Random observations for September 2017

The most precious treasure of all is time you can spend your own way.

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Understatement has a power all its own.

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Smart people ask questions.  Stupid people think they already know all the answers.

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Analogy can clarify a point, but can never prove it.  When applied in ignorance, analogy can even confuse.  An example of this would be efforts to explain the politics of a foreign country by treating its political figures or parties as equivalents of familiar American ones -- something that almost always leads to wildly-wrong conclusions.

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If you find that the language you use to condemn someone else sounds just like the language others once used to condemn you, reconsider what you are doing -- and whether you have fallen prey to the poison of excluding in order to belong.

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A multicultural society such as ours is less vulnerable to propaganda, fascist subversion, etc. than a monocultural society, for the same reason that a genetically varied population of organisms is less vulnerable to being wiped out by a single pathogen than a genetically homogenous population is.  When a society is made up of many groups who will respond to the same kind of propaganda in different ways, it's far harder to design a campaign to sway the whole population in a common direction.

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Human activity cannot be rationally regulated without the application of human judgment.  Just mechanically applying any set of rules, no matter how ingenious, to human behavior will always produce insane and unjust verdicts in at least some cases.

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Anybody who thinks socialism and communism are the same thing is too stupid to argue with.

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Better my own way to Hell than someone else's way to Heaven.

[For previous random observations, see here.]