Sunday, December 25, 2016

U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334 concerning Israeli settlement activity

On Dec. 23, 2016, the UN Security Council voted 14-0 on its Resolution 2334 concerning Israeli settlement activity. The vote was in favor of demanding that Israeli cease building settlements in disputed areas. The reason for condemning these settlements is that they are being built on disputed land that will likely have to be given to the future State of Palestine as part of any realistic peace agreement. The United States abstained from the vote but did not use its veto power to stop the resolution, as some had hoped.

After the vote, the Obama administration gave a 40-minute, on-the-record press call. On the call, Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, explained that President Obama had had "several rounds of discussions with Ambassador Rice, Ambassador Power, Secretary Kerry, and members of his national security team" before deciding not to veto the resolution. There is concern that accelerated settlement construction in disputed areas is an obstacle to a future peace agreement. Rhodes explained that "we cannot simply have a two-state solution be a slogan while the trend lines on the ground are such that a two-state solution is becoming less and less viable."

Separately, Ambassador Samantha Power said, "We would not have let this resolution pass had it not also addressed counterproductive actions by the Palestinians such as terrorism and incitement to violence, which we’ve repeatedly condemned and repeatedly raised with the Palestinian leadership, and which, of course, must be stopped."

The Obama administration continues to demonstrate its support for reaching an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Three years previously, Secretary of State John Kerry spent nine months attempting to broker a deal (more information below).

2013: VP Joe Biden expresses his commitment to a two-state solution

illustration of people on an Ark

The article below was originally posted to Helium Network on Oct. 1, 2013.

"This very moment may offer the best opportunity for peace," U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations currently under way in Washington. For the first time in years, he said, "both sides are talking directly, and both sides have taken some risk to get where they are today."

Biden addressed the J Street conference in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 30, 2013. Over 2,800 people were gathered in Washington for the conference. J Street is a political advocacy and education organization for American Jews who support a "two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, meaning the creation of a Palestinian state through negotiations with Israel.

"Like you, the president and I are absolutely devoted to the survival of the Jewish state of Israel," Biden said. That survival "requires a just and lasting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians."

He described Obama's commitment as "unrelenting." "That's why Obama chose Israel for his first visit in his second term," he explained. "That's why Secretary of State John Kerry has been there six times in the last six months."

He said that the United States shares practical security interests with Israel, as well as having a moral commitment to it. "If there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one," he quipped. More seriously, he added, "The leaders on both sides need to know, if they take risks for peace, their people will be behind them, and so will we."

Biden spoke on the last day of the federal government's fiscal year, as politicians were working overtime to determine whether the government would temporarily shut down beginning at midnight after failing to pass a budget for the coming year. For this reason, Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, had to cancel his appearance before the same crowd; he had been scheduled to speak to the J Street audience just before Biden.

Biden had also been busy, spending an earlier part of the day meeting with President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The J Street crowd enthusiastically received the vice president after waiting over two hours.

Of his meeting with Obama and Netanyahu, Biden said only that they had been "talking about issues that are of mutual concern" and that Netanyahu had publicly thanked Obama. Secretary of State John Kerry is the only one "authorized to comment publicly on the talks," as Kerry previously stated at the beginning of the nine-month negotiation process. The negotiations intend to arrive at a "final status agreement" that solves the conflict.

Biden reminded the audience that the United States is simultaneously addressing other security concerns in the Middle Eastern region. Obama has been focused on Syria's stockpile of chemical weapons. Syria killed about a thousand of its own citizens with sarin gas on Aug. 21, an incident that was close to the Israeli border and that occurred in the context of Syria's larger violent ethnic conflict.

Iran may be on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon, and Obama also spoke with the new Iranian president Hassan Rouhani on Sept. 27, the first such US-Iran diplomatic outreach in over 30 years. Furthermore, Egypt must continue building its democracy and maintain its peace treaty with Israel, Biden said.

"We approach these problems with a great deal of humility," he remarked, regarding efforts to resolve strategic problems that affect the entire world. "We cannot impose a solution."

"We cannot want peace in their country more than they do," he added.

He was introduced by Ambassador Lou Susman, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom. Susman said that Biden "understands that a two-state solution is the only solution" and commended him for having the "guts" to speak his mind to Israel and to other parties in the region. "I think we can all agree," Susman said, "that is the measure of a true friend: to tell others the truth."


