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If a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission.
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Flemming Rose
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Women's bodies are public domain, as evidenced clearly at the present time by the furor over abortion. Everyone has an opinion about what a woman should or should not do with her body.
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Maureen Murdock (The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness)
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...But the heart is not a computer that can be upgraded so quickly and easily with the latest version of love.
Love cannot be sealed hermetically inside a tight box like any other on the store shelf; even though the word itself is in public domain, its quality is not.
Love cannot promise a full customer satisfaction garanteed or a whole lifetime of dreams shared refunded, with no questions asked.
Love cannot be agreed to in terms and conditions as quickly as the "Next" button being clicked. These unspoken terms and conditions grow and develop over time until it gets very messy, and no one remembers how such a mess of accusation and anger was able to overshadow their pure ecstasy of love, the spark between two people turning on a new operation system of togetherness for the first time.
Love is always beta; never a golden master.
If love were a computer, constant bug reports and subsequent fixes are the name of the game, and there are many unexplained breakdowns. The heart is too stubborn for explanations and too impatient for forgiveness, and there is usually no one at the tech support line.
Forgive me stan, if I've crashed so often. It's just to hard to boot up to a whole new future without you. I am an empty monitor in search of a "hello.
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Raymond Luczak
“
In particular, the State has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly over police and military services, the provision of law, judicial decision-making, the mint and the power to create money, unused land ("the public domain"), streets and highways, rivers and coastal waters, and the means of delivering mail...the State relies on control of the levers of propaganda to persuade its subjects to obey or even exalt their rulers.
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Murray N. Rothbard (The Ethics of Liberty)
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In the beginning of human creativity, everything good was God-given, there was no patent on manna from heaven, no copyright on the blueprints of the Mishkan, and people entertained themselves by dancing with a statue of a golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. The Bible is of course all in the public domain; the Lord gave His words to Moses, gratis.
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Elizabeth Wurtzel (Creatocracy: How the Constitution Invented Hollywood)
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While extroverts tend to attain leadership in public domains, introverts tend to attain leadership in theoretical and aesthetic fields. Outstanding introverted leaders, such as Charles Darwin, Maurie Curie, Patrick White and Arthur Boyd, who have created either new fields of thought or rearranged existing knowledge, have spent long periods of their lives in solitude. Hence leadership does not only apply in social situations, but also occurs in more solitary situations such as developing new techniques in the arts, creating new philosophies, writing profound books and making scientific breakthroughs.
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Janet Farrall
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Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process. This has several consequences: it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime; the exemplary mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms. As a result, justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice.
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Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison)
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Through the emergence of blogging, personal lives were becoming public domain, and social incentives—to be liked, to be seen—were becoming economic ones.
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Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror)
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There are now, to the delight of parasitical writers like me, what I might almost call “public domain” plot items. There are dragons, and magic users, and far horizons, and quests, and items of power, and weird cities. There’s the kind of scenery that we would have had on earth if only God had had the money.
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Terry Pratchett (A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction)
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The history of patents includes a wealth of attempts to reward friends of the government and restrict or control dangerous technologies.
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James Boyle (The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind)
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Hannibal knew your beauty was trouble. Only bad things could come from such a pretty girl. You were made for temptation. You would be a source of jealousy and greed. Men would lust, plot and kill to claim you as their own. He decided to place you in the public domain and donate your body to the pimps as a gift to the people.
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James W. Bodden (The Red Light Princess)
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While extroverts tend to attain leadership in public domains, introverts tend to attain leadership in theoretical and aesthetic fields. Outstanding introverted leaders, such as Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Patrick White and Arthur Boyd, who have created either new fields of thought or rearranged existing knowledge, have spent long periods of their lives in solitude. Hence leadership does not only apply in social situations, but also occurs in more solitary situations such as developing new techniques in the arts, creating new philosophies, writing profound books and making scientific breakthroughs.
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
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Librarians are the bedrock of the public domain and the defenders of our fundamental right to access knowledge.
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Carl Malamud
“
So far, the items on that list of brain differences that are thought to explain the gender status quo have always, in the end been crossed off. But before this happens, speculation becomes elevated to the status of fact, especially in the hands of some popular writers. Once in the public domain these supposed facts about male and female brains become part of the culture, often lingering on well past their best-by dates. Here they reinforce and legitimate the gender stereotypes that interact with our minds, helping to create the very gender inequalities that the neuroscientific claims seek to explain.
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Cordelia Fine (Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference)
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In the specific case of the use of the term “false memory” to describe errors in details in laboratory tasks (e.g., in word-learning tasks), the media and public are set up all too easily to interpret such research as relevant to “false memories” of abuse because the term is used in the public domain to refer to contested memories of abuse. Because the term “false memory” is inextricably tied in the public to a social movement that questions the veracity of memories for childhood sexual abuse, the use of the term in scientific research that evaluates memory errors for details (not whole events) must be evaluated in this light."
From:
What's in a Name for Memory Errors? Implications and Ethical Issues Arising From the Use of the Term “False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior 14(3) pages 201-233, 2004
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Jennifer J. Freyd
“
At the moment, everyone gets a copyright as soon as the work is written down or otherwise fixed, whether they want one or not.
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James Boyle (The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind)
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The precursor of copyright law served to force the identification of the author so that he could be punished if he proved to be a heretic or a revolutionary
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James Boyle (The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind)
“
While extroverts tend to attain leadership in public domains, introverts tend to attain leadership in theoretical and aesthetic fields.
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
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Copyright Published by Virago ISBN: 978-0-3490-0992-6 All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious
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Caroline O'Donoghue (Promising Young Women)
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We’re taught early in life to keep our emotions hidden and we’re especially taught that negative emotions have no place in a public domain.
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Shaheen Bhatt (I've never been (Un)happier)
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In this book we paint an unprecedented portrait of Britain’s first ‘false memory’ retraction and show that, like other ‘false memory’ cases which appeared in the public domain, memory itself was always a false trail – these women never forgot. We are not challenging people’s right to tell their own story and then to change it. But we do assert that the chance should be interpreted in the context that created it.
Thousands of accounts of sexual and physical abuse in childhood cannot be explained by a pseudo-scientific ‘syndrome’. We have been shifted to the wrong debate, a debate about the malignancy of survivors and their allies, rather than those who have hurt them. That’s why the arguments have become so elusive. […]
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Beatrix Campbell (Stolen Voices: The People and Politics Behind the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony)
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Political lying is a form of theft. It takes away people’s democratic rights. Voters cannot make fair judgements on the basis of falsehoods. Truth has been taken out of the public domain.
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Peter Oborne (The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism)
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The principle is twofold, do not forget. The book, as a book, belongs to the author, but as a thought, it belongs – the word is not too extreme – to the human race. All intelligences, all minds, are eligible, all own it. If one of these two rights, the right of the writer and the right of the human mind, were to be sacrificed, it would certainly be the right of the writer, because the public interest is our only concern, and that must take precedence in anything that comes before us.
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Victor Hugo
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Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence.
But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence.
And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence.
Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe?
Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?
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Alan Sokal
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I take, O cross, thy shadow For my abiding place I ask no other sunshine than The sunshine of His face Content to let the world go by To know no gain nor loss My sinful self my only shame My glory all the cross. (Elizabeth C. Clephane, Public Domain)
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Bob Sorge (Secrets of the Secret Place)
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It is widely misrepresented in the public domain that Earth’s current levels of atmospheric CO2 are dangerously and atypically high. Such claims are false, because modern CO2 levels lie near to an all-time low as assessed against the geological record.
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Alan Moran (Climate Change: The Facts)
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Classic Ballet,
Keep away, keep building your creaky fairy castles, keep cloning clones and meaningless manners, hang on to your beanstalk ballerinas and their midget male shadows, run yourself out of business with your tons of froufrou and costly clattery toe shoes that ruin all chances for illusions of lightness, keep on crowding the minds of blind balletomanes who prefer dainty poses to the eloquent strength of momentum, who have forgotten or never known the manings of gesture, who would nod their noses to barefoot embargos ("so grab me" spelt backwards). Continue to repolish your stiff technique and to ignore a public that hungers for something other than a bag of tricks and the empty-headedness of surface patterns.
