowed this intellectual toxin to exert a dangerous influence; next to Religious cults, Psychology-based cults like NXIM are growing rapidly.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Nietzsche and the Death of God: Selected Writings (History & Culture))
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Your capacity to be offended, isn’t something that I or anyone else needs to respect.
Your capacity to be offended isn’t something you should respect, in fact, it’s something you should be on your guard for, perhaps more than any other property of your mind.
This feeling can mislead you.
If you care about justice (and you absolutely should) you should care about facts and the ability to discuss them openly.
Justice requires contact with reality.
It simply isn’t the case, it cannot be the case, that the most pressing claims on our sense of justice need come from those who claim to be most offended by conversation itself.
So I’m going to speak in the language of facts now, insofar as we know them, all the while knowing that these facts run very much counter to most peoples’ assumptions.
(ep #207 Waking Up podcast)
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Sam Harris
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On the American desert are horses which eat the locoweed and some are driven made by it; their vision is affected, they take enormous leaps to cross a tuft of grass or tumble blindly into rivers. The horses which have become thus addicted are shunned by the others and will never rejoin the herd. So it is with human beings: those who are conscious of another world, the world of the spirit, acquire an outlook which distorts the values of ordinary life; they are consumed by the weed of non-attachment. Curiosity is their one excess and therefore they are recognized not by what they do, but by what they refrain from doing, like those Araphants or disciples of Buddha who are pledged to the "Nine Incapabilities." Thus they do not take life, they do not compete, they do not boast, they do not join groups of more than six, they do not condemn others; they are "abandoners of revels, mute, contemplative" who are depressed by gossip, gaiety and equals, who wait to be telephoned to, who neither speak in public, nor keep up with their friends, nor take revenge upon their enemies. Self-knowledge has taught them to abandon hate and blame and envy in their lives, and they look sadder than they are. They seldom make positive assertions because they see, outlined against any statement, as a painter sees a complementary color, the image of its opposite. Most psychological questionnaires are designed to search out these moonlings and to secure their non-employment. They divine each other by a warm indifference for they know that they are not intended to forgather, but, like stumps of phosphorus in the world's wood, each to give forth his misleading radiance.
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Cyril Connelly
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It would be easy, but misleading, to see the rise of terrorism expertise as simply a response to an increase in political violence. This simplistic empirical approach neglects the reflexive relationship between experts and their objects of knowledge. Others have suggested that we view terrorism expertise as a product of political propaganda by governments seeking to demonize their enemies and draw attention away from their own use of violence. But this “critical” approach (see, for example, Chomsky 2001; Herman and O’Sullivan 1989), which argues that terrorism experts constitute an “industry,” funded and organized by the state and other elite interests, neglects the agency and interests of the experts themselves, and the ways in which these interests may either harmonize or clash with those of the state, the media, and the “terrorists” themselves.
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Lisa Stampnitzky (Disciplining Terror)
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As the philosopher George Santayana once quipped, “Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.” When it comes to health news, a dose of incredulity is especially necessary because science and journalism are no less susceptible to humanity’s flaws than other endeavors. Unfortunately for those who wanted to hear they were better off not exercising than running, the Copenhagen City Heart Study offered more truthiness than truth. Although the researchers sampled more than a thousand runners, only eighty (7 percent) engaged in strenuous exercise, and of that tiny sample only two died during the study. In addition, the researchers never looked at cause of death, making no distinction between traffic accidents and heart attacks. You don’t need a degree in statistics to realize the study’s conclusions were meaningless and misleading.
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Daniel E. Lieberman (Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding)
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Among the most virulent of all such cultural parasite-equivalents is the religion-based denial of organic evolution. About one-half of Americans (46 percent in 2013, up from 44 percent in 1980), most of whom are evangelical Christians, together with a comparable fraction of Muslims worldwide, believe that no such process has ever occurred. As Creationists, they insist that God created humankind and the rest of life in one to several magical mega-strokes. Their minds are closed to the overwhelming mass of factual demonstrations of evolution, which is increasingly interlocked across every level of biological organization from molecules to ecosystem and the geography of biodiversity. They ignore, or more precisely they call it virtue to remain ignorant of, ongoing evolution observed in the field and even traced to the genes involved. Also looked past are new species created in the laboratory. To Creationists, evolution is at best just an unproven theory. To a few, it is an idea invented by Satan and transmitted through Darwin and later scientists in order to mislead humanity. When I was a small boy attending an evangelical church in Florida, I was taught that the secular agents of Satan are extremely bright and determined, but liars all, man and woman, and so no matter what I heard I must stick my fingers in my ears and hold fast to the true faith. We are all free in a democracy to believe whatever we wish, so why call any opinion such as Creationism a virulent cultural parasite-equivalent? Because it represents a triumph of blind religious faith over carefully tested fact. It is not a conception of reality forged by evidence and logical judgment. Instead, it is part of the price of admission to a religious tribe. Faith is the evidence given of a person’s submission to a particular god, and even then not to the deity directly but to other humans who claim to represent the god. The cost to society as a whole of the bowed head has been enormous. Evolution is a fundamental process of the Universe, not just in living organisms but everywhere, at every level. Its analysis is vital to biology, including medicine, microbiology, and agronomy. Furthermore psychology, anthropology, and even the history of religion itself make no sense without evolution as the key component followed through the passage of time. The explicit denial of evolution presented as a part of a “creation science” is an outright falsehood, the adult equivalent of plugging one’s ears, and a deficit to any society that chooses to acquiesce in this manner to a fundamentalist faith.
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Edward O. Wilson (The Meaning of Human Existence)
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Because the light of evolution is not instantaneous or blinding, it is difficult to visualize the immensely slow and gradual change that is brought about by mutation and natural selection. When you consider a protozoan cell or an amphibian, on the one hand, and dolphins or, say, commuters, on the other, there is no intuitive way to make sense of the line that runs from one form of life to the next.
The popular cartoon of evolution, where the ape slowly unbends, straightens up, starts walking, and mutates into some form of modern-day human, is probably the easiest way to think about it. But [...] this caricature is misleading. Evolution does not follow the course of a single line. The tree of life bristles with stems, boughs, and branches. Most lines from one form to another are densely surrounded by branches leading to different species or dead ends.
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Christine Kenneally (The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language)
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The great danger of lying is not that lies are untruths, and thus unreal, but that they become real in other people's minds. They escape the liar's grip like seeds let loose in the wind, sprouting a life of their own in the least expected places, until one day the liar finds himself contemplating a lonely but nonetheless healthy tree, grown off the side of a barren cliff. It has the capacity to sadden him as much as it does to amaze. How could that tree have got there? How does it manage to live? It is extraordinarily beautiful in its loneliness, built on a barren untruth, yet green and very much alive.
Many years have passed since I sowed the lies, and thus lives, of which I am speaking. Yet more than ever, I shall have to sort the branches out carefully, determine which ones stemmed from truth, which from falsehood. Will it be possible to saw off the misleading branches without mutilating the tree beyond hope? Perhaps I should rather uproot the tree, replant it in flat, fertile soil. But the risk is great. My tree has adapted in a hundred and one ways to its untruth, learned to bend with the wind, live with little water. It leans so far it is horizontal, a green enigma halfway up and perpendicular to a tall, lifeless cliff. Yet it is not lying on the ground, its leaves rotting in dew as it would if I replanted it. Curved trunks cannot stand up, any more than I can straighten my posture to return to my twenty-year-old self. A milder environment, after so long a harsh one, would surely prove fatal.
I have found the solution. If I simply tell the truth, the cliff will erode chip by chip, stone by stone. And the destiny of my tree? I hold my fist to the sky and let loose my prayers. Wherever they go, I hope my tree will land there.
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Christine Leunens (Caging Skies)
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THE 1920’S, IT IS SAID, WERE A TIME OF “DISILLUSIONMENT.” Progressivism had failed. The war for democracy had ended in the debacle of Versailles; idealism gave way to “normalcy.” Defeated, intellectuals turned away from reform. Following H. L. Mencken, they now ridiculed “the people,” whom they had once idolized. Many of them fled to Europe. Others cultivated the personal life, transferring their search for salvation from society to the individual. Still others turned to Communism. In the general confusion, only one thing was certain: the old ideals, the old standards, were dead, and liberal democracy was part of the wreckage. Such is the standard picture of the twenties; but it is a gross distortion, a caricature, of the period. It has the unfortunate effect, moreover, of isolating the twenties from the rest of American history, of making them seem a mere interval between two periods of reform, and thus of obscuring the continuity between the twenties and the “progressive era” on the one hand and the period of the New Deal on the other. The idea of historical “periods” is misleading in itself. It exercises a subtle tyranny over the historical imagination. Essentially a verbal and pedagogical convenience, it tends to become a principle of historical interpretation as well; and as such it leads people to think of history not as the development of social organisms far too complicated to be depicted in simple linear terms but as a succession of neatly defined epochs, happily corresponding, moreover, to the divisions of the calendar, each century, each decade even, having its own distinctive “spirit of the age.” Thus the Zeitgeist of the twenties, it is assumed, must have been “disillusionment,” just as that of the thirties was reform. The
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Christopher Lasch (The New Radicalism in America)
“
Of Bergson's theory that intellect is a purely practical faculty developed in the struggle for survival, and not a source of true beliefs, we may say, first, that it is only through intellect that we know of the struggle for survival and of the biological ancestry of man: if the intellect is misleading, the whole of this merely inferred history is presumably untrue. If, on the other hand, we agree with M. Bergson in thinking that evolution took place as Darwin believed, then it is not only intellect, but all our faculties, that have been developed under the stress of practical utility. Intuition is seen at its best where it is directly useful—for example, in regard to other people's characters and dispositions. Bergson apparently holds that capacity for this kind of knowledge is less explicable by the struggle for existence than, for example, capacity for pure mathematics. Yet
”
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Bertrand Russell (The Bertrand Russell Collection)
“
By the end of the year 2000, Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza numbered 225,000. The best offer to the Palestinians—by Clinton, not Barak—had been to withdraw 20 percent of the settlers, leaving more than 180,000 in 209 settlements, covering about 10 percent of the occupied land, including land to be “leased” and portions of the Jordan River valley and East Jerusalem. The percentage figure is misleading, since it usually includes only the actual footprints of the settlements. There is a zone with a radius of about four hundred meters around each settlement within which Palestinians cannot enter. In addition, there are other large areas that would have been taken or earmarked to be used exclusively by Israel, roadways that connect the settlements to one another and to Jerusalem, and “life arteries” that provide the settlers with water, sewage, electricity, and communications. These range in width from five hundred to four thousand meters, and Palestinians cannot use or cross many of these connecting links. This honeycomb of settlements and their interconnecting conduits effectively divide the West Bank into at least two noncontiguous areas and multiple fragments, often uninhabitable or even unreachable, and control of the Jordan River valley denies Palestinians any direct access eastward into Jordan. About one hundred military checkpoints completely surround Palestine and block routes going into or between Palestinian communities, combined with an uncountable number of other roads that are permanently closed with large concrete cubes or mounds of earth and rocks. There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive, but official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were successful in placing the entire onus for the failure on Yasir Arafat. Violence in the Holy Land continued.
