¤ milky moon ¤

polliwog wrote:Wearing blinders leaves one unprepared for dangers approaching from the sides, while a belief in monsters requires one to take precautions against the threat of those monsters. Blinders could be blamed for the rise of the Third Reich and the subsequent deaths of millions in Europe. A belief in monsters could be blamed for attacks upon the West by Islamists, or for the Crusades of a thousand years ago. What if I see both as equally destructive? Why should I have to choose either one?

2. The intellectual conscience
I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this "great majority." But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.

Among some pious people I have found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [Discordant concord of things: Horace, Epistles, I.12.19.] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—-that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my sense of injustice.

polliwog wrote:Exactly Alex, but explaining won't change his way of seeing things. Zealots are too close to the source of their zeal. My mother used to say that anything which seemed to conflict with The Word was just the Devil trying to tempt her. So, unlike Relayor (of Bad Tidings?), she didn't think it necessary to twist or distort the arguments of others to put them off-balance. That is a political tactic, and she was not a political zealot.

polliwog wrote:I think I struck a raw nerve. If you believe that I have committed a personal attack against you, perhaps you should PM a moderator...or add me to your foe list.

polliwog wrote:I would say that you are using another Rovian tactic, which I pointed out in the previous forum, but I'm pretty sure that nothing remains of that dialog for me to cite...just like the "erroneous accusation" mentioned above. Apparently someone went through and deleted a lot of our posts. How do you suppose that happened?

dwaink wrote:I defy you give one example of me "twisting" or "distorting" anything. Until then, shut-the-f-up.

almost every sound u have made since u got back here has been a twisting and distorting of the basis for this forum, love of and discussion of Joanna Newsom's music, or music in general

from your point of view it is steve's sandbox from which to spout wisdom over the unwashed masses, about his own addiction,zealotry and political fringe attacks....how is that not a twisting and distortion? When will it not be about how much smarter steve is than everyone else, and actually become another fan posting in Joanna forum about Joanna? when will you either leave this place be or swallow your self inflated worth and join us? Never! because your only interest is self aggrandizement and chaos until u are banned, u are in short singularly and most personally a twisting and distortion of this forum

polliwog wrote:I'm not poised. I already made the leap. For past behaviors to be irrelevant to the present forum, they should remain in the past. If you seriously believe I am wrong about this, take it up with the management. Have me sanctioned, banned, or flogged with a cane. "Bailiff, whack his pee pee!"