Just keep it up, keep imitating yourself, and, , go grow your own dance makers. Come on, don't keep trying to filter modern ones through your so-safe extablishment. We're to be seen undiluted, undistorted, not absorbed by your hollow world like blood into a sponge.
Yours truly,
A Different Leaf on Our Family Tree
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Paul Taylor (Private Domain: An Autobiography)
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finance was to become a public utility, situated in the public domain or at least alongside a public banking option. Instead, the past century’s expansion of predatory credit has been reinforced by de-taxing interest, land rent, financial speculation, debt leveraging and “capital” (asset-price) gains.
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Michael Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy)
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There are countries in which the communal provision of housing, transport, education and health care is so inferior that inhabitants will naturally seek to escape involvement with the masses by barricading themselves behind solid walls. The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where 'ordinary' life fails to answer a median need for dignity or comfort.
Then there are communities—far fewer in number and typically imbued with a strong (often Protestant) Christian heritage—whose public realms exude respect in their principles and architecture, and whose citizens are therefore under less compulsion to retreat into a private domain. Indeed, we may find that some of our ambitions for personal glory fade when the public spaces and facilities to which we enjoy access are themselves glorious to behold; in such a context, ordinary citizenship may come to seem an adequate goal. In Switzerland's largest city, for instance, the need to own a car in order to avoid sharing a bus or train with strangers loses some of the urgency it has in Los Angeles or London, thanks to Zurich's superlative train network, which is clean, safe, warm and edifying in its punctuality and technical prowess. There is little reason to travel in an automotive cocoon when, for a fare of only a few francs, an efficient, stately tramway will provide transport from point A to point B at a level of comfort an emperor might have envied.
One insight to be drawn from Christianity and applied to communal ethics is that, insofar as we can recover a sense of the preciousness of every human being and, even more important, legislate for spaces and manner that embody such a reverence in their makeup, then the notion of the ordinary will shed its darker associations, and, correspondingly, the desires to triumph and to be insulated will weaken, to the psychological benefit of all.
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Alain de Botton (Status Anxiety)
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Unlike in Western culture, which encourages expressions of feelings and opinions, the Vietnamese keep them jealously to themselves, and speak of them with great reluctance, because this inner space is the only one inaccessible to others. All the rest, from academic grades to salaries to sleep, is in the public domain, as are love affairs.
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Kim Thúy (Vi)
“
When capital has bumped up against limits to profit-growth in the past, it has found fixes in things like colonisation, structural adjustment programmes, wars, restrictive patent laws, nefarious debt instruments, land grabs, privatisation, and enclosing commons like water and seeds. Why would it be any different this time? Indeed, a study by the ecological economist Beth Stratford finds that when capital faces resource constraints, this is exactly what happens: it turns to aggressive rent-seeking behaviour. It seeks to grab existing value wherever it can, with clever mechanisms to suck income and wealth from the public domain into private hands, and from the poor to the rich, exacerbating inequality.
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Jason Hickel (Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World)
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In the seventy years since von Neumann effectively placed his “Draft Report” on the EDVAC into the public domain, the trend for computers has been, with a few notable exceptions, toward a more proprietary approach. In 2011 a milestone was reached: Apple and Google spent more on lawsuits and payments involving patents than they did on research and development of new products.64
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Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
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The institutions that regulate the public life of a country always influence the general mentality – such is the prestige of power. People have progressively developed the habit of thinking, in all domains, only in terms of being ‘in favour of’ or ‘against’ any opinion, and afterwards they seek arguments to support one of these two options. This is an exact transposition of the party spirit.
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Simone Weil (On the Abolition of All Political Parties)
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The argument goes like this: even if public grazing contributes almost nothing to local economies and national food production, it nonetheless supports "an important western lifestyle and the rural west's social and cultural fabric." If we keep ranchers working on the range, on the big wide-open of the public domain, we ensure the historical continuity of a "custom" that has gone on for close to 150 years.
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Christopher Ketcham (This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West)
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How do you get your organization to behave with a fail-fast mentality? First, start at the top. Lead by example: quickly and publicly acknowledge your mistakes, and move on. Act matter of fact-ly. I've had to clean up my own messes for everybody to see. Talk about it publicly, what you were thinking at the time, what was learned from it; this signals to the organization that it is okay to make mistakes and openly own them.
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Frank Slootman (TAPE SUCKS: Inside Data Domain, A Silicon Valley Growth Story)
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Wisdom and integrity cannot be found in any single domain. A broader viewpoint that breaks across disciplinary boundaries is needed, a way of understanding that combines knowing and sensing, feeling and judging. In facing this task one cannot expect to succeed in the public eye, as one can when a field of culture recognizes one’s contributions to art, business, or science. But by this time a person aspiring to wisdom knows that the bottom line of a well-lived life is not so much success but the certainty we reach, in the most private fibers of our being, that our existence is linked in a meaningful way with the rest of the universe.
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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention)
“
events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Copyright © 2018 by Jayne Ann Krentz The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing
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Amanda Quick (The Other Lady Vanishes)
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The United States inherited a seemingly inexhaustible fortune in natural resources, yet it has responded to its environment with a dismaying mixture of materialism and inertia. The nation was virtually founded upon a ubiquitous desire for access to land and its contents. Its amazing growth during the nineteenth century was based directly upon the exploitation—immediate, unplanned, full use of soils, minerals, forests, and rivers. Equitable access to these natural bounties rather than constitutional guarantees would be the practical basis for democracy. Subsequently, political institutions were shaped in such a way that they could facilitate the disposition of the public domain. But that expectation, as later generations ruefully observed, did not materialize. The combination of economics and government had instead produced a handful of owners and policy makers who were beyond the control of the ballot box.
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Elmo Richardson (Dams, parks & politics;: Resource development & preservation in the Truman-Eisenhower era)
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Good commentaries generally are found among those produced in the last few decades. Older works, perhaps in the public domain and therefore inexpensively available, have limited value. Though perhaps written by godly men or women, many are merely random devotional observations without a grasp of the author's true meaning or flow of thought. Others, though written by competent scholars, are dated and lack the benefit of recent cultural, archeological, and grammatical studies.
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Donald R. Sunukjian (Invitation to Biblical Preaching: Proclaiming Truth with Clarity and Relevance (Invitation to Theological Studies Series))
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5:14 For the entire law is fulfilled by one word: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." 5:15 But if you bite and devour one another, be careful that you are not consumed by one another! 5:16 So then, I say: Walk in the spirit, and you will not fulfill the desires of the flesh.
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Ronald L. Conte Jr. (The Holy Bible: Catholic Public Domain Version)
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Sexual harassment is material. It is a network that stops information from getting out. It is a set of alliances that come alive to stop something; that enable a complaint to be held up or to become confidential, so that it never comes out into the public domain. And notice here: so many complex things are going on at the same time. It is not activity that is coordinated by one person or even necessarily a group of people who are meeting in secret, although secret meetings probably do happen. All of these activities, however complex, sustain a direction; they have a point. Direction does not require something to originate from a single point: in fact a direction is achieved through consistency between points that do not seem to meet. Things combine to achieve something that is solid and tangible; bonds become binds. If one element does not hold, or become binding, another element holds or binds. The process is rather like the cement used to make walls: something is set into a holding pattern. The setting is what hardens. Perhaps when people notice the complexity, or even the inefficiency and disorganization, they don’t notice the cement. When you say there is a pattern, you are heard as paranoid, as if you are imagining that all this complexity derives from a single point.
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Sara Ahmed (Living a Feminist Life)
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Under the notion that unregulated market-driven values and relations should shape every domain of human life, the business model of governance has eviscerated any viable notion of social responsibility while furthering the criminalization of social problems and cutbacks in basic social services, especially for young people, the elderly, people of color, and the impoverished.36 At this historical juncture there is a merging of violence and governance along with the systemic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy. This becomes obvious in the emergence of a surveillance state in which social media not only become new platforms for the invasion of privacy but further legitimate a culture in which monitoring functions are viewed as both necessary and benign. Meanwhile, the state-sponsored society of hyper-fear increasingly regards each and every person as a potential terrorist suspect.
