[Aphorisms, Notebook J 1789 ]
... no amount of determinism can prevent [one] from believing that he acts as a free being.
or
... all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, [man] believes he has free will.
Thursday, June 7, 2018
Thursday, May 24, 2018
Gandhi
[from an article about snakebites (1913)]
[Close to the mis-attributed "Be the change you seek in the world."]
If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.
[Close to the mis-attributed "Be the change you seek in the world."]
If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.
Alphabetical author list
- Saul Alinsky on sociology
- Dennis Altman anti-gay bigotry: origins and fighting it
- James Baldwin racism
- Jacques Barzun on significance and difficulty
- Gregory Bateson on the social "sciences"
- Gregory and Mary Bateson syllogism of metaphor
- Alison Bechdel on delayed gay teenage years
- Daniel Bell what history should focus on
- H. E. Booker on Bachelors and Doctors degrees
- Jorge Luis Borges on aging
- Samuel Butler on prayer
- Jorge Castañeda U.S. / Mexico relations
- Noam Chomsky domino theory; U.S. media
- Arthur C. Clarke Clarke's Laws
- Harvey Cox on specialization
- Steve Cuno on quarantine economy
- Samuel R. (Chip) Delany mainstream fiction vs. SF; civilization's built-in enemies
- Annie Dillard profligate nature
- Cory Doctorow on non-voters
- Ralph Waldo Emerson "Language is fossil poetry."
- Timothy Ferris on blind belief vs. evidence and science
- R. Buckminster Fuller on genius
- Gandhi ~ be the change...
- Tim Gowers on collaboration
- G. H. Hardy science is said to be useful if ...
- Eric Hoffer the learners vs. the learned
- Aldous Huxley channeling power into learning
- Ivan Illich on cars
- Molly Ivins on undeserving rich
- Gary Kasparov on propaganda
- Christina Anne Knight defining religion
- Donald E. Knuth on teaching computers
- Thomas Kuhn on reading apparent absurdities
- Timothy Leary on age
- Ursula LeGuin secret desires; endless growth; "I don't believe in evolution, I accept it."
- Ursula LeGuin on suicide
- Georg C. Lichtenberg on determinism / free will
- Robert T. Lundy logic, reason, confusion, fear
- Scott McNealy zero privacy
- HarveyMilk coming out
- Thomas Paine
- Robert Pastor U.S. / Mexico relations
- Thomas Piketty on non-voters
- Cecil Rhodes on the lottery of life
- Richard Rorty on worship and on social goals
- Richard Rorty objectivity; physics vs. psychology
- Richard Rorty personhood, awareness, civil rights
- Jane Rule inventing heaven and hell
- Joanna Russ "Women ought to run things ... "
- Martha Shelley having to keep being gay secret
- Michael Shermer "overidentify patterns and causation"
- Neal Stephenson on agreeing on facts
- Adlai Stevenson "That's not enough..."
- Jonathan Symons anti-gay bigotry: origins and fighting it
- William Irwin Thompson on entertainment
- William Irwin Thompson on sociology
- William Irwin Thompson on political virtual reality
- William Irwin Thompson on just war
- Mark Twain on bad habits
- Gore Vidal "do as I advise"
- Tim Wu on economic concentration
- William Butler Yeats fed the heart on fantasies
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
R. Buckminster Fuller
[NASA speech (1966)]
There is no such thing as genius, some children are just less damaged than others.
There is no such thing as genius, some children are just less damaged than others.
Friday, May 18, 2018
Ivan Illich
[Energy and Equity (1974)]
The typical American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly instalments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls, insurance, taxes and tickets, He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.
And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy.
The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only three to eight per cent of their society's time budget to traffic, instead of 28 per cent.
What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.
[paragraph breaks added]
The typical American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly instalments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls, insurance, taxes and tickets, He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.
And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy.
The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only three to eight per cent of their society's time budget to traffic, instead of 28 per cent.
What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.
