Rationale Quotes

A man is made of emotions, largely, and intellect – wit, humour, rationale and that's it? No! A man is the rob that hides a soul

Belief has very little to do with rationale. Why demand a map for uncharted territory?

The line between faith and fanaticism is a constantly shifting one,” Dr. Poblocki said. “When does belief become justification? When does right become rationale and crusade become crime?

Fashion, my love, just like the universe, owes you neither explanation nor rationale.

People had an illogical, self-serving rationale when it came to interpreting the behavior of others.

When your reasons for believing something are justified ad hoc, you are left susceptible to further discoveries undermining the rationale for that belief.

The physical powers of the body cannot be separated from the rationale of the mind and the emotions of the heart. They are one and the same, a compilation of a singular being. It is in the harmony of these three-body, mind, and heart- that we find spirit. ... Spirit. In every language in all the Realms, surface and Underdark, in every time and every place, the word has a ring of strength and determination. It is the hero's strength, the mother's resilience, and the poor man's armor. It cannot be broken, and it cannot be taken away.

Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.

Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one's savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life: better a few hours now than an eternity later.

Rather, genuine compassion is based on the rationale that all human beings have an innate desire to be happy and overcome suffering, just like myself. And, just like myself, they have the natural right to fulfill this fundamental aspiration.

I pretended that it wasn't such a big deal, that I knew we weren't suited, that I agreed with what-ever bullshit rationale you used - 'we don't make each other the best possible versions of ourselves' or what-ever. But you did make me the best 'me'.

Hatred is a bitter, damaging emotion. It winds itself through the blood, infecting its host and driving it forward without any reason. Its view is jaundiced and it skews even the clearest of eye sights. Sacrifice is noble and tender. It’s the action of a host who values others above himself. Sacrifice is bought through love and decency. It is truly heroic. Vengeance is an act of violence. It allows those who have been wronged to take back some of what was lost to them. Unlike sacrifice, it gives back to the one who practices it. Love is deceitful and sublime. In its truest form, it brings out the best in all beings. At its worst, it’s a tool used to manipulate and ruin anyone who is stupid enough to hold it. Don’t be stupid. Sacrifice is for the weak. Hatred corrupts. Love destroys. Vengeance is the gift of the strong. Move forward, not with hatred, not with love. Move forward with purpose. Take back what was stolen. Make those who laughed at your pain pay. Not with hatred, but with calm, cold rationale. Hatred is your enemy. Vengeance is your friend. Hold it close and let it loose. May the gods have mercy on those who have wronged me because I will have no mercy for them. (Xypher)

Was there to be any end to the gradual improvement in the techniques and artifices used by the replicators to ensure their own continuation in the world? There would be plenty of time for improvement. What weird engines of self-preservation would the millennia bring forth? Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members. [Explaining rationale for using prominent black leaders to advocate birth control and abortion]

Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest.

I was still in high school when I decided I didn't want children. My somewhat twisted rationale was that I would never inflict childhood on anybody, especially not someone I loved. I never changed my mind.

We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.

This points to a nagging and important question about free-market ideologues: Are they ‘true believers’, driven by ideology and faith that free markets will cure underdevelopment, as is often asserted, or do the ideas and theories frequently serve as an elaborate rationale to allow people to act on unfettered greed while still invoking an altruistic motive?

Riots happen because rationale is eclipsed by revenge.

Does this rationale make sense to you? (Syd) That’s Jack-Logic. It makes total sense. (Steele)

(I know this sounds suspiciously like a rationale I had come up with to keep from doing something I didn’t want to do anyway, but hey, I can’t help that.)

There is no sincere stupidity that doesn't create, eventually, its own rationale, conduct, operating procedures, its own critical formulae whereby it may be, in all seriousness, discussed: witness the advertising business. Witness the best-seller list. Areas of idiocy within which various degrees of the spurious are compared.

I now believe truth lies not in logic but in hope, both past and future. I believe hope can surprise you. It can survive the odds against it, all sorts of contradictions, and certainly any skeptic's rationale of relying on proof through fact.

The more improbable the situation and the greater the demands made on [the climber], the more sweetly the blood flows later in release from all that tension. The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen his awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities.

Ecology teaches us “that the total economy of the planet cannot be guided by an efficient rationale of exploitation alone,” wrote Burke more than 70 years ago, “but that the exploiting part must eventually suffer if it too greatly disturbs the balance of the whole.

A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value

Love is just like the flower; it has hidden depths that we rarely ever explore. Beneath the surface lies a network of roots. You can admire the flower for what it is, or you can dig deeper. The more you dig, the more you will find. The real reasons we love a person sometimes exist in the darkest and deepest part of us, the part that knows no logic…or rationale.

Would we argue that ten thousand target nuclear warheads are likely to enhance the prospect for our survival? What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet Earth? We have heard the rationales offered by the nuclear superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?

I don't know," I said. "Maybe you're right, and all that stuff I think I missed is overrated. Why should I even bother? What's the point really?" He thought for a moment. "Who says there has to be a point?" he asked. "Or a reason. Maybe it's just something you have to do." He moved down to start bagging while I just stood there, letting this sink in. Just something you have to do. No excuse or rationale necessary. I kind of like that.

The rationale that etiquette should be eschewed because it fosters inequality does not ring true in a society that openly admits to a feverish interest in the comparative status-conveying qualities of sneakers. Manners are available to all, for free.

When it comes to sexuality, romantic love plays a large part in feminine sexual scripts. Research suggests that women make sense of sexual encounters in terms of the amount of intimacy experienced; love becomes a rationale for sex. If i am in love, women often reason, sex is okay. Men more easily accept sex for its own sake, with no emotional strings necessarily attached. In this way, sexual scripts for men have involved more of an instrumental (sex for its own sake) approach, whereas for women it tends to be more expressive (sex involving emotional attachments). There is evidence to suggest that women are moving in the direction of sex as an end in itself without the normative constraints of an emotional relationship. By and large, however, women are still more likely than men to engage in sex as an act of love. Many scholars suggest that romance is one of the key ways that sexism is maintained in society.

the entire rationale for fighting in Vietnam was rooted in faith. Faith that his elected leaders and military bosses knew what they were doing and that the calculation that had placed his life at such peril mattered, that it did more than just make sense but demanded his suffering and sacrifice.

The chilly rationale of hindsight is what exposes the how and why of something that once seemed supernatural. It's the magician's manual that shows you how the tricks are done, not with sorcery but with careful cues and mysterious devices.

Koch's youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest.

It’s a rationale that is clearly a function of sexism, a symptom of a world that believes women’s lives are less important than ‘human’ lives, where ‘human’ means male.

If you want to understand your emotions, the rationale behind your words so that you can treat the source of your struggles; Tarot is the solution.

If a curiously selective plague came along and killed all people of intermediate height, 'tall' and 'short' would come to have just as precise a meaning as 'bird' or 'mammal'. The same is true of human ethics and law. Our legal and moral systems are deeply species-bound. The director of a zoo is legally entitled to 'put down' a chimpanzee that is surplus to requirements, while any suggestion that he might 'put down' a redundant keeper or ticket-seller would be greeted with howls of incredulous outrage. The chimpanzee is the property of the zoo. Humans are nowadays not supposed to be anybody's property, yet the rationale for discriminating against chimpanzees in this way is seldom spelled out, and I doubt if there is a defensible rationale at all. Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! [T]he only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.

Be rational’ is what they tell you when you are having a sane reaction to an insane situation, and the rationale behind their conception of reason is FUCKED. Be rational. What it really means is assume your position in the status quo. Assume the position.

As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.

These are attitudes masquerading as ideas, emotional commitments disguised as intellectual honesty. However sincere the current evangelists of unbelief may be, they are doing nothing more than producing rationales--ballasted by a formidable collection of conceptual and historical errors--for convictions that are rooted not in reason but in a greater cultural will, of which their arguments are only reflexes.

The opportunity for evil in itself does not suffice; people need a rationale as well. Consider how unpleasant, how awkward it must be when your neighbor, catching his breath (and that can happen anytime), screams, 'Why?' - or, 'Aren't you ashamed?!' It's embarrassing to stand there without a ready answer. A crowbar makes a poor rebuttal, everybody senses that. The whole trick lies in having the proper grounds to brush aside such aggravating objections. Contemptuously. Everyone wants to commit a villainy without having to feel like a villain.

The sit-down strikers began to worry about the illegality of their action and the why and wherefore, and it was then the chief of all C.I.O. organizers, Lewis, gave them their rationale. He thundered, 'The right to a man's job transcends the right of private property! The C.I.O. stands squarely behind these sit-downs!' The sit-down strikers at GM cheered.

Goldman’s top four officers could not sell more than 10 percent of their Goldman shares until 2011, or until Buffett sold his own, even if they left the firm. He had explained his rationale for this condition to Blankfein by saying, “If I’m buying the horse, I’m buying the jockey, too.

Could it be that we lost something because had we not lost it, we would have lost ourselves?

What was the rationale for all this pillaging? Souvenirs. These people needed something to remember themselves by. An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt launched Social Security in 1935, he did not present it as expressing the mutual obligation of citizens to one another. ... Rather than offer a communal rationale, FDR argued that such rights were essential to "true individual freedom," adding, "necessitous men are not free men.

Every war has its martyrs — the unsung heroes who sometimes don’t even know the rationale behind the war they are fighting. They fight because they are trained to, kill because they are told to and die because they are destined to.

In a modern evangelical culture that punishes uncertainty—where weakness is wokeness, where indecision is the wrong decision—asking pastors to provide all the other answers is a recipe for institutional ruin. Because what their congregants crave, more and more, is not so much objective religious instruction but subjective religious justification, a clergy-endorsed rationale for living their lives in a manner that might otherwise feel unbecoming for a Christian.

Maybe we need to stop choosing people purely by résumés and rationales that have led us headfirst into disappointment. We need instead to find people who are in sync with our beat and form a more perfect union with those who hear the same rhythm! It is time for us to find the thing we were created to do, the people we were meant to affect, and the power that comes from alignment with purpose. Having had unique opportunities to sit at the table with champions in

And when the Duke of Alva ordered three hundred Citizens to be put to Death together at Antwerp, a Lady who saw the Sight was presently afterwards deliver'd of a Child without a Head. So lives the Power of Imagination even in this Rationall Age.

We are guided by laws that operate without concern for destination, and yet we constantly ask ourselves where we are headed. We are shaped by laws that seem not to require an underlying rationale, and yet we persistently seek meaning and purpose.

Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.

And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rainstorm we cannot predict. And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old—the dream of total control—has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn’t true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and as misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly.

