Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Discussion of science, technology, politics, and other topics that aren't strictly philosophical.
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Unidian
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Post by Unidian »

Philosophaster wrote:It sounds really similar to something that Daniel Dennett said, that he suspects that more people "believe in belief," believe that it's a "good thing" to believe in God, than actually believe in God.
I'd agree with this based on real interactions I've had with religious people. Quite a few of them assume that because I reject their religion, I "believe in nothing." They insist that "you have to believe in something!"

It's the certainty and security in religious beliefs that attracts people to them. The specific question of which god and which belief is less important. The form religion takes is primarily dependent on where one happens to be born.
I live in a tub.
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Nordicvs
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Post by Nordicvs »

"Write better emails. Make more moneys."

A deep, noble goal to be sure...
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Jamesh
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Jamesh »

I sometimes love the Red Indian figure of speech.

"Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?"

Listen to some speeches. The ones read by Arthur Junaluska, make me tearful.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speechbank.htm - Great Native American Speeches (towards the bottom of the page)
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Trevor Salyzyn
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Trevor Salyzyn »

Technically, one could argue that both sale and consequent respect of another's purchasing rights based on collective agreement as to what constitutes ownership is use by everyone.

A great part of human activity is economic; denying our right to be economical with our land makes a lot of noble human behaviour seem evil.

Natives have always seemed collectively greedy. The entire Western hemisphere is their land, even though it was clearly conquered by a powerful invading army. But they use double-speak to also consider it nobody's land (if they can't have it, noone can). This hypocricy reveals the base motivations of a group trying to rebound from a humiliating defeat that wiped out their entire primitive culture, rather than a graceful and enlightened concession to defeat, and quiet transition into the conquerers' mightier empire.
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Nordicvs
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Nordicvs »

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:Natives have always seemed collectively greedy.
Uh huh. That's why the "best man" in Native ceremonies is the one who gives the most away. That's why whites made deserts of their lands and slaves of other men, all the while hoarding and accumulating wealth---while Natives did no such thing, taking only what they needed to live. That's why North and South America were pure, natural paradises until the white worms slithered onto the scene and fucked it all up.

Tit.

Thanks for the link, Jamesh. Good, wise stuff. It's truly refreshing to hear from honourable men like those, especially today, when honour is just "illogical," because, well, it is...
General Jackson, I am not afraid of you. I fear no man, for I am a Creek warrior. I have nothing to request in behalf of myself; you can kill me, if you desire. But I come to beg you to send for the women and children of the war party who are now starving in the woods. Their fields and cribs have been destroyed by your people, who have driven them to the woods without an ear of corn. I hope that you will send out parties who will safely conduct them here in order that they may be fed. I exerted myself in vain to prevent the massacre of the women and children at Fort Mims. I am now done fighting. The Red Sticks are nearly all killed.

I have done the white people all the harm I could. I have fought them, and fought them bravely. If I had an army I would yet fight, and contend to the last. But I have none. My people are all gone. I can now do no more than weep over the misfortunes of my Nation.

There was a time when I had a choice and could have answered you; I have none now. Even hope has ended. Once I could animate my warriors to battle, but I cannot animate the dead. My warriors can no longer hear my voice. Their bones are at Talladega, Tallashatchie, Emunckfow and Tohopeka. If I had been left to contend with the Georgia Army, I would have raised corn on one bank of the river and fought them on the other. But your people have destroyed my Nation. I rely on your generosity.
---Chief Red Eagle.
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Jamesh
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Jamesh »

If the trends hold, the one thing that we can be sure of is that Mr Rove’s political grave will receive no lack of irrigation from future Republicans
This quote just amused me.
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Post by Ataraxia »

Jamesh wrote:"Everything is caused" is not an entirely correct statement. A truer one is that everything is constantly causing. In reality there are no effects, one is always viewing causes in action. At no point is any thing truely static, and I mean any thing, even space. (Re Space - I'm a dualist who believes that two opposite fundamental forces, Expansion and Contraction, create and are all things, as well as permanently creating each other. If we can observe something such as space or time, then they must be caused by something active. In being caused by something active they also must be active causal agents. The whole of existence is a continual two-way flow from an infinitely expansion pyramidal base to infinitely finite contractive point at the top. All things are just combinations of many layers of this process).

God to be infinite would need to have some form of absolute staticness. It could not be subject to change or causes. If something is not subject to causes then it would have to be outside of the universe, rather than actually being the universe. If something was outside the universe and not subject to causes, then it could not in return be a causal agent that could act upon the universe.
Indeed.