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Ark painting by Dorin Coltofeanu. Wikimedia Commons.

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Rick Perry's support for outlawing gay sex

This article was written for Helium Network in 2011. It was updated in 2014 and had minor updates in 2016.

Regarding the looming threat of openly gay Boy Scout leaders in his 2008 book On My Honor, longtime Texas Gov. Rick Perry claims that the Boy Scouts as an organization tolerate gay people but don't want a leader "whose personal agenda is to make an open issue of his sexual orientation." Within the book, he claims that he supports an individual's right to be gay — just not within the Boy Scouts! — but his record does not show that he has actually supported even that much.

Why Perry's approach to the topic is severely flawed

First, in focusing the argument in "On My Honor" only on those who are openly gay, Perry neglects to address the entire Scouting policy that excluded "known or avowed homosexuals" — that is, people who are merely discovered to be gay as well as those who openly acknowledge it.

Second, in trying to demonstrate how commonsense his position is, he begins with this disingenuous premise: "The defining characteristic of homosexuality and heterosexuality is sex. Scouting is not intended to advance a discussion about sexual activity, whether of the heterosexual form or the homosexual form." Notably, however, the Boy Scout policy excluded only "homosexuals" and not "heterosexuals." One can easily agree with Perry that a man should refrain from sharing his "dating patterns" with the children he mentors, but if a straight man may casually reveal his marital status should the question arise, why can't a gay man do the same?

Elsewhere in the book, Perry is more honest about his prejudices. An openly gay person, he says, turns his sexuality into an "issue" or a "public matter" that will inevitably trigger "debate" or become an object lesson in "sex education." The presence of gay leaders would cause the Boy Scouts to be "an experiment in social engineering." He conflates being "openly gay" with being "openly [sexually] active" and says that gay people make gay activism "central" to their lives and cannot refrain from talking about it around children. He provides not a single statistic or anecdote to bolster his assumptions, nor is there any indication that he attempted to speak to an actual gay person for research purposes.

Can an organization practice exclusion and still teach tolerance?

 

Perry denies that the exclusion of openly gay Scout leaders, as well as the exclusion of open atheists, teaches intolerance. He says it is just a way of avoiding debate on sexual matters and atheist ideology that are not part of the organization's mission.

Later in the book, however, he makes an unrelated observation that unwittingly challenges his own argument. He complains that some parents and teachers have asked for intelligent design theory (a form of creationism) to be removed from science classes and debated in religion classes instead. Instead of acknowledging that these people are simply trying to find a better forum for that debate according to their understanding of science and religion, Perry complains that "the left advocates tolerance while crushing dissenting views." In the case of science classes, then, he believes that the deliberate exclusion of dissenting views is an example of intolerance.

Might it be plausible, then, that gay would-be Scout leaders might perceive their exclusion from the organization as a way of crushing their dissenting viewpoints rather than as a benign relocation of their speech? And if Perry is correct in his analysis of the redirection of discussion about intelligent design, why wouldn't gay people also be correct about the redirection of their very persons to which they would be subject regardless of what they choose to discuss?

Does Perry support a person's right to be gay — anywhere?

Finally, Perry claims that "I respect their [gays'] right to engage in the individual behavior of their choosing," which the record shows to be flatly false. Texas had a longstanding "Homosexual Sodomy Law" which classified gay sex as a misdemeanor. Former President George W. Bush, while campaigning in 1994 to become governor of Texas, referred to sodomy laws as "a symbolic gesture of traditional values." In 2002, threatened by the possibility that the Supreme Court might declare this particular law to be unconstitutional (it did, the next year), Gov. Perry likewise championed the law as "appropriate."

Even in 2010, when the law had been unenforceable for seven years, the Texas Republican Party platform stated: "We oppose the legalization of sodomy." Perry ran his re-election campaign in association with this platform. Two subsequent attempts to remove the obsolete law — HB 2156 and HB 604 in the 2011 legislative session — did not make it out of committee. (The mention of support for anti-sodomy laws was finally removed in the 2012 Texas Republican Party platform, and a different bill to repeal the anti-sodomy law, SB 538, made some progress in 2013 before fizzling out.)

