Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.
Has society really become quite thin-skinned, or is acting “offended” a new tactic that is being used to shut down legitimate political debate? Progressives are increasingly claiming to be offended whenever those on the right disagree with their left-wing positions. It doesn't matter what the issue is; the left will divert a legitimate political debate into an accusation that the right disagrees with them because they are full of hate towards them.
“The trustworthiness of science comes not from certainty, but from its very openness about its uncertainty, always calling into question what we currently understand and being prepared to replace that knowledge with a deeper understanding if something better comes along. In other walks of life, this attitude might be regarded as fickle. But not in science. Scientific progress depends on scientists' unwavering commitment to the qualities of honesty and doubt.”
Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committ
Try to notice-in all your thoughts, sensations, and direct encounters-the objects and 'outside-standers' that make appearance meaningful. For each object encountered or referred to, note it and embrace it in its immediate givenness as being part of 'you'. You can do this both by saying to yourself, "That too is 'I'," and by extending your sense of located awareness to embrace the apparently separate and distant object.This exercise helps to counteract the tendency to polarize experience, which creates a self that is cut off from the rest of reality. It might at first seem to set up a monomaniacal selfishness, but actually, if practiced carefully, it will undermine the idea of a solid and continuous 'self'. The exercise might also seem to cultivate confusion between things themselves and thoughts about these things and about the world. But this is not the case. By initially forcing the subject and object together in this way, we can soon progress to the perception of a 'time' which naturally gives the subject and object as together. This process also shows the felt difference between the thought about a thing and the 'thing itself'-between the reference and its referent-in a new light. We can progress from an artificial intimacy to an uncontrived one, and further, to an intimacy which simply is and which involves neither a self nor an object. This intimacy does not reach out to things elsewhere, nor does it assimilate them all in an ordinary location 'here'.
“We can show that there are differences in the profiles of chemicals that come from the tissue, and these tissue profiles can be used to diagnose a particular disease or determine how far the disease has progressed. We reported in a previous paper, and it is highlighted in the current article, that there are differences in profiles of chemical species from the tissue, indicating a diseased area and also the margin at which that diseased area is separated from the non-diseased area of the tissue.”
“Once I got to the UA and had the resources to receive coaching every day and train with other teammates, I was able to progress very quickly into an internationally competitive level, ... I stayed on track and have now eventually ended up where I am today, and to know that I made it here through hard work and a great deal of support makes my wins that much more meaningful.”
“Once I got to the UA and had the resources to receive coaching every day and train with other teammates, I was able to progress very quickly into an internationally competitive level. I stayed on track and have now eventually ended up where I am today, and to know that I made it here through hard work and a great deal of support makes my wins that much more meaningful.”
“What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.”
“This is a remarkable accomplishment that each and every one of us at Green Mountain Power is proud of. It confirms that we have made significant progress in our efforts to run our business in a way that is environmentally, socially and economically responsible. Our employees have worked very hard to transform this company into a high performing enterprise that holds strong environmental and corporate responsibility values and I am happy to see them recognized.”