Strain Theory Quotes

The Couple Overfloweth We sometimes go on as though people can’t express themselves. In fact they’re always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are those where the woman can’t be preoccupied or tired without the man saying “What’s wrong? Say something…,” or the man, without the woman saying … and so on. Radio and television have spread this spirit everywhere, and we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we’re plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements. But what we call the meaning of a statement is its point. That’s the only definition of meaning, and it comes to the same thing as a statement’s novelty. You can listen to people for hours, but what’s the point? . . . That’s why arguments are such a strain, why there’s never any point arguing. You can’t just tell someone what they’re saying is pointless. So you tell them it’s wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn’t that some things are wrong, but that they’re stupid or irrelevant. That they’ve already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the measure of the truth of what I’m saying. It’s the same in mathematics: Poincaré used to say that many mathematical theories are completely irrelevant, pointless; He didn’t say they were wrong – that wouldn’t have been so bad. (Negotiations)

Camilla, you…my God,” he whispered against my skin, his voice sounding oddly strained. “Sweetheart, do you even know? You’re so perfect and you don’t even realize.” The endearment seeped into me like a touch, warming me as much as his body did. “Did I say a good thing, Professor?” “Oh, you said an amazing thing. Tonight I’m going to make very, very sure you know how much it means to me.

MAKE SMARTER MISTAKES! STOP BEATING YOURSELF UP! CONTROL YOUR VARIABLES! BLEND AND STRAIN! CHANGE YOUR MIND! The Freak knows this sounds corny because you're so used to looking at hateful shit, right? News shows and conspiracy theories. Rape jokes and dank memes. You're so used to the humor of the put-down that you didn't see that you slid down a hole and into a tunnel. DIG YOUR WAY OUT!

Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster. I explored it all. Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself. Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain. All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders—Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity—wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question. Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first.

My theory was that readers just thought they cared nothing but the action; that really, although they didn't know it, they cared very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialog and description. The things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn't even hear death knock on the door. That damn little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers.

Nobody knew exactly how the zombification process worked, and there were as many different strains as theories.

Lowlanders who left Scotland for Ireland between 1610 and 1690 were biologically compounded of many ancestral strains. While the Gaelic Highlanders of that time were (as they are probably still) overwhelmingly Celtic in ancestry, this was not true of the Lowlanders. Even if the theory of 'racial' inheritance of character were sound, the Lowlander had long since become a biological mixture, in which at least nine strains had met and mingled in different proportions. Three of the nine had been present in the Scotland of dim antiquity, before the Roman conquest: the aborigines of the Stone Ages, whoever they may have been; the Gaels, a Celtic people who overran the whole island of Britain from the continent around 500 B.C.; and the Britons, another Celtic folk of the same period, whose arrival pushed the Gaels northward into Scotland and westward into Wales. During the thousand years following the Roman occupation, four more elements were added to the Scottish mixture: the Roman itself—for, although Romans did not colonize the island, their soldiers can hardly have been celibate; the Teutonic Angles and Saxons, especially the former, who dominated the eastern Lowlands of Scotland for centuries; the Scots, a Celtic tribe which, by one of the ironies of history, invaded from Ireland the country that was eventually to bear their name (so that the Scotch-Irish were, in effect, returning to the home of some of their ancestors); and Norse adventurers and pirates, who raided and harassed the countryside and sometimes remained to settle. The two final and much smaller components of the mixture were Normans, who pushed north after they had dealt with England (many of them were actually invited by King David of Scotland to settle in his country), and Flemish traders, a small contingent who mostly remained in the towns of the eastern Lowlands. In addition to these, a tenth element, Englishmen—themselves quite as diverse in ancestry as the Scots, though with more of the Teutonic than the Celtic strains—constantly came across the Border to add to the mixture.