”
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Jimmy Carter (Palestine Peace Not Apartheid)
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It is often the case that people of noble character and great mental gifts betray a strange lack of worldly wisdom and a deficiency in the knowledge of men, more especially when they are young; with the result that it is easy to deceive or mislead them; and that, on the other hand, natures of the commoner sort are more ready and successful in making their way in the world.
The reason of this is that, when a man has little or no experience, he must judge by his own antecedent notions; and in matters demanding judgment, an antecedent notion is never on the same level as experience. For, with the commoner sort of people, an antecedent notion means just their own selfish point of view. This is not the case with those whose mind and character are above the ordinary; for it is precisely in this respect—their unselfishness that they differ from the rest of mankind; and as they judge other people's thoughts and actions by their own high standard, the result does not always tally with their calculation.
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Arthur Schopenhauer (Counsels and Maxims (The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer))
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Death is only relevant to "genetic adaptation" insofar as it relates to the capacity for self-reproduction (what is relevant is not that an individual died, but success in gene propagation while alive). The potentially misleading phrase "genetic adaptation" means that either because or despite an organism's adaptedness to external conditions, genes were or are successful in propagating themselves. Success in reproducing genes, in other words, is the ultimate measure of so-called "genetic adaptation". The possibility of adaptation unto extinction through individualism does not contradict the Darwinian notion of adaptation for survival. On the contrary, it is only a confirmation of it. The question here is what survives, the individual or its genes? The genes, and not the individual organism, provide the measure of survival in biological evolution. This point is illustrated by the modern corporate executive who adapts to the changing economic conditions better than any of his or her competitors, but fails to produce any children.
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Mitchell Heisman (Suicide Note)
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I now found that, in the social democratic papers, I could study the inner nature of their thought-process far better than in all their theoretical literature... And what a striking difference there was between the two! In the literary text that dealt with the Social Democrat theory, there was a display of high-sounding phraseology about liberty, human dignity, and beauty. It was all promoted with an air of profound wisdom and calm prophetic assurance-a meticulously-woven glitter of words to dazzle and mislead the reader. On the other hand, the daily press hammered out this new doctrine of human redemption in a most brutal fashion. No means were too crude, provided they could be exploited in the slanderous campaign. These journalists were experts in the art of deception and twisting facts. The theoretical literature was intended for the middle- and upper-class 'intellectuals,' whereas the newspaper was intended for the masses... With an understanding of the workings of the colossal system for poisoning the popular mind, only a fool could blame the victims.
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Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf Volume I)
“
She gazed at the man across from her. Her lover. His powerful shoulders worked beneath his shirt as he pulled on the oars. The display of strength and agility, set to a steady rhythm…memories of their lovemaking assailed her with quiet force.
In some other place, under some other circumstance, they might have been a courting couple. Rowing across a placid lake, caressed by a glowing sunset. From a distance, this could have been the picture of romance.
But the reality was confusion, and resentment, and pain. Did she feel sorry for misleading him? Sophia considered. She was not sure she could. By his own admission, he would not have made love to her had she not. And she could not regret that exquisite pleasure; nor could she regret sharing it with him. She looked at the handsome, strong, charismatic, passionate, exhausted man across from her. Selfish and wicked though she might be, she could not feel sorry that he was now bound to her-that for good or ill, he had not left her behind.
Sophia was, however, unequivocally sorry for one thing.
“Gray,” she said, “I’m so sorry I’ve hurt you.”
His eyes flashed, and there was a slight hitch in his stroke.
”
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Tessa Dare (Surrender of a Siren (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy, #2))
“
The phenomena with which we are here concerned are commonly discussed in psychology under the heading of “discrimination.” This term is somewhat misleading because it suggests a sort of “recognition” of physical differences between the events which it discriminates, while we are concerned with a process which creates the distinctions in question. The same is true of most of the other available words which might be used, such as “to sort out,” “to differentiate,” or “to classify.” The only appropriate term which is tolerably free from misleading connotations would appear to be “grouping.” For the purposes of the following discussion it will nevertheless be convenient to adopt the term “to classify” with its corresponding nouns “classes” and “classification” in a special technical meaning. . . . By “classification” we shall mean a process in which on each occasion on which a certain recurring event happens it produces the same specific effect. . . . All the different events which whenever they occur produce the same effect will be said to be events of the same class, and the fact that every one of them produces the same effect will be the sole criterion which makes them members of the same class.
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Friedrich A. Hayek (The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology)
“
You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting and fornicating? But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
The inherited sense of being a higher type of creature with higher claims already makes such a man fairly cold and leaves his conscience at rest: we all, indeed, lose all feeling of injustice when the difference between ourselves and other creatures is very great, and will kill a gnat, for example, without the slightest distress of conscience. Thus it is no sign of baseness in Xerxes (whom even the Greeks depict as being outstandingly noble) when he takes a son from his father and has him dismembered because he has expressed fearful and ominous misgivings about the whole campaign they are engaged on: in this instance the individual is disposed of like an annoying insect: he is too lowly to be allowed to go on upsetting a world-ruler. Indeed, no cruel man is so cruel as he whom he has misused believes; the idea of pain is not the same thing as the suffering of it. The same applies to the unjust judge, to the journalist who misleads public opinion with petty untruths. Cause and effect are in all these cases surrounded by quite different groups of thoughts and sensations; while one involuntarily presupposes that doer and sufferer think and feel the same and, in accordance with this presupposition, assesses the guilt of the one by the pain of the other.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits)
“
I stop using the “I’m not a racist” or “I can’t be racist” defense of denial. I admit the definition of racist (someone who is supporting racist policies or expressing racist ideas). I confess the racist policies I support and racist ideas I express. I accept their source (my upbringing inside a nation making us racist). I acknowledge the definition of antiracist (someone who is supporting antiracist policies or expressing antiracist ideas). I struggle for antiracist power and policy in my spaces. (Seizing a policymaking position. Joining an antiracist organization or protest. Publicly donating my time or privately donating my funds to antiracist policymakers, organizations, and protests fixated on changing power and policy.) I struggle to remain at the antiracist intersections where racism is mixed with other bigotries. (Eliminating racial distinctions in biology and behavior. Equalizing racial distinctions in ethnicities, bodies, cultures, colors, classes, spaces, genders, and sexualities.) I struggle to think with antiracist ideas. (Seeing racist policy in racial inequity. Leveling group differences. Not being fooled into generalizing individual negativity. Not being fooled by misleading statistics or theories that blame people for racial inequity.)
”
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Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials))
“
It would be a mistake to imagine that drug companies are the only people applying pressure for fast approvals. Patients can also feel they are being deprived of access to drugs, especially if they are desperate. In fact, in the 1980s and 1990s the key public drive for faster approvals came from an alliance forged between drug companies and AIDS activists such as ACT UP. At the time, HIV and AIDS had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and young, previously healthy gay men were falling ill and dying in terrifying numbers, with no treatment available. We don’t care, they explained, if the drugs that are currently being researched for effectiveness might kill us: we want them, because we’re dying anyway. Losing a couple of months of life because a currently unapproved drug turned out to be dangerous was nothing, compared to a shot at a normal lifespan. In an extreme form, the HIV-positive community was exemplifying the very best motivations that drive people to participate in clinical trials: they were prepared to take a risk, in the hope of finding better treatments for themselves or others like them in the future. To achieve this goal they blocked traffic on Wall Street, marched on the FDA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, and campaigned tirelessly for faster approvals.
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Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
“
People used to consider change, alteration, and becoming in general as proof that appearances were illusory, as a sign that something must be misleading us.
These days, on the other hand, we see ourselves mired in error, drawn necessarily into error, precisely to the extent that the prejudice of reason forces us to make use of unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, objectification, being.
We have checked this through rigorously and are sure that this is where the error lies.
This is no different than the movement of the sun, where our eye is a constant advocate for error, here it is language.
Language began at a time when psychology was in its most rudimentary form: we enter into a crudely fetishistic mindset when we call into consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language - in the vernacular: the presuppositions of reason.
It sees doers and deeds all over: it believes that will has causal efficacy: it believes in the 'I', in the I as being, in the I as substance, and it projects this belief in the I-substance onto all things - this is how it creates the concept of 'thing' in the first place.
Being is imagined into everything - pushed under everything - as a cause; the concept of 'being' is only derived from the concept of 'I' . . .
In the beginning there was the great disaster of an error, the belief that the will is a thing with causal efficacy, - that will is a faculty . . . These days we know that it is just a word.
”
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols)
“
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting and fornicating? However, fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
The hero-deed to be wrought is not today what it was in the century of Galileo. Where then there was darkness, now there is light; but also, where light was, there now is darkness. The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul.
Obviously, this work cannot be wrought by turning back, or away, from what has been accomplished by the modern revolution; for the problem is nothing if not that of rendering the modern world spiritually significant—or rather (phrasing the same principle the other way round) nothing if not that of making it possible for men and women to come to full human maturity through the conditions of contemporary life. Indeed, these conditions themselves are what have rendered the ancient formulae ineffective, misleading, and even pernicious. The community today is the planet, not the bounded nation; hence the patterns of projected aggression which formerly served to coordinate the in-group now can only break it into factions. The national idea, with the flag as totem, is today an aggrandizer of the nursery ego, not the annihilator of an infantile situation. Its parody rituals of the parade ground serve the ends of Holdfast, the tyrant dragon, not the God in whom self-interest is annihilate. And the numerous saints of this anticult—namely the patriots whose ubiquitous photographs, draped with flags, serve as official icons—are precisely the local threshold guardians (our demon Sticky-hair) whom it is the first problem of the hero to surpass.
