Catch-All
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Experiment with prose poetry. About Hell.
People wonder where is hell and what is hell and others answer, hell is here. It’s here on earth, and it’s pain. People are in pain and it’s hell. People are in hell. And people are out of hell. Some leave, some enter, some remain. There are three ways, three ways out of hell. First. Continue reading
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We Habitually Dehumanize Each Other. So what?
“And since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies either my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous.” Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. Dover Publications, 2004. (Original: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922.) p 69 Dehumanizing others is a move we often attribute to Continue reading
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Hume: poetry, music, philosophy quote (with photo)
‘Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy. David Hume. Ed. Ernest C. Mossner. A Treatise of Human Nature. Penguin Classics: New York. 1985 (First published 1739 and 1740). p 153 Continue reading
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People are saying
*Update: substitute for “pandemic” any highly charged story currently looping on news media. “People are saying….” People are saying all kinds of things as this pandemic unfolds. Of course they are, that’s what people do !! Inspiring things, horrible things, hypocritical things, smart things, stupid things, true things, false things, all kinds of things. Some Continue reading
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Music, stories, games as responses to ‘uncertain times’
About our responses during uncertain times …This is not a “beware the apocalypse” doom and gloom post. Neither is it a “look on the bright side” post. Rather, last summer I read a book called Apocalyses by Eugene Weber, an Canadian historian. And a passage therein set me to thinking about the various kinds of responses to Continue reading
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The Real Experts.
Some people attempt to inject a little sense into the world by writing a letter to the editor, others by commenting on the comments commenting on the comments on a comment thread, and others still by preaching from a soapbox at a public discussion forum or from a soapbox on a street corner (location, location, Continue reading
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‘Mom-advice’. You take a little cringe with the good.
Some parental advice is worth keeping, some not. Here’s a not. Mom used to tell me, You can’t get married until you can put your hands in hot water. By this warning she figured she could get me to wash the dishes without having to nag. And she was right. Time and again, I took Continue reading
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Cephalus On Ageing
Cephalus, in answer to Socrates’ question of whether life is harder towards the end, “For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many.” (3) Plato, Trans. Benjamin Continue reading
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Sweet Revenge.
It is very sweet to do a just action which is disagreeable to those we do not like. Victor Hugo. By Order of the King. (Or, The Man Who Laughs.) The Valjean Edition of the Novels of Victor Hugo. New York: P.F. Collier & Son. (1912?) The Waif Knows Its Course, p 391. Continue reading