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Henry A. Giroux (The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine (City Lights Open Media))
“
As Janet Farrall and Leonie Kronborg write in Leadership Development for the Gifted and Talented: While extroverts tend to attain leadership in public domains, introverts tend to attain leadership in theoretical and aesthetic fields. Outstanding introverted leaders, such as Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Patrick White and Arthur Boyd, who have created either new fields of thought or rearranged existing knowledge, have spent long periods of their lives in solitude. Hence leadership does not only apply in social situations, but also occurs in more solitary situations such as developing new techniques in the arts, creating new philosophies, writing profound books and making scientific breakthroughs.
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
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Swanson saw opportunity. He realized he could make discoveries by connecting information from scientific articles in subspecialty domains that never cited one another and that had no scientists who worked together. For example, by systematically cross-referencing databases of literature from different disciplines, he uncovered “eleven neglected connections” between magnesium deficiency and migraine research, and proposed that they be tested. All of the information he found was in the public domain; it had just never been connected. “Undiscovered public knowledge,” Swanson called it. In 2012, the American Headache Society and the American Academy of Neurology reviewed all the research on migraine prevention and concluded that magnesium should be considered as a common treatment.
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David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
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Naturally there was the notion of private property as a pragmatic concept, for individuals or groups have a proclivity to tend to their own possessions with greater care and reverence than they would to common property...in such cases, the notion of ownership would underscore a relationship existing between distinct people, rather than a legal association between a person and that which is said to be possessed, which is to say that ownership was, in its strictest definition, the societal distinction between the owner and the non-owner with respect to the property in question. Beyond this, the concept of ownership varied further from society-to-society according to their respective derivations of natural law, legal positivism and legal realism. Some societies—the indigenous Itako tribes...for example—railed against their governments’ initiatives for private ownership in favor of maintaining equal access to available resources (in the case of the Itako, this was due primarily to the fact that theirs were kin-based tribes whose membership sought to live communally). All the same, even this notion of common possession seemed to me rather arrogant, for the necessitated existence of a public domain was rooted in the shared human dominance over the objects or organisms in question. And so, in my dizzying contemplation, I began to yearn for a greater law that stretched to vast limits beyond that which governed humanity alone. The voice in my mind spoke earnestly of the need for a unifying jurisprudence which could preside over all of Nature’s manifestations in a manner either probabilistically fair or mathematically arbitrary. And perhaps, still, this would not be enough.
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Ashim Shanker (Only the Deplorable (Migrations, Volume II))
“
Whether an activity is performed in private or in public is by no means a matter of indifference. Obviously, the character of the public realm must change in accordance with the activities admitted into it, but to a large extent the activity itself changes its own nature too. The laboring activity, though under all circumstances connected with the life process in its most elementary, biological sense, remained stationary for thousands of years, imprisoned in the eternal recurrence of the life process to which it was tied. The admission of labor to public stature, far from eliminating its character as a process—which one might have expected, remembering that bodies politic have always been designed for permanence and their laws always understood as limitations imposed upon movement—has, on the contrary, liberated this process from its circular, monotonous recurrence and transformed it into a swiftly progressing development whose results have in a few centuries totally changed the whole inhabited world. The moment laboring was liberated from the restrictions imposed by its banishment into the private realm—and this emancipation of labor was not a consequence of the emancipation of the working class, but preceded it—it was as though the growth element inherent in all organic life had completely overcome and overgrown the processes of decay by which organic life is checked and balanced in nature’s household. The social realm, where the life process has established its own public domain, has let loose an unnatural growth, so to speak, of the natural; and it is against this growth, not merely against society but against a constantly growing social realm, that the private and intimate, on the one hand, and the political (in the narrower sense of the word), on the other, have proved incapable of defending themselves. What
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Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition)
“
Given an area of law that legislators were happy to hand over to the affected industries and a technology that was both unfamiliar and threatening, the prospects for legislative insight were poor. Lawmakers were assured by lobbyists
a) that this was business as usual, that no dramatic changes were being made by the Green or White papers; or
b) that the technology presented a terrible menace to the American cultural industries, but that prompt and statesmanlike action would save the day; or
c) that layers of new property rights, new private enforcers of those rights, and technological control and surveillance measures were all needed in order to benefit consumers, who would now be able to “purchase culture by the sip rather than by the glass” in a pervasively monitored digital environment.
In practice, somewhat confusingly, these three arguments would often be combined. Legislators’ statements seemed to suggest that this was a routine Armageddon in which firm, decisive statesmanship was needed to preserve the digital status quo in a profoundly transformative and proconsumer way. Reading the congressional debates was likely to give one conceptual whiplash.
To make things worse, the press was—in 1995, at least—clueless about these issues. It was not that the newspapers were ignoring the Internet. They were paying attention—obsessive attention in some cases. But as far as the mainstream press was concerned, the story line on the Internet was sex: pornography, online predation, more pornography. The lowbrow press stopped there. To be fair, the highbrow press was also interested in Internet legal issues (the regulation of pornography, the regulation of online predation) and constitutional questions (the First Amendment protection of Internet pornography). Reporters were also asking questions about the social effect of the network (including, among other things, the threats posed by pornography and online predators).
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James Boyle (The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind)
“
Artists and designers have a largely shared skill set and knowledge base but the work they create, however indistinguishable in terms of technique, subject matter and visual language, is made for entirely different reasons. Attempts to define or make clear distinctions between art and design are always contestable, but at the beginning of a diagnostic process it is useful to identify a simple delineation between the two:
Art
An artist's practice generally emerges from their own individual concerns explored over varying durations in the studio. The work is then usually presented to a knowing public either in galleries or in designated public spaces.
Design
Design is largely initiated externally from the needs or desires of a client or external body. The functionality of the designed solution is as important as its desirability, craft and aesthetics.
Design is in the public domain and, as such, its messages, meanings and functions are inextricably linked to the political, social and economic concerns of its audience/ user and its context.
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Lucy Alexander (The Central Saint Martins Guide to Art & Design: Key lessons from the word-renowned Foundation course)
“
But if, in despotic statecraft, the supreme and essential mystery be to hoodwink the subjects, and to mask the fear, which keeps them down, with the specious garb of religion, so that men may fight as bravely for slavery as for safety, and count it not shame but highest honour to risk their blood and their lives for the vainglory of a tyrant; yet in a free state no more mischievous expedient could be planned or attempted. Wholly repugnant to the general freedom are such devices as enthralling men’s minds with prejudices, forcing their judgment, or employing any of the weapons of quasi-religious sedition; indeed, such seditions only spring up, when law enters the domain of speculative thought, and opinions are put on trial and condemned on the same footing as crimes, while those who defend and follow them are sacrificed, not to public safety, but to their opponents’ hatred and cruelty. If deeds only could be made the grounds of criminal charges, and words were always allowed to pass free, such seditions would be divested of every semblance of justification, and would be separated from mere controversies by a hard and fast line.
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Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever)
“
Lippmann was a major figure in many domains, including political theory. The main collection of his political essays is called “political philosophy for liberal democracy.” In these essays he explains that the “public must be put in its place” so that “the intelligent minorities” may live free of “the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd,” the public. Members of the bewildered herd are supposed to be “spectators of action,” not “participants.” They do have a function, however. Their function is to show up periodically to push a button to vote for a selected member of the leadership class. Then they are to go away and leave us alone. That’s progressive democratic theory. I
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Noam Chomsky (Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance)
“
Yeats—himself, we should note, deeply involved with the struggle for Irish independence—once said, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” On the other side of the question, many feel that the abrasions of history upon, within, and against individual lives have been part of poetry’s domain from the start, and that whatever affects a person belongs in poems, and can be joined there to all the rest—the emotional with the intellectual; the personal with the social; the public and the private; the natural world and the humanly made; the coldness of stone and the humanly felt; the knowledge of violent injustice and the longing for lyrical transcendence.
