Soup.GroundPlane.org

“ “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.” ”

Reposted by Lifeof

“ John Adams, "I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy . . . ," quoted in Seabury and Codevilla, War: Ends and Means, p. 3.
cited in Irfan Khawaja, “Victory: Means and End” ”

“ Like Plato, Strauss taught that within societies, "some are fit to lead, and others to be led," according to Drury. But, unlike Plato, who believed that leaders, which he called philosopher-kings, had to be people with such high moral standards that they could resist the temptations of power, Strauss thought that "those who are fit to rule are those who realise there is no morality and that there is only one natural right, the right of the superior to rule over the inferior."

Moral law was nonetheless indispensable Strauss' view because "it is necessary to keep internal order." It should be propagated through religion, which, like Karl Marx, Strauss considered to be "the opiate of the people," or in Strauss' own words, "a pious fraud." But religion is for the masses alone; the rulers need not be bound by it; indeed it would be absurd if they were, because they know there is no reality behind it. ”

“ The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best. To be realized, it must affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion. And even as far as political arrangements are concerned, governmental institutions are but a mechanism for securing to an idea channels of effective operation. ... Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an altrenative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of democracy itself." --John Dewey, "The Public and its Problems (1927; p. 143, 148) ”

“ even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, ”

“ History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King, Jr. ”

“ The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

• Second Inaugural Address (20 January 1937)

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“ Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.

• The Act of Creation

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Aim: Geiselman (1985) set out to investigate the effectiveness of the cognitive interview.

Method: Participants viewed a film of a violent crime and, after 48 hours, were interviewed by a policeman using one of three methods: the cognitive interview; a standard interview used by the Los Angeles Police; or an interview using hypnosis. The number of facts accurately recalled and the number of errors made were recorded.

Results: The average number of correctly recalled facts for the cognitive interview was 41.2, for hypnosis it was 38.0 and for the standard interview it was 29.4.  There was no significant difference in the number of errors in each condition.

Conclusion: The cognitive interview leads to better memory for events, with witnesses able to recall more relevant information compared with a traditional interview method.

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“ "The definition of politics: In politics there are no right answers, only a continuous flow of compromises among groups resulting in a changing, cloudy, and ambiguous series of public decisions where appetite and ambition compete openly with knowledge and wisdom." (part of his presentation [MP3]) ”

“ I think that more philosophical disputes are substantive than Carnap did, but the dissolution of verbal disputes is nevertheless part of my metaphilosophical religion. The diagnosis of verbal disputes has the potential to serve as a sort of universal acid in philosophical discussion, either dissolving disagreements or boiling them down to the fundamental disagreements on which they turn. If we can move beyond verbal disagreement to  either substantive agreement or to clarified substantive disagreement, then we have made philosophical progress.
    To make this progress, though, we need some general tools to help us ... ”

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The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

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“ ‘In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration,’ ... ‘In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.’ ”

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"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

--Thomas Jefferson, letter to george logan, 1816

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"A continual circulation of lies among those who are not much in the way of hearing them contradicted, will in time pass for truth; and the crime lies not in the believer but the inventor."

--Thomas Paine

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“ Revolution is not revolt. It was revolt which bolstered the Resistance for four years. It was the complete, obstinate refusal, almost blind at the beginning, of an order which wanted to bring men to their knees. Revolt stems first of all from the heart, but a time comes when it passes to the spirit, where feeling becomes idea, where spontaneous fervor leads to direct action. This is the moment of revolution.
— The Rebel ”

“ What I’m really closing in on here is not signal to noise but a third vector, the special context that comes from the missing feedback loop in Plus. To illustrate it, I’ll bring up a seeming wild card, Spotify, which I fell in love with over the weekend after receiving a complementary invite. I might have played with it in the freemium edition, but getting a chance to experience it full bore was a gift I much appreciate. In a few minutes I was diving into the past, like the swooping cable car of the last Harry Potter as I tumbled through my favorite haunts, in realtime, streaming, on demand, live.

see also Glasperlenspiel aka "Glass Bead Game" ”