Most moral relativists believe that tolerance of cultural diversity is better, in some important sense, than outright bigotry. This may be perfectly reasonable, of course, but it amounts to an overarching claim about how all human beings should live. Moral relativism, when used as a rationale for tolerance of diversity, is self-contradictory.

If we knew thoroughly the nervous system of Shakespeare . . . we should be able to show why . . . his hand came to trace on certain sheets of paper those crabbed little black marks which we . . . call the manuscript of Hamlet. We should understand the rationale of every erasure and alteration therein . . . without in the slightest degree acknowledging the existence of the thoughts in Shakespeare’s mind. The words and sentences would be taken, not as signs of anything beyond themselves, but as little outward facts, pure and simple.

I can’t think of a better rationale to create a work of art. I don’t care what form one’s art takes, it has to be an attempt to leave the world a better place than it was before we got here or it’s not doing its job. And I don’t mean just making things that are pretty.

Raja-Yoga is the science of religion, the rationale of all worship, all prayers, forms, ceremonies, and miracles.

Ich will damit bloß sagen, dass ich versuche, rationale Erklärungen für irrationale Gefühle zu finden, und das ist nie ein gutes Zeichen.

There is a rationale for every action.

When greed transcends rationale, morality becomes irrelevant.

Expelled from the truth of Being, man everywhere circles around himself as the animal rationale.

I can no longer find any rationale for living. My life is as small as a firefly's. I am always uncomfortable; often I suffer.

Patienthood can become a way of life and rationale for people who are struggling for other reasons.

Was Apollo worth all the effort and expense? If it had been about the Moon, the answer would be no, but it wasn't, it was about the Earth. The answer is yes. The only thing I can't see in all this is a rationale for going back. Unless we could find a way to take everyone.

So saved are all those who enable themselves to believe, and therefore was the military mind called a juvenile mind. It was constant; it observed a code of honor in a world where any element of devotion to a rationale summoned scorn but the world itself knew itself was sick.

Gewiss hat sich die westliche Welt über alle Maßen für Philosophie und Politik interessiert und sich in geradezu unsinniger Weise um philosophische und politische Fragen gestritten; gewiss hat die westliche Welt auch eine wahre Leidenschaft für Literatur und Kunst entwickelt; aber nichts in ihrer ganzen Geschichte hat eine solche Bedeutung gehabt wie das Bedürfnis nach rationaler Gewissheit. Diesem Bedürfnis nach rationaler Gewissheit hat die westliche Welt schließlich alles geopfert: ihre Religion, ihr Glück, ihre Hoffnungen und letztlich ihr Leben.

There's a danger and a beauty to the moment which seems out of time. It pierces something deep inside of him, bypassing his rationale, and it touches his very core. In a sudden shock of illumination, and of knowing, he recognizes this woman is his destiny, and their fates are intertwined.

My point is, I have a job, just like you. I get a paycheck, I get memos. Just like you, I have superiors, and they have superiors who I am not allowed to speak to. Orders filter down from on high, arriving at my level stripped entirely of all context or rationale or justification. Orders do not come with an illustration of how they serve the overall goals of the organization. Same as any other job.

The rationale seems to be that we keep people as victims by validating them, empathizing with them, and fighting alongside them for equality and the dignity they deserve. I don’t think people are kept down by that. I believe what keeps people down is the constant dismissal of their pain, the degradation, the humiliation, the fear of injustice, and the continuous crushing of their will, their faith, and their hope. This type of oppression kills the self-esteem people need to empower themselves, and it's flat-out terrorism.

Instead of suggesting that people with cultures and customs we do not understand, people with different color skin, or those who speak another language are somehow beneath us, instead of developing an elaborate rationale to justify our discomfort, it is more honest to simply admit our insecurity and gain acceptance.

Navy personnel began clamoring for it. To the embarrassment of many, the current Navy working uniform is a blue camouflage print. Unsure whether perhaps I was missing the point, I asked a Navy commander about the rationale. He looked down at his trousers and sighed. “That’s so no one can see you if you fall overboard.” No

I believe in science. It provides a solution and a rationale for everything. And if there is anything that appears like a miracle, the only explanation is that a scientific reason for it has not been discovered as yet.

To summarize, the rationale for using the here-and-now is that human problems are largely relational and that an individual’s interpersonal problems will ultimately be manifested in the here-and-now of the therapy encounter

Science Class Would you invent some irrational explanation for we lost souls that the glaciers aren’t really melting at all, that they are and will remain just as they always have been? Some rationale that claims the whole climate change scenario is really just a satanic plot, concocted by liberal secular humanists to trick the world into thinking that the glaciers have been melting for twice as long as the Bible says the Earth has been around.

Adam Smith FRSE (baptised June 5, 1723 O.S. / June 16 N.S. – July 17, 1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneering political economist. He is also the founder of economics. One of the key figures of the intellectual movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment, he is known primarily as the author of two treatises: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter was one of the earliest attempts to systematically study the historical development of industry and commerce in Europe, as well as a sustained attack on the doctrines of mercantilism. Smith's work helped to create the modern academic discipline of economics and provided one of the best-known intellectual rationales for free trade, capitalism, and libertarianism. Adam Smith is now depicted on the back of the Bank of England £20 note. Source: Wikipedia

As I join with you, our destination is the same. However, the rationale for that destination is entirely different. Your rationale is the fact that this destination is your calling, while my calling is to get you to your destination.

I can rather effectively protect myself from failure by crafting genuinely convincing rationales that justify my unwillingness to try. But I might consider the fact that an action such as this is the real failure. And there’s no protection in that.

People play the lottery all the time unaware of how mind-bogglingly difficult it is to win. It seems like they take a different approach to probabilities. Their rationale must be, “Well, I can either win it or not win it, so my odds of winning are 50/50.

It really helps if we can respect each other's perspectives. That alone can get us past so many impasses. Sometimes it can even help us find a new possibility we hadn't seen before; but even if not, sometimes it can help us at least see the other person's rationales; but even if not, sometimes it can help us just accept that another way of seeing it, of doing it, exists, functions, is effective for someone, even if not for us, even if we can't understand it. It really helps if we can respect each other's perspectives. But sometimes we can't. Then it really helps if we can trust each other's intentions, know that we want the best for each other as much as for ourselves even if we disagree on how to get there. It really helps if we can trust each other's intentions. But sometimes we can't.

Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.

Transcendent generosity is simply a willingness to be open and do whatever is necessary in the moment, without any philosophical or religious rationale. Seeing someone in need, you’re willing to share your wealth, your happiness, or your wisdom, and you’re also willing to share in the pain of others. Yet when you give, you need to do so with the awareness that your gift will be both appropriate and helpful.

The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following idea: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them. . . . What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. And

Jobs had a tougher time navigating the controversies over Apple’s desire to keep tight control over which apps could be downloaded onto the iPhone and iPad. Guarding against apps that contained viruses or violated the user’s privacy made sense; preventing apps that took users to other websites to buy subscriptions, rather than doing it through the iTunes Store, at least had a business rationale. But Jobs and his team went further: They decided to ban any app that defamed people, might be politically explosive, or was deemed by Apple’s censors to be pornographic.

The doppelganger nature of the country’s identity is embedded in the dualistic language used to describe it, in which everything is double and never singular: Israel-Palestine, Arab and Jew, Two States, The Conflict. Based on a fantasy of symmetrical power, this suturing together of two peoples implies conjoined twins in a state of unending struggle, an irresolvable sibling rivalry between the two peoples, both descended from Abraham. For Rooney, Israel as doppelganger exists on two levels. First, it is a doppelganger of the forms of chauvinistic European nationalisms that turned Jews into pariahs on the continent since well before the Inquisition. That was Zionism’s win-win pitch to anti-Semitic European powers: you get rid of your “Jewish problem” (i.e., Jews, who will leave your countries and migrate to Palestine), and Jews get a state of their own to mimic/twin the very forms of militant nationalism that had oppressed them for centuries. (This is why Zionism was so fiercely opposed by the members of the Bund, who believed that nationalism itself was their enemy and the wellspring of race hatred.) Israel also became a doppelganger of the colonial project, specifically settler colonialism. Many of Zionism’s basic rationales were thinly veiled Judaizations of core Christian colonial conceptions: Terra Nullius, the claim that continents like Australia were effectively empty because their Indigenous inhabitants were categorized as less than fully human, became “A land without a people for a people without a land”—a phrase adopted by many Zionists and that originated with nineteenth-century Christians. Manifest Destiny became “land bequeathed to the Jews by divine right.” “Taming the wild frontier” became “making the desert bloom.

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

Religions have no merit for me Any new religion we created Brought upon countless discord Amplifying Hatred and Animosity The Crusades recurred Human blood covered the earth, time and again in the name of faith I am neither Muslim, nor Christian nor Jew I follow the command of rationale Rationale decrees that the ultimate pleasure is in coexistence Religion on the other hand promises eternal reward by shedding the blood of unfaithful Different thinkers are human too Why does religion promote their killing? I shall not shed the blood of fellow humans This is the reason for my lack of faith I have nothing to do with religion!” As for you, my son: “Follow your rationale to reach the pinnacle Befriend all humans on earth This is the ultimate faith.

The man who thinks that he is receiving response to his prayers does not know that the fulfillment comes from his own nature, that he has succeeded by the mental attitude of prayer in waking up a bit of this infinite power which is coiled up within himself. What, thus, men ignorantly worship under various names, through fear and tribulation, the Yogi declares to the world to be the real power coiled up in every being, the mother of eternal happiness, if we but know how to approach her. And Raja-Yoga is the science of religion, the rationale of all worship, all prayers, forms, ceremonies, and miracles.

Considering the timespan of human evolution and the vast potential of humankind -- as evidenced by great genius and leadership, inventions and discoveries, works of art and literature -- it is lamentable that the economic and political systems of 'advanced' cultures are still based on the unenlightened rationales that 'more is better' and 'might makes right.' In the name of 'survival of the fittest' and ensuring 'vital interests,' our economic system creates an ever-widening gap between rich and poor as it dismantles the environment upon which we all depend. Even 'lower' animals generally do not foul their own nests.

ARE WOMEN INHERENTLY LESS WARLIKE THAN MEN? Throughout history, women in power have used a rationale similar to men’s to send men to death with similar frequency and in similar numbers. For example, the drink Bloody Mary was named after Mary Tudor (Queen Mary I), who burned 300 Protestants at the stake; when Henry VIII’s daughter, Elizabeth I, ascended to the throne, she mercilessly raped, burned, and pillaged Ireland at a time when Ireland was called the Isle of Saints and Scholars. When a Roman king died, his widow sent 80,000 men to their deaths.29 If Columbus was an exploiter, we must remember that Queen Isabella helped to send him.

