ellauri026.html on line 453: Vast political powers were contending for the possession of long-disputed territories, while within their borders great social and industrial discontents were gathering to a demonstration whenever the strain of these dynastic struggles should become unbearable.
ellauri072.html on line 477: What will happen when the age-old economy of scarcity gives way to the Age of Leisure? Professor Gabor, who won the 1971 Nobel Prize for physics offers a futuristic projection based on a static population and GNP, "classless, democratic, and uniformly rich." Fearful that total secruity "will create unbearable boredom and bring out the worst in Irrational Man," Gabor is anxious to retain "effort," "hardship," and the Protestant Ethic -- lest society dissolve in an orgy of anti-social, hedonistic nihilism (viz. the current drug explosion and the spoiled-brat students). To avoid such evils Gabor proposes that work and its attendant moral uplift be divorced from production and the service sector of the economy be vastly enlarged. But this is only the beginning -- enthusiastic about Social Engineering Gabor suggests using it to weed out potential misfits, trouble-makers and "power addicts"; supplementing I.Q. tests with E.Q. (Ethical Quotient) measurements; and modeling elementary and secondary education on the 19th century British public school which knew so well how to inculcate good citizenship, intellectual excellence and pride in achievement. The Third World, still wrestling with pre-industrial material want, is ignored -- since we can't afford any more industrial pollution presumably they will just have to adjust to their misery. Gabor's assessment of "the Nature of Man" shows a woefully naive Anglo-American ethnocentricity and complete ignorance of anthropology and his vision of post-industrial utopia operating on the moral axioms of the 19th century is as elitist as it is improbable.
ellauri096.html on line 140: Kyburg might answer that there is a scale effect. Although the dull pressure of joint inconsistency is tolerable when diffusely distributed over a large set of propositions, the pain of contradiction becomes unbearable as the set gets smaller (Knight 2002). And indeed, paradoxes are always represented as a small set of propositions.
ellauri210.html on line 1234: The old Kentauros was accidentally wounded by Herakles when the hero was battling other members of the tribe. The wound, poisoned with Hydra-venom, was incurable, and suffering unbearable pain Kheiron voluntarily relinquished his immortality.
ellauri420.html on line 289: A pervasive numbness prevails; a numbness not just of emotion, but of dick and balls. I’m convinced that’s why some pastors turn to porn. It’s their way of treating their own unbearable emotional and psychic pain. It jolts them out of their bleak, numb world of acedia. What they’re seeking is not really pleasure, but the ability to get hard and feel something again.
xxx/ellauri193.html on line 830: “To err is human, to forgive is divine” (this saying is from “An Essay on Criticism,” by Alexander Pope). We need more forgiveness, not only in South Africa, but across the world. I know that the pain associated with murder for the nearest relatives (pain on both sides) is unbearable, but forgiveness is an important component if we want to progress in our thinking beyond the death penalty. If you cannot forgive, you are killing your own spirit. A long detention sentence is healthier.
xxx/ellauri200.html on line 190: The actual world has for Naipaul a radiance that diminishes all ideas of it. The pink haze of the bauxite dust on the first page of Guerrillas tells us what we need to know about the history and social organization of the unnamed island on which the action takes place, tells us in one image who runs the island and for whose profit the island is run and at what cost to the life of the island this profit has historically been obtained, but all of this implicit information pales in the presence of the physical fact, the dust itself. ... The world Naipaul sees is of course no void at all: it is a world dense with physical and social phenomena, brutally alive with the complications and contradictions of actual human endeavour. ... This world of Naipaul's is in fact charged with what can only be described as a romantic view of reality, an almost unbearable tension between the idea and the physical fact ...
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