What is it,” Maestra had asked quite rhetorically, “that separates human beings from the so-called lower animals? Well, as I see it, it’s exactly one half-dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism—as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glowworms or raccoons—Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake. “Now,” she’d gone on to say, “since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce? And in those cases where the defining qualities are virtually nonexistent, well, what we have are entities that are north of the animal kingdom but south of humanity, they fall somewhere in between, they’re our missing links.” In his grandmother’s opinion, the missing link of scientific lore was neither extinct nor rare. “There’re more of them, in fact, than there are of us, and since they actually seem to be multiplying, Darwin’s theory of evolution is obviously wrong.” Maestra’s stand was that missing links ought to be treated as the equal of full human beings in the eyes of the law, that they should not suffer discrimination in any usual sense, but that their writings and utterances should be generally disregarded and that they should never, ever be placed in positions of authority. “That could be problematic,” Switters had said, straining, at the age of twenty, to absorb this rant, “because only people who, you know, lack those six qualities seem to ever run for any sort of office.” Maestra thoroughly agreed, although she was undecided whether it was because full-fledged humans simply had more interesting things to do with their lives than marinate them in the torpid waters of the public trough or if it was because only missing links, in the reassuring blandness of their banality, could expect to attract the votes of a missing link majority. In any event, of the six qualities that distinguished the human from the subhuman, both grandmother and grandson agreed that Imagination and Humor were probably the most crucial.

Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small.

it’s easy for businesses to increase supply in response to more spending. But as an economy moves closer to its full employment limit, real resources become increasingly scarce. Rising demand can begin to put pressure on prices, and bottlenecks can develop in industries that are experiencing the greatest strain on capacity. Inflation can heat up. Once the economy hits this full employment wall, any additional spending (not just government spending) will be inflationary. That’s overspending, and it can even happen if the government’s budget is balanced or in surplus.

I had heard that Presley died on the toilet, but I’d assumed the location was happenstance, as it was with Judy Garland and Lenny Bruce: an embarrassing setting for a standard celebrity overdose. But the straining-at-stool theory made some sense. With all three autopsies—that of J.W., Mr. K., and E., as Presley’s intimates called him—the collapse was abrupt and the autopsy revealed no obvious cause of death. (Though Presley had traces of several prescription drugs in his blood, none was present at a lethal level.) What Elvis’s autopsy did unambiguously reveal was a colon two to three times normal size.

The fungus Shenidioides had originated in Shenzhen, then spread to nearby regions of China. The reigning theory, first disseminated by a prominent doctor in the Huffington Post, was that the new strain of fungal spores had inadvertently developed within factory conditions of manufacturing areas, the SEZs in China, where spores fed off the highly specific mixture of chemicals. To predict the transmission of the fever, the blogger claimed, wind patterns may be analyzed. Not only that, but the holiday traffic surrounding the mass commute of migrant factory workers back to their home villages, such as during Chinese New Year, should also be limited. Traffic carries spores.

Herd immunity may never be achieved because high vaccination rates encourage the evolution of more severe disease-causing organisms “A partially effective immune response — enough to exert selective pressure but not effective enough to suppress escape viral mutants — is the most effective driving force of antigenic variation.” Rodpothong P, Auewarakul P. Viral evolution and transmission effectiveness. World J Virol 2012 Oct 12; 1(5): 131-34. In theory, if enough people are vaccinated, herd immunity will be achieved and chains of infection will be disrupted. In reality, a true herd immunity threshold may never be reached within normal heterogenous populations. If a true herd immunity threshold level is achieved, it will create a strong selective pressure that encourages the emergence of mutant viral strains.

At that time I was still naive enough to try to make clear to them the madness of their ideas; in my small circle I talked until my tongue was weary and till my throat was hoarse, and I thought I could succeed in convincing them of the destructiveness of their Marxist doctrine of irrationality; but the result was contrary. It seemed as though the increasing realization of the destructive influence of Social Democratic theories would serve only to strengthen their determination. The more I argued with them, the more I got to know their dialectics. First they counted on the ignorance of their adversary; then, when there was no way out, they themselves pretended stupidity. If all this was of no avail, they refused to understand or they changed the subject when driven into a corner; they brought up truisms, but they immediately transferred their acceptance to quite different subjects, and, if attacked again, they gave way and pretended to know nothing exactly. Wherever one attacked one of these prophets, one's hands seized slimy jelly; it slipped through one's fingers only to collect again in the next moment. If one smote one of them so thoroughly that, with the bystanders watching, he could but agree, and if one thus thought he had advanced at least one step, one was greatly astonished the following day. The Jew did not in the least remember the day before, he continued to talk in the same old strain as if nothing had happened, and if indignantly confronted, he pretended to be astonished and could not remember anything except that his assertions had already been proved true the day before. Often I was stunned. One did not know what to admire more: their glibness of tongue or their skill in lying. I gradually began to hate them.

