Tag Archives: zenmichief

quotes

Monthly Quotes

Here goes with this month’s collection of newly encountered quotes …

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
[Shakespeare; The Tempest]

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
[TS Eliot]

Attacking the rich is not envy, it is self-defence. The hoarding of wealth is the cause of poverty. The rich aren’t just indifferent to poverty; they create it and maintain it.
[Jodie Foster]

Anybody who pretends that it’s a hardship for billionaires to pay a little bit more in taxes so that a single mom gets childcare support or so that we’re doing something about climate change … That’s an argument that is unsustainable.
[Barack Obama]

Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself.
[Robert G Ingersoll]

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
[Edgar Allan Poe]

[T]he greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.
[Aldous Huxley]

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
[Hannah Arendt]

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre.
[Frank Zappa]

Fools multiply when wise men are silent.
[Nelson Mandela]

This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.
[Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), German historian and philosopher]

Humanity has an ambition to try to understand everything in its World, and that now has become everything in its universe. We’re a very bold group of people living on a planet that’s a relatively tiny part of everything.
[Paul Halpern; interviewed in Scientific American, July/August 2024]

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
[George Bernard Shaw]

It is well known that skewed Bhattacharyya distances between the probability densities of an exponential family amount to skewed Jensen divergences induced by the cumulant function between their corresponding natural parameters, and that in limit cases the sided Kullback-Leibler divergences amount to reverse-sided Bregman divergences.
[Frank Nielsen in journal Entropy; quoted in New Scientist, 29/06/2024]

And finally, remember …
If they can prove you wrong you’re not being vague enough.
[unknown]

medical, personal

On Depression – X

Another in my very occasional series of articles on depression – my depression. They are written from a very personal perspective; they are my views of how I see things working and what it feels like on the inside. Your views and experiences may be vastly different. My views and experiences are not necessarily backed by scientific evidence or current medical opinion. These articles are not medical advice or treatment pathways. If you think you have a problem then you should talk to your primary care physician.

I recently came across the following elsewhere on social media.

One of the worst things about depression is that it’s a self-reinforcing cycle. In many ways, a lot of the popular “mindfulness” or “yoga” or “touch grass” or “diet and exercise” things about recovering from depression is a correlation, not causation thing which is a reversal of cause and effect. When you’re depressed, you CAN’T do the things that help you not be depressed, or at least you can’t sustain doing them for long because they drain more energy than they’re returning.

It’s a lot of feel good “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” nonsense. When you’re depressed, even when you try to force yourself to do the endorphin generating activities, your brain is so full of depression juice that it sucks up all the endorphins you might have gotten otherwise. So now you’re just even more exhausted from trying to do the thing, and have even more depression juice in your brain because you tried to do the thing and didn’t feel any better, which must just be because you’re a broken failure.

[Jess, @JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange at https://infosec.exchange/@JessTheUnstill/111880212752583330]

I don’t really agree with the final phrase about being a “broken failure”. I’m a broken failure only in terms of getting rid of the depression and in consequence having fucked up too many things in my life. And who’s surprised after 50+ years experience – we’ve trained so long and hard that we’re now experts! Otherwise this is a pretty spot on summary of how my depression seems to work.

Medics please note that this is how depression works for many of us, so don’t be surprised when we tell you that all your suggested fixes don’t work for us.