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Joseph Campbell (The Hero With a Thousand Faces)
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Would have attracted him once. . . . Suddenly, like a thing that leaped to him across infinite distances with the speed of light, desire (salt, black, ravenous, unanswerable desire) took him by the throat. The merest hint will convey to those who have felt it the quality of the emotion which now shook him, like a dog shaking a rat; for others, no description perhaps will avail. Many writers speak of it in terms of lust: a description admirably illuminating from within, totally misleading from without. It has nothing to do with the body. But it is in two respects like lust as lust shows itself to be in the deepest and darkest vault of its labyrinthine house. For like lust, it disenchants the whole universe. Everything else that Mark had ever felt—love, ambition, hunger, lust itself—appeared to have been mere milk and water, toys for children, not worth one throb of the nerves. The infinite attraction of this dark thing sucked all other passions into itself: the rest of the world appeared blenched, etiolated, insipid, a world of white marriages and white masses, dishes without salt, gambling for counters. He could not now think of Jane except in terms of appetite: and appetite here made no appeal. That serpent, faced with the true dragon, became a fangless worm. But it was like lust in another respect also. It is idle to point out to the perverted man the horror of his perversion: while the fierce fit is on, that horror is the very spice of his craving. It is ugliness itself that becomes, in the end, the goal of his lechery; beauty has long since grown too weak a stimulant.
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C.S. Lewis (That Hideous Strength (The Space Trilogy #3))
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As Christians, we celebrate many holidays and memorials throughout the year. Some we decide to celebrate by referencing events in the Bible. Others are related to events in our personal lives. Still more are pushed upon by this World.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with celebrating events that bring us joy or keep important parts of our lives in focus.
As a Christian, it is important for me to follow Christ's words and teachings. I do not obey man's intepretations of God's word. I read it and follow it. Its that simple. I dont need an interpreter. Christ is my intermediary. Ive been blessed to have been given the gift of language and... in the Bible, when you read it in Aramaic, there is only ONE event, one memorial that Jesus asks us to remember and thus honor our Savior. And its not His birthday. We are upon that annual event this weekend. For Jesus "blessed and he broke and he said, “Take eat; this is my body, which is broken for your persons; thus you shall do for my Memorial."
[1 Cor 11:24]
Holidays can be fun times for families to get together and to celebrate life. This weekend lets not lose focus. For this is the one and ONLY holiday that our Christ commands us to memorialize. Its in his words. Its in the Bible. It was important enough for Him to spell it out. It should be important enough for us to listen. Above all other events in our lives, isn't Christ Jesus's sacrifice truly the most magnificent one? Lets remember our Savior and not allow the World to mislead us into over prioritizing any other day than when -He gave His life for us. Truly His act was a gift to mankind that remains matchless.
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José N. Harris
“
Can Religion Cure Our Troubles:
Mankind is in mortal peril, and fear now, as in the past, is inclining men to seek refuge in God. Throughout the West there is a very general revival of religion. Nazis and Communists dismissed Christianity and did things which we deplore. It is easy to conclude that the repudiation of Christianity by Hitler and the Soviet Government is at least in part the cause of our troubles and that if the world returned to Christianity, our international problems would be solved. I believe this to be a complete delusion born of terror. And I think it is a dangerous delusion because it misleads men whose thinking might otherwise be fruitful and thus stands in the way of a valid solution.
The question involved is not concerned only with the present state of the world. It is a much more general question, and one which has been debated for many centuries. It is the question whether societies can practise a sufficient modicum of morality if they are not helped by dogmatic religion. I do not myself think that the dependence of morals upon religion is nearly as close as religious people believe it to be. I even think that some very important virtues are more likely to be found among those who reject religious dogmas than among those who accept them. I think this applies especially to the virtue of truthfulness or intellectual integrity. I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organised beliefs.
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Bertrand Russell
“
That the Roman Near East could be looked at, in more than a purely geographical sense, as part of Asia, or 'the Orient', cannot be denied. The mere currency there of a group of related Semitic langauges is sufficient evidence of that. But it was also an area of already long-standing Greek city-foundation and settlement. To look at the culture of any one of the sub-regions of the Near East is to see how profoundly the Greek language and Greek culture were rooted in the civilisation of this region. Any notion of a crude contrast between 'Greek' on the one hand and 'Oriental' or 'Semitic' on the other must seem wholly inadequate. Too much time had passed since Alexander's arrival in 332 BC. Yet the military history of the region itself serves to suggest that this contrast is not completely meaningless. The Roman forces here fought many successive campaigns, large and small, in contexts other than rivalry with Parthia or Persia: repeatedly in Judaea but also in Commagene, in Nabataea in 106, against Palmyra and finally, under Diocletian, against the 'Saracens'. But none of these operations was directed against a community or political formation which we would be tempted to characterise as unambiguously Greek.
Nonetheless, any attempt to understand the culture or cultures of the region in terms of a simple contrast between 'Greek' and 'Oriental' would be inevitably misleading. There is little or nothing to suggest that the supposed 'Orientals' shared any sense of common identity. On the contrary, everything shows that Jewish identity, whose maintenance is beyond question, conflicted rather than cohered with the identities of other groups using Semitic languages. Nor did those others show anything like the same capacity for survival. Whether anything distinctive remained of Commagene after the end of the dynasty, of Nabataea after it was made into the province of Arabia, or of Palmyra after Aurelian's reconquest is precisely one of the crucial questions we need to answer.
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Fergus Millar (The Roman Near East: 31 BC-AD 337)
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One cannot erase from a human being's soul those actions which his ancestors loved most and carried out most steadfastly: whether they were, for example, industrious savers attached to a writing table and money box, modest and bourgeois in their desires, as well as modest in their virtues, or whether they were accustomed to live giving orders from morning until night, fond of harsh entertainment and, along with that, perhaps of even harsher duties and responsibilities; or whether, finally, they had at some time or other once sacrificed the old privileges of their birth and possessions in order to live entirely for their faith ― their "God" ― as men of an unrelenting and delicate conscience, which blushes when confronted with any compromise. It is in no way possible that a man does not possess in his body the characteristics and preferences of his parents and forefathers, no matter what appearance might say to the contrary. This is the problem of race. If we know something about the parents, then we may draw a conclusion about the child: some unpleasant excess or other, some lurking envy, a crude habit of self-justification ―as these three together have at all times made up the essential type of the rabble― something like that must be passed onto the child as surely as corrupt blood, and with the help of the best education and culture people will succeed only in deceiving others about such heredity. And nowadays what else does education and culture want! In our age, one very much of the people - I mean to say our uncouth age ―"education" and "culture" must basically be the art of deception― to mislead about the origin of the inherited rabble in one's body and soul. Today an educator who preached truthfulness above everything else and constantly shouted at his students "Be true! Be natural! Act as you really are!" ― even such a virtuous and true-hearted jackass would after some time learn to take hold of that furca [pitchfork] of Horace, in order to naturam expellere [drive out nature]. With what success? "Rabble" usque recurret [always returns].
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
“
I’ve been discussing elite attitudes toward democracy. I sketched a line from the first democratic revolution, with its fear and contempt for the rascal multitude who were asking for ridiculous things like universal education, health care, and democratization of law, wanting to be ruled by countrymen like themselves who know the people’s sores, not by knights and gentlemen who just oppress them. From there to the second major democratic revolution establishing the US Constitution, which was, as discussed last time, a Framers’ Coup, the title of the main scholarly work, a coup by elites that the author describes as a conservative counterrevolution against excessive democracy. On to the twentieth century and such leading progressive theorists of democracy as Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, Harold Lasswell, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and their conception that the public has to be put in its place. They’re spectators, not participants. The responsible men, the elite, have to be protected from the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd, who have to be kept in line with necessary illusions, emotionally potent oversimplifications, and, in general, engineering of consent, which has become a gigantic industry devoted to some aspects of the task, while responsible intellectuals take care of others. The men of best quality through the ages have to be self-indoctrinated, as Orwell discussed. They must internalize the understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn’t do to say. It must be so fully internalized that it becomes as routine as taking a breath. What else could anyone possibly believe? As long as all of this is in place, the system functions properly, with no crises. This picture, I think, captures crucial features of thought control in the more free societies, but it is misleading in essential ways. Most importantly, it largely omitted the constant popular struggles to extend the range of democracy, with many successes. Even in the last generation, there have been quite substantial successes. Such successes typically lead to a reaction. Those with power and privilege don’t relinquish it easily. The neoliberal period that we’re now enduring, long in planning, is such a reaction.
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Noam Chomsky (Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance)
“
The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it. Religious ideas are like words— of little use, and often misleading, unless you know the concrete realities to which they refer. The word “water” is a useful means of communication amongst those who know water. The same is true of the word and the idea called “God.”
I do not, at this point, wish to seem mysterious or to be making claims to “secret knowledge.” The reality which corresponds to “God” and “eternal life” is honest, above-board, plain, and open for all to see. But the seeing requires a correction of mind, just as clear vision sometimes requires a correction of the eyes.
The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.
Most of us believe in order to feel secure, in order to make our individual lives seem valuable and meaningful. Belief has thus become an attempt to hang on to life, to grasp and keep it for one’s own. But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God.