Richard Goldstein in his book Homocons proposed that few people relish the actual penalties that are inflicted on gay people as a result of sodomy laws; rather, the real reason straight people support sodomy laws is that they maintain a social hierarchy that privileges heterosexuality. This would explain why Bush praised the law's main impact as "symbolic" and why he made a vague appeal to "traditional values." In this context, the values in question are little more than one group having power over another group.

However, to pretend that the law has mainly a symbolic impact and not a material impact as well is demonstrably false, which is why such pretenses must be blown through. The criminalization of gay sex impacts people's lives by threatening their careers or their custody of their children. It is particularly egregious for Perry to say on the one hand throughout his political career that he supports the criminalization of gay sex and then to publish that he acknowledges people's "right to engage in the individual behavior of their choosing." He cannot mean the first in a purely symbolic way while meaning the latter in a material way. It is one law: he either supports it or opposes it.

Although people can no longer be prosecuted or penalized for same-sex liaisons in Texas because of the Supreme Court having declared such laws unconstitutional, the Texas Republican Party has frustrated all attempts to remove the law from the books and it remained there under Perry's governorship. If Perry genuinely believes in an adult's legal right to consensual sex with another adult of the same sex, there is one clear action he could take to demonstrate it: lead a bipartisan campaign to strike the obsolete sodomy law from the books. That he has not even made a statement suggesting he would be willing to do so — an inquiry with the gay rights organization Equality Texas in 2011 did not turn up any leads — suggests that he does not really support an individual's right to private sexual activity and only said so where it was convenient (albeit totally false) in his book.

The only way in which Perry supports an individual's right in this area is through his expressed support of their right to leave Texas and move to another U.S. state with more permissive laws, which he advocated in his 2010 book, Fed Up!.

What Texans want

Perry's position is out of step with the majority of Texans on issues pertaining to gay people. An opinion poll of Texas voters commissioned by Equality Texas in 2010 revealed that 78 percent knew someone who was gay; 60 percent thought that gay people were seeking "equal rights," not "special rights"; 69 percent thought that gay people should have the same parental rights as straight people; 63 percent supported recognizing same-sex relationships with a "civil union"; 62 percent supported "domestic partnership" benefits for government workers; and 43 percent thought Texas should perform same-sex marriages, a number that increased to 48 percent when the question was whether Texas should recognize such marriages if they had been performed elsewhere.

Perry is particularly out of step with the younger generation on these issues, given that people under 30 were more likely to express support for gay rights than were people over 65 on every issue proposed in that poll.

Another opinion poll conducted in 2012 by the University of Texas/Texas Tribune found that 69 percent supported recognizing same-sex relationships with either civil unions or full marriage. Only 25 percent wanted to maintain the status quo in that regard, and one imagines that a rather smaller number would have supported criminalizing sex between consenting adults in private, had they been asked.

Perry's presidential bids

Perry ran for the Republican Party nomination in the 2012 presidential election. That nomination finally went to Mitt Romney, who ultimately lost to Barack Obama, who was elected for a second term.

With regard to the nation as a whole, which is more liberal on these issues than Texas, several polls in 2011 found that a majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage and military service by openly gay people, the latter already having become military policy anyway. This was something with which Perry had to contend in his presidential campaign.

On Dec. 29, 2011, a questioner at a coffeehouse appearance asked him to discuss his view of limited government in light of Lawrence v. Texas. This was the Supreme Court case in 2003 surrounding two men who had been arrested for having consensual sex in their home in Texas, resulting in the ruling that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional in any state. Perry admitted that he was not familiar with the case, deriding the inquiry as an attempted "'I gotcha' question" and pleading, "I'm not a lawyer." When a reporter later asked him to clarify, he said the same thing: "I'm not taking the bar exam." His unfamiliarity with the case may explain why, as governor of Texas, he continued to support anti-sodomy laws for years after they were ruled unconstitutional. He dropped out of the presidential race on Jan. 19, 2012.

He campaigned again for the 2016 presidential election but dropped out on Sept. 11, 2015. When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, he nominated Rick Perry to be Secretary of Energy. On Jan. 19, 2017, Perry told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that he regretted his own presidential campaign pledge in 2011 to eliminate the department: "My past statements made over five years ago about abolishing the Department of Energy do not reflect my current thinking. In fact, after being briefed on some of the vital functions of the Department of Energy, I regret recommending its elimination."