A much more difficult and confusing situation would arise if we could, some day, establish a theory of the phenomena of consciousness, or of biology, which would be as coherent and convincing as our present theories of the inanimate world. Mendel's laws of inheritance and the subsequent work on genes may well form the beginning of such a theory as far as biology is concerned. Furthermore,, it is quite possible that an abstract argument can be found which shows that there is a conflict between such a theory and the accepted principles of physics. The argument could be of such abstract nature that it might not be possible to resolve the conflict, in favor of one or of the other theory, by an experiment. Such a situation would put a heavy strain on our faith in our theories and on our belief in the reality of the concepts which we form. It would give us a deep sense of frustration in our search for what I called "the ultimate truth." The reason that such a situation is conceivable is that, fundamentally, we do not know why our theories work so well. Hence, their accuracy may not prove their truth and consistency. Indeed, it is this writer's belief that something rather akin to the situation which was described above exists if the present laws of heredity and of physics are confronted.

Heritage dot org, May 5, 2021 Purging Whiteness To Purge Capitalism By Mike Gonzalez and Jonathan Butcher KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. CRT [Critical Race Theory] theorists see capitalism’s disparities as a function of race, not class. Capitalism, all the leading CRT proponents believe, is therefore “racist.” 2. CRT intellectuals are trying to change the view that racism is an individual issue, and insist it is systemic, in order to get society to change the entire system. 3. The purpose of the CRT training programs, and the curricula, is now to create enough bad associations with the white race. Race is suddenly all the rage. Employees, students, and parents are being inundated with “anti-racism” training programs and school curricula that insist America was built on white supremacy. Anyone who raises even the slightest objection is often deemed irredeemably racist. But what if the impetus behind a particular type of race-based training programs and curricula we see spreading at the moment is not exclusively, or even primarily, about skin color? What if race is just a façade for a particular strain of thought? What if what stands behind all this is the old, color-blind utopian dream of uniting the “workers of the world,” and eradicating capitalism? … If this all sounds very Marxist, it should. All the giants in whiteness studies, from Noel Ignatiev, to David Roediger, to their ideological lodestar, W.E.B. Du Bois—who first coined the term “whiteness” to begin with—were Marxist. In the cases of Ignatiev and Du Bois, they were actual Communist Party members.

According to this view, free-market capitalism and state-controlled communism aren’t competing ideologies, ethical creeds or political institutions. At bottom, they are competing data-processing systems. Capitalism uses distributed processing, whereas communism relies on centralised processing. Capitalism processes data by directly connecting all producers and consumers to one another, and allowing them to exchange information freely and make decisions independently. For example, how do you determine the price of bread in a free market? Well, every bakery may produce as much bread as it likes, and charge for it as much as it wants. The customers are equally free to buy as much bread as they can afford, or take their business to the competitor. It isn’t illegal to charge $1,000 for a baguette, but nobody is likely to buy it. On a much grander scale, if investors predict increased demand for bread, they will buy shares of biotech firms that genetically engineer more prolific wheat strains. The inflow of capital will enable the firms to speed up their research, thereby providing more wheat faster, and averting bread shortages. Even if one biotech giant adopts a flawed theory and reaches an impasse, its more successful competitors will achieve the hoped-for breakthrough. Free-market capitalism thus distributes the work of analysing data and making decisions between many independent but interconnected processors. As the Austrian economics guru Friedrich Hayek explained, ‘In a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people.

The failure of the Crusades intensified anti-Jewish persecutions in Europe. Banned from owning land or joining trading companies, forced to wear special clothing, Jews were often involved in moneylending, supposedly taboo for Christians. Kings borrowed money from them, and so protected them, but whenever society was strained, by recession or plague, they were attacked. In 1144, after a boy was murdered in Norwich, England, Jews were accused of killing Christian children to make Passover matzoh, unleashing the ‘blood libel’ which in various forms – but always featuring a conspiracy of Jews to harm non-Jews – reverberates down to the twenty-first century. It spread: in 1171, it hit Blois, France, where thirty-three Jews (seventeen women) were burned alive. In the failed state of England, where Henry III struggled to maintain royal power in the face of endemic noble revolt, both king and rebels borrowed from a wealthy banker, David of Oxford. After David’s death, his widow Licoricia of Winchester, the richest non-noble in England, lent to both sides, partly funding the building of Westminster Abbey. But her murder in 1277 showed the perils of being a prominent Jew. In 1290, Henry’s son Edward I expelled the Jews from England. Yet in 1264 Bolesław, duke of Poland, had granted the Statute of Kalisz which gave Jews the right to trade and worship freely and banned the blood libel, legislating against Christian conspiracy theories and denunciations: ‘Accusing Jews of drinking Christian blood is expressly prohibited,’ declared the Statute. ‘If, despite this, a Jew should be accused of murdering a Christian child, such charge must be sustained by testimony of three Christians and three Jews.’ Poland would be a Jewish sanctuary for many centuries.