[paragraph breaks added]
Arthur C. Clarke
Clarke's Laws:
Every revolutionary idea — in science, politics, art, or whatever — seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:
- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Every revolutionary idea — in science, politics, art, or whatever — seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:
(1) "It's completely impossible — don't waste my time";
(2) "It's possible, but it's not worth doing";
(3) "I said it was a good idea all along."
(2) "It's possible, but it's not worth doing";
(3) "I said it was a good idea all along."
Monday, April 16, 2018
Richard Rorty
From Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Once upon a time, we felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world. Later we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God. Later, a love of ourselves. We should try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything.
The point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities. That goal requires peace, wealth, and freedom.
Once upon a time, we felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world. Later we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God. Later, a love of ourselves. We should try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything.
- - - - - -
The point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities. That goal requires peace, wealth, and freedom.
William Irwin Thompson
From The American Replacement of Nature: The Everyday Acts and Outrageous Evolution of Economic Life
[In America,] history is replaced by movies, education is replaced with entertainment ... Entertainment has now replaced education as the basic process of socialization.
Disneyism is the world's cleverest and most successful new religion.... Attacks ... are, like the Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians against the railroads, just simply not powerful enough to stop the electronic spread of Disneyism, Hollywood movies and TV programs, rock and roll, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds.
[In America,] history is replaced by movies, education is replaced with entertainment ... Entertainment has now replaced education as the basic process of socialization.
- - - - - - -
Disneyism is the world's cleverest and most successful new religion.... Attacks ... are, like the Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians against the railroads, just simply not powerful enough to stop the electronic spread of Disneyism, Hollywood movies and TV programs, rock and roll, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds.
Jane Rule
[From A Hot-Eyed Moderate]
We are as much rule- as tool-making creatures because few of our behavior patterns are handed to us in our genes.
...
The human appetite for justice is so often thwarted in life that one of the chief activities of fantasy is to punish or reward those people who deserve but seem to receive neither in life. We are so frustrated by not only the lack of plot but also by lunatic accident that we invent heaven and hell to correct the meaninglessness and error in this world.
We are as much rule- as tool-making creatures because few of our behavior patterns are handed to us in our genes.
...
The human appetite for justice is so often thwarted in life that one of the chief activities of fantasy is to punish or reward those people who deserve but seem to receive neither in life. We are so frustrated by not only the lack of plot but also by lunatic accident that we invent heaven and hell to correct the meaninglessness and error in this world.
Robert Pastor and Jorge Castañeda
From Limits to Friendship: The United States and Mexico
Each new proposal from the United States suffers from historical amnesia; each hesitant and suspicious response from Mexico suffers from historical paralysis.
Almost every U.S. expression of opinion is seen as interference. A lose/lose situation: ignoring Mexico is seen as a slight, and concern for Mexico is seen as interference.
Each new proposal from the United States suffers from historical amnesia; each hesitant and suspicious response from Mexico suffers from historical paralysis.
- - - - - -
Almost every U.S. expression of opinion is seen as interference. A lose/lose situation: ignoring Mexico is seen as a slight, and concern for Mexico is seen as interference.
Gregory and Mary Bateson
From Angels Fear: Towards An Epistemology Of The Sacred
Syllogism of metaphor:
Grass dies;
Men die;
Men are grass.
Syllogism of metaphor:
Grass dies;
Men die;
Men are grass.
Noam Chomsky
From On Power and Ideology
The true domino theory is the threat of the good example: that a tiny and impoverished country with minuscule resources might succeed in social and economic development outside the framework of U.S. control.
If anything is freely discussed [in American media], it is probably unimportant.
The true domino theory is the threat of the good example: that a tiny and impoverished country with minuscule resources might succeed in social and economic development outside the framework of U.S. control.
- - - - - - -
If anything is freely discussed [in American media], it is probably unimportant.
Donald E. Knuth
From “The Concept of a Meta-Font” in Visible Language, Vol. XVI, #1 Winter 1982
We know from experience that we understand an idea much better after we have succeeded in teaching it to someone else; and the advent of computers has brought the realization that even more is true: The best way to understand something is to know it so well that you can teach it to a computer. Machines provide the ultimate test, since they do not tolerate “hand-waving” and they have no “common sense” to fill the gaps and vagaries in what we do almost unconsciously....