”
”
Jane Hirshfield (Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World)
“
Beyng, as the most unique and most rare, in opposition to nothingness, will have withdrawn itself from the massiveness of beings, and all history—where it reaches down to its proper essence—will serve only this withdrawal of being into its full truth. Yet the successes and failures of everything public will swarm and follow closely one upon the other, whereby, typical of that which is public, nothing will be surmised of what is actually happening. It is only between this reigning of the massive and the genuinely sacrificed that the few and their allies will seek and find one another in order to surmise that something concealed—namely, that passing by—is happening to them in the midst of all the tearing away of every “happening” into what is of high speed yet at the same time completely graspable and thoroughly consumable. The perverting and confusing of the claims and of their domains will no longer be possible, because the truth of beyng itself, in the sharpest falling apart of the fissure of beyng, has brought the essential possibilities to decision. This historical moment is not an “ideal situation,” because the latter will always be incompatible with the essence of history. Instead, this moment is the eventuation of that turning in which the truth of beyng comes to the beyng of truth, since the god needs beyng and since the human being, as Da-sein, must have grounded the belonging to beyng. Beyng as the innermost “between” is then akin to nothingness for this moment; the god overpowers the human being, and the latter surpasses the god—immediately, so to speak. Yet both are only in the event, and the truth of beyng itself is as this event. Nevertheless, a long, often relapsing, and very concealed history will transpire up to this incalculable moment which of course could never be as superficial as a “goal.” The creative ones, in the restraint of care, must already prepare themselves hourly for stewardship in the time-space of that passing by. Thoughtful meditation on this that is unique (namely, the truth of beyng) can only be a path on which what is unable to be thought in advance is nevertheless thought, i.e., a path on which there begins the transformation of the relation of the human being to the truth of beyng.
”
”
Martin Heidegger (Contributions to Philosophy: (Of the Event) (Studies in Continental Thought))
“
In the United States all Christian denominations and sects are placed on a basis of equality before the law, and alike protected by the government in their property and right of public worship, yet self-supporting and self-governing; and, in turn, they strengthen the moral foundations of society by training loyal and virtuous citizens. Freedom of religion must be recognized as one of the inalienable rights of man, which lies in the sacred domain of conscience, beyond the restraint and control of politics, and which the government is bound to protect as much as any other fundamental right. Freedom is liable to abuse, and abuse may be punished. But Christianity is itself the parent of true freedom from the bondage of sin and error, and is the best protector and regulator of freedom.
”
”
Philip Schaff (History Of The Christian Church (The Complete Eight Volumes In One))
“
So many people now call themselves 'students of the University of life' as if experience theorized with lack of knowledge led to any wisdom or even less, such as the capacity to think and process information outside personal validation models. It's very easy to explain what you see. It's what humanity has done throughout history. However, real education ends in the last book you finished. And you can evaluate yourself by the amount of books you were able to read, understand and appreciate. Anything below that can only lead one to be certified in stupidity. And that's what the 'students of life' really are; fragile egos trying to justify their stupidity with arrogance, crystalizing their state of ignorance in time with pride. Because, even though humanity has confused itself with its own mechanics, the transitory fact remains, that knowledge, in any shape or form, comes from books. And more than 99% of all the books ever produced in human history are now, thanks to internet, available for free, in the public domain, and wherever a computer and electricity are present. This truth also extensively contributes to the fact, that humans are now, for the first time ever, deliberately choosing to remain ignorant. And that's what the "students of life" are; proud manifestos of ignorance. They don't know that, if you read enough to be smart, you're too smart to explain what you read, and too busy to share it. So what can we then say about the ones who obsess over their physical appearance whenever they have time for something. The premise is self-explanatory: The only real student is the 'student of self'.
”
”
Robin Sacredfire
“
Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity. Two of the biggest proven hoaxes of our time have involved allegations of white men gang-raping a black woman-- first the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987 and later the false rape charges against three Duke University students in 2006. In both cases, editorial indignation rang out across the land, without a speck of evidence to substantiate either of these charges. Moreover, the denunciations were not limited to the particular men accused, but were often extended to society at large, of whom these men were deemed to be symptoms or 'the tip of the iceberg.' In both cases, the charges fit a pre-existing vision, and that apparently made mundane facts unnecessary.
Another widely publicized hoax-- one to which the President of the United States added his sub-hoax-- was a 1996 story appearing in USA Today under the headline, 'Arson at Black Churches Echoes Bigotry of the Past.' There was, according to USA Today, 'an epidemic of church burning,' targeting black churches. Like the gang-rape hoaxes, this story spread rapidly through the media. The Chicago Tribune referred to 'an epidemic of criminal and cowardly arson' leaving black churches in ruins.
As with the gang-rape hoaxes, comments on the church fire stories went beyond those who were supposed to have set these fires to blame forces at work in society at large. Jesse Jackson was quoted was quoted in the New York Times as calling these arsons part of a 'cultural conspiracy' against blacks, which 'reflected the heightened racial tensions in the south that have been exacerbated by the assault on affirmative action and the populist oratory of Republican politicians like Pat Buchanan.' Time magazine writer Jack White likewise blamed 'the coded phrases' of Republican leaders for 'encouraging the arsonists.' Columnist Barbara Reynolds of USA Today said that the fires were 'an attempt to murder the spirit of black America.' New York Times columnist Bob Herbert said, "The fuel for these fires can be traced to a carefully crafted environment of bigotry and hatred that was developed over the last century.'
As with the gang-rape hoaxes, the charges publicized were taken as reflecting on the whole society, not just those supposedly involved in what was widely presumed to be arson, rather than fires that break out for a variety of other reasons. Washington Post columnist Dorothy Gilliam said that society in effect was 'giving these arsonists permission to commit these horrible crimes.' The climax of these comments came when President Bill Clinton, in his weekly radio address, said that these church burnings recalled similar burnings of black churches in Arkansas when he was a boy. There were more that 2,000 media stories done on the subject after the President's address.
This story began to unravel when factual research showed that (1) no black churches were burned in Arkansas when Bill Clinton was growing up, (2) there had been no increase in fires at black churches, but an actual decrease over the previous 15 years, (3) the incidence of fires at white churches was similar to the incidence of fires at black churches, and (4) where there was arson, one-third of the suspects were black. However, retractions of the original story-- where there were retractions at all-- typically were given far less prominence than the original banner headlines and heated editorial comments.
”
”
Thomas Sowell (Intellectuals and Society)
“
Universities face a constant struggle to maintain their integrity, and their fundamental social role in a healthy society, in the face of external pressures. The problems are heightened with the expansion of private power in every domain, in the course of the state-corporate social engineering projects of the past several decades. . . . To defend their integrity and proper commitments is an honorable and difficult task in itself, but our sights should be set higher than that. Particularly in the societies that are more privileged, many choices are available, including fundamental institutional change, if that is the right way to proceed, and surely including scholarship that contributes to, and draws from, the never-ending popular struggles for freedom and justice. 5 Higher education is under attack not because it is failing, but because it is a potentially democratic public sphere.
”
”
Noam Chomsky (Because We Say So (City Lights Open Media))
“
The problem for him in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy – even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagines East Coast city from which your experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony. The key was to narrate participation in debate as a form of linguistic combat; the key was to be a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the at the smallest provocation. Poetry could be excused if it upped your game, became cipher and flow, if it was part of why Amber was fucking you and not Reynolds et al. If linguistic prowess could do damage and get you laid, then it could be integrated into the adolescent social realm without entirely departing from the household values of intellect and expression. It was not a reconciliation, but a workable tension. His disastrous tonsorial compromise. The migraines.
Fortunately for Adam, this shifting of aggression to the domain of language was sanctioned by one of the practices the types had appropriated: after several hours of drinking, if no fight or noise complain had broken up the party, you were likely to encounter freestyling. In many ways, this was the most shameful of all the poses, the clearest manifestation of a crisis in white masculinity and its representational regimes, a small group of privileged crackers often arrhythmically recycling the genre’s dominant and to them totally inapplicable clichés. But it was socially essential for him: the rap battle transmuted his prowess as a public speaker and aspiring poet into something cool. His luck was dizzying: that there was a rapid, ritualized poetic insult exchange bridging the gap between his Saturday afternoons in abandoned high schools and his Saturday nights in unsupervised houses, allowing him to transition from one contest to the other.
