"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature." - Tom Robbins

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"Stick to it, gentlemen! It is nothing compared to what you'll have to play in 25 years' time" - Henry Wood to his orchestra in 1912 as they struggled through Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, Op 16 (1909)

"At our "official" czech community forum, I have a signature like:
"FAQ is not just an explicit word [it's pronounced like...something explicit in our language x)], Searching is not only for blind ones — and Miranda is NOT for idiots x) — press ALT-F4 and you'll see a magic ;)"
You have no idea how many people sent me a IM message or PM telling me why I've advised them to close their browser x)))) There is something on it :) .."
The English is quite screwy, but I found it pretty funny when I got it.

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Epictetus' Enchiridion shows that motivational bullshit is millennia old.

A deceptive piece of popular wisdom is that if everyone hates you, you must be doing something wrong. How come no one applies this to the Jews?


The reason why we have such diversity of bloodtypes is that those with A and B blood are vulnerable to malaria. A map of the world shows that malarial regions coincide with regions where there're more people with bloodtype O - the cooler regions have more people with type A and B blood (AB comes from a mix of people with A and B).

I was in an MRT carriage and counted 32 Priority seats versus 18 Normal seats. This is retarded. Priority is the new Normal.

Even guys who are normally very smart become stupid when intense emotions come into play. Which gives us a clue about female irrationality.

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While the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes experiment is revealing, I daresay that a similar experiment, where you told a group that they were being discriminated against (but subsequently did not discriminate against them), would reveal that those told they were being discriminated against thought they were (when in reality they weren't). Ditto for outside observers. (That's what happens when you're obsessed with suffering, rather than with doing or objective reality, even)

I wonder if anyone claims that social conventions about which side of the road to drive on discriminate against either left-handers (no one cares about right-handers, because they are a majority).


While putting less pressure on people to conform to social expectations and norms is a good thing, totally demolishing these expectations and norms is not. Social expections should be a guide rather than a prison. Of course, this is a tough line to draw, but it is better than the alternative, I think.

Humans are socially-embedded beings, and some form of social framework and structure is needed to orient and ground them so they can find identity and belonging and partake in social intercourse.

For example, gender identity is one thing that virtually all people of both genders cling to, and I daresay abolishing gender norms will lead to much anomie (gender norms are part of gender identity; saying "I am a man" means nothing if there're no norms attached to "being a man"). There is a reason second- or third-generation immigrants often reflexively fall back on their ethnic or religious identities, and cherish and perform them a lot more faithfully than their parents.