"Hate comes from offence. Offence is feeling personally attacked." - Unknown

"Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward." - Mikhail Bakunin

"A trifle consoles us because a trifle upsets us." - Blaise Pascal

"The worst government is the most moral." - HL Mencken

"Plagarism only occurs if the work is not bettered by the borrower." - John Milton

Advice to my young self #97: For those obsessed with purity, nothing is ever pure enough.

Advice to my young self #28: Everyone is either trapped or satisfied.

Advice to my young self #81: Often the best answer is: The question is meaningless.

Advice to my young self #22: Sanity is a moral category.

Advice to my young self #71: The bigger the ego, the more delicate.

Hubbard's Law of Conspiracies: Every conspiracy theory expands to
include child sex grooming.

Miscaviage's Corollory: This includes sex-obsessed conspiracy theories
about sex-obsessed conspiracy theorists.

Penned

Penn Gillette is entertaining, which is not the same as interesting.

Kim Kardashian, Alex Jones spinning another conspiracy theory, and Charlie Sheen going into meltdown are entertaining. Noam Chomsky explaining political euphemisms, HL Mencken dissecting democracy, even Robert Price making his case against abortion - these are interesting, even if you fundamentally disagree with them.

But in "Presto!" - Penn Gillette's book about how you can get thin if you have exactly the psychological peculiarities of Penn Gillette - he makes an interesting observation in passing.

There are, he says, two ways to achive - to be a juggler, or a magician.

Juggling, fire eating, contortionism - these are skills, not tricks. You can pretend to be able to juggle, but you can't fake the ability. Jugglers are those who get things done by painfully mastering a difficult skill.

Magicians...find ways to make hard tasks easy. Or by extension, to make the impossible possible. Inventors, programmers, and engineers are magicians. So are scientists and philosophers - but not religious mystics.

Penn's diet involves eating nothing but plain baked potatoes for two weeks, bulldozing through the consequent illness and mental fog to lose two pounds per day. It works. If you can do it. Which almost no one can.

But then, Penn is one of those people with heroic willpower who thinks what the world needs is more people with heroic willpower. He also seems to think you can develop heroic willpower by an effort of heroic willpower.

I'm a magician - one of those people who will spend weeks of effort to save minutes of effort every day thereafter. And I think the world needs more technicians. I also catch myself thinking you can become technically minded by approaching the world with a technical mind.

We use the word "bored" to mean both "not interested" and "not entertained". Perhaps we shouldn't. Because when we think we want to be entertained, often we really want to be interested.

Advice to my young self #32: There is no problem to which tears are the solution.

Advice to my young self #73: Every moral asbolute is a fossilised tactic from a defunct power struggle.

Dreams never make sense when you try to explain them.
Don't go wandering off.
Watch out, you might get what you're after. Strange but not a stranger.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.