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https://gatorlog.wordpress.com/2017/0...

Throughout the world, more and more entrepreneurs, engineers, experts, scholars, lawyers and managers are called to join the empire. They must ponder whether to answer the imperial call or to remain loyal to their state and their people. More and more people choose the empire.

All human cultures are at least in part the legacy of empires and imperial civilizations, and no academic or political surgery can cut out the imperial legacies without killing the patient.

제국에 의해 전파된 문화가 지배 엘리트들이 독자적으로 창조한 경우는 거의 없다. [...] In the imperial US, an American president of Kenyan blood can munch on Italian pizza while watching his favorite film, Lawrence of Arabia, a British epic about the Arab rebellion against the Turks.

Jews, for example, owe far more to the empires under which they lived during the past two millennia than to the traditions of the ancient kingdom of Judaea. If King David were to show up in un ultra-Orthodox synagogue in present-day Jerusalem, he would be utterly bewildered to find people dressed in East European clothes, speaking in a German dialect and having endless arguments about the meaning of a Babylonian text

There are two things you can’t find on the internet.
1. You can’t search for the answer to questions that haven’t been asked yet.
2. 2. You can’t Google a new idea.
The internet can only tell us what we already know.

“My strongest sense of curiosity is what I call emotional curiosity: I want to understand what makes people tick.”

We do not trust the strangers, or the next-door neighbor--we trust the coin they hold. If they run out of coins, we run out of trust.

Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits.

Counterfeiting is not just cheating--it's a breach of sovereignty. [...] the legal term is lese-majesty (violating majesty), and was typically punished by tortue an death.

We accept the dollar in payment, because we trust in God and the US secretary of the treasury.

Money isn't a material reality--it's a psychological construct.

us vs. them을 초월하고자 했던 사람들은 merchants, conquerors and prophets. For the merchants, the entire world was a single market and all humans were potential customers.

us vs. them을 초월하고자 했던 사람들은 merchants, conquerors and prophets. For the merchants, the entire world was a single market and all humans were potential customers.

Homo Sapiens evolved to think of people as divided into us and them. [[...] no social animal is ever guided by the interests pf the entire species to which it belong.

A real clash of civilization is like the proverbial dialogue of the deaf. Nobody can grasp what the other is saying.

equality 와 freedom 。 Two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality.

equality 와 freedom 。 Two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality.

Bonobo and elephant societies are controlled by strong networks of cooperative females, while the self-centered and uncooperative males are pushed to the sidelines.

In truth, our concepts 'natural' and 'unnatural' are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology.

In many societies women were simply the property of men. [...] Raping a woman who did not belong to any man was not considered a crime at all, just as picking up a lost coin on a busy street is not considered theft. [...] To say that a husband 'raped' his wife was as illogical as saying that a man stole his own wallet.

...complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination.

Aristotle argued that slaves have a 'slavish nature' whereas free people have a 'free nature.'

The filed of AI is seeking to create a new kind of intelligence based solely on the binary script of computers.

'Created equal' should therefore be translated into 'evolved differently.'

'Created equal' should therefore be translated into 'evolved differently.'

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criterial of survival and reproduction.

괴베틀리 테페의 발견이 암시하는 것.. 농경사회로의 전환이 utilitarian motive(ie., to increase their normal food supply)가 아닌 mysterious culture purpose때문이었을 수도 있다는 것: It may well be that foragers switched from gathering wild wheat to intense wheat cultivation , not to increase their normal food supply, but to support the building and running of a temple.)