Man was made for action, and to promote by the exertion of his faculties such changes in the external circumstances both of himself and others, as may seem most favourable to the happiness of all. He must not be satisfied with indolent benevolence, nor fancy himself the friend of mankind, because in his heart he wishes well to the prosperity of the world. That he may call forth the whole vigour of his soul, and strain every nerve, in order to produce those ends which it is the purpose of his being to advance, Nature has taught him, that neither himself nor mankind can be fully satisfied with his conduct, nor bestow upon it the full measure of applause, unless he has actually produced them. He is made to know, that the praise of good intentions, without the merit of good offices, will be but of little avail to excite either the loudest acclamations of the world, or even the highest degree of self-applause. The man who has performed no single action of importance, but whose whole conversation and deportment express the justest, the noblest, and most generous sentiments, can be entitled to demand no very high reward, even though his inutility should be owing to nothing but the want of an opportunity to serve. We can still refuse it him without blame. We can still ask him, What have you done? What actual service can you produce, to entitle you to so great a recompense? We esteem you, and love you; but we owe you nothing. To reward indeed that latent virtue which has been useless only for want of an opportunity to serve, to bestow upon it those honours and preferments, which, though in some measure it may be said to deserve them, it could not with propriety have insisted upon, is the effect of the most divine benevolence. To punish, on the contrary, for the affections of the heart only, where no crime has been committed, is the most insolent and barbarous tyranny.

Students of the theory of ethics call only those acts "good" which are the expression of good impulses and refuse to acknowledge others as such. But society is on the whole guided by practical aims and does not bother about this distinction; it is satisfied if a man adapts his conduct and his actions to the precepts of civilization and asks little about his motives. We have heard that the outer compulsion which education and environment exercise upon a man brings about a further transformation of his impulse life for the good, the change from egotism to altruism. But this is not the necessary or regular effect of the outer compulsion. Education and environment have not only love premiums to offer but work with profit premiums of another sort, namely rewards and punishments. They can therefore bring it about that a person subject to their influence decides in favor of good conduct in the civilized sense without any ennobling of impulse or change from egotistic into altruistic inclinations. On the whole the consequence remains the same; only special circumstances will reveal whether the one person is always good because his impulses compel him to be so while another person is good only in so far as this civilized behavior is of advantage to his selfish purposes. But our superficial knowledge of the individual gives us no means of distinguishing the two cases, and we shall certainly be misled by our optimism into greatly over-estimating the number of people who have been transformed by civilization. Civilized society, which demands good conduct and does not bother about the impulse on which it is based, has thus won over a great many people to civilized obedience who do not thereby follow their own natures. Encouraged by this success, society has permitted itself to be misled into putting the ethical demands as high as possible, thereby forcing its members to move still further from their emotional dispositions. A continual emotional suppression is imposed upon them, the strain of which is indicated by the appearance of the most remarkable reactions and compensations. In the field of sexuality, where such suppression is most difficult to carry out, it results in reactions known as neurotic ailments. In other fields the pressure of civilization shows no pathological results but manifests itself in distorted characters and in the constant readiness of the inhibited impulses to enforce their gratification at any fitting opportunity.