The Boy Scouts, and the US, move forward

In May 2013, the Boy Scouts of America decided to allow openly gay youths — although not openly gay adult leaders — to participate in the organization. A clear majority of the 1,400-member national council voted for the change at an annual meeting in Texas. The resolution took effect in January 2014. In July 2015, the policy was changed again to allow gay leaders.

As 2014 opened, one-third of Americans lived in a state where same-sex marriage is recognized, and the federal "Defense of Marriage Act" that prevented recognition of such marriages for nearly two decades was finally ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. There is no movement to reintroduce anti-sodomy laws (save an abortive attempt by Virginia's Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli in 2013, the promotional website for which was disabled within a few months). Montana repealed theirs, as it had, of course, been unenforceable ever since Lawrence v. Texas. In 2016, Pew Research Center polling found that 55 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage rights and only 28 percent believe that homosexuality should be discouraged.

Rick Perry may wish to criminalize gay sex. However, it's hard to find other people who do, and there is neither political will nor constitutional room for it in the United States. In this area, Americans clearly prefer their limited government and their individual freedoms.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Things you don't know you know about love

Adam Phillips:

"All love stories are frustration stories. As are all stories about parents and children, which are also love stories, in Freud’s view, the formative love stories. To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had (of one’s formative frustrations, and of one’s attempted self-cures for them); you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there. And what is renewed in that experience is an intensity of frustration, and an intensity of satisfaction. It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn’t know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want."

Kathleen Dean Moore:

"The love of a mother for her infant is inevitable, unsurprising, Frank says. Take goats, for example. Whatever a mother goat smells right after she gives birth, that becomes the object of its goofy mother love. This is why, if a tiny kid dies, a goatherd will skin it and tie its steaming hide onto an orphan goat. The mother doesn't know or care. She doesn't love her kid. What she is attached to, what she is compelled to nourish and protect, is the blood-touched smell of a newborn kid: chemicals washing silently over receptors at the nose-edge of her brain. Love is a matter of hormones and pheromones and reproductive necessity, of rhythms and cycles, life and death, chemicals ebbing and flooding like tiny tides under a microscopic moon.

But what about lovers? I ask. What about tundra swans who mate for life and languish and die if their mate dies? What about ptarmigans, who follow each other around, clucking softly, fussing over each other, sifting their feathers? It's evolution again, according to Frank. Swans and ptarmigans nest on the ground, where their chicks need the protection of two parents, one to sit on the nest and one to warn off predators. Wandering foxes have long ago eaten the offspring of faithless parents."

James Lasdun:

"Courtly Love, that elaborate medieval attempt to reconcile raw desire with the smooth running of the social machine, is in fact a deliberate exercise in such ambiguities. Under its rules a young knight may fall in love with a married woman and enter into the steamiest of flirtations with her, in which everything is permitted except for the ultimate consummation. The beauty of the formula is that it appears to acknowledge both the force of lust and the virtue of fidelity. Like all codes of sexual conduct, it is fatally flawed, the state of deferred gratification being naturally unstable, and therefore highly likely to culminate in tragedy or farce. But it has an appealing realism about it, and at least tries to recognize the human psyche in all its contradictory totality."

John Stuart Mill:

"Though the practice of chivalry fell even more sadly short of its theoretic standard than practice generally falls below theory, it remains one of the most precious monuments of the moral history of our race; as a remarkable instance of a concerted and organized attempt by a most disorganized and distracted society, to raise up and carry into practice a moral idea greatly in advance of its social conditions and institutions; so much so as to have been completely frustrated in the main object, yet never entirely inefficacious, and which was left a most sensible, and for the most part a highly valuable impress on the ideas and feelings of all subsequent times. ... Chivalry was the attempt to infuse moral elements into a state of society in which everything depended for good or evil on individual prowess, under the softening influences of individual delicacy and generosity."