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Alan W. Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety)
“
Matt takes some time to settle himself before he speaks. When he does, he shares an anecdote about how Julie had written a book for him to have after she was gone, and she titled it, The Shortest Longest Romance: An Epic Love and Loss Story. He loses it here, then slowly composes himself and keeps going. He explains that in the book, he was surprised to find that near the end of the story—their story—Julie had included a chapter on how she hoped Matt would always have love in his life. She encouraged him to be honest and kind to what she called his “grief girlfriends”—the rebound girlfriends, the women he’ll date as he heals. Don’t mislead them, she wrote. Maybe you can get something from each other. She followed this with a charming and hilarious dating profile that Matt could use to find his grief girlfriends, and then she got more serious. She wrote the most achingly beautiful love letter in the form of another dating profile that Matt could use to find the person he’d end up with for good. She talked about his quirks, his devotion, their steamy sex life, the incredible family she inherited (and that, presumably, this new woman would inherit), and what an amazing father he’d be. She knew this, she wrote, because they got to be parents together—though in utero and for only a matter of months. The people in the crowd are simultaneously crying and laughing by the time Matt finishes reading. Everyone should have at least one epic love story in their lives, Julie concluded. Ours was that for me. If we’re lucky, we might get two. I wish you another epic love story. We all think it ends there, but then Matt says that he feels it’s only fair that Julie have love wherever she is too. So in that spirit, he says, he’s written her a dating profile for heaven. There are a few chuckles, although they’re hesitant at first. Is this too morbid? But no, it’s exactly what Julie would have wanted, I think. It’s out-there and uncomfortable and funny and sad, and soon everyone is laugh-sobbing with abandon. She hates mushrooms, Matt has written to her heavenly beau, don’t serve her anything with mushrooms. And If there’s a Trader Joe’s, and she says that she wants to work there, be supportive. You’ll also get great discounts. He goes on to talk about how Julie rebelled against death in many ways, but primarily by what Matt liked to call “doing kindnesses” for others, leaving the world a better place than she found it. He doesn’t enumerate them, but I know what they are—and the recipients of her kindnesses all speak about them anyway.
”
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Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
“
Obama is also directing the U.S. government to invest billions of dollars in solar and wind energy. In addition, he is using bailout leverage to compel the Detroit auto companies to build small, “green” cars, even though no one in the government has investigated whether consumers are interested in buying small, “green” cars—the Obama administration just believes they should. All these measures, Obama recognizes, are expensive. The cap and trade legislation is estimated to impose an $850 billion burden on the private sector; together with other related measures, the environmental tab will exceed $1 trillion. This would undoubtedly impose a significant financial burden on an already-stressed economy. These measures are billed as necessary to combat global warming. Yet no one really knows if the globe is warming significantly or not, and no one really knows if human beings are the cause of the warming or not. For years people went along with Al Gore’s claim that “the earth has a fever,” a claim illustrated by misleading images of glaciers disappearing, oceans swelling, famines arising, and skies darkening. Apocalypse now! Now we know that the main body of data that provided the basis for these claims appears to have been faked. The Climategate scandal showed that scientists associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were quite willing to manipulate and even suppress data that did not conform to their ideological commitment to global warming.3 The fakers insist that even if you discount the fakery, the data still show.... But who’s in the mood to listen to them now? Independent scientists who have reviewed the facts say that average global temperatures have risen by around 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 100 years. Lots of things could have caused that. Besides, if you project further back, the record shows quite a bit of variation: periods of warming, followed by periods of cooling. There was a Medieval Warm Period around 1000 A.D., and a Little Ice Age that occurred several hundred years later. In the past century, the earth warmed slightly from 1900 to 1940, then cooled slightly until the late 1970s, and has resumed warming slightly since then. How about in the past decade or so? Well, if you count from 1998, the earth has cooled in the past dozen years. But the statistic is misleading, since 1998 was an especially hot year. If you count from 1999, the earth has warmed in the intervening period. This statistic is equally misleading, because 1999 was a cool year. This doesn’t mean that temperature change is in the eye of the beholder. It means, in the words of Roy Spencer, former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, that “all this temperature variability on a wide range of time scales reveals that just about the only thing constant in climate is change.”4
”
”
Dinesh D'Souza (The Roots of Obama's Rage)
“
As it turned out, Mary Jo White and other attorneys for the Sacklers and Purdue had been quietly negotiating with the Trump administration for months. Inside the DOJ, the line prosecutors who had assembled both the civil and the criminal cases started to experience tremendous pressure from the political leadership to wrap up their investigations of Purdue and the Sacklers prior to the 2020 presidential election in November. A decision had been made at high levels of the Trump administration that this matter would be resolved quickly and with a soft touch. Some of the career attorneys at Justice were deeply unhappy with this move, so much so that they wrote confidential memos registering their objections, to preserve a record of what they believed to be a miscarriage of justice.
One morning two weeks before the election, Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general for the Trump administration, convened a press conference in which he announced a “global resolution” of the federal investigations into Purdue and the Sacklers. The company was pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and to violate the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, as well as to two counts of conspiracy to violate the federal Anti-kickback Statute, Rosen announced. No executives would face individual charges. In fact, no individual executives were mentioned at all: it was as if the corporation had acted autonomously, like a driverless car. (In depositions related to Purdue’s bankruptcy which were held after the DOJ settlement, two former CEOs, John Stewart and Mark Timney, both declined to answer questions, invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves.) Rosen touted the total value of the federal penalties against Purdue as “more than $8 billion.” And, in keeping with what had by now become a standard pattern, the press obligingly repeated that number in the headlines.
Of course, anyone who was paying attention knew that the total value of Purdue’s cash and assets was only around $1 billion, and nobody was suggesting that the Sacklers would be on the hook to pay Purdue’s fines. So the $8 billion figure was misleading, much as the $10–$12 billion estimate of the value of the Sacklers’ settlement proposal had been misleading—an artificial number without any real practical meaning, designed chiefly to be reproduced in headlines. As for the Sacklers, Rosen announced that they had agreed to pay $225 million to resolve a separate civil charge that they had violated the False Claims Act. According to the investigation, Richard, David, Jonathan, Kathe, and Mortimer had “knowingly caused the submission of false and fraudulent claims to federal health care benefit programs” for opioids that “were prescribed for uses that were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary.” But there would be no criminal charges. In fact, according to a deposition of David Sackler, the Department of Justice concluded its investigation without so much as interviewing any member of the family. The authorities were so deferential toward the Sacklers that nobody had even bothered to question them.
”
”
Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty)
“
Then if it is denied that the unity at that level is the interconnection of the plurality or dissimilarity of religions as of parts constituting a whole, rather that every one of the religions at the level of ordinary existence is not part of a whole, but is a whole in itself-then the 'unity' that is meant is 'oneness' or 'sameness' not really of religions, but of the God of religions at the level of transcendence (i.e. esoteric), implying thereby that at the level of ordinary existence (i.e. exoteric), and despite the plurality and diversity of religions, each religion is adequate and valid in its own limited way, each authentic and conveying limited though equal truth. The notion of a plurality of truth of equal validity in the plurality and diversity of religion is perhaps aligned to the statements and general conclusions of modern philosophy and science arising from the discovery of a pluraity and diversity of laws governing the universe having equal validity each in its own cosmological system. The trend to align modern scientific discovery concerning the systems of the universe with corresponding statements applied to human society, cultural traditions,and values is one of the characteristic features of modernity.
The position of those who advocate the theory of the transcendent unity of religions is based upon the assumption that all religions, or the major religions of mankind, are revealed religions. They assume that the universality and transcendence of esotericism validates their theory, which they 'discovered' after having acquainted themselves with the metaphysics of Islam. In their understanding of this metaphysics of the transcendent unity of existence, they further assume that the transcendent unity of religions is already implied. There is grave error in all their assumptions, and the phrase 'transcendent unity of religions' is misleading and perhaps meant to be so for motives other than the truth. Their claim to belief in the transecendent unity of religions is something suggested to them inductively by the imagination and is derived from intellectual speculation and not from actual experience. If this is denied, and their claim is derived from the experience of others, then again we say that the sense of 'unity' experienced is not of religions, but of varying degrees of individual religious experience which does not of neccesity lead to the assumption that the religions of inviduals who experienced such 'unity', have truth of equal validity as revealed religions at the level of ordinary existence. Moreover, as already pointed out, the God of that experience is recognized as the rabb, not the ilah of revealed religion. And recognizing Him as the rabb does not necessarily mean that acknowledging Him in true submission follows from that recognition, for rebellion, arrogance, and falsehood have their origin in that very realm of transcendence. There is only one revealed religion.
There is only one revealed religion. It was the religion conveyed by all the earlier Prophets, who were sent to preach the message of the revelation to their own people in accordance with the wisdom and justice of the Divine plan to prepare the peoples of the world for the reception of the religion in its ultimate and consummate form as a Universal Religion at the hands of the last Prophet, who was sent to convey the message of the revelation not only to his own people, but to mankind as a whole. The essential message of the revelation was always the same: to recognize and acknowledge and worship the One True and Real God (ilah) alone, without associating Him with any partner, rival, or equal, nor attributing a likeness to Him; and to confirm the truth preached by the earlier Prophets as well as to confirm the final truth brought by the last Prophet as it was confirmed by all the Prophets sent before him.
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Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas (Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam)
“
Memories of actual events have more temporal and spatial attributes than
do memories of imagined events (you may recall the exact time of your visit to the library and remember which
floor you visited), more sensory attributes (you may recall the color of the shirt you wore that day), more detailed
and specific information (you may recall which books you checked out, which other people were present, what the
librarian said), and more emotional information (you may recall your boredom and frustration as you stood in the
long checkout line). You may also have supporting memories (you may still have the book you checked out that
day), and your memories may be corroborated by those of others (your friend reports remembering going to the
library with you that day). We rely on all these cues to distinguish real from imagined events. We may also rely on
our reasoning powers: If the memory includes logically impossible events (books jumping off the shelf to greet
you), you may conclude that this event must have been imagined. On the other hand, if the recalled events seem
coherent and logically interrelated, you may view the memory as more accurate.
Because we rely on such cues to construct the reality of recalled events, we may sometimes confuse reality and
imagination when the cues mislead us. As imagined events become more rich and detailed, we become more likely to mistake them
for real.
”
”
Ziva Kunda (Social Cognition: Making Sense of People)
“
Thales signaled a major change in Greek thinking and world thinking. A new, rational way of understanding reality was born, as opposed to one tied to myth or religious ritual—as still prevailed in two much older civilizations, Egypt and Babylon. It was a major shift, and a radical one. Quite suddenly, Greeks of the sixth century BCE lost faith in the ancient legends about the origins of the world told by Homer, Hesiod, and other early poets; about how Uranus had fathered the Titans with Mother Earth and how the Titans fought and lost to Zeus and the other gods for dominance of the world. They no longer seemed believable; they even seemed deliberately misleading (one reason Plato bans poets from his Republic). Instead, the question that every Greek sage before Socrates wanted to answer was: “What is real about reality?” More specifically, what is the stuff from which everything else in the world is made?
”
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Arthur Herman (The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization)
“
No matter how honest and well-intentioned we are, we’re in a perpetual state of misleading ourselves and others for no other reason than that our brain is designed to be efficient, not accurate.