People often find that the knowledge gained while writing computer programs is far more valuable than the computer's eventual output.
We know from experience that we understand an idea much better after we have succeeded in teaching it to someone else; and the advent of computers has brought the realization that even more is true: The best way to understand something is to know it so well that you can teach it to a computer. Machines provide the ultimate test, since they do not tolerate “hand-waving” and they have no “common sense” to fill the gaps and vagaries in what we do almost unconsciously....
People often find that the knowledge gained while writing computer programs is far more valuable than the computer's eventual output.
Richard Rorty
I wrote this down (in 1981) as “From a Rorty rebuttal”
The fallacious inference from 'better for mastering' to 'more objective' is just a quirky, though central, feature of Western metaphysical tradition....
Liking Bohr and disliking Skinner ... [is just] expressing a preference for predicting rocks over doing anything else with them and for doing other things with people over predicting their behavior. Yes, Skinner is dotty, but physicists are equally dotty to think they view nature naked, unveiled by human concerns.
The fallacious inference from 'better for mastering' to 'more objective' is just a quirky, though central, feature of Western metaphysical tradition....
Liking Bohr and disliking Skinner ... [is just] expressing a preference for predicting rocks over doing anything else with them and for doing other things with people over predicting their behavior. Yes, Skinner is dotty, but physicists are equally dotty to think they view nature naked, unveiled by human concerns.
Thomas Kuhn
From The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change
When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, ... when these passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.
When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, ... when these passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.
Richard Rorty
From Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (paraphrased)
Personhood is a matter of decision rather than knowledge, an acceptance of another being into fellowship rather than a recognition of a common essence.
Knowledge of what pain is like or what red is like is attributed to beings on the basis of their potential membership in the community. Thus babies and the more attractive sorts of animal are credited with “having feelings” rather than (like machines or spiders) “merely responding to stimuli.”
To say that babies know what heat is like, but not what the motion of molecules is like is just to say that we can fairly readily imagine them opening their mouths and remarking on the former, but not the latter. To say that a gadget that says “red” appropriately doesn't know what red is like is to say that we cannot readily imagine continuing a conversation with the gadget....
Attribution of pre-linguistic awareness is merely a courtesy extended to potential or imagined fellow-speakers of our language. Moral prohibitions against hurting babies and the better-looking sorts of animals are not based on their possessions of feeling. It is, if anything, the other way around....
Rationality about denying civil rights to morons or fetuses or aboriginal tribes or blacks or Martians or trees is a myth. The emotions we have toward borderline cases depend on the liveliness of our imagination, and conversely.
Personhood is a matter of decision rather than knowledge, an acceptance of another being into fellowship rather than a recognition of a common essence.
Knowledge of what pain is like or what red is like is attributed to beings on the basis of their potential membership in the community. Thus babies and the more attractive sorts of animal are credited with “having feelings” rather than (like machines or spiders) “merely responding to stimuli.”
To say that babies know what heat is like, but not what the motion of molecules is like is just to say that we can fairly readily imagine them opening their mouths and remarking on the former, but not the latter. To say that a gadget that says “red” appropriately doesn't know what red is like is to say that we cannot readily imagine continuing a conversation with the gadget....
Attribution of pre-linguistic awareness is merely a courtesy extended to potential or imagined fellow-speakers of our language. Moral prohibitions against hurting babies and the better-looking sorts of animals are not based on their possessions of feeling. It is, if anything, the other way around....
Rationality about denying civil rights to morons or fetuses or aboriginal tribes or blacks or Martians or trees is a myth. The emotions we have toward borderline cases depend on the liveliness of our imagination, and conversely.
Eric Hoffer
[I wrote this quote from a Hoffer television appearance around 1978]
Learning people are prepared for the world.
Learned people are prepared for a world that no longer exists.
[I see it quoted the following way from Hoffer's Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)]
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
Learning people are prepared for the world.
Learned people are prepared for a world that no longer exists.
[I see it quoted the following way from Hoffer's Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)]
William Butler Yeats
From "The Stare's Nest by My Window" in Meditations in Time of Civil War
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare, ...