Ira F. Stone:

"Love is that internal emotional state achieved when fulfilling our needs leads to the pursuit of pleasure. To say that love is a complex phenomenon is an understatement. It communicates both desire for and service to another, and we will express these two aspects of love as yirat hashem (fear of God) and ahavat hashem (love of God) in later chapters. For our present purposes we recognize that love is an internal sensation, but one that is inextricably connected to something outside ourselves. We feel love when we take in or internalize enjoyment, but our love is also directed toward the source of that pleasure. Love describes the experience we have of belonging in the world and at the same time being beholden to the world and to other people in it. The pursuit of our own enjoyment would be impossible as a solitary activity, without stimulation beyond ourselves. Love is both a feeling and an acknowledgement. It ends up within us, but comes to us from the outside. We are affirmed by it, but we are indebted because of it – or, at least, we are conscious of its bi-directionality."

William Ian Miller:

"We know this about love, yet we don't know; we know that the particular contours of what we call love depend greatly on the object of that love, whether it be parents, spouse, lover, child, dog, country, faith, or friend; yet we are never quite sure which is the love that is the purest or deepest or that should set the standard for the others. Somehow all are felt to be paler versions of the love celebrated in fiction, the passionate quest for a mate. We are put to ranking these loves, in part, because the word 'love' applies to all of them and forces the comparison upon us. We think of them, if not exactly the same, as being of the same species."

Juan Valera:

“Who knows if he would grow tired of me and end up hating me?”

“I can see that you overanalyze things and enjoy torturing yourself by creating obstacles for what you want the most.”

“Who says that is what I want? I myself do not know. I have my doubts. I cannot discern the depths of my soul. Might it be my vain pride, the childish contentment at being loved by a person of such standing, that leads me to believe that I love him too? What is love? Is love that which I feel in my heart and that draws me to this man? Listen, Manuela, I may as well tell you all. Everything is dark and muddled. There is another man whose every word I hang on when he speaks, whose gifts amaze me, whose intellectual superiority enthrall me, whose virtues fill me with wonder and thrill me, whose great kindness I can see clearly in the depths of his heart. And you are well aware of how it infuriates and disturbs me for anyone to think for one moment that my feelings for that man, and doubtless his feelings for me, could be confused with love.”

Gabrielle Zevin:

Maya’s not-christening party is held the week before Halloween. Aside from several of the children in attendance wearing Halloween costumes, the party is indistinguishable from either a christening christening or a book party. A.J. watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it’s love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother. It’s completely gotten in the way of his plan to drink himself to death, to drive his business to ruin. The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything.”

Martha Stout:

”Psychologically speaking, conscience is a sense of obligation ultimately based in an emotional attachment to another living creature (often but not always a human being), or to group of human beings, or even in some cases to humanity as a whole. Conscience does not exist without an emotional bond to someone or something, and in this way conscience is closely allied with the spectrum of emotions we call "love." This alliance is what gives true conscience its resilience and its astonishing authority over those who have it, and probably also its confusing and frustrating quality.

Conscience can motivate us to make seemingly irrational and even self-destructive decisions, from the trivial to the heroic, from missing an 8:00 meeting to remaining silent under torture for the love of one's country. It can drive us in this way only because its fuel is none other than our strongest affections. … A story about conscience is a story about the connectedness of living things, and in unconscious recognition, we smile at the true nature of the tale.”

Simon Critchley:

“When Courtney Love first read out Cobain’s [suicide] note at a press conference, she finished by saying to the crowd, ‘Just tell him he’s a fucker, OK?...and that you love him’. The ambivalence of Cobain’s suicide note of love and hate is captured precisely in Love’s hate. This is what Jacques Lacan called ‘hainamoration’, ‘hate-love’.”

Sources

Adam Phillips. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. pp. 17-18.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water. New York: Harvest, 1995. pp. 24-25.

James Lasdun. Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. New York: Picador, 2013. pp. 91-92.

John Stuart Mill. The Subjection of Women. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2001. Originally London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1869. p 82.

Ira F. Stone. A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of Mussar. New York: Aviv Press, 2006. p. 12.

William Ian Miller. Faking It. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. p 180-181.

Juan Valera, Doña Luz

Gabrielle Zevin. The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2014.

Martha Stout. The Sociopath Next Door. Harmony, 2005. (Released by Random House Digital for Kindle.)

Simon Critchley. Suicide. Thought Catalog, 2015.

Quotes: Talking oneself into fear

"Anxiety is continual death."
Nicolas Berdyaev. The Divine and the Human. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. p 61.

