Sunday, November 30, 2014

Study notes: Nov 23-29, 2014: "Gene Study Finds Cannibal Pattern" and other things

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 

Other notes: 

Also check out: 
  • I have decided to not read Mencius Moldbug's "Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives" after all. I will maybe/probably take it up at a later time. If you wish to perform this Herculean labor, then the link has been provided. But it is fourteen chapters long. Now, let me make something clear: I am willing to examine alternate points of view, even/especially the ones that I really don't like. But my time is valuable, and there is a limit to how much time I am willing to spend on someone who wants to convince me that feminism is evil, racism is justified, and monarchies are the best, most awesome, super-est form of government ever.

Homework for next week: 

"The 7 Types of Short Story Opening, and How to Decide Which is Right for Your Story"
  • "A short story is like a chess game: The opening is a huge part of whether you win or lose. The first sentence of a short story doesn't just 'hook' readers, it also sets the gone and launches the plot." 
  • "Short stories are different [from novels]: the first sentence, or the first paragraph, often hangs over the whole rest of the story. Many short stories are really about one idea, or one situation, and what's what the opening sentences establish." 
  • The different types are: (1) scene-setting, (2) conflict establisher, (3) mystifier, (4) third person narrator speaking to you, (5) first person narrator speaking, (6) quotation, and (7) puzzler.
  • In the scene-setting opening, "we join the characters in a pause before the action, and this allows us to get to know the characters and the setting first... This can be a gorgeous literary flourish, that sets the mood and creates a strong image in the reader's mind at the start of the story. Often, the action begins in the second or third paragraph." 
  • The scene-setting opening is for stories with a focus on setting, establishing mood, or are about particular feelings. It slows the story down though, and is not good for stories that focus on ideas or plot. 
  • "Sometimes you can do scene-setting in the second or third paragraph, and it'll have more impact." 
  • The conflict establisher opening is for when "you want to start your story with a bang," but "if your bang falls flat, then your story is lost. This is actually a high-risk opening. It's also easy to overuse the 'starting with a bang' style. Sometimes you want to be a bit more subtle, and draw your readers in slowly before dropping the boom on them. Your readers may expect the rest of your story to keep that propulsive feeling." 
  • The mystifier opening can establish intrigue or curiosity, but "the mystery has to be really cool, for this to work, Also,you're asking your readers to work pretty hard." It is "the riskiest type, because it's the kind that asks the most of the reader. You have to be pretty skillful, to unravel your cryptic opening at the same time as you're introducing the world and the characters." 
  • "If your story has a chatty narrator, then addressing the reader directly creates a nice warm tone... If you're actually a funny writer, you can make this sort of thing funny... You have to be willing to sustain that level of narratorial chattiness, at least on and off, for the rest of the story. Some readers get freaked out about being addressed directly." 
  • "When it's done right, this opening [the first person narrator speaking] can create a more intimate feeling... This can pack quite an emotional punch, or help the reader to bond with your narrator right off the bat. Plus it blurs the line between fiction and essay, which is always a plus." However, "sometimes we bond more with your first person narrator if he/she gives us some scene-setting or tells us something about what he/she was doing at the start of the story, instead. That way, we're not just getting to know your character, we're getting to know him/her in the world. Plus it really depends on how philosophical you want to get." 
  • The quotation opening is "like the 'thrown in the deep end' opening crossed with the mystery opening, except that you're also giving us someone's voice at the same time. You're getting the raw personality of the speaker, as well as getting tossed into the middle of the story right away. You can convey stuff in dialogue that it would take a paragraph or two of narration to get across." But keep in mind that it also "has all the disadvantages of the 'mystery' and 'deep end' openings. The single line of dialogue needs to be ultra-sharp, or you'll fall flat." I'm not sure what the writer is meaning by referring to "deep end" and "mystery" as two separate things, because "deep end" is only used in describing the mystifier. Mystifier and Puzzler openings? Proofreader needed? 
  • The puzzler both establishes conflict and mystifies the reader. "If you can hit your reader with a concentrated blast of strangeness and verbal pyrotechnics, then you're already way ahead of the game. When it works, it's the best kind of story opening." But it can go badly. "When this type of opening falls flat, it really falls flat. You have to be very confident of your ability to deliver quality WTF-age without losing the reader." I like that term, "WTF-age." 

 "Gene Study Finds Cannibal Pattern"
  • Researchers have discovered "a genetic signature, found almost worldwide, that points to a long history of cannibalism" 
  • "The signature is one that protects the bearer from infection by prions, proteins that can be transmitted in infected meat and attack the nerve cells of the brain. Prions can be acquired from eating infected animals, as in the case of the mad cow disease that in 1996 spread to people in England, but they spread even more easily through eating infected humans." 
  • "This fact is known from study of the Fore, a tribe in the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea that started to practice ritual cannibalism at the end of the 19th century." 
  • Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek "noticed that the Fore were being devastated by a neurodegenerative disease known as kuru. He linked it with their practice of eating the brains of their dead in mortuary feasts. When the feasts were banned by Australian authorities in the mid-1950s, the incidence of kuru declined, and no cases have appeared in anyone born after thattime." 
  • Researchers "analyzed DNA from 39 elderly Fore women who had participated in many cannibal feasts before they were banned. Many of these survivors of the kuru epidemic had a particular genetic signature, which was much less common in the younger population, indicating that it conferred substantial protection against the disease. In support of this assumption, none of the patients who have contracted the human version of mad cow disease in Britain carry the protective signature." 
  • "The researchers then examined DNA from various ethnic groups around the world and found that all but one, the Japanese, carried the protective signature to some degree, and that the Japanese are protected by a different signature in the same gene." 
  • "Various genetic tests showed that the protective genes could not be there by chance, but were a result of natural selection. This implies that human populations in the past must have been exposed to some form of prion disease... [which] was probably spread by cannibalism." 
  • "Frequent epidemics of prion disease caused by cannibalism in ancient populations would explain the existence of the protective genetic signature in people today. 
  • "About half of today's English population has the protective signature, which may be one among several reasons why so few people-- one 134 in a population of more than 50 million-- have contracted the human form of mad cow disease." 
  • "An alternative explanation for the protective signature could be that early human populations were exposed to prion disease by eating infectious animals. Dr. Mead said he could not rule out that explanation but added that cannibalism seemed more likely. The epidemic of kuru among the Fore showed how quickly the protective signature could be selected. Also, 'there is no animal prion disease that appears to cross the species barrier so easily and dramatically." 
  • "Because of the long latency time, some elderly Fore continue to come down with kuru." 
  • "The genetic signature found by Dr. Mead and his colleagues occurs in the gene that makes the prion protein. An abnormal form of the prion protein can make the normal proteins abnormal too, the process that leads to the disease. The normal gene itself exists in two versions. People who inherit both versions, one from each parent, are protected against prion disease, whereas people who have two copies of either version are susceptible. Usually natural selection will favor one version of a gene over another. The favoring of both versions together is called a balancing selection." 
  • "The genetic evidence alone could not determine whether the balancing selection in the prion gene occurred just once, in the ancestral human population before it left Africa, or whether it arose more recently, and many times independently, in each of the world's major population groups." 