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare, ...
Martha Shelley
From "Gay Is Good" (1970) in Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation
Understand this — that the worst part of being a homosexual is having to keep it secret. Not the occasional murders by police or teenage queer-beaters, not the loss of jobs or expulsion from schools or dishonorable discharges — but the daily knowledge that what you are is so awful that it cannot be revealed. The violence against us is sporadic. Most of us are not affected. But the internal violence of being made to carry — or choosing to carry — the load of your straight society's unconscious guilt — this is what tears us apart, what makes us want to stand up in the offices, in the factories and schools and shout out our true identities.
Understand this — that the worst part of being a homosexual is having to keep it secret. Not the occasional murders by police or teenage queer-beaters, not the loss of jobs or expulsion from schools or dishonorable discharges — but the daily knowledge that what you are is so awful that it cannot be revealed. The violence against us is sporadic. Most of us are not affected. But the internal violence of being made to carry — or choosing to carry — the load of your straight society's unconscious guilt — this is what tears us apart, what makes us want to stand up in the offices, in the factories and schools and shout out our true identities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
From Essays: Second Series
The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.
The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.
Gregory Bateson
From Steps to an Ecology of Mind
About 50 years of work in which thousands of clever men have had their share have, in fact, produced a rich crop of several hundred heuristic concepts, but, alas, scarcely a single principle worthy of a place in the list of fundamentals. It is all too clear that the vast majority of the concepts of contemporary psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, and economics are totally detached from the network of scientific fundamentals....
[E]xcessive preference for induction ... must always lead to something like the present state of the behavioral sciences — a mass of quasi-theoretical speculation unconnected with any core of fundamental knowledge.
About 50 years of work in which thousands of clever men have had their share have, in fact, produced a rich crop of several hundred heuristic concepts, but, alas, scarcely a single principle worthy of a place in the list of fundamentals. It is all too clear that the vast majority of the concepts of contemporary psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, and economics are totally detached from the network of scientific fundamentals....
[E]xcessive preference for induction ... must always lead to something like the present state of the behavioral sciences — a mass of quasi-theoretical speculation unconnected with any core of fundamental knowledge.
H. E. Booker
In Science magazine (probably around 1973)
At the conclusion of an ideal undergraduate education, a man's brain works well. He is convinced, not that he knows everything or even that he knows everything in a particular field, but that he stands a reasonable chance of understanding anything that someone else has already understood. Any subject that he can look up in a book he feels that he too can probably understand.
On the other hand, if he cannot look it up in a book, he is uncertain what to do next. This is where graduate education comes in. Unlike the recipient of a Bachelor's Degree, the recipient of a Doctor's Degree should have reasonable confidence in his ability to face what is novel and to continue doing so throughout life.
At the conclusion of an ideal undergraduate education, a man's brain works well. He is convinced, not that he knows everything or even that he knows everything in a particular field, but that he stands a reasonable chance of understanding anything that someone else has already understood. Any subject that he can look up in a book he feels that he too can probably understand.
On the other hand, if he cannot look it up in a book, he is uncertain what to do next. This is where graduate education comes in. Unlike the recipient of a Bachelor's Degree, the recipient of a Doctor's Degree should have reasonable confidence in his ability to face what is novel and to continue doing so throughout life.
Joanna Russ
Women ought to run things, as we are friendlier than men, but alas, that is only because we are not allowed to run things.
Ursula LeGuin
From The Word for World is Forest
For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do it over, and over, and over.
For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do it over, and over, and over.
Jacques Barzun
The recurrent hardening of the arteries and this periodic denunciation of it explain why, for instance, learning poetry by heart is suddenly deemed wicked; why lecture courses become an abomination; why diagramming sentences is assailed as a violation of natural rights. Someone discovers, quite simply, that the point of doing these things has been lost. Originally they were sensible devices; now they are administered in a dull mechanical way, because the teacher has lost the sense of their novelty and difficulty. Few things retain their significance when they are done without difficulty or at least a dash of inexperience.
G. H. Hardy
[A] science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.