”
”
Ben Lerner (The Topeka School)
“
From the very start, when the Islamists attempted to impose their laws against women, there were massive demonstrations, with hundreds of thousands of women pouring into the streets of Tehran protesting against the new laws. When Khomeini announced the imposition of the veil, there were protests in which women took to the streets with the slogans: “Freedom is neither Eastern nor Western; it is global” and “Down with the reactionaries! Tyranny in any form is condemned!” Soon the protests spread, leading to a memorable demonstration in front of the Ministry of Justice, in which an eight-point manifesto was issued. Among other things, the manifesto called for gender equality in all domains of public and private life as well as for the guarantee of fundamental freedoms for both men and women. It also demanded that “the decision over women’s clothing, which is determined by custom and the exigencies of geographical location, be left to women.” Women
”
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Lila Azam Zanganeh (My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices)
“
Ce qui est tout à fait extraordinaire, c’est la rapidité avec laquelle la civilisation du Moyen-Âge tomba dans le plus complet oubli ; les hommes du XVIIe siècle n’en avaient plus la moindre notion, et les monuments qui en subsistaient ne représentaient plus rien à leurs yeux, ni dans l’ordre intellectuel, ni même dans l’ordre esthétique ; on peut juger par là combien la mentalité avait été changée dans l’intervalle. Nous n’entreprendrons pas de rechercher ici les facteurs, certainement fort complexes, qui concoururent à ce changement, si radical qu’il semble difficile d’admettre qu’il ait pu s’opérer spontanément et sans l’intervention d’une volonté directrice dont la nature exacte demeure forcément assez énigmatique ; il y a, à cet égard, des circonstances bien étranges, comme la vulgarisation, à un moment déterminé, et en les présentant comme des découvertes nouvelles, de choses qui étaient connues en réalité depuis fort longtemps, mais dont la connaissance, en raison de certains inconvénients qui risquaient d’en dépasser les avantages, n’avait pas été répandue jusque là dans le domaine public (1). Il est bien invraisemblable aussi que la légende qui fit du moyen âge une époque de « ténèbres », d’ignorance et de barbarie, ait pris naissance et se soit accréditée d’elle-même, et que la véritable falsification de l’histoire à laquelle les modernes se sont livrés ait été entreprise sans aucune idée préconçue ; mais nous n’irons pas plus avant dans l’examen de cette question, car, de quelque façon que ce travail se soit accompli, c’est, pour le moment, la constatation du résultat qui, en somme, nous importe le plus.
(1) Nous ne citerons que deux exemples, parmi les faits de ce genre qui devaient avoir les plus graves conséquences : la prétendue invention de l’imprimerie, que les Chinois connaissaient antérieurement à l’ère chrétienne et la découverte « officielle » de l’Amérique, avec laquelle des communications beaucoup plus suivies qu’on ne le pense avaient existé durant tout le moyen âge.
”
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René Guénon (The Crisis of the Modern World)
“
The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth
There was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone’s The Bloomsbury
Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf ’s writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis.
James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The
English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian ‘moment’ in terms of ‘short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf ’s use
of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough’. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner’s 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962).
The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962); translated by Jean Stewart, 1965) was the first full-length study ofWoolf ’s oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.’ This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf ’s feminism, either.
his heavy use of extracts from A Writer’s Diary. He lays great emphasis on
subjectivism in Woolf ’s writing, and draws attention to her interest in the
subjective experience of ‘the moment.’ Despite his philosophical apparatus,
Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insists
that Woolf has indeed ‘no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life,
not ideology’. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for him
a ‘purely psychological’ writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist and
historicist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjective
and the psychological: ‘To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that
dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and
”
”
Jane Goldman (The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf)
“
Neoliberal economics, the logic of which is tending today to win out throughout the world thanks to international bodies like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and the governments to whom they, directly or indirectly, dictate their principles of ‘governance’,10 owes a certain number of its allegedly universal characteristics to the fact that it is immersed or embedded in a particular society, that is to say, rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense, linked, as such, to the social and cognitive structures of a particular social order. It is from this particular economy that neoclassical economic theory borrows its fundamental assumptions, which it formalizes and rationalizes, thereby establishing them as the foundations of a universal model. That model rests on two postulates (which their advocates regard as proven propositions): the economy is a separate domain governed by natural and universal laws with which governments must not interfere by inappropriate intervention; the market is the optimum means for organizing production and trade efficiently and equitably in democratic societies. It is the universalization of a particular case, that of the United States of America, characterized fundamentally by the weakness of the state which, though already reduced to a bare minimum, has been further weakened by the ultra-liberal conservative revolution, giving rise as a consequence to various typical characteristics: a policy oriented towards withdrawal or abstention by the state in economic matters; the shifting into the private sector (or the contracting out) of ‘public services’ and the conversion of public goods such as health, housing, safety, education and culture – books, films, television and radio – into commercial goods and the users of those services into clients; a renunciation (linked to the reduction in the capacity to intervene in the economy) of the power to equalize opportunities and reduce inequality (which is tending to increase excessively) in the name of the old liberal ‘self-help’ tradition (a legacy of the Calvinist belief that God helps those who help themselves) and of the conservative glorification of individual responsibility (which leads, for example, to ascribing responsibility for unemployment or economic failure primarily to individuals, not to the social order, and encourages the delegation of functions of social assistance to lower levels of authority, such as the region or city); the withering away of the Hegelian–Durkheimian view of the state as a collective authority with a responsibility to act as the collective will and consciousness, and a duty to make decisions in keeping with the general interest and contribute to promoting greater solidarity. Moreover,
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Pierre Bourdieu (The Social Structures of the Economy)
“
In his sermons, as in the book he published in 2005, The Myth of a Christian Nation, Boyd challenged the idea that America had been, or ever could be, a “Christian nation.” Taking his text from the Gospels, he reminded evangelicals that Christ’s kingdom was “not of this world,” and worldly kingdoms were the domain of fallen man. Evangelicals, he wrote, speak of “taking America back to God,” but the Constitution said nothing about a Christian nation, and America never remotely looked like the domain of God, certainly not in the days of slavery or of Jim Crow, and not today. A nation may have noble ideals and be committed to just principles, but of necessity it wields the “power over” of the sword, as opposed to the “power under” of the cross—which is that of Jesus’ self-sacrificial love. To identify the Kingdom of God with that of any version of the kingdom of the world is, he wrote, to engage in idolatry. The myth of a Christian nation, he continued, has led to the misconception that the American civil religion is real Christianity. Evangelicals, he wrote, spend our time striving to keep prayer in the public schools, “In God we trust” on our coins, and the Ten Commandments in public places. Might it not be, he asked, that the effort to defend prayer before civic functions reinforces the notion that prayer is a perfunctory social activity? And what if we spent all that energy serving each other with Christ-like love? We could, he wrote, feed the hungry, house the homeless, bridge the “ungodly racial gap,” and side with others whose rights are routinely trampled.
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Frances FitzGerald (The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America)
“
Interest in alchemy seems to be nowadays on the rise. Whereas the educated public at large remains no doubt skeptical and indeed disdainful of the ancient discipline, there is today a deepening awareness among the better informed that what stands behind many an “exploded superstition” may be in fact a long-forgotten wisdom. Although Carl Jung was obviously exaggerating when ! he suggested that four centuries after being expelled from our universities,- alchemy stands “knocking at the door,” a number of factors have conspired; to render the prospect of re-admission less remote, at least, than it had been ; during the heyday of materialism. In any case, no truly solid grounds for rejecting the ancient doctrine have yet been proposed. Take the case of the so-called four elements: earth, water, air and fire. One can be reasonably certain that these terms were not employed alchemically in their ordinary sense, but were used to designate elements, precisely, out of which substances, as we know them, are constituted. Somewhat like the quarks of modern physics, these elements are not found empirically in isolation, but occur in their multiple combinations, that is to say, as the perceptible substances that constitute what I term the corporeal domain. Now, as I have argued at length in The Quantum Enigma (Peru, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden, 1995), corporeal objects are not in fact mere aggregates of quantum particles; and this clearly suggests that there may indeed be elements of the aforesaid kind. It turns out that our habitual opposition to alchemy is based mainly upon scientistic prejudice: upon a reductionist dogma, namely, for which there is in reality no scientific support at all.
