opinions and purposes.........

 

Here in Kerry I live among mountains, some of them almost touchably near, all of them breaking and raising my horizon, higher than the highest-flying ravens by day, high as high-hunting Orion at night.  And these mountains, all of them, have old names, the Paps, Coghane, Brennaun Mor, Stoompa, the Blind Horse's Glen with its three lakes and its almost perpendicular back wall, Mangerton Mountain, Torc Mountain and, not entirely eclipsing the Reeks, a cluster of Bens called Toomies.  Northwards, the world stretches away across the hilly, rolling lands of north Kerry and west Limerick.

     To live in a place so heartbreakingly beautiful can be a difficult blessing.  Sooner or later as I'd sit here writing in the morning I would lift my head and look out and, as arrestingly as a heart attack or a stroke, what I'd see would invalidate me in my opinions and purposes.

     Here, in such a world on such a day, opinions and purposes are a Fall or at least they are the agents and symptoms of our exile from what we paradisiacally are at the core of our being.

     There at the core of our being we are as pure as a drop of water on a lotus leaf.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

dogma vs truth...........

 

However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that, however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.

-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

the best test of truth............

Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment

-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, from this dissent

Not universally true....................

 

The more the Internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.

-Benedict Evans

Ah, human nature.........................

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) … the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

-John Ronald Reuel Tolkien 

being obliged...........................

 

I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.

-Ben Franklin, speaking at the Constitutional Convention, September 1787

the virtue of free expression........

 

     The opinions people have, Franklin wrote, are "almost as various as their faces."  The job a printers is to allow people to express these differing opinions.  "There would be very little printed," he noted, if publishers produced only things that offended nobody.  At stake was the virtue of free expression, and Franklin summed up the Enlightenment position in a sentence that is now framed on newsroom walls: "Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter."

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

outsourcing........................

 

     There is an endless torrent of media advice.  It is an overwhelming firehose of speculation and opinion.  Most of it can be safely ignored. . . .

     The bigger issue is not the bad advice, but rather, the outsourcing of your thinking to a third party.  You need to do your own thinking.

-Barry Ritholtz, How Not to Invest

On opinions....................

 

I think opinions should be judged by their influences and effects; and if a man holds none that tend to make him less virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded that he holds none that are dangerous, which I hope is the case with me.

-Ben Franklin, as culled from here

Wisdom.............................

 

When I think I am getting too caught up in daily events, I do two things: First, I wait 24 hours (or at least overnight) before starting to form an opinion. Second, I try to think like a historian and put myself 50 or 100 years in the future and frame the disagreement that way.

-Kurt Harden

a curious thing.........................

 

One of the curious things about political opinions is how often the same people line up on the opposite sides of different issues.  The issues themselves may have no intrinsic connection with each other.  They may range from military spending to drug laws to monetary policy to education.  Yet the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again.  It happens too often to be coincidence and it is too uncontrolled to be a plot.  A closer look at the arguments on both sides often shows that they are reasoning from fundamentally different premises.  These different premises—often implicit—are what provide the consistency behind the repeated opposition of individuals and groups on numerous, unrelated issues.  They have different visions of how the world works.

-Thomas Sowell,  A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles

Newsweek deliveres the opinion that..............

 

........America is getting the President we deserve.

You can read the essay yourself if you wish.  I will tell you that the following sentence made me stop and say, "What?":

When approximately half of adults in the U.S. lack literary proficiency, is it any surprise we elect leaders who speak in soundbites rather than solutions?

In 2025 almost half (actually, if you follow the link the number used is 54%) of the adults in the United States "lack literary proficiency"?   Can that possibly be true?

via

I like how he thinks...................

 If Donald Trump creates the position, I volunteer to be Secretary of Feeding People to Komodo Dragons. The first round of tossings into the lizard-pit will involve “experts” who still use grossly snobbish terms like “fringe” and “contrarian” to describe beliefs held by most of the population . . .

-Matt Taibbi, from here

Beware the echo chamber..................

Taken together, these studies suggest an unnervingly plausible two-part engine of polarisation: first, given the choice, we seek out other people like us. Then, being surrounded by people like us makes us more extreme in our views and more confident that those views are correct.
Our current information ecosystem offers us more choice than ever. Alongside social media we can pick and choose from websites, podcasts and YouTube channels to reflect any interest, geography and ideology. And how do we use that choice? Generally, by seeking out people who share our views, broadcasters who seem to “get” us and, often, by avoiding news altogether.
I am wary of blaming social media for all our ills. It can be a great source of support and information, particularly for people in an unusual situation: anything from having a disability to a minority sexual orientation to a niche hobby. There is a real benefit to being able to reach out and find like-minded people.
Yet we must acknowledge the risk that we are self-selecting into echo chambers. Social media algorithms may be giving us a push, recommending content to us that drives “engagement”, the most surprising, outrageous and often toxic material. But we shouldn’t blame algorithms steering us away from serious and thoughtful exposure to different points of view. We are quite capable of choosing that for ourselves.

-Tim Harford, from here

ability......................

 The deadliest flaw in human nature is the ability to hold an unshakable opinion based on inadequate evidence.

-anonymous/unknown, but found here

debating one's self..........................

 A few years ago, I decided I would try to change my mind about something at least once a month – and that turned out to be way too easy.

I started with politics – we are a polarized nation and I’ve got plenty of opinions about why the other side’s policies are so awful. But if the US is split close to 50/50 on most of these issues, I can’t possibly believe that 160 million people are dead wrong. Or stupid. Or misguided.

I needed to approach my beliefs the way I did when I was debating in high school. I had to prepare myself to be able to articulate and defend a certain side of an argument, but I had to do so without knowing until right before the debate which side I would need to argue for.

The more I did this, the more I realized how shallow so many of my opinions were . . .

-Marc Randolph, from here

wisdom..........................

. . . getting another opinion seldom is a lengthy process and not getting extra insight may wind up gobbling massive amounts of time.

-Michael Wade, from here

expensive.......................

 I don't know anything that a young business man ought to keep more entirely to himself than his dislikes, unless it is his likes.  It's generally expensive to have either, but it's bankruptcy to tell about them.  It's all right to say nothing about the dead but good, but it's better to apply the rule to the living, and especially to the house which is paying your salary.

-George H. Lorimer, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

A pretty good explanation...................

 ...........................of the concept of "Woke".

Rooting for "polarization".............

 “There are some encouraging signs of polarization.” Nothing flippant inheres in this remark; a long and risky life has persuaded him that only an open conflict of ideas and principles can produce any clarity. Conflict may be painful, but the painless solution does not exist in any case and the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness; the apotheosis of the ostrich.

-from Marc Andreessen's substack