I could hear talking, singing, shouting, crying, and other sounds, and I noticed everybody wore different clothes on that day. Men and women with fine clothes were going down there, and soon two or three men wearing long black coats passed me and followed the crowd. Everybody respected those fellows, and I decided they were the medicine men. I resolved to see what was going on down there, so I slipped through the bushes and watched them. I saw one of the men whom I thought was a medicine man get up and read something out of a book; occasionally he would look at his congregation and then up, and I wondered why he did not smoke; then I concluded it was a council of war, but there were too many squaws there for that. The audience rose and sang, then they all got down on their knees and covered up their faces; some groaned while others wept, and one man mumbled a lot of words; then they all got up and sang a song. The medicine man came to the front and went through a long talk and gesticulations and everybody watched him. The sober-looking man with the long coat mumbled something at first, but gradually grew louder and began singing off his speech, while the tear drops trickled down his cheeks and his face wore a sad expression. His audience seemed to lean forward and drink in every word he said. He kept talking and all the people arose and commingled their voices in a mighty chorus, while the melodious strains floated on the zephyr breeze and reached my ears and seemed as a balm to the aching pains of my breaking heart. Then shouts of laughter, shrill screams, merry faces, sad-eyed spectators, some shouted, others rushed to the center and began dancing, shaking hands and general confusion reigned supreme. It was a sure-enough old fashion Methodist shouting meeting, but of course I did not know this. I thought it must be a new kind of a war dance, rain dance or some kind of a religious ceremony, so I rushed in, gave the Comanche yell, cleared several benches and landed in the midst of the revival. My manner of worship did not suit those white people and they stampeded, leaving me “monarch of all I surveyed.” I gave a few more whoops and a little dance anyway, and looked around to see what had become of all the council, and I saw the big medicine man tearing along with his coat tails flapping as he headed for my mother’s home. My people never permitted me to go to another Methodist revival until I could understand English and knew how to behave myself. True, I broke up the meeting that day, but I was just as earnest, just as fervent, just as candid and sincere as the most sanctified among them, only my mode did not conform to their theories. I have seen just as much earnestness and less hypocrisy among the Indians in their worship as I ever have seen since I came among the whites.

It is hard for anyone who has not given himself wholeheartedly to a belief (and I say again, Miss V., that is how it is: you give yourself to it, it does not fall upon you like sanctifying grace from Heaven) to appreciate how the believer’s conscious mind can separate itself into many compartments containing many, conflicting, dogmas. These are not sealed compartments; they are like the cells of a battery (I think this is how a battery works), over which the electrical charge plays, leaping from one cell to another, gathering force and direction as it goes. You put in the acid of world-historical necessity and the distilled water of pure theory and connect up your points and with a flash and a shudder the patched-together monster of commitment, sutures straining and ape brow clenched, rises in jerky slow motion from Dr. Diabolo’s operating table.

As regards the footing or standing and the attitudes of archers, it may be safely asserted that there are as many varieties as there are archers to call them into existence; that no two are exactly alike in all particulars; and that no one archer has yet been seen to combine all the excellences that might be centred in a perfect archer. That an archer's general position may be a good one it must possess three qualities—firmness, elasticity, and grace: firmness, to resist the strain and the recoil of the bow—for if there be any wavering or unsteadiness the shot will probably prove a failure; elasticity, to give free play to the muscles, and the needful command over them—which cannot be the case should the position be too rigid and stiff; and grace, to render the archer and his performance agreeable, and not ludicrous, to the spectator. It so far, fortunately, happens that the third requirement—that of grace—is almost a necessary consequence of the possession of the other two: as the best position for practical results is, in fact, the most graceful one. Experience proves that an awkward ungainly style of shooting is very seldom successful. All these three requisites must be kept constantly in mind in every endeavour to arrive at the best position for combining them.

But while retrogression is difficult, a fresh advance in conspicuous expenditure is relatively easy; indeed, it takes place almost as a matter of course. In the rare cases where it occurs, a failure to increase one’s visible consumption when the means for an increase are at hand is felt in popular apprehension to call for explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those who fall short in this respect. A prompt response to the stimulus, on the other hand, is accepted as the normal effect. This suggests that the standard of expenditure which commonly guides our efforts is not the average, ordinary expenditure already achieved; it is an ideal of consumption that lies just beyond our reach, or to reach which requires some strain. The motive is emulation—the stimulus of an invidious comparison which prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in the habit of classing ourselves. Substantially the same proposition is expressed in the commonplace remark that each class envies and emulates the class next above it in the social scale, while it rarely compares itself with those below or with those who are considerably in advance. That is to say, in other words, our standard of decency in expenditure, as in other ends of emulation, is set by the usage of those next above us in reputability; until, in this way, especially in any community where class distinctions are somewhat vague, all canons of reputability and decency, and all standards of consumption, are traced back by insensible gradations to the usages and habits of thought of the highest social and pecuniary class—the wealthy leisure class.