 "Buddhist Hard Determinism"
  • "This is the third article in a four-article series that examines Buddhist responses to the Western philosophical problem of whether free will is compatible with 'determinism,' the doctrine of universal causation." Okay. I have to look those other three up, then. 
  • "Charles Goodman argued that Buddhists accept hard determinism-- the view that because determinism is true, there can be no free will-- because in the absence of a real self determinism leaves no room for morally responsible agency." 
  • "Determinism implies that every event is causally necessitated by previous events in inviolable accordance with immutable laws of nature. Belief in free will implies that some of our deliberative efforts, choices, and actions are sufficiently self-authored or 'up to us,' such that they ground attributions of moral responsibility, such as praise and blame, related to reactive attitudes, such as remorse and punishment, and the variety of our normative institutions to presuppose that much of our behavior flows from our autonomous agency." 
  • "The dilemma here is that either determinism is true or false. If determinism is true, then the causes of our actions predate our existence and are unalterable, in which case our behavior, though it appears to be our free choice, is really rigidly fixed in advance, in which case we are not morally responsible. However, if determinism is false, the causes of our choices are utterly random and chaotic, and thus they are no more 'up to us' than a seizure or the toss of a coin. Either way, we seem to lack free will and ultimate moral responsibility." In The Paper People, make sure to explore the moral element of determinism. Also some random coin flips? 
  • "Determinism, it should be noted, resembles the Buddhist causal doctrine of 'dependent origination' (pratitya samutpada). Dependent origination theory asserts the dependence of all conditioned/composite phenomena on previous (and/or simultaneous) impartite microphenomena."
  • "Chaotic indeterminism" is "the other horn of the dilemma." 
  • "Soft determinism is the idea that determined behavior need not be rigid and need not be incompatible with a certain nonchaotic conception of free will and moral responsibility, because one may satisfy certain determinism friendly agent proximal conditions that might be sufficient for responsible agency."
  • "Mindfulness of the way volition generates action helps to cultivate control over one's volitions-- and control is nonchaotic." 
  • "Fatalism and hard determinism share the idea that nothing anyone does can make any difference to what-- already-- will be, but the former is an acausal doctrine, whereas the latter is causal." 
  • "The Buddha rejected the fatalistic attitude of agential impotence, precisely on the ground that it would lead to what may be described as a form of volitional catatonia... Instead, the Buddha emphasized the knowledge of cause and effect and the cultivation of mindfulness of beliefs, volitions, and actions as his basic prescription for what an agent may do to foster her own liberation and bring about the end of her suffering."
  • "Goodman argues essentially that free will is straightforwardly incompatible with determinism from the Buddhist's eliminative perspective of the self because without any such entity as a self, if all behavior is impersonally determined there can be no such entity as a responsible agent."
  • "Siderits takes this general posture-- of offering Buddhist ideas as items of potential interest to Western philosophers, without asserting them himself..."
  • "Analysis suggests first that common sense realism about the reality of partite wholes-- the appearance/reality gap-denying view that partite wholes are just as real as they appear to be-- is naive. This recognition leads to mereological (part/whole) reductionism, the view that less real conventional reality discourse level wholes like 'chariot' and 'person' turn out on analysis to be reducible to more real ultimate reality discourse level parts, the faulty apprehension or understanding of which as wholes is an illusory conceptual construction." 
  • "The logical analysis just rehearsed implies that there are not any atoms. And if there are not, then nothing really exists. Obviously, we experience something, but whatever it is, it is not objectively real. Antirealism accepts the nonatomistic implication that parts are just as unreal as wholes, all the way down, whereby we arrive at an initially more egalitarian ontology-- albeit a nihilistic one-- in which everything is considered equally unreal." 
  • 23: "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."
  • "Goodman's larger project... [is] to prove that Buddhist ethics is best conceived as a form of consequentialism."
  • "Consequentialism... is consistent with hard determinism, given that nothing about consequentualism requires that agents be construed as ultimately responsible for their behavior, and further given that Skinnerian conditioning and related forms of autonomy-neutral or even autonomy-undermining forms of conditioning, are obviously consistent with determinism." 
  • "The idea is that because there is no 'auto' (self), there can be no 'nomos' (rule) that can govern it-- no 'autonomos' (self-rule, or autonomy). Given such impersonal determinism, there is nobody who can be a genuinely morally responsible agent." 
  • "Consider this analogy...: 'If there is no red apple, there is no red.' Even if composite wholes like apples do not really exist as wholes, there may be nonapple red (composite, partite) things-- including whatever ti is that we conventionally call 'apples.'"
  • "If there are no substantive persons (or apples, shoes, and so forth), it is not because there are no such entities, but because they are regarded in Buddhist philosophy as being ultimately empty. To say that something is empty in this sense is to say that it lacks an independent nature, an essential or intrinsic nature, or a self-nature. But this means only that it is dependent on the existence of other things-- for example, the way my body is dependent on the bodies of other organisms-- it does not mean that it does not exist at all." 
  • "It is unproblematic that there are red apples. After all, Zen masters eat them after chopping wood, carrying water, and asking their disciples to fetch them red apples." 
  • "Before enlightenment, fetch and eat red apples. After enlightenment, fetch and eat red apples." 
  • "One cannot remove a cause, or eradicate something, moreover, that does not exist." 
  • Goodman: "If there is no genuine boundary between self and other, there can be no genuine distinction between actions that flow from the self and motions imposed on the self from outside." 
  • "In Gestalt theory, there is no self separate from one's organism/environmental field; more specifically, self does not exist without other... The field is differentiated by boundaries.... Connecting meets biological, social, and psychological needs."
  • "The 'contact boundary' is where the organism and its environment meet in experience." 
  • "As Michael Barnhart noted (in conversation), Asian philosophers sometimes exhibit a 'blissful maintenance of contradiction," so we cannot assume that anyone maintaining two beliefs has a belief about their compatibility. 
  • "Buddhist interest in free will is not contingent upon responsibility, or vice versa, but rather on soteriology. The key questions here are: How can I eliminate suffering? How can I cultivate bohicitta (universal altruism)?"