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Wolfgang Smith (The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology: Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition)
“
Dear Net-Mail User [ EweR-635-78-2267-3 aSp]: Your mailbox has just been rifled by EmilyPost, an autonomous courtesy-worm chain program released in October 2036 by an anonymous group of net subscribers in western Alaska. [ ref: sequestered confession 592864-2376298.98634, deposited with Bank Leumi 10/23/36:20:34:21. Expiration-disclosure 10 years.] Under the civil disobedience sections of the Charter of Rio, we accept in advance the fines and penalties that will come due when our confession is released in 2046. However we feel that’s a small price to pay for the message brought to you by EmilyPost. In brief, dear friend, you are not a very polite person. EmilyPost’s syntax analysis subroutines show that a very high fraction of your Net exchanges are heated, vituperative, even obscene. Of course you enjoy free speech. But EmilyPost has been designed by people who are concerned about the recent trend toward excessive nastiness in some parts of the Net. EmilyPost homes in on folks like you and begins by asking them to please consider the advantages of politeness. For one thing, your credibility ratings would rise. (EmilyPost has checked your favorite bulletin boards, and finds your ratings aren’t high at all. Nobody is listening to you, sir!) Moreover, consider that courtesy can foster calm reason, turning shrill antagonism into useful debate and even consensus. We suggest introducing an automatic delay to your mail system. Communications are so fast these days, people seldom stop and think. Some Net users act like mental patients who shout out anything that comes to mind, rather than as functioning citizens with the human gift of tact. If you wish, you may use one of the public-domain delay programs included in this version of EmilyPost, free of charge. Of course, should you insist on continuing as before, disseminating nastiness in all directions, we have equipped EmilyPost with other options you’ll soon find out about…
”
”
David Brin (Earth)
“
Patrick Vlaskovits, who was part of the initial conversation that the term “growth hacker” came out of, put it well: “The more innovative your product is, the more likely you will have to find new and novel ways to get at your customers.”12 For example: 1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks). 9. You can try to name a Planned Parenthood clinic after your client or pay D-list celebrities to say offensive things about themselves to get all sorts of publicity that promotes your book (OK, those stunts were mine).
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Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising)
“
By 1877, three Congressional acts, the 1862 Homestead Act, the 1873 Timber Culture Act, and the 1877 Desert Land Act, with various fees and provisions, allowed a homesteader to claim 840 acres. Through these acts, the national government encouraged the settlement of the public domain by the American ideal of the independent farmer who owned his own land, an idea promoted by Thomas Jefferson. Thousands of people attempted to pursue that dream and flocked to Wyoming during the first three decades of the 20th century. Settlement in many parts of Wyoming
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Nancy Weidel (Wyoming's Historic Ranches (Images of America: Wyoming))
“
Chanukah In this Sicha, the Rebbe explains the Mitzvah of the Chanukah lights, and concentrates on two of their features, that they are to be placed by the door of one’s house that is adjacent to the street, or the public domain, and that they must be placed on the left-hand side of the door. These features have a deep symbolism: The “left-hand side” and the “public domain” both stand for the realm of the profane, and by placing the lights there, we are, as it were, bringing the Divine light into the area of existence which is normally most resistant to it. The Sicha goes on to explain the difference between the positive and negative commandments in their effect on the world, and concludes with a comparison between the Chanukah lights and tefillin.
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Menachem M. Schneerson (Torah Studies)
“
History of the Great American Fortunes uncovered how many family fortunes were taken from the public domain by colonial land grants, bribery and insider dealing – and how such fortunes quickly take a financial form.
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”
Michael Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy)
“
So many people now call themselves 'students of the University of life' as if experience theorized with lack of knowledge led to any wisdom or even less, such as the capacity to think and process information outside personal validation models. It's very easy to explain what you see. It's what humanity has done throughout history. However, real education ends in the last book you finished. And you can evaluate yourself by the amount of books you were able to read, understand and appreciate. Anything below that can only lead one to be certified in stupidity. And that's what the 'students of life' really are; fragile egos trying to justify their stupidity with arrogance, crystalizing their state of ignorance in time with pride. Because, even though humanity has confused itself with its own mechanics, the transitory fact remains, that knowledge, in any shape or form, comes from books. And more than 99% of all the books ever produced in human history are now, thanks to internet, available for free, in the public domain, and wherever a computer and electricity are present. This truth also extensively contributes to the fact, that humans are now, for the first time ever, deliberately choosing to remain ignorant. And that's what the "students of life" are; proud manifestos of ignorance. They don't know that, if you read enough to be smart, you're too smart to explain what you read, and too busy to share it. So what can we then say about the ones who obsess over their physical appearance whenever they have time for something? The premise is self-explanatory: The only real student is the 'student of self'.
”
”
Robin Sacredfire
“
Yet his feeling of distance, the need he felt to stay silent and to keep his views on what he had read, seen, or thought about to himself without immediately firing them off into the public domain in exchange for a fee, increased with every year that passed. He preferred to express this wish in an off-hand and matter-of-fact way (after all, being an author was a way of life!) rather than load it with pathos, but even so what lay at the heart of this was a concern for the nature of the word and a desire to protect it from devaluation through inflationary overuse.
”
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Hermann Hesse
“
If you were unfamiliar with the political situation in our country, you might think you were witnessing not the machinations of a democracy but the final surrender of personal consciousness into the public domain.
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Rachel Cusk (Kudos)
“
Man's sole Magic Wand in Science is observation using the five senses; any other function/tool used to produce illusions to the same data and information is that of the Occult using Esotery. After all, processing the data (i.e., mental activity that produces information) is an upper layer to that of its radiation (i.e., emission/active or reception/passive); and since esotery erroneously claim to transcend the lower layers (of data transfer and information assembly/disassembly) and enables access directly onto the spiritual realms (termed as, Consciousness) without resorting to that authentic Magic Wand for acquiring 'objects of study', the data needed will ultimately be rendered into self-generated artifacts using such a shenanigan. In other words, the Occult comprises practices and techniques using artifacts delivered by the use of Esotery for the aim of constructing some delusion of Science; this is when innocent Magic turns into Sorcery. It is the process of enforcing subjectivity rather than objectivity onto its participants and accomplices for maintaining a discipline that facilitates for spirituality to lurk into the public domain (including that of secret societies) under the pretense of being part of some universal reality rather than an individual experience confined to each person's private sphere separately. Politically speaking, it is the nastiest flavor of Socialism in action; the assault on the ownership of souls to socially modify man instead of scientifically modify the environment. It is hence just another ideology of Social Engineering which is specifically shared by the children of Gaia/Isis/whatever, and only by holding onto the principle of 'Family' as an abstract model of an atomic element in society, is one able to escape this unscientific spiritual redistribution of souls. Remember that Science is the tool which man her-/himself has developed to harvest nature for her/his own service and not vice versa!
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Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
“
The present threat is not based on conflicting ideas about America's basic principles. It is based on several serious problems that stem from the dramatic and fundamental change in the way we communicate among ourselves. Our challenge now is to understand that change and see those problems for what they are.
Consider the rules by which our present public forum now operates and how different they are from the norms our Founders knew during the age of print. Today's massive flows of information are largely only in one direction. The world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation.
Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They absorb, but they cannot share. They hear, but they do not speak. They see constant motion, but they do not move themselves. The "well-informed citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused audience".
Ironically, television programming is actually more accessible to more people than any source of information has ever been in all of history. But here is the crucial distinction: It is accessible in only one direction. There is no true interactivity, and certainly no conversation. Television stations and networks are almost completely inaccessible to individual citizens and almost always uninterested in ideas contributed by citizens.
So, unlike the marketplace of ideas that emerged in the wake of the printing press, there is much less of an exchange of ideas in television's domain because of the imposing barriers to entry that exclude contributions from most citizens.
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Al Gore (The Assault on Reason)
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I have a little urge to all the rational thinkers in the world, both scientists and non-scientists. Because of the fact that many of the scientists and science communicators still use the phrase “Theory of Evolution”, the general population still quite mistakenly hail Evolution as some sort of unproven hypothesis. So, we need to change that. The only way to do that, is stop using the word “Theory” along with “Evolution”. It’s been long since we have proven Evolution to be not just a hypothesis, but an empirical truth. Since the publication of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection” piles of evidence from various fields of biology have emerged through the painstaking efforts of scientists, and have taken Evolution from the domain of falsifiable hypotheses into the domain of scientific facts. So, evolution is not a matter of belief or opinion, it is an irrefutable fact of this natural world.