Support has no direction. Our plan is to hold the patient - to strengthen the container - until the patient develops his own container-strengths or until the contents settle down. We do not know just how or when all this ought to happen. Worse we do not have a particularly cogent rationale for limiting our own actions...

despite a high incidence of women in certain professions such as medicine. The status and rewards of such professions have declined as women enter them, and they are permitted to enter such areas under a rationale that society or the state (and socialist countries are also patriarchal) rather than woman is served by such activity.

We have talked at length of individual rights; but what, it may be asked, of the “rights of society”? Don’t they supersede the rights of the mere individual? The libertarian, however, is an individualist; he believes that one of the prime errors in social theory is to treat “society” as if it were an actually existing entity. “Society” is sometimes treated as a superior or quasi-divine figure with overriding “rights” of its own; at other times as an existing evil which can be blamed for all the ills of the world. The individualist holds that only individuals exist, think, feel, choose, and act; and that “society” is not a living entity but simply a label for a set of interacting individuals. Treating society as a thing that chooses and acts, then, serves to obscure the real forces at work. If, in a small community, ten people band together to rob and expropriate three others then this is clearly and evidently a case of a group of individuals acting in concert against another group. In this situation, if the ten people presumed to refer to themselves as “society” acting in “its” interest, the rationale would be laughed out of court; even the ten robbers would probably be too shamefaced to use this sort of argument. But let their size increase, and this kind of obfuscation becomes rife and succeeds in duping the public.

The entire aim and endeavor of yoga is to open up the cocoon of the physical body to the larger sensory body where you experience everything as a part of you. Fasting is an extension of this logic: it is a way of nourishing yourself without any active ingestion. It may be done as a detoxification process nowadays, but this is the internal rationale.

In the parlance of economics, Julien has said to Pari that if she cut off the supply of attention, perhaps the demands for it would cease as well.

You know what the book of Job doesn’t do? It doesn’t explain anything. But even without explanations or rationales it does answer our questions. God is God. We are not. Be silent.

The rationale is this: our research will attempt to differentiate between what people bring into a prison situation from what the situation brings out in the people who are there.

Intuition? Yes, from experience I can say that’s a kind of knowing that has no rationale, but just rises up your body, your mind, your whole being and lets you know.

Feelings, rationale and values are the top qualities that make a person exceedingly human.

If there was one ideological rationale that had broad appeal, it was nationalism, which for many boiled down to a fervent desire to be left alone.

...it's hard to confine an irrational woman in a rational pattern, so I had no idea really what was in her mind.

Because we follow Christ and are citizens in the kingdom of God, the rationale “that’s just the way it is,” is not near enough motivation or excuse to keep going with the flow.

The rationale of family-based discipleship is multi-generational faithfulness to God. We must learn the lessons of history lest we repeat the mistakes of the past.

When you are Patient you can be Practical and rationale

Lynching and vigilantism were considered duties, the necessary protection of men who were guarding the sanctity of social boundaries and the “purity” of their lineage. No matter the rationale, these ideas put a virtuous face on centuries of brutal history that actually robbed our aggressors of their moral grounding and made them creative participants in violence.

However, what I do believe to genuinely sacred - and, indeed, more useful to the earth as a whole - is trying to ensure that there are as few unbalanced, destructive people as possible. By whatever rationale you use, ending a pregnancy 12 weeks into gestation is incalculably more moral than bringing an unwanted child into this world. It's those unhappy, unwanted children, who then grew into angry adults, who have caused the great majority of humankind's miseries. They are the ones who make states feel feral; streets dangerous; relationships violent.

Like it or not, war (cold or hot) is the most powerful funding driver in the public arsenal. Lofty goals such as curiosity, discovery, exploration, and science can get you money for modest-size projects, provided they resonate with the political and cultural views of the moment. But big, expensive activities are inherently long term, and require sustained investment that must survive economic fluctuations and changes in the political winds. In all eras, across time and culture, only war, greed, and the celebration of royal or religious power have fulfilled that funding requirement. Today, the power of kings is supplanted by elected governments, and the power of religion is often expressed in nonarchitectural undertakings, leaving war and greed to run the show. Sometimes those two drivers work hand in hand, as in the art of profiteering from the art of war. But war itself remains the ultimate and most compelling rationale.

The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and bewilderment. Their uncouth movements may disappear in a moment with music and dancing—suddenly, with music, they know how to move. We see how the retarded, unable to perform fairly simple tasks involving perhaps four or five movements or procedures in sequence, can do these perfectly if they work to music—the sequence of movements they cannot hold as schemes being perfectly holdable as music, i.e. embedded in music. The same may be seen, very dramatically, in patients with severe frontal lobe damage and apraxia—an inability to do things, to retain the simplest motor sequences and programmes, even to walk, despite perfectly preserved intelligence in all other ways. This procedural defect, or motor idiocy, as one might call it, which completely defeats any ordinary system of rehabilitative instruction, vanishes at once if music is the instructor. All this, no doubt, is the rationale, or one of the rationales, of work songs.

Let’s appreciate and welcome the arrival of a new prophet The one who can be Reasonable and rational Realistic and democrat The one who respects the rights of women and children And does not make everyone slave of his nation Let’s do not whip some virgin pregnant women They may have Christ in their belly Let’s arrange a new miracle That can be little rationale and less awkward Maybe an application (software) or a gadget That can make us smile Or let’s build a green park that children could play and be happy And let’s bring a little educated prophet Not like the old one Illiterate! Marrying 10 to 12 women and waging war Maybe someone who does not blind the world by his Eye to eye policy and manifestation A little kind and a little rational

I am a person. You are a person. Without you I am not a person, for only through you is language made possible and only through language is thought made possible, and only through thought is humanness made possible. You have made me important. Therefore, I am important and you are important. If I devalue you, I devalue myself. This is the rationale of the position I’M OK – YOU’RE OK.

Amena and Ratthi kept suggesting that I should help it “adjust” whatever that is. I knew if I was in its position, I’d want to be left alone. And if it hadn’t even sat down in a chair voluntarily yet, it probably wasn’t ready to talk. (I know this sounds suspiciously like a rationale I had come up with to keep from doing something I didn’t want to do anyway, but hey, I can’t help that.)

Major West, a character in the zombie movie 28 Days Later, tells a story reminiscent of the founding of Rome. He gives the rationale for the rape of the Sabine women in just a few lines: “Eight days ago, I found Jones with his gun in his mouth. He said he was going to kill himself because there was no future. What could I say to him? We fight off the infected or we wait until they starve to death... and then what? What do nine men do except wait to die themselves? I moved us from the blockade, and I set the radio broadcasting, and I promised them women. Because women mean a future.

with the proper information and rationale, which it is my job to provide, people have a nearly limitless capacity to adapt and to rise to the occasion, whether for themselves or their family members.

Slut-bashing and slut-shaming often are justified on the grounds that they teach girls a lesson: that they should not be sexually active at all, or that they should not be ‘too' sexually active. If girls heeded this lesson, the rationale goes, they would adopt healthy behaviors. Yet we see that slut-bashing and slut-shaming cause the opposite to occur. Girls and women consistently turn to dangerous, damaging, and degrading behaviors. Calling a female a slut is like telling her, 'Do not take care of yourself, because you are worthless.' Tragically, some girls and women believe this to be true.

On May 17, Webb announced in court that the defense’s jurisdiction motions were “dismissed for reasons to be given later”—an unsurprising outcome but with a shocking absence of any stated rationale.[70]

In his history, Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent, Martin notes that the passage of the income tax in 1913 was regarded as calamitous by many wealthy citizens, setting off a century-long tug-of-war in which they fought repeatedly to repeal or roll back progressive forms of taxation. Over the next century, wealthy conservatives developed many sophisticated and appealing ways to wrap their antitax views in public-spirited rationales. As they waged this battle, they rarely mentioned self-interest, but they consistently opposed high taxes that fell most heavily on themselves.

I'm reading a book that actually scares me. It is not a form of fear that is embodied in some irrational phobia of a specific object, living being, or an event, but a fear of words, of actions of beings towards one another, how one word or command wrongly distributed can destroy someone or many people. How following blindly into the paths of something you truly believe is right without any rationale to back it up or the thought of the consequences it can cause may blindly lead others to their death. How in that moment, thinking you're doing it for the right reasons, you ignore all the laws of nature that tell you that human life is sacred and that no one man's ideals can ever compensate for its loss. To have the power to destroy and cause suffering without much care. This is a fear of what humanity is turning into, and such a future truly scares me.

A man's imperative command is not only to say "no" in cases where "yes" would be a sign of "disinterestedness," but also to say "no" as seldom as possible. One must part with all that which compels one to repeat "no," with ever greater frequency. The rationale of this principle is that all discharges of defensive forces, however slight they may be, involve enormous and absolutely superfluous losses when they become regular and habitual. Our greatest expenditure of strength is made up of those small and most frequent discharges of it. The act of keeping things off, of holding them at a distance, amounts to a discharge of strength,—do not deceive yourselves on this point!—and an expenditure of energy directed at purely negative ends. Simply by being compelled to keep constantly on his guard, a man may grow so weak as to be unable any longer to defend himself.

...but there were four things I taught Walter to consider: 1) That it was Cain who built the first City, 2) That there is a true Science in the World called Scientia Umbrarum which, as to the publick teaching of it, has been suppressed but which the proper Artificer must comprehend, 3) That Architecture aims at Eternity and must contain the Eternal Powers: not only our Altars and Sacrifices, but the Forms of our Temples, must be mysticall, 4) That the miseries (If the present Life, and the Barbarities of Mankind, the fatall disadvantages we are all under and the Hazard we run of being eternally Undone, lead the True Architect not to Harmony or to Rationall Beauty but to quite another Game. Why, do we not believe the very Infants to be the Heirs of Hell and Children of the Devil as soon as they are disclos'd to the World? I declare that I build my Churches firmly on this Dunghil Earth and with a full Conception of Degenerated Nature. I have only room to add: there is a mad-drunken Catch, Hey ho! The Devil is dead! If that be true, I have been in the wrong Suit all my Life.

Once everyone can enrich their souls for free, government subsidies for enrichment forfeit their rationale. To object, 'But most people don't use the Internet for spiritual enrichment' is actually a damaging admission that eager students are few and far between. Subsidized education's real aim isn't to make ideas and culture accessible to anyone who's interested, but to make them mandatory for everyone who *isn't* interested . . . The rise of the Internet has two unsettling lessons . . . First: the humanist case for education subsidies is flimsy today because the Internet makes enlightenment practically free. Second: the humanist case for education subsidies was flimsy all along because the Internet proves low consumption of ideas and culture stems from apathy, not poverty or inconvenience. Behold: when the price of enlightenment drops to zero, remains embarrassingly scarce.