”
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Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life)
“
America, the richest nation in the world, indeed the richest in all history—its 125 million people possessed more real wealth and real income, per person and in total, than the people of any other country—was now paying the price for accepting too many get-rich-quick schemes, the damaging duels fought between bulls and bears, pool operations and manipulations, buying on overly slim margins securities of low and even fraudulent quality. The indecisive and sometimes misleading leadership from the business and political world had contributed to the nationwide stampede to unload.
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”
Gordon Thomas (The Day the Bubble Burst: A Social History of the Wall Street Crash of 1929)
“
Muslim Mosques And Fake Jesus Created By Qadiyanis
***
The visionary figures pay intention whatever issues come to the table; whereas, mindless people ignore those issues. However, the truth stays brightening.
I exemplify the point of view and concerns as below, hoping the world realizes that.
If whatever groups or gangs establish the false subjects with similar names as The United Nations Organization, The White House, and The Downing 10, The Kremlin, and such ones; indeed, such attempts show not only misleading and misguiding; these also describe the illegality and naked crime.
It is the governmental level example; however, it can be non-governmental as well.
In such situations, if that crime happens, what will be the action and reaction by the authorities and the judiciary? - Certainly, offenders will face transparent justice; otherwise, it means the world is blind, and justice is silent on that.
After the above scenario, now I come to the point why I am writing that: As the Muslim world knows significantly about the fake prophet Mira Ghulam Ahmad Qadiyani as Jesus and his Ahmedi Movement, which executes and spreads its false and fake objects and subjects openly and secretly to mislead the world, especially Christians and Muslims.
Mostly Muslim countries consider Qadiyanis, another term Ahmadis as non-Muslim according to their fake belief and prophet as Jesus Christ. In Western states and around the world where Qadiyanis pretend as the Muslim, and they build their payer places, naming Mosques of Muslims, which falls under the deception and violation of the Islamic concept.
Consequently, most of the Westerns and simple Muslims, who have not knowledge about the fake prophet, become their victim since they keep naming their prayer places, as Mosques; thereupon, they wear the mask to pretend as real Muslim and join the real Muslim Mosques to become members, and later they occupy and claim of the Mosque as that belong to Qadiyanis.
I do not feel problems and objections if Qadiyanis created a new religion; however, I have serious concerns that they misuse Islam and Muslim values and concept within the context of the Quran, the Holy Book of Allah. Indeed, they have the right to avail the human rights as others without distinctions, but they do not have the right to pretend, falsify and deceive, and even practice black magic to gain their awkward intentions and motives.
Western states and Christian World should pay heed to this matter and stop Qadiyanis, who follow the fake Jesus Christ, to use their prayer place as Mosques for protection and respect of Islam.
- Ehsan Sehgal
”
”
Ehsan Sehgal
“
But, as emphasized before, this comparison between the Law of Return and other immigration laws is misleading. Underlying it is the fallacious position that Palestinian citizens are immigrants. This is wholly incorrect, as Palestinians are the indigenous residents of the land. Furthermore, in democratic states immigration laws do not condition the right to immigrate and qualify for citizenship on religious/ethnic criteria, as does the Law of Return.
”
”
Tikva Honig-Parnass (The False Prophets of Peace: Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine)
“
The official position on the 1948 Nakba was that Palestinians willingly left the country following orders broadcast over the radio by Arab and Palestinian leaders, calling for people to move to safer places in anticipation of the triumphant Arab armies. Supposedly others fled due to their baseless fears of the Jewish army. The misleading official Israeli position led to the widely accepted conclusion that refugees should be settled in the Arab states, given that they (the Arabs) started the war and created the problem in the first place; thus, they should pay for the consequences. Since the late 1950s, the Israeli narrative has been refuted by historians like Walid Khalidi and Erskine Childers.18 These historians disproved the Israeli contention that official and unofficial bodies in the Arab world, including Palestinian groups, called upon Palestinians to stay in their homes, and even threatened to punish those who left.19
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Tikva Honig-Parnass (The False Prophets of Peace: Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine)
“
Sweeping assertions about the unified beliefs of the nation's 'framers' or 'founders' - or, worse yet, 'founding fathers' - are almost invariably misleading. Most fail to appreciate the generation's diversity and divisiveness out of ignorance. Others intentionally obscure those qualities to bolster some faulty contemporary argument. Reality was more complex. The ranks of those who contributed to the American Revolution and the independent country that followed included merchants and landowners, politicians and preachers, slave owners and those appalled by the practice, each part of a national palette so vast that few residents could reliably claim to have visited its wide expanse or even met someone from each of its thirteen states.
”
”
Jeffrey A. Engel (Impeachment: An American History)
“
Husserl had picked up this idea from his old teacher Franz Brentano, in Vienna days. In a fleeting paragraph of his book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano proposed that we approach the mind in terms of its ‘intentions’ — a misleading word, which sounds like it means deliberate purposes. Instead it meant a general reaching or stretching, from the Latin root in-tend, meaning to stretch towards or into something. For Brentano, this reaching towards objects is what our minds do all the time. Our thoughts are invariably of or about something, he wrote: in love, something is loved, in hatred, something is hated, in judgement, something is affirmed or denied. Even when I imagine an object that isn’t there, my mental structure is still one of ‘about-ness’ or ‘of-ness’. If I dream that a white rabbit runs past me checking its pocket watch, I am dreaming of my fantastical dream-rabbit. If I gaze up at the ceiling trying to make sense of the structure of consciousness, I am thinking about the structure of consciousness. Except in deepest sleep, my mind is always engaged in this aboutness: it has ‘intentionality’. Having taken the germ of this from Brentano, Husserl made it central to his whole philosophy. Just try it: if you attempt to sit for two minutes and think about nothing, you will probably get an inkling of why intentionality is so fundamental to human existence. The mind races around like a foraging squirrel in a park, grabbing in turn at a flashing phone screen, a distant mark on the wall, a clink of cups, a cloud that resembles a whale, a memory of something a friend said yesterday, a twinge in a knee, a pressing deadline, a vague expectation of nice weather later, a tick of the clock. Some Eastern meditation techniques aim to still this scurrying creature, but the extreme difficulty of this shows how unnatural it is to be mentally inert. Left to itself, the mind reaches out in all directions as long as it is awake — and even carries on doing it in the dreaming phase of its sleep. Understood in this way, the mind hardly is anything at all: it is its aboutness. This makes the human mind (and possibly some animal minds) different from any other naturally occurring entity. Nothing else can be as thoroughly about or of things as the mind is: even a book only reveals what it’s ‘about’ to someone who picks it up and peruses it, and is otherwise merely a storage device. But a mind that is experiencing nothing, imagining nothing, or speculating about nothing can hardly be said to be a mind at all.
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Sarah Bakewell (At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others)
“
Western attitudes toward Chinese and Japanese religions were formed largely from the descriptions given by Christian missionaries to those countries. Earlier accounts provided by travelers, such as Marco Polo, John of Montecorvino, Odoric of Pordenone, and others, were too vague and never mentioned the Buddhist sects as such (Demiéville 1964). So misleading, for instance, was Marco Polo's description of Cathay that it took some fifteen years for the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) to realize that this empire was none other than China.
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Bernard Faure (Chan Insights and Oversights)
“
If we attempt to explain crime rates (our dependent variable) by using police officers per capita as an explanatory variable (along with other controls), we will have a serious reverse causality problem. We have a solid theoretical reason to believe that putting more police officers on the street will reduce crime, but it’s also possible that crime could “cause” police officers, in the sense that cities experiencing crime waves will hire more police officers. We could easily find a positive but misleading association between crime and police: the places with the most police officers have the worst crime problems. Of course, the places with lots of doctors also tend to have the highest concentration of sick people. These doctors aren’t making people sick; they are located in places where they are needed most (and at the same time sick people are moving to places where they can get appropriate medical care). I suspect that there are disproportionate numbers of oncologists and cardiologists in Florida; banishing them from the state will not make the retiree population healthier.
”
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Charles Wheelan (Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data)
“
So, the claim made by the Forbes resolution and Barton about federal funds authorizing evangelism and/or the "propagation of the gospel to the heathen" is simply false. While some might dismiss this as a minor point, we find the claim tendentious and troubling. Those who make the claim about government-sponsored evangelism obscure the whole story of the Gnadenhutten massacre and the real purpose of the involvement of the federal government with the United Brethren and the Christian Indians. By making these bills about Jefferson and his alleged support for religion, Barton minimizes an atrocity committed against native Americans. When one examines this episode in context, it is clear that the federal government did not simply decide to give money to the United Brethren in order for them to "propagate the gospel among the heathen." The federal government gave a trust to a group of people who organized as "The Society of the United Brethren for propagating the Gospel among the Heathen" for the purpose of helping the brutalized native people return and keep rights to their lands. If there had not been an atrocity and subsequent displacement of the Delaware converts, there would have been no need for federal legislation in this case. The narrative developed by Barton and others is misleading and obscures the situation. All Jefferson did was approve bills that had a religious society's name attached to the title. Barton’s appropriation of the story hides a cruel irony. It was the propagation of the Gospel among the Indians that led to their conversion and pacifism. They would not protect themselves or fight back against their aggressors because of the Gospel they believed. Barton wants to make this story about a government outreach to teach Indians the Gospel, when it was the actions of a state militia that led to the slaughter of men, women, and children from their community. If anything, this story provides a precedent for reparations paid to those harmed by government action. The Christian Indians were brutally murdered by a state militia and in response, the federal government attempted to deed them land.
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Warren Throckmorton (Getting Jefferson Right: Fact-Checking Claims About Thomas Jefferson)
“
This amounts to nothing more than misleading propaganda. The purpose is to create a climate of acceptance for the passage of legislation which will turn the majority of parents into criminals of the most heinous kind-those whose victims are defenseless children. The resulting body of law will play directly into the hands of ultraliberal social engineers as well as social activists within the professional community. The outward motive-the protection of children-conceals several more insidious ones:
• The desire to expand and consolidate the power of the helping professions. At the present time, there is no law that says an individual must, under certain circumstances, submit to psychological evaluation and counseling. If they are written as is being suggested, however, antispanking laws will require exactly that. They will give helping professionals the power to define when the law has been broken, who is in need of "help" and how much, and when a certain parent's "rehabilitation" is complete. It is significant to note that in all of history the only other state to confer this much power on psychologists and their ilk was the former Soviet Union.