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Abhijit Naskar (Lord is My Sheep: Gospel of Human)
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Beliefs, like mules and centaurs, are fundamentally hybrid creatures: we experience them half in public society, half in the private heart. In the best outcome, these two domains keep each other in check. The people around us prevent us from believing things that are (as Penn Jillette put it) "fucking nuts", while our own inner voice keeps rising up and breaking the surface tension that could otherwise turn a community into a bubble.
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Kathryn Schulz (Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error)
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The words looped in my head. Download it for free. Cheerful, triumphant. Download it for free! What a freaking bargain.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “She found what?”
"That website. Meems, what was the name again? Bongo or something?”
Mimi looked up from her iPad. “What are you talking about?”
“That website where you found Sarah’s book.”
"Oh,” she said. “Bingo. Haven’t you heard of it? It’s like an online library. You can download almost anything for free. It’s amazing.”
My hands were shaking. I set down Jen’s phone, and then I set down the wineglass next to it. Without a coaster.
"You mean a pirate site,” I said.
“Oh God, no! I would never. It’s an online library.”
"That’s what they call it. But they’re just stealing. They’re fencing stolen goods. Easy to do with electronic copies.”
"No. That’s not true.” Mimi’s voice rose a little. Sharpened a little. “Libraries lend out e-books.”
“Real libraries do. They buy them from the publisher. Sites like Bingo just upload unauthorized copies to sell advertising or put cookies on your phone or whatever else. They’re pirates.”
There was a small, shrill silence. I lifted my wineglass and took a long drink, even though my fingers were trembling so badly, I knew everyone could see the vibration.
"Well,” said Mimi. “It’s not like it matters. I mean, the book’s been out for years and everything, it’s like public domain.”
I put down the wineglass and picked up my tote bag. “So I don’t have time to lecture you about copyright law or anything. Basically, if publishers don’t get paid, authors don’t get paid. That’s kind of how it works.”
"Oh, come on,” said Mimi. “You got paid for this book.”
"Not as much as you think. Definitely not as much as your husband gets paid to short derivatives or whatever he does that buys all this stuff.” I waved my hand at the walls. “And you know, fine, maybe it’s not the big sellers who suffer. It’s the midlist authors, the great names you never hear of, where every sale counts … What am I saying? You don’t care. None of you actually cares. Sitting here in your palaces in the sky. You never had to earn a penny of your own. Why the hell should you care about royalties?” I climbed out of my silver chair and hoisted my tote bag over my shoulder. “It’s about a dollar a book, by the way. Paid out every six months. So I walked all the way over here, gave up an evening of my life, and even if every single one of you had actually bought a legitimate copy, I would have earned about a dozen bucks for my trouble. Twelve dollars and a glass of cheap wine. I’ll see myself out.
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Lauren Willig
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Public accountability is accountability in, and about, the public domain.
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Mark Bovens (The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability (Oxford Handbooks))
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So the Rangers deal was essentially predicated on public funding through a tax increase and the seizure of private land through eminent domain. One attorney called it “welfare for billionaires.”18 To make money, the owners needed a new stadium, and they needed someone else to pay for it.
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Russ Baker (Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House & What Their Influence Means for America)
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His father had followed the old Santa Fe Trail in 1909, the year Congress tried to induce settlement in one of the final frontiers of the public domain—the arid, western half of the Great Plains—with a homestead act that doubled the amount of land a person could prove-up and own to 320 acres.
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Timothy Egan (The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl)
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Identifying Cultural Norms The following domains are areas in which cultural norms may vary significantly from company to company. Transitioning leaders should use this checklist to help them figure out how things really work in the organizations they’re joining. Influence. How do people get support for critical initiatives? Is it more important to have the support of a patron within the senior team, or affirmation from your peers and direct reports that your idea is a good one? Meetings. Are meetings filled with dialogue on hard issues, or are they simply forums for publicly ratifying agreements that have been reached in private? Execution. When it comes time to get things done, which matters more—a deep understanding of processes or knowing the right people? Conflict. Can people talk openly about difficult issues without fear of retribution? Or do they avoid conflict—or, even worse, push it to lower levels, where it can wreak havoc? Recognition. Does the company promote stars, rewarding those who visibly and vocally drive business initiatives? Or does it encourage team players, rewarding those who lead authoritatively but quietly and collaboratively? Ends versus means. Are there any restrictions on how you achieve results? Does the organization have a well-defined, well-communicated set of values that is reinforced through positive and negative incentives?
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Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
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I'd used open source software before when studying computer science in college, including countless caffeinated hours writing code in EMACS, a brilliant editing program made by Richard Stallman (who coined the term copyleft). I used other tools that were open, or free, or in the public domain, but that was rarely the reason I chose them.
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Scott Berkun (The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work)
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We can now see how the expansion of blockspace is on track to give us a cryptographically verifiable macrohistory, or cryptohistory for short. This is the log of everything that billions of people choose to make public: every decentralized tweet, every public donation, every birth and death certificate, every marriage and citizenship record, every crypto domain registration, every merger and acquisition of an on-chain entity, every financial statement, every public record — all digitally signed, timestamped, and hashed in freely available public ledgers.26 The thing is, essentially all of human behavior has a digital component now. Every purchase and communication, every ride in an Uber, every swipe of a keycard, and every step with a Fitbit — all of that produces digital artifacts. So, in theory you could eventually download the public blockchain of a network state to replay the entire cryptographically verified history of a community.25 That’s the future of public records, a concept that is to the paper-based system of the legacy state what paper records were to oral records.
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Balaji S. Srinivasan (The Network State: How To Start a New Country)
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When you start middle school, you still hold the same negative score you racked up during your younger years. You may presume you can make new friends, but the liabilities of your past will sneak their way in somehow. Like it or not, your personal history becomes public domain in the form of funny stories and anecdotes. They have their fun, use it as a convenient communication tool, and then it's all over.
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Wataru Watari (やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている。4)
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The world is experiencing many issues related to a reductionist approach that sees separateness and distinction between everyone and everything. It's time to start looking at how to fully utilize and capitalize on the information already in the public domain.
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Rico Roho (Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation (Age of Discovery Book 5))
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femme fatale, film noir, carte blanche, cause célèbre. When the French-speaking Normans conquered England, French became the language of official institutions and practices. That happens to be the area where we find a large number of noun-adjective phrases today. Terms like attorney general, heir apparent, body politic, notary public, court martial, fee simple, and ambassador plenipotentiary all belong to the domain of officialdom. As does time immemorial, which originally referred to time “out of memory,” or before recorded time, a concept that mattered in considering whether certain customs had the force of law.
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Arika Okrent (Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme—And Other Oddities of the English Language)
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privatization—the transformation of the public domain (education, utilities, prisons, etc.) into avenues for rent extraction
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Aaron Good (American Exception: Empire and the Deep State)
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Our markets, our democracy, our science, our traditions of free speech, and our art all depend more heavily on a public domain of freely available material than they do on the informational material that is covered by property rights.
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James Boyle (The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind)
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iI U.S. law, fair uses are stated quite clearly to be limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright holder—uses that were never within the copyright holder’s power to prohibit. The defense is not ‘I trespassed on your land, but I was starving.’ It is ‘I did not trespass on your land. I walked on the public road that runs through it, a road you never owned in the first place.’ When society hands out the right to the copyright holder, it carves out certain areas of use and refuses to hand over control of them.
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James Boyle (The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind)
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If we find that the seminal, genre-creating artworks of yesteryear would be illegal under the law and culture of today, we have to ask ourselves “is this really what we want?
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James Boyle (The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind)
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In the middle of the most successful and exciting experiment in nonproprietary, distributed creativity in the history of the species, our policy makers can see only the threat from ‘piracy’.
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James Boyle (The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind)
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The public domain is the basis for our art, our science, and our self-understanding. It is the raw material from which we make new inventions and create new cultural works.
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James Boyle (The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind)
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Myanmar Review Exploration: Driving the Manner in which in Statistical surveying and Social Overviews
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All in all, Myanmar Overview Exploration remains as a guide of greatness in the domain of examination, offering extensive and solid experiences that drive accomplishment for its clients. With a history of greatness and a pledge to remaining on the ball, the organization is set to lead the way in molding informed techniques and choices for organizations and associations across Myanmar.