"Vladimir Putin is Right Out of a Russian Novel"
  • Nina L. Krushcheva: "Russia is a hypothetical culture. Ruled by despots for most of our history, we are used to living in fiction rather than reality."
  • "If Russian society exists in an unreal world-- filled with fictional plots and settings and characters-- we wondered: Are there certain traits in the Russian soul-- recurring motifs in Russian literature-- that can help put President Vladimir Putin in perspective?" Alright. Definitely getting the gears turned for a possibly-magical realism story, ayup. 
  • The crisis in Ukraine [not the Ukraine, incidentally; see below] "isn't merely geopolitical," according to Andrew D. Kaufman. "It's a deep-seated drama of the Russian soul that's been around for centuries. And Russian literature is the place we see it in full flower." 
  • According to Kaufman, Putin is "grappling" with a question that "recurs throughout the nineteenth-century Russian classics: What is the source of our national greatness?"
  • "Nineteenth-century Fyodor Dostoevsky, for instance, believed that Russia's mission was to establish a widespread Christian empire-- with Russian at its epicenter... Dostoevsky's contemporary, Leo Tolstoy, on the other hand, believed that every nation is unique and worthwhile-- none better or worse than others." 
  • Kaufman: "Tolstoy was a patriot. He loved his people, as is so clearly demonstrated in War and Peace, but he was not a nationalist. He believed in the dignity of every human being and culture." 
  • "In his Sevastopol Tales, which were inspired by his own experiences as a Russian soldier fighting against the French, British, and Turks in the Crimean War, Tolstoy celebrates the humanity of all his characters, whether Russian, British, or French." 
  • Kaufman: "[Putin] has chosen the Dostoevskian tradition, not the Tolstoyan one." 
  • Laura Goering: "[In some works by Dostoevsky] the West is depicted as something seductive, yet soulless, a temptation to be resisted at all costs." 
  • Dostoevsky, writing of the Crystal Palace in London: "You sense that it would require great and everlasting spiritual denial and fortitude in order not to submit, not to capitulate before the impression, not to bow to what is, and not to deify Baal, that is, not to accept the material world as your ideal." 
  • "Goering: "We see a claim to a kind of spiritual and moral exceptionalism [in Russian literature] that is fundamental to Putin's rhetoric. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which Putin called the 'biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,' it is not surprising that he continues to draw on the myth of a Russia divinely foreordained to stand firm against the corrupting forces of the West." 
  • "The genius of Russian literature, aficionados say, is that it is so very real. The great 19th century writers, such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol did a masterful job of capturing the corruption, hypocrisy, inequity and greed-- as well as that yearning "Russian soul"-- of their times. 
  • "To Nina Krushcheva, the spirit of Russia is captured in Dead Souls, a novel by Gogol. The story, she says, circles around the 'messianic paradigm of greatness, large size, central control-- in which affairs of the state are more important than affairs of an individual." 

"Letter of His Holiness John Paul II to Artists"
  • "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good." Genesis 1:31
  • "The opening page of the Bible presents God as a kind of exemplar of everyone who produces a work: the human craftsman mirrors the image of God as Creator. This relationship is particular clear in the Polish language because if the lexical link between the words stwórca (creator) and twórca (craftsman)." 
  • "The one who creates bestows being itself, he brings something out of nothing... and this, in the strict sense, is a mode of operation which belongs to the Almighty alone. The craftsman, by contrast, uses something that already exists, to which he gives form and meaning."
  • "Through his 'artistic creativity' man appears more than ever 'in the image of God.'"
  • "With loving regard, the divine Artist passes on to the human artist a spark of his own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in his creative power." 
  • Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa: "Creative art, which it is the soul's good fortune to entertain, is not to be identified with that essential art which is God himself, but is only a communication of it and a share in it." 
  • "Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece." 
  • "In producing a work, artists express themselves to the point where their work becomes a unique disclosure of their own being, of what they are and of how they are." 
  • "In shaping a masterpiece, the artist not only summons his work into being, but also in some way reveals his own personality by means of it. For him art offers both a new dimension and an exceptional mode of expression for his spiritual growth. Through his works, the artist speaks to others and communicates with them. The history of art, therefore, is not only a story of works produced but also a story of men and women."
  • Cyprian Norwid: "Beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up." 
  • "In perceiving that all he had created was good, God saw that it was beautiful as well." 
  • "In a certain sense, beauty is the visible form of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty. This was well understood by the Greeks who, by fusing the two concepts, coined a term which embraces both: kalokagathia, or beauty-goodness." 
  • Plato: "The power of the Good has taken refuge in the nature of the Beautiful." 
  • "The artist has a special relationship to beauty. In a very true sense it can be said that beauty is the vocation bestowed on him by the Creator in the gift of 'artistic talent.'" So what does it mean, should everyone's vocation be beauty? How, then, shall we live? I am not sure if His Holiness recognizes the implications of his statement that a life, lived, can be art, filtered through the rest of this letter. 
  • "God transcends every material representation: 'I am who I am,' (Ex 3:14). Yet in the mystery of the Incarnation, the Son of God becomes visible in person."
  • "God becomes man in Jesus Christ, who thus becomes 'the central point of reference for an understanding of the enigma of human existence, the created world and God himself.'" We see here and elsewhere, incidentally, a mirror of the idea that a life, lived, can be art, through the idea that God's mortal Incarnation was a kind of art. 
  • "All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardour of the creative moment: what they manage to express in their painting, their sculpting, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendour which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit." 
  • "Every genuine art form in its own way is a path to the inmost reality of man and of the world. It is therefore a wholly valid approach to the realm of faith, which gives human experience its ultimate meaning." And simple human living is a kind of art.
  • "While architecture designed the space for worship, gradually the need to contemplate the mystery and to present it explicitly to the simple people led to the early forms of painting and sculpture." 
  • "Sacred images, which were already widely used in Christian devotion, became the object of violent contention. The Council held at Nicaea in 787, which decreed the legitimacy of images and their veneration, was a historic event not just for the faith but for the culture itself. The decisive argument to which the Bishops appealed in order to settle the controversy was the mystery of the Incarnation: if the Son of God had come into the world of visible realities-- his humanity building a bridge between the visible and the invisible-- then, by analogy, a representation of the mystery could be used, within the logic of signs, as a sensory evocation of the mystery. The icon is venerated not for its own sake, but points beyond to the subject which it represents." 
  • "What has characterized sacred art more and more, under the impulse of Humanism and the Renaissance, and then of successive cultural and scientific trends, is a growing interest in everything human, in the world, and in the reality of history." 
  • "In so far as it seeks the beautiful, fruit of an imagination which rises above the everyday, art is by its nature a kind of appeal to the mystery."
  • "Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption." 
  • "The work of the historian of theology would be incomplete if he failed to give due attention to works of art, both literary and figurative, which are in their own way 'not only aesthetic representations, but genuine "sources" of theology.'"
  • "In order to communicate the message entrusted to her by Christ, the Church needs art. Art must make perceptible, and as far as possible attractive, the world of the spirit, or of the invisible of God. It must therefore translate into meaningful terms that which is ineffable." 
  • "Christ himself made extensive use of images in his preaching, fully in keeping with his willingness to become, in the Incarnation, the icon of the unseen God." This Christ-as-God's-art concept is a new one to me, one which I think will prove idea fodder both philosophically and in story. 
  • "The Church needs architects, because she needs spaces to bring the Christian people together and celebrate the mysteries of salvation." 
  • "Human beings, in a certain sense, are unknown to themselves. Jesus Christ not only reveals God, but 'fully reveals man to man.'" 
  • "It is up to you, men and women who have given your lives to art, to declare with all the wealth of your ingenuity that in Christ the world is redeemed: the human person is redeemed, the human body is redeemed, and the whole creation which, according to Saint Paul, 'awaits impatiently the revelation of the children of God' (Rom 8:19), is redeemed."
  • Adam Mickiewicz: "From chaos there rises the world of the spirit." 

