Quote of the day

 "Someone despises me. That's their problem. Mine: not to do or say anything despicable. Someone hates me. Their problem. Mine: to be patient and cheerful with everyone, including them." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Quote of the day

 "You can generally be sure, whenever ideologues speak of true or serious freedom, that it will be at the expense of actual, ordinary freedom. And when the rhetoric is transcendental, the reality will probably be miserable." - Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible

Baleful quote of the day

From "Alabama’s IVF Ruling Is Christian Theology Masquerading as Law" by Elie Mystal

What’s troubling to me is the extent to which the rest of the country has just accepted that we live under the rule of theocrats in robes and there’s nothing we can do about it. Establishment politicians, media figures, and even non-theocratic judges just kind of shrug and pretend that scripture is a reasonable basis for judicial pronouncements in a free society. If these judges and justices were establishing any religion other than fundamentalist Christianity, people would lose their minds. If an Alabama court ruled that Trump had to be kicked off the ballot because he lies so much he lacks satya, and rested their opinion in quotes from the Vedas, there would be riots. The ruling would be overturned and the judges, probably, impeached.

Quote of the day

 "Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value." - Albert Einstein

Via The Quotable Einstein edited by Alice Calaprice

Stealing from the future to give to the present(ly) rich

 I hear often people saying there is too much free stuff given away by the government. Almost always this ire is directed towards people on the lower end of the economic spectrum, and that this is how people have their votes purchased.  What I very rarely hear spoken against, however, is the much vaster sum of money that is given to the already rich and powerful; corporations and the super-rich - people who have vastly more political influence than people who receive some form of social welfare. This is why I consider Free Lunch and Perfectly Legal by David Cay Johnston to be such important books. They detail how our economic system has been rigged across decades to transfer the nation's wealth from the many to the few, flowing money upwards like Niagra Falls in reverse, and how the wealthy benefit extensively from taxpayer subsidies.

So today I come across this: a detailed article about how corporate tax breaks are leading to the defunding of education across the nation. Read it and weep for the future: "Students lose out as cities and states give billions in property tax breaks to businesses − draining school budgets and especially hurting the poorest students."

What exactly Atlanta and other cities and states are accomplishing with tax abatement programs is hard to discern. Fewer than a quarter of companies that receive breaks in the U.S. needed an incentive to invest, according to a 2018 study by the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a nonprofit research organization.

This means that at least 75% of companies received tax abatements when they’re not needed – with communities paying a heavy price for economic development that sometimes provides little benefit.

Quote of the day

 "I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794)

Via Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell

It's still difficult for me to wrap my mind around how someone could express this kind of sentiment and end up so despised (only 6 people saw fit to attend Paine's funeral, despite him having played a significant part in the birth of the United States and generally lived as an avatar for democracy.) 

People are fickle and take it personally when their beliefs are criticized; and many were inclined to see his criticism of superstition and organized religion to be corrosive to organized society. But Paine believed that "[i]nfidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what [one] does not believe." 

Quote of the day

 "There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being." - Montaigne

Via Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell

This quote compliments and extends the previously quoted quote of the day from him (and Bakewell) about living a life well.

Quote of the day

 "The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies ... A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. " - George Eliot, "The Natural History of German Life" (1856)

Via Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell

Quote of the day

 "Concedo nulli" 

According to Sarah Bakewell in Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope this was "the emblem and motto of Terminus, Roman god of boundaries and limits." Sixteenth century Christian humanist Erasmus adopted this phrase as his personal motto and his friends had it inscribed on a memorial plaque when he died. It translates to "I yield to no one."

Quote of the day

 "[T]o be happy is to be good." - Aristotle, eulogy for Plato

Via Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages by Richard Rubenstein

On haters

 From Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

What their minds are like. What they work at. What evokes their love and admiration.

Imagine their souls stripped bare. And their vanity. To suppose that their disdain could harm anyone - or their praise help them.

There is just something so human about seeing someone who lived almost two thousand years ago struggling (recall that this is an entry in his personal journal) with dealing with toxic people in his life and reminding himself that their opinion doesn't matter.

He has another passage that compliments this one well: "It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinions than our own." 

Of course, he didn't mean that we shouldn't be considerate of other people, but that we should focus on what is in our control (or own opinions) and "[j]ust that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter."

Also: "The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do."

I love that Marcus had to remind himself this more than once, in an earlier entry in the journal he tells himself to face whatever challenges life presents "not worrying too often, or with any selfish motive, about what other people say. Or do, or think." He goes on to write "that to care for all human beings is part of being human" but that "doesn't mean we have to share their opinions." 

Quote of the day

"Become who you are." - Nietzsche

Via Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are by John Kaag