Same and different people

A friend of mine sometimes mentioned a thought that he considered disturbing: If you could rise up high enough into the air, human beings would all started looking the same, like a bunch of ants. One consequence of this perspective is that particular humans would seem expendable and replaceable. Personally, I vacillated between thinking that human animals are exquisitely different from each other or disturbingly the same. Along came Donald Brown to convince me that we are deluded to think that people are meaningfully different from each other. Last night my wife and I watched an unusual video that, to me, reinforced this idea that humans everywhere are largely the same. The video is title "Life in a Day," and it was produced by National Geographic. Imagine 4,500 hours of video all all shot on the same day, edited down to 94 minutes. Here is a description of the project at the site where you can view the entire video:

Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) and producer Ridley Scott (Alien, Gladiator) team up to offer this candid snapshot of a single day on planet Earth. Compiled from over 80,000 YouTube submissions by contributors in 192 countries, Life in a Day presents a microcosmic view of our daily experiences as a global society. From the mundane to the profound, everything has its place as we spend 90 minutes gaining greater insight into the lives of people who may be more like us than we ever suspected, despite the fact that we're separated by incredible distances.
This is a compelling video that I recommend. It reminded me that most of what I think of as "happening" are the images and sounds I personally experience. For the most part, I don't know what in the world is going on. While I live my life, and it seem important to me, 7 billion other people are living lives that they consider equally important. The video is a terrific reminder that we are each only a tiny part of a much bigger whole.

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Quotes for the new year

Here is another batch of quotes that I have collected over the past couple of months. Hundreds more of my favorite quotes can be found here. I don't travel in circles where people say, 'I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.' That's just a long-winded religious way to say, 'Shut up.' Penn Jillette, NPR interview Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something. Pancho Villa (1877 - 1923), last words “No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice.” -Chuck Palahniuk Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, and went bang in the noonday sun. Kurt Vonnegut - God Bless You Mr. Rosewater “It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the groud, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re done with it.” Poster “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” ― Albert Einstein "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940), "The Crack-Up" (1936) "Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person." T-shirt "The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him." Russell Baker (1925 - ) “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ‎"When I feed the poor, I am called a saint... when I ask why the poor are hungry, I am called a Communist!" Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara (Liberation Theologian RC priest, Brazil 1909-1990) "It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power." David Brin (1950 - ) "Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them." Joseph Heller (1923 - 1999), "Catch-22" “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” Christopher Hitchens. "Conceit is God's gift to little men." Bruce Barton "If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room." Anon "You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger." Buddha "We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." Martin Luther King, Jr. “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government." Patrick Henry

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Quotes on tolerance

A reader named Mike Baker handed me a huge collection of quotes, organized by topic. Here are the quotes he collected on the topic of tolerance: "Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival." ~ René Dubos Without tolerance, our world turns into hell. ~ Friedrich Durrenmatt Anger and intolerance are the twin enemies of correct understanding. ~ Mohandas Gandhi I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers. ~ Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931) Tolerance and celebration of individual differences is the fire that fuels lasting love. -- Tom Hannah The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. -- Eric Hoffer I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others. -- Thomas Jefferson "Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others." -- John F. Kennedy Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another's beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them. -- Joshua Liebman No human trait deserves less tolerance in everyday life….. than intolerance. -- Giacomo Leopardi Let us not speak of tolerance. This negative word implies grudging concessions by smug consciences. Rather, let us speak of mutual understanding and mutual respect. -- Father Dominique Pire We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. -- Karl Popper "If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace." -- Franklin Roosevelt Tolerance is the oil which takes the friction out of life. -- Wilbert E. Scheer In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty. ~Thomas Jefferson

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Haven’t you ever read . . . ?

I am often asked whether I've read a particular book, and I usually haven't because there are a gazillion new books published every year. Here's what I say: "No, I haven't read THAT book. Thank you for your suggestion." Here's what I think: Please quit acting as though I haven't been doing any serious reading just because I haven't read the book that YOU just told me to read. For the past 20 years, I have been on a quest to grasp a somewhat detailed understanding of human animals. This has been a rather intense pursuit, jump-started (for about 5 years beginning in 2006) by my auditing of more than 30 hours of graduate level cognitive science courses at nearby Washington University in St. Louis. During the past 20 years, I have read almost entirely non-fiction, and I've been rather careful to limit my topics mostly to the topics represented by the books below. Recently, I decided to inventory what I have been reading. I'm not entirely sure why I did this. Perhaps it is because the end of the year is approaching, which tends to be a time for reflection regarding who we are and where we are headed. What better way for a writer to determine his direction based upon the books he has especially admired for the past two decades? Thus I took an inventory of the non-fiction books I have read that have significantly influenced me. I tend to make many notes on the books I own (I haven't started into electronic books yet), and I retain them in my "library," which is actually a storage room that contain lots of other household items. Yesterday, I ventured into my library with the intent of documenting the books that have especially impressed and challenged me. I ended up selecting less than 20% of the books I own for this honor. What follows below is a list of such books, all of which I have read over the past 20 years. It is not a perfect list. I am sure that there are many dozens of other books that I have overlooked. I probably own 500 books that I have only browsed so far, or not even begun, yet look promising. I'm more and more convinced that I will never read most of my unread books unless I win the lottery and retire. I try to not keep a steady course, though my quest seems hopeless. I'm reminded of this hopelessness every time I stumble on a pile of 30 unread and partially read books by the side of my bed. In my list below, I have only included those books that I have actually read. I would highly recommend any of them. I have not included in many other books I have read that I would consider merely been useful or "good." As I made my list, it occurred to me that I have been greatly influenced by more than books. I have read far more pages of online or in paper magazine articles than book pages. More recently, I've been impressed by many video and in-person presentations/lectures. I have also corresponded with many people over the years on these topics, including many of the authors of the books in my list. I've poured immense time into my reading and writing. It surprised me how much material I have reviewed in 20 years, considering that I also have a day job as a consumer lawyer and also try to spend time with my family. It occurs to me that I am extremely lucky to be living in a time and place where I can benefit from so many incredible ideas developed be others. Each of these authors spends his or her entire life working hard, and then I simply scoop up the their life's work by investing a mere day or two or reading. I have mentioned many of these books and authors in the five years that I've been writing at this website; I find that writing comments about these book helps me to absorb the material better. It also occurs to me that I would not be at all who I am had I not seriously read the books in my list. I make reference to many of these ideas many times each day. To the extent that I have been able to come up with interesting ideas, it is quite likely that "my" ideas came, directly or indirectly, from these books, and that I am thus standing on the shoulders of giants (there I go again with the borrowing). Without further ado, here many of my favorite non-fiction books, broken into a few general categories: [More . . . ]

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Maintaining Order

How is it that Americans are so incredibly ignorant of many of these atrocities? How is it, for example, that most people do now know that in 1954 the United States overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran to install a Shah? The following video should be required viewing for any American who barks that we ought to invade Iran or, worse yet, "nuke Iran" (I've heard both of these on the street). This is insanity from a nation that claims to love liberties and spout pro-life rhetoric.

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