"Neoreactionary Movement" article on Rational Wiki
  • The movement is also called neoreaction, NRx, or the dark enlightenment. 
  • It is a "loosely defined cluster of internet-based political thinkers who wish to return human society to forms of government older than liberal democracy. They generally present their views as a revival of the traditions of Western civilization, or a return to a natural order of things." 
  • "Neoreactionaries are the latest in a long line of intellectuals who somehow think that their chosen authoritarian thugs wouldn't put them up against the wall. Possibly using sheer volume of words as a bulletproof shield. Or that they are somehow too competent, virtuous and useful to end up one of the serfs." 
  • Basically founded by Mencius Moldbug. Also includes Michael Anissimov and Nick Land. 
  • Neoreaction "started amongst the Bay Area technolibertarian subculture, particularly including the transhumanists-- Moldbug commented extensively on Overcoming Bias, the predecessor of Less Wrong."
  • They really got organized at Less Wrong, then mostly went away in the wake of "Scott Alexander's takedown," but are starting to come back. 
  • "Moldbug had originally called his ideology 'formalism,' but Kling's usage [neo-reactionary] was quickly adopted by the subculture." 
  • "The term 'neo-reactionary' was also used by George Orwell in 1943, to refer to conservatives who felt human nature was not perfectible therefore changes to society were not worth pursuing." 
  • "The main thing neoreactionaries do is blog. One common feature of the movement is a long-winded-- ridiculously long-winded-- and oblique prose style, eager to show off its mastery of historical trivia; it seems more poetry than politics at times. This is right-wing politics in its dotage."
  • Here's a nice picture illustrating the scope of the "Dark Enlightenment," at least according to the Neoreactionists. I remember the name "Robin Hanson" from Less Wrong. It's weird to have a basic idea of the geography there, and then... Hey! Neoreaction! All over! It's like flipping over a beloved pet turtle and discovering that some kind of heinous mutant fungus from the Nightosphere has settled in. 
  • "Their not-entirely-consistent broad themes include: 
    • "Political authoritarianism
      • "Desire to return to monarchy or aristocracy
      • "Admiration of fascism
    • "Ethnic nationalism
      • "Scientific racism ("racial realism" or "human biodiversity")
      • "A belief in biological determinism
      • "A belief that ethnic uniformity increases social capital
    • "Hostility to feminism, multiculturalism, and progressivism in all its forms, especially democracy and equality; in their metaphor, the 'Cathedral'
      • "Normative arguments based on evolutionary psychology
      • "Pick-up artist jargon
      • "Men's rights activism
    • "Austrian School of economics
      • "Anarcho-capitalism
      • "Old time social Darwinism
    • "Traditionalist Catholicism, frequently
    • "Transhumanism and other technological utopias (the odd idea out)
  • The Cathedral" is a "recurring theme" of Moldbug's." "It is a 'distributed conspiracy,' one that treats feminism, democracy, and other 'progressive' causes, and the general world view of educated Westerners, as the current world's version of an established church."
  • Moldbug: "And the left is the party of the educational organs, at whose head is the press and universities. This is our 20th-century version of the established church. Here at UR, we sometimes call it the Cathedral-- although it is essential to note that, unlike an ordinary organization, it has no central administrator. No, this will not make it easier to deal with." 
  • "Even if there's something like this [the above quote] that you could be persuaded to see, it's hard to imagine a proper conspiracy without conspirators. What Moldbug describes looks more like a culture: a broadly shared set of associated social values embodied in shared institutions, symbols, and practices." 
  • "There are neoreactionaries who will attempt to reconcile transhumanism and singularitarianism with taking the rest of society back several hundred years... The attempts are certainly creative, at least." 
  • "Despite Yudkowsky rejecting neoreaction, MIRI's goal closely resembles the neoreactionary goal: a single sovereign Friendly artificial intelligence, ruling human space for all time for the good of all." 
  • Rational Wiki describes "Moldbug's proposal" as "a world divided up into libertarian anarcho-monarchies, informed by pickup-artist patter... among many little autonomous princedoms governed by kings, aristocrats, or dictators." 
  • There is apparently a big to-do in neoreactionism about whether transgendered people are okay to talk with. 
  • Ignatius J. Reilly, from A Confederacy of Dunces: "What I want is a good, strong monarchy with a tasteful and decent king who has some knowledge of theology and geometry and to cultivate a Rich Inner Life." 
  • "Nyan Sandwich of MoreRight is organizing an in-person meetup group called Phalanx, a 'reactionary fraternity for the cultivation of masculine virtue and the development of social and moral capital.' The plan is 'not to directly engage, but to become strong and worthy.'"

