E.T. > Recent Status Updates

"If citizens of a well-ordered society are to recognize one another as
free and equal, basic institutions must educate them to this conception of
themselves, as well as publicly exhibit and encourage this ideal of political
justice. This task of education belongs to what we may call the wide role of
a political conception."
Are we sure that veiling underage girls in classrooms makes them feel free and equal to boys ?

Unconvinced by Rawls focused on equality as a pre-condition for social co-operation. Think it should be about ensuring dignity so that people can participate as free and equal citizens.
A lot to read and digest in this (seemingly) short book.

V.engaging
Michener is better at this sort of historical fiction but this is worth a read !

“The desire to be good is one of the loveliest things in the world, but in order to have a genuinely good life, we may sometimes need to be (by the standards of the good child) fruitfully and bravely bad.”

Mostly non-romantic poetry - and the word most used so far - "lahu" (blood)

“Our civilization is full of great books on how to speak – Cicero’s On the Orator and Aristotle’s Rhetoric were two of the greatest in the ancient world – but sadly no one has ever written a book called The Listener”

We too readily assume that we are approaching a person of genius when we stop understanding anything of what they’re saying.

2 other key takeaways :-
a) Iran is a mirror-image of Pakistan - albiet with better literacy perhaps. The same Aman-ki-Asha wale chamans (retards) might be behind Iran's benign image.
b) The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran explicitly says it will interfere in other countries and turn them into (Islamic) theocracies. It has tried that with a few too. So much for a country that blames USA for imperialism!

For years, lying Left-liberals, well-meaning liars ofcourse ran a propaganda that LTTE started using suicide bombing as a terror tactic and it had nothing to do with the religion that must always be exonerated.
Actually it was started by Hezbollah and Shias in Lebanon in early 1980s and by as religious-minded ppl as they come.

‘महिमा घटी समुद्र की रावण बसा पड़ोस’ :)

Diff culture, diff language - poetry feels so fresh ! Just like traveling in a diff country.

“They plant four hundred million trees a year in Sweden, and only harvest one percent of the forest area. There are, they say, eighty-seven billion trees in the country.”

“I am not sure how many humans would pass Turing’s human test.”
+1 said this myself

The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like, of becoming more root than plant.
The man who cuts his away and denies
that they were ever connected with him withers into half a man.
- John Graves

“When people who live by conventions, rules, and molds find themselves dissatisfied, they’ll make themselves feel better not by pulling up stakes, but by running down those who do, and wishing—just wishing—that their own lives offered something more.”

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.

“Churchill had never cared for Wilson. He liked men of passion, of exuberance, even men of occasional folly, but Wilson was altogether much too self-contained, a civil servant to the core.”
+1

“They tell me,” Churchill spat, “that competitive examinations are an excellent means of weeding out idiots and imbeciles. It is a monumental pity,” he continued, “that elections don't appear to be so discriminating.”

"Not that he has been awarded the Peace Prize yet, of course. But his Noble Laureate brother had never had a poem dedicated to his honor by the Poet Laureate, John Masefield:

As Priam to Achilles for his son,
So you, into the night, divinely led,
To ask that young men's bodies, not yet dead,
Be given from the battle not begun."

Wrt Neville Chamberlain in 1938. How fortunes changed for him and Churchill a yr later!

“So whose fault was it?”
“The System.”
“What system?”
“Any System. Happens everywhere.
Politicians and rulers who decide, who decree, and who leave ordinary folk like me to pay for their mistakes.
At least one thing about the Russian Revolution, Mr. Burgess, is that when they shot the Tsar at last they got someone to pay for their own”

“Harold Macmillan, the forty-four-year-old Conservative Member for Stockton, drifted in their direction. He was not often popular with his colleagues.
Not only did he have a conscience, he would insist on sharing it.”

“4.Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.”
On the plus side, a lot of stress on education and freedom from religious dogma (except for Marxism ironically)

“What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed?”

“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.”

“Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.”

“The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

“The old order of the shopkeepers, the handcraftsman are conservative and are a part of the “revolution” only to save their skin.”
Its amazing how this book is not considered “hate speech”.

“The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.”

“Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman.”
Parallels with rise of AI and also discussion of economic crises.

“Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”