"In the actual victim, according to various Gothic Tales, this glorying in impenetrability takes the form of admiration, even love of the cruel one while he is coiled to strike. And in the spectator there is a sense of identify [sic] or empathy with both the sufferer and the agent of that suffering. This double identity is the ‘terrible and indefinite curiosity of despair’ we call ‘horror.’"
Philip P. Hallie. The Paradox of Cruelty. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969. p. 73.

"[The wise do] not put a wrong construction upon everything."
Seneca, quoted by Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy, New York: Vintage Press, 2000. p 103.

"Then I realized that we [Jews] have something better [than Christmas traditions]. We have fire. Think about it. The whole shpiel of Hanukkah is lighting the menorah to commemorate the miracle of the lamp oil that lasted for eight days (whatever.) Little kids like myself were handed matches and told to light the candles. I remember standing mesmerized in front of the flames as my mother and father gave us our nightly presents. It felt so dangerous. And in my book, just like rock beats scissors, danger beats tinsel."
"In Defense of Hanukkah," Barbara Rushkoff. Fresh Yarn. December 2004. Accessed December 25, 2004.

“...reason is often a casualty of fear...
* * *
Both religious faith and uncomplicated explanations of the world are even more highly valued at a time of great fear." [Al] Gore isn't slamming religion but is instead criticizing an interpretation of faith that contradicts reason. Faith is not the enemy of reason; fear is, something we seem to forget when we're afraid and searching for answers."
Nikki Stern. Because I Say So: The Dangerous Appeal of Moral Authority. Bascom Hill Books, 2010. p. 48, 121. Quoting Al Gore, The Assault on Reason (New York: Penguin Books, 2007) p. 55.

"To be afraid is to behave as if the truth were not true."
Civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, quoted in PhillyMag.com, quoted in The Week, May 18, 2012, p. 19.

"
Western psychologists call this biological response to experience an ‘affect.’ * * * Only in mammals do cognition and memory interact with affect to create the emotion of fear."
Tara Brach. Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha. Chapter 7, "Opening Our Heart in the Face of Fear." p. 166.

"Our worship of heroes who brave fear and go beyond the call of duty distracts us from the importance of those who simply (not easily) fulfill their duty in the face of fear—those, that is, who avoid cowardice. If it is a dangerous idea, as we shall see again and again, it is also a bracing one. More abstractly, pondering cowardice illuminates (from underneath, as it were) our moral world. What we think about cowardice reveals a great deal about our conceptions of human nature and responsibility, about what we think an individual person can and should have to endure, and how much one owes to others, to community or cause. Cowardice and cowards have something to teach us. Let us speak of them."
Chris Walsh. Cowardice: A Brief History. Princeton University Press, 2014. p. 21.

"We believed our paranoia would protect us; after all, what are the odds that two girls so well versed in disaster would be the ones to fall prey to it?"
Koethi Zan, The Never List

Quotes: 'There is no time...'

"If the situation is to be different, then the moment in time must have such decisive significance that for no moment will I be able to forget it, neither in time nor in eternity, because the eternal, previously nonexistent, came into existence in that moment.
"
Johannes Climacus (Soren Kierkegaard). Philosophical Fragments. ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1985. p 13.

"I shall use the term presence to denote the point of intersection in man's existence; and the term flow of presence to denote the dimension of existence that is, and is not, time.
"
Eric Voegelin, "Immortality: Experience and Symbol," 1967

"Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears. As such, memory is another evidence that we have a flexible and creative relation to time, the guiding principle being not the clock but the qualitative significance of our experiences.
"
Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself, p 258

"There is no time where the Spirit has not been nor will not be; it neither was nor is it yet to be. It is forever now."
G. W. F. Hegel. Reason in History: A General Introducton to the Philosophy of History. Translated by Robert S. Hartman. Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1953. (Originally 1837.) p 65.

"I see the Past, Present, and Future existing all at once before me.
"
William Blake

"Time does not exist! There exist no perpetual and eternal appearance and disappearance of phenomena, no ceaselessly flowing fountain of ever appearing and ever vanishing events. Everything exists always! There is only one eternal present, the Eternal Now, which the weak and limited human mind can neither grasp nor conceive."
P. D. Ouspensky. A New Model of the Universe: Principles of the psychological method in its application to problems of science, religion, and art. Translated by R. R. Merton. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, Inc., 1997. (Originally published New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931.) p. 139.

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