• The desire to manipulate the inner workings of the American family; specifically, the desire to exercise significant control over the child-rearing process. Take it from someone who was, at one time, similarly guilty, a significant number of helping professionals possess a "save the world" mentality. They believe they know what's best for individuals, families, and children. The only problem, as they see it, is that most people are "in denial"-unwilling to recognize their need for help. This self-righteousness fuels a zealous, missionary attitude. And like the first missionaries to the New World, many helping professionals seem
to believe that their vision of a perfect world justifies whatever means they deem necessary, including licensing parents, taking children away from parents they define as unfit, and the like. (For a close look at the social engineering being proposed by some professionals, see Debating Children's Lives, Mason and Gambrill, eds., Sage Publications, 1994).
”
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John Rosemond (To Spank Or Not To Spank (John Rosemond Book 5) (Volume 5))
“
Mother's Prayer for Her Children Holy Father, Immortal, from whom all goodness and gentleness comes, penitently I pray Thee for the children whom Thou hast given me to bear. Keep them in Thy grace and holiness, that Thy name may be glorified in them. Direct me by Thy grace to raise them toward the glory of Thy holy name and the benefit of other people. Grant me the gift of the patience necessary to do so. O Lord, enlighten the mind of my children with Thy Wisdom to learn to love Thee in their souls and thoughts. Instill in their hearts the fear and abhorrence of every vice, that they may be able to go the right way without sin. Adorn their souls with purity, goodness, humility, diligence, patience, and every virtue. Guard their lips from all slander and lies. Bless my children, that they may progress in virtue and holiness, and grow under Thy care into honest people. May their guardian angels be with them and protect them in their youth from misleading thoughts, from the evil and sinful temptations of this world, and from the traps of all unclean spirits. And when my children sin before Thee, do not turn away Thy face from them, but according to Thy great mercy be merciful unto them, for Thou alone art the one who cleansesth people from all sin. Reward my children with worldly good things and everything they need for salvation. Keep them from wrath, anger, misfortune, evil, and suffering all the days of their lives. O good Lord, I pray Thee, grant me joy and happiness from my children. Keep me in righteousness and justice, that with Thy children I may stand before Thee in the day of Thy dreaded judgment, and that without fear I may say: Here I am, Lord, with the children whom Thou hast given me, that together with them I may praise Thy most holy name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, unto ages of ages. Amen.
”
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Monaxi Agapi (Orthodox Prayer Book (St George Monastery 4))
“
The notion of becoming more productive—to constantly increase our rate of doing—as a measure of success, is misleading. We are not machines. Productivity is a paradigm for the Industrial Era. Doing is an important aspect of our lives. But there are other things that matter much more. Like loving what we do, helping others or sharing our passion with those we love.
”
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Gustavo Razzetti (Stretch for Change: How To Improve Your Change Fitness And Thrive In Life)
“
we most desire what we do not or cannot have; that the pursuit of a thing is more pleasing than the possession of it; that possession of a good and familiarity with it tend to produce indifference or disgust; that we mismeasure the value of what we have, or don’t have, by comparing it to our expectations or to the holdings of others. In sum, we talk to ourselves about our desires in ways that are constantly misleading. The Stoics seek to give us more accurate things to say, as well as some advice about how to avoid or outwit our irrationalities.
”
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Ward Farnsworth (The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual)
“
Clearly, if one can’t prove that the coronavirus even exists and that the testing for this imaginary virus is bogus, then the world has been led wildly astray. If the test for the coronavirus is inaccurate and misleading, as is the case, then there are no grounds for believing the reports about the number of Covid-19 cases, the number of Covid-19 deaths, or any other statistics coming from the orthodox medical institutions. If the testing is bogus, then the coronavirus emperor has no clothes.
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Thomas S. Cowan (The Truth About Contagion: Exploring Theories of How Disease Spreads)
“
It is not evasiveness .. It is only that that any answer I give will be just as incomplete and misleading, so this is as good - or bad - as any other.
”
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Samia Serageldin (بيت العائلة)
“
The diagnosis should be especially careful in the first round. Fighting lightly and carefully, try to explore your opponent's combat capabilities, reaction speed and other properties as closely as possible. Through deceptively masked actions, you can get an idea of the opponent's way of fighting, his favorite blows and types of defense, his ability to lead a half-distance fight. During the reconnaissance, be careful and avoid unexpected blows of the opponent. Diagnosis should be made imperceptibly, so that the opponent does not recognize the boxer's distinctive tactics and by misleading actions did not evoke from his side an incorrect idea of his intentions and manner of conducting the fight.
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Michael Wenz (BOXING: COMBAT SPORT: RULES, TECHNIQUES, POSITIONS, DISTANCE, MOVEMENT. BECOME A SPORT LEGEND. (TRAINING))
“
Asking for help in the military is changing. Before, it used to be seen as weak or shameful. It was synonymous with you could no longer handle your load. Fortunately now, it is not normally seen that way. When your household, career, religious beliefs, Dojo, friends, family, or associates view asking for help as being weak, then shame will prevent you from asking for help. We hold in high regard the people and things closest to us. Those inside our circle, especially our circle that we choose. There is no shame in doing a thing of which everyone you love already approves. In other words, you have to feel like it's not acceptable to feel shame. Sometimes this shame and the negative environment is created unintentionally; when the people you surround yourself with never admit mistakes, never have problems, and never forgive mistakes. These create a negative environment. A better description of it is a misleading environment.
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Dexter A. Daniels (Consistent, Not Different: Why We Stray from the Path and Reasons to Return)
“
Every medical student knows that lungs are designed to accommodate a huge surface area. But anatomists are trained to look at one scale at a time—for example, at the millions of alveoli, microscopic sacs, that end the sequence of branching pipes. The language of anatomy tends to obscure the unity across scales. The fractal approach, by contrast, embraces the whole structure in terms of the branching that produces it, branching that behaves consistently from large scales to small. Anatomists study the vasculatory system by classifying blood vessels into categories based on size—arteries and arterioles, veins and venules. For some purposes, those categories prove useful. But for others they mislead.
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James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
“
Elections are around the corner and elections brings evil spirits in other people. Spirit of deception, spirit of sabotaging, spirit of killing each other. Spirit of vandalism. Spirit of fighting. Spirit of lying. Spirit of looting. Spirit of stealing. Spirit of not caring. Spirit of power mongering . Spirit of division. Spirit of misleading. Spirit of backstabbing. Spirit of fraud and corruption. May God grand us leaders who are sincere and leaders who will care about people. Leaders who will be serving the people not serving their stomach or singing for their meal. Leaders who will unite people.
1 John 4:1 | 1 Timothy 2:1-4
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D.J. Kyos
“
Many complain that the nonworking poor are failing to make useful contributions to society while simultaneously bene ting from the productive contributions of others. But many with this complaint regard as “work” only (legal) activities for which a person gets paid. This misleadingly conflates earning income through market-remunerated activity with making a positive contribution to society. It would leave out lots of socially beneficial activities for which people are often not paid. If the point of demanding work is that the ghetto poor should engage in activities that contribute to the public good, then care work—particularly raising
children—should definitely count.
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Tommie Shelby (Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform)
“
The matrix out of which these powerful decisions are born is sometimes called racism, sometimes classicism, sometimes sexism. Each is an accurate term surely, but each is also misleading. The source is a deplorable inability to project, to become the “other,” to imagine her or him. It is an intellectual flaw, a shortening of the imagination, and reveals an ignorance of gothic proportions as well as a truly laughable lack of curiosity.
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Toni Morrison (The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations)
“
The name of the new peace organization is to be the United Nations. It is a misnomer and will mislead the people. The name of the organization should be the League of Free and Independent Nations pledged to Enforce Peace, or the Fifty Sovereign Nations of the World Solemnly Sworn to Prevent Each Other from Committing Aggression. These titles are clumsy, candid, and damning. They are exact, however. The phrase 'United Nations' is inexact, because it implies union, and there is no union suggested or contemplated in the work of Dumbarton Oaks. The nations of the world league will be united only as fifty marbles in a dish are united. Put your toe on the dish and the marbles will scatter, each to its own corner.
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E.B. White (The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters)
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When someone becomes obsessed with making money, or is obsessed with sex or has a jealous obsession, it has a very bad effect on their inner development. Rather than cultivating any of the finer feelings, they are leading a narrow and restricted life and have stunted their spiritual development. There is nothing inherently wrong with making money, with sex, or whatever; it is what people sometimes turn themselves into to fulfill their obsession that’s the real problem. It is the callous way they treat others that is the core of the issue. If they mislead, lie, cheat and steal in some way to get money, sex or power this is what stunts their development and puts them in harmony with low Astral levels and even Hell states. It is not so much what a person wants which is the problem; it is doing harm to others in order to get what they want which is the problem.
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William Fergus Martin (Afterlife Adventures: Life After Death Stories | What Happens when We Die | Is there Proof?)
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Nyayang has received some warnings from a few family members telling her who to avoid. Chuol has talked to her about how he wants her to be. There is nothing desirable about a woman who gets easily wound up in a crowd of women, simply for being part of the same community. When Chuol’s mother comes to her and speaks these scenarios in her ears again, it gets Nyayang thinking.
“These are bad women. They have no respect for their husbands. Whose wife could leave her house, come in between compounds and brazenly open her mouth and say things that only an elephant could swallow? These women are misleaders. They don’t like seeing young women like you staying in their marriages, because in many ways, they are not really in one. They are just misleaders.” She says this to her daughter-in-law in a way that it seems as if she is not really talking to her, but the fact that there is not any other wife in the compound narrows it down to Nyayang that she is speaking to her.
Nyayang looks around. She doesn’t know anything about what she is talking about. Women get into fights all the time. Sometimes it is about their children, other times it is about their husbands. There is no connection, Nyayang thinks. But she is not supposed to say anything and so she says nothing. But the mother-in-law knows what she is talking about, she just came back from separating some women. She knows what she is talking about. But, even if she knows, is there any reason to talk about these lost souls who have often had the misfortune of being on the wrong side of other women? That is all they know. Blaming each other.
