"There is the stupid party. And there is the evil party. I am proud to be a member of the stupid party."
He added: "Periodically, the two parties get together and do something that is both stupid and evil. This is called-bipartisanship."
From a column by Peter Brimelow, the rest of which I disagree with.
I don't think there was any Arab in the seventies who did not want Saddam Hussein to have an atomic weapon. They wanted him to have military parity. Israel had atomic weapons. The Arabs wanted an Arab country to have atomic weapons. Iraq was the head of the pack and therefore all Arabs supported Saddam Hussein. I have news for you: I don't think there are many Arabs at this moment in time--you can exclude me out of this statement at this moment in time--who do not want Saddam Hussein to have an atomic weapon now. They don't look at it as weapons of mass destruction. They look at it as transfer of technology. That the Arabs have done it. The Arabs have joined the modern world. That's the way they see it. And that pleases them. The fact that Saddam Hussein eliminates people, kills innocent men, uses a chemical weapon against his own people, is actually in a way secondary to this image. The Iraqi people are concerned with the latter. They suffer because of the latter. But the Arab people outside of Iraq do not suffer because Saddam Hussein eliminates people, because he doesn't eliminate them. He eliminates Iraqis.
Iraqi journalist Saïd K. Aburish, in a webbed interview. Emphasis mine.
(David Buss, Evolutionary Psychology, discussing ways in which
Confederate soldiers in John Brown' Body, a book length poem by Stephen Vincent Benét. On my web page during the Iraq war.
... place at the apex of your order of creation a fiction. If you are born in the Middle Ages, call it God. If you live now, call it the Ecological Balance. Identify a perturbation in nature, then interpret it as a warning that we are living wrongly and should change our ways. Finally, earn yourself status, a pulpit, a Commons cheer, a living, or a research grant by elaborating on the perturbation and enumerating the ways we should change. ...Note that in every case the voice crying 'I told you so' has an ulterior motive. Science is wheeled on just as God was once wheeled on, as corroborating evidence (from a superior source) for something upon which the voice of moral reproof wanted to insist anyway. Many and loud have been the voices crying that Aids was God's way of punishing an unnatural practice. One day, perhaps, an inoculation against HIV may be discovered. A bottle of champagne, then, for whoever cites me evidence of one of those voices crying that the breakthrough is God's way of telling us to bugger each other.
Matthew Parris, from a (webbed) column
"...Then in the midst of it all came a bulletin that Ecuador had declared war on Japan. ... . It was an absurd thought that Ecuador had come to the rescue of the United States of America, it was like a bad line in a play, and yet what was happening to my emotions had no least connection with either thinking or playwriting. Something within me burst, and I ached with my gratitude to Ecuador, I ached with my love for my country, I ached with horror at the Japanese deception, I ached with sickness for the American loss. ......
...The generation that was to respond to the last man on Pearl Harbor's dawn had been conditioned to the last man to believe that wars accomplish nothing. Had America been an enormous laboratory and had we all been albino rats, no more elegant experiment could have been devised to test the powers of social conditioning. Perhaps its only equal has been that of the Soviet Union in its total effort half a century long to induce the Russian farmer to put his heart into crops raised on land not his own. Ours was as total in its way, and it lasted for twenty-three years, and it failed in a dawn's bad hour. Yet human gullibility is such that a generation who survived the experiment will instruct another generation that patriotism is something we are taught.
Robert Ardry, The Territorial Imperative, discussing his and his contemporaries' reaction to Pearl Harbor.
"Young man, there's a lot of ruin in a nation."
Adam Smith, responding to a
student who told him
that the surrender at Yorktown would be the ruin of
England
The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?
Chuang-tzu, quoted in The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil.
"Since there is a limit to how brilliant you can be and want to go to law school ..."
(Judge Richard Posner, The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory--a very entertaining book)
(about French women in the 18th c.):"Yet because the woman's spheres were largely removed from contact with the outside market economy, she had little leverage upon her husband. … The roles she was obliged to perform in relation to him and the outside world were all inferior, subjugated ones, in which the autonomy she enjoyed within the domestic sphere did her no good. Only when wives gained direct contact with the market economy--by means of cottage industry and later by means of factory work--did they seize hold of a solid lever with which to pry themselves loose from these subordinate roles."
(Shorter, Edward, The Making of the Modern Family)
But I eventually came to realize that working biologists regard Gould much the same way that economists regard Robert Reich: talented writer, too bad he never gets anything right.
(Paul Krugman on Stephen Jay Gould. For justification, click here.)
"What this new technique, and so many others like it, tell us is that there is nothing special about human reproduction, nor any other aspect of human biology, save one. The specialness of humanity is found only between our ears; if you go looking for it anywhere else, you'll be disappointed."Mouse geneticist Lee Silver, responding to a bioethicist concerned that a technique that might make it possible to produce human sperm from the testes of an animal challenged "the specialness of humanity." From Remaking Eden.
The causal world imposes a nonarbitrary distinction between detecting in one's visual array the faint outline of a partly camouflaged stalking predator and not detecting it because of alternative interpretative procedures. Nonpropagating designs are removed from the population, whether they believe in naive realism or that everything is an arbitrary social construction.(Tooby and Cosmides, in The Adapted Mind, Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby, editors )
In the thirteenth century, movement was to be noted everywhere: there was general prosperity and the population was increasing by leaps and bounds; popular culture was effervescing in bubbles that researchers are only now beginning to pick up. Then, in the late Middle Ages, a long term regression set in (for reasons much too complicated even to suggest in this short book), and a period of economic, demographic, and cultural retrenchment began which was to continue until the early nineteenth century. It is this epoch of decline and stagnation in the grand sweep of Western life that one might call "traditional." During this epoch the popular values and patterns of doing cultural business were nailed into place that subsequent folklorists would think had begun with the Druids.
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