The Trump method of bluster, ambiguity, threat, and parry created a sense of ongoing crisis. It alienated critics, strained overseas alliances, and exhausted the patience of the electorate. Populism identified real problems and acted as a check on unaccountable elites, but it was also susceptible to demagoguery, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories.

Every bit of energy we spend straining to recall things is energy not spent doing the thinking that only humans can do: inventing new things, crafting stories, recognizing patterns, following our intuition, collaborating with others, investigating new subjects, making plans, testing theories. Every minute we spend trying to mentally juggle all the stuff we have to do leaves less time for more meaningful pursuits like cooking, self-care, hobbies, resting, and spending time with loved ones.

Every bit of energy we spend straining to recall things is energy not spent doing the thinking that only humans can do: inventing new things, crafting stories, recognizing patterns, following our intuition, collaborating with others, investigating new subjects, making plans, testing theories.

One way to sidestep such guilt is to make our objects of envy boys rather than men. There is a definitive boyishness to the litany of masc aspirational figures I opened this chapter with, and it's not at all incidental. They are all safe boys to love: non-threatening, gentle, empathic, features that are amplified by the nexus of youth and whiteness. This is, indeed, what makes them popularly palatable teen heartthrobs, and what makes transmasc cathodes to them ones that don't threaten to devour. Awkward-Rich, in a brilliant criticism of what he calls "the boys of queer trans theory," suspects that the figure of the boy (as theorized in the work of Jack Halberstam, Bobby Noble, and others) emerges as central to these strains of trans masculine theorizing because he stands for a kind of "masculinity without phallic power" that "fashions masculinity for the [feminist] movement." In halberstam's work, the boy—and, specifically, the paradigmatic boy that is Peter Pan—signals a refusal to grow up and into the staid gender stereotypes associated with heteronormative adulthood.

Among the most ardent enemies of Judaism today is the Left. Marxists, for example, are theoretically opposed to all religions. But from Marxism’s earliest days, its adherents tended to be particularly anti-Jewish. Among other reasons: Judaism, unlike other religions, incorporates nationhood, while Marxist theory advocates the tearing down of national as well as religious allegiances. In practice, however, Marxist parties have been intensely nationalistic wherever they attained power, and the combination of chauvinistic nationalism with Marxist theory produced a particularly virulent strain of antisemitism. Neither could tolerate the Jews. Thus, for example, Soviet Jews who were committed to the God and Torah components of Judaism provoked antisemitism for Marxist reasons (quite aside from traditional Russian Orthodox antisemitism), while those who affirmed the national component of Judaism provoked Jew-hatred for Soviet nationalist (Russian, Ukrainian, Moldavian, etc.) as well as Marxist reasons. Thus, Soviet antisemitism was a reaction to every component of Judaism.

wanting to create a monument to Shakespeare in the US capital. “The poet is one of our best sources, one of the wells from which we Americans draw our national thought, our faith, and our hope,” Emily Folger explained, drawing on a strain of American literary criticism that saw Shakespeare, paradoxically, as America’s poet. He had influenced the founding fathers, who saw in his villains and tyrants the dangers of monarchy and the need for institutional checks on power. Shakespeare’s history plays heralded the “inauguration of modern democracy,” Walt Whitman wrote, for they put “on record the first full exposé—and by far the most vivid one… of the political theory and results” of a feudal system “which America has come on earth to abnegate and replace.

There are endless variations on this sort of tit-for-tat, or almost tit-for-tat, gift exchange. The most familiar is the exchange of presents: I buy someone a beer; they buy me the next one. Perfect equivalence implies equality. But consider a slightly more complicated example: I take a friend out to a fancy restaurant for dinner; after a discreet interval, my friend does the same. As anthropologists have long been in the habit of pointing out, the very existence of such customs—especially, the feeling that one really ought to return the favor—can’t be explained by standard economic theory, which assumes that any human interaction is ultimately a business deal and that we are all self-interested individuals trying to get the most for ourselves for the least cost or least amount of effort.28 But this feeling is quite real, and it can cause genuine strain for those of limited means trying to keep up appearances. So: Why, if I took a free-market economic theorist out to an expensive dinner, would that economist feel somewhat diminished—uncomfortably in my debt—until he had been able to return the favor? Why, if he were feeling competitive with me, would he be inclined to take me to someplace even more expensive?