"Geeks for Monarchy"
  • "Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries, democracy has actually done more harm than good. They propose a return to old-fashioned gender roles, social order, and monarchy." 
  • "Many [neoreactionaries] are former libertarians who decided that freedom and democracy were incompatible." 
  • Anissimov: "Demotist systems, that is, systems ruled by the 'People,' such as Democracy and Communism, are predictably less financially stable than aristocratic systems. On average, they undergo more recessions and hold more debt. They are more susceptible to market crashes. They waste more resources. Each dollar goes further towards improving standard of living for the average person in an aristocratic system than in a Democratic one." 
  • "Some want something closer to theocracy, while Yarvin proposes turning nation states into corporations with the king as chief executive officer and the aristocracy as shareholders." 
  • Scott Alexander: "To an observer from the medieval or Renaissance world of monarchies and empires, the stability of democracies would seem utterly supernatural. Imagine telling Queen Elizabeth I-- whom as we saw above suffered six rebellions just in her family's two generations of rule up to that point-- that Britain has been three hundred years without a non-colonial-related civil war. She would think either that you were putting her on, or that God Himself had sent a host of angels to personally maintain order." 
  • "Yarvin proposes that countries should be small-- city states, really-- and that all they should [sic?] for citizens. 'If residents don't like their government, they can and should move,' he writes. 'The design is all "exit," no "voice."'"
  • "Neoreationary ideas overlap heavily with pickup artistry, seasteading and scientific racism."
  • "Neoreactionaries believe 'The Cathedral,' is a meta-institution that consists largely of Harvard and other Ivy League schools, The New York Times and various civil servants. Anissimov calls it a 'self-organizing consensus.'... The fundamental idea is that the Cathedral regulates our discussions enforces a set of norms as to what sorts of ideas are acceptable and how we view history-- it controls the Overton window, in other words."
  • "Neoreactionaries are obsessed with a concept called 'human biodiversity' (HBD)-- what used to be called 'scientific racism.' Specifically, they believe that IQ is one of-- if not the-- most important personal traits, and that it's predominantly genetic. Neoreactionaries would replace, or supplement, the 'divine right' of kings and the aristocracy with the 'genetic right' of elites." 
  • "It's not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with white male geeks. It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world, but that they are simultaneously being oppressed by a secret religious order. And the more media attention is paid to workplace inequality, gentrification and the wealth gap, the more their bias is confirmed." 

"Mormon Women, Traditionalists and Feminists"
  • "I recently asked a non-LDS friend and scholar of religion and gender, 'Which, of all the religions that you study, "does gender" the best?' She thought for a minute and replied, 'Often, the ones who "do gender" the worst, are the ones who end up doing it the best.' I knew what she meant, even before she finished her thought: 'Women in traditional religions like Mormonism prefer the order, safety, and security of having carefully and strictly defined gender roles, even if it means giving up a semblance of equality.'"
  • "Traditionalists argue that they've never felt unequal, and that any attempt to expose inequalities through public criticism of the Church or its leaders causes pain that is just as equivalent to the pain that Mormon feminists feel at their perceived unequal status, because, 'when you say the Church is manifestly sexist, you're calling [the traditionalists'] entire worldview into question.' [first brackets original]"
  • "On the other hand, Mormon feminists suggest that the institution itself is built upon a framework of historically-constructed gender inequality, wherein expectations of women's submission to male authority are present at every level, from the family to ward and stake governance, and the highest leadership of the Church." 
  • "Mormonism was, and always has been, a mixed bag for women." 
  • "With the insistence upon the immutability of gender, the expectations for Mormon women over almost two hundred years have caused significant confusion, especially over women's relationship to the Priesthood. For example, most Mormon women have probably heard, at any given time, [many, many contradictory statements]."
  • "Some members are not content with this rationale [that 'blessings of His priesthood are equally available to men and women' even though 'only men are ordained to serve in priesthood offices.'], instead countering that the actual exercising of Priesthood is, in and of itself, a blessing that only men may enjoy." 
  • "Moderates who are hopeful for greater gender inclusion celebrate the acknowledgment of women's access to priesthood authority-- and this is striking: not just blessings, but authority. Even Oaks recognized how unprecedented this is: 'We are not accustomed to speaking of women having the authority of the priesthood in their Church callings, but what other authority can it be?'"
  • "OW supporters feel galvanized [by Kate Kelly's excommunication], but unfortunately, with that galvanization, a cult of personality has formed around Kate, with some supporters focusing their indignation on her role as a martyr-heroine, at odds with the institutional church." 
  • "Many Mormon feminists are choosing to resign their church membership in despair, fear, and hopelessness." 
  • "My hope is that, rather than avoiding these discussions, members of all inclinations will be challenged to confront seriously their assumptions about gender, about the history and theology of women in the church, and to have real, sincere, and respectful conversations about what is at stake." 