Daniel Bell
The gradual electrification of the world was more fraught with consequences, and has been more responsible for the modification of life, than the political events which are the foci of the historian's concern.
Annie Dillard
From Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance? Nature will try anything once. This is what the sign of the insects says. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too grotesque. If you're dealing with organic compounds, then let them combine. If it works, if it quickens, set it clacking on the grass; there's always room for one more; you ain't so handsome yourself. This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent.
Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance? Nature will try anything once. This is what the sign of the insects says. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too grotesque. If you're dealing with organic compounds, then let them combine. If it works, if it quickens, set it clacking on the grass; there's always room for one more; you ain't so handsome yourself. This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent.
Harvey Cox
From Seduction of the Spirit
I used to try to "keep abreast" of the books and articles in my "field." Then I dropped back to "keeping abreast" of the reviews of the books and the titles of the articles. Now even that seems like too much. But then I have always been a secret sinner against the orthodoxy of specialization, even falling into transgressions as a graduate student when presumably I should have been exploiting every moment to prepare for my comprehensive exams. I was weak. I simply could not prevent myself, while walking through the massive alluring stacks of Widener Library in search of a book in my field, from stealing side-long glances at the titles in a section I happened to be walking past. Venial turned to mortal sin as I first stopped, made sure no one was watching, then reached out for a book far afield from any exam I would ever face, to squander sometimes a whole hour or two on it. I now confess that there were more than one of these secret trysts; that I loitered, dallied and frittered many such afternoons away — and that the books I stealthily savored were drawn from such a chaotic variety of stacks and floors that no one could possibly relate them to any one "discipline." These were flagrantly undisciplined acts of impulsive self-indulgence. But I do not recant....
The sentiments [against specialization] are not those of mere intellectual vagabonds growing up to be dilettantes.... The specialist is also inimical to free society — nurturing tunnel vision and "I only followed orders."
I used to try to "keep abreast" of the books and articles in my "field." Then I dropped back to "keeping abreast" of the reviews of the books and the titles of the articles. Now even that seems like too much. But then I have always been a secret sinner against the orthodoxy of specialization, even falling into transgressions as a graduate student when presumably I should have been exploiting every moment to prepare for my comprehensive exams. I was weak. I simply could not prevent myself, while walking through the massive alluring stacks of Widener Library in search of a book in my field, from stealing side-long glances at the titles in a section I happened to be walking past. Venial turned to mortal sin as I first stopped, made sure no one was watching, then reached out for a book far afield from any exam I would ever face, to squander sometimes a whole hour or two on it. I now confess that there were more than one of these secret trysts; that I loitered, dallied and frittered many such afternoons away — and that the books I stealthily savored were drawn from such a chaotic variety of stacks and floors that no one could possibly relate them to any one "discipline." These were flagrantly undisciplined acts of impulsive self-indulgence. But I do not recant....
The sentiments [against specialization] are not those of mere intellectual vagabonds growing up to be dilettantes.... The specialist is also inimical to free society — nurturing tunnel vision and "I only followed orders."
William Irwin Thompson
From Passages About Earth
American social science, so lavishly supported by the Ford Foundation, was simply ideological camoflage for the spread of a world view congenial to the growth of American-based multi-national corporations.
American social science, so lavishly supported by the Ford Foundation, was simply ideological camoflage for the spread of a world view congenial to the growth of American-based multi-national corporations.
Aldous Huxley
From Eyeless in Gaza
I used to think I had no will to power. Now I perceive that I vented it on thoughts rather on people. Conquering an unknown province of knowledge. Getting the better of a problem. Forcing ideas to associate or come apart. Bullying recalcitrant words to assume a certain pattern. All the fun of being a dictator without any risks and responsibilities.
I used to think I had no will to power. Now I perceive that I vented it on thoughts rather on people. Conquering an unknown province of knowledge. Getting the better of a problem. Forcing ideas to associate or come apart. Bullying recalcitrant words to assume a certain pattern. All the fun of being a dictator without any risks and responsibilities.