To begin with, the child of five, six, or seven is in many ways an extremely competent individual. Not only can she use skillfully a raft of symbolic forms, but she has evolved a galaxy of robust theories that prove quite serviceable for most purposes and can even be extended in generative fashion to provide cogent accounts of unfamiliar materials or processes. The child is also capable of intensive and extensive involvement in cognitive activities, ranging from experimenting with fluids in the bathtub to building complex block structures and mastering board games, card games, and sports. While some of these creations are derivative, at least a few of them may exhibit genuine creativity and originality. And quite frequently in at least one area, the young child has achieved the competence expected from much older children. Such precocity is particularly likely when youngsters have pursued a special passion, like dinosaurs, dolls, or guns, or when there is a strain of special talent in areas like mathematics, music, or chess or simply a flexibility, a willingness to try new things.

Virginia Woolf said, speaking from the perspective of the writer, that there’s no such thing, objectively, as a good or a bad novel, there’s just the novel you wanted to write. From the perspective of the reader, equally, there’s no such thing (objectively again) as a good or a bad novel – just the novel that moves you, that seems really felt and imagined by the author, lively and alive. This probably means that the more idiosyncratic the novel the better, because any writer straining to conform to the precepts of a genre, or the fashions of an age, may well end up suppressing his or her real self, deferring to other people’s maxims and theories and generally becoming a terrible phoney. --an excerpt from Literary Review (March 2012)

Nationalism appeals to our tribal instincts, to passion and to prejudice, and to our nostalgic desire to be relieved from the strain of individual responsibility which it attempts to replace by a collective or group responsibility. It is in keeping with these tendencies that we find that the oldest works on political theory, even that of the Old Oligarch, but more markedly those of Plato and of Aristotle, express decidedly nationalist views; for these works were written in an attempt to combat the open society and the new ideas of imperialism, cosmopolitanism, and equalitarianism51.

As Rorty, James’s successor in twentieth-century philosophy, said, Russell had a theory of truth, a natural corollary of his foundationalism and his demand for certainty, against which pragmatism recoiled. But, as is his wont, Rorty goes further than he should: ‘Neither William nor Henry James would have had anything to say in a world without Russells’ (1982: 136). This is rather strained, to say the least, since William and Henry were putting their ideas forward before Russell came on the scene. But Rorty is using Russell as an archetype for ‘straight men’ who defend ‘common-sense realism’.

The strands in this moment were complex, and the formula which associates the Reformation with the rise of economic individualism is no complete explanation. Systems prepare their own overthrow by a preliminary process of petrification. The traditional social philosophy was static, in the sense that it assumed a body of class relations sharply defined by custom and law, and little affected by the ebb and flow of economic movements. Its weakness in the face of novel forces was as obvious as the strain put upon it by the revolt against the source of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the partial discredit of the canon law and of the ecclesiastical discipline, and the rise of a political science equipped from the arsenals of antiquity.

In theory, as long as food production continued to grow, it didn’t matter that a small percentage of the planet controlled most of the world’s resources and consumed the vast majority of its calories. The ideology of industrial agriculture held out the attractive fantasy that hunger could be alleviated through purely technical means—without needing to challenge power relations or alter the economic status quo. HOME

In ancient days two aviators procured to themselves wings. Daedalus flew safely through the middle air across the sea, and was duly honored on his landing. Young Icarus soared upwards towards the sun till the wax melted which bound his wings, and his flight ended in fiasco. In weighing their achievements perhaps there is something to be said for Icarus. The classic authorities tell us that he was only "doing a stunt," but I prefer to think of him as the man who certainly brought to light a constructional defect in the flying machines of his day. So too in science. Cautious Daedalus will apply his theories where he feels most confident they will safely go; but by his excess of caution their hidden weaknesses can not be brought to light. Icarus will strain his theories to the breaking-point till the weak joints gape. For a spectacular stunt? Perhaps partly; he is often very human. But if he is not yet destined to reach the sun and solve for all time the riddle of its constitution, yet he may hope to learn from his journey some hints to build a better machine