"Mormon Studies in the Classroom"
  • "So, here is a dilemma for me: While I am personally in favor of promoting greater gender equality and inclusion for women, how do I teach the history of women's rights from a Mormon perspective, with some attempt at objectivity and dispassion, without sounding like I am 'advocating'?"
  • "I'm approaching a very complex topic from an overly-simplified framework... I begin by using a very simplified historical context, defining basic concepts (patriarchy, feminism, equality, protectionism, separate-but-equal, structural power, and agency), and showing them well-placed and illustrative visuals, capped off with some useful side-by-side comparisons... So I make sure that students know that women's rights were part of human rights from the very beginning of the emergence of Enlightenment and liberal principles in the late-18th century." 
  • "The Medieval Christian doctrinal, cultural, and institutional frameworks for interpreting women's roles through the lens of either Mary, the idealized godly mother, or Eve as the evil temptress." 
  • "How women have been treated through European/American history has depended upon whether they have been seen as Mary: acceptable to society's expectations, like being married with children, domestic, submissive, pious, private, and virtuous, or as being Eve: trouble-makers, public, outspoken, temptresses, seductive, and evil." 
  • "The romanticizing of women's goodness and maternal instincts have placed women ideally above men-- but still out of reach of political and legal power--, while the highlighting of women's depraved and sexual nature has placed women below men-- allowing for even more violent institutional and societal forms for keeping women in their place." 
  • "These structures were transferred to the American experience via the British common law notion of feme coverture, or that the woman's identity, property, and autonomy were given up to her husband in marriage. (At this point, we have lots of fun referencing Jane Austen books and films to illustrate the importance of marriage for women with no potential to own or inherit property of their own.)"
  • "The 'equality' approach' believed that gender differences are mostly socialized, while the 'protectionist' approach focused on the natural differences between the sexes.' Or the 'equality' approach recognizes women as unique individuals with individual rights, while the 'protectionist' agenda grouped all women together, assigning them universal, shared characteristics, with strictly separated roles, justified by the ideology of 'Separate but Equal.'" 
  • "Protectionism says that women should focus solely on the private, domestic sphere, while the Equality perspective says women might expand their influence into the public, political, and business spheres previously restricted to them. But most importantly, the equality perspective suggests that men and women might share decision-making power in government, education, politics, and religions; the protectionist approach believes that decisions should be made by men for women, and that women might offer support to male leadership through their 'moral authority' or 'soft power.'"
  • "Mormonism presented a unique blend [of approaches], of both the radical restructuring of gender roles (female deity, reframing Eve's role in the Fall, inclusion in temple rites, liturgical healing, support of suffrage and coeducation, and an autonomous women's organization), as well as holding on to the primacy of male authority and decision-making power, and women's marital submission to men as the 'heads' of their families." 
  • "We're at the point right now-- a major crossroads-- in which historians, activists, church leaders, and both feminists and traditionalists alike are trying to grapple with how much of our gendered constructions are divine, how much they are culturally and historically determined, and how much things can or cannot change." 
  • "If I can walk them [the students] through the history and evolution of women's roles and rights carefully, they are much more willing to explore the notions of equality and patriarchy in careful and open-minded ways." 
  • "Why might so many women want to hold onto patriarchy, when it comes at the cost of shared decision-making and women's larger institutional and spiritual contributions?" 

"Pragmatism and Progress"
  • "Estimates place the numbers of female 'missionaries' at fewer than 200 during the whole 19th century. A major shift occurred in 1898, when the Church called the first full-time proselying single female missionaries, Inez Knight and Jennie Brimhall. The Church needed public female representatives to counter persistent negative stereotypes about Mormon women, especially in the decade of the post-polygamy transition." 
  • "By WW I, sister missionary numbers increased as males dropped off to military service, with sisters peaking in 1918 at 38% of the total missionary force. During these early years, age and length of service varied upon individual circumstance, but the minimum age for sisters generally held at twenty-three... The year 1945 was 'the only year... in which sisters accounted for a majority of missionaries set apart.'"
  • "In 1951, the minimum age for sisters was officially set at twenty-three, to the specific end of encouraging earlier marriages." 
  • "Another swing occurred in 1964, when the Church dropped the official age for sister missionaries back to 21, a change that proved useful when some wards were limited to only one elder per year during the Vietnam War."
  • "By the 1970s, a culture somewhat unfriendly to sister missinoaries had emerged, along with anti-sister stereotypes like the 'ugly Old Maid,' and the 'unmarriageable woman.'"
  • "The very popular Mormon musical, Saturday's Warrior (1973), reinforced the notion that missions were exclusively male spaces, with women filling their proper supportive roles as dutiful girlfriends, patiently waiting for their missionaries." 
  • "In 1971, the Church shortened the mission length for sisters to 18 months." 
  • "This move [lowering the age minimum for sister missionaries] goes a long way toward demystifying and de-objectifying young women, by increasing opportunities for healthy male-female interaction in a (hopefully) non- or less-sexualized environment." 

"Ukraine, not the Ukraine" & "Ukraine or the Ukraine"
  • William Taylor: "Ukraine is a country. The Ukraine is the way the Russians referred to that part of the country during Soviet times... Now that it is a country, a nation, and a recognized state, it is just Ukraine. And it is incorrect to refer to the Ukraine, even though a lot of people do it."
  • Taylor: "Whenever they [citizens of Ukraine] hear the Ukraine, they fume. It kind of denies their independence, denies their sovereignty." 
  • "There are plenty of times when sticking a the in front of a place name is perfectly acceptable, like when one is referring to a country that is a geographic area... Some countries named for rivers have long kept the article... Plural names, like the United States or the Netherlands, get one too." 
  • "Ukraine's name is thought to come from the Slavic word for borderland." 
  • "Taylor has another linguistic pet peeve that he fought to eradicate from the government's vocabulary during his time as ambassador: spelling Ukraine's capital as Kiev, rather than Kyiv. Kiev is the Russian transliteration, while Kyiv is the Ukrainian one." 
  • Anatoly Liberman: "Those who called it 'the Ukraine' in English must have known that the word meant 'borderland.' So they referred to it as 'the borderland.'"
  • "The Germans still use it but the English-speaking world has largely stopped using it." 
  • "According to several authoritative sources, such as the CIA World Factbook, the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, and the US Department of State, only two countries, The Bahamas and The Gambia, should officially be referred to with the article. The two Congos are officially Democratic Republic of the Congo and Republic of the Congo. And the longer, official name for Netherlands is Kingdom of the Netherlands." 
  • "Mick Ashworth: "It's most likely the approach of the UK Foreign Office to retain 'the' as the short form of the [longer] official name... We [Times Atlas] will tend to take the advice of the Foreign Office and the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (PCGN). These quite often have a long and a short form." 
  • "The habit of putting 'the' in front of place names is heard through the English-speaking world and is common to Germanic and Romance languages." 
  • Liberman: "In general, use of the definite article is unpredictable. Why should it be London but The Thames. There is no logic for it yet this is the way it is. Sometimes country names go back to river names."

