What we've done with our politics is to create a situation where we are electing idiots.
~ Liz Cheney
Good advice
Whenever I’m about to do something, I think ‘Would an idiot do that?’ and if they would, I do not do that thing.
~ Dwight Schrute, The Office
The best thing I've read all week!
The best way to spot an idiot - look for the person who is cruel.
Let me explain:
When we see someone who doesn't look like us, or sound like us, or act like us, or love like us, or live like us, the first thought that crosses almost everyone's brain is either rooted in fear or judgement, or both.
That's evolution. We survived as a species by being suspicious of things we aren't familiar with. In order to be kind, we have to shut down that animal instinct and force our brains to travel a different pathway.
Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges. This may be a surprising assessment because somewhere along the way in the last few years, our society has come to believe that weaponized cruelty is part of some well thought-out master plan.
Cruelty is seen by some as an adroit cudgel to gain power. Empathy and kindness are considered weak. Many important people look at the vularable only as rungs on a ladder to the top.
I'm here to tell you that when someone's path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct; they never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so, their thinking and problem solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades.
Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true: The kindest person in the room is often the smartest.
~ Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, 2023 Northwestern University commencement speech
Almost always!
PowerPoint's are the peacocks of the business world -
All show, no meat.
~ Dwight Shute, in The Office
The man has thought it through!
Ted Bundy (shoe salesman) to arrogant lady:
So you think I'm a loser?
Just because I have a stinking job that I hate, a family that doesn't respect me, and a whole city that curses the day I was born?
Well, that may mean loser to you, but let me tell you something:
Every morning when I wake up, I know that it's not going to get any better until I go back to sleep again.
But I get up, have my watered-down Tang and still-frozen Pop Tart. Get in my car with no upholstery, no gas, and six more payments, to fight traffic just for the privilege of putting cheap shoes on the cloven hooves of people like you.
I'll never play football like I thought I would. I'll never know the touch of a beautiful woman.
And I'll never again know the joy of driving without a bag on my head.
But I'm not a loser.
Because despite it all, me and every other guy who will never be what he wanted to be are still out there being what we don't want to be, 40 hours a week for life.
And the fact that I haven't put a gun to my head makes me a winner!
~ from Married with Children
Surely we deserve and can do better...
"Among us friends, let's be honest," John Kelly said. "About a third of the things the President wants us to do are flat-out stupid. Another third would be impossible to implement and wouldn't even solve the problem. And a third would be flat-out illegal."
~ John Kelly, retired U.S. Marine Corp General and Trump's former Chief of Staff
Old school sportsmanship
In one of the most notable moments in sports history, Kenyan runner Abel Mutai was just a few feet from the finish line, but became confused with the signage and stopped thinking he had completed the race.
A Spanish athlete, Ivan Fernandez, was right behind him, and after realizing what was happening, he started shouting at the Kenyan for him to continue running; but Mutai didn't understand his Spanish.
Fernandez eventually caught up to him and instead of passing him, he pushed him to victory.
A journalist asked Ivan, "Why did you do that?"
Ivan replied, “My dream is that someday we can have a kind of community life where we push and help each other to win.”
The journalist insisted “But why did you let the Kenyan win?"
Ivan replied, "I didn't let him win, he was going to win.”
The journalist insisted again, “But you could have won!”
Ivan looked at him & replied, “But what would be the merit of my victory? What would be the honor of that medal?
What would my Mom think of that?”
Values are transmitted from generation to generation.
What values are we teaching our children?
Let us not teach our kids the wrong ways to WIN.”
Indeed...
I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather......not screaming in terror like his passengers.
~ Jack Handy
More VP word salad...[smh]*
But let's always take a moment to also see what we have achieved thus far, while we clearly see the moment that we are presently in.
So we have achieved a lot.
~ Vice President Kamala Harris
* shaking my head
Applies to many adults, too
Tips for dealing with teenagers:
Don't try to win arguments with teenagers using logic, evidence, or persuasion.
Even if they see your point, it's not worth the loss of power, so they must resist.
~ From Voice Lessons
Sigh...
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
~ George Orwell
I'm so out of luck...
If you judge the success of your marriage on your happiness, what do you have when it's nothing but suffering?
What you want to have in your marriage, first and foremost, is a scrupulous honesty. And I don't mean you tell each other other the truth, because you can be brutal with the truth.
I mean the kind of honesty that's devoted towards thriving in love.
You want someone in a relationship that you can spar with - and it's partly because you have hard problems to solve. And if the person that you're with isn't willing to put forward their opinion, then you only have half the cognitive power that you would otherwise have.
Hopefully, you find someone who is interestingly different from you, but not so different that you can't communicate.
~ Jordan Peterson
Cognitive bias
The human mind is not wired for probabilty.
What's wrong with feeling special?
I guess in principle, nothing. But it's not an accurate understanding of the world.
That is your choice. Do you want to live in a delusion of what you think is true?
Or do you want to live in a reality of what IS true?
~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, on Master Class
And the difference is…?
Sally: You lied to me…
Barry: I didn’t lie to you…
Sally: You did. You did!
Barry: I didn’t lie to you - I didn’t tell you the part I didn’t want to be true.
~ Barry (on HBO)
The Pale Blue Dot
Pale Blue Dot is a photo of Earth that was taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990 from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) as it was leaving our solar system.
This is what Carl Sagan said about the photo:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor, and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
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