Historically, wolf trappers staked traps in the earth so that a trapped animal was stuck at a single location. This made it easier for the trapper to find his quarry, but it caused a great deal of stress for the animal. Stake-trapped animals often struggle so violently against the metal clinching their legs that they severely injure themselves. By not staking their traps, and by adding features like a drag with a coil spring and swivel - which reduces the strain from the pointed prongs when it’s being dragged - the red wolf program allows a trapped animal to continue moving and to seek refuge. In theory, this makes the trapping experience less stressful, both physically and mentally, for the animals. It can also make them harder to locate. “Please take it off,” I blurted. The sight of the metal trap biting Ryan’s hand shot adrenaline up and down my spine. Even though he claimed it didn’t hurt, I still expected geysers of blood to spout at any second. Ryan paused, clearly taken aback. Then he grinned like a jester and doubled over in laughter at me. When he freed himself and slipped off the glove, a faint purple pressure mark wrapped around his fingers. He often demonstrated this to groups sans glove.

of. The true purpose of Marxism and communism was never social justice or the fair redistribution of wealth and property. Its founders knew they couldn’t publicly announce their plan to create an all-powerful totalitarian world government, so they found softer words to convince the masses that this would be in their best interest. Given the deaths of tens of millions of people in the twentieth century’s communist revolutions and Hitler’s National Socialism movement resulting in World War II and the Holocaust, this would seem a formidable task. But the ruling elite, the oligarchy, the “scientific dictatorship,” the Illuminati, or whatever you choose to call them, really believe that the masses are genetically inferior and can be deceived by a well-funded campaign of carefully crafted messaging and subliminal and overt scientific mind control. Remember, the elite are completely convinced of the validity of Darwin’s theory of evolution in which certain races and genetic lines are vastly superior to others. That’s why the occult ruling families are obsessed with having their children breed within certain genetic lines to preserve their superiority. In the early twentieth century, the Rockefeller family funded eugenics programs—the science of selective breeding. The term was coined in the late 1800s by British natural scientist Francis Galton, who, influenced by Darwin’s theory, proposed a system allowing “the more suitable races or strains of blood a

Reilin only smiled, eyes ahead. Then he said something Ronoah never would have expected from him. "You strain yourself trying to understand something before it is ready to reveal itself to you. Truth barely has time to set up her gauntlet before you are sprinting towards her prize. A piece of advice to you, Ronoah: wait it out. Enjoy the run. As I have already said, it is the unexpected things which impact us the most, and really, you do not want to know everything nearly as badly as you think you do.

Once the relation of science and metaphysics with “intellectual intuition” is misunderstood, Kant has no difficulty in showing that our science is entirely relative and our metaphysics wholly artificial. Because he strained the independence of the understanding in both cases, because he relieved metaphysics and science of the “intellectual intuition” which gave them their inner weight, science with its relations presents to him only an outer wrapping of form, and metaphysics with its things, an outer wrapping of matter. Is it surprising, then, that the first shows him only frameworks within frameworks, and the second phantoms pursuing phantoms? He struck our science and metaphysics such rude blows that they have not yet entirely recovered from their shock. Our mind would willingly resign itself to see in science a wholly relative knowledge and in metaphysics an empty speculation. It seems to us even today that Kantian criticism applies to all metaphysics and to all science. In reality it applies especially to the philosophy of the ancients, as well as to the form—still ancient—that the moderns have given most often to their thought. It is valid against a metaphysics which claims to give us a unique and ready-made system of things, against a science which would be a unique system of relations, finally against a science and a metaphysics which present themselves with the architectural simplicity of the Platonic theory of Ideas, or of a Greek temple. If metaphysics claims to be made up of concepts we possessed prior to it, if it consists in an ingenious arrangement of pre-existing ideas which we utilize like the materials of construction for a building, in short, if it is something other than the constant dilation of our mind, the constantly renewed effort to go beyond our actual ideas and perhaps our simple logic as well, it is too evident that it becomes artificial like all works of pure understanding. And if science is wholly the work of analysis or of conceptual representation, if experience is only to serve as the verification of “clear ideas,” if instead of starting from multiple and varied intuitions inserted into the movement proper to each reality but not always fitting into one another, it claims to be an immense mathematics, a single system of relations which imprisons the totality of the real in a mesh prepared for it, it becomes a knowledge purely relative to the human understanding. A close reading of the Critique of Pure Reason will show that for Kant this kind of universal mathematics is science, and this barely modified Platonism, metaphysics. To tell the truth, the dream of a universal mathematics is itself only a survival of Platonism. Universal mathematics is what the world of Ideas becomes when one assumes that the Idea consists in a relation or a law, and no longer in a thing.