What is the ethical or philosophical justification for a basic income? A fundamental claim is that it is an instrument of social justice that reflects the intrinsically social or collective character of society’s wealth. In the writer’s view, social justice is the most important rationale for moving towards basic income as an economic right, although it is complementary to the other two major rationales, namely freedom and economic security.

No matter how we feel about Trump or any other subject of our reporting, we are not entitled to exaggerate about them, publish poorly sourced reporting, or treat them unfairly under the rationale that they somehow deserve it.

But the death machine had only sampled a vast new source of raw material: the civilians behind the lines. It had not yet evolved equipment efficient to process them, only big guns and clumsy biplane bombers. It had not yet evolved the necessary rationale that old people and women and children are combatants equally with armed and uniformed young men. That is why, despite its sickening squalor and brutality, the Great War looks so innocent to modern eyes.

If the formerly enslaved and their descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire rationale for how this nation had allowed slavery would collapse.

The rationales for centralized, to-down decision making - control, direction, and compliance - melts away when individuals are tightly aligned with the company's values and goals, accountable for their actions, and self-regulated.

She understood the genre constraints, the decencies we were supposed to be observing. The morally cosy vision allows the embrace of monstrosity only as a reaction to suffering or as an act of rage against the Almighty. Vampire interviewee Louis is in despair at his brother’s death when he accepts Lestat’s offer. Frankenstein’s creature is driven to violence by the violence done to him. Even Lucifer’s rebellion emerges from the agony of injured pride. The message is clear: By all means become an abomination—but only while unhinged by grief or wrath. By rights, Talulla knew, she should have been orphaned or raped or paedophilically abused or terminally ill or suicidally depressed or furious at God for her mother’s death or at any rate in some way deranged if she was to be excused for not having killed herself, once it became apparent that she’d have to murder and devour people in order to stay alive. The mere desire to stay alive, in whatever form you’re lumbered with—werewolf, vampire, Father of Lies—really couldn’t be considered a morally sufficient rationale. And yet here she was, staying alive. You love life because life’s all there is.

There is NO LIFE if it’s a programmed mind. Listen to the struggling kid inside, and follow the innocent unbiased zeal; YOU ARE ONE STEP CLOSER TO YOU. Never fall in to the trap of traditional rationales, which only evaluates in terms of transactions which leads to somebody else's goals someday. Time is Man-Made, Calendar is Man-Made to help us, not to disturb us, Set your own time, and allow the inner explosion to express itself. YOU ARE ONE STEP CLOSER TO YOU

Qualitative and quantitative research with adults and children reporting ritual abuse has found that it occurs alongside other forms of organised abuse, particularly the manufacture of child abuse images (Scott 2001, Snow and Sorenson 1990, Waterman et al. 1993), and hence subsuming such non-ritualistic experiences under the moniker ‘ritual abuse’ is misleading at best and incendiary at worst. Moreover, it is unclear why an abusive group that invokes a religious or metaphysical mandate to abuse children should be considered as largely distinct from an abusive group that invokes a non-religious rationale to do so. The presumption evident amongst some authors writing on ritual abuse that a professed spiritual motivation for abusing children necessarily reflects the offenders actual motivation seems naïve at best, and at worst it risks colluding with the ways in which abusive groups obfuscate responsibility for their actions.

How should we know what they're guilty of or not? says Mariche. But we do know, says Ona. We do know that the conditions of Molotschna have been created by man, that these attacks have been made possible, even the conception of these acts, the planning of these attacks, the rationale for these attacks within the minds of the men, because of the circumstances of Molotschna. And those circumstances have been created and ordained by the men, by the elders and by Peters.

The universe appeals to your sense, not your senselessness; your understanding, not your shallowness; your discernment, not your blindness; your intellect, not your nonsense; your rationale, not your recklessness; your knowledge, not your ignorance; your wisdom, not your imprudence; your insight, not your brainlessness; and your enlightenment, not your foolishness. The universe also appeals to your enjoyment, not your sadness; your courage, not your fearfulness; your hope, not your bitterness; your humility, not your arrogance; your honesty, not your deceitfulness; your mercy, not your ruthlessness; your charity, not your stinginess; your strength, not your weakness; and your love, not your hatefulness.

Richard Clarke, former cybersecurity czar under the Bush administration and a member of the panel, later explained the rationale for highlighting the use of zero days in their report. “If the US government finds a zero-day vulnerability, its first obligation is to tell the American people so that they can patch it, not to run off [and use it] to break into the Beijing telephone system,” he said at a security conference. “The first obligation of government is to defend.”40

Honesty is not the same as truth. That is the obstacle of the notion of relative truths. I would like to put my trust in the lunatic. He is the one least concerned of what I think of him, the mark of an honest man. I can always depend on him to be completely honest in what he thinks and feels, about anything, no matter the consequences laid before him, however with no course of rationale, I cannot necessarily take his word for even the well-being of him in his own reality.

Some people find no comfort in the prophets’ vision of a future world. “The church has used that line for centuries to justify slavery, oppression, and all manner of injustice,” they say. The criticism sticks because the church has abused the prophets’ vision. But you will never find that “pie in the sky” rationale in the prophets themselves. They have scathing words about the need to care for widows and orphans and aliens, and to clean up corrupt courts and religious systems. The people of God are not merely to mark time, waiting for God to step in and set right all that is wrong. Rather, they are to model the new heaven and new earth, and by so doing awaken longings for what God will someday bring to pass.

This kind of thing is why more and more Christian parents are concluding that they cannot afford to keep their children in public schools. Some tell themselves that their children need to remain there to be "salt and light" to the other kids. As popular culture continues its downward slide, however, this rationale begins to sound like a rationalization. It brings to mind a father who tosses his child into a whitewater river in the hopes that she'll save another drowning child.

Innovation was a curious thing. It never failed to amaze him. And yet this place confirmed what they’d long known: that truly disruptive innovation rarely came from the expected sources. They’d had so much more luck investing in eccentric B and C students. The rationale was simple: Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it—and were often tainted by it. Especially when success and peer approval beckoned. One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions. No, the truly different thinkers often went unnoticed.

The Air Loom, for all its florid craziness, can be seen to have a function and a rationale: as a miraculous, if temporary, fix for a breaking mind, a coping strategy for a life that had become too brutally contradictory to sustain otherwise.

As the Big Shift takes hold, companies are no longer places that exist to drive down costs by getting increasingly bigger. They’re places that support and organize talented individuals to get better faster by working with others. The rationale of the firm shifts from scalable efficiency to scalable learning—the ability to improve performance more rapidly and learn faster by effectively integrating more and more participants distributed across traditional institutional boundaries.

defense lawyers challenged the credibility of these experts, but were rarely successful. Judges were often overwhelmed by the science and had little or no time to educate themselves. If a proffered witness had some training and seemed to know what he was talking about, he was allowed to testify. Over time, judges adopted the rationale that since a witness had been qualified as an expert in other trials in other states, then certainly he must be a genuine authority. Appellate courts got into the act by affirming convictions without seriously questioning the science behind the forensics, and thus bolstering the reputations of the experts. As résumés grew thicker, the opinions grew to encompass even more theories of guilt.

Heredity and Environment are the master-influences of the organic world. These have made all of us what we are. These forces are still ceaselessly playing upon all our lives. And he who truly understands these influences; he who has decided how much to allow to each; he who can regulate new forces as they arise, or adjust them to the old, so directing them as at one moment to make them cooperate, at another to counteract one another, understands the rationale of personal development.

What possible rationale demanded this many debased representations of the recently freed Black people produced in the final third of the nineteenth century? How many ways can one call a woman or a man a "n*****" or a "c***"? How many watermelons does a person have to devour, how many chickens does an individual have to steal, to make the point that Black people are manifestly, by nature, both gluttons and thieves? Why in the world was it necessary to produce tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of these separate and distinct racist images to demean the status of the newly freed slaves in a set of fixed types and motifs, which reached their perverse apex with the characterizations of Black people during Reconstruction in The Birth of a Nation, in the figures of deracinated Black elected officials and, of course, the black male as rapist? The explanation comes in three words: justifying Jim Crow, or, in three different words, disenfranchising Black voters

... I now believe truth lies not in logic but in hope, both past and future. I believe hope can surprise you. It can survive the odds against it, all sorts of contradictions, and certainly any skeptic's rationale on relying on proof through fact.

The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen his awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities.

The irony is that each new war begins in hope: hope of restoring lost honor, hope of redressing injustices and reclaiming tarnished glory, hope of a grand new world. Each war ends with the black seeds of the next war sown: honor newly lost, injustice freshly inflicted, a world more broken than before. Always, someone steps forward, ready to water and weed and harvest those black seeds, dreaming of the day when they will bring forth their bounty of vindictive vindication. Into that dreamer's ear, a bloodred god whispers, "Offer flattery in one hand, fear in the other. Rule or be ruled! Dominate or disappear!" The rationales warp and shift. The closer war comes, the simpler and stupider the choices. Are you a warrior or a coward? Are you with us or against us? "All men dream," Colonel Lawrence wrote, "but not equally. Those who dream by night wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

In summing up the affair in his memoirs, president Eisenhower seemed to settle upon one rationale in particular, and this is probably the closest to the truth of the matter. This was to put the world—and specifically the Soviet Union and Nasser—on notice that the United States had virtually unlimited power, that this power could be transported to any corner of the world with great speed, that it could and would be used to deal decisively with any situation with which the United States was dissatisfied, for whatever reason.

The “large majority of ministers who published sermons during the Revolutionary era justified the war effort by a rationale that was more political than religious.” Rather than making the Revolution into a religious cause, they turned religion into a political cause.

Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots,* sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.

The purpose of such propaganda phrases as "war on terrorism" and attacking "those who hate freedom" is to paralyze individual thought as well as to condition people to act as one mass, as when President Bush attempted to end debate on Iraq by claiming that the American people were of one voice. The modern war president removes the individual nature of those who live in it by forcing us into a uniform state where the complexities of those we fight are erased. The enemy-terrorism, Iraq, Bin Laden, Hussein-becomes one threatening category, something to be defeated and destroyed, so that the public response will be one of reaction to fear and threat rather than creatively and independently thinking for oneself. Our best hope for overcoming perpetual thinking about war and perpetual fear about both real and imagined threats is to question our leaders and their use of empty slogans that offer little rationale, explanation or historical context.

