Sceptic Watch: August 2023

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Wonderland

John Tolkien (1892 – 1970):
War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory.
I love only that which they defend.
(The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings, 1954)

John Kipling, 1897–1915

Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936):
My son was killed whilst laughing at some jest.
I would I knew what it was, it might serve me in a time when jests are few.
(A Son, Epitaphs of the War, 1914–18)

Josephine Kipling, 1892–99

Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936):
Her brows are bound with bracken-fronds,
And golden elf-locks fly above;
Her eyes are bright as diamonds
And bluer than the sky above.

In moccasins and deer-skin cloak,
Unfearing, free and fair she flits,
And lights her little damp-wood smoke
To show her Daddy where she flits.

For far—oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him!
(Merrow Down, Just So Stories, 1902)

Alan Milne (1882 – 1956):
Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing.
Of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering. …

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known. …

So, they went off together.
But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing.

Christopher Milne, 1920–96

Eric Rauchway [Professor of History, University of California, Davis]:
When [Woodrow Wilson] was a university professor, he said that he feared that teaching woman was atrophying his mental muscles.

Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924):
We have made partners of the women in this war ...
Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?
(Appeal for Women's Suffrage, 1918)

(The American Presidency with Bill Clinton, 2022)

James Webb Space Telescope

The Murdochs: Empire of Influence, CNN, 2022

Rupert Murdoch (1931):
[There’s] a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks:
to silence conversation,

to stifle debate,

to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential.
This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility.
To many people have fought too hard, in too many places, for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy. …
There are many goals still to come and challenges to overcome.
Well, I'm far from done.
(Acceptance Speech, Lifetime Achievement Award by the Australia Day Foundation UK, Australia House, 23 January 2021)

The Korean Fertility Crisis

Monetizing Your Children

Rawls' Theory of Justice

Criminalizing Poverty

Think with Pinker

Bruce Powell

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Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919):
Leave it as it is.
You can not improve on it.
The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.
What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you …
(Grand Canyon, 6 May 1903)

We must handle the water, the wood, the grasses … so that we will hand them on to our children and children's children in better and not worse shape than we got them. …
(David Grubin, TR, PBS American Experience, 1996)

Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679):
In [the natural condition of mankind], there is
no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently

no Culture of the Earth;

no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea;

no commodious Building;

no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force;

no Knowledge of the face of the Earth;

no account of Time;

no Arts;

no Letters;

no Society; and which is worst of all,

continuall feare, and danger of violent death;
And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
(Leviathan, 1651)

Silvia Federici is & Alice Markham-Cantor:
[The] following were the crimes of 65-year-old Margaret Harkett, who was hanged at Tyburn, England, in 1585:
Keith Thomas (1933):
She had picked a basket of peas in a neighbor’s field without permission.
Asked to return them, she flung them down in anger; since when, no peas would grow in the field.
Later, William Goodwin’s servants denied her yeast, whereupon his brewing-stand dried up.
She was struck by a bailiff who had caught her taking wood from his master’s ground; the bailiff went mad.
A neighbor refused her a horse; all his horses died.
Another paid her less for a pair of shoes than she asked; later he died.
A gentleman told his servants to refuse her buttermilk; after which they were unable to make butter or cheese.
(Religion and the Decline of Magic, 1971)
(Witch Hunts, Scientific American, May 2023, p 48)

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Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970)

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it.
If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence.

The glorification of the State, and the doctrine that it is every citizen's duty to serve the State, are radically against progress and against liberty.
The State, though at present a source of much evil, is also a means to certain good things, and will be needed so long as violent and destructive impulses remain common.
But it is MERELY a means, and a means which needs to be very carefully and sparingly used if it is not to do more harm than good.
It is not the State, but the community, the worldwide community of all human beings present and future, that we ought to serve.
And a good community does not spring from the glory of the State, but

from the unfettered development of individuals:
from happiness in daily life,
from congenial work giving opportunity for whatever constructiveness each man or woman may possess,
from free personal relations embodying love and taking away the roots of envy in thwarted capacity from affection, and above all
from the joy of life and its expression in the spontaneous creations of art and science.