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Tabitha Biel Luak (What a Godly Privilege to Be Born a Man)
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The term “microaggressions” refers to a way of thinking about brief and commonplace indignities and slights communicated to people of color (and others). Small acts of aggression are real, so the term could be useful, but because the definition includes accidental and unintentional offenses, the word “aggression” is misleading. Using the lens of microaggressions may amplify the pain experienced and the conflict that ensues. (On the other hand, there is nothing “micro” about intentional acts of aggression and bigotry.)
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Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
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The term “microaggressions” refers to a way of thinking about brief and commonplace indignities and slights communicated to people of color (and others). Small acts of aggression are real, so the term could be useful, but because the definition includes accidental and unintentional offenses, the word “aggression” is misleading. Using the lens of microaggressions may amplify the pain experienced and the conflict that ensues. (On the other hand, there is nothing “micro” about intentional acts of aggression and bigotry.) By encouraging students to interpret the actions of others in the least generous way possible, schools that teach students about microaggressions may be encouraging students to engage in emotional reasoning and other distortions while setting themselves up for higher levels of distrust and conflict. Karith Foster offers an example of using empathy to reappraise actions that could be interpreted as microaggressions. When she interpreted those actions as innocent (albeit insensitive) misunderstandings, it led to a better outcome for everyone. The number of efforts to “disinvite” speakers from giving talks on campus has increased in the last few years; such efforts are often justified by the claim that the speaker in question will cause harm to students. But discomfort is not danger. Students, professors, and administrators should understand the concept of antifragility and keep in mind Hanna Holborn Gray’s principle: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
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Is this how it happens? Not with a bang, but with gaps between hangs that gradually get larger, and you forget to send that birthday message... and the only time you all get together is at weddings, but the weddings are running out, then months turn into years into decades and you're telling optimistic thirtysomethings that THIS is when friendships begin to fade. Please do not let me be that guy. I'm not resigning us to that fate, not yet. I'm old enough now to know that it's possible to grow distant from your closest friends. But it's not a foregone conclusion. These people mean too much to me. These people ARE me. The destabilizing feeling that sinks my stomach at the thought of losing them proves that better than any model of identity, better than even the brilliance of Virginia Woolf. So I'll work to stay in their lives. I'll make an effort to see them. I'll listen and share, ask for advice, tell them I love them. The distance between us makes it harder, but it's only our bodies that are distant. And the body misleads.
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Evan Puschak (Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions)
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SHOPPING TIPS Most of the fakery surrounding the King of Cheese has to do with the misleading use of “Parmesan,” not Parmigiano-Reggiano, so when you see the full Italian name and it says “Made in Italy” and has the PDO seal, it is usually the real deal. The same is true of Prosciutto di Parma. However, the cheese is made in very large wheels that begin to deteriorate once cut, so it is important to buy from retailers with a lot of volume turnover who are constantly opening new wheels and storing it right. More than many other cheeses, it’s usually better to buy from a specialty cheese shop like Murray’s in New York—most cities have these. If you go mail order/online, you cannot beat Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which buys whole wheels directly from
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Larry Olmsted (Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don't Know What You're Eating and What You Can Do About It)
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TOMMY, old thing!" "Tuppence, old bean!" The two young people greeted each other affectionately, and momentarily blocked the Dover Street Tube exit in doing so. The adjective "old" was misleading. Their united ages would certainly not have totalled forty-five.
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Agatha Christie (The Secret Adversary)
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All boundaries are challenged by those that neighbour them. Even divides as certain as truth or fiction become fraught on close inspection. The library contains novels written in the style of a historian, leading the unwary down rabbit holes into imaginary pasts wherein sabbers built great cities and dwelt within them, aping the habits of man. Obviously, such flights of fancy are unlikely to mislead any but the most foolish reader, but other variations on the truth may be sufficiently plausible to trick even the most erudite. Know Your Library, by Axon Bloom
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Mark Lawrence
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The damage to self is more than hurt self-esteem. Your confidence in your own judgment is destroyed. As an empty shell, you are then open and vulnerable to indoctrination because you cannot trust your own thinking. Your thoughts are inadequate, your feelings are irrelevant or misleading, and your basic drives are selfish and destructive.
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Marlene Winell (Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion)
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And yet, nothing narrows our minds like loss; if one of our most urgent desires is to narrow our minds, to simplify and oversimplify ourselves, then loss certainly does the trick. If profit is there to offset loss; if salvation is there to cure us of absence; if pleasure is there to help us forget its transience, then we clearly think of ourselves, to use that most pernicious and misleading term, as essentially potential losers (we know of course that only winners can make losers, and wanting to be either is the problem). But if we are essentially elegiac creatures - obsessed only by what we have lost, or can or will lose - we should note that no other animal seems so similarly stricken.
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Adam Phillips (On Giving Up)
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Let’s say you’re in a book club. You’ve been meeting for years and years. Sometimes you can no longer remember which ideas were yours and which were someone else’s. You come to see that all your conversations over the years have been woven together into one long conversation. It’s almost as if the club has its own distinct voice, one greater than the individual voice of each member. Two sorts of knowledge have been generated here. The first kind, of course, is a deeper understanding of the books. The second kind of knowledge is more subtle and important. It’s knowledge about the club. It’s each member’s awareness of the dynamics of the group, what role each member tends to take in the conversations, what gifts each member brings. Maybe it’s misleading to use the word “knowledge” here. Maybe it’s more accurate to call this second kind of knowledge an “awareness.” It’s the highly attuned
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David Brooks (How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen)
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The Pakistan Election Commission failed to perform its fairness as an international standard even though the voting time couldn't pass and match that; only 8 hours for voting were not appropriate.
Imran Khan may manage to form an unstable government with unwanted compromises in question, which, indeed, degrade him more, as he went too far to victimize Muslim League N and Pakistan Peoples Party Zardari; however, he cannot fulfill what he promised to the people of Pakistan nor will he be able to execute new and standard foreign policy independently. Any compromise will cause him to be an opportunist for power, especially to become the prime minister at all costs. It does not seem that any party will cooperate with him to form even a weak government. As a fact, even in the leading position of the PTI in elections, the confused establishment faces grave defeat in the face of compromise for a coalition government that holds slurs and severe consequences.
Pakistani media airing Imran Khan as a prime minister is not only false but also misleading to the nation. Though Khan's PTI is a leading party in the elections, it does not have the required seats to form a full-fledged government, nor has any other party or parties shown their willingness to join PTI for that purpose. In this context, why does the Pakistani media execute something that does not define the reality within the strong foes such as the PMLN and PPP? Let's realize and wait for the coming days to see how the sun rises and what the shape and outcome will be. The media seem non-professional and irresponsible.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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When we look at the subject of time, the initial situation is more clear and fair than with any other resource: every person has 24 hours each day. So why do some people have “no time” while others get bored? Because the language is misleading: when someone has “no time,” the disorder is not in his or her time but in his or her tasks.
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Werner Tiki Küstenmacher (Simplify Your Life)
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Misleading, lying, destruction, vexatious conduct, dishonor to others, abuse, blame, denying facts, and use of awkward language do not match with a real, fair, and true leader of any nation.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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So in fear we assume the future will be like the past; and we believe — that is, behave as if — we know what that past was like. Fear, in other words, makes us too clever; or at least misleadingly knowing. Knowing becomes rather literally the process of jumping to conclusions. In fear the wish for prediction is immediately gratified; it is as though the certainty — the future — has already happened.
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Adam Phillips (Terrors and Experts)
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Never take advice, trust, or rely on a hungry person.
Hunger has made people kill each other and sell each other.
Hunger has made people turn against each other.
We have no shame , morals, values, or principles anymore.
We don’t have back bone or stand for something, because of hunger we fall for everything. Hunger controls lot of people.
Hunger for success or for attention. Hunger to be rich. Hunger for being relevant or to trend. Hunger for being famous. Hunger for power or to be in control. Hunger for being noticed or liked. Hunger for sex or pleasure. Hunger for being loved. Hunger for money. Hunger for being cool, hunger for being credited, Hunger for being looked at as the smartest, wisest, or educated. Hunger for more followers or promos. Hunger for being right. Hunger for being in the circle or table. Hunger for being admired and hunger for friends.
A starving person will say and do anything as long it is feeding their hunger. They can mislead, say wrong things, misinform, manipulate, abuse, lie, provoke, insult, intimidate, black mail, rage farm, influence, instigate people if it will feed their hunger.
I hate poverty. It has made lot us break the law, support criminals, bad people, bad leaders , bad parties, bad things, bad behavior because whatever we support feeds our hunger.
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De philosopher DJ Kyos
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Obama assured us, only the United States. He claimed to have worked across party lines in the Illinois state senate on bipartisan issues like ethics and health-care reform, when in fact he had a fiercely partisan voting record. As a legislator Obama voted against the death penalty for cop killers, against legislation requiring medical intervention to save the life of a child born alive during an abortion, and for raising taxes. His Senate voting record displayed the same pattern, and he was rated the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate by National Journal.1 No matter, for with Obama, style always trumps substance, and rhetoric always replaces the record. Facts and failure may shame other politicians into a reassessment of their policies, but not Obama. In his case, misleading the public is not a function of ego or a personality flaw. It is a deliberate strategy designed to tickle the ears with pleasing words while doing things radical and transformational.
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Reed Ralph (Awakening: How America Can Turn from Economic and Moral Destruction Back to Greatness)
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There is a current misconception which sees in Jung an early disciple of Freud who subsequently deserted his master. Nothing could be more misleading. From the very beginning there were differences of procedure and of outlook that were bound to lead to divergent results. Freud's work is based on a scientific method restricted to the principle of causality: that is to say, it is assumed that everything that happens has an explanation in prior causes, and is merely the result of those causes. The world is a mechanism that can be taken to pieces and we can only understand how it works if we know how to dismantle and reassemble its constituent parts. Jung does not deny this causal principle, but he says it is inadequate to explain all the facts. In his view, we live and work, day by day, according to the principle of directed aim or purpose, as well as by the principle of causality. We are drawn onwards and our actions are significant for a future we cannot foresee, and will only be explicable when the final effect of the impulse becomes evident. In other words, life has a meaning as well as an explanation; a meaning, moreover, that we can never finally discover, for it is being extended all the time by the process of evolution.