Take that Aquinas!
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Jamesh
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Jamesh »

Paul Keating - What a real politician should be like

He has his failings, but no one is perfect. I'd rather his failings than Bush's or Howard's.

First some of his rather humorous, and true, quotes.

http://www.webcity.com.au/keating/

A video of what he said tonight on Aussie TV relating to the Asian region
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s2013520.htm

Some speeches he made in the past

http://www.keating.org.au/main.cfm
Click on the speeches link

War and Peace - Terrorists and Weapons of Mass Destruction - 22 November 2002
World Outlook - China and its Challenges - 3 September 2004
World Outlook - The New Global Mosaic - 28 July 2003
Indigenous Issues - Redfern Speech (Year for the world's Indigenous People) - 10 December 1992 (the orgs he set up have failed, but he lost gov in 96. Nor do I neccessarily agree that the maintenance of the aboriginal culture is realistic)

On some of the problems we are having with the current Liberal (Torrie-like Conservatives) government
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/conten ... 911229.htm

And his first job :)
Young Paul left school at 15 and joined the NSW Labor Party. He worked as a sales assistant at a Sydney department store, David Jones, but this was not his forte and his employment papers were marked ' never to be re-employed'.
Ataraxia
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Ataraxia »

i didn't mind him as PM ,Jamesh.(well as far as someone doesn't mind a politician) but to be honest, lately I'm sick of the sight of him and his self aggrandizing.

Everytime I see his smug mug these days I half expect him to start refering to himself in the third person.
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Dan Rowden
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Dan Rowden »

At bottom, one experience has the same essential character as any other. One single experience is all it takes to become wise; it's just a matter of how one thinks about the nature of that one experience.
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Matt Gregory
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Matt Gregory »

What the fuck are you talking about Dan?!?!?
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Elizabeth Isabelle »

Men who treat women as helpless and charming playthings deserve women who treat men as delightful and generous bank accounts.
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Cahoot
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Cahoot »

“We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road running through the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his hand behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us."

“That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another on and upward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth--that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way--an honorable way--in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life, I was able to understand the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

“In front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him. The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my soul found its way back from the prisoners existence to another world, and I resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she questioned me in return, and I answered...

“My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she were still alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, and the thoughts of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I still would have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of that image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. ‘Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.’"

- Viktor Frankl
Man’s Search For Meaning
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Cahoot
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Cahoot »

from Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing

Rule #1.
Never open a book with weather.
cousinbasil
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by cousinbasil »

Cahoot wrote:from Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing

Rule #1.
Never open a book with weather.
The experts disagree:

Image
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Cahoot
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Cahoot »

Quote:
“I can handle all the rage you can muster.”
No doubt. Long suffering but unnecessary, as the man-child usually masters a rationalizing method of self-forgiveness.
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Tomas
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George Orwell

Post by Tomas »

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a
boot stamping on a human face - forever.

-George Orwell 1903-1950
Don't run to your death
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Cahoot
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Cahoot »

Sir Thomas, this past week I’ve been reading Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, the source of that quotation.

Here’s another from that book:
Orwell wrote:His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again; and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.
This is interesting and correlates with the world outside the novel in various ways, where the words "hypocritical" or "sophisticated" are often used in place of the word "doublethink," and one way of interest that comes to mind is the nature of actual assertions that people publicly make. For example, Obama’s word de jour is “balanced,” which is a huge clue that unbalanced is in fact the reality. False assertions of reality such as stressing the palliative “balanced,” are either wishful thinking or deliberate propaganda. I think that the case of a calculating politician reading prepared text from a teleprompter indicates the latter, which would mean that characterizing the method of this politician as propagandizing is a truthful observation rather than unsubstantiated cynicism. A less generous labeling would simple be to call him a liar.
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Tomas
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T Stokes

Post by Tomas »

People may starve but the banks
must take their pound of flesh.

-- T Stokes
Don't run to your death
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Tomas
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Einstein

Post by Tomas »

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

--Albert Einstein
Don't run to your death
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Cahoot
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Cahoot »

"Christianity without tears - that’s what soma is."

- Aldous Huxley
cousinbasil
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by cousinbasil »

Probably cited elsewhere at GF, still one of my favorites:

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
- Abraham Maslow
eyekwah
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by eyekwah »

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
“He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
Life is wasted on the living.
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Tomas
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by Tomas »

Take this brother, may it serve you well.

--John Lennon (1940-1980)

.
Don't run to your death
1456200423
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Re: Random quotes or posts from elsewhere

Post by 1456200423 »

If we are all gods children, then what was so special about Jesus?
veritas odium parit
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