Oh, to be sure, there are the get-rich dreams that float in and out of idle conversation. But there are much headier rewards closer at hand - the freedom to be your own boss and chart your own course, the chance to explore the leading edge of some new technology, the career-opening opportunity to take on far more responsibility than any established organisation would ever grant. These are what really drive early market organisations to work such long hours for such modest rewards - the dream of getting rich on equity is only an excuse, something to hold on to your family and friends as a rationale for all this otherwise crazy behavior.

Pedestrianism, [William Bingley] claims, is the most 'useful' mode of travel, 'if health and strength are not wanting.' 'To a naturalist, it is evidently so; since, by this means, he is enabled to examine the country as he goes along; and when he sees occasion, he can also strike out of the road, amongst the mountains or morasses, in a manner completely independent of all those obstacles that inevitably attend the bringing of carriages or horses.' Bingley has a specific reason here for valuing the combination of freedom and intimacy with one's surroundings enjoyed by the pedestrian, but his rationale is generalisable to other travellers.

The accession of not one but three illegal drug users in a row to the US presidency constitutes an existential challenge to the prohibitionist regime. The fact that some of the most successful people of our time, be it in business, finances, politics, entertainment or the arts, are current or former substance users is a fundamental refutation of its premises and a stinging rebuttal of its rationale. A criminal law that is broken at least once by 50% of the adult population and that is broken on a regular basis by 20% of the same adult population is a broken law, a fatally flawed law. How can a democratic government justify a law that is consistently broken by a substantial minority of the population? What we are witnessing here is a massive case of civil disobedience not seen since alcohol prohibition in the 1930 in the US. On what basis can a democratic system justify the stigmatization and discrimination of a strong minority of as much as 20% of its population?

We had better want the consequences of what we believe or disbelieve, because the consequences will come! . . . But how can a society set priorities if there are no basic standards? Are we to make our calculations using only the arithmetic of appetite? . . . The basic strands which have bound us together socially have begun to fray, and some of them have snapped. Even more pressure is then placed upon the remaining strands. The fact that the giving way is gradual will not prevent it from becoming total. . . . Given the tremendous asset that the family is, we must do all we can within constitutional constraints to protect it from predatory things like homosexuality and pornography. . . . Our whole republic rests upon the notion of “obedience to the unenforceable,” upon a tremendous emphasis on inner controls through self-discipline. . . . Different beliefs do make for different behaviors; what we think does affect our actions; concepts do have consequences. . . . Once society loses its capacity to declare that some things are wrong per se, then it finds itself forever building temporary defenses, revising rationales, drawing new lines—but forever falling back and losing its nerve. A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything! Take away a consciousness of eternity and see how differently time is spent. Take away an acknowledgement of divine design in the structure of life and then watch the mindless scurrying to redesign human systems to make life pain-free and pleasure-filled. Take away regard for the divinity in one’s neighbor, and watch the drop in our regard for his property. Take away basic moral standards and observe how quickly tolerance changes into permissiveness. Take away the sacred sense of belonging to a family or community, and observe how quickly citizens cease to care for big cities. Those of us who are business-oriented are quick to look for the bottom line in our endeavors. In the case of a value-free society, the bottom line is clear—the costs are prohibitive! A value-free society eventually imprisons its inhabitants. It also ends up doing indirectly what most of its inhabitants would never have agreed to do directly—at least initially. Can we turn such trends around? There is still a wealth of wisdom in the people of this good land, even though such wisdom is often mute and in search of leadership. People can often feel in their bones the wrongness of things, long before pollsters pick up such attitudes or before such attitudes are expressed in the ballot box. But it will take leadership and articulate assertion of basic values in all places and in personal behavior to back up such assertions. Even then, time and the tides are against us, so that courage will be a key ingredient. It will take the same kind of spunk the Spartans displayed at Thermopylae when they tenaciously held a small mountain pass against overwhelming numbers of Persians. The Persians could not dislodge the Spartans and sent emissaries forward to threaten what would happen if the Spartans did not surrender. The Spartans were told that if they did not give up, the Persians had so many archers in their army that they would darken the skies with their arrows. The Spartans said simply: “So much the better, we will fight in the shade!

All social orders command their members to imbibe in pipe dreams of posterity, the mirage of immortality, to keep them ahead of the extinction that would ensue in a few generations if the species did not replenish itself. This is the implicit, and most pestiferous, rationale for propagation: to become fully integrated into a society, one must offer it fresh blood. Naturally, the average set of parents does not conceive of their conception as a sacrificial act. These are civilized human beings we are talking about, and thus they are quite able to fill their heads with a panoply of less barbaric rationales for reproduction, among them being the consolidation of a spousal relationship; the expectation of new and enjoyable experiences in the parental role; the hope that one will pass the test as a mother or father; the pleasing of one’s own parents, not to forget their parents and possibly a great-grandparent still loitering about; the serenity of taking one’s place in the seemingly deathless lineage of a familial enterprise; the creation of individuals who will care for their paternal and maternal selves in their dotage; the quelling of a sense of guilt or selfishness for not having done their duty as human beings; and the squelching of that faint pathos that is associated with the childless. Such are some of the overpowering pressures upon those who would fertilize the future. These pressures build up in people throughout their lifetimes and must be released, just as everyone must evacuate their bowels or fall victim to a fecal impaction. And who, if they could help it, would suffer a building, painful fecal impaction? So we make bowel movements to relieve this pressure. Quite a few people make gardens because they cannot stand the pressure of not making a garden. Others commit murder because they cannot stand the pressure building up to kill someone, either a person known to them or a total stranger. Everything is like that. Our whole lives consist of metaphorical as well as actual bowel movements, one after the other. Releasing these pressures can have greater or lesser consequences in the scheme of our lives. But they are all pressures, all bowel movements of some kind. At a certain age, children are praised for making a bowel movement in the approved manner. Later on, the praise of others dies down for this achievement and our bowel movements become our own business, although we may continue to praise ourselves for them. But overpowering pressures go on governing our lives, and the release of these essentially bowel-movement pressures may once again come up for praise, congratulations, and huzzahs of all kinds.

By denying that he had ever played a role in the conflict, Adams was, in effect, absolving himself of any moral responsibility for catastrophes like Bloody Friday–and, in the process, disowning his onetime subordinates, like Brendan Hughes. 'I'm disgusted with the whole thing,' Hughes said. 'It means that people like myself... have to carry the responsibility of all those deaths.' If all of that carnage had at least succeeded in forcing the British out of Ireland, then Hughes might be able to justify, to himself, the actions he had taken. But he felt robbed of any such rationale for absolution. 'As everything turned out,' he said, 'not one death was worth it.

Simply to make the accusation is to prove it. To hear the allegation is to believe it. No motive for the perpetrator is necessary, no logic or rationale is required. Only a label is required. The label is the motive. The label is the evidence. The label is the logic. Why did Coleman Silk do this? Because he is an x, because he is a y, because he is both. First a racist and now a misogynist. It is too late in the century to call him a Communist, though that is the way it used to be done. A misogynistic act committed by a man who already proved himself capable of a vicious racist comment at the expense of a vulnerable student. That explains everything. That and the craziness.

The commercial poultry industry boasts of “biosecurity,” described as the industry’s “buzzword du jour,”2207 arguing that keeping birds confined indoors year-round protects them from exposure to wild birds and any diseases they might be carrying.2208 The U.S. National Pork Board defends large-scale pig confinement using the same rationale.

All this attempt to control... We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old... The basic idea of science - that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational - that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the future, and it swept away the old medieval system, which was hundreds of years old. The medieval world of feudal politics and religious dogma and hateful superstitions fell before science. But, in truth, this was because the medieval world didn't really work any more. It didn't work economically, it didn't work intellectually, and it didn't fit the new world that was emerging... But now... science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting to not fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it can not tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways - air, and water, and land - because of ungovernable science... At the same time, the great intellectual justification of science has vanished. Ever since Newton and Descartes, science has explicitly offered us the vision of total control. Science has claimed the power to eventually control everything, through its understanding of natural laws. But in the twentieth century, that claim has been shattered beyond repair. First, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle set limits on what we could know about the subatomic world. Oh well, we say. None of us lives in a subatomic world. It doesn't make any practical difference as we go through our lives. Then Godel's theorem set similar limits to mathematics, the formal language of science. Mathematicians used to think that their language had some inherent trueness that derived from the laws of logic. Now we know what we call 'reason' is just an arbitrary game. It's not special, in the way we thought it was. And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rain storms we cannot predict. And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old - the dream of total control - has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn't true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly... We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power. Because things are going very fast now... it will be in everyone's hands. It will be in kits for backyard gardeners. Experiments for schoolchildren. Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And that will force everyone to ask the same question - What should I do with my power? - which is the very question science says it cannot answer.

The more improbable the situation and the greater the demands made on [the climber], the more sweetly the blood flows later in release from all that tension. The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen his awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities. It’s a small scale model for living, but with a difference: Unlike your routine life, where mistakes can usually be recouped and some kind of compromise patched up, your actions, for however brief a period, are deadly serious. A. Alvarez            The Savage God:   A Study of Suicide A

Le point final du processus dialectique represente l'esprit qui se reconnait comme l'ultime realite, et realise que tout ce qu'il a considere jusqu'alors comme etranger et hostile a lui-meme, en verite, en fait partie integrante. Il s'agit simultanement d'un etat de connaissance absolue ou l'esprit s'identifie enfin comme etant l'ultime realite, mais aussi un etat de liberte totale dans lequel l'esprit, au lieu d'etre controlee par des forces exterieures, est capable d'organiser le monde d'une facon rationnelle. Il prend alors conscience que le monde est en fait lui-meme, et qu'il lui suffit simplement de mettre en oeuvre ses propres principes de rationalite afin de l'organizer rationalement.

Bannon didn’t promote internal debate, provide policy rationale, or deliver PowerPoint presentations; instead, he was the equivalent of Trump’s personal talk radio. Trump could turn him on at any moment, and it pleased him that Bannon’s pronouncements and views would consistently be fully formed and ever available, a bracing, unified-field narrative

A primary purpose of school - and this is true for our culture's science and religion as well - is to lead us away from our own experience. The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings - as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture - but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiosity, interior lives, and time. This lesson is crucial to individual economic success ("I love art," my students would say, "but I've got to make a living"), to the perpetuation of our economic system (What if all those who hated their jobs quit?), and it is crucial, as should be clear now, to the rationale that causes all mass atrocities.

The Blank Slate is today's Great Chain of Being: a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the day. As in the century following Galilee, our moral sensibilities will adjust to the biological facts, not only because facts are facts but because the moral credentials of the Blank Slate are just as spurious.

I believe that we must have a public reckoning with the history of the full record presented to the Court in Brown, which predicted with devastating clarity the mind-warping harm of segregation on white children.” The now-lost rationale for why segregation must fall—the rationale that included the costs to us all—might have actually uprooted segregation in America. After all, arguing that Black and brown children suffered from not being with white children affirmed the reality of unequal conditions, but once the argument was divorced from the context of legal segregation, it also subtly reaffirmed the logic of white supremacy. Today, it’s that logic that endures—that white segregated schools are better and that everyone, even white children, should endeavor to be in them.

What I’d like to explain is that I don’t think Julie in her heart of hearts is all that acquisitive either. She’s just unhappy and frustrated and she hasn’t yet discovered how to “be” in the world. Unsure what to desire, she simply wants. Or this is the conclusion I’ve come to. A father’s too generous theory, perhaps. Applied evenly, it might be a rationale for acquisitiveness in general,

In 1980, the compensation of the average chief executive officer was forty-two times that of the average worker; by the year 2004, the ratio had soared to 280 times that of the average worker (down from an astonishing 531 times at the peak in 2000). Over the past quarter-century, CEO compensation measured in current dollars rose nearly sixteen times over , while the compensation of the average worker slightly more than doubled. Measured in real(1980) dollars, however, the compensation of the average worker rose just 0.3 percent per year, barely enough to maintain his or her standard of living. Yet CEO compensation rose at a rate of 8.5 percent annually, increasing by more than seven times in real terms during the period. The rationale was that these executives had "created wealth" for their shareholders. But were CEOs actually creating value commensurate with this huge increase in compenstion? Certainly the average CEO was not. In real terms, aggregate corporate profits grew at an annual rate of just 2.9 percent, compared to 3.1 percent for our nation's economy, as represented by the Gross Domestic Product. How that somewhat dispiriting lag can drive average CEO compensation to a cool 9.8 million in 2004 is one of the great anomalies of the age.

If, as is the tendency today, the governing class defines job-creation as its main aim, where will this transformation of all activities into paid activities (with remuneration as their sole rationale and maximum productivity as their goal) finally end? How long will the extremely fragile barriers which still prevent the professionalization of motherhood and fatherhood be able to hold out? When shall we see the commercial procreation of embryos, the sale of children, or a trade in organs? Are we not already monetizing, professionalizing and selling not only those things and services we produce, but also what we are and what we cannot produce at will or detach from ourselves? In other words, are we not already transforming ourselves into commodities and treating life as one means among others rather than the supreme end which all means must subserve?

Hypocrisy is a tricky thing. It parades itself around like rationale and reason, deceiving you into believing your thoughts are sound and just when they are anything but. I had demanded honesty from Alessia but was attempting to pull the wool over my own eyes. I could tell myself all day long one taste of her would be enough, but I knew deep down inside, I had no intention of letting her go. Consequences be damned—she was mine.

Just because some dreams never see light that doesn’t make us nonbelievers, they are wings to our sky and fiction makes us dream. I know the truth is fatal, especially for the stubborn’s but trust me the illusion is worse.

The fragmentation of the neoliberal self begins when the agent is brought face to face with the realization that she is not just an employee or student, but also simultaneously a product to be sold, a walking advertisement, a manager of her résumé, a biographer of her rationales, and an entrepreneur of her possibilities. She has to somehow manage to be simultaneously subject, object, and spectator. She is perforce not learning about who she really is, but rather, provisionally buying the person she must soon become. She is all at once the business, the raw material, the product, the clientele, and the customer of her own life. She is a jumble of assets to be invested, nurtured, managed, and developed; but equally an offsetting inventory of liabilities to be pruned, outsourced, shorted, hedged against, and minimized. She is both headline star and enraptured audience of her own performance.

Some cognitive scientists believe human response to music provides evidence that we are more than just flesh and blood—that we also have souls. Their thinking is as follows: All reactions to external stimuli can be traced back to an evolutionary rationale. You pull your hand away from fire to avoid physical harm. You get butterflies before an important speech because the adrenaline running through your veins has caused a physiological fight-or-flight response. But there is no evolutionary context within which people’s response to music makes sense—the tapping of a foot, the urge to sing along or get up and dance, there’s just no survival benefit to these activities. For this reason, some believe that our response to music is proof that there’s more to us than just biological and physiological mechanics—that the only way to be moved by the spirit, so to speak, is to have one in the first place. There

He also came to like the idea of having a uniform for himself, because of both its daily convenience (the rationale he claimed) and its ability to convey a signature style. "So I asked Issey to make me some of his black turtlenecks that I liked, and he made like a hundred of them." Jobs noticed my surprise when he told this story, so he gestured to them stacked up in a closet. "That's what I wear," he said. "I have enough to last for the rest of my life.

We’re terribly worried about Uncle Henry. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ ‘Well, why don’t you send him to the doctor?’ ‘Well, we would, only we need the eggs.’ ” Standish stared at her as if a small but perfectly formed elderberry tree had suddenly sprung unbidden from the bridge of her nose. “Say that again,” he said in a small, shocked voice. “What, all of it?” “All of it.” Kate stuck her fist on her hip and said it again, doing the voices with a bit more dash and Southern accents this time. “That’s brilliant,” Standish breathed when she had done. “You must have heard it before,” she said, a little surprised by this response. “It’s an old joke.” “No,” he said, “I have not. We need the eggs. We need the eggs. We need the eggs. ‘We can’t send him to the doctor because we need the eggs.’ An astounding insight into the central paradoxes of the human condition and of our indefatigable facility for constructing adaptive rationales to account for it. Good God.” Kate

Diversity is what happens when you have representation of various groups in one place. Representation is what happens when groups that haven’t previously been included, are included. Intersectionality is what happens when we do everything through the lens of making sure that no one is left behind. More than surface-level inclusion, or merely making sure everyone is represented, intersectionality is the practice of interrogating the power dynamics and rationales of how we can be together.

A language may be like other cultural products, which may be used at different times by innovators, early adopters, early majorities, late majorities, and laggards. […] This new usage may fall dead born from the innovators lips or be welcomed into a segment of the community with open arms. The reception is partly capricious, but when a new combination does catch on, it could involve the later adopters grasping the rationale with the stroke of insight recapitulating that of the original coiner, their dumbly memorising the verb in that construction, or something in between. […] Can we catch innovators in the act of stretching the language? It happens all the time. Though linguists often theorise about a language as if it were the fixed protocol of a homogeneous community of idealised speakers, like the physicists’ frictionless plane an ideal gas, they also know that a real language is constantly being pushed and pulled at the margins by different speakers in different ways.

Human sacrifice was common in the pagan world. It was cruel but had a logic and rationale. The first child was often believed to be the offspring of a god, who had impregnated the mother in an act of droit de seigneur. In begetting the child, the god’s energy had been depleted, so to replenish this and to ensure the circulation of all the available mana, the firstborn was returned to its divine parent. The case of Isaac was quite different, however. Isaac had been a gift of God but not his natural son. There was no reason for the sacrifice, no need to replenish the divine energy. Indeed, the sacrifice would make nonsense of Abraham’s entire life, which had been based on the promise that he would be the father of a great nation. This god was already beginning to be conceived differently from most other deities in the ancient world. He did not share the human predicament; he did not require an input of energy from men and women. He was in a different league and could make whatever demands he chose.

No white people in my office on that spring day in 1968. On the other hand, visualizing the presence of some sweaty, ham-fisted, Caucasian version of John Henry, the steel-driving man, hammering iron wedges between the students and me, incarcerating us behind bars as invisible as he was, clarifies the encounter. Why weren’t novels and poems by Americans of African descent being taught at the university? Why were so few of us attending and almost none of us teaching there? What rationales and agendas were served by dispensing knowledge through arbitrary, territorial “fields”? Why had the training I’d received in the so-called “best” schools alienated me from my particular cultural roots and brainwashed me into believing in some objective, universal, standard brand of culture and art—essentialist, hierarchical classifications of knowledge—that doomed people like me to marginality on the campus and worse, consigned the vast majority of us who never reach college to a stigmatized, surplus underclass.

The Hutterites (who came out of the same tradition as the Amish and the Mennonites) have a strict policy that every time a colony approaches 150, they split it in two and start a new one. "Keeping things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to manage a group of people," Spokane told me. "When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another." The Hutterites, obviously, didn't get this idea from contemporary evolutionary psychology. They've been following the 150 rule for centuries. But their rationale fits perfectly with Dunbar's theories. At 150, the Hutterites believe, something happens-something indefinable but very real-that somehow changes the nature of community overnight. "In smaller groups people are a lot closer. They're knit together, which is very important if you want to be be effective and successful at community life," Gross said. "If you get too large, you don't have enough work in common. You don't have enough things in common, and then you start to become strangers and that close-knit fellowship starts to get lost." Gross spoke from experience. He had been in Hutterite colonies that had come near to that magic number and seen firsthand how things had changed. "What happens when you get that big is that the group starts, just on its own, to form a sort of clan." He made a gesture with his hands, as if to demonstrate division. "You get two or three groups within the larger group. That is something you really try to prevent, and when it happens it is a good time to branch out.

In any case, if we are to understand the meaning of Maoist reason and a critique of its boundaries, we must also learn to think Maoism in its totality: which means to also think its distance from pre-Maoist Leninism and pre-Leninist Marxism, and which further means to think what makes Maoism the highest stage of revolutionary science - by what rationale can we call it a stage, what makes the rocess of which it is a part scientific, and what scientific thinking means for Maoists interested in developing revolutionary theory.

I eventually got a handle on the drinking. It happens as you get older. It happens, or you don’t get older. Drink hard in your twenties and you’re a regular, fun guy. Keep drinking hard through your thirties and you start to separate yourself from fun, health and indeed other people. If you’re still doing it in your forties it’s probably because you have unresolved stresses and problems which you are clumsily and destructively self-medicating. Drinking hard into your fifties means that you’re blowing hot and cold on ever seeing your sixties. I woke up a week after my fiftieth birthday unable to remember the previous three days, and decided to stop. I could say ‘simple as that’, except that it really wasn’t simple at all. There was a clincher, though, and it was this: my main rationale for drinking was to calm myself in the face of my night terrors. But although I drank a lot, the nightmares refused to go away. I tried a few weeks of facing them without the alcohol, and though the terrors were no better they were certainly not worse. So I quit drinking.

Yet another tactic was offered the Negro. He was encouraged to seek unity with the millions of disadvantaged whites of the South, whose basic need for social change paralleled his own. Theoretically, this proposal held a measure of logic, for it is undeniable that great masses of southern whites exist in conditions scarcely better than those which afflict the Negro. But the rationale of this theory wilted under the heat of fact. The need for immediate change was more urgently felt and more bitterly realized by the Negro than by the exploited white. As individuals, the whites could better their situation without the barrier that society places in front of a man whose racial identification by color is inescapable. Moreover, the underprivileged southern whites saw the color that separated them from Negroes more clearly than they saw the circumstances that bound them together in mutual interest. Negroes were therefore forced to face the fact that, in the South, they must move without allies; and yet the coiled power of state force made such a prospect appear both futile and quixotic.

Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel. […] You see it too in the small acts of everyday life, of the person who feels perfectly justified, of the person who doesn’t know he’s just committed harm, of the person who says something whose motives are clear to everyone but her, of the person who comes up with intricate rationales or just remains oblivious, of the person we’ve all been at one time or another. Taken to an extreme, it’s the mind-set of murder; enlarged in scale it’s war. Elaborate are the means to hide from yourself, the dissociations, projections, deceptions, forgetting, justifications, and other tools to detour around the obstruction of unbearable reality, the labyrinths in which we hide the minotaurs who have our faces.

Historically, from around the sixteenth century “white and black connoted purity and filthiness, virginity and sin, virtue and baseness, beauty and ugliness, beneficence and evil, God and the devil” (p.6). Jordan has observed that from about 1680 there was a marked shift from the terms “free” and “christian”, which colonists had applied to themselves, toward the use of the new self-identifying term of “white”. Skin color was of such importance that by the beginning of the eighteenth century it had been employed as a rationale for enslavement. For instance, in 1709, a Samuel Seawall purportedly recorded in his diary that a Spaniard who had petitioned the Massachusetts Council for manumission had been opposed by a captain on the basis that any one of his dusty color was destined to be a slave. Jordan, who related the story, commented that the prevalent attitude underlined the existence of a “we” and a “they” group in slave society based on the visible characteristic of skin color, a stereotyping that was to become permanent. Yet the ideology of racism did not supplant the ideology of religion and the ideology of slavery. What happened was that each contributed tenets

But the essence of man consists in his being more than merely human, if this is represented as ‘being a rational creature.’ ‘More’ must not be understood here additively, as if the traditional definition of man were indeed to remain basic, only elaborated by means of an existentiell postscript. The "more" means: more originally and therefore more essentially in terms of his essence. But here something enigmatic manifests itself: man is in thrownness. This means that man, as the ek-sisting counter-throw [Gegenwurf] of Being, is more than animal rationale precisely to the extent that he is less bound up with man conceived from subjectivity. Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being. Man loses nothing in this ‘less’; rather, he gains in that he attains the truth of Being. He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being itself into the preservation of Being's truth. The call comes as the throw from which the thrownness of Da-sein derives. In his essential unfolding within the history of Being, man is the being whose Being as ek-sistence consists in his dwelling in the nearness of Being. Man is the neighbor of Being

joke by any standards, ancient or modern. But their argument with Tiberius was a fundamental one, which framed Roman political debate for the rest of the Republic. Cicero, looking back from the middle of the next century, could present 133 BCE as a decisive year precisely because it opened up a major fault line in Roman politics and society that was not closed again during his lifetime: ‘The death of Tiberius Gracchus,’ he wrote, ‘and even before that the whole rationale behind his tribunate, divided a united people into two distinct groups [partes].’ This is a rhetorical oversimplification.

For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which fastned to the seat of the Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty) are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall; The Wealth and Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength; Salus Populi (the Peoples Safety) its Businesse; Counsellors, by whom all things needfull for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the Memory; Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civill War, Death.

When did you realize you should stop playing? There was no one moment. Moments of realization are generally seductive lies concocted by unscrupulous memoirists. Typically, the process of epiphany is not instant—your mind doesn’t just crack open. You usually realize something long after you’ve suspected that it might be true, after it’s been lurking there for a long time, in the form of an uncomfortable thought that might have been droning in the background for weeks or years, like the purr of a detuned oboe. What we call “realization” is often the death of a self-serving rationale after it’s been strangled by reality for a long time.

We were beginning to see that the medical profession, at the time still over 90 percent male, had transformed childbirth from a natural event into a surgical operation performed on an unconscious patient in what approximated a sterile environment. Routinely, the woman about to give birth was subjected to an enema, had her pubic hair shaved off, and was placed in the lithotomy position - on her back, with knees up and crotch spread wide open. As the baby began to emerge, the obstetrician performed an episiotomy, a surgical enlargement of the vaginal opening, which had to be stitched back together after birth. Each of these procedures came with a medical rationale: The enema was to prevent contamination with feces; the pubic hair was shaved because it might be unclean; the episiotomy was meant to ease the baby's exit. But each of these was also painful, both physically and otherwise, and some came with their own risks, Shaving produces small cuts and abrasions that are open to infection; episiotomy scars heal m ore slowly than natural tears and can make it difficult for the woman to walk or relieve herself for weeks afterward. The lithotomy position may be more congenial for the physician than kneeling before a sitting woman, but it impedes the baby's process through the birth canal and can lead to tailbone injuries in the mother.

Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it. The two modes of the Government which prevail in the world, are, First, Government by election and representation: Secondly, Government by hereditary succession. The former is generally known by the name of republic; the latter by that of monarchy and aristocracy. Those two distinct and opposite forms erect themselves on the two distinct and opposite bases of Reason and Ignorance. - As the exercise of Government requires talents and abilities, and as talents and abilities cannot have hereditary descent, it is evident that hereditary succession requires a belief from man to which his reason cannot subscribe, and which can only be established upon his ignorance; and the more ignorant any country is, the better it is fitted for this species of Government. On the contrary, Government, in a well-constituted republic, requires no belief from man beyond what his reason can give. He sees the rationale of the whole system, its origin and its operation; and as it is best supported when best understood, the human faculties act with boldness, and acquire, under this form of government, a gigantic manliness.

The power to pardon is conferred upon the presidency. It is not a personal power of the man or woman who inhabits the office. ... Where a pardon is being used to protect the president personally, or protect the president’s family, friends, or conspirators, it should not be seen as a valid exercise of that constitutional power. Being able to tell one scenario from the other may not be difficult. Until Trump’s presidency, all recent presidents used a formal process for evaluating and granting pardons. Where pardons are awarded to conspirators of the president, and without any consistent rationale to support them, a court could find the pardon to be an invalid exercise of the power of the presidency.

American Heritage Dictionary: “The only rationale for condemning the construction is based on a false analogy with Latin. . . . In general, the Usage Panel accepts the split infinitive.” Merriam-Webster Unabridged online dictionary: “Even though there has never been a rational basis for objecting to the split infinitive, the subject has become a fixture of folk belief about grammar. . . . Modern commentators . . . usually say it’s all right to split an infinitive in the interest of clarity. Since clarity is the usual reason for splitting, this advice means merely that you can split them whenever you need to.” Encarta World English Dictionary: “There is no grammatical basis for rejecting split infinitives.

How jealous I am of those I have known afraid to sleep for dreaming. I fear those moments before sleep when words tear from the nervous matrix and, like sparks, light what responses they may. That fragmented vision, seductive with joy and terror, robs rest of itself. Gratefully sunk in nightmare, where at least the anxious brain freed from knowing its own decay can flesh those skeletal epiphanies with visual and aural coherence, if not rationale: better those landscapes where terror is experienced as terror and rage as rage than this, where either is merely a pain in the gut or a throb above the eye, where a nerve spasm in the shin crumbles a city of bone, where a twitch in the eyelid detonates both the sun and the heart.

These are things you’re not supposed to say on campuses now. But let’s be frank. To begin with, if colleges and universities around the country were in any way serious about policies to prevent sexual assaults, the path is obvious: don’t ban teacher-student romance, ban fraternities. And if we want to limit the potential for sexual favoritism—another rationale often proffered for the new policies—then let’s include the institutionalized sexual favoritism of spousal hiring, with trailing spouses getting ranks and perks based on whom they’re sleeping with rather than CVs alone, and brought in at salaries often dwarfing those of senior and more accomplished colleagues who didn’t have the foresight to couple more advantageously.

Filoteo: Because the First Principle is the most fundamental, it follows that if one attribute were finite, then all attributes would likewise be finite; or else, if by one intrinsic rationale He is finite, and by another infinite, then necessarily we must consider him as composite. If therefore, he is the operator of the universe, then He is surely an infinite operator; in the sense that all is dependent on Him. Furthermore, since our imagination is able to move toward infinity, imagining always greater size and yet still greater, and number beyond number, following a certain succession, and as they say, power, so too we must also understand, that God actually conceives infinite dimension and infinite number. And from that understanding follows the possibility with the convenience and opportunity such as may be: that should the active power be infinite, then by necessary consequence, the subject power takes part in the infinite: because, as we have demonstrated elsewhere, what can be done must be done, the ability to measure implies the measurable thing, and the measurer implies the measured. Thus, as there really are bodies with finite dimension, the Prime Intellect understands bodies and dimension. If He has understanding of this, He understands infinity no less, and if He understands the infinite, and such bodies, then necessarily these are intelligible species, and are products of that intellect, for what is divine is most real, and as such what is that real must exist more surely than what we can actually see before our eyes.

In Uprooting Racism, Paul Kivel makes a useful comparison between the rhetoric abusive men employ to justify beating up their girlfriends, wives, or children and the publicly traded justifications for widespread racism. He writes: During the first few years that I worked with men who are violent I was continually perplexed by their inability to see the effects of their actions and their ability to deny the violence they had done to their partners or children. I only slowly became aware of the complex set of tactics that men use to make violence against women invisible and to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. These tactics are listed below in the rough order that men employ them.… (1) Denial: “I didn’t hit her.” (2) Minimization: “It was only a slap.” (3) Blame: “She asked for it.” (4) Redefinition: “It was mutual combat.” (5) Unintentionality: “Things got out of hand.” (6) It’s over now: “I’ll never do it again.” (7) It’s only a few men: “Most men wouldn’t hurt a woman.” (8) Counterattack: “She controls everything.” (9) Competing victimization: “Everybody is against men.” Kivel goes on to detail the ways these nine tactics are used to excuse (or deny) institutionalized racism. Each of these tactics also has its police analogy, both as applied to individual cases and in regard to the general issue of police brutality. Here are a few examples: (1) Denial. “The professionalism and restraint … was nothing short of outstanding.” “America does not have a human-rights problem.” (2) Minimization. Injuries were “of a minor nature.” “Police use force infrequently.” (3) Blame. “This guy isn’t Mr. Innocent Citizen, either. Not by a long shot.” “They died because they were criminals.” (4) Redefinition. It was “mutual combat.” “Resisting arrest.” “The use of force is necessary to protect yourself.” (5) Unintentionality. “[O]fficers have no choice but to use deadly force against an assailant who is deliberately trying to kill them.…” (6) It’s over now. “We’re making changes.” “We will change our training; we will do everything in our power to make sure it never happens again.” (7) It’s only a few men. “A small proportion of officers are disproportionately involved in use-of-force incidents.” “Even if we determine that the officers were out of line … it is an aberration.” (8) Counterattack. “The only thing they understand is physical force and pain.” “People make complaints to get out of trouble.” (9) Competing victimization. The police are “in constant danger.” “[L]iberals are prejudiced against police, much as many white police are biased against Negroes.” The police are “the most downtrodden, oppressed, dislocated minority in America.” Another commonly invoked rationale for justifying police violence is: (10) The Hero Defense. “These guys are heroes.” “The police routinely do what the rest of us don’t: They risk their lives to keep the peace. For that selfless bravery, they deserve glory, laud and honor.” “[W]ithout the police … anarchy would be rife in this country, and the civilization now existing on this hemisphere would perish.” “[T]hey alone stand guard at the upstairs door of Hell.

On December 18, 2003, six months after I had passed my economic recovery plan in the Knesset, Sharon surprised the nation by announcing his plan to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip. His stated rationale was that Israel should rid itself of controlling this sizable Palestinian population, and would do so while giving up minimal territory. He argued that Israel’s security would actually be enhanced and that if a single rocket was fired at us, Israel would retaliate massively with full international backing. Gaza had no special hold on the public’s imagination. Many Israelis would have been delighted to get rid of it. Sharon’s move was aligned with this sentiment, even though it completely contradicted his campaign pledge a few months earlier never to uproot any of the Jewish communities built in the Gaza Strip during the previous four decades.

In an effort to justify the prohibition of 186 species of mushroom, including the ‘offending’ psilocybin containing mushrooms sold to the public through smart shops, Dutch Minister of Health, Dr. Ab Klink, refers to the high instance of anxiety and ‘even paranoia’ experienced by those who use them. He makes no mention of the very low incidence of harm (social or otherwise) involving fresh psilocybin containing mushrooms, or the disproportionate number of alcohol and tobacco related deaths, injuries and social disruptions. We are left with an impression that the Minister believes the state has a duty to banish fear itself. This exemplifies the degree to which scientific and medical rationales may become confused with moral and ideological commitments that undermine the ‘wall of separation between Church and State,’ a fundamental tenet of modern democracy.

Here is a fundamental distinction between Judaism and Christianity. The Gospels record the miracles performed by Jesus at length, and miracles play an extremely significant role in Christianity. The wondrous acts of Jesus, such as reviving the dead, healing the incurable, and transforming water into wine, are meant to serve as cogent evidence not only of his divine authorization but of his divinity. The virgin birth and the resurrection are not only major events but also fundamental articles of belief; this, despite the specific warning in Deuteronomy that "if there arise in your midst a prophet or a dreamer of dreams, and he gives you a sign or a wonder" and that sign or wonder is used as a rationale for rejecting any part of the Torah, then the "miracle" must clearly be rejected. In Christianity, miracles were sufficient to warrant the replacement of the Old Testament by the New, the message of Moses to be superseded by that of Jesus.

You Are What You Eat Take food for example. We all assume that our craving or disgust is due to something about the food itself - as opposed to being an often arbitrary response preprogrammed by our culture. We understand that Australians prefer cricket to baseball, or that the French somehow find Gerard Depardieu sexy, but how hungry would you have to be before you would consider plucking a moth from the night air and popping it, frantic and dusty, into your mouth? Flap, crunch, ooze. You could wash it down with some saliva beer.How does a plate of sheep brain's sound? Broiled puppy with gravy? May we interest you in pig ears or shrimp heads? Perhaps a deep-fried songbird that you chew up, bones, beak, and all? A game of cricket on a field of grass is one thing, but pan-fried crickets over lemongrass? That's revolting. Or is it? If lamb chops are fine, what makes lamb brains horrible? A pig's shoulder, haunch, and belly are damn fine eatin', but the ears, snout, and feet are gross? How is lobster so different from grasshopper? Who distinguishes delectable from disgusting, and what's their rationale? And what about all the expectations? Grind up those leftover pig parts, stuff 'em in an intestine, and you've got yourself respectable sausage or hot dogs. You may think bacon and eggs just go together, like French fries and ketchup or salt and pepper. But the combination of bacon and eggs for breakfast was dreamed up about a hundred years aqo by an advertising hired to sell more bacon, and the Dutch eat their fries with mayonnaise, not ketchup. Think it's rational to be grossed out by eating bugs? Think again. A hundred grams of dehydrated cricket contains 1,550 milligrams of iron, 340 milligrams of calcium, and 25 milligrams of zinc - three minerals often missing in the diets of the chronic poor. Insects are richer in minerals and healthy fats than beef or pork. Freaked out by the exoskeleton, antennae, and the way too many legs? Then stick to the Turf and forget the Surf because shrimps, crabs, and lobsters are all anthropods, just like grasshoppers. And they eat the nastiest of what sinks to the bottom of the ocean, so don't talk about bugs' disgusting diets. Anyway, you may have bug parts stuck between your teeth right now. The Food and Drug Administration tells its inspectors to ignore insect parts in black pepper unless they find more than 475 of them per 50 grams, on average. A fact sheet from Ohio State University estimates that Americans unknowingly eat an average of between one and two pounds of insects per year. An Italian professor recently published Ecological Implications of Mini-livestock: Potential of Insects, Rodents, Frogs and Snails. (Minicowpokes sold separately.) Writing in Slate.com, William Saletan tells us about a company by the name of Sunrise Land Shrimp. The company's logo: "Mmm. That's good Land Shrimp!" Three guesses what Land Shrimp is. (20-21)

Al-Zawahiri, the son of an upper middle-class family who had grown up in Al-Maadi, an affluent Cairene suburb, joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of fifteen right after the 1967 defeat. He quickly moved from the Brotherhood's ordinary ranks to join (and create) independent, highly radicalized cells. Though he had no links to the murder of Sadat, he was imprisoned in the major incarceration waves that followed the crime, and was sentenced to three years. Having served his prison sentence, he emigrated to Saudi Arabia, then soon afterwards to Afghanistan to join in the fight against the Soviets. It was during that time that he met Dr Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian godfather of many militant Islamic groups and the founder of the Jihad Service Bureau, the vehicle that helped recruit thousands of Arabs to the Afghanistan War. Al-Zawahiri became a close friend and confidant of Azzam. After the Soviets' withdrawal from Afghanistan, he returned to Egypt where he became the effective leader of the Al-Jihad group. In 1992, Dr Al-Zawahiri joined his old Arab Afghan colleague, the Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden, in Sudan, and from there he continued to lead Al-Jihad, until its merger with Al-Qaeda in 1998. Dr Al-Zawahiri presented his thinking and rationale for ‘jihad by all means’ in his book Knights under the Prophet's Banner.38

Here are four more strategies to help you stack the deck in your favor when seeking a raise or a promotion: ✓ DO YOUR RESEARCH: Understand your market value and, more important, your value to the company. Be prepared to explain, candidly and concretely, what you feel you’re doing that you’re not being compensated for. Have confidence in your own worth. ✓ ASK TO BE PAID FOR THE JOB YOU’RE ACTUALLY DOING: If your responsibilities have increased but you haven’t been recognized since, say, you’ve taken over for the manager who left several months earlier, approach your new boss and say, “I’ve been effectively doing this person’s job since she departed and I’d like to formally assume her position.” Have a conversation. Express that you feel confident you can grow in this role and create value for the organization. ✓ PROVE YOUR WORTH: To earn an increase in salary, you need to be increasing your responsibilities and performing at a higher level than when you were hired. ✓ DON’T NEGOTIATE IF YOUR BOSS SAYS NO: Typically no means no when it comes to this type of discussion. If your boss says no, you have two choices: you either accept the rationale, think about it, and grow based on the feedback, or you leave. This is a good time to be reflective. Ask why you haven’t earned the increase. You may not walk away with a new title or more money, but hopefully you’ll learn something that will help you correct your course moving forward.

The other problem with empathy is that it is too parochial to serve as a force for a universal consideration of people’s interests. Mirror neurons notwithstanding, empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity. Though empathy can be spread outward by taking other people’s perspectives, the increments are small, Batson warns, and they may be ephemeral.71 To hope that the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature.72 Nor is it necessary. The ideal of the expanding circle does not mean that we must feel the pain of everyone else on earth. No one has the time or energy, and trying to spread our empathy that thinly would be an invitation to emotional burnout and compassion fatigue.73 The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them. What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need. SELF-CONTROL

The educational goal of self-esteem seems to habituate young people to work that lacks objective standards and revolves instead around group dynamics. When self-esteem is artificially generated, it becomes more easily manipulable, a product of social technique rather than a secure possession of one’s own based on accomplishments. Psychologists find a positive correlation between repeated praise and “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.” 36 The more children are praised, the more they have a stake in maintaining the resulting image they have of themselves; children who are praised for being smart choose the easier alternative when given a new task. 37 They become risk-averse and dependent on others. The credential loving of college students is a natural response to such an education, and prepares them well for the absence of objective standards in the job markets they will enter; the validity of your self-assessment is known to you by the fact it has been dispensed by gatekeeping institutions. Prestigious fellowships, internships, and degrees become the standard of self-esteem. This is hardly an education for independence, intellectual adventurousness, or strong character. “If you don’t vent the drain pipe like this, sewage gases will seep up through the water in the toilet, and the house will stink of shit.” In the trades, a master offers his apprentice good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, the better to realize ends the goodness of which is readily apparent. The master has no need for a psychology of persuasion that will make the apprentice compliant to whatever purposes the master might dream up; those purposes are given and determinate. He does the same work as the apprentice, only better. He is able to explain what he does to the apprentice, because there are rational principles that govern it. Or he may explain little, and the learning proceeds by example and imitation. For the apprentice there is a progressive revelation of the reasonableness of the master’s actions. He may not know why things have to be done a certain way at first, and have to take it on faith, but the rationale becomes apparent as he gains experience. Teamwork doesn’t have this progressive character. It depends on group dynamics, which are inherently unstable and subject to manipulation. On a crew,