Comments by "Dan" (@Dan-ud8hz) on "The Humanist Report"
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“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still...In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
― George Orwell
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them
all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”
― Niels Bohr
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta 'might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women.' The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
— Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours and your children's included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 69 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
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"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328719303507
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ozymandias
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
“There may not be a predictable future but there is still a need to engage in futuring—continually constructing a future. We need ways to decide whether we are engaged in the most appropriate activities and relating in the most appropriate way to our stakeholders…”
(Futuring - A Complex Adaptive Systems Approach to Strategic Planning)
https://www.academia.edu/11897598/Futuring_a_Complex_Adaptive_Systems_Approach_to_Strategic_Planning
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