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30/08/2022

"The liberal attitude does not say that you should oppose authority. It says only that you should be free to oppose authority, which is quite a different thing.

The essence of the liberal outlook in the intellectual sphere is a belief that unbiased discussion is a useful thing and that men should be free to question anything if they can support their questioning by solid arguments.

The opposite view, which is maintained by those who cannot be called liberals, is that the truth is already known, and that to question it is necessarily subversive."

— Bertrand Russell, The Best Answer to Fanaticism -- Liberalism; Its calm search for truth, viewed as dangerous in many places, remains the hope of humanity (16 December 1951), The New York Times Magazine, p. 183

Image: Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) was a philosopher, mathematician, educational and sexual reformer, pacifist, prolific letter writer, author and columnist. Bertrand Russell was one of the most influential and widely known intellectual figures of the twentieth century. In 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his extensive contributions to world literature and for his "rationality and humanity, as a fearless champion of free speech and free thought in the West."

30/06/2022

"I find myself in opposition to both (Communism and Fascism), and I can no more accept either alternative than, if I had lived during the great Wars of Religion, I could have been either a Protestant or a Catholic."
Bertrand Russell (1935)

The below excerpts are the opening and closing paragraphs to Bertrand Russell's 1935 essay Scylla and Charybdis, or Communism and Fascism where Russell contrasts the Communism and Fascism of his day.

"It is said by many in the present day that Communism and Fascism are the only practical alternatives in politics, and that whoever does not support the one in effect supports the other. I find myself in opposition to both, and I can no more accept either alternative than, if I had lived during the great Wars of Religion, I could have been either a Protestant or a Catholic. My objections to Fascism are simpler than my objections to Communism, and far more fundamental. The purpose of the Communists is one with which, on the whole, I am in agreement; my disagreement is as to means rather than ends. But in the case of Fascists, I dislike the end as much as the means. I will set forth, as briefly as I can, my objections, first to communism, then to fascism, and then to what both have in common ...
p. 109
... In any case, believing, as I do, that Communist and Fascist dictatorships are alike undesirable, I deplore the tendency to view them as the only alternatives, and to treat democracy as obsolete. If men think them the only alternatives, they will become so; if men think otherwise, they will not."
p.120

— Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935), Ch. VI: Scylla and Charybdis, or Communism and Fascism, p. 109 & p. 120

Image (L): Joseph Stalin (18 December 1878– 5 March 1953), was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Widely considered one of the 20th century's most significant and infamous figures, Stalin was the subject of a pervasive personality cult within the international Marxist–Leninist movement, which revered him as a champion of the working class and socialism. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Stalin has retained popularity in Russia as a victorious wartime leader who established the Soviet Union as a major world power. Conversely, his totalitarian government has been widely condemned for overseeing mass repressions, ethnic cleansing, deportations, hundreds of thousands of executions, and famines that killed millions.

Estimates of the number of deaths attributable to the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin vary widely. According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953, with a further 7 to 8 million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union, including entire nationalities in several cases. The deaths of 5.7 to perhaps 7.0 million people in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and Soviet collectivization of agriculture are included among the victims of repression during the period of Stalin by some historians. This categorization is controversial, as historians differ as to whether the famine in Ukraine (The Holodmor) was created as a deliberate part of the campaign of repression against kulaks and others was an unintended consequence of the struggle over forced collectivization, or was primarily a result of natural factors.

Image (R): Adolph Hi**er (20 April 1889- 30 April 1945). Considered one of history's most notorious leaders, Hi**er was at the dead center of N**i Germany and directly and personally responsible for World War II in Europe and the Holocaust. Hi**er fearfully denounced international capitalism and communism as being part of a confused and paranoid Jewish and racist conspiracy. Under Hi**er's ruinous leadership the N**i regime was responsible for the genocide of at least 5.5 million Jews and millions of other victims whom Hi**er and his followers deemed "racially inferior".

The number of civilians killed during the Second World War was unprecedented in the history of modern warfare. An estimated total of 70–85 million people perished, or about 3% of the 2.3 billion (est.) people on Earth in 1940. Deaths directly caused by the war (including military and civilian fatalities) are estimated at 50–56 million, with an additional estimated 19–28 million deaths from war-related disease and famine. Hi**er's so-called enemies set for extermination had a wide list, which included Jews, Romanis, Christian Poles, communists, LGBT people, atheists, Soviet POWs (Ukrainians and Russians among many others) people of colour (especially the Afro-German Mischlinge, called "Rhineland Bastards" by Hi**er and the N**i regime), and other minorities not considered A***n (Herrenvolk, or part of the "master race"). Even the mentally and physically disabled who were ethnically German or Austrian were murdered. In total, approximately 11 million people were killed under Hi**er's orders, of whom approximately one million were innocent, helpless and defenseless children.