- - - - - - -
So who said I want to be a saint or achieve anything? I don't. I want to be, completely; develop all one's potentialities. I want to know.... Single-mindedness costs you your liberty. You're a prisoner.Dennis Altman and Jonathan Symons
From Queer Wars
We seek to answer two questions: first, why, as homosexuality has become more visible globally, have reactions to sexual and gender diversity become so polarized? [My answer: religion and opportunists] ... The book's second question is: what is to be done? [My answer: come out, encourage others to come out, and patience]
We seek to answer two questions: first, why, as homosexuality has become more visible globally, have reactions to sexual and gender diversity become so polarized? [My answer: religion and opportunists] ... The book's second question is: what is to be done? [My answer: come out, encourage others to come out, and patience]
- - - - -
'[Q]ueer rights' ... is more inclusive, but overly academic.
- - - - -
In reality, the goal of campaigns for 'queer rights' is the universal application of human rights, irrespective of sexual orientation or gender identity, and many have argued that this is better pursued through building protection for the 'sexual freedom and rights' of all people. The very concept of 'sexual rights' was born from a feminist critique which rightly saw the subordination of women and the denial of the right to control their bodies as central to both social justice and genuine 'development'.
- - - - -
[A]lmost all religious and cultural traditions impose strict rules around what is and is not appropriate behavior. The rules differ enormously; what seems also true is that hypocrisy is a common element of most sexual regimes.
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One of the few issues on which religious fundamentalists of all faiths can agree is opposition to homosexuality....
- - - - -
Is speaking out strongly for gay rights ... helpful — or does it, in practice, help fuel, even create, more political homophobia?
- - - - -
[A] gay identity and community are both a product of and a marker of a certain sort of modernity.
- - - - -
[C]ultural shift must usually be the first step in any successful strategy to expand sexual freedom.
- - - - -
"The contempt for homosexuality and homosexual men ... is part of the ideological package of hegemonic masculinity"
-- R.W. Connell
- - - - -
[What is to be done?] There are no simple answers.... [L]asting social progress can ultimately only emerge from within societies. [emphasis added]
Ursula LeGuin
From No Time To Spare
Are you living your secret desires? ... I have none, my desires are flagrant.
Are you living your secret desires? ... I have none, my desires are flagrant.
- - - - -
Capitalism thinks it's adaptable, but if it only has one stratagem, endless growth, the limit of its adaptability is irrevocably set. And we have reached that limit... [I]ncreasingly, all economic growth benefits only the rich.... Growth capitalism provides security for none but the strongest profiteers.
- - - - -
I don't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution, I accept it. It isn't a matter of faith, but of evidence.... I wish we could stop using the word belief in matters of fact, leaving it where it belongs, in matters of religious faith and secular hope. I believe we'd avoid a lot of unnecessary pain if we did so.
Samuel R. (Chip) Delany
From Silent Interviews
Mainstream fiction is like looking in a mirror.
SF is like looking through a door.
Mainstream fiction is like looking in a mirror.
SF is like looking through a door.
- - - - -
The two instincts always there to battle the notion of civilization are first, "Might makes right," and, second, "The strange and unknown is dangerous, evil, and must be destroyed."
James Baldwin
From I Am Not Your Negro
White people are astounded by Birmingham. Black people aren't. White people are endlessly demanding to be reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars. They don't want to believe, still less to act on the belief, that what is happening in Birmingham is happening all over the country. They don't want to realize that there is not one step, morally or actually, between Birmingham and Los Angeles.
White people are astounded by Birmingham. Black people aren't. White people are endlessly demanding to be reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars. They don't want to believe, still less to act on the belief, that what is happening in Birmingham is happening all over the country. They don't want to realize that there is not one step, morally or actually, between Birmingham and Los Angeles.
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I don't know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian church which is white and a Christian church which is black.... I can't afford to trust most white Christians, and I certainly cannot trust the Christian church. I don't know whether the labor unions or their bosses really hate me ... but I know I'm not in their union. I don't know whether the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto. I don't know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools we have to go to. Now, this is evidence.
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You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me.
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What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a "nigger" in the first place. I'm not a nigger, I'm a man. But if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need him.... If I'm not the nigger here and you invented him, ... then you've got find out why.
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