Thus in order to be a “radical” one must be open to the possibility that one’s own core assumptions are misconceived.
Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all. How dare you intervene? As well ask, How dare you not?
On the other hand, and as if by way of compensation, religion teaches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that god cares for them individually, and it claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in mind. This explains the supercilious expression on the faces of those who practice religion ostentatiously: pray excuse my modesty and humility but I happen to be busy on an errand for god.
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are.
The holy book in the longest continuous use – the Talmud – commands the observant one to thank his maker every day that he was not born a woman.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. This is even more true when the “evidence” eventually offered is so shoddy and self-interested.
As the great Eugene Debs used to tell his socialist voters in the 1912 election campaign, he would not lead them into a Promised Land even if he could, because if they were trusting enough to be led in, they would be trusting enough to be led out again. He urged them, in other words, to do their own thinking.
The United States makes large claims for itself, among them the claim that the nation is the model for a society based simultaneously on democracy and multiethnicity. It’s certainly no exaggeration to say that on the success or failure of this principle much else depends. But there must be better ways of affirming it than by clinging to an insipid parody of a two-party system that counts as a virtue the ability to escape thorny questions and postpone larger ones.
How sad to be a woman – not to know Aught of the glory of this breast of snow, All unconcerned to comb this mighty hair; To be a woman and yet never know! Were I a woman, I would all day long Sing my own beauty in some holy song, Bend low before it, hushed and half afraid, And say “I am a woman” all day long.
It was well said – by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think – that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one’s awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being ‘waterboarded’ and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable.
The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it’s your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you.
I am so made that I cannot believe.
To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns out to be not even a Holocaust denier but a Holocaust affirmer. There has to be a moral limit, and either this has to be it or we must cease pretending to ourselves that we observe one.
Religion poisons everything.
But there is a reason why religions insist so much on strange events in the sky, as well as on less quantifiable phenomena such as dreams and visions. All of these things cater to our inborn stupidity, and our willingness to be persuaded against all the evidence that we are indeed the center of the universe and that everything is arranged with us in mind.
Osama bin Laden’s writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.
You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
Beware of identity politics. I’ll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics.
Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think ‘first woman president.’ We think – for example – ‘first ex-co-president’ or ‘first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent’ or ’first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband’s perjury rap.
Very often, people embarking on such guesswork make the vulgar assumption that the lower the motives, the more likely they are to be authentic.