
“I may say things with the right intention, but more often than not, people will misconstrue it.”
From interview with Anshul Chaturvedi
[199806201726.KAA26569@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998
“I may say things with the right intention, but more often than not, people will misconstrue it.”
From interview with Anshul Chaturvedi
“It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong.”
“Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.”
Source: Wyrd Sisters
Source: The Phantom Tollbooth
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 123.
A rant about stupidity... and the coming civil war... (2009)
Context: I've long felt that the best minds of the right had useful things to contribute to a national conversation — even if their overall habit of resistance to change proved wrongheaded, more often than right. At least, some of them had the beneficial knack of targeting and criticizing the worst liberal mistakes, and often forcing needful re-drafting.
That is, some did, way back in when decent republicans and democrats shared one aim — to negotiate better solutions for the republic.
Alas, today's Republican Establishment seems not only incapable but uninterested in negotiation or deliberation. It isn't just the dogmatism, or lockstep partisanship, or Koolaid fantasies spun-up by the Murdoch-Limbaugh hate machine. Heck, even though "culture war" is verifiably the worst direct treason against the United States of America since Fort Sumter, that isn't what boggles most.
It's the stupidity. The vast and nearly uniform dumbitudinousness of ignoring what has happened to conservatism, a transformation of nearly all of the salient traits of Barry Goldwater from:
While campaigning in Cincinnati, as quoted in The New York Times (11 August 2007)
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)