 "Life Tips You Need to Know" & "College Life: Tips for Survival"
  • Arranging for automated phone calls will do better at waking you up than an alarm clock. 
  • Buy tickets in the middle of the week. 
  • CD-rom holders make fantastic bagel totes. 
  • Unplug anything if you're not using it. Even when they're off, they're still using electricity.
  • Scribbling over permanent marker on a whiteboard with a dry erase marker will allow you to erase both. 
  • Threading a small, hard item through the handles of a plastic bag will make it easier to carry.
  • Turning a normal toaster sideways makes it into a nice little toaster oven.
  • Dryer sheets keep away mosquitoes.
  • The tannins from olives will sooth motion sickness if you keep them in your mouth. 
  • The concierge knows everything about the city. 
  • Times New Roman will save more ink than most other fonts. 
  • Putting a speaker in a bowl will amplify the sound. 
  • Rubbing walnut on light scratches in wood will make many of them disappear. 
  • Rubbing banana over CD scratches will seal them. Wash the CD before you put it back in, obviously.
  • Toothpaste is good for cleaning headlights. 
  • Hairclips are good for organizing long wires. Better than rubber bands.
  • Stack clothes vertically so that you can see them all. 
  • Make ice packs out of soaked-and-frozen sponges in sandwich baggies. 

"What's so bad about hating the Daleks, anyway?"
  • "But I guess I'm wondering just what's so wrong about hating creatures that are actually engineered, both biologically and mechanically, to be pure instruments of genocide. I mean, it might be bad for your soul, but who cares about that?" Interesting question. I should make a story about that, shouldn't I? The sad thing is that it's not hard at all to devise a scenario for it. The gears are already turning in my head and none of it seems contrived. 
  • "'Be careful when you fight monsters, lest you become one' is sort of an overused trope, and a deterrent to heroism." I would have to contest that. 
  • The Troughton Doctrine: "There are some corners of the universe that have bred the most terrible things. They must be fought." 
  • "Sometimes you really do have to fight monsters, even if it makes you less of a nice person." But is "being less of a nice person" really the worst that can happen? When you want to oppose the Evil Empire, that's all good. But when you start torturing people, spying on your own citizens, killing civilians, and so on, you have to take a step back and wonder if you've become a pale reflection of the very thing you set out to end. And you have to wonder if some of the newer evil empires you're opposing only got that way because, in the course of opposing you, they became a reflection as well. This is not a space whale Aesop. This happens on a regular basis. 

 "The Economics of Star Trek"
  • "Traditional economics, of course, deals with the efficient allocation of inherently scarce materials. Post scarcity economics deals with the economics of economies that are no longer constrained by scarcity of materials-- food, energy, shelter, &c. The thing that never sits quite right with post scarcity economics, though, at least the very little that I've read, is that it's always an all or nothing sort of affair: you either don't have enough of anything or you have enough of everything... It seems to me that getting from point A-- a scarcity economy-- to point B-- post scarcity-- is going to be a long, complicated journey as some things become more abundant in some places, while other things are still scarce. What is needed is some kind of interim-, or proto-post scarcity economics." 
  • "We are, as a race, constrained by the economic models we have." 
  • "We have European-style socialist capitalism, but that's still capitalism, and scarcity-based, albeit with a much more robust safety net than we have here in the US. Some Americans seem to think that a robust safety net somehow nullifies the distributed planning of capitalism. I'll listen to them again when our schools are decent and our life span starts increasing again magically." 
  • "The key here, to me, is to start thinking about how economics would work when we decouple labor from reward." 
  • "There are plenty of reasons to believe that we may be at the beginnings of a post scarcity economy. We have a surplus, no doubt. Of course we still have legions of people in the world that are starving, and even people still here at home. But we actually have the capacity to feed them, to feed everyone, even now, even if we don't have the will. It's not a matter of scarcity; it's a matter of the organization of labor and capital." 
  • "I have always wondered: is there any economic proof that we need full employment to reach full satisfaction of needs?"
  • "Here we get to our shitty world of unabated consumerism, Thorstein Veblen's conspicious consumption and George Battaille's accursed share-- the inevitable destiny of all economies to eventually produce more than they need, and, thus, waste it." 
  • "Seems to me that if we could think beyond capitalism and think of a new model, we could break out of this pointless cycle of more and more consumption of shit we don't need and model things in another way... The problem seems to me that the minute we leave capitalism behind, we only look at the alternatives of communism, marxism, and pure socialism and pooh pooh them." 
  • Participatory economics is "a bit preoccupied with 'workers' and 'individual need' to really work in any post-scarcity economy where the very concept of a laborer is iffy." 
  • "Economics is really at its worst when it's just making up theories. It's a lot more noble when there's some real data to back it up." 
  • "There is absolutely, obviously, still private property in the Federation: most obviously Joseph Sisko's restaurant in New Orleans and Chateau Picard, evidencing that not just small possessions are allowed by that land itself is still privately owned." 
  • "The Maquis routinely refer to 'our land,' which they presumably owned, and while an individual tribe may have collectively owned the land through a corporation, like the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act, or through a co-op, they clearly 'owned' the land, while the Federation was the superseding government that could give that territory away to another sovereign party, much like the ceding of Sudetenland or Guam... Finally, let's not forget Star Trek: Generations when Kirk says in the Nexus; This is my house. I sold it years ago.'" 
  • "The Federation is not true post scarcity economy: famines routinely still exist, transportation lines are vital in moving around goods within the Federation. Transportation is a whole grey area in most post-scarcity economic works, at least the few I've read."
  • "It seems pretty clear cut that jobs are optional. They explicitly state on many occasions that the Federation is based on a philosophy of self improvement and cultural enrichment, and in any case we sure do run into a lot of 'artists' in the Federation... The Federation seems a bit like Williamsburg-- a lot of artists who don't need to work. Or maybe more like the UK at the heigh of its social programs supporting artists." 
  • "Imagine there's some level of welfare benefits in every country, including America. That's easy. That's true. Imagine that, as the economy became more efficient and wealthy, the society could afford to give more money in welfare benefits, and chooses to do so. Next, imagine that this kept happening until society could afford to give the equivalent of $10 million US dollars at current value to every man, woman, and child. And imagine that, over the time that took to happen, society got its shit together on education, health, and the dignity of labor. Imagine if that self-same society frowned upon the conspicuous display of consumption and there was a large amount of societal pressure, though not laws, on people that evolved them into not being obsessed with wealth." 
  • The Federation is "essentially, European socialist capitalism vastly expanded to the point where no one has to work unless they want to." 
  • "The amount of welfare benefits available to all citizens is in excess of the needs of the citizens. Therefore, money is irrelevant to the lives of the citizenry, whether it exists or not. Resources are still accounted for and allocated in some manner, presumably by the amount of energy required to produce them (say Joules). And they are indeed credited to and debited from each citizen's 'account.'"
  • :Because the welfare benefit is so large, and social pressure is so strong against conspicuous consumption, the average citizen never pays any attention to the amounts allocated to them, because it's perpetually more than they need. But if they go crazy and try and purchase, say, 10 planets or 100 starships, the system simply says 'no.'"
  • "The big challenge here is how does society get someone to do the menial jobs that cannot be done in an automated manner. Why would anyone? There are really only two options: there is some small, incremental increase in your hypothetical maximum consumption, thus appealing to the subconscious in some primal way, or massive societal pressure has ennobled those jobs in a way that we don't these days. I opt for the former since it grounds everything in market economics, albeit on a bordering-on-infinitesimal manner."
  • "There is almost zero mention of central planning. It's a capitalistic society, its benefits are just through the roof. Also, market economics = crowdsourced." 
  • "Either way, presumably, you take whatever job you want, and your benefits allocations are adjusted accordingly. But by and large you just don't care, because the basic welfare allocation is more than enough... After all, if you were effectively 'wealthy' why would you take a job to become wealthy? It pretty much becomes the least likely reason to take a job."
  • "People don't acquire things based upon a currency value. People just acquire things from replicators, from restaurants such as Sisko's or coffee shops like Cosimo's, or, presumably, get larger things from dealerships or (more likely) factories. This could still be called 'buying,' as a throwback. 
  • "Resource allocation is mainly about energy anyhow, doubly so if it's only robots building most things." 
  • "However, you could still buy and sell things. You could take a thing from a replicator and go to someone else and 'buy' something else with it. Why couldn't you? It's a free society. It's essentially barter. Kirk may well have sold his house for a year's supply of Romulan ale." 
  • "I'm gonna make a bold new theory here. Federation Units are 'Federation' the same way that American Cheese is American. It is simply descriptive... I believe the Federation Unit is a private currency, developed by third parties to facilitate complex trades or trades outside the Federation. I believe that the Federation Unit is not actually underwritten or issued by the Federation. I think it is more akin to the Calgary Dollar, or the Chiemgauer. Or bitcoin." 
  • "It's a more realistic vision of post-capitalism than I have seen anywhere else. Scarcity still exists to some extent, but society produces more than enough to satisfy everyone's basic needs. The frustrating thing is that we pretty much do that now, we just don't allocate properly. And allocating properly cannot be done via central planning." 
  • "The Federation clearly adheres to the 'laws made as close to home as possible' routine, since as far as we can tell the Federation president really only has authority over Starfleet, Foreign Relations and power allocation and accounting. Virtually every other law we encounter in the Federation happens to be at the individual planet or colony level." 