11/06/2022

Is a degree important in today's world? Let's talk.

04/05/2022

"I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.”
Bertrand Russell

“The leaders of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.”

— Bertrand Russell, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization (1923), Part II. Ch: XII, p. 249

First published in 1923, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization is often considered the most ambitious of Bertrand Russell's works on modern society, offering a glimpse into often-ignored subtleties of his political thought. The book was written with Dora Black (who became Russell's second wife) while Russell was teaching in China in 1920.

Russell argues that industrialism can be a threat to human freedom, since at present, it is fundamentally linked with toxic versions of nationalism, which are then based on institutionalized racism, dogmatism and warfare. The current features of industrialism, argues Russell, supports large populations which are subject to wide and often harsh governmental controls, endangering our human freedoms. For example, Russell strikingly likens Lenin's Bolshevik Russia to Cromwell's Puritan England, asserting that both were 'religious and dogmatic dictatorships' designed to force an essentially feudal society to adopt modern industrialism.

However, Russell is not blind to the positive side of industrialism; without our machine based technologies, an economy of mere subsistence would be the best for which any society could hope, but argues that a world global village, a world government, all the while passionately subscribing to the prevailing Western values of democracy and individual freedoms should be its eventual and welcome results.

03/05/2022

"Man is a rational animal — so at least I have been told."
Bertrand Russell

Opening words to Bertrand Russell's controversial essay, originally published as a magazine and newspaper pamphlet, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish: A Hilarious Catalogue of Organized and Individual Stupidity (1943).

"Man is a rational animal — so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents. On the contrary, I have seen the world plunging continually further into madness.

I have seen great nations, formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic nonsense. I have seen cruelty, persecution, and superstition increasing by leaps and bounds, until we have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age.

All this is depressing, but gloom is a useless emotion. In order to escape from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had formerly given to it, and have found that folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived. The follies of our own times are easier to bear when they are seen against the background of past follies. A wise man will enjoy the goods of which there is a plentiful supply, and of intellectual rubbish he will find an abundant diet, in our own age as in every other."

― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (1950), Ch. VII: An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish: A Hilarious Catalogue of Organized and Individual Stupidity, p. 71

Unpopular Essays (1950) is a book by Bertrand Russell that constitutes a collection of his more controversial essays.

An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish: A Hilarious Catalogue of Organized and Individual Stupidity (1943) was originally published as a pamphlet. In the early and mid 20th century, pamphlets were the primary means of mass communication for people interested in political and religious issues. Pamphlets rarely looked at both sides of a question; most were avowedly partisan, trying not just to inform but to convince the reader. A pamphleteer is a historical term for someone who produces or distributes pamphlets, especially of a political, religious or philosophical cause.

Bertrand Russell's An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish: A Hilarious Catalogue of Organized and Individual Stupidity (1943) was a one of the most clandestine, widespread, reprinted and probably most well read pamphlet of the mid 1940's. Initially, both highly popular and "unpopular" this concise essay at only 13, 700 words, concerns what Russell held to be a harsh yet humorous sampling of our failed human intellectual pursuits, unsupported beliefs and downright "stupidities". It appeared spontaneously and uncontrollably, to publishers great annoyance, as a "protest pamphlet" in such diverse formats as Time News magazine (then a favorite news source for the conservative American middle-class), Life magazine (a publication of politics, culture and society that dominated American visual perceptions in the era before television), Fortune Magazine (which explored in depth the economy and the world of business, introducing to executives avant-garde ideas such as Keynesianism), and even the first publication of the French daily afternoon newspaper, Le Monde on 19 December 1944, shortly after the Liberation of Paris from N**i Germany.

The original publisher for Russell's An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish: A Hilarious Catalogue of Organized and Individual Stupidity (1943), was E. Haldeman-Julius (July 30, 1889 – July 31, 1951) a Jewish-American socialist writer, atheist intellectual, social reformer and pamphleteer. Haldeman-Julius is best remembered as the head of Haldeman-Julius Publications, the creator of a series of controversial and argumentative pamphlets known as "Little Blue Books," the total sales of which ran into the hundreds of millions of copies. Since then the essay has contiuned to be reprinted and circulated widely, most notably in Russell's Unpopular Essays (1950) and by the late Christopher Hitchens, in his 2007 anthology of atheist and agnostic thought, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (2007).

Similar to Russell's What I Believe (1925), Why I am Not a Christian (1927), An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish: A Hilarious Catalogue of Organized and Individual Stupidity (1943) can also now be easily be found on the Internet. The ideas contained within these three well known works, were and still often are, considered controversial, contentious and - to some of the religious - blasphemous.

04/04/2022

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