We do not think that tragedy is our natural state. We do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it, and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering, that we consider unnatural. It is not success but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life.
There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days—the conviction that ideas matter . . . . That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one’s mind matters . . . .
Its consequence is the inability to believe in the power or the triumph of evil. No matter what corruption one observes in one’s immediate background, one is unable to accept it as normal, permanent or metaphysically right. One feels: “This injustice (or terror or falsehood or frustration or pain or agony) is the exception in life, not the rule.” One feels certain that somewhere on earth—even if not anywhere in one’s surroundings or within one’s reach—a proper, human way of life is possible to human beings, and justice matters.
I knew enough, in my college days, to know that it was useless to attempt political protests in Soviet Russia. But that knowledge broke down, involuntarily, many times; so I would probably have been one of those protesters in the street who engaged in the terrible futility of debating with the secret police. I know how they felt and what would make them do it.
Parents need to realize that the powers-that-be don't want kids to get an education. They want kids to be indoctrinated and serve the state, and push us towards towards communism. That's their goal.
Scientific theories are not ‘derived’ from anything. We do not read them in nature, nor does nature write them into us. They are guesses – bold conjectures. Human minds create them by rearranging, combining, altering, and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them. We do not begin with ‘white paper’ at birth but with inborn expectations and intentions and an innate ability to improve upon them using thought and experience.
Theory is a bad explanation not because it fails to explain everything (no theory does), but because what it leaves unexplained is effectively the same as what it purports to explain in the first place. (The theory that the designer of the biosphere was designed by another designer, and so on ad infinitum, is another example of an infinite regress.)
The universities play favorites based on the speech they prefer, and the racial group hierarchies they’ve established. It’s a nasty game and they need to be called to account for it.
The universities play favorites based on the speech they prefer, and the racial group hierarchies they’ve established. It’s a nasty game and they need to be called to account for it.
The universities play favorites based on the speech they prefer, and the racial group hierarchies they’ve established. It’s a nasty game and they need to be called to account for it.
The best argument against moral equivalency is that denying that one culture is better than another entails denying that the future state of one's own culture can be better than the present. It denies the possibility of progress, is hostile to it, and sides with evil.
They concluded that the exact shade, texture and depth of the imprints on the cloth could only be produced with the aid of ultraviolet lasers – technology that was clearly not available in medieval times.
They concluded that the marks were not made by paints, pigments or dyes and that the image was not “the product of an artist”, but that at the same time it could not be explained by modern science.
I have settled on a simple test for judging claims […] to have explained the nature of consciousness (or any other computational task):
If you haven’t programmed it, you haven’t understood it.
I believe it would be worth trying to learn something about the world even if trying to do so we should merely learn that we don’t know much… It might be well for us to remember that, while differing widely in what we do know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.
The force that we're up against...made a terrible mistake...during COVID. It took all of the competent people. All of the courageous people, and it shoved them out of the institutions...and in so doing created the dream team.
They try to leech off others without working, they are tireless in their pursuit. so this battle must be waged increasingly. we cannot take a day off, because when we rest, socialism creeps in.
