Law, Political Theory and Psychological Science
Law
Schopenhauer and Racism
Jun 23rd
I just came across Schopenhauer’s justification for racism.
The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmins, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent More >
Robofetishism and Technosexuality
Jun 20th
Technosexuality is fast becoming de rigour amongst the MTV generation, with their vibrating mobile WAP phones “going off” in their pockets, computer peripherals and multi-function entertainment systems. Found in all walks of life they can often be found hanging around electrical stores, exchanging glances over 32″ LCD TV screens with integrated DVD players.
Technosexuality may be expressed in a number of divergent ways, from dressing up as popular characters from Sci Fi stories, to rubbing themselves against toasters and vending machines. Several cases have been reported of people gaining sexual pleasure from slamming their genitals in fridge doors, though this More >
Germaine Greer Quotes
Jun 19th
The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more.
Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They’ve become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master’s ulterior motives — to be fattened or made docile — women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It’s a process More >
The Real History of Capitalism
Jun 5th
Take a look at the history of “trucking and bartering” itself; look at the history of modern capitalism, about which we know a lot. The first thing you’ll notice is, peasants had to be driven by force and violence into a wage-labor system they did not want; then major efforts were undertaken – conscious efforts – to create wants. In fact, if you look back, there’s a whole interesting literature of conscious discussion of the need to manufacture wants in the general population. It’s happened over the whole long stretch of capitalism of course, but one place where you can More >
English Proverbs
Jun 2nd
If you have heard of any more English Proverbs please let me know by contacting me.
A
A bad settlement is better than a good lawsuit.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.
A bad penny always turns up.
A bellyful is one of meat, drink, or sorrow.
A big tree attracts the woodsman’s axe.
An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
A bad workman blames his tools.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
A burnt child dreads the fire.
A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.
A little pot is easily hot.
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.
A More >
Suicide Quotes
May 12th
I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat. - Antonin Artaud
“You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.” - Chuck Palahniuk
I think suicide is the most perfect thing you can do in life. - Damien Hirst
There is no refuge from confession but More >
John Mortimer Quotes
Apr 22nd
I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.
I found criminal clients easy and matrimonial clients hard. Matrimonial clients hate each other so much and use their children to hurt each other in beastly ways. Murderers have usually killed the one person in the world that was bugging them and they’re usually quite peaceful and agreeable.
If you can’t sleep with your own wife wearing a false beard, what can you do?
People will go to endless trouble to divorce one person and then More >
Robert Nozick Quotes
Apr 12th
American libertarian philosopher (16/12/1938 – 23/1/2002).
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.
There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more.
Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.
Individuals have rights More >
Brief Outline of Feminist Theory
Apr 5th
In the early 1980s law became subject to a variety of new and influential critiques. The foremost being the culmination of feminism. The vindications of women’s rights lead to a prominent movements, whereby, contextualisation of domestic violence, rape, sexual objectification, oppression, sexual discrimination, marriage and sexual marginalisation became scrutinized against the social normality, and new discourses of investigation, known as feminist scholarship, appeared to the general populace.
Key Disciplines:
Liberal feminism - Contrasts the inequality of sexes and the ideology of equality.
Difference Feminism - Contrasts the differences between male and female roles and how women are under-appreciated within society.
Radical Feminism - Develops ideas to overcome More >
Law, Legislation and Liberty – Hayek
Apr 2nd
There exists no third principle for the organisation of the economics process which can be rationally chosen to achieve any desirable ends, in addition to either a functioning market in which nobody can conclusively determine how well-off particular groups or individuals will be, or a central direction where a group organised for power determines it.
Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left.
There are two ways of looking at the pattern of human activities which lead to very different conclusions concerning both its explanation and the possibilities of deliberately altering More >
Roland Barthes Quotes
Mar 9th
The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.
The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition … always new books, new programs, new More >
Social State of Marxism
Mar 9th
(Aleksandr Zinovyev Quotes)
Communism does not eliminate the inequality between men, the social injustice, exploitation of man by man and other evils of society — communism merely changes their form and gives birth to new evils, which become eternal fellow-travelers of communism.
If a Communist Party of a certain Western democracy promises to preserve after its seizure of power the positive characteristics of Western democracies (including civil liberties and high living standard) in the country and to avoid the negative characteristics of the Communist (socialist) mode of life, which have occurred and occur in the Soviet Union and the countries of the More >
Reforming Education: There is No Quick Fix
Mar 8th
(Mortimer Adler Quotes)
An adequate reform of public education in our school system cannot be accomplished by anything like a quick fix. We suspect that anyone who thinks otherwise cannot fully understand the shape of an adequate reform or all the obstacles to be overcome in achieving it.
The books to be read should not be limited to those written in English…. Instead it should be devoted to the great works of history, biography, philosophy, theology, natural science, social science, and mathematics, as well as the… tradition of Western literature — in English translation… Its aim should not be a survey of More >
The Virtue of Selfishness
Mar 8th
(Ayn Rand Quotes)
The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals.
Poverty, ignorance, illness and other problems of that kind are not metaphysical emergencies. By the metaphysical nature of man and of existence, man has to maintain his life by his own effort; the values he needs—such as wealth or knowledge—are not given to him automatically, as a gift of nature, but have to be discovered and achieved by his own thinking and work.
Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational More >
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
Mar 8th
(Ayn Rand Quotes)
Remember also that the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.
America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to More >
Issues with Communism
Feb 8th
Communism does not destroy and cannot in principle destroy social differences among the people. It changes only their forms, leading social contrasts to the monstrous sizes, which are at least not inferior to those in the West. Communism does not eliminate the inequality between humanity, the social injustice, exploitation of humanity and other evils of society — communism merely changes their form and gives birth to new evils. Marxism emerged not only with the intention of explaining scientifically everything in the world, but in addition to this, as a representative of the ‘hurt and injured’ classes of the world, expressing More >
Violence is not just Physical – Words that Underpin Intolerance
Feb 8th
Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself More >
Can one love truth without loving man? Can one love man without loving truth?
Feb 8th
Love comes first. To love truth, you must know truth. To know truth is to deny truth. What is known is not truth. What is known is already encased in time and ceases to be truth. Truth is an eternal movement, and so cannot be measured in words or in time. It cannot be held in the fist. You cannot love something which you do not know. But truth is not to be found in books, in images, in temples. It is to be found in action, in living. The very search for the unknown is love itself, and you More >
