Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“The answer to bad speech, we are told, is more speech. The only way that tired bromide could be true, though, would be if it were possible for the bad speech to be definitively rejected through reasoned argument. That is to say, free speech can only be the solution if the result of the ongoing…
“The best response to anyone who wants to take seriously Nietzsche’s fantasies about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other’s bodies for failure to remit are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer-an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home…
“Like all misers he had a constant need to pit his wits against those of other men, to mulct them of their crowns by fair legal means. To get the better of others, was that not exercising power, giving oneself with each new victim the right to despise those weaklings of the earth who were…
“The ideology of modern capitalism is an expression of the deficient mental structure’s repression of the time element, of creative becoming. Instead of recognizing the importance of the dialectic of history and the ongoing and entangled processes of natural and social transformation, capitalist economic theory insists that the present arrangement represents the “end of history”…
“Cruelty plays a fundamental role in the vegetarian’s argument inasmuch as the principal reason the vegetarian does not want to eat meat is that she does not want to kill animals or cause them to suffer. The vegetarian sees cruelty in purely negative terms; she believes that its complete eradication is a realistic goal that…
“In discussions about plastic use it is common to blame mass consumerism and a throwaway culture for the environmental problem of plastic. However, rather than being demand led, the throwaway culture was created and driven by the corporations who profit from it. The amazing materials created from the waste products of the oil and gas…
“Thus [in Keynesian economics] there is no need for any change in the mode of production for profit; just take control of the money machine to ensure an infinite flow of money and all will be well […] Well, capitalism is a monetary economy but it is not a money economy (alone). Money cannot make…
“Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.” – Salvador Dali I know lots of people who have made relatively honest and minor mistakes at their workplace and have then been disciplined for it. These sort of scenarios always get me thinking about human nature and how, when we talk about mistakes, excellence,…
“Self-oriented perfectionism is the tendency to hold oneself to an unrealistically high standard, while other-oriented perfectionism means having unrealistic expectations of others. But “socially prescribed perfectionism is the most debilitating of the three dimensions of perfectionism,” Curran and Hall contend. It describes the feeling of paranoia and anxiety engendered by the persistent — and not…
I watched a really funny movie on Netflix over the weekend called The Polka King. (**SPOILERS AHEAD!!**) Beside the fact that the movie takes place in the town where I went to high school (Hazleton, Pennsylvania) and the fact that it has lots of polka music (which I fondly remember my grandmother listening to…