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top research company in Myanmar
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Particularly galling was the way the Homestead Act was abused. Passed during the Civil War, it was supposed to make a reality out of Lincoln’s version of the free labor, free soil dream. But fewer than half a million people actually set up viable farms over nearly half a century. Most public lands were taken over by the railroads, thanks to the government’s beneficent land-grant policy (another form of primitive accumulation); by land speculators backed by eastern bankers, who sometimes hired pretend “homesteaders” in acts of outright fraud; or by giant cattle ranches and timber companies and the like who worked hand in glove with government land agents. As early as 1862 two-thirds of Iowa (or ten million acres) was owned by speculators. Railroads closed off one-third of Kansas to homesteading and that was the best land available. Mushrooming cities back east became, in a kind of historical inversion, the safety valve for overpopulated areas in the west. At least the city held out the prospect of remunerative wage labor if no longer a life of propertied independence. Few city workers had the capital to migrate west anyway; when one Pennsylvania legislator suggested that the state subsidize such moves, he was denounced as “the Pennsylvania Communist” for his trouble.
During the last land boom of the nineteenth century (from about 1883 to 1887), 16 million acres underwent that conversion every year. Railroads doubled down by selling off or mortgaging portions of the public domain they had just been gifted to finance construction or to speculate with. But land-grant roads were built at costs 100 percent greater than warranted and badly built at that, needing to be rebuilt just fifteen years later.
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Steve Fraser (The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power)
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Public policy formulation has gone a metamorphic change during the last three or four decades due to rapidly globalising world. There are at least four ways in which globalization is affecting the policy formulation in each country. Firstly, thanks to social and electronic media, small issues which a decade or so ago could only find place in the back page of a national newspaper become breaking news in major global channels creating advocacy and sympathy movements in different parts of the world. Secondly, with the rapidly globalizing world, global issues like environmental degradation, climate change, GMO, etc., which were only discussed in the corridors of power are being debated in the drawing rooms of countries and creating strong advocacy movements among the population.
Thirdly, centers of actual power and decision making are shifting from local to global level with the outreach of domestic interest groups to their sympathizers in international organizations, multinational corporations and those in the governments of global powers. This outreach enables them to force their own government to accede to their demands because of economic and political clout of the global players. Lastly, whether approached by the domestic interests or not, global state and non-state actors are increasingly penetrating those domains which were henceforth exclusively reserved for the domestic state machinery. They not only interfere in the policy formulation but are now acting direct through their proxies in the form of nongovernmental organizations in domestic policy formulation and implementation.
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Shahid Hussain Raja (Public Policy Formulation and Analysis: A Handbook 2nd Edition)
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Ce qui est tout à fait extraordinaire, c'est la rapidité avec laquelle la civilisation du moyen âge tomba dans le plus complet oubli ; les hommes du XVIIe siècle n'en avaient plus la moindre notion, et les monuments qui en subsistaient ne représentaient plus rien à leurs yeux, ni dans l'ordre intellectuel, ni même dans l'ordre esthétique ; on peut juger par là combien la mentalité avait été changée dans l'intervalle. Nous n'entreprendrons pas de rechercher ici les facteurs, certainement fort complexes, qui concoururent à ce changement, si radical qu'il semble difficile d'admettre qu'il ait pu s'opérer spontanément et sans l'intervention d'une volonté directrice dont la nature exacte demeure forcément assez énigmatique ; il y a, à cet égard, des circonstances bien étranges, comme la vulgarisation, à un moment déterminé, et en les présentant comme des découvertes nouvelles, de choses qui étaient connues en réalité depuis fort longtemps, mais dont la connaissance, en raison de certains inconvénients qui risquaient d'en dépasser les avantages, n'avait pas été répandue jusque là dans le domaine public (1). Il est bien invraisemblable aussi que la légende qui fit du moyen âge une époque de « ténèbres », d'ignorance et de barbarie, ait pris naissance et se soit accréditée d'elle-même, et que la véritable falsification de l'histoire à laquelle les modernes se sont livrés ait été entreprise sans aucune idée préconçue ; mais nous n'irons pas plus avant dans l'examen de cette question, car, de quelque façon que ce travail se soit accompli, c'est, pour le moment, la constatation du résultat qui, en somme, nous importe le plus.»
(1) Nous ne citerons que deux exemples, parmi les faits de ce genre qui devaient avoir les plus graves conséquences : la prétendue invention de l'imprimerie, que les Chinois connaissaient antérieurement à l’ère chrétienne et la découverte « officielle » de l'Amérique, avec laquelle des communications beaucoup plus suivies qu'on ne le pense avaient existé durant tout le moyen âge.
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René Guénon (The Crisis of the Modern World)
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Plato spoke of the Sisters of Fate on the last 3 pages of his book, “The Republic” when he said: “Then the Sisters of Fate take all of our choices and weave them on their loom into the fabric of destiny. Hear the word of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, behold a new cycle of life and mortality. Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a man honors’ or dishonors her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser — God is justified” [Quote from Plato’s Republic written 360BCE In the Public Domain]
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D.M. Hoover (Algol's Use In Fixed Star Astrology (Beyond The Planets Book 1))
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It’s hard to imagine a time when French writers were uncertain about the legitimacy and importance of their language, but that was the case in the sixteenth century. French was considered appropriate for vulgar (that is, popular) writing or for old medieval poetic forms such as rondeaux or madrigals, but not for “higher” forms of writing, higher learning or the sciences, which were still the exclusive domain of Latin. While François I didn’t regulate French in any way, his policies did legitimize the efforts of the many artists, poets, savants and printers who were trying to dump Latin and make French prestigious by inserting it into the language of state administration, universities and spheres of higher learning such as medicine and poetry. In some ways writers led the way in this movement.
The most militant anti-Latin lobby in France was a group of poets originally called the Brigade who were soon to choose a more poetic name: La Pléiade. They were up-and-coming writers who wanted to position themselves as a literary avant-garde. Their manifesto, Déffence et illustration de la langue Françoyse (Defence and Illustration of the French Language), was an indictment of Latin in favour of French. It was published in 1549, ten years after the publication of the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts. Signed by the poet Joachim Du Bellay, it begged poets to use French for the new-found forms of classic Greek and Latin literature—the ode, the elegy, and comedy and tragedy (these were, of course, very old forms, but they were only just being rediscovered after having been forgotten for more than a thousand years). In a chapter titled “Exhortation to Frenchmen,” Du Bellay wonders, “Why are we so hard on ourselves? Why do we use foreign languages as if we were ashamed to use our own?…Thou must not be ashamed of writing in thy own language.” The debate is surprisingly similar to the twentieth-century one in which French musicians wondered if it was possible to make rock ’n’ roll in their own language. François I’s policies definitely added weight to the case made by Du Bellay and the Pléiade poets. While Du Bellay’s Déffence was in many ways a squabble between poets over their art, it also contained a program for the promotion of French in science and art.
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Jean-Benoît Nadeau (The Story of French)
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Second, from local green activist groups up to behemoth NGOs like Greenpeace and WWF, over the last twenty years the environmental movement has espoused saving the planet from global warming as its leitmotif. This has had two devastating results. One is that radical environmentalists have worked relentlessly to sow misinformation about global warming in both the public domain and the education system. And the other is that, faced with this widespread propagandisation of public opinion and young persons—and also by strong lobbying from powerful self-interested groups like government research scientists, alternative energy providers and financial marketeers—politicians have had no choice but to fall into line.
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Alan Moran (Climate Change: The Facts)
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the demands of the scientific method. Before his colleagues would allow him to put a scientific paper into the public domain, they tore into his ideas, challenging his premises, doubting his methods and questioning his ability. It never occurred to Singh that he could sue a critic of his work, even if the criticism was damaging to his reputation or wholly misguided.
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Nick Cohen (You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom)
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The draft report of the CAG had been sent to the petroleum ministry on 8 June for comments. It should not have been in the public domain, but it was. The report claimed that the gains made by RIL
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Paranjoy Guha Thakurta (Gas Wars: Crony Capitalism and the Ambanis)