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Herbert Read (Essays in Literary Criticism)
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the CEO who misleads others in public may eventually mislead himself in private.” -1983 letter
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Mark Gavagan (Gems from Warren Buffett: Wit and Wisdom from 34 Years of Letters to Shareholders)
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■■■■■■■■■■ led the interrogation, and ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ was a good translator. The other guy didn’t get the chance to ask questions, he just took notes. ■■■■■■■■■■ didn’t really come up with a miracle: all he did was ask me some questions I had been asked uninterruptedly for the past three years. ■■■■■■■■■ spoke a very clear English, and I almost didn’t need the translator. He seemed to be smart and experienced. When the night grew late, ■■■■■■■■■■ thanked me for my cooperation. “I believe that you are very open,” he said. “The next time we’ll untie your hands and bring you something to eat. We will not torture you, nor will we extradite you to another country.” I was happy with ■■■■■■■■■■ assurances, and encouraged in my cooperation. As it turned out, ■■■■■■■■■■ was either misleading me or he was unknowledgeable about the plans of his government.
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Mohamedou Ould Slahi (The Mauritanian (originally published as Guantánamo Diary))
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Truth is the very essence of the teachings of the Buddha, who referred to himself as the Tathagata or ‘one who has come to the truth’. The Buddhist king must therefore live and rule by truth, which is the perfect uniformity between nomenclature and nature. To deceive or to mislead the people in any way would be an occupational failing as well as a moral offence. ‘As an arrow, intrinsically straight, without warp or distortion, when one word is spoken, it does not err into two.’ Kindness
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Aung San Suu Kyi (Freedom from Fear: And Other Writings)
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The human tendency to find their sense of accomplishment within their family, caste, community, region, nation, language and religion will only lead to anarchy for others. In their particular reference framework, this whole quest is about finding one's identity, not eternal peace. The ongoing popular discourse in the world is guided by populist slogans for religion, country and community. It's selfish, misleading and is about one-upmanship. Most often, support is sought for the so called fight for identity in the name of religion and justice. Do
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Acharya Balkrishna (Yog: In Synergy with Medical Science)
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The dependent origination, or structure of conditions, appears as a flexible formula with the intention of describing the ordinary human situation of a man in his world (or indeed any conscious event where ignorance and craving have not entirely ceased). That situation is always complex, since it is implicit that consciousness with no object, or being ( bhava— becoming, or however rendered) without consciousness (of it), is impossible except as an artificial abstraction. The dependent origination, being designed to portray the essentials of that situation in the limited dimensions of words and using only elements recognizable in experience, is not a logical proposition (Descartes’ cogito is not a logical proposition). Nor is it a temporal cause-and-effect chain: each member has to be examined as to its nature in order to determine what its relations to the others are (e.g. whether successive in time or conascent, positive or negative, etc., etc.). A purely cause-and-effect chain would not represent the pattern of a situation that is always complex, always subjective-objective, static-dynamic, positive-negative, and so on. Again, there is no evidence of any historical development in the various forms given within the limit of the Sutta Piþaka (leaving aside the Paþisambhidámagga), and historical treatment within that particular limit is likely to mislead, if it is hypothesis with no foundation.
Parallels with European thought have been avoided in this translation. But perhaps an exception can be made here, with due caution, in the case of Descartes. The revolution in European thought started by his formula cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) is not yet ended. Now, it will perhaps not escape notice that the two elements, “I think” and “I am,” in what is not a logical proposition parallel to some extent the two members of the dependent origination, consciousness and being (becoming). In other words, consciousness activated by craving and clinging as the dynamic factory, guided and blinkered by ignorance (“I think” or “consciousness with the conceit ‘I am’”), conditions being (“therefore I am”) in a complex relationship with other factors relating subject and object (not accounted for by Descartes). The parallel should not be pushed too far. In fact it is only introduced because in Europe the dependent origination seems to be very largely misunderstood with many strange interpretations placed upon it, and because the cogito does seem to offer some sort of reasonable approach.
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Nanamoli Thera
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If I scan the expanse of my heart and find it empty of everything except emptiness, it is because I ‘poured’ the whole of my passion into something other than God. And anything other than God will always be too ‘poor’ to be able to ‘pour’ back anything that can fill that kind of emptiness.
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Craig D. Lounsbrough
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Have the “willingness to pay” talk with customers early in the product development process. If you don't do it early, you won't be able to prioritize the product features you develop, and you won't know whether you're building something customers will pay for until it's in the marketplace. Don't force a one-size-fits-all solution. Whether you like it or not, your customers are different, so customer segmentation is crucial. But segmentation based on demographics—the primary way companies group their customers—is misleading. You should build segments based on differences in your customers' willingness to pay for your new product. Product configuration and bundling is more science than art. You need to build them carefully and match them with your most meaningful segments. Choose the right pricing and revenue models, because how you charge is often more important than how much you charge. Develop your pricing strategy. Create a plan that looks a few steps ahead, allowing you to maximize gains in the short and long term. Draft your business case using customer willingness-to-pay data, and establish links between price, value, volume, and cost. Without this, your business case will tell you only what you want to hear, which may be far afield from market realities. Communicate the value of your offering clearly and compellingly; otherwise you will not get customers to pay full measure. Understand your customers' irrational sides, because whether you sell to other businesses or to consumers, your customers are people. You should take into account their full psyches, including their emotions, in making purchase decisions. Maintain your pricing integrity. Control discounting tightly. If demand for your new product is below expectations, only use price cuts as a last resort, after all other measures have been exhausted. We
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Madhavan Ramanujam (Monetizing Innovation: How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price)
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In the cloudy swirl of misleading ideas surrounding public discussion of addiction, there’s one that stands out: the misconception that drug taking by itself will lead to addiction — in other words, that the cause of addiction resides in the power of the drug over the human brain. It is one of the bedrock fables sustaining the so-called “War on Drugs.” It also obscures the existence of a basic addiction process of which drugs are only one possible object, among many. Compulsive gambling, for example, is widely considered to be a form of addiction without anyone arguing that it’s caused by a deck of cards. The notion that addiction is drug-induced is often reinforced.
Clearly, if drugs by themselves could cause addiction, we would not be safe offering narcotics to anyone. Medical evidence has repeatedly shown that opioids prescribed for cancer pain, even for long periods of time, do not lead to addiction except in a minority of susceptible people. During my years working on a palliative care ward I sometimes treated terminally ill cancer patients with extraordinarily high doses of narcotics — doses that my hardcore addict clients could only dream of. If the pain was alleviated by other means — for example, when patient was successfully given a nerve block for bone pain due to malignant deposits in the spine — the morphine could be rapidly discontinued.
Yet if anyone had reason to seek oblivion through narcotic addiction, it would have been these terminally ill human beings. An article in the Canadian Journal of Medicine in 2006 reviewed international research covering over six thousand people who had received narcotics for chronic pain that was not cancerous in origin. There was no significant risk of addiction, a finding common to all studies that examine the relationship between addiction and the use of narcotics for pain relief. “Doubts or concerns about opioid efficacy, toxicity, tolerance, and abuse or addiction should no longer be used to justify withholding opioids,” concluded a large study of patients with chronic pain due to rheumatic disease.
We can never understand addiction if we look for its sources exclusively in the actions of chemicals, no matter how powerful they are.
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
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Error is the ultimate inside job. Yes, the world can be profoundly confusing; and yes, other people can mislead or deceive you. In the end, though, nobody but you can choose to believe your own beliefs. That's part of why recognizing our errors is such a strange experience: accustomed to disagreeing with other people, we suddenly find ourselves at odds with *ourselves*.
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Kathryn Schulz (Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error)
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Another federal law makes it a felony for any person “knowingly to deliver or cause to be delivered for transmission through the mails or interstate commerce by telegraph, telephone, wireless, or other means of communication false or misleading or knowingly inaccurate reports concerning crop or market information or conditions that affect or tend to affect the price of any commodity in interstate commerce.”21 For this “crime,” you can be fined up to one million dollars and imprisoned for up to ten years. If you are ever prosecuted for a violation of this law, the way it is written, all the government needs to do to put you behind bars is to prove that you sent anybody a single bit of inaccurate information that somehow concerned crop or commodity market information or conditions. It does not matter whether you sent that message by telephone or mail or telegraph. It does not matter who you sent that letter to. It does not matter whether the information was actually false, or merely misleading. It does not matter whether your note actually had any effect on market prices anywhere, or even whether you intended for it to have that effect. The way this law was written by the morons in Congress, you are guilty of a felony if you send a postcard to your grandmother in a nursing home, trying to make her feel better by lying about how nice the weather has been in Florida, or how low the gas prices have been. And you will not find this law in Title 18 either; this one is buried in the bowels of Title 7 (sec. 13), which lists the laws supposedly regulating “Agriculture”.
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James J. Duane (You Have the Right to Remain Innocent)
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Do not assume that a source agrees with a writer when the source summarizes that writer’s line of reasoning. Quote only what a source believes, not its account of someone else’s beliefs, unless that account is relevant. 2. Record why sources agree, because why they agree can be as important as why they don’t. Two psychologists might agree that teenage drinking is caused by social influences, but one might cite family background, the other peer pressure. 3. Record the context of a quotation. When you note an important conclusion, record the author’s line of reasoning: Not Bartolli (p. 123): The war was caused … by Z. But Bartolli: The war was caused by Y and Z (p. 123), but the most important was Z (p. 123), for two reasons: First,… (pp. 124–26); Second,… (p. 126) Even if you care only about a conclusion, you’ll use it more accurately if you record how a writer reached it. 4. Record the scope and confidence of each statement. Do not make a source seem more certain or expansive than it is. The second sentence below doesn’t report the first fairly or accurately. One study on the perception of risk (Wilson 1988) suggests a correlation between high-stakes gambling and single-parent families. Wilson (1988) says single-parent families cause high-stakes gambling. 5. Record how a source uses a statement. Note whether it’s an important claim, a minor point, a qualification or concession, and so on. Such distinctions help you avoid mistakes like this: Original by Jones: We cannot conclude that one event causes another because the second follows the first. Nor can statistical correlation prove causation. But no one who has studied the data doubts that smoking is a causal factor in lung cancer. Misleading report: Jones claims “we cannot conclude that one event causes another because the second follows the first. Nor can statistical correlation prove causation.” Therefore, statistical evidence is not a reliable indicator that smoking causes lung cancer.
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Kate L. Turabian (A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers)