Replacement Related Quotes

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Now, let's never talk about you being related to her again. Because I'm technically still engaged to her, and that's really weird." Cinder couldn't help laughing, even exhaustedly, even just to cover up the screaming inside, as he bound her up in his arms again. Her headache began to fade, replaced with the strength of his heartbeat and the way she felt almost delicate when she was pressed up against him like this. Almost fragile. Almost safe. Almost like a princess.
Marissa Meyer (Cress (The Lunar Chronicles, #3))
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.
Peter Matthiessen
Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the universal experiences, like love and weeping and laughter, common to all human beings.
Aberjhani (Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays)
Dear God Please take away my pain and despair of yesterday and any unpleasant memories and replace them with Your glorious promise of new hope. Show me a fresh HS-inspired way of relating to negative things that have happened. I ask You for the mind of Christ so I can discern Your voice from the voice of my past. I pray that former rejection and deep hurts will not color what I see and hear now. Help me to see all the choices I have ahead of me that can alter the direction of my life. I ask You to empower me to let go of the painful events and heartaches that would keep me bound. Thank You for Your forgiveness that You have offered to me at such a great price. Pour it into my heart so I can relinquish bitterness hurts and disappointments that have no place in my life. Please set me free to forgive those who have sinned against me and caused me pain and also myself. Open my heart to receive Your complete forgiveness and amazing grace. You have promised to bind up my wounds Psa 147:3 and restore my soul Psa 23:3 . Help me to relinquish my past surrender to You my present and move to the future You have prepared for me. I ask You to come into my heart and make me who You would have me to be so that I might do Your will here on earth. I thank You Lord for all that’s happened in my past and for all I have become through those experiences. I pray You will begin to gloriously renew my present.
Sue Augustine (When Your Past Is Hurting Your Present: Getting Beyond Fears That Hold You Back)
Mathematicians do not deal in objects, but in relations between objects; thus, they are free to replace some objects by others so lone as the relations remain unchanged. Content to them is irrelevant; they are interested in form only.
Henri Poincaré
Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content.
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
When I hear the phrase “Asians are next in line to be white,” I replace the word “white” with “disappear.” Asians are next in line to disappear. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. This country insists that our racial identity is beside the point, that it has nothing to do with being bullied, or passed over for promotion, or cut off every time we talk. Our race has nothing to do with this country, even, which is why we’re often listed as “Other” in polls and why we’re hard to find in racial breakdowns on reported rape or workplace discrimination or domestic abuse. It’s like being ghosted, I suppose, where, deprived of all social cues, I have no relational gauge for my own behavior. I ransack my mind for what I could have done, could have said. I stop trusting what I see, what I hear. My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.
Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning)
If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.
William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch: The Restored Text)
Line of control must be renamed as garden of love and the barbed wire fencing should be replaced by the garden of flowers.
Amit Ray (Nuclear Weapons Free World - Peace on the Earth)
Manage me, I am a mess, swept under the rug of yesterday’s home improvement, a whimsical urge tossed aside for the easy reassurance of home and comfort. I am the photograph tucked away as a book-mark, in a book left half unread, once reopened to find memories crawling back into peripheral sight, faded, creased and lonely. I long to be admired, long to be held, torn and laughed at, laughed with, like a distant relative or an old friend breathing in their last breath. I missed the moment when time collapsed and memory was erased, replaced by finicky social experiments, lost in the blur of intoxication, sucked through multi-colored bendy-straws, making way for a spinning world where hub-caps stood still, but our vision didn’t. If I could leave you with only one thing, it would be small, foldable, and made from trees, with a few careless words, scribbled in blue; Take a minute to learn me, take a moment to love me, because I need your love to live,and without it, I am nothing.
Alex Gaskarth
Lily had lived with the same pain for so long it felt like a part of her. The worst days, though, were when the pain was different. When it came faster, or harsher, or fiercer than she was used to. When it prickled instead of throbbed. When it attacked her right ankle instead of her left knee. When it woke her up at night instead of aching dully first thing in the morning. On those days, her standard-issue pain was replaced by something different and frightening, something that took over her body and left her without the slightest clue of when, or even if, it would release her. Those times, her pain wasn’t a part of her anymore. Those times, she was a part of it.
Robin Talley (As I Descended)
That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes -- the legal subordination of one sex to the other -- is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.
John Stuart Mill
Can anyone actually find a replacement for a lost loved one? Isn't there a difference between things and human beings?
honeya
Our whole image of wolf packs and alphas is completely wrong. Instead, wolves live the way people do:7 in families made up of a mom, a dad, and their children. Sometimes an unrelated wolf can be adopted into a pack, or one of the mom’s or dad’s relatives is part of the pack (the “maiden aunt”), or a mom or dad who has died could be replaced by a new wolf. But mostly wolf packs are just a mom, a dad, and their pups.
Temple Grandin (Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals – A NYT Bestseller on the Emotional Needs of Dogs, Cats, Horses, and Zoo Creatures)
When everything is convertible, and when trust depends on anonymous coins and cowry shells, it corrodes local traditions, intimate relations and human values, replacing them with the cold laws of supply and demand.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.
John Stuart Mill (The Subjection of Women)
Question: Which Mediterranean government shares all of Ronald Reagan's views on international terrorism, the present danger of Soviet advance, the hypocrisy of the United Nations, the unreliability of Europe, the perfidy of the Third World and the need for nuclear defense policy? Question: Which Mediterranean government is Ronald Reagan trying, with the help of George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, to replace with a government led by a party which professes socialism and which contains extreme leftists? If you answered 'the government of Israel' to both of the above, you know more about political and international irony than the President does.
Christopher Hitchens
Once war was considered the business of soldiers, international relations the concern of diplomats. But now that war has become seemingly total and seemingly permanent, the free sport of kings has become the forced and internecine business of people, and diplomatic codes of honor between nations have collapsed. Peace in no longer serious; only war is serious. Every man and every nation is either friend or foe, and the idea of enmity becomes mechanical, massive, and without genuine passion. When virtually all negotiation aimed at peaceful agreement is likely to be seen as 'appeasement,' if not treason, the active role of the diplomat becomes meaningless; for diplomacy becomes merely a prelude to war an interlude between wars, and in such a context the diplomat is replaced by the warlord.
C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite)
The relations one has with a woman one loves (and that can apply also to love for a youth) can remain platonic for other reasons than the chastity of the woman or the unsensual nature of the love she inspires. The reason may be that the lover is too impatient and by the very excess of his love is unable to await the moment when he will obtain his desires by sufficient pretence of indifference. Continually, he returns to the charge, he never ceases writing to her whom he loves, he is always trying to see her, she refuses herself, he becomes desperate. From that time she knows, if she grants him her company, her friendship, that these benefits will seem so considerable to one who believed he was going to be deprived of them, that she need grant nothing more and that she can take advantage of the moment when he can no longer bear being unable to see her and when, at all costs, he must put an end to the struggle by accepting a truce which will impose upon him a platonic relationship as its preliminary condition. Moreover, during all the time that preceded this truce, the lover, in a constant state of anxiety, ceaselessly hoping for a letter, a glance, has long ceased thinking of the physical desire which at first tormented him but which has been exhausted by waiting and has been replaced by another order of longings more painful still if left unsatisfied. The pleasure formerly anticipated from caresses will later be accorded but transmuted into friendly words and promises of intercourse which brings delicious moments after the strain of uncertainty or after a look impregnated with such coldness that it seemed to remove the loved one beyond hope of his ever seeing her again. Women divine all this and know they can afford the luxury of never yielding to those who, from the first, have betrayed their inextinguishable desire. A woman is enchanted if, without giving anything, she can receive more than she generally gets when she does give herself.
Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7])
The present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content.
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production.
Friedrich Engels (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)
Consider an AI that has hedonism as its final goal, and which would therefore like to tile the universe with “hedonium” (matter organized in a configuration that is optimal for the generation of pleasurable experience). To this end, the AI might produce computronium (matter organized in a configuration that is optimal for computation) and use it to implement digital minds in states of euphoria. In order to maximize efficiency, the AI omits from the implementation any mental faculties that are not essential for the experience of pleasure, and exploits any computational shortcuts that according to its definition of pleasure do not vitiate the generation of pleasure. For instance, the AI might confine its simulation to reward circuitry, eliding faculties such as a memory, sensory perception, executive function, and language; it might simulate minds at a relatively coarse-grained level of functionality, omitting lower-level neuronal processes; it might replace commonly repeated computations with calls to a lookup table; or it might put in place some arrangement whereby multiple minds would share most parts of their underlying computational machinery (their “supervenience bases” in philosophical parlance). Such tricks could greatly increase the quantity of pleasure producible with a given amount of resources.
Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies)
our tragedy begins humid. in a humid classroom. with a humid text book. breaking into us. stealing us from ourselves. one poem. at a time. it begins with shakespeare. the hot wash. the cool acid. of dead white men and women. people. each one a storm. crashing. into our young houses. making us islands. easy isolations. until we are so beleaguered and swollen with a definition of poetry that is white skin and not us. that we tuck our scalding. our soreness. behind ourselves and learn poetry. as trauma. as violence. as erasure. another place we do not exist. another form of exile where we should praise. honor. our own starvation. the little bits of langston. phyllis wheatley. and angelou during black history month. are the crumbs. are the minor boats. that give us slight rest. to be waterdrugged into rejecting the nuances of my own bursting extraordinary self. and to have this be called education. to take my name out of my name. out of where my native poetry lives. in me. and replace it with keats. browning. dickson. wolf. joyce. wilde. wolfe. plath. bronte. hemingway. hughes. byron. frost. cummings. kipling. poe. austen. whitman. blake. longfellow. wordsworth. duffy. twain. emerson. yeats. tennyson. auden. thoreau. chaucer. thomas. raliegh. marlowe. burns. shelley. carroll. elliot… (what is the necessity of a black child being this high off of whiteness.) and so. we are here. brown babies. worshipping. feeding. the glutton that is white literature. even after it dies. (years later. the conclusion: shakespeare is relative. white literature is relative. that we are force fed the meat of an animal that our bodies will not recognize. as inherent nutrition. is not relative. is inert.)
Nayyirah Waheed (Nejma)
Of all the intoxicants you can find on the road (including a "national beer" for nearly every country in the world), marijuana deserves a particular mention here, primarily because it's so popular with travelers. Much of this popularity is due to the fact that marijuana is a relatively harmless diversion (again, provided you don't get caught with it) that can intensify certain impressions and sensations of travel. The problem with marijuana, however, is that it's the travel equivalent of watching television: It replaces real sensations with artificially enhanced ones. Because it doesn't force you to work for a feeling, it creates passive experiences that are only vaguely connected to the rest of your life. "The drug vision remains a sort of dream that cannot be brought over into daily life," wrote Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard. "Old mists may be banished, that is true, but the alien chemical agent forms another mist, maintaining the separation of the 'I' from the true experience of the 'One.'" Moreover, chemical highs have a way of distracting you from the utterly stoning natural high of travel itself. After all, roasting a bowl might spice up a random afternoon in Dayton, Ohio, but is it really all that necessary along the Sumatran shores of Lake Toba, the mountain basins of Nepal, or the desert plateaus of Patagonia? As Salvador Dali quipped, "I never took drugs because I am drugs." With this in mind, strive to be drugs as you travel, to patiently embrace the raw, personal sensation of unmediated reality--an experience for more affecting than any intoxicant can promise.
Rolf Potts
The study reported a 24 percent relative increase in the risk of breast cancer among a subset of women taking HRT, and headlines all over the world condemned HRT as a dangerous, cancer-causing therapy. All of a sudden, on the basis of this one study, hormone replacement treatment became virtually taboo. This reported 24 percent risk increase sounded scary indeed. But nobody seemed to care that the absolute risk increase of breast cancer for women in the study remained minuscule. Roughly five out of every one thousand women in the HRT group developed breast cancer, versus four out of every one thousand in the control group, who received no hormones.
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing.
Henry Kissinger (World Order)
She was one of the few stay-at-home moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else. She said that she expected to be “beheaded” someday by one of the windows whose sash chains she’d replaced. Her children were “probably” dying of trichinosis from pork she’d undercooked. She wondered if her “addiction” to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her “never” reading books anymore. She confided that she’d been “forbidden” to fertilize Walter’s flowers after what had happened “last time.
Jonathan Franzen (Freedom)
The Rhineland cities were developing the market economy that would eventually replace agrarian civilization; they were therefore in the very early stages of modernization, a transition that always strains social relations.
Karen Armstrong (Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence)
How does one undermine the framework of racial reasoning? By dismantling each pillar slowly and systematically. The fundamental aim of this undermining and dismantling is to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning, to understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles and wise politics, and to combat the black nationalist attempt to subordinate the issues and interests of black women by linking mature black self-love and self-respect to egalitarian relations within and outside black communities. The failure of nerve of black leadership is its refusal to undermine and dismantle the framework of racial reasoning.
Cornel West (Race Matters)
This is the pattern of gun killings in big cities. Most homicides are not professional jobs, in felonious pursuits, but are committed by relatives, friends or neighbors, in the home or nearby. They are sparked by liquor, by lust, by jealousy, or greed, or a burning sense of injustice. And most are committed by people with no previous record of violence. It is these who will be restrained by stricter gun laws, who will find it much harder to go home, pick up a gun and shoot an adversary. The liquor will pass, the lust will die, reflection will replace passion if the instrument of death is not so readily available.
Sydney J. Harris
The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist. ... A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well?
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest)
Assimilation was frequently but another name for the very special brand of relations between human beings which had been imposed by colonialism. These relations demanded that the individual, torn from the context to which he owed his identity, should replace his habits of feeling, thinking, and acting by another set of habits which belonged to the strangers who dominated him.
James Baldwin (Nobody Knows My Name)
Whereas penetration most often means that industry demand will level off, for durable goods, achieving penetration can lead to an abrupt drop in industry demand. After most potential customers have purchased the product, its durability implies that few will buy replacements for a number of years. If industry penetration has been rapid, this situation may translate into several very lean years for industry demand. For example, industry sales of snowmobiles, which underwent very rapid penetration, fell from 425,000 units per year in the peak year (1970-1971) to 125,000 to 200,000 units per year in 1976-1977.6 Recreational vehicles underwent a similar though not quite so dramatic decline. The relation between the growth rate after penetration and growth before penetration will be a function of how fast penetration has been reached and the average time before replacement, and this figure can be calculated.
Michael E. Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors)
I believe that the Big-Bang Theory and the Evolution Theory, as well as Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory which does not allow for the existence of faster-than-light (superluminal) phenomena, all have flaws in them and must be replaced by new theories that can give Mankind a more concise view of our Universe. But the fact is exceptional discoveries and theories that challenge official science have been ignored by the Establishment for decades.
Takaaki Musha (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
Global warming, in contrast, will probably have different impacts on different nations. Some countries, most notably Russia, might actually benefit from it. Because Russia has relatively few coastline assets, it is far less worried than China or Kiribati about rising sea levels. And whereas higher temperatures are likely to turn Chad into a desert, they might simultaneously turn Siberia into the breadbasket of the world. Moreover, as the ice melts in the far north, the Russian-dominated Arctic sea lanes might become the artery of global commerce, and Kamchatka might replace Singapore as the crossroad of the world.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
Many historians have noted an interesting phenomenon in American life in the years immediately after a war. In the councils of government fierce partisanship replaces the necessary political coalitions of wartime. IN the great arena of social relations -- business, labour, the community -- violence rises, fear and recrimination dominate public discussion, passion prevails over reason. Many historians have noted this phenomenon. It is attributed to the continuance beyond the end of the war of the war hysteria. Unfortunately, the necessary emotional fever for fighting a war cannot be turned off like a water tap. Enemies must continue to be found. The mind and heart cannot be demobilised as quickly as the platoon. On the contrary, like a fiery furnace at white heat, it takes a considerable time to cool.
E.L. Doctorow (The Book of Daniel)
How long does it take to accurately replace a person, I wonder? Certainly longer than a life. An eye patch doesn't relate the eye, it just provides temporary coverage.
Hilary Leichter (Temporary)
We destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education with social.
Kevin Swanson (Apostate - The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West)
Sociologists keep the rationality hypothesis of the consumer away and replace it in the heart of social relations and strengths in which it is taken.
David Abikzir (Flash Winners)
some people cannot be replaced no matter how many relations you create. the person with whom you share yourself and all your thoughts and ideas is irreplaceable.
umair jan
The more obsessed with personal identity campus liberals become, the less willing they become to engage in reasoned political debate. Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: 'Speaking as an X' . . . This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. (One never says, 'Speaking as an gay Asian, I fell incompetent to judge on this matter'). It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned. So classroom conversations that once might have begun, 'I think A, and here is my argument', now take the form, 'Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B'. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means that there is no impartial space for dialogue. White men have one "epistemology", black women have another. So what remains to be said? What replaces argument, then, is taboo. At times our more privileged campuses can seem stuck in the world of archaic religion. Only those with an approved identity status are, like shamans, allowed to speak on certain matters. Particular groups -- today the transgendered -- are given temporary totemic significance. Scapegoats -- today conservative political speakers -- are duly designated and run off campus in a purging ritual. Propositions become pure or impure, not true or false. And not only propositions but simple words. Left identitarians who think of themselves as radical creatures, contesting this and transgressing that, have become like buttoned-up Protestant schoolmarms when it comes to the English language, parsing every conversation for immodest locutions and rapping the knuckles of those who inadvertently use them.
Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics)
Deception is the natural defence of the weak against the strong, and the South used it for many years against its conquerors; to-day it must be prepared to see its black proletariat turn that same two-edged weapon against itself. And how natural this is! The death of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner proved long since to the Negro the present hopelessness of physical defence. Political defence is becoming less and less available, and economic defence is still only partially effective. But there is a patent defence at hand,—the defence of deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying. It is the same defence which peasants of the Middle Age used and which left its stamp on their character for centuries. To-day the young Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive personal advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he must not complain. Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage. With this sacrifice there is an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity. Without this there is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is this situation peculiar to the Southern United States, is it not rather the only method by which undeveloped races have gained the right to share modern culture? The price of culture is a Lie.
W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk)
every year 98% of your atoms are replaced with the air that you breathe, the foods that you eat and the liquid that you drink [79]. This might sound slightly scary or even a surprise to you but look at it as an opportunity. An opportunity that you can take to make a new slimmer healthier body for yourself by eating well and exercising smartly, and in a years time you'll literally be looking at an almost whole new you.
Sam Feltham (Slimology: The Relatively Simple Science Of Slimming)
Hanging out consists of people getting together in groups and doing stuff together. The atmosphere is relaxed and relations in the group rarely rise above the level of friendship (or friendship with benefits). Dating consists of pairing off with someone in a temporary commitment so you can get to know the person better and perhaps start a long-term relationship with them. There is nothing wrong with hanging out, but it’s not a replacement for dating.
Brett McKay (The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man)
In my travels on the surface, I once met a man who wore his religious beliefs like a badge of honor upon the sleeves of his tunic. "I am a Gondsman!" he proudly told me as we sat beside eachother at a tavern bar, I sipping my wind, and he, I fear, partaking a bit too much of his more potent drink. He went on to explain the premise of his religion, his very reason for being, that all things were based in science, in mechanics and in discovery. He even asked if he could take a piece of my flesh, that he might study it to determine why the skin of the drow elf is black. "What element is missing," he wondered, "that makes your race different from your surface kin?" I think that the Gondsman honestly believed his claim that if he could merely find the various elements that comprised the drow skin, he might affect a change in that pigmentation to make the dark elves more akin to their surface relatives. And, given his devotion, almost fanaticism, it seemed to me as if he felt he could affect a change in more than physical appearance. Because, in his view of the world, all things could be so explained and corrected. How could i even begin to enlighten him to the complexity? How could i show him the variations between drow and surface elf in the very view of the world resulting from eons of walking widely disparate roads? To a Gondsman fanatic, everything can be broken down, taken apart and put back together. Even a wizard's magic might be no more than a way of conveying universal energies - and that, too, might one day be replicated. My Gondsman companion promised me that he and his fellow inventor priests would one day replicate every spell in any wizard's repertoire, using natural elements in the proper combinations. But there was no mention of the discipline any wizard must attain as he perfects his craft. There was no mention of the fact that powerful wizardly magic is not given to anyone, but rather, is earned, day by day, year by year and decade by decade. It is a lifelong pursuit with gradual increase in power, as mystical as it is secular. So it is with the warrior. The Gondsman spoke of some weapon called an arquebus, a tubular missile thrower with many times the power of the strongest crossbow. Such a weapon strikes terror into the heart of the true warrior, and not because he fears that he will fall victim to it, or even that he fears it will one day replace him. Such weapons offend because the true warrior understands that while one is learning how to use a sword, one should also be learning why and when to use a sword. To grant the power of a weapon master to anyone at all, without effort, without training and proof that the lessons have taken hold, is to deny the responsibility that comes with such power. Of course, there are wizards and warriors who perfect their craft without learning the level of emotional discipline to accompany it, and certainly there are those who attain great prowess in either profession to the detriment of all the world - Artemis Entreri seems a perfect example - but these individuals are, thankfully, rare, and mostly because their emotional lacking will be revealed early in their careers, and it often brings about a fairly abrupt downfall. But if the Gondsman has his way, if his errant view of paradise should come to fruition, then all the years of training will mean little. Any fool could pick up an arquebus or some other powerful weapon and summarily destroy a skilled warrior. Or any child could utilize a Gondsman's magic machine and replicate a firebal, perhaps, and burn down half a city. When I pointed out some of my fears to the Gondsman, he seemed shocked - not at the devastating possibilities, but rather, at my, as he put it, arrogance. "The inventions of the priests of Gond will make all equal!" he declared. "We will lift up the lowly peasant
R.A. Salvatore (Streams of Silver (Forgotten Realms: The Icewind Dale, #2; Legend of Drizzt, #5))
Making God’s mission into an idol is a common and serious fault of the LIFE FOR GOD posture because it perpetuates the rebellion of Eden; it is a more subtle way of dethroning God and replacing him with something we can control.
Skye Jethani (With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God)
. . . Neither ecological nor social engineering will lead us to a conflict-free, simple path . . . Utilitarians and others who simply advise us to be happy are unhelpful, because we almost always have to make a choice either between different kinds of happiness--different things to be happy _about_--or between these and other things we want, which nothing to do with happiness. . . . Do we find ourselves a species naturally free from conflict? We do not. There has not, apparently, been in our evolution a kind of rationalization which might seem a possible solution to problems of conflict--namely, a takeover by some major motive, such as the desire for future pleasure, which would automatically rule out all competing desires. Instead, what has developed is our intelligence. And this in some ways makes matters worse, since it shows us many desirable things that we would not otherwise have thought of, as well as the quite sufficient number we knew about for a start. In compensation, however, it does help us to arbitrate. Rules and principles, standards and ideals emerge as part of a priority system by which we guide ourselves through the jungle. They never make the job easy--desires that we put low on our priority system do not merely vanish--but they make it possible. And it is in working out these concepts more fully, in trying to extend their usefulness, that moral philosophy begins. Were there no conflict, it [moral philosophy] could never have arisen. The motivation of living creatures does got boil down to any single basic force, not even an 'instinct of self-preservation.' It is a complex pattern of separate elements, balanced roughly in the constitution of the species, but always liable to need adjusting. Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means to survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict. Motivation is fundamentally plural. . . An obsessive creature dominated constantly by one kind of motive, would not survive. All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like. The traditional business of moral philosophy is attempting to understand, clarify, relate, and harmonize so far as possible the claims arising from different sides of our nature. . . . One motive does not necessarily replace another smoothly and unremarked. There is _ambivalence_, conflict behavior.
Mary Midgley (Beast and Man)
Stories tell of children stolen away by faeries, replaced by inhuman look-alikes. These look-alikes, they say, could be identified by their strange speech or silence. They cried without reason or never showed any emotion at all, and struggled to relate to a world that seemed foreign to them. Folklorists theorize that these stories were early descriptions of autistic children - proof that autistic people have always been here. But once, they called us changelings.
Ivelisse Housman (Unseelie (The Unseelie Duology, #1))
Annual global demand for fossil carbon is now just above 10 billion tons a year—a mass nearly five times more than the recent annual harvest of all staple grains feeding humanity, and more than twice the total mass of water drunk annually by the world’s nearly 8 billion inhabitants—and it should be obvious that displacing and replacing such a mass is not something best handled by government targets for years ending in zero or five. Both the high relative share and the scale of our dependence on fossil carbon make any rapid substitutions impossible: this is not a biased personal impression stemming from a poor understanding of the global energy system – but a realistic conclusion based on engineering and economic realities.
Vaclav Smil (How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going)
Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles...In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women's natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma...The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972...The lucrative 'transfer of guilt' was resurrected just in time.
Naomi Wolf
As you work to replace lost nurturance, protection, and guidance, remember that this is an ongoing process. You’re building a new brain, and like any new routine, it takes time before you feel the results. Please don’t do all this by yourself. You’ve been alone long enough. Your body is designed for well-being, but we are relational creatures and we need connection with others. Healing Mother Hunger brings you home—home to yourself—but it’s really helpful when you have a village around your home.
Kelly McDaniel (Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance)
I, for one, would prefer to speak of uniqueness rather than relativity. [...] [M]an is unique in terms of both existence and essence. He is unique in that, in the final analysis, he cannot be replaced. And his life is unique in that no one can repeat it.
Viktor E. Frankl (The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy)
Freud does at this point shift ground. He moves from an energetic to a topological model of the psyche. So that there be no contradiction, Freud assigns the pleasure principle to its own agency of the personality. “We know,” Freud reminds us, “that the pleasure principle is proper to a primary method of working on the part of the mental apparatus, but that, from the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the external world, it is from the very outset inefficient and even highly dangerous.” That is, the PP is blind. In itself, it is not a tendency but pure automaticity which, with respect to another topos undergoes a mutation by which is “is replaced by the reality principle.” A change in place obviates the contradiction but sets the places into relation by which the PP becomes the reality principle (RP.)
Patrick McCarty (Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as Analyzed by Jacques Derrida: ICG Academic Series)
A great deal of the pleasure which a woman finds in entering a class of society different from that in which she has previously lived would be lacking if she had no means of keeping her old associates informed of those others, relatively more brilliant, with whom she has replaced them.
Marcel Proust (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
We have shown two important and related sets of facts. In most US industries, market shares have become more concentrated and more persistent. Industry leaders are less likely to be challenged and replaced than they were twenty years ago. At the same time, their profit margins have increased.
Thomas Philippon (The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets)
Even if a particle could travel backward in time, information could not. Retrocausality will be replaced by something more sophisticated. There are no perfect symmetries, there is no pure randomness everything is an approximation of something else. Information may appear in a digital form but meaning never does. Spacetime is built up from approximations, not discrete ones and zeros, and the only constant may be ratios. Quantum entanglement and geometry; if we think of a particle as being at one pole of an expanding sphere that is not perfectly symmetrical, this surface would be "rippling" like the surface of the ocean (in the audio world this is called dithering), at the other pole is the entangled particle's pair and it is a property of the sphere that gives the illusion of connectivity. This is not a physical geometry, it is a computational geometry. Is spacetime a product of entanglement? Renate Loll believes that time is not perfectly symmetrical. Her computer models require causality. Possibly some form of quantum random walk in state space. If a photon is emitted by an electron inside of a clock on Earth and it travels to a clock four light years away, time stops for the clock on Earth and time jumps forward eight years for the distant clock also, the electron that will capture the photon becomes infinitely large relative to the photon but the electron that emitted it does not become infinitely small therefore, time is not perfectly symmetrical.
Rick Delmonico
It is my conviction that, with the spread of true scientific culture, whatever may be the medium, historical, philological, philosophical, or physical, through which that culture is conveyed, and with its necessary concomitant, a constant elevation of the standard of veracity, the end of the evolution of theology will be like its beginning—it will cease to have any relation to ethics. I suppose that, so long as the human mind exists, it will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify its intellectual conceptions. The science of the present day is as full of this particular form of intellectual shadow-worship as is the nescience of ignorant ages. The difference is that the philosopher who is worthy of the name knows that his personified hypotheses, such as law, and force, and ether, and the like, are merely useful symbols, while the ignorant and the careless take them for adequate expressions of reality. So, it may be, that the majority of mankind may find the practice of morality made easier by the use of theological symbols. And unless these are converted from symbols into idols, I do not see that science has anything to say to the practice, except to give an occasional warning of its dangers. But, when such symbols are dealt with as real existences, I think the highest duty which is laid upon men of science is to show that these dogmatic idols have no greater value than the fabrications of men's hands, the stocks and the stones, which they have replaced.
Thomas Henry Huxley (The Evolution Of Theology: An Anthropological Study)
This extreme treatment was among the proliferating regimens developed in response to the stunning increase in nervous disorders diagnosed around the turn of the century. Commentators and clinicians cited a number of factors related to the stresses of modern civilization: the increased speed of communication facilitated by the telegraph and railroad; the “unmelodious” clamor of city life replacing the “rhythmical” sounds of nature; and the rise of the tabloid press that exploded “local horrors” into national news. These nervous diseases became an epidemic among “the ultracompetitive businessman and the socially active woman.
Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism)
A child who has been denied the experience of connecting with his own emotions is first consciously and then unconsciously (through the internal identification with the parent) dependent on his parents. Alice Miller writes: He cannot rely on his own emotions, has not come to experience them through trial and error, has no sense of his own real needs and is alienated from himself to the highest degree. Such a person cannot separate from his parents. He is fantasy bonded with them. He has an illusion (fantasy) of connection, i.e., he really thinks there is a love relationship between himself and his parents. Actually he is fused and enmeshed. This is an entrapment rather than a relationship. Later on this fantasy bond will be transferred to other relationships. This fantasy-bonded person is still dependent on affirmation from his partner, his children, his job. He is especially dependent on his children. A fantasy-bonded person never has a real connection or a real relationship with anyone. There is no real, authentic self there for another to relate to. The real parents, who only accepted the child when he pleased them, remain as introjected voices. The true self hides from these introjected voices just as the real child did. The “loneliness of the parental home” is replaced by “isolation within the self.” Grandiosity is often the result of all this. The grandiose person is admired everywhere and cannot live without admiration. If his talents fail him, it is catastrophic. He must be perfect, otherwise depression is near. Often the most gifted among us are driven in precisely this manner. Many of the most gifted people suffer from severe depression. It cannot be otherwise because depression is about the lost and abandoned child within. “One is free from depression,” writes Alice Miller in The Drama of the Gifted Child, “when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of one’s own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.” Emotional abandonment is most often multigenerational. The child of the narcissistically deprived parent becomes an adult with a narcissistically deprived child and will use his children as he was used for his narcissistic supplies. That child then becomes an adult child and the cycle is repeated.
John Bradshaw (Healing the Shame that Binds You)
I sense a dark foreboding in man’s separation from his body, as if it heralded the severing of man’s direct link to nature’s laws. This is not a minor issue: it’s about whether man is a human being or a machine. This question is related to even more profound matters — in fact, the most serious matters of all. The most crucial question regarding every human action in this era is how much strain it exercises on nature: the choice is between growth and preservation. This increasing lack of physical exercise does not bode well. The replacement of muscle power with industrial energy means, of course, a great increase of burden, the fiasco of all fiascos.
Pentti Linkola (Can Life Prevail?)
By the twentieth century, when the individual had replaced the family as the primary economic unit, the tie between sexuality and reproduction weakened further. Influenced by psychology as well as by the growing power of the media, both men and women began to adopt personal happiness as a primary goal of sexual relations. Various
John D'Emilio (Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America)
More pertinent, however, is that capitalism tends to stultify the worker’s creativity, his human urge for self-expression, freedom, mutually respectful interaction with others, recognition of his self-determined sense of self, recognition of himself as a self rather than an object, a means to an end. Karl Marx called it “alienation.” Capitalism alienates the worker—and the capitalist—from his “fundamental human need” for “self-fulfilling and creative work,” “the exercise of skill and craftsmanship,”8 in addition to his fundamental desire to determine himself (whence comes the desire to dismantle oppressive power-relations and replace them with democracy). Alternative visions of social organization thus arise, including Robert Owen’s communitarian socialism, Charles Fourier’s associationist communalism, Proudhon’s mutualism (a kind of anarchism), Marx’s communism, Bakunin’s collectivist anarchism, Kropotkin’s anarchist communism, Anton Pannekoek’s council communism, and more recently, Murray Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, Michael Albert’s participatory economics, Takis Fotopoulos’s inclusive democracy, Paul Hirst’s associationalism, and so on. Each of these schools of thought differs from the others in more or less defined ways, but they all have in common the privileging of economic and social cooperation and egalitarianism.
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
Establish and employ metrics for measuring your status relative to other potential challengers. Chinese strategy places a high premium on assessing China’s relative power, during peacetime and in the event of war, across a plethora of dimensions beyond just military considerations. The United States, by contrast, has never attempted to do this.
Michael Pillsbury (The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower)
These statues have a complex history. They were not erected to honor the Confederate dead following the war or even at the end of Reconstruction. Most appeared in the early 1920s to send a message that the race-relation liberalization that happened between 1880 and 1900 would not return. The progress and normalcy would be replaced by a racist/statist/“progressive” movement rallying around new eugenic laws, zoning, white supremacy, forced exclusion, state segregation and so on—policies supported not by the people but by white elites infected with demographic fear and pseudo-science. This is when a movement started putting up these statues, not to honor history but as a symbol of intimidation and state control of association.
Jeffrey Tucker (Right-Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty)
In their later years, each (Einstein and Schrödinger) hoped to find a unified field theory that would fill in the gaps of quantum physics and unite the forces of nature. By extending general relativity to include all of the natural forces, such a theory would replace matter with pure geometry - fulfilling the dream of the Pythagoreans, who believed that "all is number".
Paul Halpern
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students' reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. These are things you don't think about. The students' backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral inten- tion. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society.
Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind)
How do we move from a growing culture of cruelty to a culture of compassion where we not only perceive and relate to our fellow Americans with a sense of solidarity, but in which public policy reflects community, mutual kindness and concern, and where the idea of the common good is revived so as to replace the alienating, disconnected individualism that threatens to destroy us?
Tim Wise (Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America (City Lights Open Media))
should a legislator, wishing to impose a new tax, choose that which would be theoretically the most just? By no means. In practice the most unjust may be the best for the masses. Should it at the same time be the least obvious, and apparently the least burdensome, it will be the most easily tolerated. It is for this reason that an indirect tax, however exorbitant it be, will always be accepted by the crowd, because, being paid daily in fractions of a farthing on objects of consumption, it will not interfere with the habits of the crowd, and will pass unperceived. Replace it by a proportional tax on wages or income of any other kind, to be paid in a lump sum, and were this new imposition theoretically ten times less burdensome than the other, it would give rise to unanimous protest. This arises from the fact that a sum relatively high, which will appear immense, and will in consequence strike the imagination, has been substituted for the unperceived fractions of a farthing. The new tax would only appear light had it been saved farthing by farthing, but this economic proceeding involves an amount of foresight of which the masses are incapable.
Gustave Le Bon (The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind)
Economics 2.0 apparently replaces the single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the parameterized desires and subjective experiential values of the players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all such transactions intrinsically untrustworthy.
Charles Stross (Accelerando)
Unfortunately the hostility that the European displayed toward the native cultures he encountered he carried even further into his relations with the land. The immense open spaces of the American continents, with all their unexploited or thinly utilized resources, were treated as a challenge to unrelenting war, destruction, and conquest. The forests were there to be cut down, the prairie to be plowed up, the marshes to be filled, the wildlife to be killed for empty sport, even if not utilized for food or clothing. In the act of 'conquering nature' our ancestors too often treated the earth as contemptuously and as brutally as they treated its original inhabitants, wiping out great animal species like the bison and the passenger pigeon, mining the soils instead of annually replenishing them, and even, in the present day, invading the last wilderness areas, precious just because they are still wildernesses, homes for wildlife and solitary human souls. Instead we are surrendering them to six-lane highways, gas stations, amusement parks, and the lumber interests, as in the redwood groves, or Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe-though these primeval areas, once desecrated, can never be fully restored or replaced.
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
A related model to watch out for is the hydra effect, named after the Lernaean Hydra, a beast from Greek mythology that grows two heads for each one that is cut off. When you arrest one drug dealer, they are quickly replaced by another who steps in to meet the demand. When you shut down an internet site where people share illegal movies or music, more pop up in its place. Regime change in a country can result in an even worse regime.
Gabriel Weinberg (Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models)
Balaji Srinivasan, an investor who was one of Thiel’s picks to lead the FDA under Trump—has argued that the media deserves to be destroyed and replaced by something he calls “full stack narrative”—public relations, in other words. “Builders must critique the critiques,” he tweeted, using the Randian word for entrepreneur that is favored by Thiel and his friends. “Stop the people standing athwart the future yelling stop. It’s your duty.
Max Chafkin (The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power)
Newspeak occurs whenever the primary purpose of language – which is to describe reality – is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it. The fundamental speech-act is only superficially represented by the assertoric grammar. Newspeak sentences sound like assertions, but their underlying logic is that of the spell. They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance. As a result Newspeak developed its own special syntax, which – while closely related to the syntax deployed in ordinary descriptions – carefully avoids any encounter with reality or any exposure to the logic of rational argument. Françoise Thom has argued this in her brilliant study La langue de bois.5 The purpose of communist Newspeak, in Thom’s ironical words, has been ‘to protect ideology from the malicious attacks of real things’.
Roger Scruton (Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left)
If the body is no longer a site of otherness but of identification, then we have urgently to become reconciled with it, repair it, perfect it, turn it into an ideal object. Everyone treats their bodies the way men treat women in projective identification: they invest them as a fetish, making an autistic cult of them, subjecting them to a quasi-incestuous manipulation. And it is the body's resemblance to its model which becomes a source of eroticism and 'white' seduction -- in the sense that it effects a kind of white magic of identity, as opposed to the black magic of otherness. This is how it is with body-building: you get into your body as you would into a suit of nerve and muscle. The body is not muscular, but muscled. It is the same with the brain and with social relations or exchanges: body-building, brainstorming, word-processing. Madonna is the ideal specimen of this, our muscled Immaculate Conception, our muscular angel who delivers us from the weaknesses of the body (pity the poor shade of Marilyn!). The sheath of muscles is the equivalent of character armour. In the past, women merely wrapped themselves in their image and their finery -- Freud speaks of those people who live with a kind of inner mirror, in a fleshly, happy self-reference. That narcissistic ideal is past and gone; body-building has wiped it out and replaced it with a gymnastic Ego-Ideal -- cold, hard, stressed, artificial self-reference. The construction of a double, of a physical and mental identity shell. Thus, in `body simulation', where you can animate your body remotely at any moment, the phantasy of being present in more than one body becomes an operational reality. An extension of the human being. And not a metaphorical or poetic extension, as in Pessoa's heteronyms, but quite simply a technical one.
Jean Baudrillard (The Perfect Crime)
Without the context of the biblical teaching about Man, meaning, and morals, such rightful insights and tools as democracy, economic interests, global relations, and techniques take on a life of their own. Fanatical religion will replace truth and commitment. They turn the human being into a little god with monstrous, because untrained, irrational and unrestrained intentions who has tools at his disposal to justify the most murderous competition, selfishness, and greed.
Francis A. Schaeffer (Death in the City)
All minds, except such as are delivered from doubt by dulness of sensibility, must be subject to this recurring conflict where the many-twisted conditions of life have forbidden the fulfilment of a bond. For in strictness there is no replacing of relations: the presence of the new does not nullify the failure and breach of the old. Life has lost its perfection: it has been maimed; and until the wounds are quite scarred, conscience continually casts backward, doubting glances.
George Eliot (Romola)
By “crime” I do not mean mere illegality, but instead a category of socially proscribed acts that: (1) threaten or harm other people and (2) violate norms related to justice, personal safety, or human rights, (3) in such a manner or to such a degree as to warrant community intervention (and sometimes coercive intervention). That category would surely include a large number of things that are presently illegal (rape, murder, dropping bricks off an overpass), would certainly not include other things that are presently illegal (smoking pot, sleeping in public parks, nude sunbathing), and would likely also include some things that are not presently illegal (mass evictions, the invasion of Iraq). The point here is that the standards I want to appeal to in invoking the idea of crime are not the state’s standards, but the community’s — and, specifically, the community’s standards as they relate to justice, rights, personal safety, and perhaps especially the question of violence. (...) Because the state uses this protective function to justify its own violence, the replacement of the police institution is not only a goal of social change, but also a means of achieving it. The challenge is to create another system that can protect us from crime, and can do so better, more justly, with a respect for human rights, and with a minimum of bullying. What is needed, in short, is a shift in the responsibility for public safety—away from the state and toward the community.
Kristian Williams (Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America)
Side by side with the limitless possibilities opened up by the new technologies, reflection about international order must include the internal dangers of societies driven by mass consensus, deprived of the context and foresight needed on terms compatible with their historical character. In every other era, this has been considered the essence of leadership; in our own, it risks being reduced to a series of slogans designed to capture immediate short-term approbation. Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing. As diplomacy is transformed into gestures geared toward passions, the search for equilibrium risks giving way to a testing of limits.
Henry Kissinger (World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History)
Even amid an avalanche of meetings with aliens in the years to follow, Truman referred to the aliens as “Space Monkeys”. Truman was a very complicated man, and did not trust anybody. Behind the screen, he had developed his own plans regarding German UFOs and aliens’ technology. He replaced the OSS with the Central Intelligence Agency by the 1947 National Security Act, and gave the agency an unlimited power to investigate everything and anything related to Germany’ UFOs and the alien phenomenon.
Maximillien de Lafayette (Volume I. UFOs: MARIA ORSIC, THE WOMAN WHO ORIGINATED AND CREATED EARTH’S FIRST UFOS (Extraterrestrial and Man-Made UFOs & Flying Saucers Book 1))
Other individuals find it difficult to be authentically themselves even in the presence of their spouses, lovers, or closest friends and relatives. Such individuals, whilst not going so far as to construct a false self which entirely replaces the true self at a conscious level, have an especial need to be alone which goes beyond the occasional demand for solitude referred to above. One possibility, plausible but as yet unproven, is that this especial need to be alone in adult life is derived from, or has been enhanced by, some degree of insecure attachment in early childhood. The child who has not, in infancy, formed secure bonds of trust with attachment figures, may react to parents, and later to other people, in a variety of ways; but I suggest that these variants are founded upon two basic themes. The first is placation; the second, avoidance. I shall try to show that placation is associated with the development of a depressive personality, whilst avoidance is associated with the development of a schizoid personality.
Anthony Storr (Solitude a Return to the Self)
This extreme treatment was among the proliferating regimens developed in response to the stunning increase in nervous disorders diagnosed around the turn of the century. Commentators and clinicians cited a number of factors related to the stresses of modern civilization: the increased speed of communication facilitated by the telegraph and railroad; the “unmelodious” clamor of city life replacing the “rhythmical” sounds of nature; and the rise of the tabloid press that exploded “local horrors” into national news.
Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism)
As Cornford pointed out, the best way to understand the simile is to replace ‘the clumsier apparatus’ of the cave by the cinema, though today television is an even better comparison. It is the moral and intellectual condition of the average man from which Plato starts; and though clearly the ordinary man knows the difference between substance and shadow in the physical world, the simile suggests that his moral and intellectual opinions often bear as little relation to the truth as the averagefilm or television programme does to real life.
Plato (The Republic)
A consequence of this alienation of humans from their own nature is that they are also alienated from each other. Productive activity becomes ‘activity under the domination, coercion and yoke of another man’. This other man becomes an alien, hostile being. Instead of humans relating to each other co-operatively, they relate competitively. Love and trust are replaced by bargaining and exchange. Human beings cease to recognize in each other their common human nature; they see others as instruments for furthering their own egoistic interests.
Peter Singer (Marx: A Very Short Introduction)
Colby’s resourceful, I’ll give him that.” “You used to be good friends.” “We were, until he started hanging around Cecily,” came the short reply. “I’m not as angry at him as I was. But it seems that he has to have a woman to prop him up.” “Not necessarily,” Matt replied. “Sometimes a good woman can save a bad man. It’s an old saying, but fairly true from time to time. Colby was headed straight to hell until Cecily put him on the right track. It’s gratitude, but I don’t think he can see that just yet. He’s in between mourning his ex-wife and finding someone to replace her.” He leaned back again. “I feel sorry for him. He’s basically a one-woman man, but he lost the woman.” Tate packed back to the wing chair and sat down on the edge. “He’s not getting Cecily. She’s mine, even if she doesn’t want to admit it.” Matt stared at him. “Don’t you know anything about women in love?” “Not a lot,” the younger man confessed. “I’ve spent the better part of my life avoiding them.” “Especially Cecily,” Matt agreed. “She’s been like a shadow. You didn’t miss her until you couldn’t see her behind you anymore.” “She’s grown away from me,” Tate said. “I don’t know how to close the gap. I know she still feels something for me, but she wouldn’t stay and fight for me.” He lifted his gaze to Matt’s hard face. “She’s carrying my child. I want both of them, regardless of the adjustments I have to make. Cecily’s the only woman I’ve ever truly wanted.” Matt spread his hands helplessly. “This is one mess I can’t help you sort out,” he said at last. “If Cecily loves you, she’ll give in sooner or later. If it were me, I’d go find her and tell her how I really felt. I imagine she’ll listen.” Tate stared at his shoes. He couldn’t find the right words to express what he felt. “Tate,” his father said gently, “you’ve had a lot to get used to lately. Give it time. Don’t rush things. I’ve found that life sorts itself out, given the opportunity.” Tate’s dark eyes lifted. “Maybe it does.” He searched the other man’s quiet gaze. “It’s not as bad as I thought it was, having a foot in two worlds. I’m getting used to it.” “You still have a unique heritage,” Matt pointed out. “Not many men can claim Berber revolutionaries and Lakota warriors as relatives.
Diana Palmer (Paper Rose (Hutton & Co. #2))
9.1 Understand that you and the people you manage will go through a process of personal evolution. a. Recognize that personal evolution should be relatively rapid and a natural consequence of discovering one’s strengths and weaknesses; as a result, career paths are not planned at the outset. b. Understand that training guides the process of personal evolution. c. Teach your people to fish rather than give them fish, even if that means letting them make some mistakes. d. Recognize that experience creates internalized learning that book learning can’t replace.
Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
I took care to replace the Compendium in its correct pamphlet, and in doing so dislodged a slim pamphlet by Grastrom, one of the most eccentric authors in Solarist literature. I had read the pamphlet, which was dictated by the urge to understand what lies beyond the individual, man, and the human species. It was the abstract, acidulous work of an autodidact who had previously made a series of unusual contributions to various marginal and rarefied branches of quantum physics. In this fifteen-page booklet (his magnum opus!), Grastrom set out to demonstrate that the most abstract achievements of science, the most advanced theories and victories of mathematics represented nothing more than a stumbling, one or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us. He pointed out correspondences with the human body-the projections of our sense, the structure of our physical organization, and the physiological limitations of man-in the equations of the theory of relativity, the theorem of magnetic fields and the various unified field theories. Grastrom’s conclusion was that there neither was, nor could be any question of ‘contact’ between mankind and any nonhuman civilization. This broadside against humanity made no specific mention of the living ocean, but its constant presence and scornful, victorious silence could be felt between every line, at any rate such had been my own impression. It was Gibarian who drew it to my attention, and it must have been Giarian who had added it to the Station’s collection, on his own authority, since Grastrom’s pamphlet was regarded more as a curiosity than a true contribution to Solarist literature
Stanisław Lem (Solaris)
there is a relation among the desire for mastery, an objectivist account of science, and the imperialist project of subduing nature, then the posthuman offers resources for the construction of another kind of account. 18 In this account, emergence replaces teleology; reflexive epistemology replaces objectivism; distributed cognition replaces autonomous will; embodiment replaces a body seen as a support system for the mind; and a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines replaces the liberal humanist subject’s manifest destiny to dominate and control nature. Of
N. Katherine Hayles (How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics)
The word cellulite, for example, first appeared in the April 15, 1968, issue of Vogue magazine, and this invented disease soon had a believer base worldwide: Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles.… In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a “problem” where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women’s natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma… . The number of diet- related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972.
Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman)
In an affluent society, even men of well-below-average provisioning capability can easily reproduce at above replacement rate. They may, for that matter, be better husbands and fathers than most wealthy men. Considered rationally, therefore, general prosperity ought to lead to a flourishing society of moderately large families. But the female sex instinct, as the reader may possibly have noticed, is not rational. It is triggered by relative rather than absolute wealth, and so men’s sexual attractiveness is still determined by their status within the social hierarchy as perceived by women.
F. Roger Devlin (Sexual Utopia in Power: The Feminist Revolt Against Civilization)
Thaler recounts an amusing real-life example of mental accounting.15 A professor of finance he knows has a clever strategy to help him deal with minor misfortunes. At the beginning of the year, the professor plans for a generous donation to his favorite charity. Anything untoward that happens in the course of the year—a speeding ticket, replacing a lost possession, an unwanted touch by an impecunious relative—is then charged to the charity account. The system makes the losses painless, because the charity does the paying. The charity receives whatever is left over in the account. Thaler has nominated his friend as the world’s first Certified Mental Accountant.
Peter L. Bernstein (Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk)
Quantum theory reinforces this conclusion, but its chief philosophical importance is that it regards physical phenomena as possibly discontinuous. It suggests that, in an atom (interpreted as above), a certain state of affairs persists for a certain time, and then suddenly is replaced by a finitely different state of affairs. Continuity of motion, which had always been assumed, appears to have been a mere prejudice. The philosophy appropriate to quantum theory, however, has not yet been adequately developed. I suspect that it will demand even more radical departures from the traditional doctrine of space and time than those demanded by the theory of relativity.
Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)
Marx defines the commodity form of circulation (commodity—money —commodity, or C—M—C, for short) as an exchange of use values (the use of shoes against bread, for example) which depends essentially upon the qualities of the goods being exchanged. Money functions here as a convenient intermediary. We now encounter a form of circulation, M—C—M, which begins and ends with exactly the same commodity. The only possible motivation for putting money into circulation on a repeated basis is to obtain more of it at the end than was possessed at the beginning. A quantitative relation replaces the exchange of qualities. Money is thrown into circulation to make more money — a profit. And money that circulates in this way is called capital.
David Harvey (The Limits to Capital)
In the 1980s and 1990s, Venezuela’s Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (widely known by its acronym, PDVSA), was one of the world’s most politically independent and well-managed national oil companies. In the early 2000s, President Hugo Chávez stripped PDVSA of its independent authority and replaced its top officials with loyal followers. He then placed PDVSA in charge of administering a new set of social programs, closely tied to his political machine. By 2004, two-thirds of PDVSA’s budget went to social programs, not petroleum-related activities. As its social programs grew, PDVSA’s transparency fell. After 2003, its financial disclosures dropped sharply, and independent observers found its activities increasingly difficult to monitor.73
Michael L. Ross (The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations)
It is in the area of shedding light on human migrations—rather than in explaining human biology—that the genome revolution has already been a runaway success. In the last few years, the genome revolution—turbocharged by ancient DNA—has revealed that human populations are related to each other in ways that no one expected. The story that is emerging differs from the one we learned as children, or from popular culture. It is full of surprises: massive mixtures of differentiated populations; sweeping population replacements and expansions; and population divisions in prehistoric times that did not fall along the same lines as population differences that exist today. It is a story about how our interconnected human family was formed, in myriad ways never imagined.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
The ideal of progress also should not be confused with the 20th-century movement to re-engineer society for the convenience of technocrats and planners, which the political scientist James Scott calls Authoritarian High Modernism.14 The movement denied the existence of human nature, with its messy needs for beauty, nature, tradition, and social intimacy. Starting from a “clean tablecloth,” the modernists designed urban renewal projects that replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises, windswept plazas, and brutalist architecture. “Mankind will be reborn,” they theorized, and “live in an ordered relation to the whole.” Though these developments were sometimes linked to the word progress, the usage was ironic: “progress” unguided by humanism is not progress.
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern era have meant relatively little to the wealthy. The rich in Ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing: running servants replaced running water. Television and radio? The patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading actors as domestic retainers. Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets — all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life. The great achievements of Western capitalism have redounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
The ‘labour theory of value’, implicit in Adam Smith and made explicit by David Ricardo, presented labour as the source of economic value, the prime mover of the market and the part of man’s nature that is inherently priced. By harnessing labour we replace the old relation between nature and need with the new relation between man and his products. The translation of use into exchange, of nature into commodities, of personal relations into the disguises assumed by human power – all these changes that mystify the world, placing a veil between human beings and their fulfilment, and surrounding them with the will-o’-the-wisps engendered by their own malleable appetites, had their origin in the trick, the deception, the ‘forging’ that had given one man the power to extract labour from another. To
Roger Scruton (The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung)
If secularism is to be understood as a political ideology or social-movement agenda that advocates (at least) the separation of church and state or (at most) the diminishment of religion in society, then humanism can be understood as a related and yet distinct phenomenon; it is more of an optimistic cultural expression or personal worldview, defined by what beliefs it eschews as well as what beliefs it affirms. Simply put, humanism rejects belief in heaven, hell, God, gods, and all things supernatural, while at the same time affirming belief in the positive potential for humans to do and be good, loving, and altruistic. Humanism rejects faith in favor of reason, it rejects superstition in favor of evidence-based thinking, and it replaces worship of a deity with an appreciation for and love of humankind and the natural world.
Phil Zuckerman (Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions)
Enigmas answered. Not only is QFT the answer to Einstein's search, it also answers or resolves his Enigmas, and in a way that can be understood by the man (or woman) on the street. In Appendix A you will see how the paradoxes of special relativity become natural and understandable consequences of the way fields behave. In Appendix B you will see that the problematic curvature of space-time in general relativity is gone; in QFT gravity is just another force field and space and time are the same space and time we intuitively believe in. Finally, in Appendix C you will see how the infamous wave-particle duality of QM is eliminated because there are no particles - only fields - and hence there is no duality. However abandoning the familiar picture of solid particles and replacing it with intangible fields is not easy. It will require a leap of imagination greater than did the atomic picture that Eddington struggled with.
Rodney A. Brooks (Fields of Color: The theory that escaped Einstein)
Kaizong watched Uncle Chen’s solemn expression; watched the young people taking photographs and recordings of the proceedings so that the files could be sent to the email addresses of dead relatives; watched the silent, praying faces, childish or lined, flickering in the flames from the candles and burning incense—and something deep in him was moved. Perhaps there would come a day when everything he was looking at would be replaced by virtual reality, by simulation, by technology, but what couldn’t be replaced was how people longed for those they loved. They needed some ceremony, some platform, some way to cross the border between life and death, to connect the past to the present, to shape the formless memories and longing into objects, acts, or ritualized performances so that the feelings that had been numbed by the passage of time might be reawakened, so that the pain of loss, once heartbreaking and bone-weary, could be recalled along with the endless memories that followed.
Chen Qiufan (Waste Tide)
Each new human life retraces this ancient story. Young children are the very essence of human innocence. They run, play, and feel—and, as in Genesis, when they are naked they are not ashamed. Children provide a model for the assumption of healthy normality, and their innocence and vitality are part of why the assumption seems so obviously true. But that vision begins to fade as children acquire language and become more and more like the creatures adults see reflected every day in their mirrors. Adults unavoidably drag their children from the Garden with each word, conversation, or story they relate to them. We teach children to talk, think, compare, plan, and analyze. And as we do, their innocence falls away like petals from a flower, to be replaced by the thorns and stiff branches of fear, self-criticism, and pretense. We cannot prevent this gradual transformation, nor can we fully soften it. Our children must enter into the terrifying world of verbal knowledge. They must become like us.
Steven C. Hayes (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change)
Arthur and his partner – shifting fridges is a two man job – are not employed by the delivery company directly, but rather have a contract that requires them to undertake a certain amount of deliveries while paying the company for the use of their liveried van. You read that correctly. Arthur pays for the privilege of going to work in a van owned by a company that pays him no sick pay, holiday pay or pension contributions. While technically self-employed, he is obviously unable to work for any other company or employer except over and above his already full-time schedule. Indeed, if one of them is ill or otherwise indisposed and unable to source their own replacement, the rent for the van is still due. It means that, in twenty-first-century Britain, getting sick while holding down a relatively menial job sees the sick person not just lose their wage for the days they’re off sick, but actually pay money to their employer (who’s not technically their employer) for every day they’re off the road.
James O'Brien (How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong)
Westcliff paused at the bedside and glanced at the two women. “This is going to be rather unpleasant,” he said. “Therefore, if anyone has a weak stomach…” His gaze lingered meaningfully on Lillian, who grimaced. “I do, as you well know,” she admitted. “But I can overcome it if necessary.” A sudden smile appeared on the earl’s impassive face. “We’ll spare you for now, love. Would you like to go to another room?” “I’ll sit by the window,” Lillian said, and sped gratefully away from the bed. Westcliff glanced at Evie, a silent question in his eyes. “Where shall I stand?” she asked. “On my left. We’ll need a great many towels and rags, so if you would be willing to replace the soiled ones when necessary—” “Yes, of course.” She took her place beside him, while Cam stood on his right. As Evie looked up at Westcliff’s bold, purposeful profile, she suddenly found it hard to believe that this powerful man, whom she had always found so intimidating, was willing to go to this extent to help a friend who had betrayed him. A rush of gratitude came over her, and she could not stop herself from tugging lightly at his shirtsleeve. “My lord…before we begin, I must tell you…” Westcliff inclined his dark head. “Yes?” Since he wasn’t as tall as Sebastian, it was a relatively easy matter for Evie to stand on her toes and kiss his lean cheek. “Thank you for helping him,” she said, staring into his surprised black eyes. “You’re the most honorable man I’ve ever known.” Her words caused a flush to rise beneath the sun-bronzed tan of his face, and for the first time in their acquaintance the earl seemed at a loss for words. Lillian smiled as she watched them from across the room. “His motives are not completely heroic,” she said to Evie. “I’m sure he’s relishing the opportunity to literally pour salt on St. Vincent’s wounds.” Despite the facetious remark, Lillian went deadly pale and gripped the chair arms as Westcliff took a thin, gleaming lancet in hand and proceeded to gently open and drain the wound.
Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Winter (Wallflowers, #3))
The Marxist prediction that capitalism would ultimately collapse and be replaced by socialism (Khrushchev’s tactless ‘We will bury you!’) had been a comfort to Soviet Communists as they struggled against Russia’s historical ‘backwardness’ to make a modern, industrialised, urbanised society. They made it, more or less, by the beginning of the 1980s. Soviet power and status was recognised throughout the world. ‘Soviet man’ became a recognisable animal, with close relatives in the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, more problematic relatives in China and North Korea, and admirers in the Third World. Then, in one of the most spectacular unpredicted ‘accidents’ of modern history, it was Soviet ‘socialism’ that collapsed, giving way to what the Russians called the ‘wild capitalism’ of the 1990s. An array of fifteen new successor states, including the Russian Federation, emerged blinking into the light of freedom – all, including the Russians, loudly complaining that in the old days of the Soviet Union they had been victims of exploitation.
Sheila Fitzpatrick (The Shortest History of the Soviet Union)
Einstein substituted events for particles; each event had to each other a relation called 'interval', which could be analysed in various ways into a time-element and a space-element. The choice between these various ways was arbitrary, and no one of them was theoretically preferable to any other. Given two events A and B, in different regions, it might happen that according to one convention they were simultaneous, according to another A was earlier than B, and according to yet another B was earlier than A. No physical facts correspond to these different conventions. From all this it seems to follow that events, not particles, must be the 'stuff' of physics. What has been thought of as a particle will have to be thought of as a series of events. The series of events that replaces a particle has certain important physical properties, and therefore demands our attention; but it has no more substantiality than any other series of events that we might arbitrarily single out. Thus 'matter' is not part of the ultimate material of the world, but merely a convenient way of collecting events into bundles.
Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)
Horvitz and his colleagues discovered several genes that coded for the effectors of cell death in nematodes—the death genes. Their findings were fascinating in their own right, but by far the most unexpected and important discovery was that there were exact equivalents of the death genes in flies, mammals, and even plants. Cancer researchers had already identified some of these genes at the time, but why or how they were involved in cancer was still unknown. The link with nematodes made their function clear, while giving another demonstration of the fundamental unity of life. Not only were the human genes unambiguously related to the nematode genes, but also they could even be genetically engineered to replace the nematode genes in the worms themselves, where they worked equally well! Mutations that disabled any of the death genes prevented the nematodes from losing their 131 cells by apoptosis as usual. The implications for cancer were plain: if the same mutations had a similar effect in people, then incipient cancer cells would likewise fail to commit suicide, and would instead continue to proliferate to form a tumour.
Nick Lane (Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the meaning of life (Oxford Landmark Science))
It is thus a very useless commonplace to assert that a religion is necessary for the masses, because all political, divine, and social creeds only take root among them on the condition of always assuming the religious shape -- a shape which obviates the danger of discussion. Were it possible to induce the masses to adopt  atheism, this belief would exhibit all the intolerant ardour of a religious sentiment,  and in its exterior forms would soon become a cult. The evolution of the small  Positivist sect furnishes us a curious proof in point. What happened to the Nihilist  whose story is related by that profound thinker Dostoïewsky has quickly  happened to the Positivists. Illumined one day by the light of reason he broke the images of divinities and saints that adorned the altar of a chapel, extinguished the  candles, and, without losing a moment, replaced the destroyed objects by the works of atheistic philosophers such as Büchner and Moleschott, after which he piously relighted the candles. The object of his religious beliefs had been transformed, but can it be truthfully said that his religious sentiments had changed?
Gustave Le Bon (The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind)
The process of simplifying man's environment and rendering it increasingly elemental and crude has a cultural as well as a physical dimension. The need to manipulate immense urban populations—to transport, feed, employ, educate and somehow entertain millions of densely concentrated people—leads to a crucial decline in civic and social standards. A mass concept of human relations—totalitarian, centralistic and regimented in orientation—tends to dominate the more individuated concepts of the past. Bureaucratic techniques of social management tend to replace humanistic approaches. All that is spontaneous, creative and individuated is circumscribed by the standardized, the regulated and the massified. The space of the individual is steadily narrowed by restrictions imposed upon him by a faceless, impersonal social apparatus. Any recognition of unique personal qualities is increasingly surrendered to the manipulation of the lowest common denominator of the mass. A quantitative, statistical approach, a beehive manner of dealing with man, tends to triumph over the precious individualized and qualitative approach which places the strongest emphasis on personal uniqueness, free expression and cultural complexity.
Murray Bookchin (Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Working Classics))
Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut. This principle is also true, ultimately, in human behavior, in human relationships. They, too, are natural systems based on the law of the harvest. In the short run, in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to “play the game.” In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success. Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you’ll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.” There are, of course, situations where people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well. But the effects are still secondary. In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. We all know it. There are people we trust absolutely because we know their character. Whether they’re eloquent or not, whether they have the human relations techniques or not, we trust them, and we work successfully with them. In the words of William George Jordan, “Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
The Renaissance was the culture of a wealthy and powerful upper class, on the crest of the wave which was whipped up by the storm of new economic forces. The masses who did not share the wealth and power of the ruling group had lost the security of their former status and had become a shapeless mass, to be flattered or to be threatened—but always to be manipulated and exploited by those in power. A new despotism arose side by side with the new individualism. Freedom and tyranny, individually and disorder, were inextricably interwoven. The Renaissance was not a culture of small shopkeepers and petty bourgeois but of wealthy nobles and burghers. Their economic activity and their wealth gave them a feeling of freedom and a sense of individually. But at the same time, these same people had lost something: the security and feeling of belonging which the medieval social structure had offered. They were more free, but they were also more alone. They used their power and wealth to squeeze the last ounce of pleasure out of life; but in doing so, they had to use ruthlessly every means, from physical torture to psychological manipulation, to rule over the masses and to check their competitors within their own class. All human relationships were poisoned by this fierce life-and-death struggle for the maintenance of power and wealth. Solidarity with one's fellow man—or at least with the members of one's own class—was replaced by a cynical detached attitude; other individuals were looked upon as "objects" to be used and manipulated, or they were ruthlessly destroyed if it suited one's own ends. The individual was absorbed by a passionate egocentricity, an insatiable greed for power and wealth. As a result of all this, the successful individual's relation to his own self, his sense of security and confidence were poisoned too. His own self became as much an object of manipulation to him as other persons had become. We have reasons to doubt whether the powerful masters of Renaissance capitalism were as happy and as secure as they are often portrayed. It seems that the new freedom brought two things to them: an increased feeling of strength and at the same time an increased isolation, doubt, scepticism, and—resulting from all these—anxiety. It is the same contradiction that we find in the philosophical writings of the humanists. Side by side with their emphasis on human dignity, individuality, and strength, they exhibited insecurity and despair in their philosophy.
Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom)
In addition to depoliticization as a mode of dispossessing the constitutive histories and powers organizing contemporary problems and contemporary political subjects—that is, depoliticization of sources of political problems—there is a second and related meaning of depoliticization with which this book is concerned: namely, that which substitutes emotional and personal vocabularies for political ones in formulating solutions to political problems. When the ideal or practice of tolerance is substituted for justice or equality, when sensitivity to or even respect for the other is substituted for justice for the other, when historically induced suffering is reduced to “difference” or to a medium of “offense,” when suffering as such is reduced to a problem of personal feeling, then the field of political battle and political transformation is replaced with an agenda of behavioral, attitudinal, and emotional practices. While such practices often have their value, substituting a tolerant attitude or ethos for political redress of inequality or violent exclusions not only reifies politically produced differences but reduces political action and justice projects to sensitivity training, or what Richard Rorty has called an “improvement in manners.” A justice project is replaced with a therapeutic or behavioral one.
Wendy Brown (Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire)
Space Rockets as Power Symbols The moon rocket is the climactic expression of the power system: the maximum utilization of the resources of science and technics for the achievement of a relatively miniscule result: the hasty exploration of a barren satellite. Space exploration by manned rockets enlarges and intensifies all the main components of the power system: increased energy, accelerated motion, automation, cyber-nation, instant communication, remote control. Though it has been promoted mainly under military pressure, the most vital result of moon visitation so far turns out to be an unsought and unplanned one-a full view of the beautiful planet we live on, an inviting home for man and for all forms of life. This distant view on television evoked for the first time an active, loving response from many people who had hitherto supposed that modern technics would soon replace Mother Earth with a more perfect, scientifically organized, electronically controlled habitat, and who took for granted that this would be an improvement. Note that the moon rocket is itself necessarily a megastructure: so it naturally calls forth such vulgar imitations as the accompanying bureaucratic obelisk (office building) of similar dimensions, shown here (left). Both forms exhibit the essentially archaic and regressive nature of the science-fiction mind.
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
Imagine an alternate universe in which people don’t have words for different forms of transportation—only the collective noun “vehicle.” They use that word to refer to cars, buses, bikes, spacecraft, and all other ways of getting from place A to place B. Conversations in this world are confusing. There are furious debates about whether or not vehicles are environmentally friendly, even though no one realizes that one side of the debate is talking about bikes and the other side is talking about trucks. There is a breakthrough in rocketry, but the media focuses on how vehicles have gotten faster—so people call their car dealer (oops, vehicle dealer) to ask when faster models will be available. Meanwhile, fraudsters have capitalized on the fact that consumers don’t know what to believe when it comes to vehicle technology, so scams are rampant in the vehicle sector. Now replace the word “vehicle” with “artificial intelligence,” and we have a pretty good description of the world we live in. Artificial intelligence, AI for short, is an umbrella term for a set of loosely related technologies. ChatGPT has little in common with, say, software that banks use to evaluate loan applicants. Both are referred to as AI, but in all the ways that matter—how they work, what they’re used for and by whom, and how they fail—they couldn’t be more different.
Arvind Narayanan (AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference)
The attachment voids experienced by immigrant children are profound. The hardworking parents are focused on supporting their families economically and, unfamiliar with the language and customs of their new society, they are not able to orient their children with authority or confidence. Peers are often the only people available for such children to latch on to. Thrust into a peer-oriented culture, immigrant families may quickly disintegrate. The gulf between child and parent can widen to the point that becomes unbridgeable. Parents of these children lose their dignity, their power, and their lead. Peers ultimately replace parents and gangs increasingly replace families. Again, immigration or the necessary relocation of people displaced by war or economic misery is not the problem. Transplanted to peer-driven North American society, traditional cultures succumb. We fail our immigrants because of our own societal failure to preserve the child-parent relationship. In some parts of the country one still sees families, often from Asia, join together in multigenerational groups for outings. Parents, grandparents, and even frail great-grandparents mingle, laugh, and socialize with their children and their children's offspring. Sadly, one sees this only among relatively recent immigrants. As youth become incorporated into North American society, their connections with their elders fade. They distance themselves from their families. Their icons become the artificially created and hypersexualized figures mass-marketed by Hollywood and the U.S. music industry. They rapidly become alienated from the cultures that have sustained their ancestors for generation after generation. As we observe the rapid dissolution of immigrant families under the influence of the peer-oriented society, we witness, as if on fast-forward video, the cultural meltdown we ourselves have suffered in the past half century. It would be encouraging to believe that other parts of the world will successfully resist the trend toward peer orientation. The opposite is likely to be the case as the global economy exerts its corrosive influences on traditional cultures on other continents. Problems of teenage alienation are now widely encountered in countries that have most closely followed upon the American model — Britain, Australia, and Japan. We may predict similar patterns elsewhere to result from economic changes and massive population shifts. For example, stress-related disorders are proliferating among Russian children. According to a report in the New York Times, since the collapse of the Soviet Union a little over a decade ago, nearly a third of Russia's estimated 143 million people — about 45 million — have changed residences. Peer orientation threatens to become one of the least welcome of all American cultural exports.
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
Once again, he was deducing a theory from principles and postulates, not trying to explain the empirical data that experimental physicists studying cathode rays had begun to gather about the relation of mass to the velocity of particles. Coupling Maxwell’s theory with the relativity theory, he began (not surprisingly) with a thought experiment. He calculated the properties of two light pulses emitted in opposite directions by a body at rest. He then calculated the properties of these light pulses when observed from a moving frame of reference. From this he came up with equations regarding the relationship between speed and mass. The result was an elegant conclusion: mass and energy are different manifestations of the same thing. There is a fundamental interchangeability between the two. As he put it in his paper, “The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content.” The formula he used to describe this relationship was also strikingly simple: “If a body emits the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass decreases by L/V 2.” Or, to express the same equation in a different manner: L=mV 2. Einstein used the letter L to represent energy until 1912, when he crossed it out in a manuscript and replaced it with the more common E. He also used V to represent the velocity of light, before changing to the more common c. So, using the letters that soon became standard, Einstein had come up with his memorable equation: E=mc2
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
Here we immediately face the danger of slipping into another but equally untenable romanticism, namely a call for humans to be humble and come to terms with or appreciate their finitude. The acknowledgement of the inherent lack of unity in the metabolism of humans and the rest of nature should not lead us to conceive of humans as fragile, vulnerable and ontologically homeless creatures destined to remain caught in opaque mediations. Such a way of thinking amounts to a secularisation of the religious demand for humans to display their submissiveness and obedience to God. One finds examples of this in existentialist philosophies of the Heideggerian variant or in Arnold Gehlen's conservative philosophical anthropology, according to which the natural incompleteness of human beings justify the call for stable social institutions (i.e., the shepherd-God is replaced with the shepherd-State). The key to avoid such an ideology of finitude is to recall that it is the very fragility and porosity of the human metabolism which has made humans so evolutionarily successful. Human corporeal organisation is the source of an immense flexibility and has enabled this animal to "break out of a narrow ecological niche". Far from being the sign of an inherent finitude of the human being, the loss of immediacy at the centre of its being is rather a sign of its infinity in the sense that it enables humans to socially mediate their relation to the rest of nature in an infinite number of ways.
Søren Mau (Mute Compulsion. A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital)
A region of the brain becomes mature when it settles down into a lean, functionally well-organized system. A good proxy for neural pruning in the brain is the relative density of gray versus white matter in a given region. Gray matter, the neuron-rich part of the brain that does the bulk of the computational work, decreases in density as a region matures. As gray matter density decreases, the density of white matter—the myelinated axons that transmit information, the outputs of the computational work done by gray matter—increases, resulting in greater efficiency and speed but less flexibility. One way to envision this is to see an immature, gray-matter-rich region as an undeveloped, open field, where one can wander in many directions unconstrained, but not very efficiently. In order to get to that wonderful blackberry bush to harvest some fruit, I have to bushwhack my way through vegetation and ford streams. The gradual replacement of gray matter by white matter reflects the development of this field: As roads are laid and bridges are built, I can move around more easily and quickly, but now I’m going to tend to move only along these established pathways. The new paved road to the blackberry bush makes gathering blackberries much more convenient, but rushing along on the new road I will miss the delicious wild strawberries I would have otherwise stumbled upon in the brush. There is a trade-off between flexibility and efficiency, between discovery and goal achievement.
Edward Slingerland (Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization)
Nevertheless, repression is something quite peculiar and is more sharply differentiated from the other mechanisms than they are from one another. I should like to make this relation to the other mechanisms clear by an analogy [...] Let us imagine what might have happened to a book, at a time when books were not printed in editions but were written out individually. We will suppose that a book of this kind contained statements which in later times were regarded as undesirable [...] At the present day, the only defensive mechanism to which the official censorship could resort would be to confiscate and destroy every copy of the whole edition. At that time, however, various methods were used for making the book innocuous. One way would be for the offending passages to be thickly crossed through so that they were illegible. In that case they could not be transcribed, and the next copyist of the book would produce a text which was unexceptionable but which had gaps in certain passages, and so might be unintelligible in them. Another way, however, if the authorities were not satisfied with this, but wanted also to conceal any indication that the text had been mutilated, would be for them to proceed to distort the text. Single words would be left out or replaced by others, and new sentences interpolated. Best of all, the whole passage would be erased and a new one which said exactly the opposite put in its place. The next transcriber could then produce a text that aroused no suspicion but which was falsified.
Sigmund Freud (Análisis terminable e interminable)
In 1969 the Khmer Rouge numbered only about 4,000. By 1975 their numbers were enough to defeat the government forces. Their victory was greatly helped by the American attack on Cambodia, which was carried out as an extension of the Vietnam War. In 1970 a military coup led by Lon Nol, possibly with American support, overthrew the government of Prince Sihanouk, and American and South Vietnamese troops entered Cambodia. One estimate is that 600,000 people, nearly 10 per cent of the Cambodian population, were killed in this extension of the war. Another estimate puts the deaths from the American bombing at 1000,000 peasants. From 1972 to 1973, the quantity of bombs dropped on Cambodia was well over three times that dropped on Japan in the Second World War. The decision to bomb was taken by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and was originally justified on the grounds that North Vietnamese bases had been set up in Cambodia. The intention (according to a later defence by Kissinger’s aide, Peter W. Rodman) was to target only places with few Cambodians: ‘From the Joint Chiefs’ memorandum of April 9, 1969, the White House selected as targets only six base areas minimally populated by civilians. The target areas were given the codenames BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, SUPPER, SNACK, and DESSERT; the overall programme was given the name MENU.’ Rodman makes the point that SUPPER, for instance, had troop concentrations, anti-aircraft, artillery, rocket and mortar positions, together with other military targets. Even if relatively few Cambodians were killed by the unpleasantly names items on the MENU, each of them was a person leading a life in a country not at war with the United States. And, as the bombing continued, these relative restraints were loosened. To these political decisions, physical and psychological distance made their familiar contribution. Roger Morris, a member of Kissinger’s staff, later described the deadened human responses: Though they spoke of terrible human suffering reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular: 'capabilities', 'objectives', 'our chips', 'giveaway'. It was a matter, too, of culture and style. They spoke with the cool, deliberate detachment of men who believe the banishment of feeling renders them wise and, more important, credible to other men… They neither understood the foreign policy they were dealing with, nor were deeply moved by the bloodshed and suffering they administered to their stereo-types. On the ground the stereotypes were replaced by people. In the villages hit by bombs and napalm, peasants were wounded or killed, often being burnt to death. Those who left alive took refuge in the forests. One Western ob-server commented, ‘it is difficult to imagine the intensity of their hatred to-wards those who are destroying their villages and property’. A raid killed twenty people in the village of Chalong. Afterwards seventy people from Chalong joined the Khmer Rouge. Prince Sihanouk said that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger created the Khmer Rouge by expanding the war into Cambodia.
Jonathan Glover (Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century)
YOU CAN COME to the end of talking, about women, talking. In restaurants, cafés, kitchens, less frequently in bars or pubs, about relatives, relations, relationships, illnesses, jobs, children, men; about nuance, hunch, intimation, intuition, shadow; about themselves and each other; about what he said to her and she said to her and she said back; about what they feel. Something more definite, more outward then, some action, to drain the inner swamp, sweep the inner fluff out from under the inner bed, harden the edges. Men at sea, for instance. Not on a submarine, too claustrophobic and smelly, but something more bracing, a tang of salt, cold water, all over your calloused body, cuts and bruises, hurricanes, bravery and above all no women. Women are replaced by water, by wind, by the ocean, shifting and treacherous; a man has to know what to do, to navigate, to sail, to bail, so reach for the How-To book, and out here it’s what he said to him, or didn’t say, a narrowing of the eyes, sizing the bastard up before the pounce, the knife to the gut, and here comes a wave, hang on to the shrouds, all teeth grit, all muscles bulge together. Or sneaking along the gangway, the passageway, the right of way, the Milky Way, in the dark, your eyes shining like digital wristwatches, and the bushes, barrels, scuppers, ditches, filthy with enemies, and you on the prowl for adrenalin and loot. Corpses of your own making deliquesce behind you as you reach the cave, abandoned city, safe, sliding panel, hole in the ground, and rich beyond your wildest dreams!
Margaret Atwood (Good Bones and Simple Murders)
Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders - and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands - parents, teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion - shouts in people's ears. The curiously limitation of human development - the way it hesitates, takes so long, often regresses, and turns around on itself - is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "the first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good." On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that: - the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
... - the Age of Anxiety, dating from around August 1945, is twenty three years old this very month - and her daily life is in essence a sandbagging operation against its seas and their tides. But this is worry and it is a little different from anxirty: Particular rather than pervasive, it arrives unannounced, without anxiety's harbingers, dread and forboding, the fearful tea in which we steep awaiting oblivion. Instead, worry turns up on the door step, the overbearing, passive aggressive out-of-town relative who insists he "won't be any trouble" even as he displaces every known routine and custom of the house for days and weeks on end; as he expropriates the sofa, the bathroom, the contents of the liqour cabinet and cigarette carton, and monopolises the telephone and the ear of anyone within shouting distance. Worry displaces the entire mood, the entire ethos of the house - even if that mood hitherto consisted largely of anxiety - and replaces it with something more substantive, more real than mere mood. You would be mightily pleased to have ordinary anxiety back in residence, for under worry there is no peace whatsoever, not even the peace of cynicism, pessimism or despair. Even when the rest of the world is abed, worry is awake, plundering the kitchen cupboards, raiding the refrigerator, playing the hifi, watching the late show until the national anthem closes the broadcast day; then noisily treading the halls, standing in your bedroom door, wondering if by any chance you are still up (knowing that of course you are), breathing and casting its shadow upon you, the silhouette of its slope-shouldered hulk and towering black wings.
Robert Clark (Love Among the Ruins)
Christ was an Aryan, and St. Paul used his doctrine to mobilise the criminal underworld and thus organise a proto-Bolshevism. This intrusion upon the world marks the end of a long reign, that of the clear Graeco-Latin genius. What is this God who takes pleasure only in seeing men grovel before Him? Try to picture to yourselves the meaning of the following, quite simple story. God creates the conditions for sin. Later on He succeeds, with the help of the Devil, in causing man to sin. Then He employs a virgin to bring into the world a son who, by His death, will redeem humanity! I can imagine people being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mahomet, but as for the insipid paradise of the Christians ! In your lifetime, you used to hear the music of Richard Wagner. After your death, it will be nothing but hallelujahs, the waving of palms, children of an age for the feeding-bottle, and hoary old men. The man of the isles pays homage to the forces of nature. But Christianity is an invention of sick brains : one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery. A negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in Transubstantiation. I begin to lose all respect for humanity when I think that some people on our side, Ministers or generals, are capable of believing that we cannot triumph without the blessing of the Church. Such a notion is excusable in little children who have learnt nothing else. For thirty years the Germans tore each other to pieces simply in order to know whether or not they should take Communion in both kinds. There's nothing lower than religious notions like that. From that point of view, one can envy the Japanese. They have a religion which is very simple and brings them into contact with nature. They've succeeded even in taking Christianity and turning it into a religion that's less shocking to the intellect. By what would you have me replace the Christians' picture of the Beyond? What comes naturally to mankind is the sense of eternity and that sense is at the bottom of every man. The soul and the mind migrate, just as the body returns to nature. Thus life is eternally reborn from life. As for the "why?" of all that, I feel no need to rack my brains on the subject. The soul is unplumbable. If there is a God, at the same time as He gives man life He gives him intelligence. By regulating my life according to the understanding that is granted me, I may be mistaken, but I act in good faith. The concrete image of the Beyond that religion forces on me does not stand up to examination. Think of those who look down from on high upon what happens on earth: what a martyrdom for them, to see human beings indefatigably repeating the same gestures, and inevitably the same errors ! In my view, H. S. Chamberlain was mistaken in regarding Christianity as a reality upon the spiritual level. Man judges everything in relation to himself. What is bigger than himself is big, what is smaller is small. Only one thing is certain, that one is part of the spectacle. Everyone finds his own rôle. Joy exists for everybody. I dream of a state of affairs in which every man would know that he lives and dies for the preservation of the species. It's our duty to encourage that idea : let the man who distinguishes himself in the service of the species be thought worthy of the highest honours.
Adolf Hitler (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944)
ethanol may actually make some kinds of air pollution worse. It evaporates faster than pure gasoline, contributing to ozone problems in hot temperatures. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ethanol does reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent relative to gasoline, but it calculated that devoting the entire U.S. corn crop to make ethanol would replace only a small fraction of American gasoline consumption. Corn farming also contributes to environmental degradation due to runoff from fertilizer and pesticides. But to dwell on the science is to miss the point. As the New York Times noted in the throes of the 2000 presidential race, ―Regardless of whether ethanol is a great fuel for cars, it certainly works wonders in Iowa campaigns. The ethanol tax subsidy increases the demand for corn, which puts money in farmers‘ pockets. Just before the Iowa caucuses, corn farmer Marvin Flier told the Times, ―Sometimes I think [the candidates] just come out and pander to us, he said. Then he added, ―Of course, that may not be the worst thing. The National Corn Growers Association figures that the ethanol program increases the demand for corn, which adds 30 cents to the price of every bushel sold. Bill Bradley opposed the ethanol subsidy during his three terms as a senator from New Jersey (not a big corn-growing state). Indeed, some of his most important accomplishments as a senator involved purging the tax code of subsidies and loopholes that collectively do more harm than good. But when Bill Bradley arrived in Iowa as a Democratic presidential candidate back in 1992, he ―spoke to some farmers‖ and suddenly found it in his heart to support tax breaks for ethanol. In short, he realized that ethanol is crucial to Iowa voters, and Iowa is crucial to the presidential race.
Charles Wheelan (Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated))
That such a surprisingly powerful philosophical method was taken seriously can be only partially explained by the backwardness of German natural science in those days. For the truth is, I think, that it was not at first taken really seriously by serious men (such as Schopenhauer, or J. F. Fries), not at any rate by those scientists who, like Democritus2, ‘would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia’. Hegel’s fame was made by those who prefer a quick initiation into the deeper secrets of this world to the laborious technicalities of a science which, after all, may only disappoint them by its lack of power to unveil all mysteries. For they soon found out that nothing could be applied with such ease to any problem whatsoever, and at the same time with such impressive (though only apparent) difficulty, and with such quick and sure but imposing success, nothing could be used as cheaply and with so little scientific training and knowledge, and nothing would give such a spectacular scientific air, as did Hegelian dialectics, the mystery method that replaced ‘barren formal logic’. Hegel’s success was the beginning of the ‘age of dishonesty’ (as Schopenhauer3 described the period of German Idealism) and of the ‘age of irresponsibility’ (as K. Heiden characterizes the age of modern totalitarianism); first of intellectual, and later, as one of its consequences, of moral irresponsibility; of a new age controlled by the magic of high-sounding words, and by the power of jargon. In order to discourage the reader beforehand from taking Hegel’s bombastic and mystifying cant too seriously, I shall quote some of the amazing details which he discovered about sound, and especially about the relations between sound and heat. I have tried hard to translate this gibberish from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature4 as faithfully as possible; he writes: ‘§302. Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition;—merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.—heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.’ There are some who still believe in Hegel’s sincerity, or who still doubt whether his secret might not be profundity, fullness of thought, rather than emptiness. I should like them to read carefully the last sentence—the only intelligible one—of this quotation, because in this sentence, Hegel gives himself away. For clearly it means nothing but: ‘The heating up of sounding bodies … is heat … together with sound.’ The question arises whether Hegel deceived himself, hypnotized by his own inspiring jargon, or whether he boldly set out to deceive and bewitch others. I am satisfied that the latter was the case, especially in view of what Hegel wrote in one of his letters. In this letter, dated a few years before the publication of his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel referred to another Philosophy of Nature, written by his former friend Schelling: ‘I have had too much to do … with mathematics … differential calculus, chemistry’, Hegel boasts in this letter (but this is just bluff), ‘to let myself be taken in by the humbug of the Philosophy of Nature, by this philosophizing without knowledge of fact … and by the treatment of mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as ideas.’ This is a very fair characterization of Schelling’s method, that is to say, of that audacious way of bluffing which Hegel himself copied, or rather aggravated, as soon as he realized that, if it reached its proper audience, it meant success.
Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies)
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Gray helped himself to more toast, taking the opportunity to slide an extra slice onto Miss Turner’s plate. She glanced up at him, her expression a mixture of shock and reproach. And this was his reward for generosity. He gave a tense shrug by way of excuse, then replaced the knife and fork and busied himself with his own food. He felt her staring at him. That was it. If she was entitled to stare at him, he was damned well going to stare back. And if this governess was going to reprimand him like an incorrigible charge…well, then Gray was going to misbehave. Letting his silver clatter to the china, he balled his hands into fists and plunked them down on either side of his plate. “You say you miss your family, Miss Turner? I wonder at it. Her glare was cold. “You do?” “You told me in Gravesend you’d nowhere to turn.” “I spoke the truth.” Her chin lifted. “I’ve been missing my family since long before I felt England.” “So they’re dead?” She fidgeted with her fork. “Some.” “But not all?” He leaned toward her and spoke in a low voice, though anyone who cared to listen might hear. “What sort of relations allow a young woman to cross an ocean unaccompanied, to labor as a plantation governess? I should think you’d be glad to be free of them.” She blinked. He picked up his fork and jabbed at a hunk of meat. His voice a low murmur, he directed the next question at his plate. “Or perhaps they’re glad to be free of you?” Something crushed his foot under the table. A pointy-heeled boot. Then, just as quickly, the pressure eased. But her foot remained atop his. The gesture was infuriating, and somehow wildly erotic. He met her gaze, and this time found no coldness, no reproach. Instead, her eyes were wide, beseeching. They called to something deep inside him he hadn’t known was there. Please, she mouthed. Don’t. She bit her lip, and he felt it as a visceral tug. That unused part of him stretched and ached. And at that instant, Gray would have sworn they were the only two souls in the room. In the world. Until Wiggins spoke again, confound the man.
Tessa Dare (Surrender of a Siren (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy, #2))
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Alexandre Dumas
The outcome of colonialism has been a controlling or blocking of interconnectivity and interdependence in related arenas: the environment (where rivers are dammed, channeled, or drained and natural geographies replaced by grids), in societies (where communities are divided in a pseudologic of superiority/inferiority), in economies (where resources like trees, coal, or oil are extracted as rapidly and brutally as possible without regard for surrounding destruction and pollution), and thought (where knowledge is organized under the rubrics of specialization, expertise, and compartmentalization, affected by racism and Eurocentrism). Colonialism, globalization, and development planning are ways of thinking as well as ways of life, and we need to find their alternatives, islands where other ways of life are explored through the resurgence of interconnectivity at local levels, creating dialogue among diverse points of view and projects of counter-development and liberation. When we take the idea of colonialism out of its location in history texts as a period of conquest located in the past, and begin to think of it as a metaphor for a way to live in the environment, certain general patterns appear. Before colonialism, there were environments of interpenetrating local biodiversities with cyclic retreats and advances, in which human groups integrated and competed; after colonialism, there was a large-scale monoculture, control of land and resources by distant privileged elites who exploit and fragment local communities while polluting and destroying ecosystems. Before colonialism, there were many diverse cultural worlds, each its own center of meaning-making and language arts, with Europe at the periphery. After colonialism, cultures were ranked on a kind of "great chain of being" according to European notions of culture and development, with Europe at the center. As a corollary, individual subjectivities were ranked as to how completely they could think through decontextualized universals in European languages. One way to think about liberation psychologies is as an evolving and multiple set of projects of decolonization.
Mary Watkins (Toward Psychologies of Liberation)
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Alexandre Dumas
Mr. Rudolph reaches out and lifts the flower out of its vase. "To a flower, this photograph means nothing. So when you ask what is the meaning of life, there can be no answer that will apply to everyone and everything. What is a photograph, or a sunset, to a flower? We all bring our own perceptions, needs, and experiences to everything we do. We will all interpret an event, or a sunset, differently." He pauses, and I am trying to keep up with him. "Basically," I (Jeremy) say slowly, concentrating on my words. "What you're saying is that it's all relative. The meaning of the sunset, or of life itself, is different for everyone?" Exactly," he says. ... As we head slowly into the big room, I turn to him and ask, "But even if the sunset has different meanings for everyone, it still has meaning, right?" "That's a tricky question to answer," Mr. Rudolph says, stopping to replace the frame back on the wall. "That sunset will still shine just as surely, just as colorfully, whether it is shining on a wedding or a war. So it would seem that the sunset itself doesn't have inherent meaning; it is just doing its job. If the sunset doesn't have meaning apart from what we give it, does a rock? Or a fish? Or life itself? But just because a park bench, for instance, doesn't have meaning, that doesn't mean it doesn't have worth." ... We have reached the door now, and I'm not sure I'm any closer to understanding what's in the box. My shoulders sag. "Maybe this will help clear things up," Mr. Rudolph says. "You need to be sure of the question you are asking. Sometimes people think they are looking for the meaning of life, when really they are looking for an understanding of why they are here. What their purpose is, the purpose of life in general. And that is a much easier question to answer that the meaning of life." Lizzy is already halfway out the door. "It is?" I ask, pulling her back in by the sleeve. ... "You are the same as the lamp, the chair, the flower," Mr. Rudolph explains. "All you have to do is be the most authentic you that you can be. Find out who you really are, find out why you are here, and you will find your purpose. And with it, the meaning of life.
Wendy Mass (Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life)
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Alexandre Dumas
If you’re lucky, in, let’s say eighty years, you close your eyes for the last time. Your children, grandchildren, friends, and family, whoever you still have left, if anyone, attend your funeral. They cry for a little while. Then, they mostly move on. They have to in order to survive themselves. In two hundred years, all direct traces of you are lost. Memories of you—how you looked, talked, and acted, what you did and didn’t do, the distant blur of your story—have all dissolved away with the last person who knew of you. By then, all perceptions of you had become inaccurate distortions and projections anyway, void of any authentic connection. If you did something especially noteworthy during your lifetime, direct traces of you may endure for a little longer. But not much longer. In one hundred thousand years, the twenty-first century is but a strange section in the record of history, occasionally reflected on by individuals who no longer relate to it in any meaningful way. Five million years. Most of the Earth’s species that existed during your lifetime are extinct due to the background extinction rate. They have all been replaced with new species. One billion years. There is no life left on Earth. 5.5 billion years. The sun cools and expands, consuming Earth completely. A once-lively planet billions of years old is wiped out without a trace—a grand finale of a light show with no ovation. The sun is dead. The Earth is gone. The universe doesn’t notice. There is so much time left. One hundred trillion years. The last remaining stars begin to die, fading out and burning up. The tombstones of newly formed black holes mark their gravesites. The universe becomes an expanding graveyard of the bones of evaporating stars. One duodecillion. Black holes swallow all the remaining stray matter in the universe. They will soon be all that remains. We will be here a while. Most of the universe’s lifetime is spent in these demented elderly years. Between one googol and one googolplex. The last massive black hole evaporates. One last explosion of light and energy occurs, closing the final eye of the universe. Time is no longer. Everything that has ever happened has now, as far as everything is concerned, never happened. The universe returns to nothing, and nothing happens forever.
Robert Pantano (The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think)
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Alexandre Dumas
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Alexandre Dumas
Madness is an insidious disease. We do not see the danger until it is too late. It creeps into the cracks and crevices of the mind and makes itself at home, like carpenter ants in the framing of a home. We do not know the floor has rotted away until one ill-timed step destroys the façade of normalcy. But carpenter ants do not destroy a home. They change it. As matter cannot be destroyed, they consume the structures we have built and rearrange it for their own use. While a home beset by such insects might seem uninhabitable for those who look at the situation from the outside, to the ants it was the intended outcome. We might inspect the foundation and find it derelict and dilapidated. We might scoff and say that anyone who lives within such a place is idiotic, and that they should have not neglected it in such a way. And, in extreme cases, they should move. Consider this metaphor in relation to one’s mind. That place in which we spend the entirety of our mortal lives. What happens when your home is beset by insects then? One cannot move out of one’s own mind, try as we might. We are trapped within these structures of ours, for better or worse and come what may. We must make do with what we are given and what we have left. Whereas you or I in our daily lives might seek a new homestead in such an infestation, in this labyrinth of the psyche, we cannot. There are different ways that a consciousness, once gnawed and riddled with holes, might come to adapt to such a state of being. Consider three men with this dilemma, if you will. The first man may seek to repair the damage—replace the eaten portions and shore up the foundations. This man is pragmatic, but shortsighted. He treats the symptoms, but not the cause. The second may seek to exterminate the infestation—to seek the illness at the root and rip it out. This man is wise, but must need act quickly before the house collapses around him. The third man merely laughs—he accepts his new state of being and does nothing to repair his home. He declares himself King of the Ants, lifts up hammer and sledge, and tears the remaining walls apart with his own two hands. You might think that man the fool. You might think him a harmless, laughing lunatic. It is a mistake that leads to ruin. For that man is the most dangerous of them all. -M. L. Harrow
Kathryn Ann Kingsley (The Puppeteer (Harrow Faire, #2))
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Alexandre Dumas
Correlation and causality. Why is it that throughout the animal kingdom and in every human culture, males account for most aggression and violence? Well, what about testosterone and some related hormones, collectively called androgens, a term that unless otherwise noted, I will use simplistically as synonymous with testosterone. In nearly all species, males have more circulating testosterone than do females, who secrete small amounts of androgens from the adrenal glands. Moreover, male aggression is most prevalent when testosterone levels are highest; adolescence and during mating season in seasonal breeders. Thus, testosterone and aggression are linked. Furthermore, there are particularly high levels of testosterone receptors in the amygdala, in the way station by which it projects to the rest of the brain, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and in its major targets, the hypothalamus, the central gray of the mid-brain, and the frontal cortex. But these are merely correlative data. Showing that testosterone causes aggression requires a subtraction plus a replacement experiment. Subtraction, castrate a male: do levels of aggression decrease? Yes, including in humans. This shows that something coming from the testes causes aggression. Is it testosterone? Replacement: give that castrated individual replacement testosterone. Do pre-castration levels of aggression return? Yes, including in humans, thus testosterone causes aggression. Time to see how wrong that is. The first hint of a complication comes after castration. When average levels of aggression plummet in every species, but crucially, not to zero, well, maybe the castration wasn't perfect, you missed some bits of testes, or maybe enough of the minor adrenal androgens are secreted to maintain the aggression. But no, even when testosterone and androgens are completely eliminated, some aggression remains, thus some male aggression is testosterone independent. This point is driven home by castration of some sexual offenders, a legal procedure in a few states. This is accomplished with chemical castration, administration of drugs that either inhibit testosterone production or block testosterone receptors. Castration decreases sexual urges in the subset of sex offenders with intense, obsessive, and pathological urges. But otherwise, castration doesn't decrease recidivism rates as stated in one meta-analysis. Hostile rapists and those who commit sex crimes motivated by power or anger are not amenable to treatment with the anti-androgenic drugs. This leads to a hugely informative point. The more experience the male had being aggressive prior to castration, the more aggression continues afterward. In otherwise, the less his being aggressive in the future requires testosterone and the more it's a function of social learning.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
What are the implications of ethnic identity for multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies? Tatu Vanhanen of the University of Tampere, Finland, has probably researched the effects of ethnic diversity more systematically than anyone else. In a massive, book-length study, he measured ethnic diversity and levels of conflict in 148 countries, and found correlations in the 0.5 to 0.9 range for the two variables, depending on how the variables were defined and measured. Homogeneous countries like Japan and Iceland show very low levels of conflict, while highly diverse countries like Lebanon and Sudan are wracked with strife. Prof. Vanhanen found tension in all multi-ethnic societies: “Interest conflicts between ethnic groups are inevitable because ethnic groups are genetic kinship groups and because the struggle for existence concerns the survival of our own genes through our own and our relatives’ descendants.” Prof. Vanhanen also found that economic and political institutions make no difference; wealthy, democratic countries suffer from sectarian strife as much as poor, authoritarian ones: “Ethnic nepotism belongs to human nature and . . . it is independent from the level of socioeconomic development (modernization) and also from the degree of democratization.” Others have argued that democracy is particularly vulnerable to ethnic tensions while authoritarian regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Tito’s Yugoslavia can give the impression of holding it in check. One expert writing in Foreign Affairs explained that for democracy to work “the party or group that loses has to trust the new majority and believe that its basic interests will still be protected and that there is nothing to fear from a change in power.” He wrote that this was much less likely when opposing parties represent different races or ethnicities. The United Nations found that from 1989 to 1992 there were 82 conflicts that had resulted in at least 1,000 deaths each. Of these, no fewer than 79, or 96 percent, were ethnic or religious conflicts that took place within the borders of recognized states. Only three were cross-border conflicts. Wars between nations are usually ethnic conflicts as well. Internal ethnic conflict has very serious consequences. As J. Philippe Rushton has argued, “The politics of ethnic identity are increasingly replacing the politics of class as the major threat to the stability of nations.” One must question the wisdom of then-president Bill Clinton’s explanation for the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia: “[T]he principle we and our allies have been fighting for in the Balkans is the principle of multi-ethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy. We have been fighting against the idea that statehood must be based entirely on ethnicity.” That same year, the American supreme commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, was even more direct: “There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders―and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands―parents, teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion―shouts in people's ears. The curiously limitation of human development―the way it hesitates, takes so long, often regresses, and turns around on itself―is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "the first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good." On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that:―the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war. Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” “The fist,” asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory.” Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.” Hitler did present a program (the 25 Points of February 1920), but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises.” Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent. Programs were casually fluid. The relationship between intellectuals and a movement that despised thought was even more awkward than the notoriously prickly relationship of intellectual fellow travelers with communism. Many intellectuals associated with fascism’s early days dropped away or even went into opposition as successful fascist movements made the compromises necessary to gain allies and power, or, alternatively, revealed its brutal anti-intellectualism. We will meet some of these intellectual dropouts as we go along. Fascism’s radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program, as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. Das Blut or la razza would determine who was right.
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
as Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory which does not allow for the existence of faster-than-light (superluminal) phenomena, all have flaws in them and must be replaced by new theories that can give Mankind a more concise view of our Universe.
James Morcan (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
We are trying to show not that mathematical thought rests upon the sensible but that it is creative...Non-Euclidean geometries contain Euclid's geometry as a particular case but not the inverse. What is essential to mathematical thought, therefore, lies in the moment where a structure is decentered, opens up to questioning, and reorganizes itself according to a new meaning which is nevertheless the meaning of this same structure. The truth of the result, its value independent of the content, consists in its not involving a change in which the initial relations dissolve, to be replaced by others in which they would be unrecognizable. Rather, the truth lies in a restructuring which, from one end to the other, is known to itself, is congruent with itself, a restructuring which was announced in the vectors of the initial structure by its style, so that each effective change is the fulfillment of an intention, and each anticipation receives from the structure the completion it needed.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Prose of the World (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy))
In other words, the boundary between that which is objectively true and that which is subjectively experienced ceased to be accepted. The perception of society as formed of individuals interacting with universal reality in unique ways—which underlies the liberal principles of individual freedom, shared humanity, and equal opportunities—was replaced by multiple allegedly equally valid knowledges and truths, constructed by groups of people with shared markers of identity related to their positions in society.
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
The African Humid Period seems to have ended relatively quickly, taking a couple of thousand years before being replaced by a much drier climate, and this started a process of desertification that forced many animals and human inhabitants to the outer edges of the immense desert. There would have been passages through the area that vanished as the harsh climate inexorably clawed at the mountains and hills, turning them into the sand that obliterated all traces of their ever having been there. By about 600 BCE, the terrain and habitat had become much less hospitable, so much so that it was no longer possible to use horses and oxen to carry commodities.
Charles River Editors (Mansa Musa and Timbuktu: The History of the West African Emperor and Medieval Africa’s Most Fabled City)
When something breaks, rather than repairing it, many people buy a replacement because this is faster and cheaper. However, if you continue to live your life in this way, your relationships with others will begin to resemble how you relate to objects. This will only lead to the exhaustion of your heart.
Shoukei Matsumoto (A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind)
I believe that what the vast majority of the masses call life is just fiction. A therapist's work ends up being trying to bring them into nonfiction. Although I feel that many are just replacing a novel by another. Too many people tell me: 'Why do you talk like you know the truth? There is no truth'. It is as if they felt that I'm destroying their inner world by being direct. They feel the need to project a defense mechanism to protect it. Another common phrase is: 'You don't know me better than I know myself'. This one is also interesting. Because it is as if the person was saying: 'You don't know my novel better than I do because I am the author of it.’ Life pretty much follows the same principles — gravity, air, water, fire, weight, hight; all of which is represented in maths, physics, and other sciences. But most people these days consider a personal attack when you make them observe something that may touch their inner world. It's the oversensitivity paradox in which we live today, for people want to feel more alive but are afraid to live at the same time. Allegorically speaking, they need to float like a bubble of steel. And many times they are perfectly fine in discussing others' issues until those issues are projected at them for self-analysis. Quite often, we are not really talking to a human being, but to his alter-ego. There's not much difference between the real self and the alternate version of that self for such person. And how ironic when both the therapist and the patient play the same game from different perspectives. This is why people don't want the truth anymore, but an alternate version of reality where they can merge themselves as if they were merely a chemical solution melting with another. They are too afraid of the truth because they have often been hurt when trying to find it. However, the concept of truth merges with the personality of the individual. And that is why having a personality is now an outdated concept, often falling into the realm of the abstract — Everything is relative, everything is fine, and everyone is everything you can decide for yourself. So why live if life has no meaning? Well, life does have a meaning, but won't be found by running away from it.
Dan Desmarques (Codex Illuminatus: Quotes & Sayings of Dan Desmarques)
Let’s start with the assumption that all members of a household enjoy an equal standard of living. Measuring poverty by household means that we lack individual level data, but in the late 1970s, the UK government inadvertently created a handy natural experiment that allowed researchers to test the assumption using a proxy measure.16 Until 1977, child benefit in Britain was mainly credited to the father in the form of a tax reduction on his salary. After 1977 this tax deduction was replaced by a cash payment to the mother, representing a substantial redistribution of income from men to women. If money were shared equally within households, this transfer of income ‘from wallet to purse’ should have had no impact on how the money was spent. But it did. Using the proxy measure of how much Britain was spending on clothes, the researchers found that following the policy change the country saw ‘a substantial increase in spending on women’s and children’s clothing, relative to men’s clothing’.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
The moment you treat math as an abstraction, as unreal, as manmade, as a branch of logic, as a technical game, as a bunch of axioms, as some mere formalism, you are lost. Math, ontologically, is energy, and the study of math is the study of the existence, relations, interactions and symmetries of energy. That’s exactly why math can replace science wholesale. Anyone who approaches math as anything other than noumenal, ontological energy – energy in itself – will never get anywhere with relating math to reality.
Mike Hockney (Gödel Versus Wittgenstein (The God Series Book 29))
Even if the total number of jobs does not fall, the current wave of automation tends to displace jobs that require some skills (bookkeepers and accountants) and increase the demand, either for very skilled workers (software programmers for the machines) or for totally unskilled workers (dog walkers, for example), which are both much more difficult to replace with a machine. As software engineers become richer, they have more money to hire dog walkers, who have become relatively cheaper over time, since there is little alternative employment for those with no college education. Even if people remain employed, this leads to an increase in inequality, with higher wages at the top and everyone else pushed to jobs requiring no specific skills; jobs where wages and working conditions can be really bad. This accentuates a trend that has taken place since the 1980s. Workers without a college education have increasingly been pushed out of mid-skill jobs, such as clerical and administrative roles, into low-skill tasks, such as cleaning and security.
Abhijit V. Banerjee (Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems)
The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970–1998): A First Draft of History by Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz The overwhelmingly non-Hispanic, white leadership of the environmental movement may have felt it was defensible to address population growth as long as the great bulk of this growth came from non-Hispanic whites, which it did during the Baby Boom. But the situation changed dramatically after1972. From that year forward, the fertility of non-Hispanic whites was below the replacement rate, while that of black Americans and Latinos remained well above the replacement rate. To talk of fertility reductions after 1972 was to draw disproportionate attention to nonwhites. Certain minorities and their spokespersons—with long memories of disgraceful treatment by the white majority and acutely aware of their comparative powerlessness in American society—were deeply suspicious of possible hidden agendas in the population stabilization movement. As the Reverend Jesse Jackson told the Rockefeller Commission, “our community is suspect of any programs that would have the effect of either reducing or levelling off our population growth. Virtually all the security we have is in the number of children we produce.” And Manuel Aragon, speaking in Spanish, declared to the Commission: “what we must do is to encourage large Mexican American families so that we will eventually be so numerous that the system will either respond or it will be overwhelmed.” During the twenty-six years after 1972, the non-Hispanic white share of population growth declined significantly from the 1970 era. Thus, by the 1990s, a majority of the nation’s growth stemmed from sources other than non-Hispanic whites (especially Latin American and Asian immigrants and their offspring). Environmentalist leaders—proud and protective of their claim to the moral high ground—may have been reluctant to jeopardize this by venturing into the political minefield of the nation’s volatile racial/ethnic relations through appearing to point fingers at “outsiders,” “others,” or “people of color” as responsible for America’s ongoing problem with population growth.
Roy Beck
This is what I see," becomes replaced by a question: "Is this what I see?" You share his hesitations about the positions of a tree or a branch; or the final shape of Mont Ste-Victoire, and the trees in front of it. Relativity is all. Doubt becomes part of the painting's subject.
Robert Hughes (The Shock of the New)
Guar, mostly imported from India, is derived from the guar bean. It is used extensively in the food industry to assure consistency in cakes, pies, ice cream, breakfast cereals, and yogurt. But it has another major use—in fracking, in a Jell-O-like slosh that carries sand into the fractures to expand them. But guar and the related additives were expensive. At a baseball game in Dallas, Steinsberger ran into some other geologists who had successfully replaced much of the guar with water, but in another part of Texas and not in shale. In 1997, he experimented with their water recipe on a couple of shale wells, without success. Steinsberger got approval for one final try. This was the SH Griffin #4 in Dish. The team was still using water to replace most of the guar, but this time they fed in the sand more slowly. By the spring of 1998, they had the answer. “The well,” said Steinsberger, “was vastly superior to any other well that Mitchell had ever drilled.” The code for shale had been broken.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
But the time has one very enduring legacy: the leaps forward in equal rights. The civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the gay rights movement fundamentally altered American culture, with much of the change taking root in that relatively brief seven-year period from 1963 to 1970, when the Silents were in their 20s and 30s. It began, as usual, with changes in technology. As the technological leaps of the postwar era accelerated, individualism grew: TV allowed people to see others’ perspectives and experiences, jet and space travel made the rest of the world seem closer, and the shift away from manual labor opened up more job opportunities for women. Gradually, an emphasis on individual rights began to replace the old system of social rules organized around race, gender, and sexual orientation. In the early 1960s, Blacks and Whites were segregated in the South, women were actively discriminated against in professions such as law, medicine, and engineering, and people could be arrested for being gay. By 1970, all of
Jean M. Twenge (Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future)
So, in a sense, capitalism is a monopoly. Without competition, capitalism has bent towards the agglomeration of profit and power in the hands of relatively few families, corporations, industries and governments. The coercion of twentieth century dictatorships as methods of individual persuasion and control has been replaced by marketing, far more benign and effective. Meanwhile vasts rafts of people--entire regions even--sit becalmed in seas of poverty and resentment
Sam Quinones (The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth)
The “Chinese question” found its answer at the national level, in the debate over a California-led plan for Chinese exclusion. In reconstructing the United States, California was emerging as the regional swing vote, just as the state’s enfranchised settlers became single-issue voters. The transcontinental railroad solidified the state’s membership in the Union, which was far from a given considering how often the territory had changed hands in the previous few decades as well as its continual political instability and foreign interference in Mexico, not to mention the temporary sundering of the United States itself. California’s Unionist majority helped repair that split, cutting off the Confederacy’s western tendency. But Unionist didn’t necessarily mean faithfully devoted to principles of abolition democracy and the spirit of the slave revolution. The race-based exclusion of Chinese from the country flew in the face of Reconstruction and the black-led attempt to create a pluralist, racially equal nation. But that seeming contradiction was no contradiction at all for California’s white Jacksonians, because they maintained a consistent position in favor of free white labor and free white labor only. As for the regionally aligned party duopoly, California’s vote swung against the South during the war, but it could swing back. Federal civil rights legislation meant to force the ex-Confederate states to integrate also applied to settler California’s relations with the Chinese, which left the southern and western delegations looking for a solution to their linked nonwhite labor problems. If former slaves and their children were able to escape not just their commodity status but also their working role in the regional economy, southern planters threatened to bring in Chinese laborers to replace them, just as planters had in the West Indies. That would blow the exclusion plan out of the water, which gave California an incentive to compromise with the South. These two racist blocs came to an agreement that permanently set the direction of the modern American project: They agreed to cede the South to the Confederate redeemers and exclude the Chinese.
Malcolm Harris (Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World)
It may feel weird at first, but speaking biblical truth out loud when we experience doubt and disappointment is an essential practice during any wrestle. The apostle Paul wrote, “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). We must routinely speak God’s words to ourselves so that truth begins to replace the lies of the old tapes that run on repeat in our minds. Perhaps you can relate to some of these lies: I can’t believe God let this happen. God must not love me. Why is my life such a mess? This could never turn out well. I will never have enough strength to do this. I am too tired of trying. To practice truth, we craft statements based on God’s Word. That’s how we speak truth over our lives. Here are some examples: God deeply loves me, even when He says no. “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:6-7). My story is not over. God is not finished, and He will bring beauty from ashes. “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). Even in what I am facing, I am still blessed. I don’t have to be strong because God will be my strength. “The LORD is my strength and my defense; he has become my salvation. He is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him” (Exodus 15:2, NIV).
Ashley Morgan Jackson (Tired of Trying: How to Hold On to God When You're Frustrated, Fed Up, and Feeling Forgotten)
With proper training, you should gradually get measurably stronger. Strength gains may take place quicker in the first year. When this happens, you’ll notice it’s getting easier to reach your five or six reps — that’s the time to consider gradually adding weight. Add weight carefully, sometimes starting with just a couple of pounds. Adding weight replaces the need to perform more repetitions. If, for whatever reason, you go through a period when you don’t perform any strength training, such as a few weeks or months, you may eventually lose some of the strength you gained. In this case, when getting back into training, reduce the amount of weight you previously used until you begin to get stronger again. Then you can increase the weight as needed. Sometimes we think we’re stronger than we are, relating to those days when we actually were stronger.
Philip Maffetone (Get Strong: The natural, no-sweat, whole-body approach to stronger muscles and bones)
There are many examples of how Medicine 2.0 gets risk wrong, but one of the most egregious has to do with hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for postmenopausal women, long entrenched as standard practice before the results of the Women’s Health Initiative Study (WHI) were published in 2002. This large clinical trial, involving thousands of older women, compared a multitude of health outcomes in women taking HRT versus those who did not take it. The study reported a 24 percent relative increase in the risk of breast cancer among a subset of women taking HRT, and headlines all over the world condemned HRT as a dangerous, cancer-causing therapy. All of a sudden, on the basis of this one study, hormone replacement treatment became virtually taboo. This reported 24 percent risk increase sounded scary indeed. But nobody seemed to care that the absolute risk increase of breast cancer for women in the study remained minuscule. Roughly five out of every one thousand women in the HRT group developed breast cancer, versus four out of every one thousand in the control group, who received no hormones. The absolute risk increase was just 0.1 percentage point. HRT was linked to, potentially, one additional case of breast cancer in every thousand patients. Yet this tiny increase in absolute risk was deemed to outweigh any benefits, meaning menopausal women would potentially be subject to hot flashes and night sweats, as well as loss of bone density and muscle mass, and other unpleasant symptoms
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
of menopause—not to mention a potentially increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, as we’ll see in chapter 9. Medicine 2.0 would rather throw out this therapy entirely, on the basis of one clinical trial, than try to understand and address the nuances involved. Medicine 3.0 would take this study into account, while recognizing its inevitable limitations and built-in biases. The key question that Medicine 3.0 asks is whether this intervention, hormone replacement therapy, with its relatively small increase in average risk in a large group of women older than sixty-five, might still be net beneficial for our individual patient, with her own unique mix of symptoms and risk factors. How is she similar to or different from the population in the study? One huge difference: none of the women selected for the study were actually symptomatic, and most were many years out of menopause. So how applicable are the findings of this study to women who are in or just entering menopause (and are presumably younger)? Finally, is there some other possible explanation for the slight observed increase in risk with this specific HRT protocol?[*3] My broader point is that at the level of the individual patient, we should be willing to ask deeper questions of risk versus reward versus cost for this therapy—and for almost anything else we might do. The fourth and perhaps largest shift is that where Medicine 2.0 focuses largely on lifespan, and is almost entirely geared toward staving off death, Medicine 3.0 pays far more attention to maintaining healthspan, the quality of life. Healthspan was a concept that barely even existed when I went to medical school. My professors said little to nothing about how to help our patients maintain their physical and cognitive capacity as they aged. The word exercise was almost never uttered. Sleep was totally ignored, both in class and in residency, as we routinely worked twenty-four hours at a stretch. Our instruction in nutrition was also minimal to nonexistent. Today, Medicine 2.0 at least acknowledges the importance of healthspan, but the standard definition—the period of life free of disease or disability—is totally insufficient, in my view. We want more out of life than simply the absence of sickness or disability. We want to be thriving, in every way, throughout the latter half of our lives. Another, related issue is that longevity itself, and healthspan in particular, doesn’t really fit into the business model of our current
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
Nearly ubiquitous data connectivity, at relatively high speeds, is around the corner. Wi-Fi is available almost everywhere in the materially comfortable world, and it will become significantly faster. When a hurricane devastated Puerto Rico in late 2017, Google was able to provide direct connectivity to smartphones through its project Loon, which used high-altitude balloons to replace the damaged cell towers. Technologies such as this could provide both Wi-Fi coverage and overlays to cell networks through globe-girdling constellations of balloons plying the jet stream. These technologies promise to bridge the connectivity gap for the billions of people, many of them in Africa and Latin America and Asia, who still don’t have broadband.
Vivek Wadhwa (The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future)
Nor is Rawls the only income redistributionist to evade the reality of compulsion—which is to say, the loss of millions of people’s freedom to make their own decisions about their own lives, when an inequality of economic outcomes is replaced by a far more dangerous increased inequality of power. Unequal economic outcomes nevertheless permit even the less fortunate to have rising standards of living. But power is inherently relative, so that more power for some means less freedom for others.
Thomas Sowell (Discrimination and Disparities)
I have needed to shed all my beliefs related to thinking caring for self is 'selfish' and replace these instead with allowing myself permission to prioritise what is important to me
Cathy Williams (Body Wisdom: A Guide To Connecting With Your Intuitive Self)
The task of the physical sciences is to replace that classification of events which our senses perform but which proves inadequate to explain regularities of these events by a classification which will put us in a better position to do so. The task of theoretical psychology is the converse one of explaining why these events, which on the basis or their relations to each other can be arranged in a certain ( physical) order, manifest a different order in their effects on our senses.
Friedrich A. Hayek
In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
Karl Marx
Whereas people with disabilities have always struggled to survive, many are now struggling to change their world as well. The replacement of the false consciousness of self-pity and helplessness with the raised consciousness of dignity, anger, and empowerment has meaningfully affected the way in which many people with disabilities relate personally and politically to society.
James I. Charlton (Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment)
Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two worlds, despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there is almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of the other. Before and directly after the war, when all the best of the Negroes were domestic servants in the best of the white families, there were bonds of intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood relationship, between the races. They lived in the same home, shared in the family life, often attended the same church, and talked and conversed with each other. But the increasing civilization of the Negro since then has naturally meant the development of higher classes: there are increasing numbers of ministers, teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and independent farmers, who by nature and training are the aristocracy and leaders of the blacks. Between them, however, and the best element of the whites, there is little or no intellectual commerce. They go to separate churches, they live in separate sections, they are strictly separated in all public gatherings, they travel separately, and they are beginning to read different papers and books. To most libraries, lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at all, or on terms peculiarly galling to the pride of the very classes who might otherwise be attracted. The daily paper chronicles the doings of the black world from afar with no great regard for accuracy; and so on, throughout the category of means for intellectual communication,—schools, conferences, efforts for social betterment, and the like,—it is usually true that the very representatives of the two races, who for mutual benefit and the welfare of the land ought to be in complete understanding and sympathy, are so far strangers that one side thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the other thinks educated Negroes dangerous and insolent. Moreover, in a land where the tyranny of public opinion and the intolerance of criticism is for obvious historical reasons so strong as in the South, such a situation is extremely difficult to correct. The white man, as well as the Negro, is bound and barred by the color-line, and many a scheme of friendliness and philanthropy, of broad-minded sympathy and generous fellowship between the two has dropped still-born because some busybody has forced the color-question to the front and brought the tremendous force of unwritten law against the innovators. It is hardly necessary for me to add very much in regard to the social contact between the races. Nothing has come to replace that finer sympathy and love between some masters and house servants which the radical and more uncompromising drawing of the color-line in recent years has caused almost completely to disappear. In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,—one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and streetcars.
W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk)
The problems arise when they become exhausted with their role of spouse or parent, and life involves more than work. AVPs put in huge efforts toward the tasks they do. They have very little energy left. Their families begin to feel the abandonment when ambivalence replaces the structure of rules or work. They can clean up the kitchen, help with homework, but the needed or intimate parts of relationships are more minimal. The other issue is often trying to hold the line, as it were. Many of the AVP’s psychological symptoms turn into health-related issues, which can further remove them
Dr. Sandra Smith-Hanen (Hiding In The Light: Understanding Avoidant Personality Disorder)
1. Induce complacency to avoid alerting your opponent. 2. Manipulate your opponent’s advisers. 3. Be patient—for decades, or longer—to achieve victory. 4. Steal your opponent’s ideas and technology for strategic purposes. 5. Military might is not the critical factor for winning a long-term competition. 6. Recognize that the hegemon will take extreme, even reckless action to retain its dominant position. 7. Never lose sight of shi. 8. Establish and employ metrics for measuring your status relative to other potential challengers. 9. Always be vigilant to avoid being encircled or deceived by others.
Michael Pillsbury (The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower)
Kettlebells are compact, inexpensive, virtually indestructible, and can be used anywhere. The unique nature of kettlebell lifts provides a powerful training effect with a relatively light weight, and you can replace an entire gym with a couple of kettlebells. Dan John, Master SFG[1] and a highly accomplished power athlete, famously quipped, “With this kettlebell in my bedroom I can prepare myself for the Nationals.
Pavel Tsatsouline (Kettlebell Simple & Sinister)
Forgiveness Ritual On a sheet of paper, make a list of everyone you feel has mistreated you in the past that you have not yet forgiven. This list could include members of your family, friends, coworkers, acquaintances, and beyond. Review the list of names and think briefly about the incidents involved. Next, read the following statement out loud: “I, __________, am ready to forgive all those who inflicted pain and suffering on me in the past. I choose to forgive them so that their actions of the past can no longer affect my present. My wish is to see them through the eyes of unconditional love. I also forgive myself for anything and everything related to these events. I was doing my best at the time. I pray that these people, and myself, can experience only love and peace going forward.” Just as you did in the preceding chapter's exercise when you forgave yourself, I want you to take the piece of paper, crumple it up, and throw it away. As you do so, visualize all the negative feelings you have about these people and the events going in the trash as well. This simple ritual is the beginning of replacing resentment with unconditional love for those who have caused you suffering. That being said, when the pain inflicted by others is extreme, an act of forgiveness is rarely a onetime event. As a result, you will likely need to repeat the aforementioned statement every time the events of your past replay in your mind and you feel them again, as the parasite is attempting to lead you down the road of negativity and conditional love. If there is someone on the list who you are having special trouble forgiving, say the prayer below every night before you go to bed, inserting the name of the person or persons you'd like to forgive: “I pray that ___________ receives everything they want in life, including the experience of unconditional love, peace, and happiness.
Miguel Ruiz Jr. (The Mastery of Self: A Toltec Guide to Personal Freedom (Toltec Mastery Series))
like. Electricity was relatively new, and magnetism was all the rage. Bicycles were new, replacing roller-skates as the latest fad. Bustles were on the way out. The American Civil War was only a generation past. Photographic cameras were on the cusp of being made commercially affordable to the general public, but were still too expensive to print in newspapers. Horses, trains, and streetcars were the three standard forms of transportation.
Nellie Bly (Nellie Bly's World: Her Complete Reporting 1887-1888)
The transfer of power from an older sky god to a younger storm god is attested in other contemporaneous eastern Mediterranean cultures. Cronus was imprisoned and succeeded by his son Zeus, Yahweh succeeded El as the god of Israel, the Hurrian god Teshub assumed kingship in heaven after having defeated his father Kumarbi, and Baal replaced El as the effective head of the Ugaritic pantheon. A more remote and hence less exact parallel is the replacement of Dyaus by Indra in early Hinduism. These similar developments can be accurately dated to the second half of the second millennium BCE, a time of prosperity and extraordinary artistic development but also of political upheaval and natural disasters that ended in the collapse or destruction of many civilizations, including the Mycenaean, Minoan, Hittite, and Ugaritic. This was the period of the Trojan War, of the invasion of Egypt and the southeastern Mediterranean coast by the Sea Peoples, of the international unrest related in the Amarna letters.
Michael D. Coogan (Stories from Ancient Canaan)
The perception of society as formed of individuals interacting with universal reality in unique ways—which underlies the liberal principles of individual freedom, shared humanity, and equal opportunities—was replaced by multiple allegedly equally valid knowledges and truths, constructed by groups of people with shared markers of identity related to their positions in society. Knowledge, truth, meaning, and morality are therefore, according to postmodernist thinking, culturally constructed and relative products of individual cultures, none of which possess the necessary tools or terms to evaluate the others.
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
The idea that science breaks up and replaces the system of classification which our sense qualities represent is less familiar, yet this is precisely what Science does. . . . This process of re-classifying “objects” which our senses have already classified in one way, of substituting for the “secondary” qualities in which our senses arrange external stimuli a new classification based on consciously established relations between classes of events is, perhaps, the most characteristic aspect of the procedure of the natural sciences. The whole history of modern Science proves to be a process of progressive emancipation from the innate classification of the external stimuli till in the end they completely disappear.
Friedrich A. Hayek (Scientisme et sciences sociales: Essai sur le mauvais usage de la raison)
If the eating disorder is concretized by the "not-me" ED, the patient is allowed the safety to look around comers, to follow this "other self' into the kitchen; the bathroom; yes, even the bedroom; to observe. Shame and blame are reduced; curiosity is enhanced. Conceptually this is interesting. Many patients are able to observe once allowed to look. They know well who they are at these moments. Relationally, however, they have never been entitled to look, and, as a result, self-observation and understanding have been thwarted by relational constraints and consequent immediate behavioral enactments. Ongoing, the patient is asked to consider what alternative behaviors can replace eating, purging or restricting. If the patient weren't thinking about food or weight, what else would she be thinking about? What else is needed? As the patient begins to consider concrete alternatives to symptomatic behavior, "contracts" are developed between patient and therapists.
Tom Wooldridge (Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders (Relational Perspectives Book Series))
The new relations are not the result of one barbarism replacing another barbarism, of one crushing of man replacing another crushing of man... We want an Algeria open to all, in which every kind of genius may grow.
Frantz Fanon (A Dying Colonialism)
Academic interest has grown enormously and is closely related to political positions. Several universities in the US and Britain now have dedicated (and separate) centres for Palestine and Israel studies. In the last decade or so the fundamentals of the conflict have been illuminated by the paradigm of settler colonialism – based on the experience of the US, Australia, Canada and South Africa – when native populations are replaced rather than exploited by Europeans. That approach struggles, though, to encompass the Jewish religious–national connection to Eretz-Yisrael that is so central to Zionist ideology and Israeli identity. And Mizrahi (Eastern or oriental) Jews who came to Israel from Iraq, Morocco and elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds are another specific element with no exact parallel elsewhere. In a way this heated contemporary debate reflects a familiar truth about how the conflict is perceived: Zionists have tended to focus on their intentions in immigrating to Palestine; Arabs on the results, and especially, in the words of Edward Said, of ‘having their territory settled by foreigners’.1
Ian Black (Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017)
I have desires that are related to this job that aren’t in the official job description.
Shae Sanders (The Replacements (Jackson Brothers #1))
A more concrete example happened in 1984, when a surgeon at Loma Linda University in California attempted to replace the defective heart of “Baby Fae” with the heart of a baboon. Not surprisingly, the poor baby died a few days later due to immune rejection. An Australian radio crew interviewed the surgeon, Dr. Leonard Bailey, and asked him why he didn’t use a more closely related primate, such as a chimpanzee, and avoid the possibility of immune rejection, given the baboon’s great evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey said, “Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don’t believe in evolution.” If Bailey had performed the same experiment in any other medical institution except Loma Linda (which is run by the creationist Seventh-Day Adventist Church), his experiments would be labeled dangerous and unethical, and he would have been sued for malpractice and his medical license revoked
Donald R. Prothero (Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters)
Four years to the day after Fairchild's 1908 gift of the trees to Washington's schools, on March 27, 1912, Mrs. Taft broke dirt during the private ceremony in West Potomac Park near the banks of the Potomac River. The wife of the Japanese ambassador was invited to plant the second tree. Eliza Scidmore and David Fairchild took shovels not long after. The 3,020 trees were more than could fit around the tidal basin. Gardeners planted extras on the White House grounds, in Rock Creek Park, and near the corner of Seventeenth and B streets close to the new headquarters of the American Red Cross. It took only two springs for the trees to become universally adored, at least enough for the American government to feel the itch to reciprocate. No American tree could rival the delicate glamour of the sakura, but officials decided to offer Japan the next best thing, a shipment of flowering dogwoods, native to the United States, with bright white blooms. Meanwhile, the cherry blossoms in Washington would endure over one hundred years, each tree replaced by clones and cuttings every quarter century to keep them spry. As the trees grew, so did a cottage industry around them: an elite group of gardeners, a team to manage their public relations, and weather-monitoring officials to forecast "peak bloom"---an occasion around which tourists would be encouraged to plan their visits. Eventually, cuttings from the original Washington, D.C, trees would also make their way to other American cities with hospitable climates. Denver, Colorado; Birmingham, Alabama; Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Daniel Stone (The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats)
The Atonement as the Whole Story If you ask anyone from that 74 percent of Americans who say they have made a commitment to Jesus Christ what the Christian gospel is, you will probably be told that Jesus died to pay for our sins, and that if we will only believe he did this, we will go to heaven when we die. In this way what is only one theory of the “atonement” is made out to be the whole of the essential message of Jesus. To continue with theological language for the moment, justification has taken the place of regeneration, or new life.8 Being let off the divine hook replaces possession of a divine life “from above.” For all of the talk about the “new birth” among conservative Christians, there is an almost total lack of understanding of what that new birth is in practical terms and of how it relates to forgiveness and imputed or transmitted righteousness.
Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
The ‘racial types’ they posited are of relatively recent origin, having been replaced over and over by other types of populations in previous centuries.
Ali Rattansi (Racism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
Predication may be unconventionally, but not really inaccurately, defined as, 'Whatever is done by the word is in such a sentence as: a horse is an animal; the earth is a planet.' If I say a horse is an animal; then a) if by the word animal I mean something more, or less, or other than horse, I have told a lie; but b) if I do not mean by the word animal something more, or less, or other than horse, I have said almost nothing. For I might was well have said a horse is a horse. Hence the attempts we are now witnessing to replace the traditional logic based on predication by a new logic, in which symbols of algebraic precision refer to 'atomic' facts and events having no vestige of connection with the symbols and no hierarchical relation to each other.
Owen Barfield (Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry)
You are responsible to get certain things you need for your own personal development and emotional and spiritual health outside the marriage. If you’ve blown off your support system—your female friends, your hobbies, your recreation, your spiritual friendships—hoping your husband could replace all of these while also meeting all your relational needs, then you’re setting up yourself (and your marriage) for disappointment and failure. No husband, by himself, is enough; you still need others, and it’s your responsibility to cultivate those other relationships. Could
Gary L. Thomas (Loving Him Well: Practical Advice on Influencing Your Husband)
Relational consciousness, by contrast, is synonymous with ecological consciousness. It corrects the delusion of dominion and replaces it with the knowledge that we are not outside and above nature but rather live within it as parts. This is ecological humility.
Terrence Real (Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship (Goop Press))
When the deep structures (the balance of power, economic interest, and so forth) that drive international and domestic politics favor conflict, historical narratives are generated that support conflict. When they do not, those narratives disappear, to be replaced by new narratives that support more cooperative and peaceful relations. To put it simply, it is money and bayonets that make the world go around, not whatever peculiar notions people may have about ancient grievances and past glories.
Thomas U. Berger (War, Guilt, and World Politics After World War II)
There was an acute sense of betrayal at all levels of society, from the king downwards, and the political fallout from the war was impossible to contain. On 1 November parliament passed a resolution calling for the severance of diplomatic relations with France. Only the fear of bankruptcy deterred it from calling for a break in diplomatic relations with Britain too. On 20 November, however, parliament unanimously passed a resolution calling for the abrogation of the Anglo–Jordanian treaty and of an exchange of diplomatic representatives with Russia and China. The treaty was clearly doomed, but there was as yet no agreement on how to replace the subsidy it provided. Nabulsi wanted to delay the termination of the treaty until Arab funding could be secured. Hussein, on the other hand, wished to avoid dependence on Arab allies and made a determined bid to secure American financial support for Jordan. His aim was not Arab unity against the West but the replacement of one external patron and protector by another. The first, secret approach to the Americans was made not by the king himself but by his chief of staff. On 9 November, Abu Nuwar requested from the American military attaché in Amman American economic and military aid to Jordan in “sufficient volume” to compensate for the imminent loss of British aid. If America put up the money and arms, Abu Nuwar said, communism would be prevented from dominating Jordan; he would dissolve parliament and take over the government: “I and the people of Jordan will follow US policies.
Avi Shlaim (Lion of Jordan)
Declinism is a close relative of nostalgia, and objects of nostalgia are often atemporal, lacking aliveness. An example: Say you break up with someone and many years later find yourself nostalgic for the relationship. Who is it that appears in this melancholic yearning? Assuming they’re still around, it is surely not your ex-partner as they currently are, the one who has continued to age and evolve. Instead, it is a frozen, idealized version of them, like a hologram that survives within and despite the present. What’s more, some relationships arguably end in the first place because partners have stopped seeing each other in time, one partner having replaced the living, changing other with a static image that can impart no surprises, only a comforting presence. As we learned with the moss, to think you love and appreciate something or someone is, unfortunately, not a guarantee that you can assign them their own reality or that you know them at all.
Jenny Odell (Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture)
Neither fossil fuel nor artificial intelligence is the problem - the real danger is greed. Do you think everybody will live happily ever after, once you replace fossil fuel with green energy! No - they won't! Apekind will simply use green energy to power their greed instead of oil and gas. They will use green energy to wage war, they'll use green energy to kill people. US military is already developing a high-endurance unmanned solar powered aircraft, to be used as a communication relay platform and for surveillance. Besides, solar powered reconnaissance drones have already been in military use for some years now, in various parts of the world. Which means, the planet will be safer, but the people will be in just as much muck as they are today. Apparently, there is a limit to fossil fuel, but there is no limit to human stupidity. Apekind will find one way or another to continue with their "kill or be killed" nonsense, just like any other animal in the wild. And every time government officials will make the same old statement, "it's necessary for national security" - just as power hungry tribal chiefs have been saying since our jungle days, before putting millions upon millions to death! So, my question is - what good is green energy if it's used for the same inhuman purposes as fossil fuel! Treat greed first, you fools - treat greed first! Then you won't need to make a ton of empty promises and winded policies for a sustainable future - because where there is no greed, sustainability flows like spring water. Treat greed first, then I shall call you humankind - until then, you are nothing but apekind. Without the green of heart, what green apes, what oil apes - all energy leads to but one color - the color of blood - red! Energy used to sustain the same old paradigm of greed, control and disparity, is anything but clean - no matter what it says on the label.
Abhijit Naskar (Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch)
One large US bank, for example—an aggressive adopter of AI—has announced a $350 million investment in reskilling related to AI-related job changes, and the bank is being both predictive and granular about the initiative.10 It’s working with researchers from MIT and elsewhere to understand—based on a “suitability for machine learning” (SML) assessment—which skills and jobs are most likely to be replaced by AI.11 The SML analysis will help the bank plan for changes in those jobs and help workers gain the skills they need to succeed in their modified jobs or transition to new ones.
Thomas H. Davenport (All-in On AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence)
Truth be told, though, stress is an integral part of being successful. Even after achieving a rewarding career, expect the relatively simple stresses of being able to pay your bills to quickly be replaced by the more complex stresses of managing multiple projects and many different individuals.
Scott Bradlee (Outside the Jukebox: How I Turned My Vintage Music Obsession into My Dream Gig)
Mathematicians study not objects, but relations between objects; the replacement of these objects by others is therefore indifferent to them, provided the relations do not change. The matter is for them unimportant, the form alone interests them. Without recalling this, it would scarcely be comprehensible that Dedekind should designate by the name incommensurable number a mere symbol, that is to say, something very different from the ordinary idea of quantity, which should be measurable and almost tangible.
Henri Poincaré
The question of how identity relates to replacing an object’s parts gradually over time dates back to a thought experiment first posed about 2,500 years ago, called the Ship of Theseus.
Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI)
Make performance-related goals, not weight-related ones. It’s all about body composition. Not weight. You will be replacing fat with muscle. Muscle is smaller but heavier. So a scale reflects progress poorly, especially in females, whose weight can fluctuate by six pounds daily due to factors like water retention.
Mark Lauren (Strong and Lean: 9-Minute Daily Workouts to Build Your Best Body: No Equipment, Anywhere, Anytime)
Relative to all that’s going on in my life, I would like to be certain that I am making the right choices. Feel good moments never last, at the end of the day I am most certainly left wondering “was it worth it?” My need for more tangible emotions is definitely thwarting my need to feel them filled and I yearn for the peace of mind that used to be my springboard…because it’s no longer there. It has been replaced by something so inexplicably strong and overwhelming that it literally destroys what used to be my domicile of sense and sensibility. Is this how it is supposed to feel? Did I stop years ago because this was how it was? Do I go back to that safe place that felt oh so calm and lonely? Or do I venture like a kid in a candy store, tasting it all, spitting out what is yucky and leaves a bad taste… and just enjoying that which is sweet to my palate and sends wave of pleasure to the senses… tucking away in the back of my mind, or future reference…where the good stuff is? Sonia Valencia Singh March 29, 2014.
Sonia Valencia Singh