"BYU prof fears Mormon scholars are giving in to secularism"
  • This is such crap. I just have to get that pronouncement out of the way. 
  • "Such LDS progressives, he [Ralph Hancock] says, feel free to disagree with Mormon officials..." Yes. Because we don't live in a Church of top-down authority. Or at least, that's not the Gospel. 
  • "In this world, personal conscience trumps pious pronouncements, and right and wrong are determined individually rather than collectively." Because personal conscience, so long as it is built and maintained according to rational principles and reason, should never be subordinated to anything else that is not similarly-built. "Because I said so" is the last resort of both rulers and parents, and it is a sign that the speaker-- the dictator, we might say-- has no reasonable arguments left and is now relying on force rather than persuasion. 
  • Adam Miller: "To do well in your profession, you have to accept its framework-- the shared framework of the academy is secular. There are problems with that, but also advantages." 
  • "If a Latter-day Saint accepts the notion that the world is complex and that Mormonism doesn't have a monopoly on truth, is that a sign of moral relativism or a lack of faith? Neither... just a little humility." 
  • Hancock: "[The present culture] intimidates some of the best of the rising generation by presenting them with this alternative: You can be counted among the smart people, or you can cling to your groundless and cruel prejudices. BYU shows little interest in articulating a third choice: an intellectual defense of openness to unfashionable truths." And now you present us with a 180, Hancock. Before this, you're making appeals to authority. And now you want to defend your statements on the ground of debate? Pick one side or the other. 


 Miscellany
  • Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: "The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience... The reward of the old scientist is the sense of having seen a vague sketch grow into a masterly landscape." 
  • Hugh Nibley: "The worst sinners, according to Jesus, are not the harlots and publicans, but the religious leaders with their insistence on proper dress and grooming, their careful observance of all the rules, their precious concern for status symbols, their strict legality, their pious patriotism... the haircut becomes the test of virtue in a world where Satan deceives and rules by appearances."
  • Le Samorai is very interesting. Maybe thirty seconds of dialogue in the first ten minutes. Then another three (short) sentences, and that's all you've got for first fifteen minutes. Writing this at the sixteen minute mark, I'm not sure if we're going to get much more than brief exchanges of dialogue at all. Very interesting. Update: Twenty-three minutes before any kind of lengthy exchange. I like. Second update, end of film: Very good. Not quite what I was expecting, having heard it had inspired Ghost Dog, but still good. 10/10, would watch again. 
  • Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn: "'The first great step was taken long ago,' said Mr. Monk,-'taken by men who were looked upon as revolutionary demagogues, almost as traitors, because they took it. But it is a great thing to take any step that leads us onwards.'"
  • "It's also important to remember people often look at privilege individually rather than systemically. While individual experiences are important, we have to try to understand privilege in terms of systems and social patterns. Black privilege doesn't exist because blacks (and other people of color) do not have institutional power.
  • "You don't have to be liked, [when] you've got all the guns." The Doctor, Into the Dalek
  • Joseph Rubas: "Life is progression. Imagine it as a stairway. The farther up you are, the farther down the other steps seem." 
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