Aphorisms for a human[e] world Everything that's obvious is begging to be investigated.... Vanitas! Like much other human cultural effort, when I die or cease paying my monthly Internet Service Provider fee, or my ISP gets driven out of business, or the Internet itself changes to discriminate in some new way against "personal web pages", etc., all I have done here will almost surely be lost. THINK Caveat: If the shoe doesn't fit, please don't think I'm trying to make you wear it.

«78 Return to previous aphorisms   79 Transfigure each of our ordinary daily life activities into a [minor] sacrament! A priest hands out wafers and wine at holy communion; I make a cup of expresso.  80 Why can't we have CommunismCapitalism with a human face? (See also: SocialistCapitalist realism art movement.)  81 To be neither abandoned nor intruded upon. For persons to give one (e.g., me!) both support and space.  82 Chivalry is dead? Only if we can't offshore it. [To "offshore" means: to transfer a job to a country with cheaper production costs.]  83 A good personal library: holds the source for everything its owner wants to remember ("the audit trail"), and the books he or she loves. But also its owner can go there any time to discover something of value and interest, which he or she had no idea of ("something new").[fn.83]  84 Brutes can generally do more damage to us than we can do to them, in part because they may not notice even when what they are doing is hurting themselves or if they do notice they don't appreciate it. Don't let yourself be goaded into striking back at your tormentor: You will hurt yourself! I am in awe of what's-his/her-face's self-importance.  85 No child can spill more milk than you put in its cup.[fn.103b] If you don't want to clean up after a child a second time, restrain your urge to clean up after it the first time.  86 Frustration makes waste. (Read example)  87 Contra Freud (and just about everybody else): Don't sublimate! Instead: Transfigure!  88 Two different ways a person can be be "born with a silver spoon in their mouth": (1) When the spoon gets dirty they throw it away and expect to be given a new one. (2) When the spoon gets dirty, they carefully clean and polish it.  89 "You can't hurry love." Ars longa vita brevis, too. (A society that deserves to exist does everything it can to help each person have a life fulfilled in all the ways one who knows the full range of what is possible for mortals may hope for.)  90 Political correctness is epidemiological madness. The "melting pot" is really a petri dish, and "you" are (i.e, in each case: I am) the culture medium.  91 UFOs? "Aliens" aren't aliens where they came from. If life on earth came from outer space, that "alien" life had to arise natively some place in "our universe", i.e., "here".  92 My favorite illness: Tourette's syndrome -- because it gives a person social permission to speak the truth about society.[fn.97] If psychotic delusions often consist in a person believing insane things his or her social milieu proclaims to be true, literally are true (e.g., that some person is the Son of God), what kinds of psychotic delusions would be possible in a society that did not proclaim any insane things to be true? Would psychosis even be possible in a society which only proclaimed sane and reasonable things to be true?[fn.47]  93 Anent Sigmund Freud's famous notion that women have "penis envy" -- Might this have been a compensatory reaction formation and projection of Freud's own envy, as a man, of women having everything else (i.e., men's feeling shortchanged by having only a penis)? Isn't it also likely that Freud's theory of males having a "castration complex" derives at least in part from Freud himself having been circumcised? (This might be analogous to if The Inquisition, instead of just showing Galileo the instruments of torture, had also given him a little experience of having them used on him.)  94 Those who remember the past are condemned to having to lie when asked why they repeated it. (--not George Santayana) It is often not altogether bad to make mistakes in what one says and writes (e.g., to accidentally put a "not" exactly where it will reverse one's meaning!), since that gives persons who do not want to "get it" an excuse not to do so. (Have I made this point here before?)  95 Cheval Troyen: Timeo DanaosDerridas et dona ferrentes.[fn.94]  96 Learn to see "new" things as already old -- since eventually everyone will come to see them that way, and it's good to get a head-start on the future and keep ahead of "the curve".... Conversely, try more to see things that are outmoded as novel in the situation in which they emerged (or somewhere they never were present[fn.96]...) -- that kind of novelty is unlikely soon to fade away....  97 All men are mortal. But only the self-righteous can be mortified.  98 My life-style desire: High-culture simplicity. I seek not freedom of enterprise, but rather freedom from enterprise, i.e., not to have my time used up by busyness (aka business) but to be able to devote myself to the life of the mind. [See also: John Adams quote (Quote #113).]  99 On a level playing field, tall quarterbacks would pass over the heads and beyond the reach of stubby linemen who would knock the wind out of them by head butting them in the gut at their eye level....  100 From those to whom much has been given, much should be expected.[fn.109]  101 No pain no gain.  No pain no pain.  102 It's not the size of the ice, but the size of the fall that counts.  103 Hannah Arendt called our attention to: "The banality of evil." May I also call our attention to: "The evil of banality"?

»35 There is no last word on any subject.... Conversation has no end (conversation is open-ended...); conversation is ended by misfortunate impingements of finitude and death. ....But the Information Superhighway (and the Internet) ends here.

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