Law, Political Theory and Psychological Science
Jurisprudence
Opinion and the Vanity of Humans
Aug 19th
By a peculiar weakness of human nature, people generally think too much about the opinion that others form of them; although the slightest reflection will show that this opinion, whatever it may be, is not in itself essential to happiness. Therefore it is hard to understand why everybody feels so very pleased when he sees that other people have a good opinion of him, or say anything flattering to his vanity.
Thinking: Truth and Reasoning – Opposed to Reading
Aug 19th
A person may have discovered some portion of truth or wisdom, after spending a great deal of time and trouble in thinking it over for himself and adding thought to thought; and it may sometimes happen that he could have found it all ready to hand in a book and spared himself the trouble. But even so, it is a hundred times more valuable if he has acquired it by thinking it out for himself. For it is only when we gain our knowledge in this way that it enters as an integral part, a living member, into the whole More >
A few words on hope..
Aug 19th
Hope is the result of confusing the desire that something should take place with the probability that it will. Perhaps no man is free from this folly of the heart, which deranges the intellect’s correct appreciation of probability.
It is natural to a man to believe what he wishes to be true, and to believe it because he wishes it.
Happy circumstances in life are like certain groups of trees. Seen from a distance they look very well: but go up to them and amongst them, and the beauty vanishes; you don’t know where it can be; it is only trees you More >
Society Analogy: Humans and Porcupines
Aug 17th
A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off by remaining at a little distance from one another. In the same way the need of society drives the human porcupines together, only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their nature. The moderate distance More >
Misery, Sex and Schopenhauer
Aug 16th
“It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.”
- When evaluating a person, no other facility is as rapacious in illuminating inadequacies as those shown through the choice of partner.
“Much would have been gained if through timely advice young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.”
- Peradventure the greatest of all follies a child must contend with. If only there were prescient abilities to limit this.
On Women
Jul 28th
The nature of the female
One needs only to see the way she is built to realize that woman is not intended for great mental or for great physical labor. She expiates the guilt of life not through activity but through suffering, through the pains of childbirth, caring for the child and subjection to the man, to whom she should be a patient and cheering companion. Great suffering, joy, exertion, is not for her: her life should flow by more quietly, trivially, gently than the man’s without being essentially happier or unhappier.
Women are suited to being the nurses and teachers of More >
TRUTH versus ASHHURST
Jul 28th
Jeremy Bentham
ASHHURST.—I. No man is so low as not to be within the law’s protection.
TRUTH.—Ninety-nine men out of a hundred are thus low. Every man is, who has not from five-and-twenty pounds, to five-and-twenty times five-and-twenty pounds, to sport with, in order to take his chance for justice. I say chance: remembering how great a chance it is, that, although his right be as clear as the sun at noon-day, he loses it by a quibble. Five-and-twenty pounds is less than a common action can be carried through for, at the cheapest: and five times five-and-twenty pounds goes but a More >
Critique of the Doctrine of Inalienable, Natural Rights.
Jul 14th
Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies, vol. 2 of Bo wring, Works, 1843.
The Declaration of Rights — I mean the paper published under that name by the French National Assembly in 1791 — assumes for its subject-matter a field of disquisition as unbounded in point of extent as it is important in its nature. But the more ample the extent given to any proposition or string of propositions, the more difficult it is to keep the import of it confined without deviation, within the bounds of truth and reason. If in the smallest corners of the field it ranges over, it fail More >
Schopenhauer and Racism
Jun 23rd
I just came across Schopenhauer’s justification for racism.
The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmins, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent More >
Robofetishism and Technosexuality
Jun 20th
Technosexuality is fast becoming de rigour amongst the MTV generation, with their vibrating mobile WAP phones “going off” in their pockets, computer peripherals and multi-function entertainment systems. Found in all walks of life they can often be found hanging around electrical stores, exchanging glances over 32″ LCD TV screens with integrated DVD players.
Technosexuality may be expressed in a number of divergent ways, from dressing up as popular characters from Sci Fi stories, to rubbing themselves against toasters and vending machines. Several cases have been reported of people gaining sexual pleasure from slamming their genitals in fridge doors, though this More >
Germaine Greer Quotes
Jun 19th
The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more.
Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They’ve become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master’s ulterior motives — to be fattened or made docile — women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It’s a process More >
